OmegaMom

We were handed a tiny, solemn, scared little 10-month-old in a Chinese Affairs office in Nanning.

I still remember feeling, later that night, as we were sitting in our hotel room, looking at our new daughter, that a Very Large Mistake had been made, that these people didn’t know what they were doing:  they gave us a BABY?!?!  What on earth were they thinking?!?  We had absolutely no idea how to take care of a baby.  In fact, within a day or two, she managed to roll off the bed and bump her head, and we were sure that we had damaged her for life.

Hah.

Let me show you what she was like when she was three:

And when she was four:

And five:

Six:

Seven:

Eight:

Nine:

And ten, this year—some pics that I haven’t posted here, but may have on Facebook.  First off, all dolled up as the flower girl at her uncle’s wedding:

Her fall fifth grade school pic:

Her gymnastics team pic:

And a nice picture at lunch with us and her grandparents who came to visit (now doable because we live in New Mexico, not the wilds of Alaska):

We are well on our way into the scary world of tweendom.  There are times when she is an absolute mystery to me.  But then, there are times when we spend the entire ride home from gymnastics (1/2 hour) singing with pop songs on the radio at the top of our lungs.

She is beautiful.  She is artistic.  She is athletic.  She sings beautifully (but, alas, I haven’t been able to record her, but I might be able to talk her into it, or simply sneak a recorder into the car on one of our drives home, so she doesn’t go all self-conscious).  She is growing up.

She is in Level 6 in gymnastics, and next year, if she manages to conquer the (scary) giant on the uneven bars, she will be in Level 7/Optionals, which is a major step forward.  She has a rock-hard body, and delights in showing off her six-pack abdomen.

She is constantly alerting me to things that are inappropriate…at the same time, she and her buds at school have reached the stage where anything that can remotely, possibly be related to anything inappropriate sets off a fit of embarrassment and laughter.  (Prime example:  The science volunteer who comes in once a week to do a few hours of experiments and science with the kids was talking mechanics, and started describing a situation where one BALL was shooting into TWO BALLS, thus, no doubt, imparting kinetic energy.  Did we get told about kinetic energy by the girl?  No.  We got required to sign an essay about showing respect to teachers and volunteers because she and her buds busted a gut laughing about BALLS.)

She has finally found a book that appealed to her enough so that she a) purchased it, b) started reading it, and c) finished reading it, all on her own, with no urging from me or requirement from school.  What was this literary delight?  It was Justin Bieber’s new book.  Hey.  Whatever works, y’know?  At this point, I am ready to fall down on my knees and kiss the ground in front of his feet for that particular piece of grace.  No-one better bad-mouth Bieber to me any more! 

(I really plan to write more on the blog.  It will probably be only on weekends, though, as our time gets eaten up with traveling to and from gymnastics…)

This evening as I was driving the dotter home from gymnastics, she was talking about M.’s two sisters, who are both pregnant—one at 15 and one at 18.

Luckily, I have indoctrinated her enough so that she commented that they had made “bad decisions.”  Yo, baby, that’s what I like to hear!  She further went on to say that the younger sister, now at 6 or 7 months pregnant, was now big and ungainly (well, okay, she said “fat”, which bugs me, but let’s continue on), and I added that her back probably hurt a lot, and her legs, and she had been sick to her stomach early on…

OmegaDotter asked me how on earth I knew, since, well, I’d never been pregnant (okay, two weeks pregnant…).  I allowed as how I had gotten sick to my stomach, but that was it.

She then said that it was good that I hadn’t been pregnant, because if I’d been pregnant, we wouldn’t have adopted her.  Well, she’d still have been adopted by another family, but we wouldn’t be her parents.

And then she added the kicker:  “I’m a lucky girl.”

Ack!

So I quickly told her that we were the lucky ones, because we got her and we love her and she’s smart and funny and blah de blah de blah.

Which segued into how we didn’t have a choice, and didn’t get to choose her, which led into how (so far as I know), the folks at CCAA actually read the files on the kiddoes and read the files on the parents and try—at least a little bit—to match the personalities of the parents to the kid.  Of course, it’s hard when you’ve got nannies’ perceptions of what a little baby is like, but I occasionally read the translation of their description of the dotter, and the thing that stood out was that she was intense and thoughtful and liked music—all of which were definitely mentioned in our homestudies.

But still…”lucky girl”.  Sigh.  “Lucky” to have her birth family be forced—whether by law, by custom, by economic issues, by overbearing inlaws, or what-have-you—to abandon her where she would (hopefully) be found.  Or, possibly, “lucky” to have her birth family decide to sell her to a finding service (Brian Stuy, at Research China, has been writing about how his research seems to be leading to a great deal of baby selling earlier than previously thought).  “Lucky” to have been taken out of her birth culture…

Oh, yeah, sure:  We love her, she loves us, we’re a (generally) happy family.  She’s smart, she’s getting a good education, she’s doing great in gymnastics, she’ll have college and support, and become a fairly successful middle- to upper-class U.S.A.ian woman.  That part is all good.  But underlying it all is a basic fact:  she started out being abandoned.  And maybe it will mean a lot to her when she’s an adult, maybe it won’t.  But there are plenty of adult international adoptees out there on the internets who write about how that one basic fact forms a foundation for the rest of their outlooks and attitudes.  (Please don’t label these people “angry adoptees” or “unhappy adoptees”—typically they’re quite happy with their lives; it’s just that there’s a facet to their personalities that those of us who grew up in our birth families don’t have to cope with.)

…on December 8, we stepped off a plane in Nanning, got on a bus, drove to our hotel, and started filling out lots of paperwork.  Two hours later, we were handed a quiet, intense little girl dressed in a multitude of layers.

Sometimes I still wonder what on earth they were thinking.  They gave us a baby, fer cryin’ out loud!!!

Well, she’s definitely not a baby anymore.  Far from it.  At dinner tonight, OmegaDad was rerunning our old story of how our first dinner out went, with us eating noodles with chopsticks, and her eyes following every move of the chopsticks, her little mouth open, just waiting for us to drop a noodle in, like a bird.  OmegaDotter was clearly not amused; she was giving off an emanation of, “Oh, lordy, Daddy, not that story again!”

Hah!

The first moments:

Our first Christmas.  Somewhere, I have a picture of her happily chewing wrapping paper:

First year:

Second year:

Third year:

Fourth year:

Fifth year:

Sixth year:

Seventh year:

Eighth year:

And so it goes.  It’s been a splendid eight years.

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

In addition to suddenly being bereft of all ties to the older generation, we are dealing with the younger generation in the person of our dotter.

It is, we guess, attachment issues.  And possible ADD.  The only good thing that is holding me up right this moment is the fact that the Bad Days are coming exactly 24 hours after a therapy appointment…which, when I realized it, lifted a bit of the misery and gloom and desire to just walk away, get on an airplane, and fly to Arizona where I have a house of my own, free and clear, because if there’s such a direct correlation in response, then maybe, just maybe, the therapy might be helping.

Maybe.

And, hell, what we’re dealing with here is minor, compared to serious attachment issues.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how people deal with major attachment disorders in their children; this is wearing enough.

But, to break the mood of this post, I will pass on Allie Brosh’s latest, over at Hyperbole and a Half.  I hope it makes you howl with laughter, the way it did for me.

Early this summer, I signed OmegaDotter up for Chinese Camp in Big City.  When she heard, she pouted—seriously.  She did not want to go, no, no, no!  This came with associated stomping of feet and whining.  This Monday, as we were driving in to Big City early in the morning on the way to her week’s worth of Chinese Camp, she whimpered some more, and I laid down the law:  She was going to Chinese Camp, she was going every year we could do it, and we’d make her do it when she was a teenager, too.

Why?  She whined.

Well, because we want you to get at least a smidgen (I gestured with my fingers less than an inch apart) of an idea of Chinese culture and her heritage.  Oh, and, by the way, adults who were adopted from other Asian countries who didn’t get to go to culture camps as youngsters felt more deprived than those who did.  (Not to say those who did go felt “not deprived”, just a little “less deprived”.)

She flounced in the front seat of the car and “hmphed” and made various unhappy sounds as we pulled into the parking lot.

When I picked her up that afternoon, she was much happier about the whole thing.

Tuesday, she did a performance of the dance she was learning for OmegaDad and me after dinner.

Today, she showed us a (really cool!) “magic” trick with Chinese yo-yos that she has practiced.

And tonight, at dinner, she asked us if she could use her “real name” rather than the name we gave her when we adopted her.

Well.  What a difference a few days makes!

Now, first off, I remember very distinctly being about nine years old and telling my parents—also at dinner time—that I wanted to be called “Elizabeth”.  No real reason—I just liked the name much better than my given name, Katharine.  I also remember my mom and dad acquiescing, and calling me Elizabeth for a week, at which point I begged them to puh-leeze call me Kate again.

However, OmegaDotter has a reason:  SiSi is the name she had before we adopted her.  It’s a connection to China and her past and her heritage.  So we’re going to do our best to remember to call her that all the time, rather than OmegaDotter.  She’s asked to do it for a week to see if she can get used to it.  She wants to be registered at school using that name—I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that, alas, but maybe we can ask her teacher to call her SiSi instead of OmegaDotter.  We did tell her that she would have to get used to telling people how to pronounce it, since any American seeing it will call her “Sissy” instead of “Siih-Siih”.  In fact, OmegaDad and I, who have used her Chinese Name on a semi-regular basis anyway, pronounce it incorrectly, calling her “Ss-Suh”.  (There’s a very small schwa in there after the first S, but I don’t know how to put in a schwa, so just imagine it, please.)

