OmegaMom

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.

OmegaMom is a happy, happy camper right now.

I sit here typing this at my new desk.  In my newly painted office, painted a bright and cheery duck yellow color with white trim.  Filled with nice, new, white office furniture from The P0ttery B@rn.  With lots of study, well built filing cabinets.

All of which made me happy enough, because now it actually looks like an office, and I feel like it’s my space now, and I can actually try to organize things and keep things clear and clean in at least one room of the house.

But the creme de la creme…the thing that is making me dance on air tonight…

I don’t know if I mentioned this in the blog at any point; I know I’ve mentioned it in a comment or two on other people’s blogs:

We had lost all of OmegaDotter’s adoption paperwork except for the original official red folder containing the adoption certificate.

Birth certificate?  Vanished.  Abandonment decree?  Vanished.  Registration of adoption?  Vanished.  Chinese passport?  Vanished.  Long since.  We had become resigned to the idea of having to spend many dollars and much time trying to recreate these items.  I was too embarrassed to talk about it on the blog.  What kind of devoted mom of a Chinese adoptee was I, anyways?!

But tonight, filled with the Urge To Organize brought on by the new (sturdy!  attractive!) office furniture, I delved into the ratty old chintzy falling-to-pieces filing cabinets and started going through files, tossing out ancient insurance certificates and owner’s manuals for things we haven’t had in our possession for years.  The bottom drawer of the first filing cabinet had been jammed shut for quite a while by the aforementioned owner’s manuals, but some determined digging and reaching and yanking out jammed pieces of slick paper finally undammed the jam.

And there, in the midst of some totally unrelated stuff…

I found the buried treasure, the Ark of the Lost Covenant, Shangri-La itself:

Birth certificate, abandonment decree, registration of adoption, and Chinese passport.

Woot!

Next weekend we put up curtains and put in bookshelves, and I will post pics.

So I got three votes for the economy and foreclosures, and three votes for homeschooling.  And one that said "I’ll read anything you write!" (BadMutha, you sure know how to make me blush!  And, honest, 75-100 is not too shabby as regular readers.  Nothing like The Big Guys, but still not too shabby.  I say so as someone with an average visit of just around 100.)

Since Mrs. Fibgy voted for the economy but said she’d be interested in the homeschooling critique critiquing, I used that as a tie-breaker.

Whilst wandering around ScienceBlogs last week, I came across a snippet of a "critique of homeschooling" on Greg Laden’s blog.  I followed the link to this article.  I read it.  Really!  I actually forced myself to read it, even though my former editor’s brain kept shrieking, "ACK!  ACK ACK!  ACK ACK ACK!" and my analytic brain kept grumbling "cherry-picking, dammit!" and my marketing brain kept snickering, "Ooooh, yeah, let’s get some more stereotypes in there, why don’t we?!"

Of you go.  Read.  Go on, go go go.  I’ll just wait right here.

Done?

First, let me reveal a snobby bias:  A poorly written article automatically prejudices me against the author’s viewpoint.  I hang my head in shame.  Lots of people who Think Good Thoughts can’t write their way out of a paper bag.  But clunky construction, poor verb-subject agreement, awkward (or nonexistent) segues, and downright errors in articles make my eyes cross and my brain stutter.

But, hey.  We all know that this particular post of mine will be inevitably riddled with errors, this being the Way of the Kozmik All.  "Whom the gods destroy they first make proud" and all that.  So let’s take that as a given, and I don’t want to hear any grumbling from the roaring mob about how not only am I a snob but an utter hypocrite to boot.

Let’s get to the substance.

The author ranks the reasons for homeschooling as:  Violence in the school system/safety and desire to provide better education.  She mentions in passing that many homeschoolers are religious, but doesn’t list that as a reason.  She waves her hand at "my research" but doesn’t say where she researched or what information she got.

So I had a go at looking for reasons for homeschooling.  The U.S. Department of Education performed surveys of homeschooling parents in 1999 and 2003.  The "most important" reasons for homeschooling given in the 2003 responses were:

That "concern" about the environment included drugs and peer pressure, not just "safety".  And having an "analysis" so poorly written that reason #2–religious or moral instruction–was conflated with other reasons and not discussed separately bugs me.

Then the author goes on to sniff at any concerns about the school environment, asks homeschooling parents what the crime rate is in their neighborhoods (?), and immediately takes off after…

…all those psychotic moms and dads who homeschool their kids and abuse or kill them.  Like Andrea Yates.  Or a lady named Deanna Landrey, who beat her kids with rocks to Save Them From Satan.

