More Marriage News!

• It's a trend sweeping New England: Maine has become the second state in the country to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples through legislative action. Pam's House Blend has a good post with reactions from various other marriage equality groups.
• Via Lesbian Dad, this moving video of testimony last month before the Maine legislature. If you're the cry-at-video sort, grab the tissue box now: This reminds me of everything I love about PFLAG people. My own parents--very loving and very generous people on a daily basis to me and Politica--have religious views that apparently prevent them from taking up gay rights as a personal issue. I'm so touched by parents who are moved to advocacy on behalf of their kids. (Lesbian Dad has a pretty darn cool dad, too, btw.)


• My favorite tweet of the day, from @lizschlegel: "Dear New Hampshire, Just vote Yes! We promise, all your opposite marriages will not disintegrate. Love, Vermont, Maine, CT, MA, IA
• Once the euphoria fades in Maine--and perhaps before then--there will be a lot of work to be done on the ground. Maine's constitution provides for a voter veto option that can force the marriage law onto the ballot next fall (and if enough signatures are garnered in the 90 days after the close of the legislative session, the implementation of the law will be stayed pending the election results; otherwise the law goes into effect 90 days after the close of the session). Maine has a mixed record on gay rights laws at the ballot box, so the election would be hard fought. Pop on over to the good folks at Equality Maine to thank them for their organizing, and contribute, if you're moved, to their continuing efforts to build support for the marriage law. The legislature passed it, the governor signed it, but grass roots activism will be needed to keep the law in place.
• One Iowa has been doing bang-up work in the wake of Iowa's court decision extending marriage rights to all Iowans. Visit their site to see the ad they're running now that puts marriage equality in the context of Iowa's long-standing commitment to being a place that welcomes everyone seeking freedom. Vermont Freedom to Marry will also be continuing its education campaign at fairs and events during the summer. There's a lot of organizing going on here.
• Andrew Sullivan wrote eloquently about how suddenly ordinary it seems to be announcing that another state has opened up marriage rights. He notes: "what has made this remarkable, I think, has been the way in which ordinary people and families found the courage to testify and argue and stand up for the truth in their lives. That is a psychological and spiritual achievement - to see one's own worth in the face of widespread hostility and to fight for it until majorities are persuaded. It is not without its costs or risks or moments of deep anxiety. But that's what courage means." Lesbian Dad, in the comments on her post today, notes that the impending California Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of Prop 8 might well not be the news we want to hear, and the political battles will continue in California. Marriage equality is on the way in this country--but how long, and at what cost? I guess we'll find out.
• Marriage equality isn't a political battle I ever expected to be involved in. Since the moment for the movement has arrived, I'm happy to participate. But let's not forget that marriage equality benefits coupled people who want to get married. People who eschew marriage for whatever reason, and people who aren't married, lose out in terms of the benefits that flow through marriage in the US (health insurance being perhaps the biggie). Shortly after the Vermont legislature acted on marriage, Shannon had some very smart things to say about the virtues of making marriage matter less.
  

What'll be going on at Amazon on Monday morning?

If you're on twitter, you've probably noticed the #amazonfail trend, tweets about Amazon.com's decision to strip sales ranking info from lgbt books (b/c of their "adult" content). Metafilter reports:

Within the last few hours, a trend on Twitter has emerged in response to Amazon's removing the sales ranking of books they consider to have "adult content," which also keeps those books from appearing in search results. However, while seeming to unilaterally de-list any books with gay themes and characters, many books with adult heterosexual content were left untouched.

There's a move afoot to googlebomb amazon (described here) by generating links to a new definition of amazon rank. The info in the twitter stream is providing fascinating combination of wit, snark, and info about titles which have been delisted (or not--Lady Chatterly's Lover has lost its sales rank, but Lolita hasn't). And there are a host of interesting blog analyses of the subject, all with other links in them. (Becky Howard just tweeted that google news is still unaware of this story, although metafilter is reporting it.)

I'm thinking that there will be some early morning meetings at Amazon about this. Wonder what the corporate response will be. Hard to understand what they were thinking, really.

