Realisations

Its just beginning to hit me that there could already be a little girl lying alone in a cot in an orphanage in Ethiopia who will one day become our daughter. She could have already lost the person and family she should have been able to depend on for the rest of her life. She could be hungry. She could be cold. She could be ill. She could be my baby one day and I'm not there to look after her. Just like I wasn't for Little Prince's first 19 months. Little babies are so vulnerable and helpless they need someone there to look after them. I am sure that the orphanage workers do their very best within the resources they have. But they aren't Mothers or Fathers. The children in their care, however well looked after and however well loved they are, aren't their children. The workers can go home at night to their own families but the babies and children can't. They don't have families and that is so so wrong. How can little babies and children NOT have families? I know about the reasons that babies and children can end up in orphanages, poverty, illness, government decrees on family size. But how can this be allowed to happen? How can I be allowed to gain so much from such profound loss halfway across the world? How can this be right? And how can I bear to know that my daughter, my child, my baby is living in an orphanage without me to care for her? And one day I will have to explain all this to her, when I don't know myself how or why it is possible...