this woman’s work

From Susan!

1. Who was your first prom date? I went to prom at my best friend’s Catholic High School. We double-dated and the guy I went with was just a friend. His name was Pete but he went by Chris so we called him Chris-Pete. I don’t remember his last name or else I’d have google-stalked him by now.

2. Do you still talk to your first love? No, no, no, no and no. Last time we emailed was … hmmm, I’m not sure but it was pre-Madison. When he came into town he wanted to meet for coffee and I said, “What would we have to talk about?” That’s the last time I heard from him.

3. What was your first alcoholic drink? Like not a sip? Like not wine at passover? Like a drink? Either peach schnapps or a white russian.

4. What was your first job? Besides babysitting, I’m guessing. My first tax-paying job was as a waitress at Elby’s. We were supposed to wear hairnets but c’mon. No way. I was a terrible waitress because I was too shy to come back and say, “Is everything ok here?”

5. What was your first car? 1982 Datsun 310. It was a stick shift, which took me awhile to master. I remember once having to stop on a hill and I started sliding backwards into the BMW behind me. I panicked and my companion (Pete Igel) climbed over me to stop the car, god love him.

6. Who was the first person to text you today? I have never been texted seeing as how I rarely have hold of the cell phone. That’s Brett’s thing.

7. Who is the first person you thought of this morning? Madison because she woke me up by saying, “I wish Pennie could come over today.”

8. Who was your first grade teacher? Mrs. Turner. She put me in my own reading group and I’d read the book and then do the workbook. I made it through three or four textbooks that year. Then she’d send me to do those SRA cards. Remember those? I loved them.

9. Where did you go on your first ride on an airplane? I do believe it was moving from Richmond to Sacramento, which puts me at about five. No wait, I guess I probably flew from Novato to Boston first.

10. Who was your first best friend, and are you still friends with him/her? Pamela, who lived next door in Boston. She had black hair and blue-blue eyes and freckles. She was an only child so I thought she was the luckiest girl in the world. We were both three and I moved out of Boston when I was about four.

11. What was your first sport played? The only official sport I ever played was tennis but I never did learn how to serve correctly.

12. Where was your first sleepover? In Boston I spent the night at Elizabeth’s house. She was younger than I was and I remember that her mom was a neat freak. When it was time for bed her mom put her in the crib (Elizabeth was three but still in a crib) and then strapped her to the mattress. I remember the straps had buckles. Then she wound up a music box and left us. I remember Elizabeth turning her head and smiling at me. I got hysterical and her mom came back and took me to the phone to call my dad to take me home.

13. Who was the first person you talked to today? Madison. I said, “I think it’s too snowy for Pennie to come over today but we can call her later.”

14. Whose wedding were you in the first time? Like Susan, I have to say my own. It was only the second wedding I’d ever attended and it wasn’t much of a wedding seeing as how we just did a justice of the peace shindig.

15. What was the first thing you did this morning? Finished re-reading Persuasion.

16. What was the first concert you ever went to? David Gilmour in ninth grade. I was a huge Pink Floyd fan back then. (I saw Roger Waters, too, later on.)

17. What was your first tattoo or piercing? My mom talked me into getting my ears pierced when I was about eleven. Those holes are still useable. I got my left ear second and third pierced when I was about 18 but I let those close up. I’m so not into the body mod thing.

18. What was the first foreign country you went to? I’ve never been! Not even Canada! Not even my dad’s timeshare in Mexico!

19. What was your first run-in with the law? When I was eighteen I went to a little drug store with my friend Spike (not her real name, obviously) and she stole a box of hairdye for me. And then she got arrested. At her community service she stole magnets off the break room refrigerator so you can see that she didn’t learn her lesson. (I was terrified though. I learned her lesson for her.)

20. When was your first detention? Like Susan, I never had detention.

21. What was the first state you lived in? I was born in California.

22. Who was the first person to break your heart? My dad but it’s all ok now. Then that first love that I don’t talk to.

23. Who was your first roommate? The aforementioned Spike and our other roommate Wendie.

24. Where did you go on your first limo ride? I’ve never been in a limo. When I was in my friend’s wedding she rented a party bus. I am so not a party bus girl. Dawn in a party bus is an oxymoron.

There are several entries for me to write about tennis but this one is going to relate to adoption. Somehow. I’m thinking out loud here so bear with me.

This is how I started playing tennis. I would go outside and hit tennis balls against the garage. Because it was all we had I used one of my mom’s old racquet ball rackets. I did this every day after school in ninth grade unless I had to babysit and then I would come home in the dark and do it then. (Even in winter, as long as there wasn’t snow or rain.)