Photos from Vermont....and what's next

Vermont photographer Karen Pike has a wonderful set of photos up from the Vermont statehouse, capturing lawmakers before the vote and the emotional reaction from the crowd afterwards. I am particularly moved by the shots of Vermont Freedom to Marry's Beth Robinson, and the shots of a couple who have been together for 42 years.

One of the lessons from Vermont is that marriage equality comes after years of work. It's been a decade since Vermont, with its civil union law, became the first state in the US to offer same-sex couples the state-level legal benefits associated with marriage. The civil union law emerged after a court case (litigated by Beth Robinson and Susan Murray), and that court case emerged after years of foundational grassroots politicking. Vermont Freedom to Marry has been a presence at fairs, parades, and town meetings all across Vermont for years now. It's made movies, trained speakers, and lobbied. It's placed letters in favor of marriage equality in local newspaper all across the state. It's organized business people and clergy all around the state. It's gotten the message out, in a small state that prizes local governance, that marriage equality is good for all Vermonters. It's easy, when you read about the court decisions or the Vermont legislature's vote yesterday, to miss all those years of organizing. My hat is off for Robinson and all the other staff at Vermont Freedom to Marry, but also to the thousands of people they've been in contact with over the years. They changed things in Vermont one person at a time, and that's impressive.

What's happening in Iowa now shows that court decisions alone can't change things. There's been an immediate on-the-ground backlash calling for an Iowa constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman (that amendment wouldn't be possible until 2012, I think, but the process could start now). One Iowa is marshalling folks to contact their legislators to urge them to take a stand respecting the court decision. If you're reading this in Iowa, please call or write your legislators.

I'm going to be writing the Iowa governor and Iowa senate majority leader--to let them know how happy I am when I think about Iowa this week. They don't need to hear out-of-staters tell them what to do, but I imagine they'd like to know what a positive impression the Iowa court decision is making in my part of the woods.

Vermont Freedom to Marry, by the way, is encouraging Vermonters to write and thank all the legislators who voted for the override (particularly the 3 who changed their votes, voting for the override after voting against the original bill). That's good follow up.

My favorite tweet on the subject: "The Green Mountain State goes rainbow."

Marriage in Vermont!!!

Breaking news from the Vermont Statehouse: the legislature just overrode the governor's veto of the marriage act.

I'm so overwhelmed I hardly have words. More later.

Kudos to the fabulous people at Vermont Freedom to Marry. They've been working for more than a decade, since Vermont enacted civil unions, to lay the groundwork for this legislation. Vermont is the first state in the United States to permit same-sex marriage through legislation (as opposed to marriage proceeding from court decisions, as was the case in Iowa earlier this week).

What I've been doing lately

besides blogging in my head, that is:

• I performed surgery on a 29-year old stuffed koala whose job, at night, is to stay awake and watch over Curious Girl while she sleeps. CG cut one of his seams open in the midst of a big ol' fit, and then felt so horrible about that that she spent another half hour being hysterical about the fact that none of her animals would stay up all night with her because they all thought Ted the Koala should do it (but he couldn't, because he had been removed from her room to the Koala Hospital for a night of rest before the surgery)
• I had a conversation with CG in which she--rather worked up--yelled that she wanted to break my arm. (Fine to be very mad at me, I said, but not OK to try to hurt me.) Then she said that she wanted me to go to the hospital so that she and Politica could visit me there. (If I'm in hospital, of course I want visitors, I said.) Then she got hysterical in another vein because what if Politica said she couldn't visit me in the hospital and she had to stay home alone? what if she cried and I wasn't there? Anger, fear of abandonment, love, adorableness--almost seven is really rather amazing.
  
• I've been skiing every Sunday. I love the woods here. I think I will get in one more ski tomorrow.
• I've met a lot of faculty, and listened to lots of stories about teaching and learning
• I've walked through a sugarbush, listening to leaves crunch and mud slurp, smelling spring
• I've gotten our bikes all ready for spring
  
• I have been much missed by CG when I've not been at home, but much ignored by her when I am.
• I'm trying to decide what is special or unique about me, to answer a trivia question on a questionnaire for my college reunion this summer. For some reason, this question is tripping me up.
• I have bought two pairs of mud/rain boots (the first were too warm for warm weather) and listened to CG singing a little song she learned at school about how wonderful mud is. We're not in Old State anymore.
  

