this woman’s work

You are browsing the archives from 2006 August.

We sit out there most mornings. I drink my coffee, Noah reads and Madison plays on the porch or in the front yard. This morning she wanted to play in the driveway and I reminded her that she would need to put our little orange pylons out at the end. (The rule is that the pylons have to be out whenever a kid is playing so that cars won’t drive in.)

“No!” she screamed. “I want to play on the driveway naked!” (She means on a driveway free of pylons; not that she wants to play on the driveway in her birthday suit.)

She has become the most voracious picky eater I know. She likes almost everything — for the first few bites. All that enthusiasm but no matter how small the portion, she doesn’t eat it all. I may resort to giving her grapes one at a time.

Served with her request (cheese and crackers, banana peeled just so, pretzals in her favorite bowl), she will take a few bites and then look up, smiling politely, “I want something else,” she says. “Something dee-yishus.”

She doesn’t like anything to be fixed, wiped, tucked or straightened.

“I yike snot on my nose!”
“I want tangie [tangled] hair!”
“Don’t fix my shorts!”

She is enthusiastic about everything. She wakes up like this: “I want! I want! I want … SOMESING!”

If she hears us saying, “I think I will go…” or “I’m about to…” or “Do you want…?” she will burst in from wherever she is to say, “I go, too!” “I help!” “I want, too!” She doesn’t want to miss anything. You would think that all of this hunger for life would make getting her to sleep hard and most of the time, you’d be wrong. (Last night was an exception.) She usually will go and get a blanket herself and tell us she needs “rock-rock” now.

“I seepy,” she says. “I want a nap.”

Her favorite blank is one she calls her “ovaltine blanket.” I have no idea why; she must have had hot chocolate while she was sitting with it once.

Right now she and Noah are sitting on the couch. He’s playing his Music Maker and she’s sitting next to him listening nicely and trying to sing along.

I just sent my check. I want to start going to their monthly meetings because the second prong of our two-part family outreach plan is to find ways for the grown-ups to participate in the local African American community. (Finding opportunities for the kids is much easier.) I figure this is an easy way to do it but put it off all summer because we’ve been so busy and I am spacey (oh and wimpy but I was able to hide that behind the busy and the spacey for awhile). Then last night we were ordering new homeschool supplies and following up with the guy who does Noah’s evaulation to turn in our letter of intent for next year and this was on my list of things to do for fall.

I am just so worried about infringing on the group or being rejected or, frankly, of making an ass of myself. But then I take a deep breath, close my eyes and say, “My god, Dawn, just do it you big hypocrite.” So yeah, I joined.

I just did Madison’s hair up in twists for the first time. Five twists, each with a little butterfly at the top and a matching barette at the bottom. Her hair is long enough that I need to expand my style repetoire.

Anyway, the twists were cute; Noah was impressed. Madison went and checked it out in the mirror then returned looking pleased with herself. I came in here (kitchen) to start lunch and she wandered by with half her barettes gone.

“I don’t yike my new pretty hair,” she said. “So I taking it out.”

Rats.

(We’re visiting Jessica at her work today and I wanted Madison especially darling.)

I don’t usually apologize for commenters because they’re not my comments so I don’t feel particularly responsible for them but I have to apologize for wkh’s comments to the post below because I think they’re very hurtful and I know that quite a few of my readers found them offensive. (Several people wrote off-blog as well.)

Thing is, I’ve virtually know wkh for a decade now (we were pregnant with our sons at the same time and were on a list for women with duedates in February) and I have always known her as a smart, feminist, thoughtful woman and so I was particularly shocked by what she had to say. And I don’t feel like I can just leave them there without a response. At the same time, what she said is so ludicrous to me that I’m not even sure how to respond.

Without copying and pasting the whole thing here I will say this:

1. To basically say that women who choose to place their children for adoption have chosen their own pain and ought to have just chosen parenting is dismissive and insulting. Because I’ve known wkh for a long time, I have to believe that she did not mean to be dismissive and insulting but it sure sounded that way.

2. My god, women who regret having children are not jerks (unless they’re visiting that regret on their kids). I know that this regret is usually more complex than, “I wish you were never born” and is more “I wish I had had more control over my reproductive life.” A woman can wish her life had been different and still be a good mother. (Remember when Ann Landers asked her audience how many of them would have children if they had it to do over? 7 out of 10 said they would have chosen not to have children. It’s just one of those things that people can’t talk about.)

3. wkh wrote (about her plans to one day adopt from China), “I can worry how much she misses her birth mom, but she’s never going to see her again. I can worry about culture issues, but at the end of the day all I can do is be respectful and try the best I can.” Frankly, transracial adoption requires even more mindf*ckery (and worry) of adoptive parents. But don’t believe me, listen to transracially adopted adult adoptees like Twice the Rice, or Harlow’s Monkey, or Transracial Abductees, or A Birth Project. In other words, if you’re not prepared to spend just a wee bit of time obsessing about adoption issues, please do not adopt. And certainly don’t even think of adopting transracially. I’m not making these issues up to make my blog just that much more fun for my readers; I’m talking about them because my blog is the respository for my adoption thoughts as I tunnel through these things.

The woman who marched out of the adoption training where Lisa V and her daughter were speaking? Appalling. Appalling. [T]here was one couple who got up and walked out. The woman yelling “I’m so tired of hearing about birth parents, we will be the parents!”

That behavior is selfish, it is insulting, and it is ignorant. You want to think this way at the start of your adoption journey? Ok, I get that. Most of us have been fed soft-serve Lifetime movies and “heart-warming” memoirs and it takes time to dig through the pablum and get to what’s real but we are morally obligated to dig deeper before we sign up with an agency. There’s been a lot of talk about adoption-guilt around the blogosphere this past week and I’m not saying let guilt rule you but humility, consideration, respect and a humble acceptance that we are adopters because we have unearned privilege is vital.

Ok, I have to turn off the computer for awhile — I’m all discombobulated.

Did you see this? Yeah, pretty cool stuff. Hats off to KimKim, too.

People make me happy!