China trips
posted in Adoption, Chinese culture, NaBloPoMo, Reader Input |Instant negotiation mode: Anyone who has been a parent can recognize that. It’s when the child asks for something, and you give an answer that isn’t what that child wants, and the child immediately starts pushing the boundary back. It’s how “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” gets magically re-arranged into “yes” in a child’s mind. It’s how “next Saturday” becomes “tomorrow” when there’s talk of a friend coming over, or “one piece of candy after dinner” turns into “three! now!”
So we have told the dotter that we will be visiting China when she’s 10 or 11. This immediately gets turned into “why not when I’m 9? Or 8?” whenever it comes up.
Why not? Well, there are finances. A trip to China is spendy: there are the flights, the hotels, the meals, the tours, the museums, the tour guides, more. This means saving up money. (Sigh. Really. I actually looked just now at real, current prices for heritage tours, plus prices for air fare. So, yeah, 10…that would give us enough time to save up the dough.) In addition, there’s the question of maturity. A trip when she’s 8 is likely to become a blur when she’s an adult, whereas a trip when she’s 10 is more likely to leave specifics in the memory.
A trip to China when she’s young is not an “if”, though it may have seemed like it to some readers. A series of trips to China is an “if”. In a perfect world, we would have enough money to traipse across the continents whenever the whim took us, but this is not a perfect world. (Actually, in a perfect world, she would have been raised by her birthparents, and this would all be moot.) We are able to say “Yes, we will take you to China” once; we cannot guarantee more than that.
My international adoptee readers may not like that, but that’s the way it goes: We can schedule one trip, we may schedule two, and it would be really nice but very unlikely to do more than that before the dotter hits college age and starts wanting to make her own travel itineraries, probably including such parent-pleasing destinations as Ft. Lauderdale or Baja California during spring break.
(Excuse me while I start hyperventilating and practically faint at the very thought of my darlin’ innocent dotter in the midst of the heathen sun-loving, fun-loving, drinking & debauching freshmen and sophomores who crowd into the resorts during spring break. Specifically male freshmen and sophomores who might be eyeing her with lustful intent. ACK! La-la-la, I’m not thinking about it!!!!)
Ahem. Back now.
My non-adoption-related blog readers may think we shouldn’t do it at all. That’s what’s interesting being the parent of an internationally adopted child in these days of Ye Olde Interwebz: one can read all the mutterings, meanderings, thoughts and rants and dispassionately logical layouts of adult adoptees, and become assimilated into the Adoption Borg–but not quite enough, at which point the non-adoption people in one’s life think that you have become totally and absolutely obsessive about adoption and you’re going to turn the child into a neurotic wanker as a result.
The upshot of all this: none of your audience is completely satisfied. Well, phooey on that: We’re doing what we can, the best we think we can, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go suck lemons. Or something like that. Mainly, we’re tootling along in life doing what we think is best, and trying to keep adoption issues and Chinese culture an open item to integrate into the family dynamic without turning it into the be-all, end-all, and still doing the normal school- and summer-camp- and gymnastics- and holiday-gatherings- and family-visits-balance in life.
