I can’t make it downstairs
Sep 25, 2006 Writing
At least not safely or with grace so instead of hiding out in the basement while the babysitter is here, I’m hiding out in the big bedroom (what we call the master). In many ways this is a plus — sunlight as opposed to the gloomy office-area and ready access to a bathroom are both nice. Downside is the non-ergonomic bed set-up.
One of the things that came with the house is a quilting board. This is helping. It’s a wooden board with a ruler on it (36 inches across) and different colored strips of wood (dark then light). On the other side is a checkerboard (literal — like to play checkers on, not as a pattern) and what looks like backgammon. There’s a semi-circle cut out so that the board sits on your lap and your elbows rest on it. I don’t know if it really is a quilting board but I saw one on ebay and that’s what the description says. Anyway, it’s what I use for my laptop if I’m working on the bed or on the couch for more than a few minutes.
Also, I found a better quote from Writing for Story:
The truth is that writing is a very complex undertaking, analogous to conducting a military campaign. Things won’t simply fall into place because God is on your side. You have to plan for them, and there are far, far too many factors for you to keep them all straight without writing them down.
So far the book is pretty good although horribly dated. I wince everytime I read the word “monogoloid,” which he uses to talk about a student essay about Down’s syndrome. My book says the first Plume Printing was in 1994 and you think they could have gone in there and fixed that.
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Tags: essay
Back to the grind
Sep 24, 2006 Writing
I didn’t write at all yesterday. I was too busy sitting on the couch and feeling sorry for myself. I missed the Rosh Hashanah services and missed my friend’s surprise 40th birthday party. My foot’s hurting more today because I’m still learning how to limp properly. The house is really going to take a hit for awhile — everything takes a lot longer. Maybe I’ll get better at this and it won’t be so bad in a week.
Enough whining.
I’m rereading Writing for Story because Jon Franklin is one of the presenters. I’m trying to familiarize myself with most of the books written by the presenters. Anyway, I was reading what he wrote about outlining because the part that of writing I’m working on now is structure. This is where I think a lot of otherwise good writers fail — being able to structure. It’s the difference between a writer who writes pretty stuff and a writer who writes great stuff. It’s certainly my biggest downfall.
Jon Franklin writes:
An outline … is simply a scheme, or a set of procedures, that you use to sort out your thoughts and analyze your story before you sit down to write. In telling yourself you can’t outline, what you’re really saying is that you can’t think your story through… Integrity in a story is something you just don’t get unless you did a workmanship job of thinking your story through in the first place.
… A story is not a line of dominoes, it is a web, and tugging on any filament causes the whole thing to vibrate.
The longer the piece is, the more you have to make sure you’ve got your structure in gear. Same goes for a more complicated essay or article.
Brett says that when he listens to me talk about something I’m working on he’s reminded of putting together a puzzle. That’s what it feels like to me, too. Sometimes I can’t tell that the pieces I’m trying to shove in don’t actually work with that particular puzzle. I’m still learning how to figure that out and I’m still learning which tools make things go more easily for me. It helps knowing that I’m on the right track.
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How I celebrated the New Year
Sep 23, 2006 The Story of My Life
I broke my toe. And it hurts. A lot. I’m limping around like Hugh Laurie (only not so acerbic). I broke it on the couch leg when I got up to run down the hall to just-awake Madison trying to catch her before she wet the bed in her post-nap stupor. It hurt like a m*therf*cker and then after I got her up and limped back to the couch I was afraid to take off my sock and look. But a mother must not shrink from the hard things in life so I squinched my eyes shut, took off my sock and then slowly opened one eye and looked. Pretty gross. Then Noah looked and almost passed out. (It’s not even that bad of a break — a 30 degree angle sez the doc — but it just looked yuckier being on my foot. If it had been on Brett’s foot I would have told him to quit being such a sissie and walk it off. Just kidding!)
A broken toe is a stupid thing to have. I had to get it x-rayed (it kinda looked dislocated and Brett wanted to be sure before I taped it) and they wheeled me in the urgent care and into the office, which felt silly. And now it hurts enough that I can’t really get around easily but it’s a toe goddammit (the middle one on my left foot) so I feel silly making such a fuss.
Plus side to broken toes: I got a copy of the x-ray for Noah and it grossed him out badly. Then this morning we were explaining why we use kid-safe software to block some sites on his computer and he wanted to know what we were worried about him seeing. I was thinking about this picture from a motorcycle accident my brother sent me from awful DOT com (the one that still haunts my dreams) and I said, “You know how gross my x-ray was to you? Like that only worse.” And he was so horrifed that I think we’ve scared him totally out of demanding more surfing rights. At least for now.
It only hurts when I walk on it so I guess I’ll avoid walking for six weeks. It’s high time we trained the toddler to fetch and carry anyway. I’ll strap a bungie cord around her middle and send her out for useful things (books, my laptop, the tv remote) and then reel her in. I’m sure by the end of this we’ll have finally broken her fun-loving confidence and buoyant spirit and made her a useful drone. Hahahahahahahaha!
Noah, I must say, was a prince. Faint and light-headed by the newly acquired angle of my toe, he still managed to keep enthusiastic Madison off of it (”I kiss your toe, Mommy! I fix your foot! Want me to hug your foot?”) and get me the ice pack and the phone. He was terrified (being Noah) that I would die. (He’s like this — I was like this, too. I look forward to the teen years when hormones ramp his dramatic take on life way, way up. My mother is already thrilled to see that her curse — “May you have a child just like you one day!” — worked.)
