My good intentions only go so far
I could subtitle this: I Have Screwed Up and Now I Must Fix It
Today Madison had ballet class. She was so excited. The night before she danced around and clapped her hands saying, “Tomorrow is ballet!” She picked out her ballet shirt and her tutu and asked me to fix her hair just like her ballet teacher’s. (Pulled into a simply ponytail.) She said, “I’m sure I’m going to do it all by myself this time! Again and again!” She skipped across the parking lot, calling “hi!” to one of the other ballet girls on the way. She skipped into the center, stopping to say hello to the woman who staffs the front desk. She greeted her teacher with an excited, “My hair is like yours!” And then skipped into the room to say hello to the other girls. She introduced herself to one (another Maddie) and to another whose name begins with E. She much admires E.
E. was sliding around in her tights, slipping across the floor and falling in her mother’s arms. One of the other girls was trying to slip, too, only she had bare feet so they were sticking to the floor. E’s mother said, “I think that you won’t be able to slip in bare skin. Bare skin can be kind of sticky and sweaty and it’s not very slippery.” Madison — standing to the side and watching — said, “I have brown skin.”
“I know you do,” said E’s mom. “It’s so beautiful, too.”
Oh — did I mention everyone in the class is white? Except Madison? Well, they are.
Madison came running across the room and buried her head in my chest.
“I don’t want to do ballet,” she mumbled into my shirt.
She cried 3/4 of the way through the class. I stood next to her and held her hand and at one point took her out of the room because she was so beside herself. I finally — with the excellent teacher’s help — got her to skip across the room in the path of the other girls. I was standing back to the side watching her tremulous smile as she twirled her way and I started to cry. Because when I took her out of the room she said, “I have brown skin and it’s not sticky.” And I said, “Madison, all skin acts the same way whatever color it is. It is all the same. Your skin is just like mine except that we have different colors.” And she said, “But you’re still my mommy.”
When we got home and were sitting down eating lunch I said, “You know, Madison, I know that you are the only person in that ballet class with brown skin. I think that must get tiring to feel different so I think we need to find another dance class where there are other children with brown skin.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I want a class where it is ALL childrens with brown skin.”
“I think one reason ballet class was feeling hard today is that you were feeling uncomfortable after you talked to that mommy about sticky skin. I think you were feeling different.”
“Brown skin is not sticky,” she affirmed.
“All skin gets sticky,” I told her. “Because all skin acts the same way whatever color it is. When your feet get sweaty they stick on the floor and you can’t slide around. But still, it must be tiring to be the only kid with brown skin all the time.”
She agreed that this was so and I promised her that I would find her a class where there would be lots of brown skinned girls.
I slacked off. We had our affirmative action babysitter program but then we didn’t need our babysitter’s services anymore. Than we found the preschool where there was a black teacher and brown skinned kids were in the majority but she didn’t like to be there. And so I took the easy way out because we were already running Noah around so heck, why not just sign her up there at the same rec center figuring, hey, there are some black kids here and there (most — if not all — of ‘em with white moms). No big deal. Well, clearly big deal. There are two other more diverse rec centers within close driving distance and I was just too lazy to look up the classes there. Yeah, it’s all understandable but my kid is the one who has to pay for it.
I just wish that these lessons I need to learn didn’t come at my kid’s expense.
Possibly related posts
Tags: adoptive-parenting, Madison, my mom, Noah, preschool, transracial adoption
Adoption in the Tipping Point
Apr 23, 2008 Adoption
In the mid-1970s, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado led by Robert Plomin, one of the world’s leading behavioral geneticists, recruited 245 pregnant women from the Denver area who were about to give up their children for adoption. [No, this entry is not about the coercion inherent in being chosen for a study like this before placement. -- Dawn] They then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a batter of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving the same sets of tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a similar group of 245 parents and their biological children. For this comparision group, the results came out pretty much as one might expect. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more simlar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years then they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, goes on to say that peers are a bigger influence than parents, which I’m not so sure I agree with but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’ve been reading The Baby Thief and thinking a lot about the blank slate theory and how it’s harmed kids in adoption (actually I think it’s harmed kids raised with their biological family, too).