Because the Big Problem with homeschooling, dontchaknow, is that the kids are socially and physically isolated, and that’s a good way to hide child abuse.  Aside from the everyday horrors of not being socialized.

I stop here to say, yes, I know that there are, indeed, plenty of homeschooled kids who are socially isolated.  And social isolation is an excellent method of hiding abuse.

But then I look at all the homeschooling families I know of.  I worked in ITS with two.  I’ve made friends with a bunch via the web.  The parents of one of the dotter’s friends (another child adopted from Guangxi, whose birthday is one day later than hers) are homeschooling their child.  And the parents of one of her fellow ballet dancers are more homeschoolers.  Every single one of these parents has been using what’s known as a "home schooling co-op".  Some have been religiously oriented.  Some have been definitely non-religious.  All the kids that I’ve met are happy, healthy, dreadfully social children.  They go on homeschooling co-op field trips.  They play sports with other homeschooling kids and in the soccer leagues and the softball leagues and dancing and gymnastics.

The author goes on to say that those who are concerned about their kids’ educations should be more concerned about homeschooling than public schooling, because there are no requirements for teaching in a homeschool and the parents won’t be able to teach all the various subjects.  Amazingly enough, most of the homeschooling parents I know recognize quite well when they’ve reached the limit of their knowledge, and turn to the homeschooling co-ops for help.  Their children get taught science or math by parents in the co-op who are (gasp!) scientists or mathematicians.  They get taught English by parents in the co-op who are literature or English majors.  They learn online.  Or their parents study the subjects before their kids reach that point, so they can guide them.

Ah, but public (or private) school teachers are certified!  They’ve studied pedagogy!  They’ve done student teaching!  They have all the latest teaching theories under their belts!  They know how to handle 16 to 30 kids at once!  In some states, they need masters’ degrees!  A person without all that preparation simply can’t teach children!  Because they don’t Know How To Teach!

To which I say–pish tosh.  Again, the homeschoolers that I have encountered are wildly motivated to get their kids to learn.  Some have specifically taken their children out of school systems because…because…their kids weren’t learning.  All that teacher training, the masters’ degrees, the certification, the theories…and their kids weren’t learning.

To top it all off, she says that homeschoolers will share their biases (not "there bias’s") with their children.

Um.  Yeah…?  Do you know of any parents who do not share their biases with their children?  The only way I can think of for parents to not share their biases with their offspring is to…well…just keep their mouths shut.  All.  The.  Time.  In addition, the implication that teachers in school systems don’t share their biases with the children they teach is mind-boggling.  In every way, in every word, in every path of teaching, those teachers do share their biases.  The kids learn a whole slew of biases from the school system.  And from their parents.  And from their aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, and everyone they encounter.

Of course, being exposed to one, and only one, set of biases isn’t the best of all worlds in my mind.  Many parents do homeschool precisely because they don’t want their precious loinfruit to have their ears sullied by the word (or concept) of evolution, or sex education, or Harry Potter books.

I am not an apologist for homeschooling, trust me.  I do think that some people are quite capable of fucking up their children via homeschooling.  But to use an "analysis" such as this one to trash homeschooling is insanity.  This article is so full of stereotypes, misconceptions, scare mongering, lack of citation, and just bad writing, logic, and grammar, that it is, in my opinion, totally worthless.  If you’re going to disapprove of homeschooling and attempt to persuade someone that it’s a bad idea, this is not the article to use.

I first heard about it on Figlet’s blog.

Then I read about it on Bastardette.

And reading some comments here and there, I found this at Heart, Mind, and Seoul.

The gist, for those who don’t want to follow the links, is that someone put up a website purporting to be an adoption agency where lucky adopters who need organ donations can get two, two, two! for the price of one:  An adorable child (or baby or teen) specifically type-matched to be an organ donor.  Or you could even use the kids for sexual purposes (never said right out loud, but implied).

As Bastardette says, it’s satire.  I recognized this almost as soon as I started reading the intro.

And it’s thorough, complete:  it includes a child listing, it includes adoption prices, it includes "testimonials" from satisfied parents.

And it’s appeared on Snopes and been debunked pretty quickly as a hoax (what a surprise).

But, of course, some people take it seriously, so it was the brunt of horrified "OMG!  Have you seen this horrible, horrible website!" comments on a variety of adoption lists and sites.  I will admit that the horror came from those who thought it was real and those who didn’t but thought it was Not Funny At All.

