This is how I spent my Madison-free time
Sep 27, 2006 Family
My sister owes me one.
It’s a work in progress.
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Ugly shoe
Sep 27, 2006 The Story of My Life
I love my new post-op shoe. It’s so comfy and my foot is sore from hobbling after Madison so if I didn’t have it, I think I’d be in tears. Brett was feeling bad that we didn’t get one right away but I said it was a good thing that the doc called it in later. It’s like that Jewish fable where the guy is sick of the noise his kids make and thinks his house is too crowded so the rabbi has him bring all the animals in? And then he takes them out and says, “My gosh, isn’t it quiet in here?” See, I had to limp around without my special ugly post-op shoe for awhile so I’d appreciate it when it showed up.
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Two things
Sep 26, 2006 The Story of My Life
1. The doc wants to call in a prescription for a bootie thing for my foot so I won’t bend it. (I’ve been wearing a stiff shoe but she said this is better.) I’m happy about this because I want it to heal before the conference when I’ll be doing lots of walking and because then I won’t look like an administrator at the Ministry of Silly Walks and instead will clearly be an injured person.
2. Yesterday Noah was playing this scrabble-like game on the Tivo and Brett and I were armchair quarterbacking from the couch. (He’s getting pretty good.) Madison was dancing in the middle of the room and Noah couldn’t see past her to the screen. I told him to move by us so he did and kept on playing. Madison stopped her dancing, looked at us, and then said to me, “But now I’m having trouble getting in his way!”
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More from that book
Sep 26, 2006 Adoption, Race, Read/heard/seen
By the way, here’s the official site for her book and the documentary that inspired it: SecretDaughter.com
I wrote this up last night but firefox crashed and I lost it.
June Cross was placed in an informal adoption when she was about four because she couldn’t pass as white. (She is biracial — her mother was white and her father was African American.) There’s a harrowing scene when she’s splashing in a bubble bath during one of her visits with her mother and her mom idily says, “If only you hadn’t gotten so dark, you could have stayed with me.”
Her aunt and uncle (really her parents’ old landlords) take her in but never legally adopt her (something that becomes a problem towards the end of the book when her aunt is ill). And she continues to have regular visits with her mother, Norma, who also sends money for her keep.
Throughout her life, June’s loyalties are torn as she grapples with family, with race as perceived by her family and with race as is the reality of living in America in the 50s and 60s. For transracial adopter such as myself, there is a lot to think about.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was rocking Madison last night was the revelation in this book (not in the documentary) that June has an older sister who was placed for adoption in a formal, state-supervised adoption. (There are very little details about this in the book but June’s sister is white so race isn’t an issue in that adoption.) She also has an older brother (older, too, than the lost sister) who was raised mostly by Norma’s mother. Then even later, June discovers that her mother was farmed out to relatives, too, as a child. June herself never has children.
This was hot on the heels of reading this (courtesy of a link from Susan):
Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.
–from an essay by Alison Larkin
It’s strange how things get handed down. This, of course, made me think about some things specific to our adoption and specific to my family of origin, (which includes a history rife with reproductive crises and difficult resolutions).
Then (because my mind will wander however I try to reign it in), this made me think about FauxClaud’s tragedy post because I was thinking about how deeply run our choices and how impossible it is to take adoption as a stand-alone event in anyone’s life.
Anyway, I’m not quite ready to articulate how this is all coming together in my head but this is how it’s all running around in there.
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Tags: Erica, essay, Madison, transracial, wordpress
Disappearing Act
Sep 25, 2006 Adoption, Race, Read/heard/seen
We laughed togther, and then I was able to ask another question I had been needing to ask all along.
“So where you been my whole life? You knew where I was.”
…
“I couldn’t do nothing for you,” he said, “and if I couldn’t do nothing fo ryou, what good did it do to muck up your life? I figured you were better off without my bringing my bad luck your way.”
“But why didn’t you ever visit at least?” I pressed. “Whether or not you had money, just to say hello?”
“You had Paul there,” he countered. “You would have just gotten confused.”
Man, isn’t that always how we justify keeping things from our kids?
But I really typed up this quote from Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away (author June Cross is another presenter at Nieman) because it’s been on my mind. Even if he couldn’t have lived up to his idea of “father”, she still needed something that only he could give her.
…[T]here was no one who could teach me to pitch a curve ball, play a cool shot at billiards, whistle a decent tune, no one who might have given me the confidence to stand in front of a roomful of strangers and sing a song.
I’ve been thinking about fathers a lot — my own, Jessica’s, Madison’s both birth and adoptive. And so I’m typing this down because I’ll have to give this book back to the library eventually.
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Tags: Madison