Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Do What You Remember: Involving Dads in Their Kids’ Lives
So yesterday it was a terrific sunny winter day in Wisconsin. Because she had never been sledding anywhere but our front yard, we decided to take our 5-year old granddaughter, Alita, to a big kids’ hill. Her dad, our son, was strong-armed into coming along. It meant that he had to borrow gloves and a jacket to augment his usual summer/winter/fall hoodie attire.
He was reluctant, initially trying to beg off by saying he had to work extra hours. It’s so curious to me that the things he loved as a boy seem such a stretch for him now. He’s either working or tired. An old man in a young man’s body.
Anyway, we brought our two plastic sleds to the top of the hill. At first, she only wanted to push him down the hill.
Then after a few rounds as a spectator, she decided she was ready.
You can see his joy in the picture.
After doubling up a couple of times with each of us (Dad, Nana, and Grandpa), she said she wanted to go down the hill by herself. Her dad took her over to a small hill to practice. He made a little practice run for her first and then she took her first ride by herself. 
So after the very successful practice runs (see the happy face), she and her dad took the sled to the top of the big hill while the grandparents winced. Too soon. She has no clue how to steer. It’s good we’re out of earshot because he was doing what dads are supposed to do. Assume kids can do stuff. I wrote about this a while ago in a post called What Good Are Dads?
He waited for traffic to clear — for all the criss-crossing saucers and tubes to get out of the way — and he pushed her.
And she just flew. Unbelievably fast. She laid back in the sled and shrieked. 
He ran down the hill after her – seeming to be surprised at how fast she was going but still pretty unexcited about the whole enterprise. We, of course, were ecstatic that she didn’t suddenly veer 50 feet in the wrong direction and hit the solitary light pole at the base of the hill. When they walked up the hill, she looked a year older. More mature. Capable. And really happy.
All this was prelude to the best part. He set her off on her last run down the hill, stood watching for a minute, then whirled around, grabbed the second sled, took off on a run, flopped on his belly, powered the sled with his hands and sailed right next to her.
When they turned around and look up the hill, it was only then that he finally cracked a smile.
Soldier Through: The Adoption Home Study
Adoption socia
l workers will tell you otherwise but few things are as daunting as the adoption home study. I personally think that the spectre of it deters a lot of people from going down the adoption road. Guys especially are put off by the idea of a social worker asking a lot of questions. Women? They’re kind of used to over-sharing and are likely to figure that if answering a bunch of intrusive questions about one’s life, marriage, finances, relatives, attitudes, beliefs, and child-raising philosophy is the price of getting a child, so be it.
Most of us have things in our pasts that don’t look so wholesome in the light of day. Poor Newt Gingrich might have something to say about that. But believe me, presidential politics and the muckraking it involves come nowhere near the water-boarding that is the adoption home study.
My husband and I have been home-studied three times – once for each adopted kid. The first time was by far the worst since we had been married only a short time and didn’t actually know much about each other. Alot of the stuff he said in our interviews was a complete surprise to me. Like, huh? The social worker, an overly plump, officious woman who spent a lot of time complaining about her own 16-year old adopted daughter, set him off right away. Each question just made it worse. “How did he feel about my biological daughter?” (He was still figuring that out.) “Would the children be Christians or Jews?” (We had no idea. They ended up being Jews who celebrate Christmas.) He threatened to bail after every interview.
The kicking under the table became the steady beat that accompanied all of our visits with this lady who, mysteriously, changed her name — her FIRST NAME — between home study #1 and #2. So odd.
Then there was the fingerprinting and the background checks and asking people to be references for us. Yuck! The only people we knew who would do this were people who would have to lie about us.
We got through it. To me, the home study was the conversational equivalent of labor and childbirth. Painful, intrusive and then over with. The home study process is comprehensive and lengthy and there are no decent drugs or epidurals. There’s also no sympathy or nice people waiting in the corridor. No one strokes your forehead and tells you that you’re being strong and it’s almost over.
You just feel really, really exposed when it’s done. Sort of like having your legs up in the stirrups. Ladies, you’re with me here?
