Tending the Garden

The healing of Yuanjun..
growing a family

By Marybeth Lambe

The garden catalogs spill all around us on the floor as we pour through them and argue over the choices to be made. Many of the catalogs are replete with gorgeous pictures of mouth-watering displays of beets and broccoli, turnips and pumpkins, snapdragons and zinnias. Brendan wants potatoes, lots and lots of potatoes, while Emma Rose begs for a garden full of every kind of carrot she can find. Chengming and Shen Bo both agree on peas and I remember laughing, last spring, at their antics as they shredded the defenseless bushes of all their peas, down to the tiniest pods. Sara and Austin want corn, rows of tall corn. John has little use for vegetables but his opinion is just as loud. Lots of sunflowers! Lots of them!

Only Yuanjun is quiet. I have written much of this son in the past year. Yuanjun has struggled more than his siblings. For months after he left China, he grieved for his orphanage friends, for his Abu, and for a distantly recalled family--a little brother, a grandfather, and a mother in the army. He came to this country only to undergo serious surgery and months in a wheelchair. In casts to his hips, he was restrained through a long winter and spring. Left out of the noisy games his siblings played out of doors, he had more time to ponder, more time to reflect. Sometimes he was angry, and would demand, arms folded, chin jutting out, to be taken home. And by home, he meant China. Worse yet, sometimes he would just weep. Great gulping sobs or silent tracks of tears--either way, both of our pain was immense.

But slowly, slowly, as his legs healed, so did his heart. He would speak more of China. Of faces half-remembered, of songs and sounds, and smells. The sharp scent of the dried fish his grandfather would buy him in the market, the sweet odor of the sticky buns he shared with his baby brother, the musty boyish smell of his orphan friends as they wrestled on the hard floor of their rooms. "Like John and Shen Bo," he would explain to me. "After we¹ve arm wrestled all day. Bad, but good, you know?"

Last summer his casts came off and he learned to walk for the first time. Slowly, across the damp grass of morning, then running by the time the first leaves of autumn were falling. That summer, only Yuanjun had the patience to help me in the large gardens I tended. We used to joke, my husband, and I. "Only Yuanjun loves the food enough to help its growing." Teasing comment, but we both knew the truth. The garden, as he tended it, was healing Yuanjun. Just as he protected the seedlings, so it gave him solace.

These days, Yuanjun likes to remind me of his earlier grief. "Remember how I cried when I came here?" He watches my face. "Remember how I was going to move back to China?" I nod, not trusting my voice. His pain, those days, was so raw, so powerful--I could weep myself when I touch those memories. But now he is in my lap, shaking an order form in my face. "What was that plant I was so good at growing? The one that was green, then red?"

And a memory comes back unbidden, a memory of last summer. Yuanjun touching, with wonder, the delicate fruits of his first tomato plant. The Northwest summer had been a rainy one and most of the other tomato plants had been subsumed by blight. Only Yuanjun¹s carefully protected, and tended, had born fruit. I remember him biting into the first sweet tomato, how it dribbled down his chin, and how he laughed in delight. Then he pulled my head down and offered me a bite of his tomato and patted my cheek when I cried. Yuanjun was a wary seedling when he came to our family. With time and with love, he has found his strength; he has found his new family. Looking at this robust boy on my lap today, you would not have recognized the fearful, sad child that first arrived here 18 months ago. His courage and our faith have born fruit. May I one day have his grace to survive grief and his strength as he grew toward us, his new family.

I grab the order form from Brendan "Lots of tomatoes," I announce. "And all sorts of potatoes, carrots, peas, and sunflowers! This is going to be the best garden we¹ve ever had!" Later, my husband gasps when he spies our long list. He holds up a sheet almost two feet long, all filled with our order. I put my hands up in supplication. "Don't ask," I tell him laughing. "Don¹t even ask."

Marybeth Lambe lives on a small dairy farm with her husband Mark Levy, and their eight children. She works part time as a family physician and a writer.

© Adoptive Families Magazine

Credits: Marybeth Lambe