Two viewpoints.  Both having their points.  Two viewpoints, what is more, that are held by bloggers and posters who I actually find interesting, intelligent, respectful.  So, what to do, what to do?  Do I stand by my original POV, that of chortling in dismay at the black humor and poking at various shibboleths, the send-up of both the entire adoption industry and those who treat children as commodities, those who would put different prices on children based on their color?  I thought it was hilarious.  Dark, oh yes.  Blasting, oh yes.  Searing?  Oh yes.  Creepy?  Oh yes.  But hilarious.  This is the view of people like Figlet and Bastardette.  But horrible?  Bad?  Evil?  Not humorous at all?  People like HMS and Chicagomama (I think) stood on that side.  So I find myself torn, a bit.

The one objection that I truly agree with–once I thought it over–is that it uses real children’s pictures.  It didn’t occur to me at first; I figured they were stock pictures, but even so, perhaps that’s a step over the line.  The website could be done with children’s pictures from the back, or in the distance, or blurred by soft focus, and the "profiles" handled by not having pictures at all, with the complete justification that various countries don’t allow pictures.

But some objections?  They make me roll my eyes.  "Giving people ideas" about adopting children for sexual purposes?  "Giving people ideas"?!?!  Please.  Let me just say "Masha Allen".  (For those who don’t know, Masha Allen was adopted as a child from Russia by a single man who managed to spend years abusing her, videotaping the abuse, selling the videotapes, and more.)  There are plenty of sick, twisted people who already use adoption as a covert method of obtaining children for sexual purposes.

Then there was "oh, noes, people will come up to us in (insert country of choice) and ask us if we’re adopting for organs!".  Dudes.  Read about the rumors of the destination of internationally adopted children that run rampant in some countries–Russia, Guatemala, even China.  While I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done that (it would be most difficult to arrange, I would think!), the rumors swirl around, fly up, get denied, die down, and then pop up again all over again.  There’s not much to do about it except educating, over and over and over again–which people who have adopted have to do anyway.

It’s been sneered at as the work of someone with an ax to grind–either against organ donation or against adoption.  No…ya think so?

It "portrays children as commodities"–well, guess what?  They are, in many cases, around the world and here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

And the thing is:  There are adoption agencies that push the hard sell almost as much as this fake website does.  I have seen ads for children to be adopted from Russia where the child is described as "sweet, obedient, willing to help around the house"–profiles that make it pretty obvious the child is being pushed as a family helper, or a maid, rather than a beloved child.  There are agencies that are pushing for adoption from Vietnam whose Vietnamese facilitators went right back to the old, corrupt methods of obtaining children as soon as Vietnam re-opened for adoption after the prior corruption hiatus imposed by the U.S. immigration service.  There are agencies that still tell potential adoptive parents who are looking at China that it will take 12 months to get a referral–not telling the truth about the three to four-year wait until after the PAPs are signed up and well into the process (some obfuscating the wait until after the PAPs have their dossier completed and logged in with China’s central adoption authority).

There are agencies and facilitators that regularly pressure potential birthmothers into adoption.  There are crisis pregnancy centers that funnel girls into maternity homes and "counsel" them into adoption.  There are agencies that whisk pregnant women over state lines into states where the adoption laws favor the adoptive parents much more, and birth fathers have hardly any rights at all.  There are still, in this day and age, pregnant girls who are hidden away from "the neighbors" by their families, sent off to other cities to have their babies in secret, alone and unsupported, just to hand them over to adopters who have lied up and down and left and right about keeping the adoption open–until they get their hands on that baby.

All this website does is to distill and concentrate a whole slew of ethical issues with adoption and paste them into one fictitious bundle, guaranteed to raise hackles, make people swoon with horror, and maybe…just maybe…make some people think about some of the issues that surround adoption.

So, I guess, in the end, while I understand the objections some people have, I side squarely with those who find it a brilliant satire.  I won’t link to it, but if you’re interested, do a search on "medical adoptions".

Today, the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, is "Blogging for Choice" day.

Since it’s the 34th anniversary, we also were treated to a local newspaper’s OpEd from a community member who is against "forced abortions".

Well, whoop-de-do.  Guess what?  So am I!

This OpEd writer, in her discussion, decided to write up five murders where guys killed their pregnant girlfriends because they wouldn’t get an abortion.

I felt a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in that litany of brutality.