My advice? Hold your husband’s hand or your partner’s hand or your own hand and soldier through it. Strap on your backpack. Lace up your boots. And just plow through it.
We’re waiting for you over here on the other side.
_________
Another good resource is The Adoption Guide.
A Shadow of My Former Self: How Grandmothers are Different
I’m such a better parent since I stopped raising kids.
Seriously. You know how I know this? Here’s my story. It’s Saturday morning. There is a lot to do to get ready for our annual Three Kings celebration – a gathering of families who’ve adopted kids from Nicaragua. Their kids are now adults and many of them have kids — so now it’s a three-generation thing. (Read Cousins – there are some terrific pictures of our beautiful kids)
Anyway…..I’m on a tear to get going. It being Saturday, we have our little sidekick – our granddaughter, 5 year old Alita. She is a wonderful kid, dreamy, very soft around the edges, ephemeral. Fancy way of saying….she is extremely slow. She finds beauty everywhere. In lint, the sparkles on her shirt, the conversations of her tiny dinosaurs. And of course, she is in her own little Zen state as I hurry her out of the shower and guide her to her clothes.
This makes me crazy.
I point out her clothes and challenge her to a race to get dressed. She says she can’t get dressed because she’s cold. I tell her that she won’t be cold if she gets dressed. She looks like she’s going to start crying. I (nicely) tell her again that getting dressed will solve her problem with being cold. She drops her towel and starts bawling – now completely naked standing on the bedroom rug near, I just then noticed, a slightly opened window.
By now, of course, I’ve ratcheted back into mom mode – my sweet grandmotherly patience as cold as my half-drunk coffee. I am, after all, on a mission to get this damn Three Kings thing going. I decide, just as I would when I actually had kids around here to parent, that she’s old enough to dress herself, notwithstanding the open window.
“Alita,” I said, lowering my voice and taking a very serious stance just like I used to do when my kids were her age, “it’s time to put your clothes on so we can have breakfast and go to the store.”
Now she is not only naked and cold, she is sobbing. I crack. I bend down and ask her, “Why are you crying? It’s just time to get dressed, honey.”
“Nana, you scared me.”
Oh good grief, I thought. I have totally gone soft. Five years old and this kid has never been talked to in a business tone of voice. I am such a f**king grandmother!
It’s like I’m wearing an apron with stenciled teddy bears and a string of chocolate chip cookies around my neck. Where am I? Where’s my edge?
I wasn’t a terrible mother. I just wasn’t really terrific. OK, honestly, I was a little bossy. If this tells you something, when I got my three teenagers cell phones, the oldest one programmed them all to make Reveille the ring tone when I called.
Once when I was furious at all of them after a ridiculously uncooperative visit to the doctor (you take three kids at once to the doctor and then talk to me), my loud lecturing in the car prompted a guy who pulled up next to me at the light to shout out the window, “Lighten up, lady.” You don’t have to ask what I replied, do you?
So naturally I’ve been thinking – would my kids have turned out better if I had been a nicer person? But then I think – hey, they turned out ok and plus, they’re very, very tough. I take credit for that. I do.
Now little Alita? I guess toughening her up will need to be somebody else’s job.
Rainbow Bend
After I had a baby – as in gave birth to a baby – a friend remarked that I had the worst adjustment to motherhood of anyone she’d ever met. She was right. But I was undeterred, going on to adopt three more children. With each new child, my maternal maladjustment was refined, honed, and specialized.
Knowing that I was short on natural instincts, I made it my business to go to a lot of workshops and read a lot of books – especially after I entered the thrall of new adopted parent-ness where practically every waking moment was taken up with thinking, thinking, thinking about my new kids.
Of all the hand-wringing adoptive parent workshops I attended, just one really spoke to me. Here’s the takeaway: When all else fails, order a pizza. The theory, as explained by the expert social worker/foster parent extraordinaire, was that the hubbub and excitement of waiting for the pizza would coalesce the family into a happy hum of expectation.
