Excerpt one

From Chapter One – A Mystical Path to Motherhood

Enter a little puff of smoke.

As the sun finally set on the summer solstice that year, we stood before the snapping pine in the fire pit, about to enter the sweat lodge again -- only this time with no demands for a solution. An energetic healer had told us to make the list, burn it and have faith. On that paper was written our wishes for a child:

1) a spiritually advanced soul
2) a soul with something to teach us
3) a soul we have something to teach
4) a soul with enough flexibility to enjoy and benefit from our lifestyle
and one last wish for all three of us:
5) the financial needs for this family to be met

Letting go of the physical need to have biological children sent a swift pulse of liberation through my body so suddenly that my eyes twitched. Watching those wishes go up in smoke, everything at last made perfect sense. I’d always felt destined for a more mystical path to motherhood.

George looked at me and whispered, “Did you feel that?” I had: a slight pulling sensation from the smoke floating away.

“You know,” I whispered back, “I’ve been thinking about adoption my entire life.” George closed his eyes and inhaled a deeper breath than he’d taken in months. His sigh captured the unspoken truth that stood between us -- his desperate guilt and my hidden disappointment -- and released it into the fire. We were moving on.

Every test to gain permission from local, state and federal authorities to adopt a child was as anxiety-ridden as a prenatal exam. Yet there was no due date to plan the rest of our lives around. We were strapped to an emotional roller coaster: filling out forms; waiting; more forms; more waiting; being judged on paper as to whether we were fit to parent. The waiting required absolute submission to the divine, for adoption is a manifestation of the soul, a birth of the heart. You consciously will a child into your life, and there is magic in it.

Mysteriously, that little puff of smoke found its way from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming all the way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

I had been meditating every day, asking the energy of my heart to radiate toward our child, wherever he or she was. Country and race, we decided, did not matter. Our conversation about domestic versus international adoption was short. Why wait for a child to be born in America and for us to be selected by a birthmother, we reasoned, when we could give our love to a child in an orphanage who already was waiting for a family? We knew several couples who had adopted Chinese girls, and we joined their communication network. Our lives changed forever on the day one of those families sent us an e-mail about children waiting for parents in Cambodia.

When I read that simple message, a gentle, invisible hand took hold of my heart, and Cambodia has been a part of my soul ever since. Calls around the country ate up my days; the issues of abject poverty in a war-torn nation crowded my consciousness, merging with the bureaucratic details of Cambodia’s adoption process. Overwhelmed, I did what any levelheaded woman does when confronting her fear of the unknown: I called my mother.

“Mom, I just learned about orphaned children in Cambodia,” I said.

From her kitchen in Maine she answered, “Cambodia -- you’re kidding me! I just got back from the beauty parlor, where I met a lady who told me all about the adoption process in Cambodia.”

Mom had written down the names and telephone numbers of the exact same people I had already called during my two-week, fact-finding mission. During the conversation, George arrived with the mail and plopped the new issue of National Geographic in front of me. The cover story was about Cambodia. I looked skyward and said, “Okay, I got it!”

Adoption is a soul birth. Our labor began on December 18, 2000, when we received word of a five-month-old boy who had been living at an orphanage near Phnom Penh for several months. His name, Ratanak, wrapped itself like a mellow love song around my heart. George and I both knew instantly that he was our son. Three days later we received a picture and one-page fax that told us his height and weight and described his health in one word: “good.” His birthdate was July 1, 2000 -- ten days after our ceremonial fire when we had burned the list of our wishes. With little debate we faxed back our acceptance. We had no idea when we might hold him the first time. We’d just given birth and the child was held up before our eyes, but we couldn’t touch him until someone far away said we could.

We waited three months. Our faith strained. I nurtured my boy from afar, watching over him with my soul. It was all I could do to keep from going crazy. When the phone call finally came, we were on a plane in only three days.