Other things to read

I'm still here, although not much here in blogland. It's been a busy semester, and I've been blogging in my head more often than blogging at the keyboard. I'll be back.

In the meantime, head over the Shakesville, which today has a guest post by a birth mother about adoption. It's an eloquently smart commentary on adoption, the pro-life movement, and gender.

I figure if I'm not writing much myself, I can point you to other good reading.

And one more thing: keep your fingers crossed for marriage equality in Vermont, would you? The legislature is holding hearings on a marriage bill this week. Lots of good testimony so far this week.

Some/Thing New

This post is part of Robin's Some/Thing carnival for Freedom to Marry Week, and Mombian's blogswarm on the same subject. Freedom to Marry's event page can help you find local events: get involved!
So many new things of late:

new house
new renovations going on in my bathroom
new office
new colleagues
new bike-commuting lifestyle
new school
new job
new Farmer's Market
new friends
new feelings of loneliness when thinking about old friends who are now far away
new foods
new views
new courses
new texts
new bureacracies
new president

So much, so new, I barely have time to reflect on it all.

And so much new homework sitting next to me: time for a new activity--finish the grading before going to bed.

Something Old

This post is part of Robin's Some/Thing carnival for Freedom to Marry Week, and Mombian's blogswarm on the same subject. Freedom to Marry's event page can help you find local events: get involved!

Something old. We don't have a lot of old things in our house. Politica's parents emigrated as adults; my grandparents emigrated, and they didn't have much. Neither of us comes from families rich in tactile history--there are photographs, of course, in our parents' houses, but not a lot of old things.

We don't have a lot of old traditions in our house, either. We've been conscious of the new for so much of our relationship. When we got married, we designed our Quaker ceremony to include some music (before the silent worship period). We designed the program to explain the ceremony and its context to our guests. We created new rituals to celebrate holidays together, eventually opting together to join a new faith tradition as we solidified our sense of family. It's all new.

We had to represent something old at our wedding. We did have one relatively old guest--Politica's father, who is so delightfully clueless about gay marriage that he only learned that it wasn't actually legal when we got married. (And for years thereafter, he'd ask, every now and again, "so, how's the marriage issue coming along out there, as though our former, extremely conservative state was going to shift any day now. This even before marriage equality seemed to be picking up steam in the states.) We had to find a way, though, to represent the broader sense of old at the wedding. We used old language. Our wedding rings have an inscription in Politica's Family's Ancestral Language, matching the inscription on her parents' wedding rings. We list ourselves as daughter of all four of our parents on our wedding certificate, even though my parents didn't attend and her mother was long dead.

We see ourselves as creating new--but sometimes, I miss something old. I wish we had more things around us connecting us to generations that came before. But our new will someday be Curious Girl's old, and I sometimes think about our family rituals as things we are creating and polishing, creating and softening, readying them for her to take and use as she will, in her life and her family someday. Old will come, and I'm happy to have Politica by my side as it does.

Seven conversations in seven days is a Freedom to Marry program designed to promote creative talk about marriage--click on the graphic to learn more.

Freedom to Marry Week

It's Freedom to Marry Week! And there are two interesting blog carnivals going on. Mombian and PageOneQ are co-hosting a Freedom to Marry carnival, and Robin (at The Other Mother) is once again sponsoring her Some/Thing Carnival, with five days of themed posts (something old, new, borrowed, blue, and Celebrate Love to cap it all off).

I've written a fair bit about marriage already this year. I've been writing about marriage to my local representatives and to my governor. I've been having wedding fantasies, living now in a part of the world where it's possible to imagine marriage equality arriving sooner rather than later.

