Missing a stranger

Having just finished the delivery of 40,000lbs of food storage for about 100 families in a 12-hour marathon of logistics, I can say two things for absolutely sure:  First, I'm tired.  Second, I have spent an obscene amount of time on the computer getting ready for this event. 

On the desktop of my computer is my most recent picture of Xue, who will be known as Fiona as soon as we bring her to the US from China.  This darling little person is technically a stranger to me. I have never met her.  I know only what the orphanage says in their very few updates, which, according to others more experienced in adoption, are notoriously generic and often inaccurate.  I have a total of seven pictures of her, which constitute the entirety of my visual representation of her.  I have a couple medical reports (again, notoriously generic and often inaccurate).  I have never seen her in person.  I know nothing about her personality.  I have never heard her voice, nor do I even know if she can speak.  I don't know her likes, fears, what excites her, what makes her sad.  I know next to nothing about her.

But this I know...

I love this little person more than life.  She is MY daughter.  MY baby.  Every time I turn on my computer, or close a program, and see her face on my desktop, I smile, and my heart aches.  I miss her!  Every time I look at her I feel the distance, both in miles and in the months before I will get to hold her for the first time. 

I also know that I am as much a stranger to her as she is to me.  More so, actually.  I have been planning, working, and waiting for her.  I chose her.  She is not choosing me.  She is not choosing to be taken from the foster home - the only home she has ever known - and to be sent to a distant land with people who look wrong, sound wrong, smell wrong.  I look at her pictures every day.  I am preparing pictures to send to her, but she has never even seen my picture.  No one has told her yet that she has a foreign mama.  Even when they do, what will it mean to her?  She won't be two years old yet when we get there.  She won't be happy to see me.  She will be terrified.  It will take time and a lot of trust-building to change me from stranger to mother in her eyes. 

I know she is a stranger.  But I love her, and I miss her.