I have started and re-started this blog several times. I’ve written several more drafts in my head. There’s a struggle within me to balance honoring Marella’s story, and the truth I want her to grow up with — that she was deeply wanted in our family and beautifully created by a Heavenly Father — and acknowledging that adoption is messy, and her path to us was full of pain and heartache.
When we were first matched with Marella in our adoption process, Lisa, at our agency, America World, told us she was missing a leg. To adopt from India, you have to adopt a disabled child, so we were prepared for anything — blindness, serious illness, multiple birth defects, mental impairment, and the list could go on and on.
When she told us Marella (given name: Chatura) was missing a leg, I felt like it was no big deal. We can deal with a missing leg. Later, when the photos came in, Lisa called me back and said, “Well, I’m looking at the pictures and I see two legs!” And she did, in fact, have two legs, but the toes on one foot were turned in, and she was missing toes on both feet (she has eight toes, but only seven toenails, meaning one toe didn’t fully develop).
We showed pictures of her foot to our awesome pediatrician, who, although he admitted he wasn’t an orthopedist, felt like a simple surgery would be able to straighten out her toes. We realized from the first time we laid eyes on her in the orphanage that her mobility wasn’t affected. At all. Good Lord that child can run!
Marella loves her toes. I paint them different colors — usually whatever I’m wearing because she likes to match what I have on. She will gladly take off her shoes and socks in public to show some random stranger how pretty her toes are. She doesn’t yet know that her toes are different. Abnormal. Unique.
Last week we took her to the Shriner’s Hospital in Lexington, to begin the process of getting her foot fixed. In my mind, it was going to be easy — schedule a surgery, straighten her toes, have some physical therapy, and we’re done. Right?
Wrong.
After looking at the X-rays, the orthopedist showed us that some of the bones in her toes don’t connect to her feet, meaning her toes might not be viable. Meaning, they might have to remove her toes (remove sounds so much better than amputate, doesn’t it?).
Not what we were expecting.
Here’s the good news: the bones in her feet are fine, so there’s not really a chance that anything but the tiny little toes would be removed.
While we were still at the hospital, I started texting people who I knew were anxiously awaiting finding out what the doctor said. I was fighting back the tears, and trying to absorb all of it.
My friend Rachel sent this to me in reply: “Thank you God that you brought Marella to a family who cries over lost toes instead of throwing her out because of them.”
Truth.
There’s a lot of both pain and redemption behind those toes.
I’ve shared part of her story before, but not all of it. Partly because I want to honor her, and protect her, and partly because it’s ugly.
But sometimes the truth is ugly. And if we keep pretending that adoption is pretty and convenient and tied in a package with a nice bow, we are doing millions — MILLIONS — of orphans a disservice.
Her story is tragic, but she’s not the only one. I promise you that orphans all over the world have a similar story.
(And also, you better believe I will delete this blog when she is old enough to read).
Marella was abandoned in a pile of trash outside of a public toilet in India. When she was found, her umbilical cord was still attached, and she was covered in blood.
Not blood just from the birth.
She has several tiny stab wounds on her feet, and the bottom of the crooked foot had been cut. Badly. There’s a long scar.
That’s her truth.
Her family believed that because her toes were crooked, she wasn’t worth life, so they literally tried to end her life and put her out with the trash.
How close this world was to losing the gift of her, all because of a few crooked toes.
It’s so ugly and gross and vile, I don’t even want to write it. But it’s also true. And if I was put on this earth for one reason, it was to stand up and shout that there are millions and millions and millions of orphans all over the world, and if just 7% of the Christians on the planet would do something — 7% — every child could have a home of their own. But to take in one of them might disrupt our entire life, so we turn our head and live in a big house and drive a fancy car, claiming we can’t afford to take care of an orphan and hope someone else will do something, while children are dying in trash heaps and orphanages and on the street and in the slums.
I love what Katie J. Davis says about adoption: “Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the gospel in my living room.”
(She would know about adoption, by the way. She wrote a book, Kisses from Katie, about why she, at 22 years old, adopted 14 children — 13 when she was just 22 years old — in Uganda.)
I don’t want to share all of this with the world. I want to keep us in a little bubble and I want to erase that part of her history and I want to pretend none of it happened.
But more than that, I want us to stop pretending that orphans don’t need our help, and that if we don’t do something, someone else will. Because the reality is, every 18 seconds, a child becomes an orphan. 18 seconds. And the estimated 153 million orphans isn’t counting the orphans among the 230 million children born in the world who don’t even have a birth record.
How many children like Marella has the world missed out on because we have somehow convinced ourselves that the orphan crisis isn’t our crisis? How many have we ignored because the inconvenience to us was greater than our concern for their very lives? How many are on the streets, wondering where their next meal is coming from, while we debate which restaurant we should eat at that night?
So. The toes that brought our daughter to us might have to be removed. We pray that isn’t the case. The orthopedist will take more x-rays in six months and then re-evaluate. He said he may not make a decision for a couple years, as she grows. He stressed his biggest concern is what will give her the best mobility as she grows.
I don’t want her to lose her toes. But whether she keeps them or not, I will be forever grateful for the feet that led her right to us.
“I don’t want a flame, I want a fire. I want to be the one who stands up and says, ‘I’m gonna do something.” ~Matthew West, ‘Do Something’
