Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Not Dead or In Jail: The Role of Outcomes in Family Life
You’re probably thinking I set the bar pretty low. Yeah. I guess. But look, if your kids aren’t dead or in jail, you’ve got something to work with. Granted this leaves out being maimed, ending up homeless, being pursued by a street gang, and numerous other ills. All pretty serious outcomes, but none quite as bottom line as dead or in jail.
It’s important to have outcomes. In my other life, I advise nonprofit organizations on how to establish and measure outcomes. I encourage them to be realistic, yet ambitious. I convince them to put numeric targets on their outcomes like this: 85% of first time juvenile offenders will not re-offend within a year – that kind of thing.
When I started out as a mom by having a baby when I was 24, I never thought twice about outcomes. I just assumed my little girl would grow up, get educated, be happy, go to college, get married, all that jazz. And she pretty much did. But when I became an adoptive mom, somehow my brain got infected with the idea of outcomes and my ‘let it be’ approach to childrearing vanished. From then on, I was all about results. Well, more accurately, I was all about worrying about results. Would they learn enough at school? Would they be well-adjusted? Would they go to college?
And then while I was carefully moving my family through some cracked version of a logic model, reality happened. Special education meetings, suspensions, fights on the bus, fights off the bus, fights through the bus window, middle of the night phone calls, oddly flashing lights in front of our house, doctors, lawyers, helpers, institutions and a lot of Holy Crap. Of course, they grew out of all this and are decent adults (which is one way of saying that their problems are no longer fun size if you get my drift).
Anyway, in the midst of all this, maybe somebody said to me or maybe I said it to myself in an out of body experience, “But, hey, so things are terrible. Life sucks. And your beloved adopted children are a mess. IS ANYBODY DEAD OR IN JAIL?” And the answer was NO – to both questions. If nobody’s dead or in jail, man, I can greet the day with a smile.
You think I’m kidding. But I’m not.
What Good are Dads?
I just looked out the window to see my son and his 4 year old daughter walk up the front steps to our house. He was ahead of her by 3 or 4 steps and she was following. Walking home from the park, I guess. Both were about their business. He walked and he expected her to come along. Wasn’t looking back. Wasn’t holding her hand – although he’s not an unaffectionate guy. He wasn’t worried that she was dawdling behind him and would be standing still while a huge SUV powered down a driveway and flattened her into unrecognizable form. Didn’t think twice about it. That’s what Dads are good for. They don’t worry about shit all the time.
I like that.
It took me a while to realize that one of the greatest powers of a parent is the ability to make a child afraid. The converse of this is to make a child brave but I don’t think parents can do that. I think children are naturally brave. But I do believe that parents can make them afraid.
We take our granddaughter to swimming class every Sunday morning at the local Jewish Community Center. It’s a small class of maybe seven 4-year olds. Our girl sits in her pink bathing suit on the edge of the kiddie pool, her hair in a pony tail, a big grin on her face, her skinny body shivering, while she waits for Teacher Brittney’s instructions. She’s ready. She’s on it. She’s game. We are in the grown-ups’ pool swimming – when we end a lap we stop and look over at our little kiddo. She smiles.
But not all is so well. One kid’s mom is rubbing her daughter’s back every second of swim class, comforting her. Another’s is actually in the water, crowding out the instructor and the other kiddies. They tell their kids it will all be ok and the minute they say that, the kids are worried. Really worried.
Dads don’t ever bother with reassuring kids. (At least the dads I’ve known…..granted there are a lot of different kinds of dads). For the dads I’ve known, it’s like. “Oh, it’s time for swim class. Go swim. I’ll be over here in the hot tub. Come get me when you’re done.” It’s the matter of factness of it that just stops fear in its tracks. Gee, Dad is cool about it. Why should I worry?
Last week, I listened to a psychologist explain that a kid needed two things to develop a phobia – a genetic predisposition and someone to teach them to be afraid. And I think I’ve done that – muscled my fearfulness into the middle of something and made my kids afraid when they didn’t need to be. But I’m grateful that my kids have a dad who never thought about risk or danger or kids getting concussions on the playing field. He never made a big deal of anything. He was casual in his expectations, a lot like his own son walking up the stairs just now with his daughter trailing behind him. He had confidence. He believed life is safe. He imparted this belief to this children. Why would anyone be scared? It’s all cool. Go do stuff.