We've had two ceremonies so far: our Quaker wedding, which has no legal significance, and our Vermont civil union, which has legal significance only when we happen to be in Vermont. Anywhere else, it doesn't matter. The lack of mattering matters to me. With all the gains and losses in the marriage equality movement lately, I'm more aware than ever of the marriage rights I don't have.

Politica just called me to find out what size butternut squash to buy for the stew I want to make this week. We spent this weekend hanging out with my sister and her kids; we walked around outside, doing winter things. We all went to a science museum together. We ate dinner. We exchanged Christmas presents, finally. We laughed. We admired our giggly girls. We made plans for more visits.

All of it, so ordinary. And yet to listen to some marriage equality opponents talk, you'd be led to believe that this sort of ordinary life is going to be the end of civilization as we know it.

Not hardly. It's just ordinary people with an ordinary life. Check back here for some more stories this week--and check out the participants in the carnivals, too. You'll meet good people.

Even in Australia, with Chocolate: A tale of emerging literacy and anger management

We were on the road this weekend, visiting Politica's father, and Curious Girl was an awesome travel companion. Until about 4:00 this aft, that is, when she got out of the car for an early dinner, climbed into a snowbank, and promptly found the cold air + wet tights to be deeply distressing. I reached into the car for the handy bag of extra clothes, and we whined our way down the street to a restaurant, wherein CG decided that she was simply Too Miserable to be Helped. As she wound up, Politica and I decided that it was the better part of valor to leave the restaurant and get back in the car with bagels to go from a nearby coffeeshop. CG found this Not What She Wanted, and turned into Angry Girl. I carried her into the car (tucking her under my arm so as to keep her from pulling my hair and pinching me), somehow got her buckled into the car (while she pulled my hair bigtime, and was generally loud and obnoxious), and through a series of threats about future activities to be cancelled and empathetic comments about the Terrible State of Affairs and The Great Restaurant that We Will Now Miss, a semblance of calm returned to the car. Although as we pulled away from the car, CG opined that she was mad at me, "because you ruined my life, Mama." I just let that one go.

After a few minutes, though, I heard "here!" from the back seat, and turned around to see CG handing me the white board that has become our new favorite car toy. Sometimes, she draws on it, but sometimes, she and I write back and forth on it. Here's the correspondence that ensued:

Hi Mama, Im vry sore that I puld yor hare and tuggd on your niplz. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, I'm very sorry you hurt me, too. My head still hurts. I love you, Mama.

Hi Mama, Im rely sore. I fel bad that I hurt you. I wish I kud hid in my sweatshirt. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, Sometimes we try to hide when we make a mistake, but the best thing to do is make it right. If you hide in your sweatshirt forever, I will miss you forever. Love, Mama.


Dear Mama, I want to et. Love, Curious Girl.

At that point, we took a break and ate a bit, and Curious Girl turned back into her charming traveling self. She took her pointer and white board and started teaching a kindergarten class (in which I noticed she had to correct imaginary Curious Girl several times--I guess she was working out her own inner discipline).

Curious Girl is a great kid, and it's been clear to us from very early on that she needs help dealing with her emotions. All kids do, of course, but CG seems to easily get to a place where she can't calm down by herself. I think of her sometimes as my little Vulcan resonator--if I get angry when she's having a fit, she just feeds off my energy to ramp herself up. If I can stay calm, she can usually latch onto my calm and get herself back under control. Rachel's post on parents and anger led me to Laura Markham's parenting site, which has a ton of great information on anger. I've been reading it tonight, trying to figure out what is the right response to CG when she gets to physically angry. Markham says that tantruming kids are looking for something from their parents, and that empathy is the best way to help them name and act on their feelings.

In the midst of CG's tantrum today, I managed to distract her a bit by threatening to go through the week and cancel various activities, starting with tomorrow's play date, but that didn't really do much besides transfer the object of her anger (her cries shifted from "But I wanted to stay at the restaurant!" to "But I want to go home from school with My Friend tomorrow!"). I finally said, after one more yank on my hair, "fine, no playdate tomorrow. Keep it up and you'll lose your skating lesson on Wednesday," while thinking "a. this is not going to work: she will not remember this transaction the next time she gets mad and b. I wanted to work tomorrow afternoon. What am I doing to my own schedule?!?" While not threatening about the playdates, though, I was calm, and tried to tell her that she could calm down, that she was in charge of her body, and that it would get better. And eventually, it did.