We did, however, tell her that we wouldn’t change it legally for a while, because that requires going before a judge, and we wanted her to be sure.

We’ll see how this goes.

(For those wondering:  I am using her Chinese name in this one post, but will continue to refer to her as OmegaDotter.  Since her legal name is not SiSi, and none of her friends know her as that—so far—I figure one post with her Chinese name is okay.)

I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery.  My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery.  Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year?  After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.

So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.

Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his.  He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.

The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy.  I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally).  The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind.  Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.

In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.

First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S.  The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:

When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart.  I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China.  I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.

Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview.  While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it.  Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.

The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs.  The gist:  ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc.  It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web.  This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo.  It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such.  And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.

Well.  The shit hit the fan.  The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide.  A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why.  A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving.  One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way.  The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question.  All that’s left is the post mortems.

I watched this with great interest.  My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?!  This is an advertorial, damn it!  What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?!  Ewwwwwww!!!!

For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial.  In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine.  Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no.  I mean, it’s taboo.  Really, truly.  As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO.  You do not do this.  And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.

Period.

It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.

I was appalled, myself.  I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.

(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional.  She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism.  However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)

Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB).  Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.

She slides through the water, her body long and slim and straight, her arms curving upward and over, flashing back into the water cleanly, effortlessly, moving swiftly and aimed straight.

It’s as if her body has taken the past three years of gymnastics, and the sporadic dips into swim lessons, put them together and realized, “Ahah!  This is how it goes!”  All the various portions of her body are suddenly working in unison, propelling her through the water like an arrow.

Now, breathing?  That’s a different matter!  But it’s clear to me, watching, that she is getting the hang of that, too, the coordination of the head turn, the arms moving, the legs kicking, the water flowing, the air coming out of the body and breathing back in.

She will become a good swimmer, a fast swimmer, I can tell.

Last night at bedtime, she got off onto a discussion of how we are all related, everyone on earth.

She is coming up with funky, kicky clothes combos—definitely not my style, but very definitely her style.

So there she is, poised, on the brink, transforming while we watch from a little girl to a young lady.  Oh, it takes more time than this, she is still only eight, she goes into silly fits with her best bud, she still stands stock still in shock when she’s spilled something rather than running to get a paper towel to clean it up, she still crows with glee when she wins at a game and pouts when she loses (no matter how many times we talk about “being a good sport” yadda yadda yadda), and many days she just wants to wear a sloppy T-shirt and a pair of my sweat pants pooling around her feet.  But the future her peeks out again and again, more and more often.

The story of Artyom has lured me back into reading adult adoptee blogs again, but now I read them with less of a distance.  It hits me like a punch in the gut, reading about an adult adoptee who has reunited with her parents in Taiwan, and how she feels lost between two worlds, how she mourns her could-have-beens with her birthparents at the same time as she cherishes her did-thats with her adoptive parents.  Here, there, in-between.  Moving toward some vague semblance of the comfort that families should have, realizing it will never truly happen, because back in time, when she was just a babe, she was removed from there and placed here, and “here” and “there” are different cultures, different languages, different families, different behaviors totally.

So I look at my butterfly-in-the-chrysalis, my girl arrowing through the water, and my heart breaks for her.  Is she going to feel like that in the future?  Is my funny, smart, bouncing, athletic, silly girl going to be a 30-year-old staring helplessly at the past and realizing:  This is the Could Have Been, this is the past, this is the Never-Happened, this is my life in microcosm and I can never go back there, and how do I take these two halves that are halfway across the world and put them back together to make a whole that is Me?

Part of me scoffs, saying, “Girl!  She’s not that introspective!  She’s a live-life-full-bore-charging-off-without-consideration type of kid!”  The other part of me says, “She’s eight.  What will she be like when she’s 13?  When she’s 25?  When she’s 31?  Maybe she will slow down and it will hit her then.”  Another part of me listens to her at bedtime asking “why did Kai have to die?” or “Are we all—everyone in the world—related?” and knows that even if she doesn’t obsess over every facet, every particle, every “what-if”, she’s already starting the process of maturation that leads to questions like those.

It’s less academic now, more real.  Day by day, she’s moving towards a more adult way of looking at the world, of thinking about things.  I won’t be able to protect her when things hurt.  I shouldn’t protect her—it’s her life, not mine.  But sometimes it’s an arrow to the heart to think about it.

One thing about the tale of Artyem, the Russian boy adopted then returned, which I have seen only one post directly address, and which has been bothering the hell out of me:

When was some idiot child going to use that tale to be mean to my dotter?  When was someone going to tell her that we were going to send her back, because that’s what people do to adopted kids?

Oh, there were plenty of posts about the feeling of loss and abandonment that some adopted people feel, long into their adult years.  There were plenty of posts about the whys and wherefores of this woman’s case.  There were plenty of posts about the ethical, moral issues.  But not really any specifically saying:  I have an eight-year-old child who was adopted, and I’m terrified that someone is going to use this story to HURT HER.

There was one night last week where she was snuggled up on the Big Chair in the living room.  I was walking by, and she asked me to sit with her because she had something to say to me.  Now, OmegaDotter has a tendency to do this when you’re not paying attention to her, and it always turns out to be something lame, being used an an excuse to Get Attention.  I was dubious.  Then she said, “I’m sad about adoption.”

Oh, boy.  I immediately sat down.  So we talked—a little bit—about what made her sad.  She’s getting better at being able to say these things, but not any better about the whys.  I asked her why she was sad, and how she was sad, and all she could do was say she was sad.

“I know it’s sad for you sometimes.  It’s happy and sad for your dad and me; we’re happy that we adopted you, but sad that you had to lose your birth family for us to adopt you, and sad that it makes you sad.”

So I had to ask her, “Has anyone been teasing you about being adopted?”  She shook her head no.  We snuggled a bit, she bounced up, and that was that.

Um.  Okay.  Was that all?  Hm.

I kept wondering during the week, what do I do?  Do I ask her directly if she’s heard about the story?  Do I just let it sit?  What if I let it sit and someone pulls it out like a trump card in the midst of a kid fight?  Will she talk to us about it or just keep it hidden tight?  What do I do?!

This evening at bedtime, the dam busted.  I was giving her her goodnight kiss, and looking at her I couldn’t just let her be defenseless against this story.  I knew that at some point, someone would pull it and cut with it and it would hurt like a knife.

“Hey, kiddo.  Anyone at school tell you about the boy who was adopted and sent back?”

Hey, I never said I was subtle about these things…

Her eyes widened, and she shook her head.

“Anyone tease you about being sent back to China?”

“No.  Why?”

“Well, there was this story in the news this week about a 7-year-old boy who was adopted by a woman who ended up sending him back.”  I held her by the side of her head and stared into her eyes.  “And I just want you to know:  We would never, ever ‘send you back to China’.  Never, ever.  You’re stuck with us, girl!”  I kind of choked up on the word “stuck” so it came out funny.

“Styuck?!  Ha!  You’re styuck with me!” she giggled.

“I mean it.  You’re stuck with us.  We would never send you back to China, no matter how horribly you behave.”  I gave her the hairy eyeball (my tone and my mugged expression made sure that the “no matter how horribly you behave” was taken as an exaggeration, not a condemnation).  She smiled.  It wasn’t a “haha, that’s funny!” smile.  It wasn’t a “I’m being cute and know it” smile.  It was a big happy smile. 

“No matter how bad I am?!”

“No matter what, kiddo.”

Then she needed the details of the story, so I gave her an abbreviated version.  She asked me when it happened.  I told her.  She got indignant:  “On your birthday!  That’s sucky!”  I mentally blinked—that hadn’t even occurred to me.  She decided she wanted to go KILL the woman.  Oops, nip that in the bud right quick, OmegaMom!  Then she decided she wanted to write a letter telling the woman she was mean and cruel and—bad word alert!—shhhh!—stupid.  She wanted to see a picture of the woman; was she pretty or ugly?  Which was a good opening to OmegaMom’s standard “pretty people can be mean, too; it’s not what’s on the outside that matters, it’s what’s on the inside” shtick.

Which, of course, led to the dotter pretending to rip off her skin (her own skin) to see what was inside (all very dramatic and done in a silly way), which led to “did you know my bladder is right here”, pointing to the middle of her abdomen, “not down here”, pointing to right above the pubic bone.  Which led to the dotter explaining that her teacher had shown a picture of the insides and the bladder was in the middle and did I know the stomach wasn’t round, but was shaped like a banana?

So.  I feel better just getting it out there in the open.  The story itself, and the underlying fear that some adult adoptees say they always had, that they would be “sent back”.

Some posts on the story:  Yoon’s Blur and Harlow’s Monkey ask why adult adoptees are never interviewed about stories like these?  Random Babble talks blunt talk.  Pundit Mom says Children Don’t Come With Return Policies and also doesn’t like the media slant on these stories.  Lisa Belkin talks about the case in the context of whether international adoptions should be done at all.  Patricia Cogen talks about how the mother in the case should have searched for help.  KJ Dell’Antonia says “I Did Not Love My Adopted Child”—the gist of which is that older child adoption can be hard, and adoptive parents should talk about it more openly—but which has rubbed many people the wrong way (see comments on the story and on Twitter).  And John Raible’s post, Learning from Aryom’s plight, was the one that specifically said that adopted children—right here, right now—might be impacted and APs need to be proactive about it.  Thanks, John; I think that spurred me on to bulling through the subject in my blundering way.

The story of the single mom who adopted a 7-year-old from Russia, then sent him back unaccompanied on an international flight with a letter that said—essentially—“I’m sending the defective goods back” has been reverberating through the news and the adoptive community for the past week.