I think this is one of the big unspoken benefits of dads – their ability to impart little pieces of courage – that eventually, I think, add up to big chunks of courage. It’s a gift – albeit kind of a weird one – a gift of being careless and carefree. And having confidence. It’s a big deal.
Denis Martinez’ Balls
Old County Stadium. Fall 1996. Brewers playing the Cleveland Indians. Mom, Dad, and 3 of 4 kids sitting about 20 rows up to the right (looking down) of the Indians’ dugout. Beautiful fall evening. Mellow.
“DENIS!” “EL PRESIDENTE!!” Arms waving wildly, my husband stood up to yell at Indians’ pitcher Denis Martinez as he walked back to the dugout at the end of an inning. Denis quickly looked up and then disappeared under the dugout roof.
Howard had warned me that we were going to be seeing the great Denis Martinez pitch – Denis Martinez, the pride of Nicaragua, the first Nicaraguan to play major league baseball. El Presidente. But there was no heads up on how nuts he was going to act at the ball park.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing Jhosy. “Come on, we’re going to meet Denis Martinez.” Jhosy, who’d tuned out the game after the national anthem, rolled her eyes. I leaned over. “Why are you taking Jhosy down to meet him? She doesn’t even like baseball. In fact, why are you going at all?” Meanwhile, people in the seats around us joined in an unspoken WTF?
Standing up, taking Jhosy by the hand, he said, as if it made more sense than anything in the world, “I’m taking her because she looks the most Nicaraguan.” The other two kids – both Nicaraguan themselves – looked at me and each other and then turned back to the game. They were used to this kind of thing. Their dad acting nuts in public. They’d long ago given up on the idea of blending in, I could see that.
I can’t believe he’s doing this, I thought to myself. Such a spectacle. Ridiculous. And these kids — the whole section was looking at us. Howard managed to get down to the front row right next to the dugout. He picked Jhosy up, hung her over the edge (how he managed to do this without security coming after him I’ll never know) and yelled in Spanish, “Denis, look at this Nicaraguan face!” “And there are two more up there. Look, look!” Martinez did look, ever so briefly. We waved. Thank God. It’s over, I thought.
Back in our seats, Howard flush with triumph, the rest of us with acute embarrassment, we turned back to watching the game. Then a whistle from the Cleveland dugout. Denis Martinez stepped out of the dugout and motioned for Howard to come back down. Then he tossed him – not one, not two, but three signed baseballs – “Con carino de Denis Martinez.” Amazed, the people around us applauded as Howard came back to our seats and tossed each of our amazed kids their own signed ball. Howard was as happy as I’d ever seen him. He’d delivered for his kids. He did.
Here’s a picture of Denis Martinez pitching a perfect game. Pretty handsome guy, don’t you think? Very Nicaraguan.
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Reposting this piece because a certain dog found some particular balls tonight to chew on. Oh well.
Rescue
So yesterday I was sitting at the statewide CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) Conference and a speaker looked me in the eye and said, “Well, if you’all are into rescue, well, that’s a different matter.” And I wanted to stand up and say, “Hey, not me. I don’t do rescues. I am like way too advanced in my thinking to fall into the ‘let me rescue the poor underprivileged child’ trap.” Shit. Could she tell somehow that I was a rescue refugee?
There was a time when I thought if I had an extra bedroom – wait, an extra bed, oh, wait, space to put an extra bed – I could take in another child. Because I once said to my husband, in a fit of some kind of Mother Theresa episode, that as long as there was another place at the table, I was willing to take another child, a statement that he has never let me forget – taunting, sometimes, even – I guess I am from the Duggar camp. I would have adopted 19 kids if I’d had the chance. I didn’t, thank God.