I liked this concept. It spoke to me. I am big on having things to look forward to. And most of the time, the things are either food or trips.
I love our annual trip to the Florida Keys. I think about it all year — the vista, the food, the funkiness. In fact, I’m happy to say, I’m sitting in the Florida Keys as I write this.
I so love it here. Today, I saw a little homemade placque on the Seven Mile Bridge honoring a dead lady whose ashes were so obviously strewn there and felt envy. Resting with the Stingrays, it said. Wow. That’s so me.
So about three weeks after our newly adopted 7-year old daughter came to the U.S. in 1994, we packed her up in the car with her brothers and drove two days from Milwaukee to the Florida Keys, stopping to sleep in a rest stop because, oops, we forgot to make a hotel reservation in Atlanta and there was the whatever golf tournament they have down there in the spring. This was hard to explain to her — she being pretty monolingual as they say (in Spanish) and her new family (uneveningly lingual, to say the least) — and for a long time on the trip, she thought we were driving her back to Nicaragua.
Where we were driving her was to a resort on the ocean side near Marathon, Florida, where all of us, her big sister from college, and her grandparents were meeting up for a week in the sun.
It was either before or after that I attended a conference in Chicago about the problems of the Post-Institutionalized Child. The big message of the conference was that parents who adopt children from deprived settings like Romania or let’s say, Rolando Carazo Orphanage in Nicaragua, er, hum, should replicate the deprivation in their homes. Well, not totally, but they should have a very plain room, very few toys, no outside people. You get it? The idea being that kids need time to acclimate.
We didn’t do that. We went to a resort.
Where there was the ocean, a giant swimming pool, people who cooked you breakfast (my mother-in-law was paying), soft beds, TV’s, twinkly lights at night, and a lot of food. Ok – so basically, our little girl went from carrying a pot full of rice across the orphanage courtyard to her little cabin-mates to ordering her eggs over medium at the Kids Eat Free breakfast before she went swimming and sat in the hot tub – all in the space of three very short but truly transformative weeks.
When it was time to leave — to drive the reverse two days back to Milwaukee – I had to tackle her and practically karate-chop her in the stomach to get her to bend enough to get the seat belt on in the car. She was morose and angry as her new parents and brothers tried to explain that the last few days were just a trip, a vacation. Not our real life.
It was a pizza. It was just a pizza, sweetie.
___________
Originally posted in 2012
My Ad for Adoption
Several years ago, I counselled a young couple who had been trying unsuccessfully to have children. “Why don’t you just adopt and be happy instead of struggling with this?”
Why wrestle everyday with failure (if we want to call infertility failure which I don’t really) when you could celebrate challenge and discovery. Oh forget that.
Here’s the real question: Why go around empty-handed when there are so many kids to pick up?
Here’s a little story that I swear I’ll carry to my deathbed as the defining moment in my relationship with my husband and in the future that we created with our family.
Ours was a second marriage for me, the first for him. I was the mother of a beautiful, tough, kid of all kids 12-year old girl. He had never had children. We tried. Nothing. We tried some more. Nothing. We tested, medicated, tested some more.
Finally, we got the word. No pregnancy was going to happen without major intervention. In vitro — and this was a long time ago — so they were doing in vitro with mason jars and turkey basters. Not for us.
So anyway, as the story goes, my husband and I sat on our backyard picnic table while I told him this death knellish news. “Hmmm,” he said, “I think what this means is that God has something more important in store for us.”
Huh? God? When did my husband ever mention God in a sentence? Never. He just did.
So I packed up my Kleenex, we got in the car, and we went to a Brewers game where we sat high in the cheap seats in old County Stadium along the third base line and I sniffled my way through 9 innings, all the while balancing on my lap my surprised sorrow and my imagined mission from God.
This was a gift my husband gave me — hope. That’s what adoption is, folks. Hope. This little boy in the picture…the thousands of kids who are picked up by strangers who promise to love them. That’s hope.
That’s what you can have in the new year. Hope.
Seriously. There’s a kid sitting around somewhere waiting for you to pick her up.
