Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Castaways: Remember that It Takes a Village
This is a story about four girls, an old canoe, a sunny day, and a south wind on Lake Superior. It’s also a story about happiness and risk, ignorance and gratitude, and the ambivalence we feel as parents, especially adoptive parents, when other people try to help us.
On this particular day, about ten years ago, my daughter Jhosy and her three friends strapped on life jackets, and enlisted a friendly passer-by and his son to help them lug our ancient and very heavy aluminum canoe to the beach. Their plan was to paddle in shallow water back and forth in front of our house on Lake Superior. It was calm, sunny, and a little breezy. This made me really happy — to see these girls put down their nail polish for five minutes and do something physical. That Jhosy was the ringleader was even better. It was as if she had decided to own our lifestyle a little bit. A little remarkable, hence the photo.
They set off. I watched for a while and then became engaged in a conversation with new neighbors who were planning to build a house just west of us. It was probably 10 or 15 minutes before I turned to see that the four girls and their canoe were nearly at the end of the breakwater and moving steadily out to sea. The little breeze was now a significant south wind, essentially blowing them farther out in the lake no matter how hard they tried to stay close to shore.
My other neighbor was already on his porch, binoculars in hand. “I called the Coast Guard Auxilliary,” he said. “They’re ready to go get them if it looks like they can’t get back.” He kept studying their situation through the binoculars. He had called for rescue. I couldn’t believe it, resenting that he had taken this step without asking me. “They’ll be fine,” I said. “They can paddle back.” I didn’t believe a word of it.
I had let them go out with a south wind. This had happened before years earlier when I nearly let one of my sons float off to Canada in an inflatable raft because I wasn’t paying attention to the south wind. That time a man on the beach chastised me and I puffed up with indignation. Here it had happened again – but this time it was with four girls in an old canoe. Four girls who would panic and capsize and be bobbing all over the place – thank God for the life jackets.
Now my neighbor and I were standing on the beach along with a thin crowd of onlookers who all wondered aloud if the people in the canoe could stop its journey across the world’s biggest inland lake. And then gradually, we saw it. The canoe turned and slowly headed to shore. With three girls in it.
And one girl in the water. She was towing the canoe while the others paddled. It was the other Nica girl in the canoe, Tricia, whose daily swim team practice convinced her she could swim the distance and pull the canoe. Unbeknownst to us, while we were on the beach wringing our hands and calling the Coast Guard and resenting having the Coast Guard called, these four 14-year olds decided to solve their own problem.
To me, this little episode is an allegory for adoptive parenting — wanting kids to be happy, not wanting to see trouble, denying trouble when other people point it out, resenting the genuine concern of others, and being frozen with indecision a lot of the time. It is also an ad for resilience and strength – the young girl who slipped in the water to pull the canoe back and the other three girls who trusted her.
Adoptive parents often seem to me to be hyper-sensitive to the interest or caring shown by others – almost as if we think that any sign of uncertainty means that we’re not real parents. I saw that in myself that day in my reaction to my kind neighbor looking out for my kids – getting my back up, thinking it was none of his business that my girls were in potentially very serious trouble.
I guess what I’m saying is this — if we buy the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, we need to make sure our adopted kids are part of the village and have a little gratitude when other people see problems we can’t. It’s taken a really long time for me to figure this out.
Lighten Up, Little Susie
It’s a little disconcerting to realize that several people have found my blog by googling the term kids in jail. I deserve this, I guess, because I wrote a blog post called “Not Dead or in Jail: The Role of Outcomes in Family Life,” in which I talked about the probably outrageously low bar I put on the results of my parenting. https://reds-wrap.com/2010/10/18/not-dead-or-in-jail-the-role-of-outcomes-in-family-life/
So it occurred to me. I really need to lighten up. Be less intense. Stop talking about jail and death. Trauma and treatment and scary child welfare people and other things that go bump in the night….and remember my two little buckeroos.
This is a picture of the 6-year old Nelson and the 4-year old Joey in Laramie, Wyoming. They’re wearing their fresh off the rack, gen-u-wine cowboy hats and their little six-shooters. With no prompting, they caught the pose – the cool cowboy pose. The hands on the hips, the looks. Oh gosh, they’re so tough in their little jean shorts.
