Hovering over Hopscotch

I've been thinking about helicopter parents a lot this summer. While Wikipedia tells me that Foster Cline coined the phrase in a 1990 book, I came to hear the term more via the NYT ever-odd coverage of parenting issues and through disparaging comments from colleagues. I've written a fair bit here over the years about the importance of independence for kids, and I've built my career in part around the ways institutions can help students make a good transition to college (and independence). I like reading Free Range Kids. So you might think I'd be a critic of helicopter parenting myself.

But no. I've spent a lot of the summer simmering about the way the notion of helicopter parenting plays out in our culture. Helicopter parenting is said to be bad. It's said to deprive our children of the chance to learn how to solve problems and work things out. It's said to keep children from learning how to play independently. It's said to get in the way of teachers doing their jobs. eu retesting language note: in Scandinavia, the analagous term is 'curling parent.')

But......the thing is, I've read a lot more text about helicopter parenting than I've seen in real life. I occasionally have a parent call me to talk about their college student child (not even once a year). I explain that I can't talk about the student's record, but explain the general policy issue at hand or explain the course and tell to encourage their child to talk to me directly. I hear stories of parents who are over involved in their children's sports ( but CG doesn't run in those competitive sports circles.) I imagine that anyone reading this might have a story to tell about Parents They Have Seen Behaving Badly, but on the whole, helicopter parenting is something I've read about more than I have observed.

So let's think about whAt I have been told parents should do. Be Involved in Your Child's Education! Parents are home partners of the school, we're told by the principal. Rightio then: you want me to be involved, just not too much. My sister and brother-in-law are teachers, and a few weeks ago I had dinner with them and two other teacher friends of theirs, one of whom works in a district that,s been taken over by the state. The teachers are getting paid for an extra 4 days of professional development and the school year has been lengthened. My brother-in-law's first question: are they requiring parents to come to those workshops, too? We all laughed, but again the implication: the problem with parents is that they are not involved. Unless the problem is that they are too involved.

I've been sensitive to this issue lately because we've been wondering for the past 2 years what to make of the fact that CG has been saying she's not good at math. Sometime in the fall of 1st grade, I mentioned it to her teacher, that CG was getting pretty frustrated at home whenever some calculation needed to happen and she was verbalizing that she wasn't good at math. 7 years old seemed a little young to start buying into this cultural script (especially for girls). Not to worry, said the teacher. She's meeting all the standards, and it's ok if she counts on her fingers. After all, your fingers are always with you! But second grade has now come and gone, and the same math panic has continued. And inefficient counting on fingers. And continued shrieks of I CAN'T DO MATH. Yet still, the teacher said she couldn,t understand why CG would say this. She was meeting standards. She was fine. We should just continue to point out all the ways math comes up in daily life (counting change, cooking, counting place mats needed, etc.)

Except she isn't. Make a long story short, after several more conferences, the teacher finally agreed to have the district math coordinator do an informal assessment, which revealed that CG has erratic understandings of the math curriculum so far. While there are some big conceptual areas where she is performing at the highest levels (she is awesome at fractions, e.g.) there are some basic things about numbers that she couldn't do. And those areas, the district coordinator says, could really start holding her back. Her conclusion: CG just needs to play! And practice math as it comes up in everyday life! Her recommendation: hopscotch. In other words, you just need to play with your kid and she will learn what she has been missing.

Bull. Granted, we haven't ever set up a hopscotch board that counts by 2 or by 5, but I don't really think that would matter. We never did flashcards (never once has any teacher suggested them for anyone) but we have, since CG could talk, gotten her to help measure, cut, count, and order things. When the district coordinator finally understood that I was mightily irritated by the suggestion that parental play was the answer after 2 years of my telling teachers that there was something not right about CG's math performances, she backtracked and said that clearly the reason CG did so well on part of the assessment was because of all that parenting. We just need to play in a different way. But where's the role of, say, the math teacher and curriculum?!? Why isn't the math teacher offering clear advice to kids about how to learn what they need to know (instead of leaving it up to parental trial and error and emotional upheaval?)

We haven't been playing hopscotch this summer. CG is using an adaptive online site (Dreambox dot com, a subscription site developed by Pearson publishers), recommended eventually by the district person. We've also gotten her a tutor, a recent Math graduate who comes once a week and has been working with her on math facts. We could do flashcards ourselves, but having Cool Tutor come makes her feel like it's ok to make mistakes and it's possible to learn.

CG would tell you, if she trusted you, that sometimes she gets mad at me because I hover too much. She would probably tell you that I make her do math when she doesn't want to, and if she could read about helicopter parenting she might say that my attention to her math is something she doesn't want. But....if it weren't for our pushing the teacher so hard this year about what has turned out to be 2 years of my child struggling to learn a key part of the math curriculum, CG would just be heading into another year destined to fall further behind. (and if it hadn't been for the feeding journal I kept when she came, her serious medical problems wouldn't have been diagnosed right away, but that's another story).

In terms of math, things are getting better. It's a complicated situation, and CG needs to figure out how to remember some facts as well as how to access what she knows when she's nervous. It's coming, although I have lost faith in the teacher assessments and I have little faith in the district math curriculum. And mostly, I'm done with criticisms of helicopter parents. There are conversations to be had, for sure, about how to foster independence and how to help kids learn to fail and succeed. But the discourse around helicopter parenting serves largely to slam parents for whatever we (don't) do. And that, I have decided, isn't helping me sort out how to raise the powerful, articulate, and capable young woman I see CG yearning to become.

Considering Origins

I usually love the Lives column in the New York Times Magazine.  No surprise that someone who blogs--no matter how slowly or sporadically--likes personal essays that offer brief glimpses of other people's lives.  Yesterday's column deals with adoption, as an adoptive, lesbian mother listens to her five-year old son begin to make sense of his own story.

To Molly  and me, our children are so completely ours it feels impossible that anyone else had anything to do with them. But for Jonah, who knows? Some would say, for example, that it was the hand of God that saved his namesake, the original Jonah, from the belly of the whale; others, that it was luck that caused the beast to spit him out.

So here I am in the bed with our youngest boy, telling him the truth as I see it: “Some babies come out of their mommies, and some come through other bodies to get to their mommies. My body couldn’t make babies, so we had to find another way to get you here.” I’ve told him this before, but the story no longer satisfies the way it once did. He may be only 5, but it’s time for Jonah to begin making his own version of the narrative.