I’m trying to organize my thoughts here, so I think I’ll do it bullet-point wise while I’m organizing.

• They had had the boy for six months.  Um.  Okay; everything I’ve read says that it takes the child being in a family as long as the child has been in an institution for any real attachment to take place.  Six months is no time at all in terms of family growth and re-settlement and stability and and and…
• The adoption agency in the U.S. had been doing the follow-up visits and reported no problems at the last visit, which was about a month ago.
• Russia is angry.  Well, dammit, they’ve been angry about a series of adoption-related issues over the past few years; what does it take to (a) have them realize that good and solid information about a child’s behaviors and issues is needful and necessary for a safe and stable adoption situation; (b) have them decide there are serious problems with the current Russian-international adoption approach and figure out how to change it; (c) have them just decide to shut down the international adoption program entirely?

Now, a lot of folks are faulting the adoption agency for approving this woman for adoption.  The adoption agency in question is actually used quite often by families in Alaska for adoptions from China, and they have always had good “cred” in the Alaska FCC mailing list.

I’ve read their “questions and answers” sheet about the case, and, reading between the lines, it sounds like this woman never asked for help.  In addition, the agency claims that they have always found another family for a child who is not a “good fit” with the family that adopts him/her.

Why didn’t this woman ask for help???

Was she unprepared?

Well, supposedly she had ten hours’ worth of training in the ins and outs of international adoption.

Okay.  First off, ten hours isn’t shit.  It’s what’s required by law, but it’s still not shit.  Not for something like adoption.  Period.  Oh, we had that same ten hours of training ourselves, via videos from our out-of-state adoption agency.  Even so, even though it’s a lick and a swipe at the potential issues that can crop up in adoption, it certainly mentioned the worse-case scenarios multiple times.

At which point, we went online and researched it for ourselves.

Well, actually, we had gone online and researched it for ourselves long before we got those videos.  We joined email lists.  We read up on attachment issues.  We read up on ways to foster attachment.  If we had been adopting an older child, we would have researched ideas for fostering attachment in older children.  We talked and talked and talked about these possibilities.

But y’know, there are a lot of people out there who are…blinded…by their hopes and dreams.  A person who is blinded like that will hear the training, but not listen.  They will fall victim to magical thinking:  “Oh, yes, that sort of thing happens, but it won’t happen to us!”  Or, “Oh, yes, if that happens to us, we will be able to Make It All Better Through True Love!”  Or something.  Probably, we, too, were victims of magical thinking.  But when it became obvious to us that OmegaDotter had some issues, we didn’t cover our ears and sing, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!”  All that prior research made it very easy for me to go to our pediatrician and discuss our worries and specify why we had them, and our selection of a pediatrician with international adoption experience made it so that when I approached her about these issues, she was able to come up with a therapist (occupational therapy) who could help.

Right there, though, is a crucial element:  We asked for help.  When we realized we needed help, we reached out.

While I am fully aware that journalists are incredibly able to twist a story or leave out important details, and that speaking to the grandmother in a case like this is, essentially, relying on hearsay, the grandmother claims that the mother “talked” to psychologists, but did not take the child in for any sort of therapy.

Dudes.  If you’ve adopted, and you’re facing problems with your newly adopted child, you don’t rely on a phone call or two for either diagnosis or therapy.  Period.  You get your child into therapy with a qualified therapist of some type who has experience with children adopted from institutions, experience with attachment disorders, sensory disorders.  To boot, any psychologist who makes a diagnosis over the phone without seeing the person in question is a disgrace to the profession.  (Some of my long-time readers may recall a specific controversial instance where this was done.)

If you are adopting, here’s a word of advice:  Your agency is there to help you.  Not just before the adoption.  Not just during the adoption trip.  If you’re having problems, your agency should be able to help you.  It’s part of what you’re paying them for. 

But because these options are available doesn’t mean all people take advantage of them.  If you’re a person who has been blinded by the “I’m going to rescue a poooor helpless cheee-ild from a cold, loveless, dead-end life in a (::shudder::) orphanage!” spiel, you’re probably not going to be the kind of person who actually listens to the (ain’t shit) ten hours of training.  You’re probably not going to be the kind of person who realizes that, with older children, there’s a honeymoon period, and after the honeymoon period, it takes hard work.  Even if you’ve got a beautiful, innocent, sweet baby girl, being a parent takes hard work once the honeymoon period is over with.

(I’d be very, very interested to find out the percentage of adoption disruptions correlated to age at adoption and country of origin.  It would be nice if this information were actually tracked.  Certainly, it seems that there are a helluva lot more news stories about disruptions or accounts of abuse for children adopted from Russia; is this actually the case, or am I suffering from confirmation bias here?  I find myself wondering if there’s an inherent issue at work, being that people who are adopting from Russia are [typically] adopting from there in hopes of not being a “conspicuous family”, and, not having it in-your-face, as it were, are less likely to internalize the need to confront the less pleasant aspects of older child/international adoption/adopting institutionalized children?)

Then:

Now:

It doesn’t seem possible that seven years have passed.  Seven years ago, right now, we were on our way to Nanning after a lovely dim sum breakfast in the Guangzhou airport.  We actually signed the papers around 5 p.m. on December 8 in China, which would be around 7 a.m. here, and we met her around 6 p.m., which would be 8 a.m. here.

She’s pretty amazing.  We’re pretty damned lucky.

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

I have to admit that when I read your response to her questions (maybe not given to her, but the ones you expressed ~ about it being unlikely that she could find her first parents, or her poster could get her parents in trouble?), it bothered me.
As adoptees we grow up completely believing what our adoptive parents tell us about the circumstances around our adoption. But when we become adults and find out more information (more than our parents said was available) it brings with it emotions that “just is” ~ nothing our adoptive parents could say or do will take them away or keep us from having to walk through the grief, no matter how hard they try. And it even more invalidation when we sense our adoptive parents are trying so hard to do this for us ~ to take away our pain, through their answers, honest or not.

It’s a hard balance.  I admit that I am a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time–one way of looking at it, though I prefer to think of it as “pragmatic” or “realistic”.  I do think it unlikely that, given what information we have, we could find anything, due to the fact that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.

Or at least, the information we were given says that she was found in a busy spot in a rather big city.  Which is one of the problems:  that information could be made up of whole cloth.  And we don’t know.

How do you carefully get this across to an almost-eight-year-old?  We don’t know.  Anything.  For sure.  How do you tell a child who hasn’t experienced a really big city just how many people there are there?  How do you explain that what information we have is a grain of sand on a big beach?  How do you say, “Even what we know, we don’t know that it is true”?

I have been very careful, all along, to say, “We think” or “we were told” or “the orphanage says” about these things.  But what one person says, another person may not hear, or may hear through a filter.  I say, “We think it must have been very hard for your birthmother to leave you.”  OmegaDotter may hear, “Your birthmother was devastated.”  I say, “The orphanage says you were left at the gates of XYZ.”  She may hear, “That is where you were left.”  How do you tell a child that adults lie about things like this?  She’s still at a stage where hearing me say “Bullshit!” accidentally when we’re playing B.S. (a card game–quite fun, taught to us by Aunt L. and cousins K. and I.) makes her gasp and say, “Oh!  You said the b…sh… word!  That means cow poop, but you’re not supposed to say it!”

Yes, I want to protect her.  Yes, I know it doesn’t help, in the end.  But the things that are wrapped around these questions are…well, more mature issues, questions of honesty and decency in adults, questions of the general ethics of international adoptions, questions of the problems of involving large amounts of money in the transferrence of responsibility for a small human being, questions of “human trafficking”.  I want her to know about these things, but in an age-appropriate manner.  So I start small.  I use weasel words, semantics…”we think”, “we were told”, “the orphanage says”…all of which are true, and all of which mean “this is information but it’s not the biblical truth”.  I have, in talking about her birthmother, told the dotter about the one child laws, and how they have changed; I have also mentioned that it’s possible her mother was young and unable to raise a child.  As she gets older, the more nuanced versions come out more.

Youngsters are concrete thinkers.  But as the dotter is getting older, she is becoming more aware that black-white thinking doesn’t always fit the world around her.  International adoption–hell, private domestic adoption, even adoption through the state–all of these have shades of grey on all sides.  So as she becomes more able to shade her own thinking about the world, so can we start offering more shades to her own story.

There are people who have searched for Chinese birthparents, with some successes.  Brian Stuy, of Research-China, has interviewed some birthmothers, and in Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China, Kay Ann Johnson also found and interviewed a number of Chinese birthmothers.  So birth families can be found, and some people have located their own children’s birth families.  Then I have heard tales of birth parents who have anonymously contacted people trying to locate them, pleading with them to not continue, because they are afraid of the repercussions.

There have been tens of thousands of children adopted from China in the past 15 years, and the number of located birthparents is still very small.

So:  How to say, “we will help you look” without it turning–in a child’s magical way of thinking–into “we will find your birthmother NOW”?  How to instill a realistic view of the probabilities?  How to find that balance?

The subject of international birth parent searching has also recently been discussed on This Woman’s Work and today on American Family.  Let me know what y’all think, too…

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.

OmegaDotter has been gifted over the past year or so with many, many notebooks.  Each of them has been christened “my diary”, with great plans to write in it every day, and then, usually the day after, *poof* goes the idea, floating away with the wind.

Recently she dug up one of those notebooks and started actually writing in it.  Every day.  She has been writing at bed time, after I read (or she reads), and after we play the Feeling Game.  She stashes it under her pillow, and earnestly tells me that “it’s secret!”

Yesterday, she decided to make me read her entry.  It was about how Buffy died.

Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.