Because, y’see, murder isn’t choice.  And "pro-choice" means–of all outre notions–that the woman who is pregnant gets to choose whether she stays pregnant or not.  Legally.  The last I heard, murdering someone so that you get out of child-support payments for an unborn baby isn’t an abortion, nor was it legal.  The last I heard, murdering someone for any reason was pretty much illegal.  In other words, I found this lady’s arguments to be…somewhat irrelevant to the question of the legality or lack thereof of abortions.

I’ve never had an abortion; I certainly don’t expect to need one in the future.  But I have a dotter, and that dotter might find herself unexpectedly pregnant at a time when she’s not ready to be.  I don’t want her to have to drive five hundred miles to be able to get an abortion–legally.  I don’t want her to have to go to a backstreet doc to do it–illegally.  I don’t want to make her have an abortion, nor do I want to make her carry a child to term.  Because it won’t be my body, it won’t be my life–it’ll be hers.

I want her to be able to do it without some prurient conservatives saying that the only way she can get one is if she is a pure virgin set upon and raped.

I want her to be able to sit down, think it through, talk it over with boyfriend, friends, and–maybe–family, and decide–on her own–what she wants to do with her life, her future, her possible child.

And that’s why I’ll keep supporting choice.

Check out other bloggers who have "blogged for choice".

I’m trying to write a post–or multiple posts–about a variety of topics/issues that are on my mind this week, but every time I try to compose a paragraph, or start a mental outline of how to approach the post, my brain short-circuits.  Like a hamster on a wheel, or a car stuck on the ice, the ol’ brain just seems to keep spinning in circles.  So, rather than do anything substantive, I’ll just do some meandering.

First: my computer access has to be shared with my mom, as I have returned the work laptop to work.  ACK!  Then there’s the fact that we’ve been going hither and yon, visiting with folk and checking up on Great Grandma.  This means that my time on blogs and what-not has been severely curtailed.  Every time I pop into my Bloglines feed list (thereby having to log OmegaGranny out, which means she has to keep re-remembering her own log-in and password), there seem to be fifty kazillion new posts.  The end result is I’m tempted to hit the "mark all blogs read" button right now, and just glaze over.

We went off to the mall this a.m.; read OmegaGranny’s post on the subject.  I will merely say that the Hannah Montana wig was lusted after by the dotter.  The dotter has never seen Hannah Montana; her desire is fueled solely by her classmates’ and after-school cohorts’ discussion about how cool HM is.  That and the fact that HM has long straight blonde hair.

We met Singing Bird and the Bee for lunch out and playground playing and home socializing.  It was a lovely afternoon, and I am in love with the Bee.  The dotter is also in love with the Bee, so I expect to hear more about having a sister in the future.  I foolishly have told the dotter that I miss my little baby oh-so-much, and mentioned it once again today in the throes of Emme-Lu-lust; the end result is that the dotter decided that she should act like a baby, "Because you want a baby so much, Mommy!"  This is problematic:  I don’t want OmegaDotter to act like a baby–I want her to be herself.  And she’s just plain pestiferous when she uses baby-talk.  It is all, of course, in desire to make mommy happy, but ack!  This kid is so much fun right now, at this age, and I don’t want her to be a baby again, I want another little baby.

OmegaGranny has given me another new sun to grace the Alaska house.

Great Grandma was much better yesterday.  It made my spirits soar to have her crabbing about people whose children don’t mind, and sniffing at people who let their hair grow shaggy; it was like having her back to normal.  This evening, she wasn’t as peppy.  The dotter told OmegaGranny and me, in the car, "Great Grandma was okay tonight…not as good as last night, but much better than she was."  Fleeting glimpses of her future emotional maturity…

Yesterday, I took advantage of lovely sunny weather, and hauled the poor dotter all the way up Thumb Butte trail and back down again.  And she did it.  And there was hardly any complaining.  And when we got to the overlook at the top of the trail (not at the top of the butte–that requires rock climbing skills and a mom who won’t have her heart stop if the dotter’s hand slips), she looked out at the town and the never-ending view and sighed and said, "Oh, it’s so beautiful!"  Which made the coaxing required for the fourth fifth of the climb all worth while.

I’m trying to come up with a discussion of RAD (reactive attachment disorder), how it is different than any other horrible chronic illness, adoption disruptions, how biological parents are not all paragons of perfection who never relinquish their children (as if anything like an adoption disruption is something that never, ever happens with biological children), and how having a family member turn your life into such misery that simply turning down your street to go the last block or two home makes you feel like you might as well just cut your throat might be similar to how it feels to be dealing with a child with RAD, but, like I said, my brain isn’t working well and it may have to wait for days.  Maybe weeks.  We’ll see.