These aren't the conversations that happen around our house.  Politica and I started telling Curious Girl her adoption story---her birth story--her early story--even before she could talk to us.  (This was handy, as it let us practice all kinds of explanations! and it let us try out different stories, as we practiced putting words to what we know, and practiced forming questions we thought she might have.)  Politica and I wrote a life book for CG sometime during the time she was 1 and 2 and a half, and that was another opportunity for us to pull together the past for her.  But always, we looked at our roles as trustees for her story.  There's so very much we don't know, but we have tried to give her one kind of narrative about how she came into the world, and then later into our lives, so that she could get started telling her own story.

I understand the fierceness of her love for her children; I can't imagine my life without Curious Girl.  At the same time, I don't understand the language of possession: do I consider Curious Girl wholly mine?  Not in the least. Do I consider myself wholly a mother, and she wholly my daughter?  Yes.  At the same time, she's wholly herself, her own person.  She's wholly Politica's daughter.  And also, always, wholly her birthmother's daughter.  I'm (one of) the mother(s) day in, day out, the person who helps get her ready for school and takes her on rides and gets her to try oven-roasted tomatoes ("These are really good, Mama!  They are delicious!  They looked disgusting, but they are great!").  But then, day in, day out, there's another woman, miles away, perhaps with CG's eyes, or hair, or build, who brought CG into the world and holds the ties to her past.  CG belongs, really, to none of us, but it's through all of us that she'll move into the future she claims.

The Lives column reports just one conversation.  I don't know, of course, what other conversations Melanie Braverman and her family have had about adoption.  Braverman's two sons have a sister, adopted by another family they know.  That girl "plays a starring role" in their house, so it's clear that there was ways in which their notion of family includes the rich complications of her sons' past.   But why can’t those conversations include, more easily, conversation about her sons’ first parents?  She says that her sons were never much interested in their birth stories—but it’s hard to be interested in something you’ve never heard.

The birth mothers (and fathers) of children placed for adoption are more than just transport mechanisms to get children to their (real) parents.  For all that I can’t imagine my life without Curious Girl, I can’t imagine that massive social problems are ordained by the universe in order to bring CG to us.  It’s a weird thing to ponder, I’ll grant you, the vagaries that have formed this family of mine, and CG has recently started to wonder about that, too.  “What if you got another baby instead of me, Mama?  Would I have stayed in the orphanage?”  or “What if some other family adopted me?”  And she wonders, too, what it would be like to be living with her birth parents.

Braverman says her son is now ready “to make his own version of the narrative” of his own life.  On this point, we agree: our children will tell their own stories, making sense of their lives.  I hope CG makes sense of her life, knowing that Politica and I respect the people who brought her into this world, that our love for her is a safety net, ready to catch her when she needs it, that over the course of her life she’ll probably imagine many, many versions of her life story, and that the ability to tell her own story is what makes her her own person.  She’s not mine alone to hold, and in loving her, I hold her in the messy complexities of a loving adoptive family.

St. Harriet

I'm starting to re-read The Dance of Anger tonight, starting by browsing for some inspiration.  One I've noted already:

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior.  Mothers cannot make children think feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior.  We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck.  At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves--or within the child or the child's father, for that matter.  There is never one villain in family live, although it may appear that way on the surface. (148)

I'm a do-er, and Phantom's comment on the last post reminded me of this book, and I felt more hopeful already, just knowing I could stop at the library on the way out of work and pick up a copy.  I feel more hopeful knowing that I can read more of it.

Although I snorted as I read a few pages later, in a story about a woman whose 4 year old daughter was upset about the mother's dating, and kept throwing fits that would get the mother to cancel dates.  With St. Harriet's help, the mother realizes that she can't control her daughter's reaction to the dating, and that her daughter shouldn't be the one making dating decisions for her.  So she learns to validate the daughter's feelings and make adult decisions about the dating.  Good work all around.  And then there's this: "....throwing a tantrum was unacceptable behavior.  If Claudia did this, Alicia would pick her up and take her to her room, where she would have to stay until she calmed down" (152).  And of course, if CG were the sort of child who would just stay in her room until she calmed down, I'd be blogging about something else entirely.

I think I'll also pull out my copy of Deborah Gray's wonderful book on attachment and adoption, and Keck's Parenting the Hurt Child.  I don't know--I never know--whether CG's emotions are adoption-related, but I always wonder.  Her anger has to be trying to communicate something, and those are some other resources to try.

I don't mean to overstate the problems here, nor do I mean to assume that I (or even Politica and I) can change CG's behavior.  Seems like there's a little less resiliency there than there used to be; maybe it'll pass; maybe we need a little professional help, in or out of school.  I don't know.

But I do know that I can change my reaction to CG's outbursts, and I can snicker at all the parenting books that make it sound like time outs work if parents are serious about them, and that will probably make me feel more hopeful.

And feeling hopeful is a good thing.  Harriet.  Hope. H.

This is really the

What No One Told Me About Adoption

This post is written for a carnival on What No One Told Me About Adoption, organized by the (regrettably named blog) Grown in My Heart. (Here's an older extended explanation of my problems with that term, if anyone's interested.)

I'm an academic, and I read my way through life. When I encounter something new, I read. So I read a lot about adoption, and I was prepared for medical issues, attachment issues, conversations about biology and destiny and families and travel and hard stuff and genes. What no one told me is that knowing something in your head isn't the same as knowing something in your heart.

No one told me how profoundly sad I would feel, listening to the hurt in my daughter's voice as she asks questions I can't answer about her first family.

No one told me how small school assignments can connect to adoption. We have some art Curious Girl did last year, around election day, on the prompt "If I were the President of the United States, I would....." Last year, she was simply happy about her work (she'd make sure all animals go to the vet, in case you're wondering). This morning, though, she said it makes her sad, because she can't be President (not having been born a US citizen) and everyone else in her class last year could be President but she can't and it's.not.fair. I was ready to talk with her teachers about the family tree assignment, or the mapping family eye colors to learn about dominant/recessive genes assignment. I wasn't ready to see how even the simple request to identify yourself as someone with siblings, or not, can be hard for an adopted child to answer.

No one told me that I'd have to find a face-saving, child-supporting way to explain to CG's friends that her birth mother isn't coming to visit tomorrow, even though that's what CG has been telling people all day at school.

No one told me how fiercely protective I would feel about CG's first family, how angry I feel when people generalize about reasons women place children for adoption, assuming that birth mothers are undeserving of grace, love, and parenthood.

