Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Post Game Show
I wanted to wait a day or two to write about Christmas. Holidays for us – always, but especially the last few years – are a little touch and go. Somebody’s absent. Somebody’s a mess. People take turns. You know how some families draw names out of a hat for gifts? We kind of do that to see whose turn it is to be the fruitcake at Christmas.
Only kidding. We don’t do that. Fruitcake designation is totally random.
So because Norman Rockwell skipped our house and went next door to paint his perfect family Christmas, we’ve learned to adapt. We have expectations that are so low that the folks waiting in the funeral home basement for their turn upstairs would pass muster. If there are no sirens, flashing lights or bloodshed, we’re feeling pretty ok.
This Christmas, I would give an A-. A minus only because claiming perfection seems out of character. Here’s why it was so great.
- My kids figured out how to buy presents without borrowing money from me.
- Everyone showed up – well, everyone in Milwaukee, that is. No last minute disputes, flat tires, freeway pile-ups.
- On time. Get out, you’re saying. Yes, they were all on time.
- They laughed. A lot.
- There was a four-year old girl with bangs and pigtails.
- There was some pretty decent food. Thanks Mom (and Sam’s Club).
- We kept it short.
- There were no complicated toys that required DIY assembly.
- People were gracious and grateful.
- We lived in the moment.
Item #10. That’s the takeaway. Living in the moment. The hardest thing to achieve. The best way to live.
Say Again
My two boys started talking pretty late. For a couple of months after they came to the U.S. from Nicaragua, they didn’t even cry much. Mute little munchkins. Tip for adopters: if you adopt a child from an orphanage, they often don’t cry. This can trick you into thinking they’re so content they don’t need to cry but my theory is that they tried crying for a while and it wasn’t productive – as in nobody showed up to pick them up. Humans quit doing what doesn’t pay off, right? More theorizing — both had tons of ear infections in the orphanages. And so one school of thought was that they hadn’t heard enough language or not heard it well enough when they were babies to develop their speech properly.
Note: My little granddaughter didn’t utter a word to me until she was about 3 1/2 and I never thought twice about it, instead deciding that her silence was, in fact, a sign of her utter contentment in my care. 🙂
We were so worried about them not talking that we trucked them off to speech therapy- at UW-M, Curative, and St. Francis. Not sure what the rush was. At that point in our lives with our kids, we were all over issues like not talking, not walking, not picking things up with their little wee fingers. All of it. Everything had to be solved STAT!
Anyway, so when Joe, the younger of our two sons, finally started talking, he quickly developed the habit of repeating the last word in every sentence. Sentence. Yes, exactly like that. That. With a little pause in between. Between.
For a while, we weren’t sure we were hearing him right. But we were. Last word, every sentence. Twice.
Memory: In the car driving to Florida. It’s dark outside. The two boys are in the back playing with their little superhero action figures (remind me to tell you our little anti-sexism campaign…..Action figures are dolls. Dolls are action figures) and we pass a sign for a restaurant.
“We should go to Cracker Barrel. Barrel.”
We cured Joe of this little ticky thing (officially called echolia, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echolalia) before we were able to find a really good echolia therapist (thank God) by thinking it was so cute and funny that we all started talking that way.
Something in his little five-year consciousness decided that “Hey, that ain’t cool. They stole my thing.” It was as if he wouldn’t be caught dead talking the same way as his very uncool parents. So he stopped talking like that.
But we still do and I still think it’s hilarious. Hilarious.
Go Out and Come Back In Again
This month has been marked by a lot of coming and going. Various family members going off to collect themselves and returning with a clean shirt and a calmer frame of mind. This is both actual and metaphorical. By the end of November, we had gone through a lot of laundry.
I understand nothing in life if not fresh starts. As a parent, I’ve learned that leaving the door unlocked is often all I have to do.
The trick about this is having no expectations (other than the clean shirt). Kids show up — maybe after weeks or even months — and they sit down and have dinner. And then very often they leave – without answering questions, without explanation. They come and swish, like Zorro, they’re gone.
A psychologist would accuse me of compartmentalizing. How do we have our adult kids just show up to Hanukkah dinner when there is so much going on? How do we not get things resolved?
Here’s the answer — it’s not up to us to get things resolved. It’s up to us to be the tent in the wilderness where the lantern is shining through the canvas.
That’s our job – to be their tent. Grown-up children at the table, one next to the other – not so great latkes and pretty darn good brisket taking the edge off whatever tension and turmoil there might have been when they walked in. It’s Hanukkah and there’s light and we are all reminded.
