Home at Last

We're baaaaacckkkk! We arrived home last night and the kids and I were awake at 4:45 a.m. They are now sated after waffles and fruit salad and watching Spongebob (or baobao, if you're TJ). He seems very happy and comfortable at home even though we have only been here about 7 hours (is that possible?). This morning TJ let me hug him, told me he loved me and beamed as he played with his sisters. He's working on whistling and marveling at the toys and books, although he seems to have a very short attention span for being read to. We'll have to trot out the flash cards later today. We also need to buy a Christmas tree, drag the disabled laptop to the Apple store and prepare for TJ's birthday on Dec. 21, but we need to do all of this in as quiet and low key a way as possible. TJ definitely feels most confident in a home environment without too much stimulation (or in a plane, with blanket, slippers and headphones,  but that's another story!).
For most kids adopted internationally, becoming a citizen is easy under current law: just walk through immigration, hand over the famous brown envelope, and poof! you're a citizen (oops, TJ just landed on his bottom on the keyboard!), but for us it was a bit of a trial. We had told TJ through Yuanfang about the strict rules for behavior on the plane. He relinquished all the bottles of Gatorade he had hoarded in his backpack. He was terrific from the hotel in Hong Kong to the Airport Express train to the plane to Taipei to the long-haul flight to Newark. Then the meltdown. He sat on the floor in the fast-moving immigration line, annoying the people behind us, clutching the water bottle we bought him in Taipei, wearing his jaunty baseball cap. Lots of helpful Chinese people tried to talk him into standing up. He told them all that Mama would not let him drink his water. Finally someone translated. But he did not really want the water. Finally. I began to pick him up and carry him from stop to stop in the lines. (Daddy hurt his elbow and is trying to keep carrying big kids to a minimum). TJ is a bit of a load for me, especially when I have a backpack and carry-on to contend with, so I half-dragged him from place to place to get through immigration. While we were waiting for our papers to be processed, several people asked if everything was OK. Finally a woman who worked for the airline we had taken came and yelled at me telling me I was mistreating my child. I felt such shame and helplessness. She had no idea of the situation, but she kept repeating, "This is not how to treat a child!" And I, like the child abuser caught  in public, told her in equally loud tones that it was none of her business. I have a new understanding of the poeple whose public parenting styles I have frowned on in the past.  Maybe they were just doing the best they could to safely move their child from one pace to another. (I am wincing now at my holier-than-thou attitude toward the woman in the "Wo Ai Ni, Mommy" documentary  who pressed on with the flash cards to teach her daughter English, even when her daughter, the same age as TJ, cried and rebelled and asked why her mom could not learn Chinese instead. It is going to be a day by day effort to equip TJ with what he needs to survive and feel safe and then to succeed. We'll need a lot of help. The woman at the airport continued to follow us around. Instead of carrying or frogmarchin TJ through customs, we sat on the floor of the airport while TJ wailed and the girls began to whine for home. Tianjun wanted Yuanfang, but she had gone through a line for noncitizens and was waiting on another floor. Yuanfang, Ping and Haley have been great, but we may have too much expert help, and perhaps we are allowing TJ to rely on them rather than on his parents. Like the classic unattached child, he prefers any stranger to us and does not trust anything we (or Ping or Yuanfang or Haley) tell him, and checks it with several sources, good preparation for journalism or detective work, but first we need to get over the hurdle of school.

It's great to be home with the literal obstacle of travel  behind us. Now the real work (and fun) begins.