I don’t think it was even a matter of coming to my senses. Once we adopted child #3, I was just outta gas emotionally. And logistically. And probably financially (although I tried never to look at that inconvenient truth). But the rescue thing is big in the adoption world. When we adopted our kids, friends would congratulate us on having saved our children from terrible lives in Nicaragua which was true enough in some ways but subverted the core of what we had done – which was to figure out how to have a family by bringing kids into it from a foreign country.
So within about two weeks of becoming a CASA, I looked at my CASA kid and how extraordinarily messed up her life was and how basic stuff wasn’t getting done and, worst of all for me as a mom, how she wasn’t happy, and I thought, “Hmmmmm. I’ve got that extra bedroom.” And within minutes, I’d figured out how I could straighten out the school problems, the health issues, how to get her feeling ok about the world, engaged in positive activities. I could see her coming down the stairs to dinner. And truth be told, at that point in time, it was only my husband saying, “Don’t even think it” that stopped my moving train.
But it was so right to stop it. My CASA girl needed people — but she needed HER people. She didn’t need another substitute – no matter how well-meaning. She needed her own people back. My job was to help her get back to her people. My job was to make things work so that they people who love her and the people she loved could be her family. I guess I understand this now because I know more about how kids yearn for their people. My adopted kids were happy and robust and healthy but their yearning for their people is always just inches away. We’ve filled in. We’ve done ok. We love them. They know it. They still yearn.
My CASA girl yearns. My job is to help her find her way back.
Note: A CASA is a Court Appointed Special Advocate whose job (volunteer) it is to advocate for the best interests of a child in foster care.
Big Sad Hole
Anything Crocker Stephenson writes, I read right away. Love his writing – how he gives readers a seat across the table from a crack addict – and I trust his eye. He is, as my grandmother would say, just right as rain — or maybe it’s good as gold. Or both. So when he started the new series in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, Lives Torn Upside Down, about three families struggling in the foster care system, I was all over it. http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/103251879.html I was really excited to see this issue on the front page, partly because I’m an adoptive mom of three but also because I’m a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for a teenager who has been in foster care for 2 1/2 years, surviving six placements.
So far, the articles have tracked the course of three families – two women seeking reunification with their children and a married couple wanting to adopt the foster child they’ve cared for since birth. The articles focus – and I’m so grateful for this – on the human impact of the child welfare system – the delays, staff changes, permanency plan changes and how these things mystify and frustrate everyone involved. But the other overarching focus is on the question of parents’ rights vs. children’s rights with the theme seeming to be that the ‘system’ is putting parents’ rights over the best interests of the child. I think here we are missing something really, really important.
Children truly love their birth parents. They love them when the birth parents are addicts, when they’ve neglected them, and even when they’ve been abusive in other ways. They love them — and I know this firsthand as an adoptive mom — even when they have no conscious memory of them. Adopted children, mine and millions around the world, have a sadness, a longing, a hunger of memory, that is unfathomable to those of us who grew up with our birth parents. And this sorrow – this big sad hole – hurts them in a lot of ways. It’s a rare adopted child who can even articulate this – but the effects are manifest in depression, substance abuse, employment problems, relationship issues. Don’t get me wrong — adopted kids love their adoptive parents. Our kids love us and we know it and are glad for it every day. But still, we know…..there’s that missing piece.
So when we decide that “Oh, gee, this foster kid’s mom is never going to get it together, let’s terminate her parental rights,” we had better have a pretty damn good explanation to give that child when he/she asks why. And it can’t be some namby-pamby, “Your mom loved you very much but she just wasn’t able to take care of you.” That response – which makes the adults feel magnanimous and non-judgmental and thus is often hard for them to utter because of their own opinions about the birth parents – just won’t cut it. The adopted kid will think (but not say) “Why didn’t you help her more?”
So I guess to assume that reunification is evidence of parents’ rights trumping kids’ best interests is to shortcut the analysis into opposing teams. If we are supportive of parents regaining custody of their kids, then we’re for parents’ rights. If we support quick TPR and adoption, we are looking out for children’s best interests. It’s so not that simple. It’s so much more complex and deeper and longer term. To understand the choices, we have to understand the pain – everyone’s.