You know how it is when you’re a teenager and you can spend hours doing one thing in order to do it right. The rhythmic thonk-thonk-thonk of the ball would lull me into a daydreaming mood where I could contemplate my life or tell myself stories. Sometimes I would count to see how many times I could hit the ball before I missed and sometimes I didn’t. For Christmas that year I asked for and received an actual tennis racket.

I don’t know how I decided to try out for the tennis team because my family, we aren’t joiners. And most of us are not athletic. (Certainly not in my then-family of my sister, my brother, my mother and me.) I also wasn’t much for school spirit so playing on a team for my school was another reason not to do it. I can’t remember how or why I made my decision to try out but I did decide to do it and so one summer morning I biked the five miles to the high school for practice and then I biked the five miles home. I did this every day until try-outs and somehow I made the team (junior varisty, doubles) even though I’d never actually played tennis, didn’t know the rules and didn’t know how to serve. I was proud of myself.

Now — no one in my family ever came to one of my tennis games. I paid for my own uniform, arranged my own transporation whenever possible, and gave up trying to get my parents excited about my being on the team. I did it for one year and then quit. I never did learn how to serve. (Still don’t know how to serve.) It’s what you might call a sore spot for me because no one seemed to care what I was doing back then. I was smacking that ball around in a vacuum and eventually it wasn’t worth it.

Later my dad’s fifth child (out of six) with his third wife decided she liked tennis. She was about two when I was playing and her arrival is probably one of the reasons why my dad was too busy to come to my games. (The other reason is that my dad was just a pretty neglectful dad but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here.) When she got into tennis my dad got her: private lessons, the best racket, tennis whites and fancy shoes. He also had formal pictures taken of her with her racket sent the picture to me. Then he invited me to go to one of her games because being so into tennis myself, surely I’d want to see my little sister play.

Ouch.

Here is when this gets to be about adoption. (Or at least this was what I was thinking when I was hitting a tennis ball against a wall last night while Brett and the kids were playing at the park next to the courts.)

I think my troubled relationship with my dad and my little sisters has a lot to do with how I’ve come to think about openness. My relationship with my dad has, for most of my life and certainly most of my adult life, been very painful for me. There’s a whole lot in it that can make me cry and cry I do — on the way home from his house, after hanging up the phone with him, etc.. There have been times when I’ve had to take breaks from him — both long (two years not speaking) and short (when I beg off from an invitation to see him). I don’t really have relationships with either of my little sisters. I don’t know them very well, don’t understand them very much and sometimes the symbolism of their existence is enough to make me want to avoid them. I have a hard time making sense of what they mean to me. They are not quite family to me (I don’t relate to them by virtue of age and background) but they are most certainly family and I know that I will need to come to terms with that somehow. So far it’s been a long (two decades) process.

So I can see that family is sometimes like family and sometimes not. I can see how it is to be related to someone and yet not know them. I understand that pretending that biology doesn’t matter doesn’t make the complications of a relationship any easier to bear.

I think sometimes that it’s being a writer that makes me dwell on things. My brother and sister don’t feel as fractured in their relationships with my little sisters (quick aside: when people ask if I have siblings, I usually forget to mention my two youngest half-sisters and almost always forget my oldest half-sister who I haven’t seen in 23 years) although they’ve had to do their own work around it. The three of us have very different experiences of the divorce, my father, his other families. For me it’s always been harder. I have always come undone more quickly and more severely. Frankly, being around my dad has caused me a lot of angst that sometimes I wish I could avoid. But I can’t. He is my father. And those are my sisters.

When I think about Madison having contact with her first family I think about how people sometimes say closed is better because we need to protect our children from pain. Or people will advocate being … careful with the truth because it will cause pain. But pain is just part of the legacy of some families. It’s not that I want Madison to hurt (or that my mother wanted me to hurt) but this is the truth of things. My father is not the father I would have chosen had I gotten to choose but he’s my dad. I resented him bitterly for hurting me but I also (as an adult) understand why it happened. It trampled my self-esteem to be rejected by him but it also made me stronger. I will always miss not getting to be closer to him but I am grateful that I have found a way to love him for who he is.

I’m not comparing Jessica to my dad. I’m talking about this misguided idea that we can or should protect our children from knowing the truth about people. Someone said, “I know an adoptee who had an open adoption and he doesn’t like his birth mom and wishes he hadn’t had to have a relationship with her” as an argument against full openness. But how lucky this guy was to find out he doesn’t like her — on his own! How much worse to have a fantasy that is smashed if/when they reunite. How lucky to have the freedom to know his first mom and know that he doesn’t like her! I have friends who are adopted and who are afraid of reunion because they’re afraid of this guy’s story — what if they don’t like their first families? And that’s sad because what if they would?

Reunions look so damn hard. I don’t want Madison to have to “reunite” with Jessica. (Bad enough that it looks like she’ll have to reunite if she wants contact with the paternal side of her first family.) It looks much more difficult than struggling with but learning to accept the inevitable flaws of actual human beings. It might have made my teen years easier if my dad had just disappeared but I still would have been haunted by him.

