Category: My book

Because Kids Change Flying

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. 

-Warren Buffett

 

I remember what the old days were like. Leisure and bliss, that’s what. Stroll down aisle. Find seat. Arrange optimal carry-on access. Sit. Close eyes. Nap? Or read. Gaze out the window. Yum, is that airplane food I smell? (My wife says I’m abnormal for looking forward to meals on planes.) Nap or read some more. Listen to music. While eating. Or reading. Go crazy and do all three. Land. Stretch, grab carry-on, deplane, arrive. Refreshed.

That was life before Enoch. After he came along, our first flight was home for Christmas when he was five months old. In those days, just getting out of the house with him was a challenge. Doing it with luggage and then having to check it all in at the airport? It hardly felt familiar to anything I’d done before. We had way too much stuff. I started getting flustered as we stumble-bumble-fumbled through security. Up went the stress a few more notches when I looked at the time and saw we would have to hurry if we were going to make it. I tried to think what day it was, and if it was the same one we’d left home on. As we speed-clunked to our gate with our carry-ons, I felt irritated with every person standing remotely in my way. We arrived to find the flight had already boarded. The airline staff took our stubs and hustled us through.

We arrived at the mouth of the plane aisle, and panic set in. I squinted toward our seats. Had nobody seen all our stuff? Why hadn’t we been pre-boarded?

Oh right, late. But how are we supposed to get all this stuff back there? And another thing, what is WRONG with us? People have been having kids since like forever—it doesn’t seem it should be this hard. 

I glanced at little Enoch’s face. Oblivious.

Buddy, you cannot walk, you cannot talk, and bringing you has turned this into something like no other trip I’ve ever taken.

Babies, who really cannot do anything that might be called…useful, have luggage and accessory requirements rivaling those of a touring Maharaja. I was baptized that day. In spite of having been warned ahead of time by more people than I could count, I came to know deep in my soul right there on that plane: my life really was never going to be the same. Sure, the change kids make would grow to become an expected, welcome part of life, a humorous familiarity, a point of commonality with friends and strangers alike. But that day was revelation itself as The Question was born. I came later to call it The Mantra Question. No father forgets his first encounter with The Mantra Question:

How can one…little person…require 

all 

this 

stuff?

We pushed, pulled, lifted, and wrestled Mr. Maharaja’s stuff down the aisle. A stroller (you could bring them in those days!), Tammy’s carry-on, Tammy’s purse, the diaper bag, a toy bag, loose toys, Enoch’s blankie, Enoch’s carry-on, a sippy cup, my carry-on. I vowed the next time to get serious. Either go all the way and bring that kitchen sink, or else eliminate my own stuff entirely. If I couldn’t wear it, I would leave it. Or burn it.

We inched closer to our seats, banging a cadence to my chanting while I willed four consecutive empty overhead bins into being. When at last we got to our row, I checked our seat mates for cobwebs and began formulating a plan for hoisting the stockpile overhead. Then it hit me: the baby.

What am I supposed to do with the baby? 

I had no plan, I had no experience. The floor?

No, I don’t think I can put him on the floor. 

The flight attendants were seating other stragglers. Tammy and I needed all four hands in our scramble to get stowed before takeoff. What was that wonderful smell coming from the galley?

Forget that! Focus.

I scanned wildly for a friendly face. A guy three rows back made eye contact. Good enough. I got to him in one leap.

“WouldyoumindholdinghimforaminutewhileIputawayallhisstuffhaha?”

In later years, in optimistic moods, I would most of the time be almost definitely fairly sure that I had waited for his response before leaving Enoch in his arms.

I was back to Tammy in a flash and we got everything overhead in record time, triumphantly utilizing a final scrap of luggage to wedge tight the travel stroller that had been refusing to stay up. Then I saw her face: vexed. Extremely vexed. Not at falling strollers, but at failing husbands, husbands who passed off offspring to strangers. So I found a bin door latch that didn’t need tinkering and tinkered, which blocked mom’s access to the aisle; she sat. I leapt. I found our son gazing into the wide grin of his benefactor.