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I found it first on Twice the Rice.  Then PAGent posted about it.  Then Figlet.

The gist:  a diplomat and his wife, while living in Korea, adopt a 4-month-old little girl (and choose, of all stereotypical names, "Jade" for her name).  When the girl is 3, they move to Hong Kong.  At that point, they have two biological children.  At age 7, they decide to abandon their child to the social welfare system in Hong Kong, apparently citing "culture shock" or "inability to integrate into our lifestyle" or "problem with our foods" or "inability to integrate into our family", depending on which story you read.  Oh, yes, and then there’s the fact that she hasn’t been made a citizen of the diplomat’s country, or of Hong Kong, so she’s still a Korean citizen–but she doesn’t speak Korean–but she’ll probably have to go back to Korea in order to be legally adopted out again.

Dudes, OmegaDotter is almost six.

I simply cannot imagine taking her by the hand, taking her to Catholic Social Services or the county borough welfare system, and saying, "Eh…she’s too much for us.  She doesn’t like to eat the same things we do.  And, geez, she still won’t sleep in her own bedroom, and does the Foot Thing, and bashes against us as a sign of love, and we can’t take it any more.  Find her another home."

I find myself desperately hoping that there’s more to this story, that this couple aren’t as clueless and obnoxious as it seems.  That the child was threatening their smaller children.  That she had RAD and this is the end of a years-long struggle.  Or something.  That the "she doesn’t fit into their lifestyle" commentary was made by a grumpy social worker without a clue, rather than coming from the mouths of the adoptive parents.

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There.  Is it so damned hard to say?!

No.

It’s not.

Jen, over at MimiBoo, mentions, towards the end of her post on anxious attachment, a discussion on a list she’s on about “what do you call your child’s birthmother?”  Much to my dismay (and Jen’s), the “tummy lady” term is still being used, as in “you grew in her tummy, so she’s your tummy lady”.

Oy!

(Aside from the objectification of the birthmother that the phrase embodies, I can’t stand the concept of teaching that pregnancy means “coming from someone’s tummy”.  It’s my own hang-up, and poor OmegaDotter will probably complain to her therapist when she’s 30 that her mother kept telling her how babies grow in uteruses whenever she tried the “I grew in her tummy” statement.)

In this house, we call our child’s birthmother ”your mommy in China”.  Or “your Chinese mommy”.  Or, “your birthmother”.  And it’s “your daddy in China”, and “your other grandparents, who you have never met”.

I made damned sure those words would come easy to me by the time the dotter really needed to talk about such concepts.  I practiced telling her them from the day we brought her home.  Maybe the first time or two it was difficult.  But as a result, these days we have a dotter who feels quite safe in asking questions about her birthmother while we’re eating dinner, and let me tell you, that’s mighty damned important to me.

A helluva lot more important than reserving the Sacred Word “mommy” or “mother” for my use alone.

The “Tummy lady” term has repulsed me since the day I heard that Rosie O’Donnell was using that as her term for birthmother to her adopted children.  It wasn’t because it was being used by Rosie (har!), it was because it seemed to be–and still does seem to be–a way of deliberately distancing yourself and your child from her family of birth, a way of giving lipservice to the idea of discussing birthfamily without having to actually deal with the emotional reality.  OmegaDad, when I discussed it with him in bed last night, wrinkled his nose at the phrase and called it “incredibly impersonal”.

Of course, I have to hold my scorn towards people who use that term in check right now–because I have no idea what I’ll be like if OmegaDotter actually finds her birthmother.  Here and now, the main reaction I have to terms like “tummy lady” is:  Being comfortable with the term, the idea, of “birthmother” is not about me.  It’s about my dotter.  It’s not my life that was yanked about without my consent–it’s hers.  And if feeling comfortable enough to talk about her birth family while her mouth is full of cheesy pasta helps her, then that’s what counts.

Long gone (for now, at least) are the nights when getting the dotter to sleep was a struggle.  These days, we have two routines, which we alternate. 

One routine is “eleven minutes”, in which the dotter and OmegaDad get rambunctious, play “Brother and Sister”, climb into the Thomas the Tank Engine play tent and march around the house uttering train-like noises (”Whoooo-whoooo!”), put on performances, etc.  It’s called “eleven minutes” because at one time in the distant past, it lasted 11 minutes.  These days, it can range from a true 11 minutes to an hour or so.