Right after this, we went to a rodeo where, because of our unique family composition, we attracted more interest than the bullriding — but I don’t want to go back to the ‘dark side’ here.
Anyway, I remember this. How they looked. How they talked. How they smelled. I remember paddling with them in a canoe in some river in the Tetons and beaching the canoe on a sandbar and having lunch. I remember days of camping with no shower and then letting them roll down a dirt hill 20 times just before we hit the showers just to see how filthy boys could actually get. Very.
I remember then always walking around with an enormous sense of gratitude. These kids just dropped out of the sky, they were adorable and they were mine. Yipes. What luck.
Still true. But, as you can see, picture’s a bit blurry. 🙂
Long Story Short: Getting Investigated by Child Welfare
When the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare comes to your door, they don’t look happy and cheery like they do in the picture. And the people they’re coming to visit aren’t smiling either.
Child welfare workers have the legal authority to immediately detain a child if there is a determination that the child’s living situation presents a danger of abuse.
I know this because one day I came home from a meeting and there was a business card stuck in the screen door on my front porch. Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare, it said. Call this number immediately scrawled on the back.
It’s impossible to describe the level of panic that such a business card induces. Almost feral. What happened? How do I protect my family? What’s going to happen?
Fleeing becomes a feasible option in one’s mind almost immediately. Fear—- flight. That’s what they say, right? But fine, upstanding people who haven’t done anything wrong don’t flee. They straighten their ties, make a plan, try to remember their lawyer’s phone number. They sit at the dining room table, point at family pictures, offer coffee. Educated, refined, in control, aware, able to address the situation, capable. Leave us alone. We have everything under control.
The Bureau did leave us alone after that meeting although we had occasion to meet again a year or so later. Truth and courage go a long way in situations like this — that and having a college degree, a husband in a suit, and a lawyer on speed dial. I wonder what would’ve happened without those things. I don’t make accusations. I just wonder.
What I learned from this is an amorphous, shadowy thing. It’s a feeling that I have for people who have been the object of inquiry and investigation, whose parenting has been called into question, who have been threatened with the removal of their children. To say “it’s complicated” is to give the feeling an undeserved level of simplicity.
What happened to me, happens to people everyday in Milwaukee. It’s not unjustified either. Usually the Bureau is called because someone suspects something very bad is happening. I don’t fault the Bureau. I just truly know what it is like seeing the card in the screen door. And I feel for people in that situation. That’s all. I just feel for them.
Left Out
My dad made one phone call to me in my entire life and that was to tell me that my mother had died.
The call came about a year after I’d reconciled with my parents after a ten-year estrangement. He was 88. His voice on the phone was matter of fact but wobbly. He was getting things organized, he said. Would I come to help him? I had never helped my father before except to hand him a wrench when he was fixing something or to fetch the net so he could land the pike he’d hooked.
I got in my car and drove six hours to the Michigan town where they lived. When I got there, he was typing out my mother’s obituary notice on his ancient Underwood typewriter.
He read it out loud. The details of my mother’s life. That she was married for 64 years. That she had three children. And five grandchildren.
Five. My daughter. My brother’s son and daughter. My sister’s two sons. Five.
He asked me, “Does this sound ok to you?” Never having been asked my opinion before, I said, “Yes, it sounds fine.”
“I just want to do the right thing,” he said.
“I know,” I said, sitting on the office chair next to him, watching him pound out the obituary notice. Watching the old keys strike the ribbon, black and red. He could type 80 words a minute on that old thing. And he could zing that carriage back fast as you please.
Five.
But it wasn’t five. It was eight. My mother had eight grandchildren. The five birth children, if you will, and the three my husband and I adopted from Nicaragua. Eight.
I didn’t correct him.
I let it stand. Five.
I basically let my own father forget that he had three additional grandchildren.
I could give reasons for this. That I was tired. That I didn’t want to get into it as we say. That it wasn’t the time.
That I was equivocal in my own heart is the last reason I would recognize.
