“I will always be the oldest around here!” he declares with a look of superiority sent in his sister’s direction. She rolls her eyes a little, for this is nothing new, this place of second child that is hers to possess. She possesses it well, striving, always, to be as good as her eldest brother at everything. This drive makes her come in close behind him though she is a full 18 months younger, such that she reads better than he did at her age, she climbs higher than he did, swims deeper and further than he did when he was four. She pushes herself, sometimes to the point of tears because she is, after all, quite a bit younger than her brother. Hers is the advantage spot, a perch in life that allows her to see how to do something by watching someone else figure it out before her, perfecting her approach before she even begins. She puts puzzles together in her head before her fingers even touch the pieces; she plans her next move before her turn comes around on the board game. She, more than any of us, tends to plot.
The first arrived child has it harder, I think. He has had to break us in, to survive us while we lurched, suddenly, from child to parent in the swift movement of a baby passed from one set of arms to another. There was no labor and delivery to mark the momentousness of the occasion, no nurse there to show us how to hold him, comfort him, give him a bottle. We had to learn through trial and error and he bravely endured our many gaffs on the way to knowledge. His place of first in our family is worn well on his shoulders, but sometimes I worry that the pressure of being first will mark him somehow. He is, right now, the child that we sit and talk about at night: How will we keep him busy enough but not too busy? Is this the right school? Is he getting a good balance of freedom and structure? Do we know who his friends are, who their parents are? What is our stance on video games? Violence in media/movies/television? How are we going to not screw this up? It’s not that we don’t worry about Emma, it’s just that the first child somehow requires a different sort of worry, a more intense scrutiny of life and surroundings and influences and decisions. Our first child knows how to buckle down, to put one foot in front of the other and make his way through whatever comes his way; our daughter follows quietly and keenly in his footsteps, perfecting his moves with her own brand of intuition and authority.
As we wait for our third child, I cannot help but wonder who he will be, how his piece of this life’s puzzle will fit into our family. And how will we be with him? With two children safely and successfully growing under our care, how will we approach the raising of our littlest? I will not lie – this wait seems endless and insurmountable right now, and there are days when I wonder and despair about the possibility that the child in those pictures we so adore might not come home at all. I find myself thinking a great deal about the past, about the adjustment periods that both of our children went through upon arrival. The third time around, will these new circumstances in our adoption make a difference in how we, as a family, process each other? Will Joon, the stoic, sad face in all of these pictures, join our family with, finally, a smile?
I wonder if he will be the happy-go-lucky ‘third child’ I see in the families that blossom around us, or if he will have the yearning to always catch up that his sister so acutely feels. I grow weary of the wondering, and here we are five months in and possibly more than a year to go.
The time burns by so very slowly.