Things could be worse. Right now, they’re okay. And even though it’s not really gold, Hanukkah gelt is very sweet, indeed. 
Greedy or Good?
Tonight I watched a news segment about a couple who had adopted a slew of kids after raising a bunch of birth children. The mom rattled off the stats: 2 two-year olds, 2 three-year olds, a six year-old, a seven-year old. I lost track. There might have been another one in there. The kids – all adorable – had been in the foster care system. The dad looked a little dazed but game….in a stunned kind of way.
The segment closed with the reporter saying they were planning on adopting more kids in the future. Duggars Redux. (The Duggars are those nice folks with 19 kids who have a baby every year, rain or shine. Worse. They go to restaurants where all the kids sit up straight with their hands folded in their laps. This was my problem — oh yes, not having enough kids!!)
So I understand this compulsion to adopt. I really do. When I went to Nicaragua to get my son Joe and later my daughter Jhosy, I felt like Velcro Mama. Honest to God, I rolled through that orphanage and kids stuck to me like a wool skirt on a dry winter day.
I remember sitting on the floor at the orphanage, kind of paying attention to Jhosy spelling out her name in my journal, but really watching a gorgeous little boy named Mario scooting around the room in a Baby Bouncer. I want that little boy, I thought. But quickly realized that adoption wasn’t the kind of thing where you could trade one kid for another. Oh, ah, I think I’ll take that one instead. Besides Jhosy was beautiful and friendly and I wouldn’t trade her ever. I’ll come back for the boy.
I didn’t go back for Mario. Someone else adopted him….but that’s another and really wonderful story.
Around the time we were adopting our kids, a couple with one birth child adopted 3 kids from Nicaragua and 3 from Milwaukee County AT THE SAME TIME. And for a while, she was the envy of everyone — tons o’ kids, rolling down the highway, big ol’ minivan, lots of juice boxes, merry, merry, merry. And then she wasn’t quite so envied….if you get my drift.
A few months ago, a young woman, who was adopted from Nicaragua by one of my dearest friends blurted out in reference to her family and ours, “I don’t know what you guys were thinking – adopting one kid after another. Didn’t you stop to think about what these kids had been through? That maybe each one needed to have his own time to adjust and be ok?”
And the answer was: No. I didn’t. I was delirious. Happy, blessed, and ignorant. Like those folks on TV. They’re thinking God chose them to do what they’re doing.
They’re probably right.
10 Reasons Why You Should Adopt A
Child. It’s National Adoption Month. Because a lot of what I write has a bit of an edge to it, people might think I’m cynical about adoption or disappointed or disillusioned. And they’d be right. But I also feel grateful, lucky and amazed. Same person, different days? Maybe.
The truth of the matter is that adoption isn’t for everyone but it’s for more people than you might think. In fact, it might be for you. This is a picture of me and my dog, Jak, a puppy my husband bought for me to celebrate my graduation but also, I really think, to take my mind off my growing grief about my infertility and how inaccessible and impossible adoption seemed for us at the time. We’d gotten shooed away from Lutheran Social Services because our mixed marriage (Christian-Jewish) made us ineligible to adopt from most countries. We were mortified and discouraged at the local adoption process — scared to death by the list of possible ‘conditions’ we were told we might encounter. (Remember this is a long time ago — things have changed for the better.)
We ended up adopting three kids from Nicaragua — in the most serendipitous way imaginable. But that’s another blog post.
So maybe you want to be a parent but haven’t figured it out. Here’s why you ought to look at adoption ….. of a child (well, maybe a dog, too).
1. Adoption is exciting. If life is a box of chocolates, adoption is a crate. You don’t know what you will get. There’s no predicting.
2. Adoption makes you happy right away. If you have been wrestling with infertility, you can put all that heartache away. If you’re stuck on how sad you are because you’re single and childless, presto chango. You decide to adopt. You will be immediately happy.
3. Adoption makes people think you are selfless. If you are like me, you are unlikely to ever be called selfless in any other situation. So that’s kind of cool.
4. Adoption gets you out of yourself. You have to think bigger, think smarter, be more aware, assume less, and listen more.
5. Adoption gives you purpose. Why? Because you are offering to become the parent to a child without a parent. Is there something more important than this?
6. Adoption reminds you that falling in love isn’t a once in a lifetime experience. It can happen over and over until you have all your bedrooms and more filled up.