Later on, Politica and I having conferred somewhat on the ways in which removing-playdate-consequences really aren't helpful here, we turned back to the conversation with CG, and I tried to explain the difference between feeling sorry and making something right (if you broke something of mine, you could say you're sorry, but then you could fix it, or get me a new one, to make it right.) This led, eventually, to another round with the white board, where CG made a list of ways to make things right with me. I didn't see the spelling here, but here's her plan:

step one: say I'm sorry
step two: find out if she's OK
step three: try to do something to make it better
step four: find out what hurts the most
step five: figure out how not to do it again

She was adorably into naming all these "steps" (which she thought of on her own) and figuring out how to write it all down so she wouldn't forget. Then we ran through all the steps, and on step 5, decided that "mad jumps" (jumping up and down 5 times after saying "mama, I'm mad!") might be the thing to do, rather than hitting. This let me say that I was going to let her have her play date after all, if she was ready to take responsibility for trying to calm down her anger. (We're also going to make a new Feeling Box for home, so she has paper and crayons specially for drawing when she's angry or sad.) She says that she'll let us remind her about jumping or the Feeling Box. I hope so. We had some success with the Feeling Box for a while last year, but when we moved, CG announced she didn't need it anymore. Clearly not.

It's relatively easy for me to empathize with CG when she's angry or sad generally--but when she gets so physically angry, it's harder. It's hard to know what to do with a raging child who's trying to hurt me and escalate things. I 'm taller and stronger than Politica, so I can carry CG even in a tantrum; Politica's already hitting some of her own physical limits with CG's size and strength. At the moment, I can restrain CG while she flails, but she will eventually get too big for that (sometimes even now, it's not practical to do that--she was able to hurt me today because we were in the car, and I couldn't easily get her in front of me.) I can shut myself in my own room to get away from her, but I can't reliably get CG to stay in her own space when she's angry. I'm just not sure what the natural consequences are for fits like this--and I'm not sure how to practice empathy with someone who's pulling my hair. Laura Markham doesn't comment on this anywhere I found. I'll be rereading How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen and Listen So Your Kids Will Talk, and looking up another book Markham recomments (Smartlove, by Martha Pieper). And I'll be thinking hard about how to balance empathy and efforts to reach out to CG in her own vulnerable anger with how to keep my scalp happy.

I'll end by saying that these kinds of tantrums don't happen very often (although we've had two this month!) and Curious Girl feels awful afterwards (as evidenced by her note that she wanted to hide in her sweatshirt). I'm writing about it in such detail because, as Rachel's post noted, it's hard to find information about what parents do when we're angry. I spent half an hour in the car today worried that CG's behavior was totally abnormal, but Politica assured me that these things happen to other people, too, only they don't talk about it. So I'm writing about it, so if this happens in your car sometimes, you can remember this post.

One more observation: as I was trying to remember all the good ideas in Rachel's post on anger, which is titled "I want a chocolate bar," I remembered, I did have a chocolate bar! So we ate some chocolate, and that was good, too.

Welcome Home

If you've spent any time at all reading any of the adoption blogs out there, you've probably seen the complications that arise. Those of us who adopted internationally might encounter travel delays, embassy problems, or mysterious court requirements. Posts by adult adoptees and first mothers and adoptive parents alike show the ways the losses involved in adoption resonate throughout all our lives.

Sometimes, though, I just want to push all of life's complications aside and smile: Erin and her daughter Azucen@ are coming home together, from Guatemala, where Erin has been living for almost 2 years, weathering various twists and turns. Erin has been writing about all this and more at Jesus Was Not a Republican.

Welcome home: enjoy this next phase of adjusting to each other. I bet there will be more good stories to follow.

