Madison baby book entry
Jun 9, 2009 Parenting
Right at this minute Madison is swinging while wearing her velvet Thanksgiving dress (long sleeves, long skirt — it is hot out there) and a blue Easter hat that she got from Pennie’s dad in the dress up box and which is getting a little bit too small for her. It’s light blue and made of plastic straw. It makes an interesting contrast to the black velvet top and red satin skirt on her dress. Oh and she’s carrying a baton.
It’s 1:30pm and today is a without Noah day because he’s at Gram and Gramps camp (it’s a real camp — the park & recs department puts it on) with Brett’s parents this week. This has made for a much quieter morning.
So far Madison has helped make coffee cake, eaten coffee cake, had a tea party, read her book, gone out on the porch to listen to the (very loud) music coming from the school across the way for their last day party, rediscovered the drink & wet doll that was mine when I was little and potty trained said doll, danced to Hairspray, dressed and undressed all of her dolls, eaten lunch and picked up her mess in the family room. She has not, however, picked up her tea party yet.
It’s hard to believe that she could be in kindergarten next year if we were gonna send her. On the one hand, she seems perfectly capable of anything academia could throw at her but on the other hand, I can’t imagine her sitting at a desk for any length of time. This child needs so much big muscle time, I’m telling you. She needs to run, dance, jump and spin spin spin. She is also a major grazer, rarely eating a full meal unless you let her spread it across an hour or two or three. She eats A LOT, mind you, but she doesn’t always have the attention span to eat it all at once.
Madison quotes:
“Ooh, that dress is tacky!” (As one would say, “Lovely!” proving that what I call “tacky” are things she most admires and that now she thinks it’s a synonym for beautiful.)
Madison: Do you know DW on Arthur?
Me: Yes, I think she’s kind of a brat.
Madison (thoughtfully): She’s not a brat, per se. It’s more that she gets very intense about people touching her stuff.
(Noah can’t stop quoting that — he thinks it’s hilarious.)
Upon looking out at a sudden and heavy rainstorm. “Wow, a cloud really broke out there!”
She’s become self-conscious lately and cannot STAND criticism from anyone besides her parents or Noah. Grandma, Pennie and her babysitter have all inadvertantly sent her into a sobbing crisis by suggesting she might perhaps not want to shove in line or could maybe clear her place at lunch.
“It’s embarrassing!” she says. “I feel like they’re yelling at me!”
Her recent art series was portraits of the family — Me, Noah, Peanut, Pennie and Tommy — as octopuses. (I looked that up; you can say octopuses or octopi, just so you know.) She’s also interested in writing letters and spent one happy afternoon playing school with her dolls and an easel. She is off and on about reading — picking out words and then losing interest. When she comes back to it after days away she’s always a little further along than the last time.
Her favorite toys are her dolls. Her baby dolls, her big girl dolls (Diosius and Kit) and her Barbies. She loves her Barbies to distraction, much to my dismay. She likes them best in the bathtub because she likes washing their “real” hair. She has only just begun disappearing into her room for long stretches of time to play house with all her babies and continues to enjoy making meals for all of us at her play kitchen, especially since we moved the wooden ‘fridge from the basement into her room.
Other favorite activities include: tap dancing on the basement’s cement floor, digging in the garden, standing on our front lawn to holler greetings to passer-bys, scootering on the driveway, playing with the trains on her map-like rubber mat, playing with the Fisher-Price little people and being at Noah’s beck and call. (In the evening he’ll get her to brush his hair with the good scratchy bristle brush while he reads out loud to her.)
She is really the brightest, shiniest thing around here and sometimes we three big people just sit on the front porch and admire her while she sings and dances in the frontyard.
Tags: baby book, baby book entry, baby dolls, Barbie, fisher-price, Hairspray, Madison
I hate a front page that’s grouchy
Dec 18, 2008 Parenting, The Story of My Life
So I’m posting again just to make that grouchy post drop off the front page. This is a baby book entry.
Madison was limping around the house with growing pains. I asked her if it hurt when she put weight on her leg and she said, “Only when I walk clearly.” (She meant without a limp!)
Then she was talking about how much Abby’s youngest looks just like Abby and I said yes indeed she really does. Then because she was quiet for a minute, stirring her soup contemplatively, I asked gently, “Do you ever wish you and I looked alike?”
She looked up surprised and firmly answered, “No!”
Then she added in a very reassuring tone, “But you do smell really good.”