Here’s a place to start: Adoption Resources of Wisconsin http://www.wiadopt.org/
Christmas Story #3: Redrum
Not being clairvoyant, I don’t really know if other people go around with the same phrase drumming through their heads all day long. This isn’t every day. It’s just some days. Some particularly bad days.
Christmastime brings back memories of one of the more persistent brain boogies —I am blind and my dog is dead.
Many years ago, Bradley Center, Wisconsin Badger Hockey Classic, free tickets given to my husband along with a red long-sleeve Badger Hockey shirt (which he still has, of course) – it’s two days after a sad, rainy Christmas, a month after we had put one of our kids in residential treatment, one day after sending two other kids to dreaded Winter Camp, and hours after we had taken our dog, Davey, for her last walk around the neighborhood, loaded her into the car, took her to the vet and sat stroking her head while the vet gave her the shot that would end her 17-year stay on this earth and in our lives.
There was so much wrong.
Every slam of a hockey player into the wall, every clicking stick, each whistle. I am blind and my dog is dead. The people behind us talking, the woman in the next stall in the bathroom, the guy in the paper hat pouring the beer. I am blind and my dog is dead.
So much wrong. So much failure. So much grief. I am blind and my dog is dead.
I couldn’t make it snow on Christmas. I couldn’t make my kids like Winter Camp. I had to give my child to other people to fix. I couldn’t make our beloved dog live forever.
I am blind and my dog is dead.
I’m not into meditation. In fact, I’m not deep in the least. But I think the thing about a mantra is that it’s sort of like using a magic marker to write the same phrase over and over again until the marker runs dry. And you either have to go find another marker or just give it up.
And because there’s never a decent marker when you need one, I gave it up.
It’s Christmas many years later. Everyone’s doing ok. No one’s dead or in jail. We had a nice day. But some little fleck of the day made me remember that night at the Bradley Center and be glad I wasn’t there anymore.
_______________________
I am Blind and My Dog is Dead is a book of cartoons by Sam Gross. See www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Gross
Christmas Story: Whittle
Yes. I once gave a 9-year old girl a Swiss Army Knife for Christmas. It looked like this one.
This wasn’t completely crazy because she was a girl who climbed trees high enough to watch me through the window of our second floor flat. She could also track down and pick up a snake, bait a hook and handle a caught fish without fussing. She could hang by her heels from the jungle gym and do a penny drop. No fear. And stand on the console of my old, orange Volkswagen station wagon to stick her head and arms out of the sun roof while we motored through the neighborhood.
She was a tough and beautiful cookie. Here she is in her overalls and her scuffed up shoes with her buddy.
On Christmas Day, 1982, I remember sitting with her on top of a picnic table at Doctor’s Park in Milwaukee. We were high on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan. The day was sunny and it was balmy – probably one of the warmest Christmases in history, certainly 60 degrees. There was no one there to take our picture because, well, like most of our life at that time, when I was a single mom to a single girl, there wasn’t anyone else there. It was just us.
Whenever I go to Doctor’s Park, I see that picnic table in pretty much the same place. I never pass it without thinking about that day. How warm it was. How we sat there – just the two of us – and looked down from the bluff at Lake Michigan.
A moment in time. That’s what it was.
That, and a gift never forgotten.
Everything’s An Accident But This
A lot of life is an exercise in the improbable. You marry someone because of that look. You buy a house because the seller is desperate. You get a dog because it seems like a good idea at the time. You adopt a child because you think you see the stars lighting up a “now is the time to do this” message in the night sky. You quit jobs and tell people off and burn bridges and start new friendships and work harder and succeed, sometimes.
It’s all been an utter accident. That’s my story. I’ve never had a plan that extends beyond the project I’m working on this moment or the next holiday to muddle through. Well, I take that back. I did get a Ph.D. – a feat that required more stamina than actual planning – but some would say that was a goal-setting/planning kind of thing. At the time, though, it was something to do so I didn’t feel so crummy about being divorced and broke. Kind of a hobby like how people now go to the gym all the time. I went to class.
