Travelling Blind

In 2005, I would find myself on a domestic flight from Moscow to Rostov on Don where we were set to adopt our third child.  As glamorous as it sounds, domestic flights in other countries, especially Russia, are not quite the same as domestic flights in the US.  As we boarded the plane in Moscow, we found ourselves on what appeared to be nothing less than the flashy Pan Am flights of the 70's.  There were curtains on the oval windows with mini curtain rods, and the flight attendants even seemed to be wearing the dated suits of the previous era.  However, it wasn't the 70's, it was 30 years later and in actuality one of the ceiling tiles of the plane would simply fall onto the floor prior to take off, exposing the oxygen masks, and the seat back would not hold causing a multi hour exercise in core strength trying not to land in the lap of the guy behind us. 

As the flight took off, I had several hours to think about what had led to this point.  Anyone who is a failure at fertility like I am, will tell you when you get to the place of an adoption, the desperation of a child to call your own comes before any amount of logic. Years of failed attempts and disappointments lead up to this point and you are just ready to have a child.  Any child.  Even more, you want them right now.  Two weeks before this flight, we had received a call from our coordinator.  She had asked how I felt about traveling blind.  This meant showing up in Russia on a certain date with no further information.  No referral ahead of time, no pictures or medical history, just show up and we will take you to an orphanage to meet a boy or girl under the age of three. The other option was to wait several months for an official referral.  To me, after years of waiting, two weeks sounded pretty  good.  So, here I was a couple hours into a flight on what appeared to be a broken plane to unknown parts of Russia, and suddenly a bit anxious about what I may have gotten myself into.

The landing did little to allay my fears. As the plane touched down, I saw no terminal.  No other planes other than a cargo plane in the distance.  It was a vast airfield with many runways, and as we hit the ground I would also notice there were bunkers.  Bunkers with artillery.  My anxiety went into full blown panic as I was suddenly struck with the fact that this was not an airport.  What the hell was this place? We were stopping.  Mid runway we were stopping.  The Pan Am like flight attendants spoke no English.  Wait.  Nobody around us spoke English.  The doors were opening, we were to deplane.  Deplane to what?  We were in the middle of a runway.  There were no buildings around. There was nobody to ask.  Even worse.  I had nobody to call.  Somehow none of the other passengers seemed concerned to be standing in the middle of a runway.  They would light their cigarettes and appear to share stories.  Even when the cargo plane that originally was in the distance, began barreling towards us on the same runway and the right wing would pass directly overhead, they appeared unconcerned and would continue their conversations.  I found myself repeatedly asking my husband,"where are we?  What are we going to do?"  He didn't know either.

Ultimately, two buses would pull up and people were divided into two groups.  The instructions they were giving were all in Russian. How do we choose a group?  Yuri.  That's all I could say over and  over.  Yuri is who we were told we were meeting.  Where is this guy?  He obviously was not on the airfield.  Now we were getting on a bus.  Would he know where we were?  Where were we going?  We ultimately chose a bus and got on. We would drive off the runway and through what ultimately  proved to be a Russian military base and out into the streets of Rostov on Don.  By then, I was nearly hyperventilating with fear.  Clearly traveling blind was a bad idea.  Suddenly, the bus would stop. We were in front of a random apartment building on a busy city street.  Everybody out.  Now I was really lost. Once we got off this bus we would be in the middle of a foreign city with no contacts.  My heart pounded out of my  chest as I came down the stairs until I became aware of a Russian man right there at the door of the bus.  He was looking right at me and laughing.  Flat out laughing.  I started to be offended until he spoke.  "Summers?"

It was Yuri.  My deer in the headlights look of panic had highly amused him.  The only  thing I could say in that moment was,"is it that obvious?"  Through his gales of laughter he admitted it was. Yuri would explain the airport was closed for renovation and they were redirecting flights to the military base.  He would take us to the hotel and have us wait by the phone for a couple hours until he could get our referral.  Ultimately he would call to explain our child was in Taganrog and we would go to the orphanage the next day.  He gave all details of the trip there, pick up times, driver's names and just as he was ready to hang up, I stopped him.  "Yuri?  What are we having?"

He answered with two simple words in a thick Russian accent,"Is boy."  I met that 13 month old boy the very  next day and as I type this, he is now 12 and hard at work playing Minecraft with a buddy on a lazy snow day not really able to grasp the crazy ride it took to get him home. He slipped into the family, a perfect fit, a unique child who continues to surprise me in so many ways each day, far beyond the baby I dreamed about for the years before he got here. 

Looking back, the notion of travelling blind to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language, and putting my simple faith in an adoption system that was tough to navigate, seems a bit crazy when you try to apply logic and reason.  However, It makes me wonder if this isn't the very thing we need to apply  to our own health and wellness.  I look at how many times I was absolutely desperate to be thin and healthy, yet I put that notion into a very small box.  My success was tied to one thing, the number on the scale.  I would pick out the commercial diet of the moment and say to myself,"this time I will try...."  The comment,"this time" indicating this was really more of a temporary path to the desperation fed quick fix, rather than a lifetime commitment.   

Unfortunately, my commitment to usual methods and a number on the scale held me back from seeing a much larger picture of what was truly possible if I was only open to the possibilities. In the beginning,  I was fortunate enough to have a trainer laugh at me just as Yuri had, through the many interchanges I had with him that started with "I can't"as I struggled to hang on to the old way while dreaming of something new.  Ultimately, he taught me the only one saying "can't" was me and that was a self imposed limit, not reality.   Racing was never something I had considered before now with my history of gym class failures, until yet another person, who seemed crazy, suggested a Spartan Race early on my journey, and encouraged me to not let loose of such a foreign idea along my path. As it turns out, he was right too.   I was way more capable than I ever imagined.

I also found I had to face the notion that all good things in my life to that point had been rewarded with food.  Fancy dinners for occasions or achievements, cake, a successful Thursday, yep.  It all required carbs.  I had to open myself up to the possibility that other rewards were out there.  I began scheduling a manicure or a massage every time I reached a small goal.   I now find these things matter just as much to my psyche as any number on the scale or my favorite pair of size 2 tall jeans.  I began to learn so many other things that seemed so foreign were so much more a part of my health and happiness than any number could be.  As I continue three years into this journey, I seem to find new things all the time to feed my soul and control my waistline that exist far beyond commercial diets or a treadmill.

So instead of doing what we have always done, and failing at attempts to see a number, maybe the better thing to do is to take our desperation for good health and travel blindly into a much larger journey into foreign concepts that live far beyond the scale that we originally held so dear.  Maybe it is time to look at bigger goals, with different methods led by people, who in our current state, do not seem to be speaking our language.  Although this seems terrifying at first, I would suggest it is the only way to find the lifelong perfect fit to what we have been missing all along.