“Thanks, man,” I said.

His laugh and loud “No problem” drew chuckles from everyone around.

I plopped my sweating self into a seat at last, and now had thoughts only for my defense. I needed something…witty. To create a diversion, to save my skin in the coming onslaught. But a sideways glance revealed the danger had passed. In spite of her best efforts, the corners of Tammy’s mouth were turning up and she shook her head. The laughter had already saved me.

 

 

 

Today’s excerpt is from chapter “Fabulously Harebrained.”

This has been Part 2 of a 5-part Book Excerpt Series in the run-up to Orphan Sunday on November 8.

Stay tuned for details before the end of the series on how you can pre-order your own copy of Lily Was the Valley: Undone by Adoption.

Thanks for reading!

Love at No Sight (Part 1 in Series)

This is part of a 5-part series in the run-up to Orphan Sunday.

Each post will be a full or partial chapter from my soon-to-be-released Lily Was the Valley. Stay tuned for details before the end of the series on how to pre-order your copy. Today’s chapter (portions of which may have been posted on a former blog long ago) is:

“Adoption’s Beginnings: Conflicted to Say the Least.”

忽冷忽热

Now hot, now cold. Or, To alternate.

-Chinese Saying

 

I loved a girl.

Kitty was the most mysterious girl in all of second grade. Her eyes could capture a boy’s soul with a glance. She even spoke to me once.

But I do not mean that girl.

Nor do I mean the flautist in my sixth-grade band. My budding love for tall, smashing Dawn was slightly less childish, but my world barely bordered the worlds in which she would soon be starring. Jazz band, tap dancing, the cool boys. Cool boys didn’t wear Huskies.

I do not mean that love.

I am not speaking, either, of my youthful love for my high school girlfriend, nor of my pretended love for the list of girls I obtusely joked about liking during the same time.

The girl is none of them.

The girl is not even my wife, though our love is real and true, spanning decades, transforming. I am not speaking here of that love.

I loved a different girl.

It was not love at first sight, for never had I seen her. I loved her without sight.

A love skeptic, practically, taken by surprise. Blindsided.

Blindsided by love at no sight.

 

* * *

 

Adopting had not been my idea.

My wife had been thinking about adoption since she was a teenager, and even while dating we’d discussed it a few times. Adopting sounded fine to me, and when she continued mentioning it after marriage and after we had kids, it still sounded fine. But I considered it something for the future. Someday, sure, let’s adopt.

But one day Tammy pressed a little. The whole family had been discussing adoption quite often of late, and our four-year-old daughter had been regularly praying that God would make it happen. “Honey,” Tammy asked, “are you seriously up for adopting? Honestly, truly? I mean, are you okay if I start researching adoption agencies that we could use?”

I looked at her. I had been thinking it over. I had no real objections, no reasons it absolutely had to be later rather than now, so I innocently ignited her dry tinder with two words:

“Why not?”

Within hours, pamphlets, packets, and portfolios came flying in from all over the country. The kitchen table listed dangerously.

“Oh, you meant, like, right now, did you?”

Whereas I might take days weighing the pros and cons of a pair of shoes, research for Tammy did not entail sitting around on one’s brains all day.⁠1 Research was an action verb. She looked at me with a twinkle and shot back, “Why not?”

 

* * *

 

“Hello?”

It’s the director of adoption services from our adoption agency. She’s never called me before. It’s a sunny spring day, and the windows and both sunroofs of our borrowed silver minivan are wide open. I have parked on the side of the road to take the call, and my wife is passing out snacks to our children—ages seven, five and one—in the back.

“Mr. Johnson, I have a little girl for you.”

“Are you joking?” I hear myself ask, grinning. As if the director might reply, You got us, Mr. Johnson. We just love prank-calling our waiting families. 

I’m embarrassed.