(You know, I just thought of something. My oldest half-sister was adopted by her stepdad when she was very young. My dad disappeared from her life for a long time and I think haunted really is the best word for how that was for her — at least from what Erica has learned from her. Erica, you’ll recall, is my whole sister as opposed to one of the halfs. And Erica was haunted by this oldest half-sister, too, and by a baby my mom lost at birth. Erica has always felt haunted by the sisters who might have been.

And that reminds me of something else. My mom used to say that I looked a lot like my oldest half-sister. When I was a teen-ager this fascinated me. I thought it must mean something and I also had this fantasy about meeting her and what that would be like and how she would really like me because I looked like her. Then when I was thirteen she flew out to see us all — she must have been 20 or so? — and she didn’t like me much at all. Looking back I realize that seeing us must have been like what I have with my littlest sisters only to the nth degree, since she was harboring her own fantasies. The visit, as I remember it, was a total disappointment for everyone and I haven’t seen her since. She quit talking to my dad for about a decade after that and went through her own troubles. It was all so half-there. So not one and not the other. Everyone’s heart cracking into little pieces because what we were pretending wasn’t true.

My meandering, rambling point is that you can’t get away from this. You can’t just excise people from photo albums and pretend they don’t matter. You have to let your kids have that opportunity to make sense of it themselves. For all my misery with my dad, it’s nothing compared to the misery my oldest half-sister has had because I had more of him. I knew what he was and she didn’t and so she always thought it was her, that something was wrong with her or why wouldn’t he be there?

Hmmm, I started this writing about tennis and look where I ended up. I’m not going to re-read — I’m just hitting publish. Sorry that this is so disjointed and ridiculous.

I’m totally behind on my blog reading. Totally. The rss feeds are just piling up like crazy.

My book project got a little stalled last week because for one, I missed Noah’s Hebrew class for some reason. Why was that? I can’t remember now but it was for a good reason. Maybe I had a deadline. Maybe I had a date with someone. I wish I could remember. Anyway so there was that and then I had this idea of what I was going to find and as it turns out, I’m finding something different, which means I’m trying to reorganize my thoughts.

My book idea is related to education and so of course I’m going back and thinking about my own education. I’m realizing how cemented I am in homeschooling and I find it both reassuring (it is what it is) and horrifying (what about my options??).

I realized that I will never ever ever be a good school mom. I have way way too many issues with traditional education. I own these — I have no desire to pin these issues on other people who feel differently. I am not an evangelical homeschooler by any means. I am more than willing to say, “Yeah, I might be wrong,” but I will never be able to wrap my head around so much of it.

I’m going to try really hard to talk about *my* experiences and not get critical about school for any other living person, ok? I know that many of you had positive experiences, that your kids are having positive experiences and that in a different school with different teachers it might all have been good for me, too. I’m trying to specifically talk about why there is something in me that makes me a poor school parent. I just don’t want anyone to feel defensive so I’m laying this all out right up front.

As long-time readers might know, my mom was really really really unhappy with the school experiences of myself and my siblings. As a family we went to four different elementary schools (Erica = 4, Me = 3, Justin = 1) and she faced the same battles in every single one. I remember her coming home frustrated and near tears many times. And I also remember the click-click of her high heels when I would see her coming down the hall (so beautiful — I had the prettiest mother of anyone!) when I was on my way to class. Surprise! There she was, heading back from another meeting with the principal or the teacher trying to get us what she felt we needed.

I also remember how exhausted she got and how she got too tired to fight anymore. At that point (I’d say fifth or sixth grade) she said very clearly that we needed to learn how to play the school game and yes, she understood how bored we were and how inconsequential the rules seemed but that’s how it was. We had to have respect for our teachers, she told us, they had hard jobs. Maybe sometimes it wasn’t easy to have respect for the person but we should at least have respect for the position they held.

My mom never made us do homework. I used to do mine on the bus until I realized that I could manage without. It got to be a race for me — to see how little work I could do in class and then pull it out for a test. I never ever ever studied and it was a point of pride for me. I would scan the chapter before a quiz while the teacher was handing out the tests. Mostly I did ok. Not so much in math though or French.

I got away with too much in school. No one ever taught me how to write a paper. Junior year I wrote my term paper in the study hall before class. I’d been reading books on the subject and I just faked it and I knew I’d get an A because I always got an A whenever there was writing involved. To tell you the truth, I think some of my teachers gave me an A just because they figured it was easier than arguing with me if they tried to slip me something lower. I argued with everybody.

