Life Is Short (No Pun Intended)

by Jennifer Arnold

  A house is not a home without kids, and Jen and I were both hoping to start filling it with children before our new home was completed. We started with the “let’s get pregnant” route, so Jen scheduled a lung function test and an OB exam, the things she would need for clearance to start trying. However, the recommendation came back that she not try to get pregnant. A pregnancy would be potentially life-threatening to her, due to her restrictive lung disease. If she were to carry a baby, that baby would push on her diaphragm, further complicating her breathing and putting her life at risk. It was not impossible—people with her exact type of dysplasia had delivered successfully—but it was considered very high risk in her case.

  I couldn’t bear the possibility of losing Jen by trying to have a child. We decided we were going to go the surrogacy route, instead. Jen and I would provide the fertilized egg, which would then be implanted into a surrogate, who would carry the baby to term.

  First, we had to find a surrogacy center. We found one in Encino, California. In fact, quite unbelievably, the center was even in the same building as LMNO Productions. We learned about it from the executive producer of our show. Jen and I vetted the center and liked what we learned. It had a stellar reputation and an excellent track record in successful births. It also handled high-profile clients and was great with confidentiality, which was important to us.

  Jen and I went to California to begin the process of selecting our surrogate. The first step was looking through a dozen or so profiles, hoping to find the right match. For us, it was very simple and straightforward, as we were providing the fertilized eggs. Our criteria were that the woman be nice, understanding, healthy, and share the same philosophical and religious beliefs as us. After we went through the resumes, we made several phone calls to our top candidates and finally set up a meeting with a woman named Cindy.

  Right off the bat, Cindy seemed like the right choice. She and her husband, James, were both on board and were wonderful people. They had two children and weren’t looking to have any more, and Cindy was around our age. We contracted with her and the implant took place a few months later. We were ecstatic when we heard the news that Cindy was pregnant, but our joy was short-lived when she miscarried at about eight weeks.

  While she was very depressed about it, Jen still woke up the next morning and said, “We are going to do it again.” As devastated as she was, she thought it would be worse to give up after just one try. That is Jen, and I love her for it. She seeks out happiness and doesn’t ever give up the search.

  It wasn’t too long before Cindy was pregnant again, and we were overjoyed. This time, she carried the baby for just ten days before she miscarried. She had what was called a “chemical pregnancy,” which meant there wasn’t a truly viable embryo developing, just a rising beta HCG. This miscarriage was harder for us to handle. It was Christmas, and our families, who were in town and staying at our house, were there when we got the bad news. We were hoping dinner would be punctuated by an announcement that we were on our way to having a baby, but instead we had to live through an awkwardly somber afternoon. Fortunately, we were surrounded with our families’ love, support, and encouragement, even though it was still really hard.

  I was disappointed, but I was even more concerned about how Jennifer would handle the loss. I didn’t want her to take on any blame for these unsuccessful pregnancies. We were told it was commonplace for expectant moms to feel that way. After a bit of time passed, she was able to rebound, and we once again began the process of retrieving more eggs.

  The process of stimulating eggs and the retrieval procedures were intense, painful, and potentially dangerous, but Jen felt it was worth it. And if she felt it was worth it, I was going to support her. We had been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. The miscarriages were disappointing, but they weren’t the reason we eventually stopped trying. It came to something much simpler. At some point, you realize the way you create a family isn’t as important as having one. And while we had discussed adoption as a definite part of how we would grow our family eventually, we now wanted to refocus all of our efforts on that. We didn’t want to wait any longer to begin a life with kids in it.

  We had talked about adoption shortly after we had gotten married, nearly four years earlier. LPA had formed an adoption committee, which helped facilitate adoptions of children with dwarfism. Their goal was to make themselves known to adoption agencies and health-care providers who knew of children with skeletal dysplasia needing a loving home. They would help connect those agencies to families within LPA that expressed an interest in adoption.

  When we put our names on the register, we were told there were thirty-two other couples ahead of us, which meant it would probably take years for us to be considered. But not long after we registered with LPA, Colleen, the adoption coordinator from the organization, posted a profile of a girl, about four or five years old, who was available for adoption. However, she had already been adopted once. It had been an international adoption and unfortunately, her adoptive parents, who were average in size, hadn’t known of her particular disability until after the adoption had been completed. They subsequently realized that the added strain of dealing with the medical issues associated with her skeletal dysplasia was more than they could handle.

  Jennifer followed up with Colleen to explore the possibility of adopting this wonderful girl. But because of her unique and fragile situation, the placement needed to happen quickly. Since we hadn’t completed our home study yet and knew we were months away from being ready for initial consideration, we weren’t able to pursue adopting her.

  Home studies need to be redone every six to twelve months, so when we refocused our efforts to have a family, an international home study was a logical first step. The home study consisted of exhaustive paperwork and interviews with a caseworker. The agency wanted to know everything—family background, references, education and employment, relationships and social life, daily life routines, parenting experiences, details about our home and neighborhood, readiness, and reasons for why we wanted to adopt. There were two home visits during this process, although the real time-consuming aspect was the paperwork. In the end, we were approved and officially ready. Now, all we had to do was wait for the call.