I swivel to face the passenger seat, cover the phone, and, still grinning, mouth one word in a silent shout: “Referral!”

Raised brows and a blank stare.

Jabbing my finger toward the phone, I mouth it again, slower. Still nothing. My wife, absolutely unhampered in any other mode of communication, is a hopeless lip reader. Yet, unaccountably, I mouth my capitulation to her as well. “Never mind!”

I go back to the call and she goes back to the snacks. I learn the little girl’s special need—a cleft soft palate, no cleft lip—and the province where her orphanage is located.

With my question, “When was she born?” my wife is finally in cahoots. I catch a view of her hands flapping. We’ve been waiting for this a long time. The joy spreads to her feet, her arms, her whole body. She narrowly misses ejecting from the vehicle entirely.

Another final question or two and I hang up.

My wife is crying. I am crying.

The kids cry, “Why are you crying?”

We explain, and they get excited too. Our crying turns to laughing: a mysterious sister-to-be has become real. Her arrival is near.

Even the one-year-old is laughing.

It was pure fun, that call.

April 15. Tax day in the United States. We took the call in Texas but had spent the previous four tax days out of country, so April 15 for us had already begun to lose some of its usual consequence. Now it was gone for good. Henceforth, April 15 would be Lily Day. The day we got the call. The day an idea—that we would add to our family via special needs adoption from the People’s Republic of China, our second home—became reality. We were matched.

We got the van back on the road and drove, madly scanning for wireless so we could download the referral email. We found an open network in some parking lot and gazed wonderingly at three pictures of a girl who had not yet been named Lily when they were taken. In the next two days, we would forward translated documents and measurements to our pediatrician, await her medical opinion, and submit our official written acceptance letter. Not until then would the referral become the official match.

But grinning and crying there in our sunny van, we already knew.

It was gonna be love.

 

* * *

 

Or was it?

I had the dubious distinction of falling in love with my wife three years after I’d married her. We’d been at a retreat where my heart came so alive and felt so raw that I wondered it didn’t burn a hole through my chest and fall to the street. Every breath pressed me up against a world I’d never known existed. Feeling everything, I saw how accustomed I was to feeling next to nothing.

“Do you mean to tell me that you live like this all the time, Tammy? Like, you know exactly what you feel all the time, without having to stop and think about it?”

She laughed at me. “Yes, dear, of course. I am a woman.”

I couldn’t believe some people—men or women—had been walking around their whole lives like that.

But we went home, and the boil subsided. The old me returned. I just wasn’t the passionate, or compassionate, type.

I’d always held my wife’s compassion, on the other hand, in a bit of awe. For instance, when it came to orphans, she could sit down to look at webpages full of children waiting for families…and actually feel things. Not me. I generally had one emotion looking at pages like that: overwhelmed. There were thousands of such kids. Far too many to feel anything for them individually. Tammy would look into the eyes of a little face and be filled with compassion. I saw strangers. Kids I didn’t know, far removed from me.

I couldn’t imagine crying over one of them, and logic ensured I never would. For how could tears for one not highlight how all the rest were being ignored? And not just from that webpage but from countless others like it? There was no way to feel compassion for one child because I knew I couldn’t feel compassion for all of them. I could gaze at children with missing limbs, a cleft lip, or cerebral palsy and be sobered or grow pensive; but I never experienced heartbreak as Tammy did.

For the most part I felt nothing.

Had I seen a picture of Lily before Lily Day, I would not have taken special note of it. I would not have thought her especially beautiful. I was excited the first time I saw her picture because someone had just told us she was ours. But, like after the marriage retreat, excitement faded. I was as taken with imagining the process behind the scenes that had whittled down those endless pages to one child as I was with the child herself.

Will I be able to love this child like I love Enoch, Haddie, and Elijah?

I didn’t know.

Even while our firstborn, Enoch, had grown in my wife’s belly, I’d not been able to predict what I would feel at his birth. It took that first glimpse to bring the tears that I had honestly not known would come or not. And of course the births of Haddie, our daughter, and Elijah, our made-in-China boy, moved me, too.