This isn’t a story that has a good resolution. I never corrected him. My dear daughter (birth) dropped everything and came from California to tend to us, make lasagna, and sooth everyone. My other kids (adopted) piled in the car with their dad and made the mad dash from Milwaukee to our little town in Michigan.
They all stood behind me at the cemetery.
They never knew.
The Original Nana: The Sweet Influence of Grandmothers
Today, I miss my mother-in-law. It’s Passover and I miss her. She was the only person on earth who ever loved my husband more than me and because of that, she was formidable in all ways. First of all, she was completely, totally, through and through Jewish. I could feel her heartache looking at me across the room — oh, I was nice enough, but….you know, she had really hoped…where were all the nice Jewish girls?
Instead there was me. And my 11-year old daughter. And then there were the Nica kids – one, two, three. And she became everyone’s Nana.
And if she ever had any reservations about how we built our family, she never said so. Instead she looked like this the night Jhosy landed at Mitchell Field.
She started a new tradition of big family seders — and I mean, massively big, with cousins no one had ever met before, a dozen courses, and girls hired from the neighborhood who would clear the dishes for us.
She set it up so my husband and his cousin would lead the seder – practicing for the tradition that we would carry on for the sixteen years since she died. Someone still searches for the afikomen and we all wait for Elijah.
And so I’ve been thinking about my mother-in-law today. How she accepted me. How she made my daughter her granddaughter. How she never missed a beat with our crazy Nicaraguan adoptions. How she piled on the Barbies. And bought gifts in really big boxes.
I thought about her while I was cooking the brisket for tonight — which, for you amateurs out there, is not so easy — and I felt a whole lot of gratitude and awe.
My mother-in-law taught me something that I didn’t know I needed to learn — how to be generous – with money and time, and approval. When I think of her — that’s the word. Generous.
We all aspire to be better, smarter, richer. I’ve been working on being more generous. And being a better Nana. Fortunately, the original Nana left pretty good instructions.
Don’t Read This, Bevan Baker
This is my granddaughter, Alita. And I have reason to believe that she has fallen asleep in someone’s arms every night of her life. Tomorrow she will be 5 years old.
I raised four kids. All of them slept in their own beds. In their own rooms. One child spent a night in bed with my husband and me the night I brought him home from Nicaragua. He had scabies and diarrhea. My husband did a “him or me” thing and that was the end of that.
But Alita? She has lived a different life. And it started here.
The day she was born.
She falls asleep with her people. She did then. And she does now.
My son and his wife never made any decision about this…..this is just what they do. They’re not captive to any “what you should do” thinking (this is both good and bad in the larger scheme of things).
Now she will bring her nearly five year old self to my lap, settle in with a blanket, and go to sleep. Later, I’ll put her to bed. There’s never any crying. This is so different for me, a refugee of Dr. Spock’s admonition to put the child to bed and let her cry.
I don’t know what this means. I just know that I’ve gone along with it. That it feels better to have a child fall asleep in my arms than just about anything on earth. That this practice – as unintentional and maybe careless as it has been – seems to have created a child who is relaxed and happy, who expects love but never demands it, who trusts her people and can rest easy.
So different than what I thought should be done. So different from Dr. Spock or all the other baby-raising manuals.
So ‘no end in mind.’ So ‘what makes sense right now.’ And it adds up – somebody holding this girl every night for five years.
What a way to start a life.
Red Letter Guy
This guy is crazy. He is crazy. He’s been crazy. He’s made a career out of being crazy. Developed it into an art form. And this chick with the long black/henna’d hair in the red commencement gown is Exhibit A on the evidence table.
If he wasn’t crazy, she wouldn’t be here.
Once Jhosy’s orphan picture was put on the refrigerator, Howard became a driven man. In the picture, she was six and serious, sitting on a bench at the orphanage, a little Dutch boy haircut with straight bangs, wearing a dress with white socks and orphan shoes. Her story — which I might tell some day if she says it’s ok — was about hard, hard, hard times. But the urgency was about her health.
She had had rheumatic fever. Her heart valve damage was diagnosed by Nicaraguan doctors by listening because, at that time, they had no more sophisticated diagnostic equipment. They were also unable to do valve repair or replacement surgery so the only option was to find a way to send Jhosy to a country with first world medicine.