No one told me how profoundly happy I would feel, listening to my daughter answer her friends' questions about our family and her adoption. I love the way she's found some words to tell her own story.

No one told me how something so hard can be so wonderful, too. In an ideal world, there'd be no adoption. I can live with the contradictions between my life and that claim: I can't imagine my life not as CG's mother (although yes, the pre-child years were full of happiness, too). But the loss at the root of my wonderful life is something no parents and no children should have to endure. Still. Here I am, with my wonderful beautiful creative and curious girl sleeping upstairs. I love the way she and Politica and I forge our family one conversation at a time, one loving action at a time, one emotion at a time. We're making our family together, weaving ourselves together in ways that help each of us, in our own time, make peace with our pasts. It's amazing, and no one told me just how much I would wonder at what the love between the three of us makes possible.

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.

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.

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.

That's My Girl

To Every Problem, a Solution (even if impractical)
Standing in front of a bookshelf at her school, Curious Girl and I are waiting for her class to arrive. She has strep throat, but has had enough doses of antibiotics that I think it's safe enough to take her to school to go to the auditorium to see a cool guest artist perform. We're in front of the parent resources section, and there are lots of books about families. "I miss my dad," she says. "I really miss him." I squat down to be at her level. "I know you do, sweetheart." "Do you have his phone number?" she wonders. "No, I don't." "I really miss him." "Honey, I don't have his phone number. But you can draw him a picture any time you like, or write him letters, and I can help you save them in a special box. So if you ever do find out where he is, you could give them all to him. But I don't know where he is now." She shakes her head, looks discouraged. Then perks up. "Maybe you could ask someone! Someone else might know his phone number."

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How soon until she can read Marginal Utility? (or, more econ/math skills are on their way eventually, right?)
My parents sent Curious Girl a card today and included a five-dollar bill. CG literally jumped for joy. "My first real dollar!!!" She was giddy. "Is this real money? It looks like pretend money. Is it real?" The notion that it was a five dollar bill was somewhat confusing (those numbers in the corners are just details, apparently). "Someone wrote on it. Why did someone write on it?" We talk about the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer. Then we talk about Abraham Lincoln and end up discussing John Wilkes Booth and what happened to Booth.

But the moment I knew would happen, because kids her age equate quantity with value and money is, after all, pretty abstract: she sat quietly, lookng at the money, and with some wonder, as though she'd just come up with the best. idea. ever, said, "Can I pay with this? Because then I would get even more money!"

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You don't need to be older to be the mature one
I need more sleep. This morning, CG spilled her yoghurt after I'd warned her that a) she needed to eat it because it had medicine in it and b) her arm was likely going to knock it over if she kept motioning as she was. I was right: it spilled, and I just snapped and got insta-angry. I was tired, a bit out of sorts over a work problem I'd carried home a bit last night, and I don't entirely understand it but I just got mad. I raised my voice, even, then realized what I was doing--irrationally overreacting--and said I needed a break and went upstairs to just sit and find my own calm. CG came upstairs, though, and that made me angry all over again. A few minutes later I calmed enough, and went down to her. "Mama, I didn't like the way you talked to me," she sobbed. "It hurt my feelings." I told her I was sorry, that I didn't like how I had talked, asked her what would help her feel better. "That you try not to do that again." She held out her arms for a big hug. We hugged. Things were better.

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Who Says She's an Only Child?
Right now, Curious Girl is snuggled up with a baby blanket, having a sleep over. She's on the little travel bed we used to use, on top of her bed. "I'm sleeping with all my baby sisters, and all our friends are sleeping on my big bed," she informed me. She actually fell asleep not on top of me for the first time. Siblings are a wonderful thing, and I didn't have to do a thing for the babies. What a life.

Random Update

• I am almost, but not quite, finished with the performance reviews in my department. My colleagues are unevenly invested in performance reviews: some don't seem to take any part of the process seriously (reporting or reviewing), some take it seriously and very personally, while others take it seriously with more distance. Reviewing serves some emotional purposes that I don't think we all fully understand--and certainly haven't articulated, in our very rational review standards and processes. I've been thinking quite a bit about the emotional purposes served by performance reviews, and how different people use them (or resist them) in career development. Although this is my last year doing performance reviews, I'd like to leave the department with a framework for considering how to help this task seem more useful across the board. I hope my practice of meeting with almost everyone individually is a step in that direction, but I want to explore how reviewing might be better targeted, so people feel better understood by the system.
• There's nothing like death and potty training to bring readers out to the comment boxes! Thanks so much for all the support and suggestions. It's been invaluable, and I can't thank you all enough.
  