It started out:

Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”

She told the story of how “I became separated from her”, how her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because in China you can’t have more than one child.  (Okay, I have told her the whole “one child if a boy, two if the first is a girl”, but I guess it hasn’t sunk in yet.)  And how her birth mother kept her for a week, then left her by the side of the “rode”, and a policeman picked her up and took her to the “orfinije”.

There was a little drawing underneath, a framed picture with “I ♥ my birth mom”, sort of scrapbooking style.

So I climbed into bed with her and snuggled and talked about how it was okay to miss her birth mom, and it was okay to talk about it.  That we would be taking her to China for a visit when she was 10 or 11, and maybe we’d try to take her there every few years.

Our little lawyer immediately tried to negotiate the visit for 8 or 9 instead.  Ahem.

Then she wanted to print out posters with her picture on them, with the Chinese for “lost girl” on it, to take with us.  At which point…sigh.  How to explain to her that something like that could get her birth parents in trouble?  Or that it probably wouldn’t do much good, because, face it, where she was found is a city, a big city with 1.34 million in the urban area?

I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.

Then she made me read another entry she had written, about a dream about Kai, where I had taken his bones and made him come alive again.

Deep waters.  Each of these entries has dealt with “loss” in some form or another.  I told her I thought that writing down what she was feeling in her diary was a good idea, and that she could always talk to me or OmegaDad about her feelings.  And I told her that it was her diary, and I wouldn’t read it unless she wanted me to, and that she didn’t have to let me read it if she didn’t want to.

I must point out that there was a great deal of (normal, accustomed) squirming and twisting on her part, and some teasing on my part, wherein I told her that her birthmother would make her do her chores and her homework.  Plus some tickling, and, interspersed in the midst of it all, her trying to put her ankles behind her head.

(Once upon a time, I was able to do that.  I was able to put both ankles behind my head.  I told her ages ago.  She has tried to do it ever since.)

But still.  Deep.

Since we’re still having gorgeous, clear, hot weather, OmegaDad is taking some days off from work to paint the formerly-stable-soon-to-be-greenhouse.  Here’s what it looked like before he started his work, a month ago:

Pretty cheesy.  I have photos of the whole process, but here’s what it looked like this afternoon:

In this picture, OmegaDad is hosing off the shed portion of the “villa” (as he calls it) in preparation for primer, which has already been applied to the greenhouse framing.  Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?!  We’re going to paint it to match the house; dark blue-gray with light blue-gray trim, and we’re going to put a square deck in the area between the two “wings”.

ANYWAY.  This is all preface to what is the main point of my post.  The dotter (shown in her painting T-shirt, which once upon a time was OmegaDad’s painting T-shirt) has been painting on pieces of plywood with the white primer.  Yesterday’s painting was of a horse (of course).  Today, though, when I came out to see how things were going, the dotter was working on a different painting.  This one:

Which I just think is very cool.

One of my little pet peeves about the blogosphere is that people can use Teh Google to do a search on a particular phrase, find a particular post on a particular blog, and extrapolate a whole boatload of stuff from that one post.  Usually the people who do things like this are people with a bee in their bonnet about some particular Issue.  An example:  A PETA person performs a search on “animal experimentation”, finds a post on a medico’s blog about an experiment in which the medico makes one comment that could be considered complimentary of one particular experiment that involved animals, and goes nutsoid.  Or a super-attachment parent–the kind who proclaims that CIO (crying it out) is child abuse, that baby-wearing is The Only Way To Raise A Child, and co-sleeping is Da Bomb–finds a post on a mommy blog that says that particular mom writing that particular blog in that particular post found CIO to work for her, and posts a comment excoriating that mommy blogger up, down, left, right.  Or similar examples.  (Please note that these are just pulled out of my ass as examples, with no specific blogs or commenters in mind.)

The other day, I logged into OmegaMom’s admin section, found an unapproved comment was listed, and opened it up to look at it.  It was a comment on this post.  Note that this post is two years old.

The comment was:

She ‘chose’ you? She had no choice! Any child would chose their natural mother and country! She settled for you! Please acknowledge her feelings later when they are not so easy to manage. ;-(

Well.  Boy howdy, am I ever chastened.  My outlook on life and adoption has been totally turned around by that one comment.  Goodness knows that prior to Dolly’s little contribution to my love fest of two years ago, I was not introspective about adoption.  Nosirreebob; I am one of those folk who think that adoption is the be-all and end-all of family building approaches, dontchaknow.  I do my very best to squelch any and all mention of my dotter’s birthparents; I refuse to talk about China and her life before we brought her home; I glory in the phrase “Gotcha Day!”; and, of course, I am the kind of person who would gladly go into adoption in a corrupt regime with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears, singing “La la la, I can’t hear you!”  But now that Dolly has so graciously informed me about the ins and outs of adoption issues so succinctly and precisely, I am A Changed Woman.

Ahem.

That was, in case you didn’t realize it, a wee tad of sarcasm.

Just a wee tad.

The context:  We (the Omegas) were discussing the day we met OmegaDotter.  OmegaDotter was, at the time, four years old.  We told her that the people in the CCAA in China had chosen her for us.  She said a cute little, sweet little, “I chose you!”, which I thought was sweet, adorable, loving, yadda yadda yadda.  I hugged her, kissed her, told her we loved her, and promptly wrote about it in my blog.

(In between various posts like this, and this, and this.  And all of these.  That last specific one, by the way, was all of nine days after the one Dolly so kindly commented on.  Post that sometimes really disturb some of my readers who are not in the adoption world, and make them feel I’m paying too much attention to adoption issues…)

But, hey.  I guess what I should have done was to grab my four-year-old by the shoulders, stare into her eyes intently, and tell her that no, she didn’t choose us, that she had no choice, that she “settled” for us, that she needed to face her deep-down feelings right then, right there, and she didn’t really love us anyway, we were just a poor substitute for her real parents and birth culture.

Obviously, Dolly doesn’t have a four-year-old. 

So, folks, do me a favor:  If you chance upon a blog that says something you really and truly disagree with, read a few other entries in that blog, like a month’s worth, just to see what that blogger might really be about.  If, after doing that, you feel like the blogger is still lower than the lint in a worm’s navel, go right ahead and post your comment.  Otherwise, regard it as one of those internet exercises in restraint, like the one where after you write a blistering email in the heat of fury, you save it as a draft, go for a long walk, and then return to re-read it before hitting the “send” button.  Almost every time I do that, I end up deleting the draft and substituting a pretty toned-down “I disagree” version instead.  Or just not sending the email at all.

Because, at the end of it all, while I’m miffed at Dolly’s presumption, I’m also amused.  Because I am so not her target.  She’s aiming at a fictional version of OmegaMom, and when she fired, it went off about 180 degrees away from her intended mark.

Context is everything, right?

So I just posted a one-liner and decamped yesterday; it was late, I was tired, I had just spent a while snuggling with the dotter, and I wanted input.

So Beth and YouKnowWhereYouAreWith responded, and I thank you both very much!

The thing is:  Ages ago, pre-dotter, while I had drunk the Kool-Aid extensively, I thought Ms. Brown was a bit much.  Her emails tend to be…um…harangue-y.  And in the workshops, she’d take the kids off by themselves and not tell you what they did!  Ack!

But here we are now, almost six years after the first time we held the dotter in our arms.  She’s almost seven (Ack, indeed!).  And every so often, I have to cuddle her at bedtime and listen to her missing her birthmother, and I have to tell her that while OmegaDad and I can certainly sympathize and understand, we can’t know exactly what it’s like.

Jane Brown is coming to Big City this spring, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to try to register us for the playshop/weekend.  I asked the dotter last night if she’d like to go to an activity where there were lots of other boys and girls who were like her, who didn’t look like their parents, who were adopted, who missed their birthmothers, and there was someone who would do plays and skits and artwork and help the kiddos talk about missing their birthfamily and being sort of the odd one out.

She said yes.

Sooo…That’s why I was looking for input.

In the meantime, the dotter produced this artwork this morning.  I thought it was grand:

Anyone have any experience with one of Jane Brown’s adoption workshops?

Who is this young lady?  The one who looks all grown up?  The one who makes me think that in just a few years, we will be beating off the boys with sticks?

Today was supposed to be our annual trek to the Nutcracker.  We were going to take the dotter’s friend K. with us, as well.  But yesterday the weather gods decided it was time to dump a big ol’ load of snow on the area, around 12 inches.

Now, in Small Mountain University Town, where they regularly get 26-plus inch snows, they have clearing the highways and byways down to a science.  Yes, readers from SMUT, they really do, though you may not think so.  Anyway, a 9- to 12-incher wouldn’t phase the county crews from SMUT; they’d have the snowplows parked by each highway exit, engines running, when the snow reached one inch…and then those plows would be cruising the highways over and over and over again, scraping things down, so that the afternoon after the snow began to fall, it would be fairly clear.

Hereabouts…well, it doesn’t seem very intuitive:  Here in Alaska, Land Of Ice And Snow And Bitter Cold, they’re not quite as good about it.  Oh, in a few days, the highways will be clear, but in the meantime, driving on the highways would be an iffy proposition.

So at 11 a.m. this morning, I wimped out.  OmegaDad is still sick, hacking and coughing and not being very happy, so it would have been just me with the two girls.  And I had foolishly gotten tickets for the 5 p.m. show, which would mean driving both ways in the dark.  In the cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark.  In the snowy cold dark on snow-packed and icy roads.

In a word:  Yuck.

The dotter, when informed that we were wimping out, climbed into my lap and let the tears roll.  But a promise of hauling her and K. off to the bouncy haus for a few hours of good clean bouncin’ fun, plus a chance to dress up in her fancy new holiday finery for a few minutes so mom could take a picture, made up for it.