Emboldened by our initial health victories with our two sons adopted from Nicaragua – one with heart defects and the other failure to thrive – we impulsively agreed to adopt Jhosy.
Then the back and forth started. How sick was she? Remember, this was 1993. No cell phones with cameras. No email. Phone calls were expensive and chancy. Think two orange juice cans and a string. All we had was the fax machine.
As luck would have it, there was a Canadian man who volunteered at the orphanage who agreed to be a go-between us and the doctors. He sent us this fax saying that, no, Jhosy only needed valve surgery, she didn’t need a heart transplant.
I nearly fainted at the phrase heart transplant. My husband jumped for joy. Oh God, I thought. We’re going to adopt this girl and she’s going to die. I figure if a doctor even mentions the term heart transplant, you’ve got trouble. As in Holy Crap….they think she doesn’t need a heart transplant???
Howard? He figures we’re home free. No worries. What’s a valve here or there?
Full court press.
He’s on the phone. He’s negotiating. He’s arranging. He’s pushing. His eyes are on the prize — Little Miss Orphan stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet from the gas station. Meanwhile, I’m backpedaling, finding reasons why not, questioning his sanity, looking for the escape hatch.
So, is it any mystery that the first person to wish Howard Happy Birthday this morning is the girl in the red gown?
She doesn’t really know this story. But she does. She knows that I love her. But what she really knows is that no matter what, her Dad will never quit on her. Undeterred, always. Crazy.
Slow Scab: Adopted Kids Don’t Forget Being Left
A few weeks ago, a two year old girl was found alone at a McDonald’s on Milwaukee’s south side, no parents or relatives around; police were called and her picture was put up on the evening news. Because she looked amazingly like our older son’s daughter, my husband decided, as he often does, to “mess with him.” So Dad texted son.
Dad: How could you leave Alita at McDonald’s?
Son: what are you talking about
Dad: Somebody left a kid that looks just like Alita at a McDonald’s in Bay View.
Son (responding within seconds): Oh yeah i just heard about that this morning how could someone do that well guess my mom can 🙁 n joes and jhosys but whatever we are better off without them
Of course, right away I’m thinking he’s talking about me. As if I would leave him anywhere….but immediately realize he’s talking about his birth mother who did, in fact, leave him when he was six months old. She left him in a hospital, in good care, and, I believe, because she felt she had no other option. This is what we were told. This is what we told him. We also know that his picture was printed in La Prensa, the Nicaraguan national newspaper at the time, asking people to come forward with information about his parents.
No one stepped forward. He was placed in an orphanage. We adopted him nearly a year later.
He was a boy adored by the orphanage staff. He was tended and worried over. The Nicaraguan government expedited his adoption so he could receive good medical care in the U.S. The Nicaraguan women who worked in the orphanage held him and cared for him. I know this because I met people years later who remembered caring for him in the orphanage; their faces would soften and crease into smiles talking about Nelson Bravo, the beautiful boy.
What did this little episode teach me about adopted people — even 26 year old, self-sufficient adult adopted people? Scratch them and it’s there. It doesn’t get resolved. It doesn’t get explained. It forms a slow, sketchy scab that can catch in anything — a song, a phrase, a text message — and rip off.
We adoptive parents – with all our books and conferences and support groups – think we know. But we don’t know.
But I’m really glad I got told.
BTW, use of the text message was ok’d by the sender. 🙂
Oh….and his Dad’s response: Well, U r still my boy. And u still owe me money.
I Saw This Boy
There were children sleeping in trees. I saw them myself, riding around Managua after dark with my comadre Christina and our dear sponsor, Miriam, in February 1994. During the day, the kids rushed cars stopped in traffic, crawling up on hoods to squeegee the windshield, hawking gum and cigarettes from trays hanging from their necks just like the old Philip Morris ads but they were in dirty T-shirts and shorts, barefoot. Thin, aggressive, feral. And very young.
At night, they retreated to safety in the trees.
Stop the truck. Roll the window down. “They’re up there.” See the leaves rustling, little glimpses of feet and arms.