Another Madison conversation
Oct 7, 2008 Adoption
Madison was gluing sequins on leaf cut-outs to make our house more autumn-like and more gorgeous. She said, “Were you friends with Pennie after I was born?”
I put down my book to try to figure out what she was asking and then I told her how we met Pennie and how we became friends and how we are still friends. For the first time I told her that Pennie met us specifically to see if we would be a good mommy and daddy for Madison. I knew we were trudging into territory that I am totally unprepared for (and for which I believe I can’t ever be prepared): Why did Pennie place Madison for adoption? Sure enough:
“Why did Pennie choose you to be mommy and daddy?”
I told her because we had Noah and Pennie wanted Madison to have a brother because she has a much-loved brother (Madison’s namesake).
“Oh yeah,” says Madison. “I know him!”
“But why…” she hesitated, sprinkling her sequins. “Why did she want me to have a brother?”
I dove in.
“Madison, I think you’re asking me why Pennie chose not to be your mommy and chose me to be your mommy instead, is that right?”
She nodded, not looking at me.
This is a story that’s going to change as she grows up. This is a story that’s going to change in the telling and in the hearing (from me and from Pennie) and it’s going to change as she brings more of her own story to it. I don’t think I can ever answer why. But I have to answer why.
(I believe that my why is always inadequate to Pennie’s story. I believe that I have no right to guess why although I can’t help doing so. But I know, too, that my version of events is one I need to share with Madison although with such care and acknowledgment that it is very much my version. And that I am an unreliable narrator. Only she is just four right now and she’s asking me and somehow I have to answer)
And I fumble around. I say something like (and this isn’t all of it), “Pennie loves you so much and I think she was worried that she wasn’t ready to be your mommy and I think she worried that she would not do the right job of it.”
I want her to know that Pennie loves her without creating the “she loved you enough to give you up” heroic fable. And I want her to know that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Pennie (because unlike some adoption stories, there are no glaring addictions or scary behaviors that made her adoption such a clear decision). One day when Madison’s older and ready to contemplate the complexities of domestic infant adoption and of her adoption, I don’t want her starting out with the idea that Pennie was in some way broken and that adoption is always “right” in the presence of these outside circumstances. This is a big challenge for me. How do I put the locus of the adoption within Pennie’s person without somehow fixing Madison with the idea that her mother didn’t want her? Madison was not/is not unwanted.
How do I separate parenthood from the child who would be parented? How do I explain the daunting weight of cultural expectations, the stultifying absence of societal supports?
And how do I make it clear — is the insertion of “I think” enough — that I am an unreliable narrator?
It’s hard enough for great big grown-ups to understand let alone 4-year olds. There is nothing definitive to say, “Here is why.” It’s the glaring question she dares not ask directly: “Why am I not with her?”
Madison did ask, “Do you think she would do the right job of it?”
And I said, honestly, “Yes.” But then we talked more of things I won’t share here that are specific to this story but still, could not answer the “why” as well as I wish.
(Sooner or later Madison will ask me why I didn’t help Pennie and I hope she is old enough that I can tell her why in a way that she can understand — the complications of our particular adoption, the complications of choice within the context of a culture that does not truly honor choice. I hope by then I understand, too, because I think I will always wish I could have done things somehow better. I am always asking myself “why” too.)
Madison said, “I think she would do the right job of it, too.”
Then she asked me, and I can’t remember the wording, but she asked me if I was happy that Pennie chose us. I told her that I was very very very happy and grateful to be her mommy but I was sad that it meant that she and Pennie had to miss each other so much.
I said, “I know you miss her being your mommy and I know she misses being your mommy, too.”
Madison: But I can call her.
Me: Right.
Madison: And I can have playdates with her.
Me: And tea parties.
Madison: And I can say Macintosh. I can say Macintosh and Rome. Macintosh is a pretty big word! I don’t even know how I know it!
She is the queen of segues, this perfect little curly-haired child!
I write this stuff down for me as a baby book and also because I know you all wonder how other families do it. I wonder, too. I gobble your blog entries up, too. Frankly, this conversation — it’s not one I think I got right but I also don’t know if there’s a right way to get it. It’s the truth of our adoption, really, that there are no good answers. I think there is only an ongoing conversation that we need to be having and that I have to be willing to get it wrong because I have to say something and keep that conversation open.
I am also sorry if this entry — or any like it — hurt the first parents who read me. I know this isn’t an easy read and I apologize.
Tags: adoption stories, adoptive-parenting, baby book, domestic infant adoption, Madison, Noah, parenting adopted kids, parenting in an open adoption