So there she is.  That girl is only six years old.  I swear!  Really!  But doesn’t she look…um…mighty damn fine?  And like she’s on the verge of teen-hood?  Dayum.  It’s scary.  I swear it was only yesterday that she was shorter than the dining room table, and we could keep things safe from her by pushing them towards the middle of that same table.

It breaks my heart.

Something else that breaks my heart:  When doing the Right Thing is all wrong for a child.  The picture at the head of the story says it all to me.  I read about Anna Mae and my heart sinks.  Oh, she’ll adjust in a few years, and she’ll be a fine young lady when all is said and done, but I think of my dotter having to leave our family at the age of 8–only another year–and it just makes me miserable.  The whole story was so horrid, in every way, and I wish that both sets of parents had found some way, very early on, to resolve things.

Damn.  Now I have to find some way to cheer myself up…

I’ve kept meaning to write about Nebraska’s “safe haven” law, which took effect in July.

That’s the one that people across the nation eyeballed before it was passed and then told the legislators, “OMGWTFBBQ?!”

Okay, they didn’t quite say that.  I do think there were quite a few “OMGWTF?!” comments, though.

That’s because Nebraska did not denote a specific age cut-off for their safe-haven dropoffs.  They used the language “child”…and, in Nebraska state law, a “child” is anyone up to the age of 18 (the age of emancipation).  Safe-haven advocates and opponents from across the nation read this law and said, over and over, “Dudes!  Get a grip!  Don’t you realize that people will use that mile-wide loophole to drive their teenage kids through?”

The legislator who wrote the law smiled, shook his head at their naivete, and said, “Oh, really.  Please.  That’s not going to happen!  And if it saves a single life, it will be worth it!”

Since then (this list cribbed shamelessly from Daily Bastardette):

• September 1: Male 14–left by mother at Omaha police station. Currently in foster care.
• September 13: Male 11–left by grandmother–another report says mother–at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha; currently in foster care and partial hospitalization.
• September 13: Male 15–left by guardian aunt at Bryant Medical Center West, Lincoln.
• September 20: Pregnant female 13 left by mother at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha. Returned to mother.
• September 22: Male 18, turned himself in to hospital in Grand Island; too old for foster care, but can receive services.
• September 24: 9 siblings, 1-17 (left by father, Gary Staton, at Creighton University Medical Center ER).
• female, 1
• male, 6
• male, 7
• female, 9
• male, 11
• female 13
• female 14,
• male, 15
• male 1
• An 18-year old sister who does not live at home was not abandoned. All these children are now in foster care and several relatives have requested custody.
• September 24: Male 11–left at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha.
• September 24, Male 15–left by guardian uncle at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha; uncle plans to relinquish guardianship.
• October 5: Male 12–left by guardian grandmother at Brian LGH West, Lincoln.
• October 5: Male 12–left at Immanuel Medical Center, Omaha.
• October 7:  Female 15–her 34-year-old mother attempted to dump her and was talked out of it by hospital authorities.
• October 7:  Female 14–Driven across the river from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and left at a hospital by her grandmother.
• October 12:  Male 13–Michigan mother drove to Omaha, Neb., to leave the child at a city hospital early that morning.

Even Saturday Night Live got into the act, apparently, including a “news item” about another drop-off in their “Weekend Update” segment this past Saturday. 

Well!  After this bounty of out-of-control teens being abandoned by their parents risk-free due to the poorly written safe haven law, Nebraska state legislators have seen the light, and are planning to amend state law to change the age reference to “no more than 3 days old”.  But it may take a special session to do it, since the legislature is on recess and doesn’t meet until January.  In the meantime, rather than call a special session, the governor has authorized $100,000 (and up to $200,000 more if that’s not enough!) for the department of Health and Human Services to spend on a special hot line for troubled parents.  They’re also sending a letter to adoptive parents and foster parents with information on how to get help if they are having problems with their children.

Though it has absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble, I can’t help but be amused by the similarities:  numerous people saw the unintended outcomes, specifically warned those in power, and were ignored.  And what happens?  Exactly what the naysayers said was going to happen…

When GrannyJ was visiting, OmegaDotter and I would snuggle for half an hour to forty-five minutes before trekking downstairs to the family room to waken her.  During one of these snuggle sessions, the dotter asked me if GrannyJ was my birthmother.  When I said yes, she admitted to be intensely jealous:  I could be with my birthmother, she could not.

OmegaDotter is six and a half years old.  She’s at a stage where she can be loving, gentle, fun–those flashes of emotional maturity I mentioned.  At the same time, she can be snotty and smart-mouthed and self-centered and just an all-around pain in the ass.  A pill to be around.  A constant and ongoing battle of wills.

She has even driven OmegaDad, the most gentle, easy-going man in the world, who is wrapped around her little finger, into shouting at her very angrily many times in the past few weeks.

Last night, as we were doing the bedtime routine, she was being sassy and defiant yet one more time, right as it was time for the hug-n-kiss from daddy and the feeling game from mommy.  So, being the kind, gentle, calm, patient person I am…

I snapped.

I coldly and angrily proclaimed that I Had Had It and wasn’t going to take any more of it.  I certainly didn’t feel like hanging around her, and if she wanted someone to be there while she went to bed, she was more than welcome to ask OmegaDad if he wanted to, though I couldn’t see why.  It was time she learned to treat me and him like Real Human Beings, stop being a smart-ass all the time, stop whining all the time, I was sick and tired of it, and for all I cared, she was more than welcome to go to bed by herself.  In the meantime, I was not going to be there.  There was more, but I can’t remember it.

I stormed out.

I took the dawg out for his evening walk.

I read a book in the living room.

And I heard wild sobs from the bedroom.

And I…didn’t…care.  In fact, I was hoping that she was utterly, absolutely, thoroughly miserable at the whole thing; maybe things would sink in when mommy was Madame Fury, rather than the ongoing, “Dotter, you need to ask in a nicer manner.”

After half an hour, OmegaDad carried her out to me.  Her eyes were red, her cheeks and lashes damp with tears, her lips trembling.

“Do you want to tell her or shall I?” asks OmegaDad.

She shook her head mutely.  Then she tried talking.  Then she couldn’t.  Then…finally…she wailed:

“I want my moooommmmmyyyy!”

Um.

Well, shit.

Okay.  Y’see, she didn’t mean me.  She meant her birthmother.

Which afforded us a splendid opportunity to let her know that her birthmother sure as shit wouldn’t put up with the attitude, either.

It also, frankly, left me feeling like a second wheel.  Hey, what am I, chopped liver?

Oh, I know I’m not.  OmegaDad is fond of saying, “I’m ice cream and cookies.  You’re comfort food.”  I’m the one she clings to when she’s sick or tired or needing reassurance in the world.  But I really don’t want to have to constantly consider whether me getting angry at her over something and storming away is going to trigger abandonment issues (trust me, this was serious, absolute, prostrate misery on her part and not a sham).

Anyway, there we are.  She’s going through a stage of pillishness.  I was worried that we were absolutely, totally ruining her and she was turning into a self-centered princess who was going to drive us into misery in her teens until this morning, when I had to run her gym shoes into school (she was wearing her new cowgirl boots, and we both forgot that today was P.E.) and ran into M., her friend H.’s mom.  And unprompted by me, she immediately began telling me that her daughter (a quiet, shy, gentle thing who is always perfectly mannered) is driving her absolutely batty by being sassy, smart-mouthed, defiant, argumentative.

Wait a minute!  She’s talking about my dotter!  Isn’t she?!  And as we were commiserating, she said that yet another mom of another six year old friend of H.’s had been astonished that she (the friend) was perfectly behaved at M.’s house, because she was…sassy, smart-mouthed, defiant, and argumentative at home.

So I’m guessing it’s a stage.  Ugh.

What’s also a stage is a sudden upswing in birthmother/adoption issues.  Though I haven’t dipped into the Big List (Adoptive Parents China) in years, I remember that the parents of older kids described certain ages and stages, and they always seemed to be the same.  Seven was when grief seemed to hit a bunch of them; nine was when anger about being abandoned seemed to hit.

This evening, at bedtime, when we were playing the feeling game, I asked her if anything made her sad today.  She said, “No.”  I lifted an eyebrow and peered at her.  “What about last night?” I asked.  “Oh!” she said.  “Oh, yeah.”  “Do you want to talk about it?”  “Yessss…But not right now!”

Thinking she was going to evade the whole issue, I started to press on her.

“MOOOMMMY!  Not.  Right.  Now.  We have to finish the game first!”

I mentally rolled my eyes.  The whole original idea behind the feeling game was to–OMG!–talk about your feelings!  But, okay, so I had to wait.  Sure enough, when we had gone through the whole litany (happy, sad, angry, scared, funny stuff), then she said, “Okay!  Now I want to talk about it!” and she scrambled down off the bed, into my lap, with a blankie, snuggled down, and started talking about her first mother, adoption, the one-child law in China, and more.  All of which made me realize that she’s actually listened to some of the things I’ve told her about…

Welcome to motherhood.

We had a friend sleep over last night.  Poor OmegaDad was amazed that two girls could make so much noise, and kept trying to find a quiet spot in the house.  He was also amazed that the two didn’t destroy the bathroom when they took a bath together (one way to keep two girls entertained is to lock them into a room with a bathtub filled with bubble bath).

All went well.  There was one Solomonic decision required by me the first day, in which there were three pieces of bubblegum and K. accused OmegaDotter of giving her the two split pieces and taking two full pieces for herself.  At which point the judge (that would be me) decided that the only fair thing was to make them both spit the gum out.