I remember feeling guilty. Guilty, conspicuous, rich, and wrong. I remember thinking that the boy washing the windshield knew more than me, was tougher than me. His aura was all necessity and drive. He didn’t ask to wash the windshield. He leapt up on the car and did it — expecting that the shame of not paying him would force the driver to ante up. I remember thinking what the hell is going on in the world when my two sons who look just like the one on the hood of the car are back home in Milwaukee eating Oreos and teasing the dog.
What separates my two boys, adopted in 1986 and 1988 from Managua, Nicaragua, from the boy yelling “Chicle, Chicle” outside the car window? It isn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m dumb to all of this. I just showed up and went where I was pointed. There was no rescue. Heck, I was the one rescued (but that’s a different blog). It was an utterly random slice of luck that culled them from the sea of abandoned children and plopped them in an orphanage.
While they were growing up, we would talk about Nicaragua. But not wanting to make it sound bad, we de-emphasized the poverty. It was and is a beautiful country with a social and political and literary history that makes it unusual and extraordinary and that’s what I wanted them to think about their home country. I didn’t want them to think bad things about home.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t make it sound like Paris. I told them that poverty was a big part of their mothers’ decisions to give them up to the orphanage. But I never told them that the boy on the hood of the car and the boy I bought my Marlboros from made me sad and scared and nervous. That seeing them made me feel wrapped in a blanket of ignorance and selfishness. That I saw them, picked up my daughter, went home to Milwaukee, sent money to relief groups every now and then, and went on with my life.
Until I heard that Anthony Bourdain was going to Nicaragua in his next No Reservations and that he was going to talk to kids rifling through trash at the dump looking for food and I wondered, “Should I have the kids over for dinner and watch it together?”
I just don’t know. I really don’t.
Mistaken Identity
You might have heard — there is a lot of controversy in Wisconsin right now about the collective bargaining rights of public employees. I’m not a public employee but I’ve often been mistaken for one.
Various people have assumed that I was a social worker, child welfare worker, probation officer, and school principal. These cases of mistaken identity occurred when I was with one of my kids, usually at their school. (For the uninitiated, I am white, some say, super white – northern European. My three adopted kids are from Nicaragua.) I’ll never forget standing in the hallway of Milwaukee High School of the Arts having a nice chat with one of my kid’s teachers, walking away and hearing him yank my son back to ask, “Is that your case worker?” “Uh, no, that’s my mom.”
I started thinking it would just be better to be the social worker. Why fight it? Be a social worker. Flash that badge. Get all the info. Talk like an insider. Keep the school professionals from e-nun-ci-a-ting like they tend to do whenever they meet up with mominsweatpants.
If I just go along with being the social worker, I can avoid the story.
Because if I tell a nosy person the story, it will surely be like giving a Moose a Muffin or a Pig a Pancake. If I start with the plain fact that my husband and I adopted from Nicaragua, it will lead to the reason why, then it will lead to making it clear that we didn’t pay a lot of money for our kids, that they were abandoned and without options, that they were sick, because, of course, I would then want the person to know that I’m not a rich white imperialist thinking I can just buy children who belong to another country, and then I’ll have to answer questions about their ‘real parents’ and how they feel about that which I won’t be able to answer because I don’t actually know, and whether they have ever gone back and looked for them, and how much do I know about their past which is practically nothing. And I will feel like apologizing and my child, whichever one it is, will be slinking down the hall wishing he/she had never been born in any country because the big, giant JULY 4TH AUTO SALE spotlight will be shining on them and it just isn’t f**king worth it to explain.
So I just decided to be the damn social worker or probation officer or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have an attitude about it. I never really got mad at people who asked questions because I figured it was plenty weird seeing me and my kids. (My husband – different story — he can pass as the Dad. Me, no chance.) Plus I figured that actually having these kids was like the most massive stroke of luck in the universe so I was ok talking about it.
Still. It does really make you feel like you are wearing a bikini at a PTA meeting. Really.
So, anyway, several months ago, I walked into a group home where my CASA (I’m a Court Appointed Special Advocate for a girl in foster care) girl lives and one of the group home girls said, “Is that your grandmother?”
I loved that. I really did.
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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