• A potty update: I went back to reminding Curious Girl to go potty at regular intervals, usually around every 60-90 minutes, and at significant activity shifts (before a playdate, before leaving the house, upon coming home from school, before dinner). She's had only one accident in over a week now (and that was on a playdate at a friend's). She is also more likely to say "I have to go!" when I'm generally setting the structure in place. Things are good again.
• Anyone wondering whether a five or six year old child who is still having lots of accidents is normal should conclude that yes! it's very normal. Between the comments here, the private e-mail, and the comments on a yahoogroup I belong to, I've heard a lot of stories of older children who are still a little uneven on the potty front. Constipation is not always easy to detect, so there may be a medical component, but older kids with potty issues are not uncommon. I feel so relieved to hear that. I encourage--and always have encouraged--Curious Girl to be independent in some respects from a very early age (she started helping to clear her place at the table when she was probably two, for example). The week I spent convinced that The Authorities who think A Five Year Old Should be Indpendent with The Potty were correct was a miserable week. She needs a little reminding, and perhaps other kids do, too. Independence comes by many routes, and sometimes, teamwork with a parent is the best thing. We should talk more about such issues, as most of the mail I got from other parents in this situation expressed a bit of "but I thought my kid was the only one who..." Your kid isn't, and neither is mine. And she's splendid anyway.
• Curious Girl attended a Jane Brown adoption playshop this week. Jane is an amazing speaker--she did a three hour presentation for parents the night before, with no notes, very graceful and eloquent and engaging--and she's also great with kids. The two hour playshop gets adopted children and their siblings playing with each other, talking about adoption. They made little braided bracelets (one thread representing their first family, one representing themselves, one their current families) and learned how braided things are stronger than the threads alone. They did a play about a general adoption story, taking the roles of birth parents, prospective adoptive parents, children, siblings. They talked about how to respond to bullying and teasing and played different responses (and did scenes with puppets, too). They talked about how people are the same and different, about how many things are the same even if, say, skin color or eye folds are different.
• When we were watching a movie later, CG said, "the people in this movie are all the same color." Then she said, "but everyone is special. We all have eyes, and a heart inside." Tonight, she told me that she wished--in the part of the playshop where they made wishes about their birth families--that we knew more about J. and S., her birth parents. She cried a bit, told me we don't even have a picture, we don't know anything about them. "You know a little bit, but I don't know anything," she said. I told her that I would never, never, never have secrets about her first family, and that everything I know, she will know. I also said, "Sounds like you're feeling sad." So we talked about her sadness for a while, and I told her that I'm sad, too, that she doesn't know much about her first family. We ended up talking about the possibility of her having siblings in her first family, and she went to sleep planning to dream about living with her brothers and sisters and birth parents. She told me I could come in the dream, but that I couldn't live with them.
• "Pretend you're J., and you keeped me," she said, right before she fell asleep. This is a tricky situation. Politica and I are very careful never to speak for her birth parents. We have always (in age appropriate ways) tried to show CG the multiple reasons her first parents might not have been able to care for a baby when CG was born, always saying we don't know why. On a few other occasions CG has said "pretend I came from your belly," and I have always said "no, I can't. You grew inside J." but tonight, she said, for the first time, "Pretend you're J." I pretend to be any number of other people or things (in the course of today, I've pretended to be a cat, her big sister, her little sister, her baby, her student, her teacher, her ballet teacher). Can I pretend to be J.? My instinct was no, I can't, but I'm also aware that pretending is how she works things out. I don't want to block her attempts to work out adoption issues, especially now when she is clearly on the cusp of getting her mind around the fact that being adopted means that someone didn't keep her. She's coming to terms with the loss she suffered in a way she never has, despite the fact that she's long known the general facts of her story. Those facts are starting to be interpreted in a new way now.
• So I said, "What would J. say?" and she said, "I love you." I replied, "Go to bed, sweetheart," and she said, "remember, you're J." and I said, "Time for bed" (figuring mothers everywhere say that). She said again, "but you're J. Where's S.?" so I said, "I don't know." I was blurring the line about whether I was actually pretending to be J. or not, but the "I don't know" is factually true, and clearly not participating in what I believe her current J. and S. fantasy entails. She said, one last time, 'Tomorrow, remember, you're J." I'm not sure how this will play out tomorrow. Maybe I'll try to redirect her into play acting with some dolls or animals to play the parts. I really can't speak for J., and it's more important that she figure out what she thinks J. might say or do.
• I know this is important for her to do, and I'm so proud of her for being willing to name her feelings and talk about things. It is also heartbreaking to watch her hurt. I don't entirely know what I think about the primal wound, but I do know that CG has healing going on that wouldn't be needed if she hadn't been surrended by her first family and adopted by us. (She'd have likely had other problems she'd be working out, of course--I'm not idealizing alternate outcomes.) It's heartbreaking.
• Anyone want to buy a house? I should stop blogging and start cleaning. We have our first open house tomorrow, and too much clutter remains. Cross your fingers for buyers in a bad market.
  

Her Strengths

This post was inspired Magpie's post in response to the call from Parent Bloggers Network and Jenifer Fox for stories about children's strenghts.

Two nights ago, Curious Girl threw a fit in the middle of our (very short) violin practice. She started crying and just couldn't stop. Suddenly, she walked away from me, clearly looking for something. "I can't find it, Mama! My Feeling Box is gone and I can't find it!" She walked around in agitation. I spotted it on the other side of the room, and she ran to it, picked it up, and dumped all the little pieces of paper out. "I"m mad, Mama!"

The Feeling Box is a shoe box, covered with CG- drawn stickers of mad, angry, and sometimes happy faces. It has some crayons in it, and it used to have small pieces of paper for drawing on it. When CG gets angry, she'll get her box--or I'll get it for her--and she'll scribble a drawing to show her feelings. She likes to keep the pictures in the box, although two fits ago, she decided to rip them all up and scatter the pieces on the floor. So now it just has tiny papers in it, suitable for throwing. I love that she has created a box that helps her deal with feelings, and that she's turning to it on her own to process hard situations.

I love that CG can be so in touch with her feelings, that she's experimenting with being wildly out of control and self-regulating all at once. I love that she talks to me about her feelings, wanting me to know just how mad or happy she is. I love that she uses words in a tantrum, and I love that she's experimenting with nonverbal ways to express and process feelings, too.

I love that CG thinks about complicated things--we're bringing dinner to Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin on Sunday. "Why are we doing that?" she wondered. I said it would help them feel better. "Tante Mississippi is still sad sometimes. I am, too. I miss Uncle Quiet. Do you feel a litle sad still." "Just a little," she said. "I'm thinking about other things, because it's more happier. But that's good that we're going to visit them." I could keep adding to my last post indefinitely, it seems: she continues to talk about her wonderful uncle in ways that make me want to laugh and cry all at once.

I love this feeling of connection I have with her, and I love watching her learn to be more independent of that connection. She does, seemingly naturally, what I've spent hours in therapy to learn to do. Maybe I could do this too, when I was five. I don't know. But she can, and it's pretty darn amazing to watch.

Curious Girl has some hard things in her life to think about. Lately, she's been saying that she wishes she still lived with her birth parents. She's starting to realize that being adopted meant that she wasn't cared for by her first parents, that someone wasn't able to keep her. I don't think she's quite put it all together, but it's coming. One night she said, "Whoever gets to keep me is the luckiest." I'm careful here-I know that she will make her own way through these issues, and I never want her to feel the need to protect me or Politica from her feelings about adoption and family. So I say things like, "I wish you knew them better," or "You are an amazing girl with a very loving heart." I want to keep the conversation going, hard though it may be some day. It's hard for me, juggling all the paradoxes of adoption. I wish CG didn't have to deal with the grief and hurt from her past. I wish CG's parents didn't have the burdens they must have had not to be able to parent. Yet life without CG...hard to imagine at this point. It's mind-boggling, the complications. And she knows that, on some level, and she's making sense of it all at her own pace. She's thinking, she's reaching for words, and she has a box full of little papers to help her with the hard stuff. And tonight, that's worth bragging on.

