The Big Surprise:
Right after I got back from DC in mid-January, I posted the following:
And there’s something surprising I can’t talk about going on; very complicated, very very big and very important that we’re looking into. Very good news if true. It’s had us tied in knots thinking about it, and it’ll be a little while before we can openly talk about it. And whatever your guess is, it’s not probably what is actually going on. It’s incredibly rare and involved. More later when we can say something. It will knock you over with surprise if it comes to pass.
The short version of this is really simple. We found out something very big about Meredith. She has a sister, and that sister was also adopted by a couple from the USA, and she lives in Alabama. This has been confirmed by DNA tests we recieved last Friday (Feb 20th). All involved are in shock, are delighted beyond words, and the kids are ‘boy, it’s about time you found her.’
That sister’s name is: Meredith Ellen, as compared to our Meredith Grace Ann. In the pictures below, our daughter is playing with her dollhouse on Christmas morning. The other girl is Meredith Ellen from near Birmingham, Alabama.
People in the Chinese Adoptive community (that is, people who have adopted kids from China) have a number of resources available to them for news, information and keeping in touch with each other, and a lot of this goes on by mass e-mail lists.
- The people who are in the process generally ask each other for tips on how to get through it.
- The people who have had their paperwork sent over to Beijing in a particular month will set up a e-mail list for those folks, figuring that the bureaucrats over There will ship the responses back to the adoptive parents offering them their new kids pretty much all at once. Sorta like watching people do the Wave at a sporting event.
- The people who are going over in a group via an agency will connect up with each other before and after the trip, both in anticipation and later to relive it and stay in touch.
- And the people raising the kids will talk back and forth about the little problems unique to their situation; how to deal with racist comments from other kids, problems inherent in kids who have been in an institution, that sort of thing.
We have heard about Meredith Ellen’s family a long time ago. They were active participants in the process list, and the same month list we were on, and they also adopted their daughter from the same orphanage we did, so we saw them on the kids from Jiangmen list. We noted that they had also named their daughter Meredith, and we thought that was neat/interesting - it wasn’t the only case of that happening, but only the second or so.
Nothing too weird, just interesting. During the height of the SARS crisis, they went back to China and adopted a second little girl. And right after the Christmas holidays, they massively updated their family pictures on their web site, and mentioned it on the orphanage mailing list. We were curious, and checked it out.
We were instantly struck over the head by how much their Meredith looked like our Meredith. Earlier pictures of the two as babies would not have shown this similarity, but by the age of three, it was bloody obvious. By the age of four, it was screamingly obvious.
Susan sent them a ‘isn’t this queer and funny’; letter. She gave several links to my journal going over many recent pictures of our Meredith to them. And then they wrote back, their jaws dropping with the resemblance. Then they sent us more pictures, stuff that wasn’t on the internet.
A week passes. Much more exchanges of ‘ohmygosh’ and pictures on both sides. Then I took a number of them, mixed them up in a couple of Acrobat files, and these got passed around and sent to the other family (and some close friends to take a look. The other family did the same. We even showed the kids.
Aside of the people who took the actual pictures and me, **nobody**, including the kids, got it right. The kids would, of course, recognize favorite items of clothes, or a friend, but the more generic shots stumped them. This includes people who have known our Meredith and their from the time they came to America - on our side, Susan’s mom and Mere’s cousins and aunts, her preschool teachers, that sort of thing. Our daughter’s Spanish teacher in preschool had the most right, but that was only about half, and she’s known her nearly as long as family has.
Then we found out that the dates they were found and their ages were a lot closer than the parties had assumed. Different places in the same town -our next door to the orphanage at a ‘resort’, and hers in a office building. About a couple of weeks apart. And the guesses pulled out by the orphanage as to how old they were when they were brought in were obviously wrong, perhaps because they had been lower-birthweight twins.
Did the orphanage know? Did they cook the books, knowing twin girls would be harder to place for adoption, and generated up two ’separately found’ stories? Or did they, like us, find the resemblance in babyhood slight at best, and never considered the idea? We don’t know. An expert on Chinese Adoption that we spoke to said that the ‘cook the books’ approach wasn’t far fetched. But I can’t imagine how we’d ever get a different story from the Chinese authorities than the one that’s in the official papers. They’d be loath to admit anything else.
You take a look at the pictures. You tell us what you would have thought. We also heard about another two women who adopted at the same time (and stayed in contact) from that orphanage in 1997 who discovered that their girls were twin sisters; there’s an article on it in the December 2001 issue of Health Magazine.
We finally spoke directly over the phone with the other family, and we all agreed that we needed to go forward on this matter for the sake of the kids, and our own curiosity, and I called up a genetics firm I’d been referred to to do a DNA test to be certain. This was at the time when I’d posted the above ‘clue’ that something was up. And we did the samplings, and sent them off, and waited for the results.
We told Meredith about the whole thing on the 19th of January, just before the tests were supposed to arrive. She’d guessed something odd was up with our discussions with other people that trailed off or ended up in talking past her (spelling things out, etc), and I think it made her edgy. (Our approach to Meredith is that we’re not going to lie to her; if she asks us something direct like ‘did you have an ice cream cone without me when I was in school’, I’m not going to lie to her. I won’t volunteer the information, perhaps, if I think she might be upset with us if we did. But I won’t lie to a direct question.)
