Get it? Like listing to the side the way one might if she is very tired? And a list post? (The pun is the lowest form of humor.)

1. Another comment on my guest post: Pennie told me later that one of the things she said to Madison on the phone call is that she understood how sharing is hard because sometimes she has a hard time sharing Madison with me. Madison told me that this made her feel better. It’s very important for her to know that Pennie misses her as much as she misses Pennie. Back in the day, Madison would occasionally goad Pennie by flaunting her (Madison’s) relationship with me. I don’t think Pennie knew that she was doing this but I did. It was hard for me to figure out how to handle it (this was when she was two-ish?) but my gut told me to encourage their relationship more overtly to both of them and you know what? That’s what needed to happen. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to post a little overview of Madison’s development around her relationship with Pennie. Or I might forget and end up writing a post about breakfast cereals. I don’t know.
2. Noah is at Kalahari for the unschoolers conference this week. We couldn’t go because of work and stuff. I strongly considered driving up there yesterday to see John Taylor Gatto speak but couldn’t for a million and one bureaucratic reasons. Am I bitter? Yes, a touch.
3. We miss Noah. At least Brett and I do. Madison says she does but she’s already decided that she will sit at his place at the dinner table and last night she slept in his bed saying, “I think I’ll be Noah tonight.” Lately she won’t sleep in her OWN bed so we let her even though Noah will kill us when he gets back. She snuggled in and said, “It smells like Noah.” “What does Noah smell like?” I asked her. “Fried chicken,” she replied. I think she’s lying because to me Noah’s room smells like the dog since Peanut pretty much lives in there with him.
4. I finally subscribed to Poets & Writer’s magazine after looking at the web site longingly for months. It’s only ten bucks a year and it’s not very practical (unlike the ASJA newsletter, which is so practical that it’s nearly depressing although incredibly useful so I highly recommend it without irony). Sometimes I need to remember that I am also a Writer and not just a communications expert with a business card.
5. Speaking of business cards, I just ordered some new ones. I’m attaching one below. They are very plain but that’s what I was going for. By the way in case my orange banner up there has not made it clear, I would like everyone to hire me.

I was going to write this up for here but they were kind enough to ask for a guest blog and I was honored and happy to share: There is Enough Love.

I accidentally woke up at 4ish this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep so I gave in and got up. It does not bode well for the day (she types ominously). I don’t know if there’s enough coffee in the world to save me.

Yesterday Madison was asking questions about her bio dad and we dove into topics I’ve been dreading. Luckily my dread was propelling me to think hard about how to address them so I wasn’t totally unprepared. As a matter of fact, just last week I talked to Brett about it and his advice was avoid avoid avoid but he also said that his advice is always avoidance so probably I shouldn’t take that to heart. So I asked him what he thought my advice would be if I was advising someone else. I said, “Pretend you’re me. What do you think I would tell someone?” Because I felt too close to it all to really make a good decision. And he sighed and said, “Well, you would probably say to be honest and upfront and you would probably be right.” (Brett trusts my advice to other people but he’s not always happy about following it himself because it is rarely the easy way out.)

I’m not going to share any details of the conversation or even her reaction except that clearly reality was knocking up against her fantasies and I could see how … jarring it was for her. (Which, as an aside, makes me sure talking about this now was so important because her fantasies were not serving her well.)

I never tell Madison how she ought to feel about anything in her adoption but this time I did emphasize that she gets to decide how meaningful this information would be for her. I think this is a heavy idea for a 5-year old (really, for anyone) but I wanted to start what will be an ongoing discussion. I mean, I’ve had that talk with Noah but nothing on this level because nothing that’s happened to him is on the level of being adopted. So when I say to Noah, “You can choose not to be flipped out about your Hebrew test tomorrow. You can choose to feel a different way about it.” It’s big and it’s empowering but it’s on a fairly reasonable scale for a seventh grader. For Madison, saying, “You can choose what this person means to you and what this information about him means to you” is just HUGE and I’m sure she will be grappling with this off and on for her whole life, really. Although she’s smarter than I am so maybe she’ll nail it younger.

Also I really had to stomp on my knee jerk reaction to say, “But you have Daddy! So who needs this guy?” I was surprised at how much I wanted to do that, how much I wanted to assert that Brett fixes all and thank god for the internet and the adoptee blogs because I bit my tongue (hard and repeatedly) to not say that and just really listen to her feelings about her bio dad.

It’s hard to find the balance between not dismissing her reaction entirely (like acting as if she can simply toss her head and forget about it) but also giving her control over her reaction. With the kinds of things Noah worries about, it’s easy to tear it down to manageable pieces so that he can quickly get his head around it (more or less). But the lesson for Madison is something that I am still learning — namely that we have some choice in how events impact us. I just hope that her head start means she won’t be thirty-something and sitting in her counselor’s office saying, “Wait — I can choose not to be victimized by these circumstances that are out of my control?” (I was 33 and talking about resolving my infertility and flipping that switch is what let me stop being infertile even though I still couldn’t have a baby.)

