Ingredients:

1 quart anticipation
1 cup excitement
1 T fear
3 t hope
1 adorable little girl
1 gloomy medical diagnosis (aniridia, explained below)
Whole bowl sadness
Dash guilt

Instructions:

Wake up after a fitful night’s sleep.  Anticipation is through-the-roof.  Drive through the peachy morning light on the backroads of the Ukraine for 2 hours.  Stop for breakfast.  Drive another 2 hours.  Enter the gates of the orphanage.  Reach out for your partner’s hand (“This is it!”).  Stand outside to wait for the social worker.  Be ushered down the brightly painted halls to enter her office.  Begin the discussion about the personal and medical history of the child.  Beautiful, shy girl enters with the nurse…tears abated by two cookies she holds in her hands.  Approach her slowly and sit on the floor with her.  Notice that she can barely hold her eyes open; there’s too much sunlight in the room.  She comes to one of you and sits on your lap.  She seems to warm quickly, but again, she can barely see you; she hardly opens her eyes.  One of you seems to remember Aniridia in medical school.  In layman’s terms, this means the almost-absence of an iris, the colored part of your eye that acts like a lens, opening and closing to let more or less light in.  Since the muscles that open and close the pupil are entirely lacking, it’s like looking into a bottomless pit.  What this means for her: she cannot see in bright light.  What this means for us: a phone call to Mayo Clinic’s opthamology resident-on-call to check on the specifics.  We’re informed that until further tests are done, there are no answers.  It’s a rare congenital eye condition which usually means lots of other underlying medical problems.  In the most severe cases, ultimate blindness.  We “reject” the child (a horrible word, but that’s what it’s called).  File “refusal” papers and travel all the way back to Kiev (another 4 hours in the car), unable to hash out what’s just happened.  Sinking feeling in stomach.  An ocean of sadness.

We just didn’t know it would be this hard.

We wait for another appointment date, whenever it becomes available.

I’m not sure I know the questions to ask for today.