El Tablazo

On Tuesday morning, we all piled into Gloria’s car (Still no seatbelts! At all!) and headed off to the airports through mountain roads, bottoming out each time we sped through a dirt-road construction zone and narrowly missing several moped riders on the way. I should take this moment to send a word of gratitude to my friend Risa for the incredible Britax baby carrier/car seat she let me use. Because it’s a tad larger than the Graco seat most people have, I was able to wedge it in tight between the front and back seats, creating an “almost safe” condition for Mason to travel in. It’s no substitute for real seatbelts, but at least I felt that were we to crash, Mason’s seat would most likely stay put.

Josh and I each had signed, notarized forms from each other, in Spanish, giving the other one permission to leave the country with one child. When we arrived at the airport, we had to communicate the situation to the Spanish-speaking American Airlines personnel and get Mia and Josh through the first phase of the complicated check-in process. It was enough to distract us from the looming moment ahead, the moment we would have to say goodbye and split our family in half.

For the past day and a half, ever since it hit me that my little girl was going home without me, I had noticed the most curious, five-year-old phenomenon. It is so strange and beautiful to watch your child processing certain emotions for the first time. For us it’s easy….we’ve felt some version of most things before, and we adults are skilled in the art of reacting to our feelings in a way that is appropriate to our environment and audience. But with kids it’s different. They might be really feeling something, but if it’s new they might not understand how to behave with their new feelings. Add to that a 5-year-old girl’s brand-new sense of decorum, and you have one confused little face gazing up at you.

For the past day and a half I had watched Mia try to emulate my expressions. I saw her force out some tears in an effort to either place her feelings appropriately or maybe just to be like Mommy. But now we stood at the immigration desk where an armed guard informed us that only travelers could pass beyond this point. I looked at my little girl and in one, sudden moment I saw her realize the full force of what goodbye can feel like. I watched her loose the careful control she’d kept over her presentation since yesterday. She came apart in my arms, and I in hers, and we cried together like babies, not caring who was looking or how long it would take.

After Mia and Josh disappeared behind the corner and headed up towards security, I took a few moments to compose myself and was thankful to have a task at hand….it was time for Mason’s bottle. When he was finished (8 ounces! My boy’s a champ!), we got back into Gloria’s car and headed out to explore El Tablazo, the town where Mason’s birth mother lives. I had been told by Raquel, the orphanage director, that this was a curious little town populated mostly by very wealthy Colombians who used the homes for vacation and weekend getaways. However, Raquel had explained that there was also a small group of extremely poor citizens living in a tiny village or vereda at the top of El Tablazo. These are probably the people who maintain the property below and do domestic work for the homeowners there. In lieu of a proper baby book or any photos of Mason’s first months of life, I have been trying to gather photos and video footage for him so that I might one day be able to show him a picture of his life before we met. This blog is part of that effort.

We passed through a military check-point staffed with armed guards who took note of Gloria’s plate number. In my dramatic mind I had hoped to encounter a cluster of shacks along a dirt road, filled with honest but poor Colombian people working hard and thriving despite oppressive circumstances. What I found was a lot like….well, dare I say the Hamptons? Seriously, these houses were AMAZING. The really nice ones you couldn’t even see because they are set far back from the road and are hidden by trees and shrubbery. The roads are paved, the school is lovely….kind of like the East Hampton without the beach or the WASPS.

But at the top of the mountain-side town, the paved road ended and turned to rocky dirt. Gloria’s little car was no match for these undeveloped pathways and we had to turn around, never getting a real look at where Mason’s birth mom might have been living.

We returned to the hotel and I began to wait. I am waiting for the judge to grant us our sentencia, or final adoption decree. We have no control over how long this will take, but on Tuesday I was hopeful that it would be soon. After all, thanks to Gloria’s masterful, South-American schmoozing, we had gotten past our Bienestar Familiar interview a full four days earlier than anticipated. Surely the little day of confusion over the spelling of Josh’s name couldn’t have put us back that far! I watched Josh’s flight progress on line and I called my mother via SKYPE to confirm that despite a delay taking off from Medellin, they had made it onto their connecting flight in Miami and were on their way home to New York. So with nothing but time on our hands, Fanny and I decided to take a sleeping Mason out to the pool deck in his car seat to enjoy the evening air and a glass of Chilean Cabernet.

We sat gazing at the pool and re-hashing our memories together in New York, before Fanny moved to Florida and was our babysitter for Mia from the age of 3 weeks until 2 years. Full from days of restaurant eating, we didn’t sit down and order anything for dinner but our favorite waiter, Guillermo, brought us a plate of Colombian cheese, olives and hard-boiled quail eggs. We had a great time with our free dinner and conversation, and for a little while I was distracted enough not to miss my little girl so much it hurt.