Her reactions previous to the whole ‘wow-look-at-that’ fuss over the pictures was dismissive; she’s seen The Parent Trap recently, and she said that she didn’t think such things actually happened. She also couldn’t imagine why we were so interested in the pictures of the other kid. It was a big ‘yeah, so what, she looks like me’ to her.
When we told her, and made it clear that while we didn’t have the final confirmation, but that we were very sure, she took it all in very well. Kind of a ‘Wow, that’s so cool.’ reaction. She has been jonesing for a sister for as long as we can remember. She made noises about maybe she doesn’t need to go to China for ‘baby sister’ now.
On the 21st of January, we got the DNA sampling kit, swabbed the inside of Mere’s cheek, and sent that package overnight back out to Salt Lake City. The other family did the same.
The people who have had the most reaction are people who have an interest in either twins or Chinese adoption. There have been a few who have done a ‘they all look alike’ routine, and I’ve bit my tongue rather than snark back at them. No point.
One of our Meredith’s favorite grownups is an adoptee - and, as we recently discovered, also a twin. So he was totally bowled over.
The coincidence level is way, way high on this one. We’re fairly religious folks, and we look at it as ‘the design of the almighty’, or something similar to that. The situation is that when said design is so obvious, it rather gives you heartburn to realize that you have just had this dropped in *your* lap to deal with. You have been entrusted by God with taking care of a very special and lucky child whose angels made sure that she found her sister and vice versa. Hoo boy.
First, there’s the coincidence that she’d have a sister born at the same time. Twins are rare with Chinese. 1 in 300, as compared with 1 in 90 here.
Then, there’s the coincidence that the sister would also be abandoned. Considering Chinese traditions on baby girls, and the astonishing poverty there, and the one-child policy, it isn’t too outlandish that the parents would abandon both as extra mouths to feed, etc., especially as both were girls.
Then, there’s the ending up at the same orphanage.
Then, there’s both being adopted out internationally. Most aren’t. You don’t want to know about the mortality rates; there’s another coincidence - both survived to be adopted out. The orphanage was very good - a model orphanage by China’s standards. They were lucky to end up there.
Then, there’s both being adopted out to people in America.
Then, there’s both being adopted out to people in America who were internet-connected and interested in staying in touch with other adopting families from the same orphanage.
Then, there’s both families having web sites with pictures of the kids, and bringing attention to this fact over that mailing list of families adopting from that orphanage. And that one or the other of the families would bestir themselves to take a good look at those pictures and see the resemblance.
And then, there’s the whole Meredith Grace Ann / Meredith Ellen thing. Both families came up with the names separately long before we wnt to China - in our case, about three years before. It’s not a name used in either family before this.
To quote Michael Rawdon: ”Yikes!”
By the way, this sort of thing has and does happen in other ways. Read Bonnie Ward’s story here:
http://www.chinaadoption.org/newsletter/july2000/page3.html
http://www.childrenshopeint.org/newsletter/october02/sisters.htm
The wait for the results was awful in both households. Towards the end, both families were pestering the DNA testing firm daily. The day after my birthday, Friday the 20th of February, we were coming back from downtown Chicago, and I was checking voice mail at home for messages, and trying to call the DNA test people. They answered, and I got the information we had been waiting for.
Meredith Ellen and Meredith Grace Ann are indeed sisters. Not identical twins, but they were undoubtably sisters. The tests were quite clear on that. The exact details said that the girls were 95% or better half-sisters, and 65% or better likely to be full sisters. Given the location, the birth time and so on, two sisters born at the same time that look so much like each other - well, if that isn’t fraternal twins, I can’t imagine what it might be. We can’t prove fraternal twins as such - there’s no test to do so, and DNA testing isn’t that exact. Even mtDNA testing has its holes.
Many more details have flown back and forth between the families, and both girls know the full story. When we told our daughter, who had been good about understanding the ‘maybe’ in the whole thing, she cheered and yayed like thunder. When Meredith Ellen was told, she asked if our daughter had a little sister like she did. (We had been about to start the paper chase for a second daugher, but our recent household disrups with fire, flood and rogue contractors had stalled that.) When told no, Meredith Grace didn’t have a little sister, ME said ‘Well, then, she must really need me!” MG’s response to that was “I sure do!”
And when I reminded our Meredith about her ‘nah, never happen in real life’ reaction about the Parent Trap situation, she grinned. Yep, she said, it sure does happen in real life. To her.
As more details came to light, it was obvious that they were miror images of each other in most specifics; horrendously bright, nice kids with the almost all of the same sensitivities, many quirks and reactions, and so on. Both had been dreaming about and lobbying for a sister ever since they were born - and their reactions to the news about each other have been more of relief than anything else, as in ‘you finally found her’.
There are some big differences. Our daughter veers from rowdy tomboy to total girly-girl and back again, and is very personable and outgoing. Theirs is more generally feminine, quiet and shy. Ours is left-handed, theirs is right-handed. This is also reflected in their Chinese names; ME’s is “Refined, elegant jade”; and MG’s is “Colorful jade”.
We are working out the details with ME’s family about our coming down to visit them very soon; all parties are aware that this is a weird situation, and that there is nothing in the rulebooks to tell us what to do, but we all want the kids to enjoy each other and have the best we all can provide for them - as sisters. Our best guess is that they will have the same sort of relationship with each other that MG has with her South Dakota cousins, but…
…we don’t want anything to screw this up.