I know that some of our training at the agency had to do with meeting our kids without expectation and being ready to embrace the people that they already are and would become. But I’ve been thinking about some of the Open Adoption survey results (yes, I’m behind in posting them over there) and thinking about how many of the folks who are struggling are struggling in particular with their relationships not being what they hoped/expected them to be. I know that one of the reasons that our open adoption has worked so well so far is that we like Pennie and she likes us and that part of this is that our backgrounds are very similar but also we have similar sensibilities about a lot of things. Like we both come from families that yell and have a sense of humor and who tend to the artistic. It’s not just that we have similar cultural touchstones (despite a 14-year age difference); we also tend to lean the same way about things.
I think about this with Madison.
I know my kids will be different than I am; like Noah’s current love affair with standardized testing. I’m already girding myself for the teen years when he’ll assert his differences more strongly and I’m curious about the ways Madison will be different. In some of her differences I see similarities to her birth family (her level of energy and her extroversion and her quick-silver mind). She does seem like a Brand New Energy in our family but it’s like Brett and me getting together, you know? Not being related doesn’t preclude closeness and familiarity does help things along (we have had her since she was 3-days old, after all).
I don’t know. Day-to-day it’s just not that big a deal but I read studies like this and I’m curious about how it’ll be. And I’m interested in what it means for adoptive families and in particular for adoptees themselves. Does matching potential families to each other as relationships (i.e., Pennie to us and us to her) make more sense in the long-run not just for openness but for the child who will be placed? Do hopeful adoptive parents who are seeking placements need better training when they are adopting children whose families look nothing like their own? And how do we do that without setting kids up in other ways? I mean, when we start talking about genetics and behavior and all that especially in adoption it’s awful easy to trip lazily down the ugly eugenics path.
I’m just thinking on my keyboard between jobs. I don’t really have anything clever to say about this.
Possibly related posts
Tags: Adoption, homeschool, Homeschooling, influence, Madison, Malcolm Gladwell, Noah, open adoption, Robert Plomin, study
Noah’s latest homeschool decision
Apr 22, 2008 Homeschooling
He wants to do K12 again next year. I know! He’s crazy. He likes all the busy work and random inane quizzes. He is so not me. But that’s the paradox of unschooling Noah — if I believe he knows his own way then I’m gonna let him do it his own way even though I chose unschooling in part to get him out of that kind of stuff. But he likes it now that he and Brett have figured out how to work it.
He does it in chunks and some of it he skips entirely. So he and Brett did all the math at the beginning of the year. Noah decided to finish spelling (because he loves spelling) by guzzling it down all before the holidays. Now he’s rushing through the reading. And they’re doing science in a chunk. Stuff he’s skipping? Well, he read the history books but decided not to answer the questions. And the art and music he skipped because they were lame. Also he’s into the stuff he’s getting tested on because my son, dear Noah, loves to be evaluated.
(Think of the horror of his kindergarten through fourth grade years when he was utterly without evaluation! Merely learning that which interested him at his own pace! Poor child!)
The other day we all went on a walk to the ice cream parlour and Madison had to run back with Brett in an emergency potty situation so Noah and I were standing around by the old graveyard talking about dead bodies and somehow that led to school. Oh yes, I remember why. Because the graveyard is across from the middle school. I asked him if he ever thinks about going and he said yes. I told him that I thought he might like it because he likes a lot of the things about virtual school that are in regular school. And I said I noticed that he was a lot more peer oriented than he was when he was little so maybe he would really like making new friends. He thought on it and brought it up again a few days ago. He still doesn’t want to do school but he wants to do K12 again so he can get his fair share of worksheets and grades. But no school. He thinks it’d be too much if he had to do it all day so he’d rather skip it. Which is fine. More than fine, really.
I did tell him that if he wanted to try school that he could. We’d ask him to commit a reasonable amount of time to trying it (I have no idea what might be reasonable) but we wouldn’t make him stay if he was miserable. Basically it’s a risk-free proposition. Next year would be his last chance to try out the elementary school across the way from us so if he is going to try I think it’d be a good time to do it. We’ll see how he feels as we get through summer.
This is what so many folks outside of unschooling don’t get about the whole thing. It’s not about sticking your kid in some program — even a non-program program. It’s about doing whatever you think your kid needs to thrive. I don’t like institutional schooling; Noah does. It pained me terrifically (I cannot tell you how much) to commit to K12. I hate it. I hate having some stranger’s nose in my kid’s educational business. But it’s not about me. In Noah’s case, unschooling seems to be schooling right now. Who knows. That might change somewhere down the line. He might want more school and head to a building. He might want less and quit virtual school. I don’t know. But he continues to thrive emotionally and academically and socially so we must be doing something right. The kid is kinda awesome. Mouthy, sure, but awesome.