Five Years and Two Days

I never liked the term Gotcha Day to mark the anniversary of adoption--it's too informal, too grasping, too cut-and-dried to make sense of the complications of adoption and family. We call it Family Day, although we've never been sure how to celebrate it. The first year, think we made a point of watching some video we'd shot on the first day we met Curious Girl (but then I left it in the VCR and something recorded over part of it, which caused me great trauma, although we eventually found another copy that is whole). We made a dinner with food from CG's homeland (which she didn't eat, having a feeding tube at the time). Another year, we had a friend over. We've never really settled on a ritual. I've read that some families have very particular celebrations (like presenting the child with a gift from their homeland every year), but we've never come up with much of anything.

This year, we didn't do much of anything. Politica is away--although we had talked about the fact that she would miss family day at home--and somehow, I think we lost track of what the date is. Maybe that's OK: I'm still not sure exactly what we're celebrating. There's so much loss wrapped up in her early months, and I'm very aware of that as I think back on our time with her in her orphanage.

I love December and January, though. They remind me of that most magical period in 2002-2003, when we learned about Curious Girl, started making travel plans, and met her. When we went to court, when we held her, when we dressed her. Every day, I marvel at her: her language, her self-awareness, her joy. I treasure the unfolding relationship we have, the steps she takes toward independence, the snuggles she wants in the morning and at night, the sling she still wants to ride in when she's sad or scared, the books she shares with me, the art and letters she makes. I love the way she can talk about adoption, heartbreaking as it sometimes can be. In December, when her class put on a play, she asked "Will [my birthparents] be there?" I explained that no, they wouldn't, which led to a series of questions and comments about whether they had our phone number and if they could come to visit. The other day, she was trying to explain that she knew more things than a younger friend did. I pointed out that younger friend could do a lot, knew a lot. "But he doesn't know about orphanages," she said. Not that she remembers hers directly, but I did allow as he didn't know much about orphanages, having been born to his mother.

Judges made Politica and me mothers, legally. But Curious Girl makes us mothers over, and over, every day. And for five years and two days, it's been an honor and a privilege--I wake up every morning wanting more.

Audience

I'm just back from an adoption conference, where I presented some material on my imaginings of Curious Girl's birth family, by far the most personal conference presentation I've ever done. First rule of thumb about having a good conference panel: join a group of people who are smarter than you are, and all will be well.

This conference brought together all kinds of people who study adoption--some in the academy, some in professions--and people who are living adoption. There were birth mothers at the conference, adult adoptees (from KAAN and Bastard Nation). I saw people I know from my professional work in English who, like me, are writing about adoption because of their experiences as adoptive parents. On the whole, it was a great conference, albeit it a troubling one. Dorothy Roberts is a genius (see this press release for one example of why); she's so eloquent, in the face of crushing social problems. I left feeling torn about the ethics of virtually any adoption, and feeling challenged, too, about the ways we often seem to put the burdens of dealing with (especially transracial/transnational) adoption on the backs of children. All kinds of major global factors conspire to create the conditions supporting international adoption, and we say to adoptees, "hey, integrate your culture and identity so you can have a healthy self-image." What's our collective responsibility?

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You readers are so lovely, commenting even on my most lame of posts of late. Thank you!

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Curious Girl is reading. Not really reading, but pretend reading. This morning she read me Leo Loves Round, a lovely and out of print book about a little boy named, you guessed it, Leo, who loves his circles. She doesn't have it memorized, but she reads through it and tells the story. Then she picked up Guess How Much I Love You, and said, "but you'll have to read this one because I can't really read it. I don't know these words." I told her she could tell me a story about the pictures, and she did, putting Leo into this book, too, having conversations with his mother, with occasional references to the actual text, like "I love you to the sky and back." It's funny what she remembers, and how she will "read" aloud certain books, but not others.

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Curious Girl still doesn't like story time much. She likes to act out what we read. When she reads Leo Loves Round she plucks the round fruit from the page, takes the bagels and has a bite. She wants to be the story, and she immerses herself in stories. At the same time, she doesn't always get the motivation: we've been reading Library Lion a lot lately, and she thinks it's funny when the lion leaves the library. It's not funny, it's sad, and ordinarily that kind of abandonment is quite important to her (she still talks about the animal whose mother died when it was born, an animal we saw in the Normal IL zoo sometime last spring. "It's a good thing you didn't die when I came, Mama," she said to me just yesterday. "Well, yes, honey, but remember I wasn't there when you came." I'm at an adoption conference, and she's shifting into fantasies that she was born from me. Imagination is a powerful thing.). In Library Lion she's so interested in roaring that I guess she forgets to get into the protagonist-lion's emotional space. I can't quite figure out what kind of audience she is. Definitely one in motion.

Of Princesses and Pretending

Curious Girl is quite taken with princesses, something I expected to have more angst about than it turns out I do. We've tried to expose her to a range of toys and games, including many gender-neutral games, but she likes playing dress-up in fairy and princess outfits. She looks adorable in them. Politica and I haven't bought her many--they've been gifts or hand-me-downs for the most part--but we have gotten a few Waldorf playsilks or pieces of cool material to go with them. Those are handy for playing wedding, it turns out, a game I find endlessly fascinating for what it reveals about Curious Girl's emotional needs and imagination.

Politica and I have been quite slow to supply her with princess narratives, however, and that's what makes her princess play so darn engaging (I think). Only in the past six months (she's recently turned 5) has she seen any of the D!sney movies (Snow White and Beauty and the Beast so far), and we've never read her any versions of the stories. She's had a princess dish set for a while, and that's contributed to her notion that Cinderella, Ariel, Snow White, Belle, and Aurora all live together in a castle, and somehow occupy the same social universe even now that she's aware that they have their own stories, friends, and partners. Last night, CG was Cinderella all during dinner, and this morning, she was Snow White. In the car, she was Belle ("Well, Snow White told me I must come visit you! Where's Curious Girl?" she said. I invented an imaginary CG to the right of her car seat and they had a nice little chat.). The Beast was busy ("He had a Beast meeting. He's really nice, you know. Maybe he can join us for dinner.") but Belle and I had a great time talking together, listening to 1776. Belle told me that she and the Beast love to dance, and that they had a party once with John and Abigail Adams. "They are so fun!" Belle declared. 'We danced all night."

So princesses, not so bad, when they're dancing with John and Abigail, talking about how things are on the Adams family farm during the Constitutional Convention (and as a side note, I realized today that CG's habit of saying "Incredible!" is likely a homage to JA in 1776). Curious Girl's princess play--although it is starting to encompass the romantic elements of the stories--focuses on friendships, kindness to animals, and relations between mother-figures (real or imaginary) and children (real or imaginary). Her pretend weddings involve getting animals dressed up to be family members and guests, and receptions at which everyone is dancing with their mothers. More frequently, she wants to play "let's pretend I just got married," which involves conversations about plans to have children (adopted or in the belly?) and relationships with mothers (who's coming to visit and when?) and sometimes adoption: the other day, she pretended to be my birthmother coming to visit me. She didn't want to say much while she was being my birthmother (other than that she was staying for a long time, wasn't it nice, and that my mother knew she was there), but Politica and I thought it was a pretty good move in her own pretend play.