Guest Fiction

I am remembering, these days, that Ellen Goodman stopped writing her columns when her children got old enough to read them. I'm wondering just how to tell Curious Girl stories in this space, wondering when it's OK to tell her stories here, when it's not.

Here's her latest story, an opportunity for you to work out your invented spelling skills. I am loving watching her learn to read and write down her own words, and at the moment, I'm letting my enjoyment of all that wash over my ongoing ethical debate about what of her words it's OK to post here. So, for your pleasure (and my own memory), some guest fiction (focused a bit more on setting than plot, but hey, it's kindergarten):

The Bav Princess, by Curious Girl
Wuns upun u time ther wus a brav princess. She liket being a rav pinses. She live in a kasl. I love my kasl she said, the prinsess. The end.

[self-portrait of Curious Girl]

Theis book is dedkdid to Susan and hr dodre Politica.
[editorial comment: CG asked me if I wanted her to write a story. Of course, I said. What kind of story did I want? one about a brave girl, I said. She offered me a brave princess, and I said that was fine, and so she set to writing. She gigglingly said, at the end, that she was pretending that I was the mom and that Politica was the daughter. I guess she was the house bard or something.]

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.

Holidays and Conferences

• I just spent 3 days off line. There's something to be said for that, although I'm having fun catching up with all of you friends-in-the-computer.
• We stopped at the National Bottle Museum. I love quirky museums, and I love Politica, who stopped to park even before I'd finished my "It's open!" sentence as we drove by. And Curious Girl clapped when I said we were going into the bottle museum, and wondered whether she should bring in the blue water bottle she'd been drinking from.
• Curious Girl's first report card came home last week. We have a teacher conference in the morning. I'm looking forward to it: kindergarten is clearly going well for her, and her teacher seems to have connected with CG quite well. I'm curious to hear a bit more about CG's social habits in class, and I have a few questions about how persistent she is with challenging tasks at school.
  
• I like CG's school quite a bit. But the report card? Spectacularly uninformative in some key ways. The scale refers back to the state standards, for several reasons, including that "A standards-based report card gives "parents a clear understanding of what their children know, what they are able to do, and what they need to learn in relation to the standards." So the scale on the report card is "Exceeds/meets/nearly meets/fails to meet standards and then "little evidence." Problems here include:
• "little evidence" is not actually on the same scale of exceeding-to-not-meeting any given standard. There might well be little evidence of a student meeting a particular standard; little evidence sounds like a comment about what there is to evaluate, not an actual evaluation.
  
• the report card does not actually point us to anywhere where the actual standards are explained. I remembered that there is an explanation of the report card on the school website, but the explanation there focuses on the transistion from the old (2 years ago) format of report cards. I had to google the state standards.
• the school website does gloss the scale, though, and says that "little evidence" means that "Student's achievement shows little evidence of meeting grade level standards."
  
• When your kid "meets the standard" in October, does that mean she has met the (end-of-grade) standard? Or that she meets the where-we-think-we-are-with-this-standard-in-October-standard?
• CG "exceeds" the standard in music performance. (Yay! I got a 5! she said as we looked at the report card together. She has no clue what the numbers actually mean but clearly has solidly grasped the notion that 5s are bigger than 4s, and at the moment, bigger is better in her book.) On the state standards site, the document I found about arts standards says that there aren't kindergarten level music standards.
• All of this is more philosophically troubling me to me than parentally troubling: CG is having a fine time in kindergarten, and we already knew that this is totally the right time for her to be in kindergarten. (Anyone reading here who's obsessing about whether to repeat a year of pre-K: do it. CG wasn't ready for kindergarten a year ago, and she is in totally the right place now. I could have obsessed about something else during her first year of pre-K. It was such the right call.) So it's not like I have serious questions about what's going on in kindergarten. She's learning to read, she's loving math, she's quizzing us on what are living and non-living things (the subject of the science unit this fall). She likes school, and she's making friends. That's pretty much my idea of good kindergarten outcomes right there.
  