Ssssh.
Given the choice, I’d probably pick a rosy story over a true one. I was entranced last week listening to Scott Simon, the host of Weekend Edition, read an excerpt from his book, Baby We Were Meant for Each Other, a book he’s written about the adoption of his two daughters from China. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129375629.
It sounded a lot like my beloved daughter’s story of when she first met her own baby girl in a hotel in China. I knew this story and I loved hearing it again.
But it kind of pissed me off. I wanted to send Scott Simon an email to tell him….”Honey, you have no clue.” All of the cuddly kitten, love at first sight, and this….it took us just three days to bond. Oy.
So today, while also watching a big storm roll in over Lake Superior, I noodled around the adoption blog world which has basically two hemispheres – the hysterically happy and the massively therapeutically-involved. Our life with our four kids – three of them adopted from Nicaragua – falls somewhere in the middle. Long stretches of the mundane interspersed with absolute joy and on your knees weeping. Is this fun? Do you want to be an adoptive parent? I’m smiling. It’s wonderful. Really. Would I kid you?
So the best thing I read today was a very long essay about adoption disruptions. This is the oh, so hidden, and unspeakable underbelly of the adoption world. An adoptive parent giving a child back! Oh no. What evil, uncaring person would do that? Well, take a look at this essay and you start to get it — how hard it is to raise terribly wounded children.
“The Myth of the Forever Family: When Adoption Falls Apart,” Dawn Friedman, Brain,Child Magazine.http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/summer2010_friedman.asp
I love Dawn Friedman for writing this.
Good people trying their hardest can fail.
We shouldn’t judge them.
When Push Comes to Shove
They’re not crazy about each other at the moment. They’re kind of going their separate ways. But I can predict, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that when push comes to shove, one of my adopted Nicas will throw down for the other. No questions. No analysis. They are each other’s – ‘just call and I’ll be there.’
And thank God.
Thank God we were smart enough to know that the greatest protection we could give our kids was their own little coalition. Each one has two other people who are in the same boat – adopted, from Nicaragua, raised as Jews in Milwaukee by a gentile mom and a Jewish dad. The smallest minority on earth, maybe, but not one of them is alone. Ever.
This is a picture of the three of them taken about 6 months after Jhosy, our daughter, arrived. You can already see her position in the hierarchy. And you can see in their little happy faces — they had it going. Our kids — they ended up in our laps for who knows what reason — they figured it out. They are connected.
Ashes
Eleven years ago, the house we owned in Grand Marais, Michigan, caught fire and blew up. It was the dead of winter, in the middle of a terrific storm, at the end of a day when the power had gone off and on a dozen times. Deciding we’d better hightail it, we’d cut short our skiing trip and headed for Milwaukee, where six hours later, I listened to the phone message from a neighbor telling me, “I’m watching your house burn down.”
And did it burn. Fueled by high winds coming off Lake Superior, the fire got so hot, the house exploded. I know this because the local newspaper man braved the weather to stand on our beach and take time series photos which he sent to us later. I looked at them once and put them in the attic.
It was two months before we came back. After having been told by the fire marshal that there was nothing left to see, we figured that the heartache could wait a while. Our dream place, the summer home we’d hoped our kids would grow up in and bring their own kids to was just plain gone.
We wandered around in the March rain and called out to each other when we found things in the rubble – pieces of dishes, clothes pins, the embroidered edge of a bedsheet, the metal ladle we used to toss water on the hot stones in the sauna, and chunks of carpeting – like the piece I found today half buried in the sand.
Wherever we went, there was the question. What caused the fire? There was never an answer. No one to blame. No one to sue. Could’ve been this or that, wiring, creosote in the chimney, downdrafts, or human error. We decided it was an act of God. And we left it at that. This was a decision I never regretted and a lesson we as a family never forgot. Sometimes you just can’t figure it all out, find out who did what when and why, who’s to blame, who should pay. Sometimes you just have to bulldoze the rubble of your heart and your mind or, in our case, a big, flimsy box of a beach house, and start over.
