Just as an aside
Jul 13, 2007 The Story of My Life
My broken toe still hurts. And it’s still shaped kind of funny. I look at it sometimes and get sad because now my feet are deformed. I tell Brett it represents my lost youth; my body’s best years seem to be behind me. Alas. But I really didn’t expect it to hurt this long. My friend, K, told me it would but I decided (hoped) she didn’t know what she was talking about (even though she was speaking from her own broken toe experience).
I still can’t walk very far on it (especially in the wrong shoes) and it gets sore when I’m sitting down here on the computer because the cement floor is always cool. And I don’t know when I could ever run again (the elliptical trainer seems ok).
I’m just whining about it.
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We’re out of creamer
Jul 13, 2007 Adoption, The Story of My Life
And Diet Coke. I’ve started a mean Diet Coke addiction in the past month. It used to be an occasional desperate treat when I was gunning for a deadline but Brett, in his purported efforts to spoil me, bought a big old case of it and suddenly I was hitting the ‘fridge every afternoon. And then he leaves me like this — bereft of caffeine. Damn that man!
Actually I think he’s bringing me back some from his run. He and Madison just went off and I swear the small child said they were going to stop at CVS to buy gum for her and Diet Coke for me. But I don’t want to get my hopes up.
Open Adoption Support is coming along swimmingly. We have 61 members now. I’m adding a lot of bookmarks, including links to some obscure resources. I have a list of books I need to add, too. Even if the socializing part stays fairly low-key, I’m hoping it’ll be a one-stop place to gather information about open adoption. Especially to answer the people who say that it’s too new and there hasn’t been enough research on it yet. That’s not true. There’s been quite a bit of research, which is why most adoption professionals are behind the open adoption movement.
Speaking of that — does anyone know if it’s kosher to reprint an abstract? I have no idea how abstracts are allowed to be used but I’d like to offer a resource library of open adoption studies with the abstract and information how to get the whole study but I’m not sure if abstracts have the same copyright issues that a whole study would have. I know one of you academics could tell me. (It’d be a lot easier to cut and paste then to rewrite in my own words but I’m willing to do the other if need be.)
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Tags: Madison, open adoption
From a book
Jul 12, 2007 Adoption, Read/heard/seen
TJ is a little boy adopted as an infant by a rich woman in Argentina who hands him off to her servant, Magdalena, to raise. When he’s four the rich woman dies and his mother comes back. She (his mother) marries an American, Jamie, and they move to the states. Abby is his father’s niece. Yvette is Jamie’s mother. That’s the backstory.
“Can I go live with Magdalena again?”
“Come here,” Abby said, and TJ climbed down from his chair and into her lap. She put her arms around him. “Magdalena loves you so much that she wanted to be sure, before she started her own family, that youw ere taken care of, and went to a school you like, and made friends. You’ve done all that, right?”
TJ nodded.
“Do you think, if you went back to Argentina, you would miss playing baseball with Jamie, and seeing Yvette?”
TJ nodded again.
“It’s confusing,” Abby said. “It would be easier to have one place where all the people you love are. But you have so many people that you’re going to miss some of them wherever you are.”
This is from A Family Daughter. I’m reading it because the author, Maile Meloy, is sister to Colin Meloy, lead singer of The Decemberists. We (Brett, Noah and I) are kinda hooked on The Crane Wife these days; we listen to it in the car. (Madison likes it, too, of course because it’s catchy stuff.) Noah is intrigued by the storytelling.
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Oh go give them congrats!!
Jul 11, 2007 Adoption
Family of Choice: Finales & New Beginnings
I cried because the one thing I thought I had to give up when I came out all those years ago, a family of my own, was finally true. This was my family. My husband and my son together, surrounded by people who loved, supported and cared for us.
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It’s hard to write about adoption
Jul 11, 2007 Adoption
It gets harder as Madison gets older and I feel more protective about what I share and it’s hard, too, because so much of what I feel about adoption is a fairly new paradigm shift in the world of adoption. And I’m very aware (because I’m reading about the history of adoption) that what feels very true to me is also the result of my cultural experience and surroundings.
Here’s the thing. I feel that given this present template of what it means to be Family and it’s emphasis on biology that there are things that Madison will experience as very much part of being an adoptee although in another time and another place maybe she wouldn’t so much. If you read adoptee narratives there are so many similarities of feeling separate and different and lost. It seems pretty safe to say that many (if not all) adoptees share these feelings.
I know there’s a tendency for folks to say, “But I felt alone, too. I felt different, too and I wasn’t adopted.”
I know. I felt like a black sheep for awhile. There were times I looked at my family and thought, “Where did you all come from?” I felt like a changeling sometimes. But I also always knew that like ‘em or not (and during my teens I liked no one, least of all myself) they were indisputably my family. I was never afraid the way I’ve read some adoptees felt afraid. Trapped, yes. Unhappy, sure. Isolated, absolutely. Now I imagine having those not atypical feelings of adolescence and also having reason to think — in a cellular way — that I was alone. And that sounds like it’s a lot harder.
I hate to paint a picture of miserable adoptee-ness. I don’t think all adoptees are miserable or should be miserable or that something is wrong with adoptees who are happy. We all process things differently and we all have different needs. I do know, though, that we all have normal developmental paths we need to take and that there are parts of these paths that are made more challenging when a child is adopted. It is normal to be challenged by these. It’s normal and healthy. Things that are hard, that are difficult, that make us unhappy — sometimes it’s normal to feel not so good about things and often I think that allowing and recognizing those yucky parts makes way for the joy or at least the acceptance and peace.