  In addition to LPA, we also listed ourselves with RainbowKids Adoption and Welfare Advocacy Group, the Internet’s largest adoption website for international adoptions of children with special needs. We were looking for a child with a particular type of disability, one with skeletal dysplasia. We had been on these two lists even before we tried the surrogacy route, but now our mission was clearly set to adoption. Based on what we had been told, we braced ourselves for a very long wait until a possible adoption match came about. Fortunately, and quite unexpectedly, the wait wasn’t very long.

  In March 2012, just three months after the second miscarriage and weeks after we decided to stop egg retrievals, we received a call from the head of the organization, a woman named Martha, who wanted to pay us a visit. When we were all settled at the kitchen table, she told us why she was so excited to meet us. “I have a child who is available for international adoption,” she told us.

  Martha opened a file folder and pushed it toward us. “Here are some pictures,” she exclaimed with delight. Our excitement was hard to contain, because we couldn’t believe she was at our kitchen table presenting us with photos of a little boy who could possibly be our child. We fell in love with him that very moment. He was a little Mongolian boy, almost two years old, who had skeletal dysplasia. He had been born in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. For the first ten months of his life, he had been living in Hohhot in a state-run orphanage, but he had been transferred to Beijing for medical care when he spiked a high fever and it was feared that he had contracted meningitis.

  Martha showed us several more photos of Ri Jin—the little boy’s given name—that had been taken at various ages. One was of him as an infant and showed a little boy, all head and torso, with short ar
ms and legs (just like his soon-to-be daddy). He was adorable. In another, in which he was closer to his then-current age of two, he had clearly grown. He had a huge smile and his hair was cut very short.

  Martha told us that he was not in the best of health when he had arrived in Beijing for treatment. He was so malnourished that his eyes were bulging, his skin was taut, and the seams in his skull were still quite visible. After seeing his detailed medical records, Jennifer suspected that he hadn’t had meningitis. But his high fever and transfer out of Hohhot turned out to be very fortunate. After receiving treatment in Beijing, he was placed in a foster facility there for children with special needs, which was a far more appropriate facility than the one he had been in. From that point forward, Ri Jin had begun to thrive, as evidenced by what we saw in his photos.

  Jen and I were surprised to learn that the Beijing foster facility was run by a couple from New York who had first gone to China in the late 1980s on business and went back to open the center. The facility was Christian faith–based and subsidized by the state, but it also received private funding. Ri Jin was one of the fortunate ones, as not all of the children with special needs who were waiting to be adopted ever left the many subpar orphanages.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt this little boy was a part of our family the moment we saw his picture. Jen was just as in love, and we told Martha to begin the process. Smiling broadly, she gave us the contacts at the adoption agency that was handling his case, Children’s Hope International (CHI). Tina, one of the senior people there, helped us navigate the process, from the paperwork to what we would need to plan for when it came time to make the actual trip to China. Since I was the paperwork guru, I got our dossier together, and it was sent off to China for consideration.

  By June 2012, three months after we first sat down with Martha, the initial approvals were issued, and we were told it would likely be another six to twelve months before we would be able to travel to Beijing to get our son, whom we would name William, after me. We would keep his given name, Ri Jin, which means “Golden Sun,” as his middle name, as is common with many families that adopt children from other countries.

  With Will’s paperwork under way, Jen and I were starting to get excited. It was late June when, unsurprisingly, Jennifer and I were in the drive-in line at our local Starbucks. We were catching up on some of the progress that we had made recently regarding William’s adoption process and talking about how eager we were to meet our son. I forget which one of us started talking about how many kids we want to have, but half-kidding, I proposed, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if now we could just find a little girl in India?” knowing Jen’s love of Indian culture through her many Indian friends. “We would be all set!”

  “Yes,” she said and smiled. We went on to fantasize about traveling to China and India in the years to come, visiting our children’s homelands and enjoying the experience, culture, and being with our family. It was only a “what if,” a supposition, a “wouldn’t it be cool” kind of thing. I was joking.

  Two days later Jen received a call from Colleen at Little People of America informing her that our name had come up (after nearly five years), and there was a child available. Colleen explained that she knew we still hadn’t even brought our son home, but if we were interested, there was a little girl from India available for adoption.

  Jen was speechless. A second child! She wrote down the essentials Colleen gave her about the child and called me immediately. “You are not going to believe this,” she blurted out. “That daughter from India we were wishing for a few days ago? Well . . .” she said softly.

  I could barely wrap my own head around the news. At first, I thought she was messing with me. It was as if someone had been in the car with us that day at Starbucks and had overheard our conversation. Jen described Nidhi to me, an eight-month-old girl with some form of dwarfism, medium complexion, and huge brown eyes. She said she was utterly beautiful.