The capacity to start over is a great big gift. And I mean starting over without assurances, without resolution of past wrongs, without people changing to be the people we wished and planned for them to be. Another word would probably be forgiveness. Either way, you end up with a stronger, better house.
You Looking at Me?
Multi-racial/ethnic families turn heads. That’s for sure. I think looking – heck, staring – is mostly an involuntary thing for people – sort of like seeing a double amputee or a person with a million tattoos. You don’t want to look. You don’t intend to look. But you look. So as not to stare, you look once, look away, then sneak another peak. Because it’s interesting? Fascinating? A lot of adoptive parents think the looks translate right into an invasion of privacy. It’s zero to deeply offended real fast for those folks.
I used to be one of those prickly types, ready to get all huffy if someone looked at our family a little too hard or too long. There is a certain aggravation that comes from being constantly reminded that you’re a patched together bunch. I saw a PBS special once about the life of an interracial couple that included the wife saying that they felt like an ordinary family until they walked out the door, that it was right when they hit the street that they remembered. Oh, yeah, we’re different! The adoption world has a term for this: conspicuous family. I LOVE THIS!
This article has a good discussion about conspicuous families and includes some pointers for observers of same.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/247415/adoption_and_the_conspicuous_family.html
Some people think it’s ok to ask a conspicuous (adoptive) family a lot of questions – questions like “Where is she from?” “How did you get him?” “Do they know their real parents?” And my all time favorite, especially when asked while all my kids were standing next to me “Are they really related?” It took me a long time to figure out that it wasn’t the questions that bothered me, it was a vibe – a kind of curious, high wavelength, weird vibe that I felt as diminishment. But honestly, I don’t think people were sending that vibe – I think I was pulling it out of the air.
Now looking back, I recognize that strange vibe as feeling self-conscious – that same unpleasant, please don’t notice me, let me melt into the crowd feeling I had when I wore the homecoming dress my mom had made out of a lovely but totally unfashionable green brocade. When you have a multi-racial/ethnic/adoptive family, you are wearing green brocade. You are, indeed, conspicuous. Your story is right out there for people to poke and prod. It’s uncomfortable to be different – to be interesting. But eventually, if you relax a little, you learn to appreciate the green brocade.
It took me years to trade my self-consciousness for pride. But I finally did.
Home Field
This is the story of a magical day – a sterling day, so perfect that it could only have been a crafted, scripted waking dream. The gods created it, I’m sure, as a gift for our strained family and the troubled times we had been having.
On Christmas Day, 2004, our 19-year old son, Nelson, returned to San Marcos, Nicaragua, the village he’d left in 1986 as a very ill and fragile 21-month old boy. First, we visited the site of his former orphanage – now a small college. And then we started walking and exploring. Around the corner from the old orphanage was a soccer stadium, empty except for a couple of middle-aged men standing in the middle of the field. We watched for a while. Looked at the volcano in the distance and joked about how Nelson, the high school soccer player (All Conference honorable mention, I’ll have you know) should play on his home field.
So his dad headed out to the field to explain in his somewhat cracked but very loud Spanish about how Nelson, his son, was actually from San Marcos, about how his son was a terrific soccer player, and how he had come back to Nicaragua for the first time. And it was as if he’d picked up where he’d left off – before the recent events that had so fractured us – being Nelson’s biggest fan and supporter. Bragging about him. Like old times.
The two men on the field, who turned out to be the leaders of the local soccer league, immediately fetched a ball for Nelson to kick on his home field. Invited him to come back to San Marcos and play for them. Told him they needed him more than we did in the States. Everyone laughed.
From high in the stands, I watched Nelson running up and down the field. His black basketball shorts flapping, big grin on his face as he dribbled and juked. It was always fun to watch him play. He always looked happy playing. He seemed real happy that day. I sat high enough that I could see hills and valleys of the countryside in the distance, my daughters talking by the fence, my other son on the field with his brother, my husband with that satisfied look on his face – the one that said “I made something good happen here.”
There we were. On Christmas. In Nicaragua. Together. We would heal. I could see that.
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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