Har.  Just call me mean mommy.

But by this morning, the love and togetherness was wearing off, and the drama began.

In the midst of the drama, the girls were watching Shirley Temple in the family room while I piddled around on the intertubes.  The harmonicas were being played, and suddenly voices were raised.  And then I overheard:

"Let’s ask the lady!" sayeth K.

"What ‘lady’?" asks OmegaDotter.

"The lady in the office."

"Well, duh, that’s my mom!"

"No she’s not!  She’s not your real mom!"

"Wha–?  She is too my real mom!  What do I call her?  ‘Mommy’!  So there!"

"She’s not your real mom!  She adopted you, so she can’t be your real mom!"

"She is so my real mom!"

"Nuh-unh!"

"Unh-hunh!"

"Nuh-unh!"

"She is so!"

(Six- and seven-year-olds have such a command of logic, language, and rhetoric…)

At this point, hearing a certain amount of puzzled panic in the dotter’s voice, I thought I should intervene.

OmegaDotter was buried in blankets on the futon, sucking her thumb and looking thunderous.  K. was kneeling with her head down on the futon, pouting and picking at imaginary fluff.  When I came in, K. went bounding out and up the stairs.  OmegaDotter looked at me with her lower lip stuck out.  I sat down and poked my head close to the dotter, and whispered, in a mock drama whisper, "Hey, girlie girl.  Am I plastic?"

She shook her head.

"Am I imaginary?"

She shook her head, and said, in injured tones, "K. says you’re not my real mom!"

"Well, sweetie, I’m your real mom.  You have two real moms, your mommy in China and me.  And I’m real–poke me!"

And she poked me, and giggled, and snuggled a bit, and we went upstairs and got the girls to kiss and make up.

And a few minutes later, another drama began.  And another a little later.

Oy!  The Drama!  (Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes at the prickliness of girls.)

Anyway, I was actually surprised by the whole thing.  Obviously it’s the first OmegaDotter’s heard of this concept.  I thought it was something that just oozed from the primordial conceptual soup that floats around preschool and kindergarden.  Guess not.

So, sometime soon, I expect to hear the dread, "You’re not my real mom, so I don’t have to do x, so there!"

Blogging will lead you to an early death!

No!  Wait a minute!  Blogging is good for you!

Wait.  Really.  Here’s the scoop:  If you’re a popular blogger, you’ll get tabbed for a Big Internet Site Job, get hooked on exposing too much of yourself, ruin your personal relationships, have a nervous breakdown, think about leaving blogging entirely, and end up pretty much where you were to begin with, except (maybe) older and wiser.

Of course, we all know blogging isn’t real writing.

So much for blogging.

On a different subject entirely, can someone explain to me why everyone is (gasp!) shocked and horrified that Clinton, while discussing the ins and outs of primaries, mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s assassination?  I mean, she also mentioned a few other situations where the nomination wasn’t set until after the convention.  Dudes, she isn’t advocating assassinating Obama.  Really.  She may have been stupid to say such a thing, given how tender and delicate everyone’s sensitivities are these days about any perceived slight or threat or…whatever it was.  I swear, these days people just need to keep their yaps shut about everything, because someone is going to be (gasp!) shocked and horrified. 

The Chinese adoption community has been rocked by the news that Steven Curtis Chapman’s youngest daughter was accidentally run over by one of their sons.  I read the story and my heart froze; his daughter was five years old.  Once again, motherhood has changed my outlook–I would have read it and sympathized before, but now I read it and the hair on the back of my neck rises because OmegaDotter is six years old and scatterbrained and I could so easily see her paying attention to something else and running right behind the car as OmegaDad pulls out of the driveway.

The Chapman family is accepting donations to the Shaohannah’s Hope Foundation in Maria’s name.

Science-y stuff:

Jupiter has given birth to a brand new bouncing baby Red Spot.

I want to give one of these T-shirts to OmegaBro.  Or OmegaDad.  Or both.  Or maybe one for myself.  Go check ‘em out.

This is the night sky I miss from Small Mountain University Town.

Lisa got it first:  Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Karn Evil 9.

The court has ruled that Texas CPS acted incorrectly in seizing 48 women’s children.

But not underage.  At this point, 15 of the 31 "girls" who were pregnant or already mothers that Texas CPS claimed were underage have turned out to be adults.

The anonymous, hushed call that started it all?  "Sarah was officially considered to be a real person until Monday, when CPS dropped her court case, acknowledging that she doesn’t actually exist. State police are now investigating the calls for help from "Sarah" as hoax phone calls, made by an adult from Colorado with a history of making false reports."

I do not condone old men using the cloak of religion to force underage girls into "spiritual" marriages with other old men.  I do not condone child abuse.  I do not condone sexual abuse.

But ruthlessly sweeping through the compound and separating 440 children from their families in the guise of "doing good" makes me think of the road to Hell.  It’s paved with good intentions, as we all know.

Were there girls being forced into marriage and childbirth against their will?  I’m sure of it.

Were all of them?  I’m sure not.

Does the end–rescuing women and children from life in what seems to be a cult–justify the means?  I don’t think so.

But other people seem to think so.  While there is a contingent of people like me who found the entire operation a sweeping infringement on civil rights, there is also a contingent who has been saying, "If there are underage girls there who have been trapped, then it’s right."  My thought is what should have been done is an examination–case by case–before any warrants were served, before any children were taken.

While I tend to think that all religions are essentially lunacy, and I regard people who live their lives circumscribed by religious beliefs with a certain amount of befuddlement, this does not mean that their civil rights are negligible, eligible to be tossed aside for the "good of the chiiilllldrunnnn".

Given also that my forays into adoption research made me aware of the inconsistent oversight of foster care from state to state, and even county to county, and the fact that many states offer what is essentially a "bounty" for children to be moved to adoption as soon as possible, and the relentless market for healthy white infants, and I am bound to cast a jaundiced eye on such a widespread sweep as this.

The good thing is that the eyes of the mainstream media are upon this case.  The faults of the MSM aside, when the journalists are in full cry, the tendency for things to be hidden away, shadowed, swept under a rug will be difficult to fulfill.

I am sure that there will be some cases where the separation of the children is justified.  But there was never a justification for the full-scale raid.  Even if the "ends" are good, the "means" were not.  If a sweep like this is done and no outcry is raised, then the next time the sweep may be aimed at…inner city welfare mothers…homeschoolers…who knows.  The outcry and the subsequent examination it has provoked is a Good Thing to this observer.

I trekked off to the doc-in-the-box to get antibiotics for my sinus infection, which was feeling like someone was jabbing an ice pick up through my cheekbone.  Actually, OmegaDad and I trekked off, and I got to see The Wound.  It turns out that Dr. SledDog did not slash his throat; he merely used a paper punch to punch a hole in.  As the helpmeet, it is my duty the next few days to take a monstrous long Q-tip, drench it in H202, and plunge it into the gaping maw of the hole, then dig around the edges.  Ewww.  The things we do in the name of love.

In the meantime, I’ve come across some discussions on the intertubes that have to do with intent–as in, "Well, hey, if this offends you, it’s not my fault, and I’m going to keep doing it!  So there!"

Firstly, we have the tale of the tavern owner in the Atlanta area who has jinned up a T-shirt featuring Curious George eating a banana, and labeled it "Obama ‘08".  The question was, is this "racist"?  In the comments to Pharyngula’s write-up, an interestingly large number of folk did not "catch" it–people from Europe, young people from America, and a few folk who obviously knew it was denigrating yet sneered at the idea (mostly people who crashed Pharyngula from elsewhere, I think).  Given the quotes from the guy who did it, it’s pretty obvious it wasn’t intended nicely, yet an argument arose in the comments section as to whether "paying attention" to it, recognizing the past connotations of "black person = ape", was, in fact, perpetuating the racism.  And whether there really was racism intended.  And whether it’s better to ignore such things or fight them.

A few people in the thread suggested that those who did not think it was racist buy it and wear it around their black friends, and see what the response was.

It’s interesting that there are honest, intelligent people who do not think it was racist; it promises hope that the "black people = apes" trope is receding into the mists of history.  At the same time, it obviously hasn’t, because enough people know the coding to realize it’s offensive and wear things like this for that reason.  So is it better for the trope to fade in general consciousness, but still resonate in two areas–the targets (black people) and the perpetrators (racists)?  In other words, is it better that something be seen–and called out–as racist by the general public, or be glossed over, shunted aside?

Another item of "intent versus effect" is in Karen’s story of her dad’s response to her daughters names.  The first is that he doesn’t like the chosen name for the new baby.  The second is he makes fun of her current daughter’s Chinese middle name.  Her daughter’s middle name is "Chao Xing" (chow shing), and her dad teasingly does the "ching chong" thing with it.  There’s a lot wrapped up in it, specifically a "why remind her she’s Chinese?" attitude, a "you’re making too much of this" (the adoption) attitude.  The problem is, it’s all too easy to slide from that to the "ching chong chinaman" song.  Right now, Karen’s daughter is only a toddler…but as she grows older, this kind of thing can hurt.  (Google "ching chong Rosie O’Donnell", or "ching chong Yao Ming" or "ching chong Margaret Cho" or "ching chong Helene Chung".)

The third item that caught me was posted by YouKnowWhereYouAreWith, pointing to an article in Canadian MacLean’s Magazine, about the abrupt slowdown in adoptions from China, possible reasons behind it, and the question of whether international adoption is A Good Thing or reflective of colonialism.  Once again:  intent versus perception.  Adoptive parents aren’t looking to practice cultural genocide (and, frankly, they aren’t, because the cultures are still there, still going strong–perhaps it’s more a case of "cultural theft"?).  But some folks see it that way.  The question is:  if adoptive parents are providing the dollar motivation for cultures to not clean up their act, aren’t they helping perpetuate the problems that provide the commodity (babies)?