“I was afraid your broken toe would spread!” he told me on the way home, proving that homeschool anatomy lessons haven’t yet taken. “I’m just glad you’re ok!”
Madison charmed the waiting room and was given free drinks and many pats on her curly head and then announced that she would become a doctor someday to fix any future injuries I might sustain.
“And,” she told me, complacently. “I will put you in your car seat when you are a baby.”
I have nice kids.
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Tags: Brett, homeschool, Madison, Noah
I don’t hate adoptive parents
Sep 22, 2006 Adoption
Obviously, being an adoptive parent myself, it’d be hypocritical of me if I did. But I know sometimes I seem less than sympathetic.
I am very sympathetic towards adoptive parents theoretically; individually though, I cringe an awful lot when I happen on some of the less insightful adoptive parent blogs or postings. Sometimes we can be so damn stupid and worse yet, so unwilling to learn.
I’ve said a million times that I don’t fault feelings. Like I told Christine, feeling angry isn’t an issue. I’m unreasonably angry pretty often. I get angry at Brett for not reading my mind, I get angry at my kids for acting like children and I get angry at the weatherman for leading me to believe that today’s outdoor playdate plans make sense. However, I don’t punish Brett (usually) for not being psychic, I don’t punish my kids (usually) for their explosive chaos (although I do yell at them to keep it down to a quiet roar) and I have yet to put a revenge hit on a weatherman for ruining my plans. I can feel any way I like as long as I don’t use the worst of my feelings to drive my behavior.
I don’t have a problem with a waiting adoptive parent for feeling angry if an adoption plan falls through. If their anger means they rant to friends or go for a run or cry in the bathtub ’til the water runs cold then it’s hurting no one. And it may be necessary to get through the anger to get to peace. I do have a problem if the anger leads them (true story) to call the woman at home for weeks begging her to give the baby back until she’s forced to change her number. Or if they never resolve their anger and instead (and haven’t we seen this all over the web?) use it to fuel a campaign to smear first families, telling other hopeful adoptive parents, “You better watch it or you’ll get burned just like I did!”
I lay the blame at the feet of adoption “professionals” who don’t adequately counsel potential adoptive parents. When we matched then unmatched, we found good support from our agency who had told us it was a situation that might not happen. (They always say that anyway — that there’s a 50/50 chance no matter how “pro-adoption” it looks and that the arrival of the baby will always but always change things in unpredictable ways.) But this time they let us know ahead of time that they had a feeling she wasn’t strongly commited to her adoption plan and that choosing us was perhaps part of a process of not choosing adoption. When they called to tell us she would parent they were sympathetic to how we were feeling but positive about how this would work out for her. (In my social worker’s mind it was clear that she didn’t see this as a “failed” adoption but as an adoption never meant to be.) This helped set the tone for how we would handle it.
I wasn’t angry when T chose to parent and I can’t imagine being angry at Jessica had she chosen to parent. But our situation was unique because every situation is unique. Maybe if I hadn’t felt so confident in Jessica’s abilities — maybe if I’d had more fears about the baby’s enviroment, maybe I would have felt angry. I just can’t say. But it’s not feelings that matter so much anyway — it’s what we do with them.
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Tags: Brett, our agency
More
Sep 21, 2006 Adoption
Nina said,
But I think that parent that changes the plan must also understand the pain of a hopeful adoptive family. They shouldn’t base their decision on this, of course, but they must understand the effect of their actions, just as a family planning on adopting must understand that a change in the plan is a possibility.
Why? Why must they do this? What can they do about it? Adoption isn’t about the waiting adoptive family until it becomes adoption. Making an adoption plan is not adoption. It sounds like semantics but it isn’t. Making an adoption plan is about being a parent. A person who is making a plan for a child they are carrying is being a parent. It’s not adoption until the papers are signed.
Ok, sure, it’s part of the process of adoption but we adoptive parents, how we feel is ultimately our problem. I’m not being unkind here — we need and deserve support and sympathy but potential first parents who change their minds aren’t the ones to give it to us.
Being reminded of the potential pain of adoptive parents is coercive. Why? Because our pain has nothing to do with whether or not they should parent and there’s no way to talk about it without inserting the presence of adoptive parents into a place they shouldn’t be. The decision is NOT “who will be the best parent to this child” (because there’s no way of knowing) the decision is “am I ready, willing and able to do this?” It’s not “am I MORE ready, MORE willing, MORE able to do this.” It’s got nothing to do with hopeful adoptive parents, period.
Nina further said,
I don’t think it matters emotionally if it’s a placement or an adoption — to prepare for a baby, to fall in love with that child before they are even born, to care for the mom while she’s pregnant, and then to have that child in your home, to finally hold that baby — and then to have a birth parent change their mind — it’s got to just tear your heart out.How could you not be angry with someone for taking back something that you thought they were giving to you?
I’m not saying that changing the plan and deciding to parent makes a mom or a dad a bad person, but I do understand the anger of the hopeful adoptive family, and friends of the family. The anger doesn’t seem inappropriate to me.
Acting on the anger, or being hurtful or unkind to the parents would be inappropriate, of course, but feeling the anger? Expressing it in a safe place among friend?
Like I said, we can feel how we want to feel. Expressing it is understandable. Bashing first parents on a blog where first parents (and adoptees will see it is … less sensitive. And as the parent to an adopted child, I don’t feel like I can stand by and not say something if people are trashing her first mom by trashing first parents in general. I can be sympathetic to grieving hopeful adoptive parents at the very same time I’m typing, “I only know the truth about adoption plans — they are only plans. I will not assume that this man is a bad man because he made a plan and didn’t follow through.”