The other routine is Dotter snuggles up with mommy in bed and we read a story or a chapter or two from a chapter book.

Then it’s bedtime.  And every night, we play the “Feeling Game”.  We take turns telling what made us happy, what made us sad, and what made us angry during the day.  This is something that came from pre-school, and was supposed to help the kiddos learn to recognize their feelings, and maybe pass on a little bit of what went on during the day.  We take turns going first, because often the dotter copies what made me happy, which isn’t really the purpose.

And then we segue off into other topics sometimes, and then it’s Time For Bed, and I read a bit and the dotter (usually) sinks into a sound sleep within five minutes.  (I am terrified that even writing this will cause the Kozmik All to laugh uproariously and deem that it is time for sleep disturbances again…)

The “other topics” can range from blatant attempts to put off bedtime (”I need to tell you something, Mommy!”  “What?”  “What is that?”–pointing at something that she knows very well.  I give her the hairy eyeball.  She giggles.  “Let’s talk about that!”  Unh-hunh.  Yeah, right.) to social issues at school (”Marie is mean, Mommy!”) to adoption.

A few weeks ago, she wanted to talk about her mommy in China.  So we talked about her, and how she was adopted, and the story…and then she said something:

“Mommy?”

“Um-hmmm?”

“Y’know I have her in my heart.”

And she touched herself on the chest with an earnest look at me.

“My mommy in China…I have her in my heart.  Always.”

And then she went to sleep.

Now.  That’s a pretty standard thing to say as an adult, but I don’t think we’ve said anything like that to the dotter ever.  So she just came up with it on her own.

Which I thought was pretty cool.

Linky love tomorrow, really!

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

Today’s saddest Google hit on my blog:

How can I refinance when my house has lost so much value?

That one simple question has so much backstory, and that story is being repeated over and over and over again across the country.

Anyway, son, my answer is:  Don’t ask me.  Don’t ask blogs.  Don’t ask Google.  Ask a mortgage company.  Ask a consumer credit repair organization (and make sure it’s an organization, not a scam).

The housing market has well and truly tanked.  Housing sales are off by 50% year-over-year in parts of California, a drop that hasn’t been seen since they started keeping track of such things.  Foreclosures are skyrocketing.  In areas where people are stubbornly keeping to their original house price, sales are totally stagnant.  The Fed is rumored to be looking at dropping the interest rate.  A consortium of (scared witless) banks has gotten together to create a fund to save “structured inventment vehicles”, which are being hammered by the sub-prime mortgage mess.

And the DJIA, after dipping a toe into record territory, has slid backwards this week.

So, no, son, don’t ask me how to refinance now that housing prices are beginning to drop.  I’m sorry.  I have sympathy, I really do, but at the same time, I really don’t–if you’re in a mortgage mess, you need to take a lesson from this:  read your damned mortgage terms before you sign the paper.  And think looooong and hard before you agree to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars at some un-predetermined interest rate, gambling on your house’s value to keep rising.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Sorry.

Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

Right around the same time that my female hormones really went around the bend (aka “perimenopause”), I began to have a whole slew of side effects.  Hot flashes, a hell-on-wheels hair-trigger temper, a sex drive that tanked, and memory issues.

Each of these taken separately was a total pain in the ass.  Taken as a whole, it’s a personality disaster.  But, even so, most of it is stuff you can grit your teeth and grin and bear, or take various nostrums to deal with.

One aspect, however, really, really bothers me, and that’s the memory problems.

The thing that bothers me is not the fact that I have them–everyone has memory lapses, and walking into a room and suddenly realizing you can’t remember what you went in there for was nothing new and exciting to me, just something to take in stride.

What was disturbing, however, was the form the memory problems took.

I pride myself on my vocabulary.  My ability to flit from word to word.  My personal OED sitting at my neuron-tips, just waiting for the right shading of meaning to pull the proper word out of the mental dictionary.

The form my perimenopausal memory problems took–and still take–is one where very simple words elude me.  I’ll be talking, and suddenly, instead of, say, “oven”, my mind and mouth will say, “refrigerator”.  It’s always a somewhat related word, just slightly skewed.  And worse than that are the times where I simply cannot recall the word I want to use.  At all.  I find myself saying, “the place where all the food is kept cold” and waving my hand about as if to pull the proper word out of the ether.