Anyways, all stuff to think about.  I’d write more, but that ice pick in my cheekbone is pushing a bit harder, the dotter is in bed, OmegaDad is soon to be in bed, and I’d like to go there myself.

It’s Mother’s Day.  OmegaDad and OmegaDotter let me sleep in, and then marched in with breakfast in bed.  Whoa!  It was little Nancy’s quiches and strawberries, plus one of my Frappucinos…they then brought in their own and joined me, and presented me with a cardboard box which contained truffles (yum), three "flowers" made of pipecleaners and seed packets (some nice pansy varieties), a large abalone shell from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), a scarf from the dotter (which I had given to her ages ago), and another shell.

It was, actually, quite charming and loving, and I loved it. 

So much for being a "non-mom mom".  Har.  I’m cynically amused at how Teleflora and NBC scrambled all over themselves trying to recoup from that blunder.  At the same time, I’m glad that they did.

I’m sure they’d flinch at including birthmothers in any way in their motherhood tribute–too ambiguous for their tastes.  After all, they’d have to figure out how to present birthmothers as saintly martyrs who are gently satisfied with their choice, and avoid all the questions that even thinking about birthmoms brings to many folk.

OmegaDotter wrote a letter to her birthmother this morning.  She was happy to do it; she had asked me a while back if she could write a letter to her.  This entailed, of course, explaining that while she could write a letter, we had no way of delivering it because we didn’t know where her birthmother was or if she was okay.  But, I said, we could make a special box, and put letters to her birthmother in the box.  This morning, when she wrote the letter, she had completely forgotten that we couldn’t actually send it, and was all excited (momentarily) about getting a letter back.

::whimper::

But I explained again, and the dotter took it in good stead.

The letter was pretty short, but the first thing the dotter quickly wrote out was "I forgot your name."

::whimper::

She wrote that she can do cartwheels, and that she is good at learning.  And signed it, "Love, OmegaDotter".  Then she put it in an envelope clearly labeled "CHINA", and put it on the refrigerator, held by our very best, strongest magnet.

Then, that done, she merrily went on her way, demanding to help OmegaDad with building the veggie garden, helping me rake (yes, more raking), dipping into the house to build a picnic basket out of paper, and then dashing off next door to play with the kids there for a while.

I know that I have readers who simply don’t understand why we do things like this.  That it seems like a way to make the dotter feel capital-A-adopted.  That we make too much of it.  That our lives are all adoption angst.

First off, no, our lives are not all adoption angst.  In fact, there’s very little of it.  It’s just part of the tapestry of life for us and for the dotter; there are some things that remind her of being adopted, and we talk about them, and she chews on them a bit, and life goes on.  She goes to school, she has to do homework, we play with friends, we deal with Ballet Recital Madness, she practices her gymnastics, and on and on.

The thing is, she is adopted.  She’s our dotter, through and through, but somewhere out there is a birthmother and a birthfather, and a big question as to "why?"  From our readings of musings by adult adoptees, it seems that even the most happy, well-adjusted (female) adoptees think about birthparents and the circumstances of their adoption throughout their childhood, adolescence, adulthood.  And a lot of the adoptees who have written about it say that they were afraid to talk about it with their parents, that they feared hurting their parents by even thinking about another set of parents, by even wondering about their biological background.  Or that they tried talking about it, and their parents brushed it off, and they learned, very quickly, that it was a subject not to be touched.  And many of those adult adoptees said that they thought about the subject of birthparents a lot and were hurt and worried that they couldn’t talk about it with their parents.

Also, there’s OmegaDad.  OmegaDad’s mother died a week after giving birth to him.  He thought about her a lot.  He, too, learned early on that it was a sore subject; of course, it was because she died young, leaving a bereft husband and sons and parents, all of whom remembered her and were hurt by her early death.  So OmegaDad remembers wanting to know more about his mother, and not being able to talk about her.  So he feels it incumbent upon himself to make sure that OmegaDotter know that it’s okay to talk about her birthmother to both of us.

We’ve told the dotter her adoption story since we brought her home, too small to even understand what we were saying.  "Once upon a time, there was a lady in China who had a beautiful baby girl…" was how it started.  And "on the other side of the world, there was a man and a woman who really wanted to have children…"  And ending, "And they drove up the mountains to Small Mountain University Town in the little white car, and got home just a few days before Christmas, and that was the Very Best Christmas Ever."  As she’s grown older, the story has changed, gotten more detail, specifics have been fleshed out.

It’s all a little bit like sex, actually.  Well, not having sex, but talking about sex.  You want to keep the channels open.  You don’t want One Big Just So Story scene where you talk about sex when the kiddo is 17 and that’s that.  So you start out basic, you get comfy talking about the whole idea (omigod omigod i can’t even think about the dotter having sex omigod omigod), you try to not get tied up in knots when A Question comes up. 

I dunno.  It works for us.  Somewhere on the other side of the world is a woman who gave birth to our dotter.  Goodness knows why she had to abandon her–it could be that the dotter has an older sister, and her birthparents were trying for a son; it could be that her birthmother was a young, single woman who couldn’t keep a baby; it could be that there were in-laws who took her away and told her birthmother she was dead, in hopes of a future son to carry on the name; it could be that her birthmother couldn’t afford to keep her…We don’t know.  On a day like this, though, I think of her missing being able to watch this amazing girl grow up, not knowing her belly giggle, not knowing her artistic creations, not knowing her need to bounce and thump.  The least I can do for this other woman out there is to keep her memory alive and not flinch away when the dotter wants–or needs–to talk about her.

Adoption ranting alert!

Whoop!  Whoop!  WHOOP!  Brrrp…brrrp…brrrp…brrrp!

At this point in family life, I normally let the usual mainstream media faux pas (tell me how to pluralize that?  Please?!) about adoption pass me by.  At this point, life is less about Deep Musings About Adoption and more about how to survive the few weeks at the end of school year that are jam-packed with stuff like "Teacher Appreciation Week" (please bring a dish–Monday is breakfast, have it there by 8:30!, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is sandwiches–but the staff are bringing the makings so don’t bother, Thursday is salads, and Friday is desserts) and "The Kindergarden Circus" (in which the dotter is being–natch–a "prancing horse"–and they really need volunteers to help sell popcorn before the circus) and ballet picture day (scheduled for the middle of the morning?  Oh, well, at least it’s not in the middle of school, since school ends two days before) and Ballet Recital Madness (update:  no, littlies don’t need to be there at oh-dark-thirty and stay for 24 hours straight, thank heavens!).

In other words, general adoption stuff has taken a back-burner to Real Life.

(Which is not to say "general adoption stuff" doesn’t happen, and isn’t important.  It does, and it is.  It’s just that what pops into the ol’ noggin to write about tends to be more on the panicky side than on the thinking deeply side.)

But when egregious mainstream media cluelessness attacks, I just have to sit up and take notice.

Brought to my attention by two adoption bloggers is this little lovely:  The category in the Mother’s Day TV special "America’s Favorite Mom" that is called–wait for it–"Non-Mom Moms".

I had a few "non-mom moms" in my life.  There was Aunt Lou, my mom’s best friend.  There was Mrs. Crysanthemum, who lived next door to my paternal grandparents, and who stunned me, absolutely stunned me, when she announced to me, at 16, that I should stop calling her "Mrs. Crysanthemum" and call her by her first name.  It took me years to be able to follow that request without feeling both awkward and disrespectful.  These were women who spent a lot of time with me, disciplined me, gave me hugs, fed me, let me have adventures with their kids, knew me from the time I was a wee chee-ild until I was a grown adult.

I never, ever though of Mrs. Libby, who lived on the other side of my grandparents and had an adopted kiddo, as a "non-mom mom".  Honest!  She was just Jarrett’s mom.

NBC and its minions, though, would place her (and me, and every other adoptive mommy on earth) smack dab into that category.

There it is, in all it’s glory, among the "semi-finalists" in the category "Non-Mom Moms":  "She was an adopted child who is now mom to her own daughter, plus six adopted children who started life as "meth babies"."

First off, even by their skewed standards, she’s a "mom mom":  she has "her own daughter".

OmegaDotter, of course, is not "my own daughter".  I’m just play-acting mommy for her.

Secondly, there’s that old cliche, the "crack baby", recycled as the "meth baby".

Thirdly, she’s not being a "mom" to those adopted children, oh no.  She’s being a "non-mom mom".

Sweet Kozmik All above.  Don’t these people think?  Don’t they have any concept of what "adoption" is?  Don’t they realize how they’ve dissed all the adoptive moms in their audience by that casual sweep of the semantic hand that dusts adoptive moms off into the "non-mom mom" dustbin?

Gah.  Get a grip, NBC.  My dotter has two moms, and they’re equally valid and important in my dotter’s life.  (Which I will talk about on Mother’s Day, I think.)

Frick-frackin’ rowrbazzlin’ dim-witted dismissive twits.

When we adopted OmegaDotter, we had A Plan.  That plan was to–as soon as possible, i.e., a year after signing on the dotted line for the dotter–apply for another adoption from China.

Well, that first year was…difficult.  Having a baby in the house is life-altering, tiring, exhilarating, fun, wearing.  And then I got laid off.  Oops.  So we decided to put it off another year.  But then that next year, OmegaDad had some health issues that required all our attention.  So we decided to put it off another year.  Then we learned that OmegaDad’s health issues put us off the list for China, including the special needs list.  So we sulked and dithered and dilly-dallied.  We thought about other programs.

