Another long break from writing here, but with a good excuse -- the mom and the kid sent the dog up to the country (my brother's house in Bowdoinham), locked the house up tightly, grabbed "the dad" and headed off to Cambodia for two and a half weeks. By all accounts, it was an amazing trip -- with minimal planning, we arrived ten years less two days after Kanha climbed into my arms for the very first time on the steps of her orphanage in Roteang, Cambodia in April 2002, we happily and easily overlapped for a week with the family who had adopted their daughter, Kim Srean, the very same morning, and we managed to experience the country more as friends who can only visit every few years, not the wealthy tourists we would be without having our flesh and blood Cambodian link, Kanha. For the time we were there, I (and we) wrote mostly about the kid and her, and our, experiences in Cambodia -- you can see them, and many pictures, at www.facebook.com/KanhainCambodia2012. It's a cliche, but it truly was the trip of a lifetime.
We arrived home a couple of weeks ago with that hard, cold clash with reality that only happens when your time away has felt very real itself and you loathe feeling the connection to that other world loosen as the house, the kid, the dog, and all of their many needs begin to reclaim you. Jet lag, of course, didn't help. Having been eleven hours ahead of east coast time, I should have been sleeping all day and up all night, but truthfully, for the first two weeks I just didn't want to drag myself out of bed, at any time. There were a lot of naps.
But all those needs could not be ignored. The house spoke first. With heavy rains the first week we were back, a new leak sprung in the second floor door of our attached apartment. Water rolled through the hall on the way to Kristin's (our tenant's) bedroom, made clear in the iPhone photo she produced early one morning. Soaked through mats appeared on the front lawn and she pleaded with me, very very nicely, to get it fixed. The dog came home from the country with a pound or two newly packed on -- which is a lot on a twenty pound puppy -- and no less penchant to chew. The kid landed in Portland one evening at around 8 pm and was happily playing a lacrosse game with her Waynflete teammates less than 24 hours later, and I don't think she has stopped since. (I am getting a new appreciation for the term "soccer mom" although in our case it's "soccer/basketball/lacrosse/whatever other sport I'm loving at this moment" mom. And yes, I realize, I'm contributing to the problem... But that's for another day.)
I'm working on getting back to normal. My newly found handyman arrives early this morning to evaluate the apartment's leak, Theo, much to his grumbling stomach's chagrin, is on a diet, and I'm taking advantage of the "soccer/etc. dad" in our family and letting him do a lot of the driving from game to practice to game to practice (even if it's a bit reluctantly).
And I'm carrying the memories of the trip with me into my reality, here and now. Seeing Kanha navigate the worlds of America and Cambodia so adeptly -- playing with the orphanage kids, learning how to weave in a family's home on Mekong Island, bargaining with the merchants in the Siem Reap Night Market, learning Khmer phrases from her penpal, while remaining the modern, jean-short wearing, shopping-obsessed, boundlessly energetic, American girl I know -- did not surprise me but it amazed me: in my eyes, my amazing daughter became more fully alive, even more beautifully real, no matter where she was, and is, in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment