New Year's Meme

As seen around, most recently at Dawn's. Happy New Year, everyone!:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Drove more than 1000 miles without another adult in the car (and did all the driving myself--usually I navigate).

2. Did you keep your New Years’ Resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I made any New Year's resolutions last year. Some years, I write down my hopes/fears/expectations for the year, but I didn't do that last year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes! Historian Friend had a delightful baby on my half-birthday in February, and Neighbor Friends had a delightful baby in the summer, shortly before we moved.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Quiet Friend. I miss him. This time last year, I was blogging about his medical problems.

5. What countries did you visit?

My only travel was in the US (unless you count Disneyl@and as a world unto itself).

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?

A legal marriage to Politica.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Election Night. The night we got to Germany. The night Quiet Friend died. I may not always remember the precise dates, but those are all nights I recall with intense clarity, because on each of them, my world changed.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Moving, and getting settled into certain kinds of new routines here in Germany.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Hmmm....not sure here. December's spate of bread failures comes to mind, but surely there was something bigger? Had some family-of-origin boundary/holiday issues.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A Stokke chair for Curious Girl (on craigslist!) and panniers for my bike, so I can ride to work now.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Curious Girl: an exemplary traveler.

Lesbian Dad: an exemplary blogger and activist, who wrote a lot of beautiful words about marriage this year.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
The K of C, the LDS, and everyone else who supported Proposition 8.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Into houses: our current one, and the one we are still trying to sell in Old State.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Marriage fantasies. For the first time in my life, I'm having wedding fantasies, though they are followed by periods of dejection on marriage, too.

The election.

Germany.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
"Best Days of our Lives": the soundtrack to my drive from Old State to Germany (see the link above on question 12).

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? happier, I think. I'm missing good friends prodigiously right now, but I'm glad we've moved.
ii. thinner or fatter? About the same.
iii. richer or poorer? Richer in terms of income; more cash-strapped in terms of the unsold house. .

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Writing. Sleeping.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Mindless websurfing (usually too late at night, and addictively unsatisfying). Fretting about personnel matters at home (when it doesn't add anything to my ability to help matters)

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At home, with Politica and Curious Girl.

21. What LJ users did you meet?
Like Dawn, I'll amend this to how many online friends did I meet for the first time in 07: Artsweet, Shannon, Dawn, and Jenna. And Rev. Dr. Mom, and That Silly Mommy.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?

As Dawn said in her answer to this question, I think I fall a little more in love with Politica all the time.

23. How many one-night stands?

I'll quote Dawn here: "This is for the younger blogging set, isn’t it?"

24. What was your favourite TV program?
The Daily Show, Dr. Who, and Xena.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No. I don't really hate anyone.

26. What was the best book you read?
New mystery authors I'm enjoying: Archer Mayer and Sarah Stewart Taylor. One of the most compelling books I've read was Jennifer Boylan's She's Not There, a memoir that Joyce recommended to me (there are uncanny parallels between Joyce and Jenny Boylan, although R!chard Russ0 is not Joyce's best friend, and Joyce (and before her, George) is a friend who grows more likeable over time. The narrator in She's Not There (which is one presentation of the real Jenny Boylan; I'm sure there are tons of things she left out of her transgender narration) got less likeable to me over the course of the book. Some of the major contours of their lives might be the same, but their personalities are quite different).

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
That ocarinas are great fun in the car.

28. What did you want and get?
A house in the neighborhood I wanted to live in.

29. What did you want and not get?
An architecturally interesting house in said neighborhood. An office with a real window.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?
I'm not even sure I saw a film in 2008. No, wait, I did: the post-apocalyptic film with Will Smith in it whose name I forget. I re-saw Charlie Brown movies in 2008 and enjoyed them.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
46 last August, and I was in Charming College Town, celebrating with Historian Friend, her lovely boys, and Curious Girl. Politica was already in Germany, dealing with the house. We had wedding cake for my birthday and Messy Boy's birthday, and I missed Politica. Last week, on a day when I was missing Historian Friend, we designated another day The Official Birthday, and we went out for breakfast at one of my favorite breakfast restaurants.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
If my best friends and CG's old school had been magically transported here. I miss them, big time.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
If I could describe it, I'd probably have more of one. I have been wearing more earth tones. And I'm happy to have moved to Germany, where my clothes seem to fit in better than they did in Old State. I'm not much for fashion.

34. What kept you sane?

Twitter (which surprised me--when I first read about it, it seemed pretty useless). Politica. The lake. Bike rides. Snuggles. Friends in the computer. Pseudonymousless Friend, Historian Friend, Mississippi Friend.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Not sure. Which blogger riveted me, though: Lesbian Dad. Not sure that counts as fancying (in fact, does one fancy butches? why not? It's an amusing juxtaposition, the fancy and the butch). But her words this fall: quite captivating.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The presidential election, generally, and marriage equality.

37. Who did you miss?
Quiet Friend. The world is a poorer place without him.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Joyce, my new/old friend. Runner up: all the great connections here in Germany and we're so grateful for them!

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
Location, location, location. It's good to live in a place you feel connected to.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

If I wait to answer this question, this post may go up sometime in May. But if I hit post now, I'll probably think of a great answer during dinner. So I'll come back to this later.

Read, Kiddo, Read! (a Mother Talk Review)

I've loved to read as long as I can remember. My parents' stories suggest I loved reading even before that: my father would stand up in the kitchen, reading the newspaper at the counter, trying to carve out some time for his own reading, knowing that as soon as he sat down, I'd be climbing into his lap and saying "book! book!" One of the pleasures of the blogosphere is book recommendations. Between Library Thing, book blogs, and just posts about books by the bloggers I read, there are tons of sources of info about all kinds of books. Live and learn!

Turns out that despite my personal love of reading and my professional focus on reading and writing, there are a few major trends in the current fiction world that I've missed. Take James Patterson, for one. I discovered today (on his website) that Patterson (whose name did sound familiar, at least) has sold 1 out of every 15 hardcover books in the US (in 2007) and has written two of the most popular detective series in recent years (Alex Cross, and the Women's Murder Club). Mysteries were the first genre I really got immersed in, and I don't think I've read any Patterson.

But I'm blogging tonight about one of James Patterson's other achievements: Read, Kiddo, Read!, a website designed to make it easy to find basic book recommendations for children. (Patterson also writes young adult fiction.) RKR is a nicely organized site--the front page lets you select from great illustrated books, great transitional books, great pageturners, and great advanced reads. Each area is then further subdivided (so the great illustrated books, which focuses on books for the 0-5 or 6 set, lets you browse books for babies, story books, transitional books, and nonfiction books). The site's visual presentation is great--it loads quickly, and it gives a lot of info. For each book there's a good summary, links to places to find the book (independent booksellers as well as big box stores), snippets of published reviews--and my favorite part, the "if you liked this book, you might like...." list.

The books themselves are good. I like the detailed plot summaries (once I hit publish, my next click will be to the town library to request a copy of Keiko Kasza's The Dog that Cried Wolf--the plot sounds great, and we love a couple of his other books, like A Mother for Choco) The "if you liked this book..." lists contain lots of books I don't know. So I'm looking forward to checking out a few new-to-me-books (like Sara Swan Miller's Three Stories You Can Read to Your Dog).

Patterson has also established a Read Kiddo Read ning community. I don't regularly use ning, so maybe I'm missing something, but the community portion of the site seems underactive at the moment. There are a few groups set up, without a lot of activity in them, and there are a few blogs associated with the site. There's an interesting post with suggestions for books for boys--I'm not sure I buy the gendered logic about boys' reading preferences, but the books listed there are superb (and there are, indeed, tons of gendered issues about boys and literacy). It's not easy to see how to get back to the RKR main page from the ning community (you have to understand that the "back home" button on the community page means "back to the main RKR page" and not "back to the ning community home page."

Another quibble--I always have a quibble--I wish the "if you liked this book, you might like...." lists didn't list multiple other books by the author of the first recommended book. Wouldn't readers of Knufflebunny figure out pretty easily that they might enjoy Knufflebunny Too as well as various other works by Willems? (all of which rock, I should add. He and Kevin Henkes are two of our current favorites around here.) I suppose "find another book by the same author" is a good strategy to teach people about how to find other new books, but still.

All in all, a good site. I'll be browsing it when looking for good book suggestions (especially for kids who are much older than CG, where I'm not so familiar with the new literature). So put Read, Kiddo, Read! into your bookmarks, along with the Cybils site, and Librarian Mom, and maybe Chicken Spaghetti, and you'll soon be pulled away from the computer and into some wonderful books at a library, bookstore, couch, or bed near you.

Happy reading.

This review was sponsored by Mother Talk; I received an Amazon certificate for the review. While most Mother Talk blog tours are summarized on the MT Blog, this one doesn't seem to have a page up yet--but if you google Mother Talk and Read Kiddo Read, you'll find plenty of other posts, like Art Sweet's.

Choosing Adoption

I was reminded of Shannon's Pregnant? Considering Adoption post when I read today's post over at Mama PhD (which is an excellent group blog at Inside Higher Education. I'm purposely not linking to the post I read today because I don't want to stir up commenting trouble on a blog I lurk at). I left a long comment over at Mama PhD, but the post has stayed on my mind. My thoughts are rambling here, but I'm going to put up my musings.

edited to add: adoption changes lives, in all kinds of ways. There's the obvious: someone who had a child, doesn't live with that child anymore. Someone who didn't have a child, does. But adoption can change much more than that. My own thinking about the relationship between birth families and adoptive families has gotten so much more complicated as I've read more, listened to CG more, talked with other mothers (birth and adoptive). I come at this post from where I am today--six years ago, while I was then very respectful of CG's first family and birth families in general, I liked to think, I couldn't have written this post. Six years from now, things will be different, again. So I want to be gentle with the writer of the Mama PhD post, even as I clearly want to move in a different direction.

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I'm haunted by Curious Girl's birth mother. I've been reading Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away, a fabulous, heartbreaking history of women who placed children for adoption via maternity homes in the 1950s and 60s. Story after story tells of women who were pushed away by their families, coerced in various ways to relinquish their children, and who didn't stop thinking about, loving, and missing their children. I'm thinking, as I do every day, about CG's first mother, who has literally no voice in adoption literature. In our adoption paperwork, there's a handwritten relinquishment letter whose language is so oddly formal that it must conform to some legal specifications. It hardly feels like a personal letter, and it won't answer most of CG's questions when she sees it. I've looked some at academic studies of adoption, and I don't see much scholarship on women who place children for adoption in Eastern Europe (just as there's not much written that gives voice to poor women in this country. When Shannon, Dawn, Jenna, and I had the chance to speak at an adoption conference last year, Shannon's talk was partly about the ways in which her children's first mothers have no public voice.)

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I don't know what forces led CG's mother to relinquish her to state care. I used to think that what I would say to her, if I were ever to have the chance to meet her, would be "thank you." But thank you strikes me as precisely the wrong thing to say. She didn't give me CG, and CG wasn't, literally, a gift (although she certainly is one metaphorically). These days, I would say, "hello" and "isn't CG splendid?" (although were I to have the chance to meet her, I'd likely be speechless with emotion). The post that's got me thinking here asks women who are pregnant to consider potential adoptive parents and the joy that adoption brings. It's true: referral calls bring shrieks of joy. Five years ago today, in fact, I was sitting at home, looking at photos from our just-completed first trip to meet Curious Girl, just starting to think that I might really become a mother. Adoption has brought me such joy: being a mother is one of the best things I do, day in, day out. I love it. I love CG. And I love parenting with Politica.

And yet day in, day out, I think about CG's first family. I grieve her loss--and I know CG grieves, too. These days, she's thinking hard about the siblings that likely exist out there somewhere. She's processing the fact that maybe, someone else might have adopted her, or she might not have gotten adopted and might have stayed in her orphanage. She's trying to understand why she's small, and not tall like I am. I wish I could take all this away from her--but her shadowy past is her own story to live with, and so I answer her questions, I talk to her about what she imagines and what she feels, and I hope I help her heart fill with love and hope.

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The Mama PhD post is a request, of sorts, for people to consider adoption as a good option. For some women, adoption might well be a good option. But I thought I'd repeat here a piece of my comment on that post. Much as I love how my own family is formed, I know from my perspective within adoption, as an adoptive parent, how complicated navigating grief and loss is. That must be even moreso for women who relinquish their children. So here's what, in my view, women who are pregnant and considering adoption might do (Shannon's post, and Jenna's blog more generally, on the subject is a big inspiration here, I should say at the start):

1. Do your best to find someone to talk with who has YOUR interests at heart (many adoption professionals have their interests aligned more with adoptive parents than with women considering adoption).

2. Talk with other women who’ve made this choice. Relinquishing a child for adoption is a difficult choice, a choice that causes grief and loss. There are birthmother blogs now; there are organizations like Concerned Birthparents United.

3. Consider what support you might have for parenting. You may want to place a child for adoption, but being young, being not quite financially settled, being untenured, being surprised by a pregnancy are not necessarily reasons to relinquish. Take your time and carefully consider the option of parenting your child.

4. Know what your legal rights are (childwelfare.gov offers state-by-state overviews). You are the parent of your child until you relinquish.

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I love my daughter, who joined our family through adoption. Yet I am haunted by the thought that her birth mother might have relinquished her due to coercion of one sort or another. I love my daughter fiercely; I can’t imagine loving her more. I know she is happy here and now-but I know she, too, grieves the mother she never had the chance to know, and the other family she can only imagine.

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Those of us who adopted internationally have little chance to communicate with the other mothers of our children (although increasingly, some birth parent contact is possible. There's a yahoo group or two for searching adoptive families). Precisely because I know so little about CG's birth mother, I write and think about her a lot. I wonder about her, for GG. In writing here, even when there is little to say for or about her, I write to note her, and to honor her. I don't know her--except for what I see of her in CG--but I don't want her, and the other women around the world who have placed, or lost, children to adoption to be forgotten or elided.

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I love my girl. And it breaks my heart to listen to her talk about the family she may never know. She loves me, and she loves the family she has here. And we all of us have to come to terms with grief and loss. But I got to wait a little longer before dealing with such big emotions. She hasn't. She's doing a great job, little processor that she is.

Airport Blogging: A cool video, a cool book

I've been away, at a symposium in honor of Grad School Mentor. I'm blogging in my head about that, and grad school, and mentoring and scholarship--I'll aim to find time to actually type said thoughts later in the week.

For now, as I have a few extra hours before my plane leaves, some recommendations:

• the Dance your PhD videos on youtube, especially the study of dancers, communication and touch. I heard about the Dance your PhD contest on NPR. I've always loved assignments that ask students to translate work from one genre to another, or to use wordless formats to convey a project they will complete with words.
  
• American Band, by Kristen Laine, a narrative about a year in the life of a high school band in northern Indiana. I've never met Kristen, but she's married to one of my college classmates and I talked to her on the phone once for 40 minutes when I called, trying to reach my classmate for a piece I was writing for our class newsletter. She told me then about the research she had done for this book (which involved moving her family to Indiana for a year so that she could immerse herself in a high school band's classes, rehearsals, and culture). This book is lovely: great writing, fascinating exploration of coming-of-age themes (looking at the role of religion in some kids' lives, looking at the drive for independence, looking at the role of teachers and mentors--typical themes, maybe, but handled with such care and detail that you can really see how complicated it is to be a teenager). It's smart, readable, and fascinating. Kristen was nice enough to send me a copy of the book (inscribed!); I googled it and discovered she had won the Winship/PEN New England Award last year. I wrote to congratulate her and she offered to send me the book. So she's a Really Nice Person as well as a Really Good Writer. Looking for holiday break reading? or a gift for someone? Check out American Band. (I'm also plotting ways to use parts of the book in class: it's got great examples of using narrative, observational sources--good stuff for teaching research skills and researched writing.)
• Links on the American Band website led me to this foundation which provides musical instruments for schools. If I can't find a good German outlet to make a donation to this year, I'll give here; Kristin was nice enough to give me her book, and it's reminded me how important music can be for kids. So I'm going to be making an extra donation to a musical organization this year.
  
• On our Hanukkah tzedakah night, we'll choose between the Heifer Foundation, Maria's children (which does wonderful art programs for Russian orphans), or the Bebor school in Nigeria (which provides stable education for kids in an unstable area, through a localized effort started by one of our friends). (Shannon's strollerderby post reminded me about this.) What charities do you like to support?
  

More Musical Fun

A hilarious and musical summary of arguments about marriage equality.