One of the other countries we thought about–for a very, very short while–was Vietnam.  But it was never a real serious discussion.  For one thing, it was much, much more expensive than China.  And while our first year was chugging along, word was building that corruption was rife in Vietnam adoptions.  In 2003, the U.S. put a total freeze on adoptions from Vietnam until it could be demonstrated that the adoption system had been cleaned up to the point where the U.S. Embassy could feel relatively assured that the corruption had been rooted out.  In 2006, Vietnam and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding re-opening international adoptions from Vietnam to the U.S.

Almost immediately, problems began resurfacing.  We’re talking mere months after that MOU was signed.

Things, IMO, went downhill from there.

Part of the problem was that the wait for adoptions from China had drastically slowed down.  And some of the thousands of potential adoptive parents who were desperate for a child began to turn to other countries for an "interim" adoption–figuring that any adoption from another country would be finalized long enough before China got around to them that they’d still fit the qualifications (a year–or was it six months?!  it’s never been quite clear–between adding any new child to the family).  Vietnam had a reputation for being quick, if you were willing to spend the money, so families started queuing up.

And then, in October and November 2007, families who were trying to adopt from Vietnam started getting Notices of Intent to Deny from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (or whatever its official title is these days).  The NOIDs were based on suspicions or indications that something was amiss with the proposed adoptions; that the children in question were not actually abandoned, not actually the children described by the documentation, maybe the result of baby-selling, maybe the result of kidnapping.  The potential parents, alas, were already in Vietnam expecting to be able to bring their babies home, and the NOIDs stopped them cold.  Many decided to simply stay in Vietnam with the babies until things cleared up.

Rumors began building in the Vietnam adoption community that the U.S. would not renew the MOU when it expired, in September of this year.

A week or two ago, the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi issued a "Summary of Irregularities in Adoptions in Vietnam", along with a "Warning Concerning Adoptions in Vietnam".  The warning specifically states "recent field investigations have revealed incidents of serious adoption irregularities, including forged or altered documentation, mothers paid, coerced or tricked into releasing their children, and children offered for adoption without the knowledge or consent of their birth parents."  The summary states that U.S. officials in Vietnam had investigated more than 300 cases over a six-month period; to give an idea of the percent of potential adoptions investigated, there were 828 adoptions from Vietnam by U.S. parents in 2007.

It seems pretty clear that this is not a witch hunt by U.S. officials.  The stories in the summary make it plain that corruption and bribery are rampant in the process. 

The problem is, of course, that potential adoptive parents are wildly emotionally involved.  It’s practically impossible to expect potential adoptive parents to say–when confronted with an official piece of paper that claims that the baby you have been holding and cuddling and thinking of as your "own" for two weeks and that the Vietnamese courts have declared is your "own"–"Oh.  You’re right.  We can’t adopt this child–the evidence is too overwhelming that her birthmother was scammed out of her baby.  Here.  Take her back."  So the adoptive families pull strings, and heartstrings, trying to get the NOIDs revoked, removed, the immigration visa approved, ogodogodletusgohomewithherplease.

I’d like to think (ahem.  See my halo here?  It’s nice and shiny!  And I got it cheap!) that in that situation, OmegaDad and I would do what we thought was the ethical thing.  It is, of course, easy for me to say; we are safe and sound and working on our dotter’s sixth year home with us, and even the rumblings of corruption in the Chinese adoption system seem to have cranked up after her adoption.  And I have already said, in the midst of another post, that at this point, if someone came forward with evidence that her birthfamily had not abandoned her, I would fight tooth and claw to keep her with us…though I would also like to think (halo, remember?) that we’d do whatever possible to make sure we could take her to China on a regular basis to visit her birthfamily.

So when a good internet bud of mine forwards a plea to call, email, write, fax senators, congresscritters, and the INS/USCIS on behalf of one of the families who has been stuck in Vietnam since last fall, facing a second NOID, I am left unsettled and disturbed.  My heart breaks for the adoptive parents.  My heart also breaks, though, for the birthfamily.  I feel I cannot, in good conscience, do any such thing without full knowledge of the particulars of the case (and I tend to suspect, given that the word is the INS/USCIS is going to issue a second NOID, that the particulars are pretty egregious).  What if it’s the case where the birthmother’s baby was withheld from her by a hospital so that she would pay the hospital bill for a premature birth?  Or the one where the birthfamily, fallen on hard times, was told by an orphanage official, "Hey–leave the baby with us for a while until you get back on your feet…We’ll take care of him, and you can take him back home when you’re better off and more able to deal with it…"?  Or the one where the birthmother was a young single woman who was being housed in a maternity home, and told, after the birth, "Oh, by the way, unless you can pay us back the year’s income that it cost us to house you, we’re going to have to take your baby away…"?

In the end, I am sorry to say, it still seems to come down to money.

(For a very worthwhile read, go to Voices For Vietnam Adoption Integrity.)

Every once in a while, I haul the dotter off to Veronica’s, the local manicure-in-a-mall, for an hour of frou-frou girly-girl stuff.  The last time we were there, Veronica carefully painted an itty-bitty snowman on one fingernail, and an itty-bitty Christmas tree on one of the fingernails on the other hand.  The dotter gets pink or purple, usually with glitter, while I get clear nail polish.

It’s a pleasant little interlude.  Veronica does a much better job with fingernails than I do, the dotter gets her glittery pink or purple, I get my jagged edges filed smooth, and then the dotter begs a quarter off me so she can ride the horsie in the mall lobby.

All pretty laid-back.

I am obviously far behind the times, though.

I should be getting her a bikini wax.  Or her eyebrows plucked.  Or, if I were really thinking ahead, a botox job.

What’s that you say?  She’s only six?

No, no, no!  You don’t understand!  These days, it’s the "in" thing to do!  Mommy-daughter bonding time at the spa and salon!  Mommy goes in one door to get a bikini wax and daughter goes into the other to get her eyebrows shaped.

Now normally I’d pooh-pooh such a story, putting it down to a reporter who sees something twice and then turns it into a "trend".  But in this case, the author asked a whole slew of salon owners, and got a quote from a pediatrician; besides that, there was a remarkably similar story in the New York Times just a few days ago.

I recall a slightly bewildering Christmas visit to the in-laws, when our niece L., who the previous year had been quite happy hiking and scrambling over rocks with us, a lovely, natural beauty at 15, spent an hour and a half in the bathroom before emerging as a sleek, made-up model-type to go to the mall with her boyfriend.

I also recall a time when I had to chase three girls out of my great-aunt’s bathroom as they had monopolized it for far too long in preparation for a family gathering at the local buffet restaurant.  They emerged with Big Hair (this was, after all, the mid- to late-’80s), a cloud of perfume puffing out of the bathroom door, with big blue racoon eyes.

Somewhere between my own total lack of primping and grooming, and these ladies hauling their children off for buffing and plucking and botoxing, there’s a happy medium.

What happened to that happy medium?

On the one hand, I seriously consider taking the dotter, at age 13 or 14, to the local Clinique counter a few times to have instruction on how to do make-up without looking "made up".  I think of doing a nail-painting party for a bunch of ten-year-olds (thank heavens that’s a few years off!).  I personally indulge in massages now and then.  But all of these are "treats" in my mind, not something that gets done on a regular basis.

I dunno.  Mainly, I’m an old fart with a semi-hippy outlook and a worry that the dotter will be sucked into a pop-culture outlook that places emphasis on the outer wrappings, rather than the inner character.

It’s spring break week.  The dotter is at "camp" at her after-school care place, and they’re doing "Blast From The Past" as the theme this week.  Monday was the ’40s, Tuesday the ’50s, etc.  The kids are dressing up each day.  The dotter won for best dress-up on Wednesday–she had a mini skirt, a top with paisleys and funky colors, and a headband over carefully parted straight hair.

Tomorrow is the final day.  The ’80s.  Big Hair is my immediate response.  So we’ve purchased soft rollers and I plan to torture have tortured the child with them tonight, covered the result with a kerchief, sent her to bed, and plan to fill her hair with hair spray tomorrow.

From the back:

Looking winsome from the front:

Laughing:

Notice all the pink.  I spared you the picture of the dotter in her kerchief in her pink room.

I don’t really know how to do Big Hair, but we have a curling iron for Big Bangs and lots of hair spray.  I will display results tomorrow.

In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages.  There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news.  In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us.  That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow.

Here in Alaska, as many people know, we have an overload of daylight hours in the summer.  We’re talking 19.14 hours of daylight at the peak where the Omega Family lives, and more up north.

That’s a lot of daylight.

Our kids don’t need to work on the crops quickly after school to get them in before the sun goes down.

So why do we have Daylight Savings Time here?

I mean, really…why bother?  In the summer, our "noon" ends up being at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, an artifact of when Alaska managed to get itself all in one time zone (except for the further reaches of the Aleutian Islands) so that the state managers in Juneau could talk to various state folk in Anchorage and other places without having to worry about time zones.  Previously, we were in four time zones. 

So why didn’t they just get rid of DST at the same time?  I don’t know, but apparently there’s a move afoot to get it on a ballot this year, though some folks grumble that Alaska will then be up to five hours off the eastern part of the U.S. during the summer.

This morning, upon waking, I stumbled through the house re-setting clocks.  OmegaDad and I are going to hang drapes today; it’s necessary because now the dotter will be going to bed while it’s still somewhat light outside.  Soon the same will be happening for OmegaDad and me–we’re gaining almost six minutes of light per day.  I can sleep in any environment, but OmegaDad can’t get to sleep if it’s light in the bedroom…

Mainly, DST is a big bother for us and the other 670,000 people who live here.