But ahead of time? Feelings remained just out of reach. With Lily, all we had were a few pictures. Yes, we knew she was eating, drinking, growing, crawling, teething. But she did not feel real. I couldn’t help but think about how—up until our match—she had been one among nameless thousands. We couldn’t see her, nor would we see her until we went to sign the final papers. What would I feel up until that time? Would adoption lead to genuine feelings of love in me?

I had no idea.

There was every chance I might end up feeling nothing at all.

 

 

End of excerpt. Details on how to pre-order Lily Was the Valley will follow in an upcoming post.

1 A phrase I borrow from Mr. Henry F. Potter’s summation of Ernie the taxi driver’s job in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Submitting is Difficult

If that title brings to mind pictures of a preacher holding forth on the finer points of Ephesians 5…let’s reel that imagination back towards something that makes sense in an author blog:

Submitting to literary agents is difficult.

The difficulty is not in following agency prescription lists: query letter, cover letter, first three chapters, any three chapters, first 10 pages, first 50 pages, platform elements, writing experience, how you heard about us, brief selling points, sales handles, back cover copy… no. The difficulty is elsewhere. 

The difficulty is in the waiting. 

More so than even, I would say, in the rejection. The rejection is expected. I’ve accumulated dozens of rejection letters already in my brief non-career. Each one closes one door. One door that no longer requires my attention.

This week I’m blogging for the other aspiring authors out there. (Don’t they say everyone’s got a book in them?) Expect here no expert advice—that’s out there and necessary! appreciated! But I’ll be content for this to serve merely a breath of air. Think of my words as thoughts from someone just a step or two ahead on the publishing path. Thoughts from, Other Writer, someone possibly every bit as green as you are.

The submission process is looooooooooooooooooong.

Prepare yourself. If you are going to try getting a book published as a nobody, it is going to require a lot of your spare time (or sleep time) and a lot of patience.

Nor should you make the mistake of thinking self-publishing is the easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy shortcut to your dreams. You could pay others to do all the self-publishing steps for you (and put your project in a financial hole thousands of dollars deeper than sales of your book will likely ever match) or you could do all the work of educating yourself about layout, cover design, spine thickness, paper thickness, paper color, fonts, ISBN’s, e-pubs, PDFs, kindle formatting, registering a self-owned publishing company, on and on. Or you could hold your breath until mysterious, publishing-savvy new friends fall out of trees and do everything exactly like you like it for free (which has got to be the least reliable of the three).

I, myself, am not self-publishing, though many who ask, “can I read your book, yet?” ask why not.

Because.

I stuck my toe in the waters of traditional publishing, then slipped my whole cold self into these inky waters, so I can wait. Float here for a bit. Just how many times do you think I will get the chance to write and attempt to publish my first book?†

I know the odds are against me.

I might prune completely and still have nobody notice me floating here.

I’m still gonna try.

Back in January and February, I hired a company to make my submissions for me, and through them I queried 25-30 agents/agencies per month. That company’s services weren’t cheap, but I do credit them with showing me how it was done and getting me started, which is nothing to sneeze at. I call those mad days my “shotgun” submissions.

These days I’m selecting my own submission targets, calling these my “rifle” submissions since I research, rank, and particularly choose each agency/agent. Last week I queried three, which some experts say is quite enough at one time. For, should a full manuscript be requested, it’s very possible a several-weeks’-long period of “exclusivity” will be required as well, in which I’d be bound to not give the manuscript to anyone else. 

Which seems a little like—if the logic indeed is to move me towards avoiding too many agents asking for my manuscript all at once—insisting we throw in just one fishing line instead of a dozen, plus a net and a stick of dynamite, when everyone knows the lake was all but emptied of fish years ago.