Possibly related posts
Tags: education, homeschool, k12, Madison, Music, Noah, unschool, unschooling, virtual school
Finding serendipity (if you know how to look)
Apr 22, 2008 The Story of My Life
It’s been a hard month. The trip to Portland was in many ways lousy and stressful, not to mention a whole helluva lot of money, with gleaming beacons of light (Susan among them) that almost but not quite made it worth it. Then the very large and very late — because it’s still not here — check earmarked for our entire budget for the month, throwing us completely off our budget. (It was meant to subsidize the ten days I wasn’t working and tide us over to the next pay-out.) Oh the money woes! Oh the financial strain!
So I dug in my heels and started making calls and sending out emails and now things are trickling in. I have three meetings scheduled this week and follow-up calls to make next week and an on-site job next week and another call just came in about something that maybe will turn into something else. Plus some encouraging news in other far-flung places, which all adds up to a summer that’s not looking quite so miserable as it was before. (Brett may still try to pick up some work though depending on how next week’s on-site job pans out because we need to rebuild our cushion.
But to serendipity. It’s interesting how the more you look around for work, the more work you find. And the more effort you make in connecting the more interesting connections you make. I keep getting payback from things I did months and months ago without much expectation and this is very encouraging since sometimes I wonder why I’m making these efforts. I tell you: the world is a small pond and things ripple in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Today I met with a woman I saw speak a couple of weeks ago. She has a great story and I knew I wanted to try to pitch her. So we hooked up and before she arrived I met another woman who happens to be an adoptive mother and who started talking to me after she saw me putting OpenAdoptionSupport.com cards out on the community table at the coffee shop. She knows some resources around town I hadn’t heard about (because she’s an international adopter) and I was interested to hear about them. (Also, Julia? She used to work for the local kidney foundation so we gossiped about kidneys a little bit.) Then I met the woman I was there to meet and we played six degrees until we figured out how we know each other. After two hours I have a pretty good handle on the pitch I want to make and a few markets in mind. I also have some ideas about how she can promote the good work she’s doing and that’s exciting, too.
Now I’m blogging right before I leave to take Madison to tumbling but the world seems like a great big wonderful place of possibility and interesting stories right now and this is the best way to feel when you’re still staring down a budget deficit and wondering when that big check is going to show up.
People, hang in there when the going gets tough. Keep working. It’ll pay off if you just keep showing up. (I say this to myself because I need to hear it, too.)
Possibly related posts
Tags: adopter, budget, Julia, Madison, money, openadoptionsupport.com, payback, Portland, serendipity, wordpress, work, working
Oh Ohio adoption folks!!!!
Apr 21, 2008 Adoption
I can’t be there this time! Rats! But I can still email/call!!
From Marley:
On April 16, 2008 a substitute bill for HB 7, an adoption/fostercare reform bill, which included original birth certificate access for all post-1963 adopted adults without restriction, was introduced in the Ohio House Health The sub bill, (also called LSC ), deletes all reference to obc access found in the original bill; thus, maintaining the current 3-tiered yes-no-maybe system that divides obc access by date of adoption/date of birth and first parent permission.*
BILL INFORMATION
Original HB 7: http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=127_HB_7 (click on link at left)
Sub HB 7: http://www.adoptionnetwork.org/filegallery.asp?f=270&linkId=1346 (2n square on right—pdf.)HEARING
A hearing on Sub Bill 7 bill is scheduled for 4:00 PM, Wednesday, April 23 in Room 017 (basement) of the Statehouse Testimony requesting the reinstatement of unrestricted obc access can be given. Bring 20 copies of your testimony for the committee. If you can’t testify, then come to support.If you plan to testify please call Kara Joseph in Rep. Tom Brinkman’s office at .
We have been told that another hearing on Sub Bill 7 will probably be held on Wednesday, April 30 so save that date, too. Please check with our MySpace page for updates. http://www.myspace.com/beaohio
Possibly related posts
Tags: adoption reform, first parent, Ohio, open records, Rep. Tom Brinkman