7. Adoption cracks open your ethnocentrism. If you are white and your children are brown or black, you will feel the rage and indignity of racism for the first time in your life. You will understand 1000% more about the world than you did before.
8. Adoption gives you children who love you because you loved them when no one else did. It takes a while for them to realize this but they eventually do. They also learn that love without action is just words.
9. Adoption lets you blame genetics for stuff you don’t like. Birth parents don’t have this little trap door. And that’s kind of cool.
10. Adoption creates the family you’re yearning for. Creating a family through adoption is a stiff term for being open to chance and luck, believing in yourself and being ok, truly ok in your heart, with what life brings you.
Adoption could be for you. Think about it. Don’t be freaked out or scared or think you’re not good enough to be a parent to a kid without parents. You’re plenty good enough. Really. I know what I’m talking about.
Fun at Farm and Fleet
Because it makes me crazy when my kids look like reprobates – which is probably one of many politically incorrect words I’m going to use this week – I sometimes swoop into action with my credit card.
Today’s mission was to buy #1 son a pair of work boots so he could stop flap, flap, flapping to work as a weatherization specialist. He is, of all of my kids, the least conscious of looks, fashion, community standards….you get my drift. This doesn’t mean that he is ascetic in any way. He loves material things — especially video games and tools — he is just missing the proper attire gene. I blame it on adoption.
So after the Packers beat the Jets today, off we went to Farm and Fleet, the five of us — #1 son, #2 son, #1 son’s daughter, the husband and me. Together in the car. Ridiculous. Two grown men in the back seat squeezed up against a four year old in a car seat.
Flashbacks.
We are now Back to the Future. #1 son, sensing that I’m really needing to upgrade him….like needing to do this so I feel better as a mom kind of needing….starts hovering around the $149 work boots. It’s a game for him. Sort of like ordering lobster in every restaurant we ever walked into just to see if we’d make good on the “order whatever you’d like” directive. (We didn’t.)
The Dad points him to cheaper boots and then goes to look at snowblowers with son #2 whose threatened move to Madison in January means that we will have to shovel our own snow! Oh no!
#1 son pushes – again just for fun and because, obviously it’s worked in the past – but I’m firm. He duck walks and crawls on the floor to try out the cheaper – well, let’s say, less expensive – boots (because this is what he does when he’s insulating attics) while the same middle aged guy holding a pair of jeans keeps walking by looking sidewise at us. I didn’t even think about it until this minute — older white lady arguing with an Hispanic guy crawling around on the floor of Farm and Fleet about what boots to buy. We continue to entertain.
Feeling guilty, I throw in a package of socks. #1 son tries to hit me up for a new hammer and a tape measure. You know, work necessities. Dad’s already put the kibosh on that and because I’m a firm believer in a united front, I also say no. Of course, he should buy those things on his own. (Left alone, I would buy him the hammer, the tape measure, and possibly a level, a sander, and a power drill. They’re work-related. He’s working. Thank God. We should buy him tools to celebrate!)
We leave.
“Where are the socks?” (Mom)
“They’re not here.” (son #1)
“Dad, you must have left them.” (son 1) “No, I gave them to you.” (Dad)
(Mom thinking) We need to get the socks or I’ll feel bad about the boots.
What changes? Nothing changes.
In Good Time
This is a sto
ry about going back. Adopted kids going back to their country of origin is a rite of passage – or maybe a right of passage. Our three adopted kids are all from Nicaragua. The oldest, Nelson, lived in an orphanage in San Marcos; the other two, Joe and Jhosy, both lived at Rolando Carazo Children’s Center in Managua. Of the three, only Jhosy has vivid and true memories of living in the orphanage. She was nearly seven when she left; her brothers were toddlers.
She’s sitting there in the red shirt, waiting.
So when we went back to Nicaragua in 2004, we wondered what it would be like for her, returning to a place she knew so well – that she had left just ten years before.
I don’t know how she felt. I just know what I saw. I watched the little girls run up to her and beg to use her chapstick and wear her hat. I watched her walk through the room where she used to live, pointing out what used to be where. I watched her sit on the bench where the infamous ‘how can you resist this orphan’ picture was taken years ago – the one that made us move heaven and earth to get her adoption finalized.
I watched her maybe ‘get it’ for the first time.
How many children there were. And how right it would feel to pick one up and walk right out the door. And figure out the rest later.
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.
______________________
Reposting this piece because a certain dog found some particular balls tonight to chew on. Oh well.
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
Recent Comments