In any case, I think there are two issues for adoptees and I think they’re inseparable. One of them is the primal wound — the biological grieving of loss; the other is the emotional response created by our cultural biases. In other words, a baby who has lost his mother may grieve but the way we interpret that experience is filtered through our cultural understanding of loss, of motherhood, and of the importance of biological ties. When people start arguing about the primal wound they inevitably come down hard on the side of science saying it’s proven or disproven and frankly, I don’t think it matters. I think what matters is what adoptees themselves have to say about their experiences. I believe adoptees who say they are fine but I also absolutely believe adoptees who say they are not.
The hard part is knowing how to help my child given my biases, given my filters.
I believe Madison grieves her loss. I believe she is sometimes hurting for it. I believe that she is thinking a lot about how she does or does not fit into our family. There are many ways she is different than we are. She’s braver, for one, and more out-going. She’s brasher and more enthusiastic and more energetic. We could have given birth to a child like this, I know. And perhaps that child would have felt left-out or “other” but that child would not have been adopted and I have to believe that this imaginary child would experience and interpret that feeling of otherness differently. Maybe other kids feel like that in their bio families but those other kids are living another story. That feeling of aloneness in a bio family has got to be different than that feeling of aloneness in an adopted family because in our culture at this time it is different to be adopted than it is to be born into a bio family.
I don’t know if Madison does feel otherness although she does think a lot about matching. She points out to us that her skin is brown a lot. She points out which of her dolls also have brown skin. She knows her skin is brown because Jessica’s skin is brown. She knows in a 3-year old way that she inherited this skin from Jessica because she grew in Jessica’s uterus and Jessica is her birth mother.
This is what I do: I point out ways she is like Jessica. I tell her that Jessica picked out her hair supplies because Jessica also has curly-curly hair and so she understands about braids and things. I tell her she makes funny faces like Jessica. We look at pictures and notice when they look alike.
This is also what I do: When she wants to wear a skirt like me, I find her one. I point out when we’re wearing the same color. We talk about things we both like — raspberry chocolate chip ice cream, for one happy example. I point out the ways that we match.
And this is what I do: I point out the ways we are not alike and how this is ok with me. She likes lemonade with meals and I like water. “We are the same about some things and we are different about others,” I tell her. “That’s how people are.” And I hug her. (I did this with Noah, too, who tended to fret if I wanted things differently than he did. Like I get into later, his separation from me was in many ways much harder on him.)
I’m more explicit than I was with Noah. When Noah was sad because I was leaving to meet friends I would say, “I’ll come back. I always come back. I love you.” When Madison is sad because I’m leaving I say, “I’ll come back. I always come back. I am your mommy and you are my child and I come back. I love you.” I started doing this because she started asking. “You are my mommy? And I am your child?” In her mind “mommy” and “birth mommy” are coming to mean different things and last year at around this time (I believe — checking my archives) she started wanting to understand the differences. I am her mommy and she lives with me. Jessica is her birth mommy and she visits. I tell her that she will always live with me until she is a great grown woman and then she can live where she wants to. “But I want to live with you,” she says. “And daddy.” That’s fine, I tell her (the same way I told my 3-year old Noah), because she can stay forever if she wants. Kids live with their parents ’til the kids decide to go. We are her parents. She stays with us.
My point is that I meet her as she comes to me but I meet her with this preconceived idea that adoption means something (these particular things) and yes, I could be wrong. My filter could be off, sure. But the way I figure it, there’s no harm in taking adoptee narratives to heart and but there could be a lot of harm to wait for her to be old enough to tell me her story (if she ever could).
If Noah ever cried for me while I held him, I’d think it was loss, too. If he did it at this age, I guess I’d think it had something to do with that great developmental leap of 2 or 3 when they know they are not of you anymore. (Noah used to be mad at me for not remembering his dreams; I was so central to his experience.) This could be part of it with Madison, absolutely. So why do I think it’s not? Well, she is adopted and I do have those filters. And because she doesn’t do it in times of high stress but sometimes on ordinary days for ordinary problems. And because she is testing the waters of mommies these days. She is very interested in other people’s mommies and sometimes will insert herself into other families at the park.
“Is this your mommy?” she’ll ask a kid. “Is that my mommy? No! This is my mommy!” she’ll say, grabbing my leg, being typically three. But then, not quite typical, she looks up at me, “Right? You’re my mommy?”
Then, a few months ago, “I want white skin like you and Noah!” Then, to Brett last week, “You know, I have brown skin, Daddy.”
My filters, my experience but also my daughter telling me what she can about her experience. And this experience, I can’t fix it or fill it or make it anything for her but what it is. But I can parent her through it by being present.
Our kids have their own lives to lead away from us. It just feels like Madison’s started earlier than Noah’s.
Noah, 3-years old, furious because I can’t explain to Daddy what happened next in the dream he had last night (”Don’t you remember?” he cried. “I know you do! Just tell him!”). And then Madison has never been surprised to discover that I’m separate from her. She has never thought I could read her mind the way Noah thought I could read his.
She is not every adoptee (I don’t extrapolate what is happening in our family to what is happening in anyone else’s) but she is indeed an adoptee.
(I gotta say that I have high hopes for her being able to process and integrate her story because she does seem to be processing so young. It makes me think/hope that she will have an easier time of it.)