Pretending is a way of making her own universe. I know she will grow beyond some of this, and I will miss the permeable relationship between reality and fantasy that swirls around us now. As an adoptee, CG will always have a fantasy past: we can't give her all the details I know she will want, and she will always have to balance her rational intellect and her imagination as she makes sense of her past. Just as she will always balance her intellect and her heart as she forges a future with me, Politica, and her friends. Playing princess, playing bride....she's playing her way to her grown-up self. I'm glad I get to play along, for now.

Of forebears and hockey night in Canada

On the Tenth Day of Four
I think-as I do every day--about Curious Girl as she makes her way in the world, telling her own stories her own way

Later this month, Curious Girl will be the student of the week in her class. She'll get to bring a special snack one day and have a guest reader come in to share a special book. Her teachers have suggested it's a good week to do some talking about where she was born, and our family, and adoption. Whether it's because of that, or just her regular birthday reflective angst, Curious Girl has been thinking a lot. She told me the other day that she wants to bring her book about when she was a baby to school, so her friends can see the pictures in it. That's her lifebook, the story of her life that Politica and I have written and illustrated (which really isn't written for her friends, so we'll deal with privacy issues another day). That morning, she asked me to read it to her, so I did. It sits next to her bed. Sometimes we read it often; sometimes weeks go by without anyone picking it up.

That morning I told her that she could write her own lifebook, too. So we loaded up Powerpoint on the computer in the family room, and she dictated and I typed. She came up with something like:

My Life Came True, by Curious Girl.

I was a baby in Where I Was Born.
I didn't know Mama and Mommy. But they came to get me, and then I met them. I didn't know Mama and Mommy before.
J. and S. are very special to me. I liked them and I like them forever.
I miss them. I love them.
I miss them. I love them.

This was my first time encouraging her tell her own story as a narrative. CG talks about being a baby or being adopted quite frequently, and she thinks a lot about her first parents, especially her mother. Around her birthday, she particularly seems to ponder her birth. She likes hearing the story as we know it, and she has lots of questions (and lots of imagined conversation about what she said to J. when she was born or what she said to the doctors, or what she said to the other babies around that day). But this was the first time I helped her to tell her story (as opposed to helping her tell a fact, like the name of her home city). The first thing she said, beyond the fact that she was a baby, was about me and Politica. That was sweet, but that's not how her story goes. We don't enter until later, and I don't want her to erase those months. Not that I have a lot of story to give her about those months, but I don't want her sense of self to be all bound up in her adoptive parents. I want her to know that she, herself, existed in those months before she met us.

So I said to her, "what about telling something about how you were born? About S. and J?" She looked at me, nodding. "I grew in J's uterus." My turn to nod. "They were....." she trailed off. "They were your parents," I said to her. "Your mama and your daddy. They made you. An egg from J., and sperm from S., and it made you!"

"But you are...J....they are..... Mommy and Mama..." she said, uncertainly, and then looked up at me. "You both are!"

Four parents. We both are.

Now, we are all parents in different ways. Politica and I are here, with her, watching her grow, helping her grow, loving her day in and day out. We talk, we write, we tell stories. J. and S. are mysterious figures. They are here, in her, daily, their gifts to her blossoming as she grows. Curious Girl's body comes from them. Her talents, her personality, her looks. We may never know exactly how she maps against that first family, whether they would look at her with a sense of familiarity or whether they would look at her and wonder "how does she fit in with us?" We may well never know their stories, how they came together, what kind of ties they have to each other, what other family stories they could tell. But they are parents, who brought her life into the world.

Curious Girl makes sense of this the best she can. "Why couldn't J. take care of me when I was a baby?" "She couldn't take care of a baby when you were born," I say. "I don't know why. Maybe she didn't have enough money. Maybe she didn't have enough food. Maybe she didn't have enough help. But it had nothing to do with you, " I say. Usually CG changes the subject then, but I can tell, she's starting to think more deeply about what adoption means.

For the first time this week, she got mad and said she wished things had been different. "I want to go to Long-Haired Teacher's house," she said in tears. (She went there for 3 days of mini camp during spring break, and much fun was had.) "I think her house is bigger than ours, because it has a play basement. Neighbor Friends have a play basement, and Long-Haired Teacher has a play basement, and everyone has a play basement except us." I allowed as how play basements are fun, and in fact, I had always wanted a play basement while I was growing up, but had none. Then the zinger:

"I wish when I was a baby and I came to your house, it had a play basement. We could play hockey. Hockey is fun." Tears, tears, tears.

Hockey is fun, and I admit, I miss hockey. The fans of our minor league team are too crass and I won't go to games here (not that the Ranger fans are likely much better these days, but I have fond memories of being in Madison Square Garden with my dad when I was growing up). I miss Hockey Night in Canada coverage. But what does CG know of hockey? Not much, as far as I can tell, although perhaps it is true that she has played hockey in a friend's basement.

I'm a trained English professor, so I'm good at finding what my students call the Hidden Meaning in things. So I don't think CG was really crying about the hockey. I think she's figuring out that she misses her first parents. She's figuring out that she is getting older, and might separate more from me and Politica. She's starting to realize that her life might have been different if different choices had been made. That's sad and scary and happy and anxious. She loves us. She loves S. and J., or at least the idea of S. and J. She misses her dead grandmother, and she misses her, too.

And that's all OK. Nicole, at Paragraphein, has a wonderful post about the complicated emotions of adoption. It's not all roses, it's not all bleak, and people who talk about how placing children for adoption makes birth mothers happy, or how adoption leads to angry grownup adoptees, are way oversimplifying things. Curious Girl is starting to find that out, and testing out her own story in her own words. She'll add to it, and make her own sense of her four parents, her two families, her two countries, her past and future.

It's hard, watching her be sad, watching her struggle with these big questions. But it's also awe-inspiring, to see the complications she can juggle and the questions she can pose. I'm glad she's getting the language to talk about herself. Maybe someday, definitely someday, she'll need to talk to others about it. But for now, I'm glad she talks to me.