• I really need to come up with a good Thanksgiving entree. But not tonight. Magpie suggested a potato pie, but I am hoping for something with protein (to go along with the turnips braised with maple syrup, and turkey and traditional trimmings my sister will prepare). I'll make bread or rolls of some sort. But what protein? Time to get decisive.
• Except it's time to go to bed. So decisions will have to wait until tomorrow. But comments on non-turkey Thanksgiving options are welcomed!
  

Soggily Slogging towards Equality

Check out Andrew Sullivan's blog for a series of posts that start "The View from Your Protest" for first-hand reports and photos from marriage equality protests around the world. It rained today in Germany--hence all the umbrellas and rain gear in the photo above--but we had over a hundred people, maybe 150 people, at a rainy little rally. It was hard to hear the speakers, but Curious Girl had a great time playing with an 11-month old puppy. The moment of silence at the end was very moving; otherwise, it was an oddly quiet gathering, just a series of speakers, no crowd involvement, no chanting or singing. But there was exhortation to get involved with our state marriage equality organization. And given that Politica and I haven't ever bothered to tell Curious Girl that we're not legally married, perhaps the quiet gathering was just as well. I don't know how to explain the odd (un)legalities of lesbian family life to her just now. I'm not afraid to tackle hard issues with her--but she's young enough to expect everyone to be kind and fair, and I just can't think of a way to explain to her that the way her own family is viewed in the eyes of the law here is profoundly unfair. As far as she knows, we're married, and that's all there is to it.

Here's the letter I've written to our governor, which I will be revising a bit to send to my state legislators, too:

Dear Governor _____________:

We met last August when you attended the reception for new faculty at German State University. I was impressed, then, at the way you've set up a tradition of being so personally involved with German State University and pleased to see the ways in which you make it a priority to attend events like that, which allow you to make personal connections with Germans. I'm glad you value the personal as well as the policy sides of governance. Politics is ultimately personal: the choices you oversee in the executive branch affect the ways in which Germans get to live their lives.

My partner, daughter, and I relocated to Germany late last summer because of the remarkable professional opportunities German State U offered us. More important that those professional opportunities, however, were the state legal protections Germany's domestic partner legislation offered our family. In our previous state, Politica and I had no legal relationship to each other. Here, as far as the state is concerned, we are legal next of kin, and we enjoy all the legal, state-level benefits of marriage.

However, we don't enjoy all the social benefits of marriage, and we don't enjoy all the legal benefits of state marriage that would be recognized in other states. While we are grateful for what Germany offers, I hope that someday soon, I will be able to join Politica in a legal marriage. This would be important to me for several reasons: first, marriage means something in America that domestic partnership doesn't. "I got domestically partnered last summer" just doesn't have the same ring to it that "We got married!" does. Secondly, as our daughter gets older, I don't know how I'm going to explain to her that Germany doesn't think her two mothers are married in the same way that Germany thinks her aunt and uncle are married. In our extended family, there's really little difference in how our family works and how my sister's family works: we work, we love our kids, we enjoy our surroundings. Yet my sister's marriage to my brother-in-law is recognized very differently than my relationship to Politica. My nieces' family has considerably more legal stability than my daughter's, and that troubles me greatly.

Politica and I travel outside of Germany quite frequently. Were we married, an increasing number of other states would recognize that relationship. Unfortunately, our domestic partnership--and the other legal documents we carry with us, such as health care proxies, might not be recognized by officials in other states. When Lisa Pond suddenly fell ill on a cruise ship off Florida and slipped into a coma and died, hospital officials in Miami refused to let her partner of 18 years and their 3 children in to see her, saying that Florida did not recognize their family. Without the benefits of legal marriage, lesbian and gay families depend on the kindness of others to keep their families together in times of stress. It is easy for hospital administrators or other officials to ignore a gay or lesbian partner and turn instead to a sibling of parent for a decision in a moment of medical crisis or death. I hope, should something happen to me, that no one would question Politica's relationship to me. I hope, that should someone question it, my sister and parents would defer to Politica. I hope, but I can't ever be sure. A legal marriage would settle those issues.