Anyway, the point is this. How could I have these beautiful granddaughters?
All of my bumbling around, running up on curbs, getting lost in the dark and being overdrawn in the bank of life (put country music twang here) led me to this. Standing on the sand at Coronado Island in San Diego watching the two of them running in and out of the surf and grinning with all their little might.
That’s no accident. That’s somebody’s plan.
Men We Love – A Domestic Violence Story: Part 4 The Coda
Two years ago, I went to my old boyfriend’s funeral. I milled around with old and old-looking friends and colleagues, talked to his nieces, now adult women, with whom I’d spent several Christmases so long ago, and every now and then glanced over at the urn that sat on an unadorned table. There was no picture there – no montage of photos from a long happy life. His siblings were furious at him for what they said he had put them through. After so many attempts and threats, including several when I knew him, he had finally taken his own life.
A middle-aged woman standing alone was pointed out to me as his girlfriend. Thinking I should offer my condolences to the closest thing that he had to caring family at the moment, I introduced myself. She launched into a quiet explanation about why she, alone, was responsible for his death. She’d just ended their relationship because of his violent behavior, she wasn’t able to help him. “And now look what happened.”
It was in that moment that it hit me. In the many years since Des Moines, I had fallen in love and married someone else, moved into a big old house and raised a family of four children, started a business, had friends. If I died, there would be a lot of pictures.
He had circled back and started over. If the length of our relationship was a predictor, he probably had four or five more serious relationships, all ending the same scary way.
If all the women who’d known him sat in a circle, we would tell the same story, make a quilt with identical squares. And the quilt would be very large.
This man, to whom we had all been attracted because of his gentle heart and fun-loving spirit, never intended to hurt anyone. Whatever trauma or damage he had in his early life that would explain his violent episodes, no one really knows.
I do know it kept him from having any pictures at his funeral.
This series is dedicated to The Alma Center’s Men We Love campaign. The Alma Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a nonprofit organization that works with men involved in domestic violence to help them identify and address the trauma in their own lives so they can learn to become good partners and decent fathers. Look for the Alma Center and Men We Love on Facebook.
Men We Love: A Domestic Violence Story – Part 3
It went on like this for a couple of years. Long periods of calm interrupted by longer moments of panic and terror.
I remember….a long night watching my boyfriend sleep with a butcher knife in his hand wondering whether he intended to use it on me or himself. Being chased across town and, thinking it was the safest place I could find, pulling up in front of the 5th District Station. Being trapped in the kitchen of my upper flat which, I figured at the time, was probably the worst place in the house to be. Banging the car door against his leg as I tried to pull it closed and flee after an argument in the Dells. Listening to him tapping on my back door all night long wanting me to let him in so he could apologize.
But still he had never laid a hand on me. That had become my bottom line.
I got through the terror by convincing myself that he would stop himself from actually hurting me. But it became harder and harder to believe as time went on, sort of like thinking that even though everyone else’s basement was flooded, mine would stay dry.
It was the classic frog in boiling water. I lost sight of how out of whack my life had become. How unexplainable. How chaotic. How private.
The fight scene. Man and woman in a hotel room in Des Moines. He’s been drinking all day – beer and Irish whiskey. He wants to go out. She thinks he’s too drunk. He threatens. She grabs the keys to leave. He tackles her, pins her to the bed. And puts his hands around her neck.
Calling on angels, she gets out from under his 280 lbs and runs into the hotel hallway screaming. People open their doors and look at her standing there. He’s in the doorway shrugging his shoulders. She is ashamed.
So after the fight scene, while people from the hotel stood and watched, I got my things and my car keys and I left. Wanting to drive home but afraid to, I found an old hotel downtown and checked in to a room on the 4th floor where I pulled the chest of drawers in front of the door and sat curled up on the bed until dawn.
I drove back to Milwaukee to pick up my daughter, back from a two-week Western vacation with her dad. “Hi Mom, you’re late.”
Coming next: Men We Love: Part 4 (the coda)
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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