But such is the prevailing logic, I guess, so other than last week’s three and Jan-Feb’s shotgunners, there’s only been one other agent I’ve queried so far. I wrote her back in May, and the 8-week wait-window has just ended. Now, an agent can always reply after that window has closed, but when the website says, “You can assume after 8 weeks that we’re not interested in your project,” it doesn’t give a realist much reason to hope.

Plus, it was hard enough checking email during those 8 weeks—who needs to pile on the additional annoyance of nursing hope beyond the 8 weeks? Though I guess I’ve just now given myself three fresh reasons for barely-hopeful checking each morning, haven’t I? Just this morning there was an email with “Submission” as the subject line.

It was a soliloquy on Ephesians 5.

Kidding.

It was a rejection letter. A form letter, as most of them are. A leftover from my February shotgun submissions.

I wish everyone would send a rejection letter, though. It’s far easier to bolt a door shut than to, day after day, have your mind’s periphery jump at every squeak, every shaft of light, and forever be wondering if someone’s on the other side of that door about to push it open…

If I’ve learned one surprising thing on this journey, it’s that publishing books is about many things before it is about great writing. Of course compelling writing is fantastic, but it’s far from a necessity. Only one criterion makes it into that category:

Sales.

If an agent can’t see “$$” when they look at your book, it frankly doesn’t matter how well it’s written. Agents weed through endless slush piles seeking the one or two or twenty manuscripts this week or month or year that might have a chance of selling well. Granted, that slush pile is largely garbage, or a few inches north of that, but it contains a lot of excellent writing that will never float its way to the top, either.

Rest assured, however, my certitude (just like absolutely every single author out there) that my own writing is not part of the garbage is unshakeable. Which makes me a little shaky. For I’ve read too many embarrassments who are convinced that poor writing comes only from “other writers, never me.”

But what if I’ve become one of “those” people? Reassuringly, just the fact that I asked made me feel better. I don’t think “those” people ever ask.

Anyway…so after an agent contracts with an author to represent their work, (s)he pitches it to (a) publisher(s). I recently read that some publishers publish 1 out of every 1,000 books they’re pitched.

And out of every 10 books that do get published, 9 will cost (lose) the publisher money.

So everyone’s on a mad search for that blockbuster which can make up for all the lost ground. And it cracks me up how many new authors believe they’ve already written it.

Oh, but it’s only the rest of all them that are crazy! If only I could be discovered, they’d realize I really have written the next [The Shack, Harry Potter, whatever].

Hehehe.

The odds against an unknown, non-famous, regular, without-an-online-tribe writer getting published at all, let alone writing the latest bestseller, aren’t worth the mathematical effort it would take to calculate. Of course it happens; we’ve heard about it in the news. But there’s a reason (or rather, hundreds of thousands of reasons, a.k.a. writers) it’s news.

I’m still willing to be patient.

I can do some waiting.

Just not forever. 

Eventually, I will self-publish. Of course I will.

Because I have no idea if the book I’ve written is marketable or not. I don’t know if it’s unique or not. If it’s too similar to some other story that’s been seen before…it doesn’t stand a chance of being picked up. In fact, unless my query letter jumps—screaming, yelling, and carrying sacks of cash—off a computer screen and into the retinas of an agent (who am I kidding? it’ll be one of their assistants), almost every agency I query stands to read exactly zero of my manuscript. Many won’t make the end of the query letter. 

It’s a tough market. Countless writers more prolific and gifted than I have never broken in.

I still say to You, Aspiring Writer:

Write it anyway. 

That book inside you that has never stopped knocking at your mind’s door? That story that never stops nagging you to get it out of your head and down on paper?

Write it.

Go ahead and imagine the worst: that nary a soul beyond a few loved ones ever reads your book.

Still I say, write.

You’ll be glad you did.

I (non-published, unknown, unread, and unnoticed, too) wrote mine.

And I couldn’t be happier.

OK, a full-manuscript request from an agent would still jack the happiness levels out the roof, I admit.

But it isn’t a necessity.

 

 

 

†You were right to check, but it’s as you thought: one