I don’t know why it is that the key conversations in our family seem to occur in traffic. It's not like we spend a lot of time on the road; I probably have fewer miles on my three-year-old car right now than most families have after 12 months.

But you might remember that my older son, who was adopted from Vladivostok, started asking questions about his birth mother one night while I was navigating between tractor trailers. So I guess it was entirely fitting that this conversation with my younger son started while I was trying to avoid being rammed by a tailgater bent on doing 40 mph in a 25 mph zone while talking on a cell phone (the other driver, not me).

"Mom, I miss Sakhalin."

"Why?," I thankfully had the presence of mind to ask. My little guy has been here for 18 months, and the site of his former orphanage does come up sometimes. Like when he assured me that they make pizza differently on Sakhalin than the way I make it.

"Well, you know, I've been here a long time," he answered. A while back, when we were talking about somebody who was going to Russia on an adoption trip, he did ask me if he would ever "have to" go back. I wondered at the time whether he viewed his time in America as something akin to a summer camp--a fun respite, but not a place one stayed in all the time.

So I asked him what it was about Sakhalin that he was missing that day. If it was a particularly food we could figure out where to buy it or how to make it, I told him. No, that wasn't it. Is it because of Andrei, I asked? Andrei was his best buddy in the orphanage, the one who usually served as the spokesman for the two. My little guy had been having a time that day making himself understood about something, and maybe he was wishing for the days when Andrei would just explain it all. (Andrei was also adopted by an American family, but unfortunately they live on the other side of the country.) No, it wasn't Andrei, he said.

I tried a few other possibilities, from his former caregivers to the steep terrain near the orphanage, but I just kept hearing "No".

"OK," I finally said, "I miss other places I've lived in all the time." And when we got home, I showed him pictures of some of the cities I've been in. I never did get an answer to what it was about Sakhalin that he was missing, but hopefully he knows that it's OK to miss something, even if you don't know why.

Image Credit: shinyai