I told my seventh grade English teacher that someone ought to revoke her license. (She told the ending to a book and I figured that was a sure way to guarantee that nobody was going to read it and it was a book I loved so I wanted everybody to read it.)
I told my ninth grade math teacher that he was a chauvinist pig. (He was.)
I told the principal in eleventh grade that he was discriminating against AP English students because the AP math students could take classes at the university and we couldn’t.

I hated school. I hated it. I hated the politics. I hated the cliques. I hated the teachers who played into cliques. I hated that the poor kids mostly disappeared from the gifted classes come middle school and were replaced with rich kids. The classes were so boring that I would zone out and write (unless I could get away with reading under my desk). I fought with teachers just for the excitement.*

When I got to college, I was totally unprepared. I didn’t know how to write a thesis statement. I didn’t know what a thesis statement was. I didn’t know how to study, I didn’t know how to do homework. I still have nightmares where I suddenly realize that I’m 35 years old and have missed more than a decade of math classes and that they’re going to come take my degree away. I also didn’t know how to ask for help and I was still picking fights with my teachers.

I can trace my problems with educational authority back to kindergarten when Mrs. Frink made me read to the class while she took a smoke break. I knew it wasn’t fair especially because I wasn’t allowed to read at any other time during class. She was teaching us the alphabet and so I sat while she taught the alphabet. Unless she needed a smoke break and then she sat me up on a stool to keep the class busy for her. It wasn’t fair but then, I learned, school is not fair.

Again, I’m not saying all schools are like this or that my experiences are particularly unique (they’re not — I know) but there you go. I came out of that experience with a low disregard for worksheets, curriculum and blackboards. There is simply no way I could tell Noah, “Show your work,” when I hated having to show my work. (And I hated doing it in pencil because I never liked the feel of writing with a pencil.) I couldn’t say to Madison, “You should listen to your teacher,” if I thought the teacher was being ridiculous. And I think it would be incredibly unfair of me to send my kids to school and then disrespect their lives there. I think that would be bullshit.

There are so many stupid vestiges of all of this in my regular life. I love trainings but I distrust almost every trainer for the first ten minutes of any lecture. I have a hard time listening when I’m sitting with a group of people and there’s one person out front talking. I mean, I can do it but the first fifteen or twenty minutes are hard. I have to have a notebook, like a talisman. I can’t explain it. It’s ridiculous.

I know it’s insane. I know that I’m way too emotional about this. (I’m still mad. I’m still angry about my school experiences. I still get teary about it — it’s dumb, I know.) But there you go — it’s one reason I homeschool. I couldn’t risk that happening to my kids. I couldn’t get past my yucky feelings enough to support them. I have no faith — none — in the system. Zero. Zilch. I don’t believe in grades or standardized testing so how could I encourage my kids to get As or score 100? He’d say, “But I don’t feel like doing my homework,” and I’d say, “Yeah, no kidding. Let’s blow it off and read a book.” If I sent Noah to school, I’d be a hypocrite.

So I started reading some of these education-related books thinking that I would find out that I was/am indeed ridiculous and instead what I found out is how incredibly common my experiences were and — more importantly — how incredibly common it is to have these same, silly knee-jerk reactions, which is to say maybe it’s not so silly. Says one of the researchers, being bored is a form of torture. There’s brain chemistry that gets screwed with when you’re bored. And goddamn but I was really fucking bored in school every single day. And what kills me is how so many teachers want you to stay bored: Don’t read ahead. Do every problem. Show your work. Don’t ask so many questions. No extra credit.

Brett got migraines in elementary school because he was so unhappy. Is it any wonder that we’re keeping our kids home now? Not that we don’t question it but whenever we do talk about sending them we say, “Yeah, but it’s school.”

Noah is never bored at home. If he says he is, it’s actually code for “Hey, Mom, can I borrow your computer?” He’s always busy. He always has a project. He stayed up ’til midnight to read his book and then woke up and started reading again. He came home from my sister’s house yesterday with an idea for a story and then sat down and made the longest book he’s written so far. No one ever tells him to slow down and wait for the rest of the class or tells him that if he’s done with that page then he can do another. If he gets a concept, he can move right along to the next one. If he knows how to do a problem he doesn’t have to prove it twelve more times.

Like I said, I know it can be different for people. My old therapist said that I shouldn’t force my own experiences on my kids but I don’t see how I could do otherwise. Whose experiences should I be using to inform my decisions? Brett’s? He’s coming to the same conclusions. My distrust of formal primary and secondary education goes way, way too deep. The more I realize that about myself, the more I know that we’ll be homeschooling for as long as we, the adults, are making the decision. It’s really our only choice.

But this book project — I don’t know. It’s really not turning out like I thought and I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it.

*My brother was a lot like me. When he showed up in high school with combat boots and a black mohawk and the same last name the teachers just sighed. When my half-sisters showed up a few years later, the teachers sighed again.