The thing that scares me most in terms of getting old is Alzheimer’s disease. 

No-one in my family has had it, that I know of; we’ve been remarkably lucky in that as we age, we suffer from all sorts of icky age-related diseases but still retain full mental faculties.  Diabetes?  Yup.  Cancer?  Yup.  Heart disease?  Yup.  Alzheimer’s?  Nope.

Coming from a family that is so rich in folks with excellent mental abilities and a lively love of mental games and learning and puzzles…all of those things are prized possessions to me.  The thought of losing those abilities…the thought of having to depend on someone else because I was losing my own ability to think…these thoughts scare the snot out of me.  It’s my very deepest fear.

Researchers have recently come up with 16 protein markers in the bloodstream that serve as markers for Alzheimer’s, with a 90% success rate.

Would you want to know?

I read that story and my first thought was, “Hah!  Now I can get a test and find out if my specific type of memory lapse is a symptom of Something Worse!”

Then I thought again.  Firstly, of course, is the 90% success rate, which implies a 10% failure rate.  The articles I’ve read didn’t say whether that 10% was 10% false positives (”Why, Jane!  I am so sorry that seven years ago we diagnosed you with Alzheimer’s; it turns out you’re one of the lucky folk who actually won’t get it!”) or false negatives (”George, we’re sorry, but it turns out that we were wrong; you are developing Alzheimer’s very quickly.”). 

Secondly…well, secondly.  What would you live like if you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you were developing Alzheimer’s.  That even though nothing showed up currently in your personality, all the signposts were there indicating that every day, bit by bit, your brain was decaying, and after a certain point you would no longer exist as a person.  That in a few years, your loved ones would be dealing with you-as-a-burden, someone who no longer recognizes them and no longer loves them.

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I’d like to think that I’m the type to find out and face reality.  But at the same time, it’s so much easier to live with a “maybe” than with a “for sure”.

What would you do?  Would you want to know?

OmegaMom has a blank brain today, so it’s time for a bunch of quickies.

• Surely there’s more to this story than reported?  Can one be charged as a terrorist for having a copy of a book?  I shudder to think of the things in my parents’ library; dad was both into chemistry and into things that go boom as a young lad.  Dad’s pictures that alternate from a Rasputin-lookalike to an excellent facsimile of a skinhead would just make the HSA agents quiver like bloodhounds…
• An excellent description of a newly adopted child with attachment issues and how the parents coped and broke through to the child.  (Warning:  requires registration, but a very moving and well-worth-it listen.)
• A recent MSNBC front page featured two stories closely juxtaposed:  “Is Your Child Ready For a Credit Card?” and “Feeling the Middle Class Economic Crunch?”  Hm.  You don’t happen to think those two things just might possibly be related, do you??
• The dotter is being Gloria The Firehouse Dog quite often lately.  She sits and barks at the kitchen door.  OmegaDad put his foot down when she carefully brought him one of my Tevas in her mouth.
• Figlet asks “What did we do pre-Google??”  ProjectNiHao says, quite plainly, that it was a nightmare finding things pre-Google.  PNH and Theresa both have dealt with similar sock issues (Theresa had an ingenious approach of turning the socks inside out, though that would only work with non-patterned socks), and Courtney says that Laura at 11D is having the same issues with her son.  But, back to pre-Google–or, more properly, pre-Internet–times:  I read an awful lot more books then.  And went shopping.  Outside.
• We are having real homework now.  It’s no big whoop, just copying zeroes, ones, and twos, and answering questions about what to do if there’s a fire (it’s Fire Safety week).

Long-time readers will remember when I spent some time painting stenciled horses onto the dotter’s bedroom wall.

In a small boost to OmegaMom’s motherly ego, the dotter, when informed we were moving and finally comprehending the concept, mourned leaving the horsie mural behind.  This, let me tell you, amazed me no end, since the horsie mural had been buried behind a pile of junque on top of her dresser for lo these many months.

So, in a fit of motherly insanity, I told her I would paint new horsies on the walls of her bedroom in the new house.

Now, a year-and-a-half ago, the dotter was mainly interested in the horsies.  Currently, however, she has requested an addition:

Princesses.

Oy!

Watch OmegaMom rummaging through the googlehood for coloring pages of princesses.

Watch OmegaMom find lots and lots of coloring pages of Cinderella, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Snow White.  Just put the word “D1sney” in there, and you’ve got it.