"You both are." You bet.

Evelyn Bennett

Updated to add:This post is part of a wider effort to raise awareness about Evelyn and Stephanie Bennett. See this post for a collection of links to writing on the subject, from writers who have all different kinds of connection to adoption. If you read any of these posts and are moved by the stories, please, talk about this case.

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Next fall I'll be on a conference panel with Dawn, Shannon, and Jenna, about adoption and blogging. I'm excited to meet such smart women in person.

Both Jenna's last few posts and Dawn's current post are spot-on discussions of the need for more ethical adoption practices (internationally and domestically, although the posts I'm referencing here concern domestic adoptions). The adoption controvery regarding Evelyn Bennett, an Ohio baby whose adoption is being contested by her maternal grandparents, deserves wide press.

I love being an adoptive mother. It was my first, really my only, choice for how to become a parent. Adoption is, however, a complicated subject. People approach adoption for all sorts of reasons, and some of them are downright vile. I think that adoption should be an option for people who need it--but the people who might need adoption are parents who cannot see a way to raise a child. Adoptive parents don't need adoption. We don't have a right to other people's children.

Don't get me wrong: I am fiercely attached to Curious Girl, and I am her mother. One of her mothers: she has three, one of whom I know little about, one of whom couldn't parent her. We're all real, and as I've said before, Curious Girl will make her own relationships with all of us over time. We're not in competition with each other.

When Curious Girl is older, and she needs help, I hope that she will have a network around her. Stephanie Bennett, a young mother in Ohio who placed her child for adoption, didn't have a good network. The people she turned to for help didn't act in her best interests. School officials acting as recruiters for an adoption agency; an adoption agency failing to provide counseling and acting to isolate her from those who might have other views: this is appalling. No matter what anyone reading thinks about adoption reform, it's clear that in this case, things went wrong. Very wrong. And I'd like to think that anyone reading this would hope for a world in which teenagers who need help can get it (not that all teenaged mothers need help! but all teenagers will need help at something; it's the nature of teenagerdom, right?).

Dawn has some excellent suggestions for what we can do (this list from her post I linked to above:

1. Read the original article.
2. Read the follow-up.
3. Listen to the radio show with interviews with the Bennets.
4. Sign the petition.
5. Send a letter.
6. Blog about it (even if you don’t agree — let’s get a discussion going).

Random Bullets of Emotion

• sad
• mad
  (via lesbianfamily.org)


• amused (via Collin)
  

When I Was an Egg

Curious Girl is working out both concepts of time and history, and she, being four and a half, dates all history from herself. So things that happened a long time ago happened "when I was in my orphanage." And things that happened before that were "when I was in J's belly." And before that has been pretty much unimaginable.

But then, school happened. This fall's lessons about Martin Luther King, our talks at home about politics, and then President's Day lessons about Abraham Lincoln got her thinking about US History. "I heard about President Clinton today," she said cheerfully last week after school. "You know, with the hat,"she added, gesturing from the top of her head up towards the roof of the car. (Clinton, Lincoln: good phonemic awaress of that last sound, fuzzy name recognition) "It was on a tape, at rest time. Someone shot him. It was sad." I thought this was rather an odd rest time story, but agreed it was yes, very sad when President Lincoln got shot. (turns out that there was no story on tape at rest time, but rather a teacher-read book about Lincoln that didn't mention the asassination, but the teacher had remarked that Lincoln reminded her a bit of MLK; CG probably made the leap that since MLK was shot, so was Lincoln.) "Was that when you were a little girl?" she asked. No, it was a long time ago, I explained, which led to her wondering whether it was when she was in the orphanage, or growing inside J's belly. "So it was when I was an egg," she finally announced. I demurred. "But then where was I?" I tried saying that she wasn't anywhere in particular, but she was having none of it. The best I could do was "You were energy in the universe, waiting to become an egg." That seemed to make some kind of sense to her, although she wanted to know what was universe (the ground? no, everything all around.) I'll check the text of It's Amazing!, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover the pre-egg, pre-sperm development. Anyone else have a better explanation of where we were before we were eggs? I heard her playing the other day, telling one of her dolls that an egg was meeting a sperm and turning into a baby. She has the right idea. I love watching her scientific thinking develop, but there is something adorable about the certainty with which she discusses being an egg.

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We had a teacher conference last week, and the teachers told us that she talked about her birth mother in class. One of her classmates was in a small car accident on the way to school last week, and when he arrived and told them about it, it reminded her of how I'd had a car accident before she was born. So she told everyone that I had my accident while she was growing in J's belly, and that J was her birth mother. Later that day, she mentioned that she has two mothers and a couple of her classmates kept asking whether that was true (not in a mean way, just in a "we're four and we're curious" kind of way. Her teacher said yes, it was, and mentioned that a boy across the hall has two dads and there are all kinds of ways to have a family. CG just said, "yes, I do." I think it's neat she's able to talk about both parts of her family. She may not always want to be so verbal about it at school, but I'm glad to know she can talk about family, unprompted.

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Her other line about her first parents these days is this: "I know my birth parents really well. You don't." I say yes, she does, because she grew inside J., and she would have heard J's voice, and felt her move. Last week CG wondered why her first mother doesn't come to our house. Then she wanted to know where she is now, and when I told her that I thought her first mother was probably still in the city where CG was born, she sat up in bed and said, "Oh! We have to go visit her." A few minutes later she said, "But we don't even have any pictures of her." And a few minutes later, "I know my birth parents really well."

As the lines between reality and fantasy become more clear for her, she may lose this sense of connection. But I hope not. I hope these fantasies help her forge a narrative connection to those first months of her life, give her a strong foundation for the story of her.

And it all stems from the time when she was an egg.

The Snowy Day

We had a snow day today, and just got a call that we--well, Curious Girl--will have a snow day tomorrow. If our college doesn't close, we'll be juggling Politica teaching all day and me hosting not one but two! candidates for two different positions. But that's a problem for another day (and probably a reason my happy woman professor day post is going to be late, since let me tell you, one factor in the happy woman professor process is having good quality and consistent arrangements for your child to be taken care of while you're being that happy woman professor).

On Sunday, we took some of the snow and made the maple syrup and snow concoction described in my preview issue of Wonder Time. It was fun and easy; Curious Girl had tons of fun gathering the three bowls of snow for us to use. But the resulting candy was very chewy and hard to eat; it didn't look much like what the magazine picture showed (although it was pretty tasty). So today, CG brought in a bowl of snow and we poured maple syrup over it and she ate it all up. Yum. And at least that way, it had some calories.

