James Laughlin flew to China alone in 2008 to adopt his son, arriving with no Mandarin and a screaming child who thought he was being kidnapped. He says his son saved him, and reflects on how he'd failed at marriage by refusing to do the inner work he'd later do as a parent.
In 2008, I went to China by myself and adopted my son. What I want to do is welcome him. I want to be receiving. You don't know Mandarin, so all you got is touch, tone of voice and facial expression. That's all you've got. They're introducing me as Baba, which is Father Papa, and he's screaming. He's screaming that he's being kidnapped. I little said a prayer. I said, God, what do you want me to do? Because I've got nothing. I got nothing. I can't help this kid. I've got nothing. See, what everybody says is how great for this little kid, how you saved this little kid. This little kid saved me, James. This. This little kid saved me. What happened in those two weeks that deeply impacted the rest of your life? You did not prepare me for that. Yeah, personally, my life was a mess. I was deeply in love with this woman. She was a younger woman. She just graduated. We probably shouldn't have gotten married as early as we did, but we did. But three years later, she said, I'm leaving. I'm leaving tomorrow. As it turns out, I really wasn't giving her the energy that I should have been able to give her. I wasn't doing the work on me that I was doing in my career. We all have a growth mindset in our career, but do we have a growth mindset in our life?