The one thing I’ll tell you because it’s kind of funny is that Madison was surprised that her bio dad doesn’t have a ponytail. I don’t know why she thought he might have a ponytail because I can’t think of any man she knows who has one or anyone on television or a movie she’s seen. I mean, sure, she’s seen guys with ponytails but not in her day-to-day life so who could predict that would be part of her imaginary picture of him?

(Noah was surprised to see that her bio dad isn’t black even though he’s known this but I guess he wasn’t listening. That was funny to me, too, but not as funny as the ponytail.)

I’m writing this carefully to respect privacy.

Ok, so yesterday Pennie and Tommy and Roscoe came over. (Aside: Roscoe is the cutest little ball of cheerful butter! And chatty! And dance-y! His parents dote on him and he revels in it!) Madison was, as usual, all smoochy-smoochy-smooch with Pennie but I noticed her, mid-smooch, shooting me a look like, “This ok?” And I gave her a big smile and thumbs up. Then today while I was doing her hair I brought it up because I don’t want her feeling like she needs to get my permission to hug Pennie — it’s got nothing to do with me, right? And because I know adoptees have loyalty issues regardless of how neutral we adoptive parents are, I think neutrality is way too close to negativity so I like to be overtly celebratory about Madison loving Pennie. I hope to nip those loyalty issues in the bud. I hope to chop ‘em off at the knees. I  hope to give those loyalty issues the old heave-ho, dust my hands off and head back into the house without ‘em.

So, I’m doing her hair and I asked Madison why she was checking up on me about cuddling Pennie and she said, “You know that lady about the flowers and she didn’t talk for a week?”

Ok, here’s where I need to be careful. Recently I was privvy to a reunion story where a very lovely adult child connected with a very lovely first mom and said child brought adoptive mom along, too. Said child also brought flowers to gift to first mom. Adoptive mom later had a hissy because she didn’t get flowers and didn’t speak to the very lovely adult child for a week. Reunion suffered in part due to this.

When I became privvy to this story, it made me mad and I told Brett about it and you know what they say about little pitchers and big ears. Well, my little pitcher has some big old ears on her.

My first thought was that I really need to buy a bigger house or learn how to talk a whole lot quieter because man, these kids hear everything. Then my next thought was, well, may as well tackle it head on because if she didn’t hear a story like that from me, she’d surely hear it from someone else and it sounds like these lessons bear repeating.

I filled her in on some of the details of the story (I told her who the players in the story were because I knew that would make a difference to her — she knows one of the main people albeit from a distance) and then I told her that that story made me angry.

I said, “That adoptive mom made that situation about her and it had nothing to do with her! It was none of her business!”

And I reiterated that there is not jealousy between Pennie and me because we both love Madison, we both know Madison loves each of us and we are happy that Madison has another mother who loves her. I said, “I would not feel bad AT ALL if you gave Pennie flowers and not me because if you give Pennie flowers, it’s about you and Pennie! It’s not a contest!”

Madison said, “Yeah! I give you drawings some times.”

And I said, “Exactly! Every gift giving time doesn’t have to be about ME because I have my own gift giving times!”

And Madison said, “And she is my birth mama! She did borned me.”

And I said, “Right and of course you want to make a fuss over her when she comes over because it’s exciting and fun!”

Then Noah wanted to know why a grown person would fight over a child this way and I (having created an imaginary battle between myself and my poor beleaguered mother-in-law when he was a baby) said, “Two reasons. One is insecurity like I was insecure around Gram Pam and another reason is that some people don’t get enough love when they’re kids so they think there’s not enough love for everybody.”

“Well, that’s stupid,” said Noah.

“There is enough love,” said Madison.

Word to the mothers. Literally.

A number of bloggers have written about their open adoption resolutions or hopes for the coming year, but Debbie gets credit for suggesting it as a roundtable topic. And a great suggestion it is! Open adoption is all about relationships, after all. Most every relationship can benefit from periodically taking a step back and thinking about emotional or practical changes we'd like to make as we care for others and ourselves.

Call them resolutions, commitments, changes, or choices–how will you be proactive in the area of open adoption in 2010?

via Open Adoption Roundtable #12 : Production, Not Reproduction | A blog about open adoption.

Well, Jenna and I are going to write a book so that’s a biggie. Want to hear our working title? Ok:

Yours, Mine and Ours: How Openness is Changing Adoption in America

Someone got all over Jenna’s case for NOT writing an anti-adoption book but what that poster didn’t get was the subtleties of our method of reform. See, openness — true openness and not lip service paid to support agency advertising — confronts some basic and hard truths about adoption. If you’re truly committed to openness then you acknowledge some things that people used to NOT acknowledge about adoption. Like that kids aren’t blank slates. That the state doesn’t rule people’s hearts about who is in their family. That closed records are immoral. That people aren’t interchangeable.

We’re going to look at the realities of openness in foster-to-adopt, domestic infant adoption and international adoption. We’re not going to sugarcoat anything (I really want to look at the dearth of support) and we’re going to look at the research.

I just have to find the time to write my part of it. (sigh)

It’s gonna rock.