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There's been some interesting blogging about the new study about adoptive parents: Shannon picked up on the finding that adoptive parents are less likely to talk to other parents than bio parents are (if you read the study, the question asked was about talking to parents of other kids at your child's school, which the news reports don't mention); Daddy, Papa, and Me looks at some of the reasons adoptive families work the way they do; Jenna and Dawn looks at the issue of whether it's right to say that adoptive parents are "better." Dawn writes:

I’m all for using this information to support gay/lesbian parents ability to adopt but later the study points out that adoptive parents are “better” than single parents and families with step-parents (where — I wonder — does this put single adoptive parents? Or adoptive parents who are also step-parents?). Better how? They’re more devoted to their kids. (I’ll add that a different researcher might have put a different spin on it by playing on that stereotype that adoptive parents — especially older ones who spent a lot of time yearning for said kid — are worse helicoptor parents.) You know this will be used against a single woman contemplating making an adoption plan; after all it’s “proof” that her kid will be better off with someone else!

My state is going through another round of marriage-amendment-obnoxious-debate, so it was nice to hear some news spots about the bright points of adoptive parenting. Dawn is right, I think, that there's something a little creepy about the study from one point of view. But I've read of so many court cases where judges have presumed that lesbian families are bad for children that some nice social science research that can support what I know to be true is also good. It's complicated. I don't want a defense of my family to end up being an attack on someone else's parenting, or part of a coercive force in American adoption practices. (that said, the study isn't wholly focused on gay families; most families in the study were straight.)

Words Matter

I read John Austin in graduate school, and the typical example of a performative speech act was the words of an official presiding at a marriage, where "I now pronounce you...." actually creates the fact of the marriage. Politica and I had a Quaker wedding, which performs the wedding somewhat differently (through our speaking our vows in the presence of the Meeting). Another performative speech act: the judge saying "yes, this adoption is in the best interests of the child." Or something similar, as we were hearing it all in translation, and so nervous that we weren't hearing very well at all!

Four years ago today, we walked into a courthouse as a family of two, and we walked out mothers. Yes, a few legal issues remained to be settled in the US to ensure we all had legal rights, but we were mothers.

Some people call this day "Gotcha Day," a term I've never liked. It's too goofy, for one. More problematically, it makes the adopted child sound like a item snatched away from her first family, now possessed fully by the adopted family. It sounds too triumphant.

Don't get me wrong: I have happy memories of this day, this cold snowy day. But I have memories, too, of all the uncertainty: would she like us? who was she? who were we, now? Curious Girl was so little, so quiet. On the bumpy ride from the orphanage to the train station, she just sat in my lap, looking out, not seeming to mind the jostling. On the train that night, she slept with Politica, then with me, then with Politica, then with me. She slept a lot, waking to feed, then sleeping. We slept a bit too, but kept waking to look at her. What have I done? part of me wondered. How amazing! part of me thought. And so it began: whispered conversations about whether Curious Girl was hungry, how to get her to sleep, whether she needed more clothes or less clothes, a new diaper or a toy.

She became ours that day, and we hers. But she remains a part of her first family--however shrouded in mystery that may be. Does her first mother think of her? Probably, but I don't know for sure. How is she missed? I can't say. I know Curious Girl misses them: in her dreams lately, she tells me, she's had picnics on top of a mountain with S. and J.: her birth father is bald, and her birth mother has long hair, and lives all around the world, and she sits on their laps. I don't think these are real dreams. When I help her back to sleep in the night we plan a dream to share together, and it helps her settle down. So these are stories she imagines to help comfort herself, and I'm glad she can imagine these connections. They will likely get more complicated as she gets older, but she can talk about that.

Still, she is mine, and I hers, fiercely and intensely. All because of words in a courtroom.

The words I treasure most from that day are the unscripted ones. The adoption proceeding is pretty formulaic, as it is in an American courtroom. Various people testified in order; there were a few questions from the judge. She wanted to know what professors do, who would help take care of Curious Girl. But then, at the very end, as she was walking out of the room, she said, "Raise her up to have a good education like you do." That was the moment in the proceeding where it seemed most personal. When I made the courtroom page in our scrapbook, those words form the center of the page.

So it's family day today. We don't have any particular traditions to celebrate--no gifts for Curious Girl--but we remember, and we rejoice. Adoption is complicated, and there is much loss, but there is also joy, and it's important to feel that joy, to celebrate our coming together. Were I coloring the emotions, I'd use a different tone, because the joy is ever mindful of the loss, but today, today is a day I remember the joy of a heart slowly opening to another.

8 December 2002

This was my view--briefly, as the train moved on--at dawn. Snow, snow, snow, with signs of life here and there: a dog in a yard, smoke in a chimney, a few solitary walkers or cars. But mostly, conifers and snow as far as I could see.

A few hours later, we met Curious Girl for the first time. "Hi there," I think I said to her. Not the most original line, but then, what did she know of English words? I smiled, and she looked to her caretakers. And then she looked at Politica, looked at me, with her big brown eyes. "Do you want to be Curious Girl?" I asked her later. We were still calling her by her birth name (now her middle name, which I frequently use along with her first name), very cautious about how things would proceed. One family we traveled with ended up adopting a different child than the one they had come to meet, because the first child's mother had come to the orphanage to visit while we were flying over. That was a good thing, Politica and I thought, but I'm not sure the other family would have agreed.

When I look back at the photos from this day, I'm always struck by what I see in Curious Girl that I couldn't know then. Her seriousness a coping strategy for stress. Her little hand curled up, rubbing her head, a way of comforting herself. Politica and I smiled a lot, but we also looked around in amazement a lot. What had we gotten ourselves into?

Halloweenlover had a post a few weeks ago wondering when she would feel like a mother. I don't remember feeling like a mother on the day I met CG. But I do remember feeling like I was falling into her big brown eyes, in a miraculous, out-of-time kind of way. I felt happy and sad and excited and curious all at once.

Tonight, she told me she loves me more than anyone else, and a few seconds later said she loved me and Politica more than anyone else. She's been talking about her birth parents, too, and wanting a daddy. There's a lot going on in her head as she learns, again and again, what family means.

Four years later, I know so much more about love, both between me and Politica and with Curious Girl. Love doesn't make the loss go away, but I hope it gives us the strength to help CG grow. So far, so good.

This feels unfinished, but Politica's at the door: and really, how to wrap up a post about such an amazing day?