Full marriage equality in Germany won't solve all these problems; it will take decades, doubtless, for all 50 American states to arrive at marriage equality. But marriage equality in Germany would be an important step towards that day, and it would be an important step in improving the lives of all Germans. When our daughter runs off to kindergarten in the morning, she mixes on the playground just like all the other kids. When I come to read to her class once a week, I'm just another parent volunteer. When I pay my taxes, I'd love to be just another married German paying her taxes. There's no need to create a separate legal category for some Germans. If you have the opportunity to sign a marriage bill into law, please do it. You'll be making Germany an even better place, for all of us.

Sincerely,

Susan

Speaking Out

Saturday is a day of protest over Proposition 8. There are demonstrations scheduled in every state, and even abroad (although question to organizers: does it really make sense to call Puerto Rico an international location?). There have been many protests in California already, with thousands of protests taking to the streets. It's stirring, the sight of so many people continuing to demonstrate for marriage equality. Andrew Sullivan says it's the beginning of a gay awakening in the US. He comments, "I've long believed that the moment every gay person truly wanted the right to marry, and understood the depth of the injustice, we would win. That moment feels much closer today than it did a week ago."

There's been a lot of divisive commentary over Prop 8--accusations that African-American voters coming out for Obama put Prop 8 over the top. Nate Silver's analysis puts that to rest quite clearly. The reason Prop 8 passed was because too many Californians voted for it, period. Too many Californians who fit into lots of demographic categories voted for it. As Silver notes, if people over 65 had stayed home from the polls, Prop 8 would have narrowly failed. So in another 8 years or so, marriage equality should fare better at the California polls (although it is rather difficult to get things out of constitutions once enshrined. But still, time is on the side of marriage equality). In the meantime, we should all read some very fine posts on the relationships--or lack thereof--between the civil rights movement and the marriage equality movement. Lesbian Dad says: "Surely a silver lining will become evident in the clouds over us (dueling recriminations: homophobe! racist! bigots, all! meanwhile the powers that be at the LDS and the Knights of Columbus lean back, and smile). Lordy at times it feels like not just hard rain, but frogs and locusts are coming down. "

Frogs and locusts, but also lots of protests. The thing is, I can't quite figure out what all the protests are heading towards. In California, there's so much pent-up emotion over Prop 8: protests there make sense to me, as a way of communicating frustration and as a way of working out where to go next. But what does it mean to have nationwide protests about Prop 8? Or a boycott, as some have called for? (boycotts make no sense: gay Californians, those most directly affected by Prop 8, have no ability to not spend money where they live, San Fransisco has long been pushing, and providing, equal rights for queers in areas where the city had jurisdiction, so why boycott SF? plus see an excellent set of arguments over at An Accident of Hope.)

I can't figure out whether there's going to be a protest here in Germany or not. If there is, I'll probably go. But I want a better formulation of what the protest is aimed at: whose opinions are we targeting? What actions do we want to see? In the meantime, here's what I'm planning to do in the wake of Prop 8:

• checking out the marriage equality organization here in Germany. (want to know who's working in your state? Check out the cool stuff going on at Equality Utah! I can't find a comprehensive website listing all the state equality organizations, but HRC is one starting place. Marriage Equality USA has chapters around the country There's also a Jews for Marriage Equality group. Freedom to Marry is another source of state-by-state info. Google "marriage equality" and "your state name here" to find out what's going on in your neck of the woods.)
  
• writing to my governor to let him know what marriage would mean to me and my family
• writing to my state legislators to let them know what marriage would mean to me

I live in a state where it's possible to imagine the legislature enacting marriage equality. And what legislators--and governors with veto power--need to know is that a) their constitutents support marriage equality and b) they won't lose their seats over supporting it. One of the reasons marriage settled reasonably well in Massachusetts is that legislators who opposed civil unions tended to lose seats in the next election; legislators who supported them retained their seats. When legislators understand that their seats aren't at risk over their votes, they are less timid about supporting an issue. Even if you live in a state that already extends legal protections to same-sex couples, write your elected representatives and let them know how much you value those protections. We need to speak up, and speak out.