Chocolate Chip Cookies

Paul had been home about six weeks when he tried his first Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie. It wasn't that we were deliberately keeping cookies from him (yes we were), it's just that he really seemed to prefer strawberries and oranges. (That's our story and we're sticking to it.) Anyway, he took a bite of the cookie, looked at me wonderingly, took another bite, then said, "Paul liken dis!"

Midway through the bag he suddenly pointed at a chocolate chip then at his skin. "Mum! Paul is dis." Then he pointed to the cookie part and my skin. "Mama is dis." He grinned. "Match. Cookie match."

I worried about Paul being the only (so far) black child in a white family. (He's still not sure what color to call us. Yellow? White? Pink? Cookie-color seems the most satisfactory to him thus far.) Would this make attachment more difficult, his realization that he didn't look like the rest of us tall, pale people? I read the books and the adult-adoptee blogs and talked to dozens of people, but each child and each family is unique - there's nothing quite like going through it to learn how it's gonna feel going through it.

Sam's the cookie baker at our house, but I remember that when making chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate chips must be folded carefully in to the batter. Adoption isn't a beat and bake process, there are a lot of days and months of slow, gentle folding. We have to adapt our lives, our schedules, in a patient rhythm to match the needs of the child, working him into the batter in a way that blends him into the family while retaining his own unique character.

Paul latched on to us shortly after meeting us, but it was an attachment born of desperation - that of someone clinging to the only available life raft in an unknown and unpredictable ocean. He was the chocolate chip perched unsteadily atop our family cookie. People often said, when seeing him wrapped barnacle-like around my neck, "Wow. He really attached quickly, didn't he?" But it wasn't attachment. It was anxiety. "We're working on it," I'd reply, cuddling - and trying not to buckle under - the 50 pound strain.

But yesterday I walked into the school cafeteria. "Paul! There's your mom!" several of the children yelled. (His Kindergarten classmates  readily accept that he's chocolate chip and I'm cookie; they know that families are made in many ways and colors.) Paul looked up. "Mum!" he exclaimed. He flashed his dazzling smile. He wrapped his red-splotched-chapel-shirted arms around my neck and gave me a big kiss, then he let go and returned to animated conversation with his friends. And I savored that ketchup-hinted taste of our chocolate chip cookie family.

So I didn't have a good chocolate chip cookie picture.
But this s'more picture is really cute and the analogy still applies.
And FYI - I prefer to be the golden graham cracker, not the freakishly white marshmallow. Thanks.