Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
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.
Bear Watch
It’s funny how things work out. How we end up doing things we didn’t think we’d still be doing after already raising four kids. Every Friday, right around this time, we go on Bear Watch. Friday night to Monday morning – every week. Car seat, juice boxes, teeny t-shirts, princess dolls – the whole 9 yards. Also tantrums, potty training, learning to talk, read, listen, swim, run, play, all of it. I’m not ecstatic about the reasons why it’s necessary for us to do what we’re doing but that’s another blog post.
Bear is our granddaughter’s nickname. She is Laotian and Nicaraguan, the birth daughter of one of our adopted kids. We also have a granddaughter who is Chinese who is the adopted daughter of a birth child. I think this should earn us a feature on Oprah, don’t you?
We thought we would be doing other things right now. Fun things, adult things, maybe even expensive things. But we’re kind of stuck on the Zoo Train. All that whistle blowing, waving at people, looking at the real bears.
And Gramps? All that heavy lifting. Protecting the little squirt from the fake dinosaurs when we could be playing golf. (We’ve never actually played golf but we could have if we weren’t tied up with this darn kid.)
Pitiful, isn’t it? Poor us.
With Her Bare Hands
It was this time of year, on Indian Lake in the U.P., that I realized that my new 7-year old daughter could catch fish with her bare hands. I’d walked down to the dock from the funky little cabin where we were staying to check on Jhosy and her brothers. A lot of squeals and splashing – so I figured a close-up check-in rather than a shout from atop the hill was in order. What was going on?
Lined up on the dock were a dozen small fish in various stages of last breath-taking. “How did you guys get those fish?” I asked. “Jhosy caught ’em,” boys replied. Jhosy looked at me like — what’s the big deal?
It was unnerving. What else did she know how to do? What had her life in Nicaragua taught her?
Over the years, I learned that kids growing up in hard situations learn a lot of stuff that, when they land in a ‘normal’ situation, seems strange or inappropriate. Adopted kids from food-deprived environments will hoard food under their beds for years. Kids used to sensing and fending off violence in their prior homes or institutions will live life on full alert for a long time, maybe always. Kids used to being the grown-up with younger peers or siblings will have a very hard time becoming a child who can rely on adults. Understanding this comes the hard way for many adoptive parents who think that adoptive kids’ behavior is just about the here and now, about their adjustment, or their attachment issues. There’s a lot of past in their pasts. We can’t ever underestimate that.
Jhosy didn’t need a manual to tell her how to catch a fish with her bare hands, but if you do, see this link.
Off the Hook
A few days ago, a very good friend who is also an adoptive mom sent me an article entitled “Accepting that Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds,” published in the New York Times. The thesis of the article, written by a psychiatry professor, was that some kids are just shits. More to the point, there is not necessarily a direct linear relationship between the quality of the parents and the quality of the ‘product’, ie. the children. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/health/13mind.html?_r=1
I knew that. I’ve seen dreadful kids with (what looked like) great parents and vice versa. And I have to admit – with my own parenting career being a little rough, to say the least, I indulge in a bit of schadenfreude when I hear about the mishaps of birth children/parents. That’s awful. I know it is. Just once at a party, I’d like somebody to come up to me and, instead of a Rhodes scholar update on their darling, say, “Hey, little Frankie is finally out of jail and his re-entry’s going pretty good. Hasn’t missed a meeting with his parole officer yet.”
That person? The person who could tell me about his kid’s re-integration into society is, first of all, my pal forever, and secondly, a person who has managed to untangle his identity from the results of his parenting. He is saying that he worked hard to be a good parent, things might have gone wrong, but he’s still on board and he still loves that boy.
I admire that. Acceptance and love. And letting go of responsibility. And letting children be shits if that’s what they turn out to be. And not torturing ourselves about it.
When you’re an adoptive parent, you get an automatic pass on outcomes from the rest of the world. “Oh well, she was adopted. You can’t control genetics. We did the best we could.” Unfortunately, that big excuse – that your child was adopted – doesn’t do much to get your own self off the hook. We are so used to being responsible for everything, so overcaring and doing, so vigilant for problems to solve and ways to help, that we just can’t abide the idea that the child can and does form his own identity and we don’t always love it.
But we always love them even if it is just a thin, wispy, fishline in the wind connection that holds us together.
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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