By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

I sit with my family on the couch, we’re cozy, all wrapped up in fuzzy blankets. A candle burns and Christmas lights twinkle. We’re watching a show. The kids fall into the story on the screen and I stare at our bookshelves that flank the TV.

After years of dragging my feet, I finally bought these shelves for our basement a few months ago. Something about being at home so much, needing a change, getting sick of the growing list of things I’ve said I was going to do around the house but haven’t done yet. It took me weeks before I put even one book on them, that’s how unconfident I am at decorating. 

Without warning, I stand up, walk upstairs, and come back down with a picture frame, another candle, and a pile of books. I try my best to arrange them, then stand there for ten minutes, wholly unsure if where I put it all is okay. This has been my routine almost every night for a month. 

The only thing that hasn’t moved, the only thing I am sure of on those shelves right now? The photobooks of my kids. They have identical black bindings and are propped up with a glass jar full of shells. 

Like many moms, I started the whole photobook thing with the deadly combo of energy and grand ambitions. But at present, I’m seven years behind for my two oldest, my little boy has just one book, and my youngest … not even one. 

She’s a good sport about it, though passively hints at wanting her own. She’ll thumb through a brother’s and say something like, “Oh, I wish I had a book.” And sometimes she’ll even ask, “Mom, will I ever get a book?” Okay, maybe she’s not that passive about it after all.

Her fourth adoption day anniversary was last month—so I decided it was finally time to make her one. The first would contain memories from her life before us—with pictures that were given to us on a flash drive by her foster family. Her as a baby, laying on her tummy with a gummy smile. As a toddler, waving out the window of the back seat of a car. And as a two-and-a-half-year-old at a lush park in a pink jacket, holding the hand of her foster mom.

I don’t know who most of the people are in the pictures. I wish I knew more, could give her more, but I’ll give her what I can.   

In my book-making momentum, I decide to do another one from her adoption. On the first pages, my husband and I and our two oldest kids are in preparations to travel to China. The book ends with us back in the states, in our living room, as a family of six. (In this picture, her brother, the one who didn’t go to China with us, is screaming.) In between, there are pictures of our first days as a family: the moment we met, paperwork signing, noodle eating, an animal safari that reminded us of a modern day Jurassic Park. 

To make the book, I had to look through old paperwork to find the details of where we went when, search for the names of each place. Quinling Park in Guiyang where macaque monkeys roamed free amongst the Buddhist shrines. The Juyongguan section of the Great Wall, just shy of an hour outside of Beijing, where we climbed on stones placed 2,700 years earlier. 

But what I don’t forget, and have no problem stepping into, are the emotions of that time. How it felt to open our lives to a child we didn’t know. To hold her in our arms alongside so many questions. To be excited, scared, and trying so hard to nurture the first seeds of love. The pictures don’t capture that. 

We usually celebrate Viv’s adoption day with food—dumplings and noodles—and this year we added in pizza. Four years have passed since the first time we met. And maybe I needed all that time to be ready to make this book for her. Because adoption is beautiful. But it is also heartbreaking.

The first picture I have of her from the day we met? The day we celebrate now and call Adoption Day?  It’s her with her feet locked in place, her body leaning back, her face in a grimace—and the woman who brought her in, a nanny we were told, gently pushing her towards me. Do I want that in her book? The picture itself, sure. But the pain, the fear, the this is not what I want in that image? Or the one from twenty minutes later, where my husband holds our daughter in his arms, but she looks at the nanny as if saying, He’s nice and all but … we’re going home after this, right?  

And then there is the picture of all of us—me, my husband, my biological kids, and the woman who is not a nanny, but her actual foster mom, the woman who raised her and loved her since she was a baby—all standing there together. In the picture, the woman fights back —a testament to the tension of what she was feeling in light of her stoic culture. In the picture, Viv looks at her, looks to her. And my husband and I stand there with smiles and red eyes—we had just finished trying our very best to say Thank You Thank you Thank you in Mandarin, a phrase that fell so short for all we wanted to express to the woman who taught our daughter to love and be loved. 

The rest of the pictures of the trip are of the kids laying on the big bed in plush robes and slippers laughing, splashing in the rooftop swimming pool, swinging with wide smiles on the playground. It’s fun to remember all the places we went and saw together on a trip of a lifetime. 

What’s harder for me as I put together this book are the memories of the things I didn’t take pictures of. Like when she cried—no, wailed —herself to sleep, night after night after night. When she pushed me away, refusing my arms, my help, my presence. I knew it was normal for an adoptive child to prefer one parent over the other, and though I couldn’t help but feel the sting personally, I knew the real pain was happening in her little heart. 

Three-year-olds are admittedly … hard. My daughter was no different. And her personality was largely a mystery, all her preferences unknown. Anything beyond food and shelter and safety were communicated, just in a language we didn’t understand.

After four years of being a family, after tucking her in night after night, kissing her scrapes, reading books on the couch, I know my daughter. I know how imaginative and curious and tenacious she is. I know she needs lead time when it comes to changing activities, that she prefers her bagel buttered and not cream-cheesed, I know she likes to wear socks on her hands to be funny and to have her hair up in “piggie buns.” I no longer live in a sea of unknowns with her.    

Today, my camera roll is overflowing of pictures. Of Viv drawing, jumping on the trampoline, playing with the dog. Someday soon I’ll use them to make her more books. And more for her siblings too. My hope? That they line an entire shelf in the basement. 

That those books will give them memories and insight into the story of their lives. 

And I hope, no matter what, that they know their lives are so much more than what they see inside the pages. 

Words and photo by Sonya Spillmann.