The Most Incredible Trade-in



Flowers from my co-workers
on my last day at the clinic

He was striding across the parking lot when I recognized him through the restaurant window.  Nearly 10 years removed from veterinary practice, I had not seen my former employer in a crow’s age. My kids, having heard umpteen clinic yarns, clamored to meet him. (After all, I’d lionized the man as my salvation during innumerable obese dog spays; their tissues often hemorrhaged profusely, plunging me into panic until Dr. Smiley would swoop to the rescue.) Dr. Smiley knew I was working with orphans, and asked amiably about my recent trip to Russia. 

As I left I scanned for his car, spotting his initials on the vanity plate of a high-end black Mercedes. He’d always owned upscale automobiles, but this was several trades up from when I’d left the clinic. Though I’d never cared much about cars, the rest of the day I revisited my decision to leave my veterinary career. The statement made by Dr. Smiley’s latest wheels seemed to mock my choice, inciting unwholesome longing for what might have been.




The Stratus, the only new car we ever owned,
right before the new owners drove it away

A few years after I’d graduated, Dr. Smiley’d kept me late one evening to ask me to buy into the clinic. Honored, but by then keenly aware that veterinary medicine was not my calling, I determined that one misstep in becoming a veterinarian did not oblige me to make another in practicing long-term. I thanked him, but declined.



Our precious daughter with the Buick

We bought our only new car after I’d worked a year, but the 1996 Dodge Stratus was an early casualty in the sell-off to fund our Guatemalan adoption. An older Buick its replacement, selling the Stratus began a downward spiral in transportation. Borderline respectable but socially painful, the Buick announced the derailment of our upward ascent just as it had begun.

It was serendipitous that when driving the Buick I couldn’t foresee how much further we’d sink into the vehicular abyss. After our first adoption, I slashed my hours at the clinic. Shortly before our second daughter’s arrival from China, I quit completely, overjoyed to escape the unrelenting pressure of medicine.  It was a decision I never once regretted.



This car earned its nickname, "Smoky," by belching
black clouds every time we left a stop sign.

It would be a lengthy digression were I to chronicle each car which rolled into and out of our lives, but one, a $300 Prizm, warrants note. We drove that old jalopy countless miles as it grew progressively louder, stinkier, and rustier. When the trunk lock rusted out, we joked we had a keyless entry. Mortifying me at every bump, the trunk lid would bounce, banging as it slammed down. Our daughters would giggle at the commotion, blessedly ignorant of the spectacle our jaunts created.




My husband on the Prizm's better side

Ironically, the entire epoch so injurious to my pride started with our first adoption, and
ended with our last. Bringing home siblings from Russia finally provided the excuse to retire the Prizm. After driving the car four years without a single breakdown, we sold it for $350, a $50 profit, and bought a newer minivan. While any van blunted the image I preferred to project, it was decent, and our new kids escaped the ignominy which had shadowed our
transportation in the past.

Next, we pinballed through a series of vans, all of them refreshingly nondescript and lacking the “personality” of the Prizm.  And while I’d occasionally admire the neighbor’s Mercedes, I never felt I’d left anything on the table until that day at the restaurant when I saw Dr. Smiley’s latest ride.



Our first summer with all four kids and a van

Well into that evening, I silently rued leaving a good job for a glorified volunteer position with the Russian Orphan Lighthouse Project. By now I would have my own Mercedes—silver— instead of sharing a van with Randy. What had I been thinking? Wallowing in the morass of self-pity, I styled myself a martyr who’d made a harebrained mistake.
 

Until God called to mind Angelina.

Then Igor.

And Masha. And Inna. And Katya. And Ivan and Irina.

And Nadia, Nikolai, Nastya, and Alexandra.

And Sasha, Eduard, Daria, Lima, Liza, and more than 70 other erstwhile orphans now home, cherished by families, because I’d loosed the shackles of a life-sucking career. As faces and stories of those I’d helped, and those I yearned to, paraded through my mind, I froze in stunned astonishment.



In Moscow in 2011 with Angelina, the child dearest
to my heart of all the kids I helped

I hadn’t been given a fair trade!  

For by merely forfeiting the chance to drive a snazzy car, I’d gained the infinitely superior chance to save a child’s life.

So for my paltry token, God allowed me to make the most incredible trade-in of all.
 

*****

On Sunday, as I was putting the finishing touches on this piece, a call came from Angelina; in her sweet English she wished me a happy Mother's Day, then updated me on her life in her new home. Right before we hung up, she added, "Becky, thank you family!" and put a million exclamation points on this post. Short of the homemade cards my own kids gave me, this was the best gift I could have imagined. To make a difference in any life, and especially this one...

Dr. Adoption

Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, I spent Monday nights of my formative years with TV’s Little House on the Prairie. As I stared in traumatized disbelief, Caroline Ingalls labored to give birth, birthing my desire to adopt in the process. Dreaming in my youth of becoming the next James Herriot, I attended veterinary school, graduating with a DVM degree. Imagine my dismay to realize, months before commencement, that I’d missed my calling. Regardless, I practiced veterinary medicine seven years, enjoying most of them. Eventually I left the profession to raise our daughter, a curly-haired, extroverted tike adopted from Guatemala; four years later our Chinese daughter arrived. We had no business being at an adoption fair only six weeks after returning from China, but it didn’t stop us. Browsing booths in the exhibit hall, my encounter with Valerie of the Russian Orphan Lighthouse Project was as inadvertent as it was fortuitous. There, at that inauspicious table, I stumbled across both my life’s mission and the circuitous path leading our family to a new son and daughter.

In the six years since that November meeting, we’ve added the two older Russian kids to our family. What I saw in Russia and learned in the process was Exhibit A of the gravity of the orphan’s plight. Armed with a righteous sense of urgency, I’ve coordinated nine Lighthouse Project trips to Michigan and Oklahoma, bringing seventy-three different Russian orphans aged 5-15, some of them more than once. As coordinator, I seek families willing to host an orphan for ten days, run a Russian-language Vacation Bible School, and give the bushes a thorough, thorough beating in search of forever families. Such a succinct description of my duties belies the thousands of hours I’ve invested in them, and the phones I’ve worn out in the process. The task is formidable, since most potential adoptive families desire babies. When I succeed, the fulfillment is more than adequate to the effort, since finding families for kids literally saves their lives. Motivating my Russian work is knowledge that no safety net surrounds the kids who age out; in America, orphans without families have opportunities available to them Russian orphans could only dream of.

On the coattails of the Lighthouse Project I’ve met people whose beings brim with the same compassion for orphans; some of these kindred spirits are as dear as sisters to me. Fifty-nine children, including sibling groups as large as three, kids as young as six and as old as seventeen, and children with sundry special needs have forever families. Current events in Russia notwithstanding, I hardly feel finished. God willing, there are many more children, and a few dear friends, to come.

My training for this quasi-volunteer position has been as rigorous, expensive, and all-consuming as veterinary school, provided by three girls and a boy who work to keep Mom on her toes and seventy-three kids whose would-be futures have provoked me to repeated and frenetic action. A full-time position as a veterinarian would be less time-consuming and more prestigious, but since finding my calling I’ve never looked back.