OmegaMom

OmegaDotter is asleep in bed with horsies and doggies. OmegaDad has finished playing TradeWinds and is also ensconced in bed. The Dawg is outside barking at the moon and skunks and other wildlife. It’s not too late, and now it’s time for me to set fingers to keyboard and attempt the math thang once more.

Like I said, math just wasn’t “it” for me. I hated it. Compared to my dad–whom I regarded with something akin to awe, and who ate differential equations for breakfast–I just couldn’t figure the stuff out.

And even way back then, in Them Olden Dayes, we had “new math”, which didn’t help…set theory, oh, yes, but fractions? Hmmm. At the beginning of the year in seventh grade, our teacher began teaching us some stuff that was supposed to be pre-algebra. She struggled. We struggled. One day, about 4 or so months into the school year, our frustrated teacher came in and gave us a test on fractions. Then, she sat down with us and asked us about fractions. It came out that none of us had a clue of what to do with fractions. She immediately tossed out the curriculum and spent the rest of the year teaching us…fractions and percents.

It was horrid. Boring. Irritating. Looking back, though, I am so glad she did it.

It still didn’t make me like math. Ew, yuck, bleah. My dad took solace in my constant scribblings–short stories styled a la Conan Doyle; a carefully composed one-page newspaper, using press-on lettering and pasted-on typewritten columns (Ye Olden Dayes, remember!), artfully aged in the oven after being sprayed with lemon-water so it browned nicely, describing the attack on Fort Sumter; a paper decorated with a cartoon of Genghis Khan sitting behind an executive’s desk, claiming that his conquering success was because he was the Henry Ford of decision-making.

As I said, in my first dilletant year in college, I avoided mathematics entirely by taking a programming class (Fortran WatIV).

None of it made sense to me. It was all drudgery.

Then, at the age of 32, I returned to college (again), with A Plan. If I could successfully pass trigonometry and a semester of calculus, I would get a degree in computer science. If not, I would go into international relations or graphic design.

I lucked out.

I got a professor who was in love with math. Not only that, but she could explain it. Suddenly, all that stuff that was drudgery and confusion became clear and beautiful.

Yes. Beautiful.

Intriguing. Enthralling.

Those years of drudgery and practice and foundations paid off, because the scut-work was easy.

As a result of Carla’s classes, I ended up getting a minor in mathematics, after all those years of hatred.

I soaked in Numeric Analysis. I reveled in Graph Theory (very hard, by the way, but extremely pretty). I slogged through Matrix Algebra (eh). I stayed up until all hours of the night, scribbling proofs and equations in my notebooks. And if I hit a particularly thorny problem, my dreams took over, and I would wake up in the morning with The Answer.

Because of all that, I got comfy with my math professors and the scientific theories behind computer science, enough so that I applied for that internship at Los Alamos, met my husband, and adopted OmegaDotter.

Pretty heavy stuff…

Buuut…it’s the foundations I’d still like to get to. Part III coming up soon.

Lifted from PAGent:

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

(I’d show the listing of my super-hero correlations, but my template always gets all wonky with these tests.)

…what the hell is wrong with some folks?!?!

Soooo. We will get back to mathematics soon, soon!, I promise. This weekend. Yah, you betcha!

But after having a dearth of posting ideas, suddenly the world comes crashing in, and I have three posts noodling around in my head (Firestorms in the Blogoverse, related to the way cool concept that Chief Cecilia Fire Thunder, of the Oglala Sioux, proclaimed that she would start a South Dakota abortion clinic on the reservation and sidestep the state laws due to sovereignty; Bemidji, MN, which may be more than a blip on the OmegaFamily front Real Soon Now and is the Curling Capital of the USA; and various commentary on the story linked in the previous post).

The third topic is suddenly in the forefront, because I have RSS feeds from a few adult Korean adoptees in my blogroll, and it illustrates that the same statement can be viewed in polarly opposing fashion.

A parent in the article said this: “With an African-American child we had no guarantee that the mother or a social worker wouldn’t come and take the child away,” McKenzie’s mother, Maree Forbes, said. “With the children from China, we felt safe that there wouldn’t be anyone to come back to get them.”

The two adult adoptees who commented on this statement say they were filled with rage, that it reflects “white privilege”, that it discounts any connection between adoptees and birthparents, and more.

Gulp.

Look, fellas and gals. That kind of statement isn’t white privilege speaking. It’s fear, plain, simple, stark, unadorned fear.

Fear that you will bring a baby into your house and lose your heart to it, only to have someone yank that baby away from you in the first few months or years.

In my Why post, I discuss some of the issues that the Omegas delved into when turning to adoption. That fear of losing your heart to an innocent child, then having to relinquish, is very strong.

I don’t know about the majority of other adoptive parents out there…there are certainly plenty who actively blank out any thought of the birthparents, who deny any possibility that their children will, at adulthood, seek out the birthparents or feel any connection. But there are plenty who don’t feel like that, who realize that there are great losses connected to adoption, that their children are losing any connection with their birth culture (and are, therefore, accused of “doom and gloom” when posting about grief and hard questions from their kiddos on The Big List…”be prepared” equates to “doom and gloom” for a bunch of folks, which is why I am constantly putting in disclaimers about how the Omega Family, at least, isn’t constantly marching around with a black cloud over their heads…but I digress).

The thing is, these adult adoptees are viewing that comment from a perspective of the adoptive parents thinking they will NEVER have to worry about these things. Adoptive parents, however, are viewing it with the perspective of having a baby yanked from their arms by judicial process.

So I’m thrown for a loop. What does one say? Yes. This is a very big reason why many adoptive parents choose China. Because, if a child is in an orphanage, the odds are great that no-one is going to come knocking on your door and demand you rip your heart out.

Yes, yes, yes, the children have embedded losses. Yes, yes, yes, they had no say-so in the whole process. Yes, yes, yes, the birthparents are very likely still alive, still thinking of those children with broken hearts. Yes, yes, yes, it’s “selfish” of the adoptive parents to barrel on, with those huge aspects in the background–but, goddamn it, no-one tells bioparents that they are “selfish” for having kids.

That biological pull to have children in the house is HUGE. Huge, I tell you. You have no idea how strong it is until you are in the process, and suddenly your life is revolving around procreation, and it is at all levels of your consciousness.

I’m still processing the thought that simply telling OmegaDotter why we chose China over other possible adoption paths may end up with her throwing “white privilege” in our faces, when we thought we were following the most ethical, clean adoption process we could come up with.