Open the Door: Mitike's 2nd Birthday

On the morning of January 22, which is legally and officially Mitike's second birthday, my sweet daughter wanders to the top of the stairs in her brown and pink polka-dotted pajamas, like she does every morning, and calls out, "Mommy! All done sleeping!"

I rush up the stairs and sweep her up in my arms. "Happy birthday, sweet girl!"

Her eyes widen. We've been talking about her birthday for a few days -- she's been chanting, "'itike's birthday comin'!" and singing the "Happy Birthday" song, waiting as patiently as a toddler can wait. "Mommy," she whispers, "'itike's birthday, open the door?"

That's TK's way of asking if something is beginning, of course, but the writer in me couldn't help but savor the phrase. Open the door. Just five months ago, TK, I pushed open the door to an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and searched a dim-lit playroom for your face, which I'd only seen in two photographs. A week later, Ali opened the door to our house in Juneau, Alaska -- exactly half a world away from Ethiopia -- and you squirmed out of my arms and ran inside, as if you knew what "home" meant already. Open the door.

"Mommy!" TK's voice brings me back to this moment. "Balloons!" I smile. We've reached the bottom of the stairs, and TK's just glimpsed the balloons Tim and Katie filled and then hid under a blanket to surprise her on her birthday. TK leans down and pulls the blanket away, then claps her hands in utter joy. Balloons, balloons! She reaches for the purple one, and I start singing: "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear TK. . ."

But pause a moment. Let TK play with her purple balloon and come into the kitchen with me -- I need more coffee. The truth is, this isn't really her birthday. This is a date the translators at the Addis Ababa office recorded on her orphanage paperwork -- it's a date converted from the Ethiopian calendar one her birth father provided. Here is one of the many questions I did not ask Abose but which I wish I had in that mere half hour we got to meet: When was Mitike born? I'm certain he did not possess a calendar, or a concept of time -- he was struggling to feed himself and his family; his wife was sick; his thoughts were blurred by desperation. Two years later, he had to make a guess when the orphanage people asked him, "When was she born?" "Taerr," he must have replied, which is the Ethiopian month which begins on our Jan. 9 and ends on our Feb. 8. A guess.

Watch TK now. She is batting the purple balloon up in the air, laughing with her mouth wide open. "Lookit, Mommy! Lookit! Silly balloon!" She's clearly older than two. The pediatrician shakes her head, smiling: TK has all her teeth, she hits all the benchmarks for fine and gross motor skills, she is developing language at an amazing rate; she's either a genius or she's two and a half -- maybe three.

This makes me sad. I forget sometimes that TK's only been with us for five months; I feel I've known her her whole life. But because I haven't -- because she came to me carrying a green-brown country with round huts, goat herds, tall leafy false banana plants, a weary man with smiling eyes, 5:30 a.m. chants, wavering music, "Salaam!", and berbere spice -- I desperately want to know exactly how old she is. I want to know if it was the rainy or the dry season when she was born. I want to know which birds her birth mother might have heard when she woke in the tukul after labor. I want to know what farming task her birth father completed before he entered the tukul to find a new baby had joined his family.

I want to know how many days TK knew before she knew me.

Last week, our friends Topaz and Colin visited us with their month-old baby in tow, and -- as we watched TK run joyfully from living room to kitchen and back again -- Colin asked me when I started to think of her as my daughter. He said it was automatic for him, watching the baby grow in Topaz's body, witnessing the birth. I was startled -- not by Colin's good question, but by my own answer: when I opened Mitike's photo in my email on May 22, she was my daughter. She had been my daughter for her life, which did not mean she had not also been (and continues to be) the daughter of a woman named Amarech, whom I will never know. It simply meant that when I saw her photograph, I knew her already. That I loved her already.

And here she is now, proudly helping me balance the tray of cupcakes we made as we walk through the door of her preschool. The cupcakes are frosted in Technicolor, then sprinkled liberally with pink and purple sugar. TK has dressed herself completely in purple for her birthday day, and she beams her wide and beautiful smile when her teachers call out birthday greetings to her. I store away my sadness. I cannot know everything. I missed her first two years; now I miss these hours when she is at preschool and I am at work. What matters is this incredible little person, my brimming love for her, and the U.S. Embassy-recognized fact that today, January 22, is her birthday.

I scoop her up into my arms and kiss the soft place beneath her ear. "Happy birthday, my beautiful girl," I murmur. She wraps her little arms around my neck. "Happy bir'day, 'itike, beautiful mommy," she whispers back, and then happily squirms down to the floor, where she runs toward the other kids, toward a day of cupcakes and singing and the color purple. Toward a day of being two years old -- the door open wide.