  And while it certainly wasn’t the timing we had envisioned, we knew this wasn’t a little girl we should let pass us by. Of course, we wanted the confidence of being competent parents of one child before we considered a second. But I had more confidence in our being decent parents than I did in Nidhi’s being in a good, safe, forever home if we weren’t her new family. We never intended for our son to be an only child and did indeed wish to expand our family. So we decided to move forward and work toward welcoming this little girl into our family, too.

  That very day, Jen got on the phone with the adoption agency handling the little girl’s case. She expressed our interest and excitement to move forward. She was told we needed to get the paperwork in right away. The Indian laws regarding international adoptions were changing at the time. We were told that if we submitted our paperwork too late, there was a chance the child’s file might become unavailable, and we would be unable to adopt this little girl at all. They also sent us a photo of her. Everyone we shared the picture with made the same comment: “What beautiful eyes!”

  Now, for some odd reason, I had made two copies of every document needed for Will’s adoption. It wasn’t something Will’s agency had told us was necessary, just something I did inexplicably. It turns out there was a reason for it, I just didn’t know it at the time. Where the documentation took weeks upon weeks to accumulate for the dossier we submitted to China, we were able to turn around the bulk of our dossier for India in just three days.

  In January 2012, we had been reeling from our second miscarriage and unsure of how we would proceed with our family plan. By the Fourth of July of that year, we were waiting for the Chinese and Indian governments to allow us to come pick up our children.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jen

  Now a Family

  THE TRIP TO CHINA to meet our son after what felt like an eternity of waiting took seventeen hours. We went through San Francisco, then hopped on a flight to Beijing. Packing for our trip had taken us almost as long. I had been researching blogs of what to bring when adopting your child from China. There were things I didn’t even think of. I learned they only have diapers there, and not pull-ups. We debated bringing our own car seat or buying one there. The list of items we needed for Will was long. Not only were we first-time parents of a toddler, but we would be in a foreign country where running up to the local Target might not be an option. We were so excited to meet our son for the first time that we didn’t even go to sleep the night before.

  We landed in Beijing having not slept in twenty-four hours. Because we had the television crew in tow, things at the airport were a little more complicated than usual. The place was monstrous and unbelievably crowded. We had to take little airport trains just to get to the baggage area. Just like in the movies, everybody was pushing and shoving in order to pack as many people as possible into the train cars.

  At last, we got to the baggage claim area, where we met the government minder who had been assigned specifically to us. She told the crew about the restrictions that they had to honor, such as no videotaping of anything that might besmirch the People’s Republic of China. She wasn’t just a government enforcer; she had lots of power as well. It turned out that she could get us around security checkpoints or other obstacles. Being accompanied by a government minder gave us a kind of VIP status, although at the same time we were keenly aware of just how much we were being watched.

  This was our first trip to Asia, and it was very special. Bill had always wanted to visit China and Japan. Ironically, one of my dreams has always been to go to India, because I had so many friends who are Indian and I had grown to love the culture. How amazing that the reason a trip to India was in the stars was that our soon-to-be daughter was waiting for us there.

  Beijing has about forty million people, so it is overwhelmingly large. Most of the people didn’t seem particularly friendly or happy, but busy and focused.

  The adoption process in China actually requires prospective parents to take some time sightseeing before meeting their child so th
at we can have a better appreciation for the country and culture that the child is from. On our first night in Beijing we met with our local adoption agency guide, named Amy (which was the “English” name she used when meeting with adoptive parents from the U.S.). She gave us our schedule, told us the dos and don’ts for the adoption process, and even taught us a few vital phrases in Mandarin such as how to order food or find the bathroom. She would be our best friend while we were in Beijing, but we would have guides in each of the cities we would be traveling to.

  Because Beijing is the capital, I could feel the presence of “Big Brother” more than in any other city we visited. We were told to expect that at any point government officials might look through your belongings and download any media that they felt suspicious of. For that reason, we didn’t bring our cell phones, but got a new one without any personal information just for the trip, and we cleaned out our laptops. Good thing, because after dinner one night it was obvious to me someone had been through my suitcase. Nothing was missing, but things were rearranged.

  We were only in Beijing for a few days, but we got to see some amazing and historic landmarks. Bill and I loved being able to tour Tiananmen Square, so rich in Chinese history. We were able to sidestep the crowds because our government minder got us around the security. The next day we made the journey to the Great Wall of China. That was amazing, and as we walked up the steps, all I kept thinking was how much I wished Will was already with us! The Great Wall historically was the divider between China and Mongolia—now, of course, Inner Mongolia, on the other side, is part of China. Knowing that Will was from Inner Mongolia, I wished I could explain to him the history of where he was from. I guessed we would just have to make another trip when he was officially ours! Practically speaking, however, it was probably a good thing he wasn’t with us, because it was absolutely freezing on the Wall. We didn’t last up there very long.