Now.  When she demanded princesses, my immediate response was to say to myself, “Self, we are not going to be limited to D1sney princesses for the dotter’s bedroom wall.  Nosirree, we are going to find non-D1sney princesses.  Nary a D1sney princess will touch our sacred walls!”

Har.

The dotter scotched that idea by specifically requesting a D1sney princess or two.  So I will put one each, scattering in and amongst the horsies.

However, I also told myself, “Self, we are going to look for specifically ethnic princesses to supplement the ew-ick D1sney plague.  I am tired of rosy-cheeked Caucasian princesses with very little variation.  I also want to find some warrior-type princesses.”  Just call me Mama-PC.

So I began looking on the intertubes for ethnic maidens of one type or another dressed in flowing gear.

I found a native American maiden (yah, right, like that’s hard to do) that actually had Indian facial features.

I’ve got D1sney’s Mulan if I really want to use her, but would prefer a different Asian princess.  But when I searched on Asian princess, I found more than one.  If I looked beyond the first two or three pages.  And there’s always (gag) anime as a resource, though it strikes me as an Asian riff on big-eyed black velvet paintings from the 60s.

Hey.  Here’s another:  Try googling “African-American princess coloring page”.  Give it a whirl.

I’ll sit here and twiddle my thumbs while you do.

You back?  Did you find anything?

Okay, okay, anything aside from “Maddy”, D1sney’s token black princess?  Anything that looked like a real, live, black woman, not like a Caucasian cartoon character whose skin has been darkened?

I didn’t.

I looked really hard.

I can find lots of coloring pages for Martin Luther King, when searching with that phrase (web sites with coloring pages of him that also happen to have “princess” somewhere on the page).

Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes at me, saying, “Sheesh, making a mountain out of a molehill!  What’s the big deal–you’re trying too hard to be PC!”  And an entirely separate group of you is rolling your eyes at me, saying, “And this is supposed to be news?!  What, are you blind, deaf, and dumb to realize how color-stratified popular culture is?!”

But, lordy, it’s just so depressing to me.  I know that my mom had a hard time finding strong women role models for me as a child; you’d think that along with all those strong women (yes, there are lots of strong women in pop culture), with all the emphasis on diversity and colorblindness and racial equality and blah blah blah over the past thirty, forty years, something as simple as “black princess coloring pages” would be easy to find on the intertubes.  Call me naive.

OmegaDad suggested I get a “Teach Yourself Cartooning” book and teach myself to draw (such touching confidence in my abilities!) and start doing my own to put on the web.

Anyway, anyone have any suggestions?  I’m cheap, so preferably free.

Those of us who have been involved in infertility treatments realize that it’s not a perfect science, but rather an imperfect ART (pun intended).

The docs can eyeball embryos and think they look good, transfer them, and the end result is a big fat negative on the pregnancy test.  They can toss in an “ugly” embryo or two, and voila, a plus sign.  They can transfer two embryos and the end result can be a triplet or quadruplet pregnancy.  They can transfer six embryos to an older potential mom who has tried multiple times, and end up with a singleton, or a negative.

The clients are presented with a multitude of forms to fill out.  What do you want to do with leftover sperm?  Leftover embryos?  How many embryos do you want to transfer?  Hold harmless agreements.  Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis?  And more.

Lots of those forms you fill out are to ensure that the procedure goes the way you want it.  Typically, you’re not supposed to change your mind at the last minute; while it seems simple, there are many people involved, and it’s a good idea to have the details spelled out first.

Which is why I’m not at all sympathetic to the lesbian couple in Australia who had IVF done, had signed a document saying they wanted one to two embryos transferred, and at the last minute, just prior to going under anesthetic for the transfer, said, “Hey!  We want only one embryo!” who are now suing because the end result was…gasp!…twins.

They want $400,000 to cover the expenses of raising the second child, including tuition for private school.  The lady who got preggers suffered from (gasp!) nausea…she needed to use a walking stick to walk in the later months of her pregnancy…she was perturbed because they had to buy a two-kid stroller…their love life was ruined because she has focused so much attention on two kids…

Oy.

I am rolling my eyes here.

Would this couple be suing if one embryo had been transferred and implanted, then split into identical twins?  Would the pregnant lady have been so utterly devasted by that result?

If the couple had wanted only one embryo transferred, they should have specified so from the get-go, in the forms.  A form was signed that said one to two embryos.  They had every opportunity to–at that time–specify the one-embryo transfer.  Why didn’t they?

Bah.

As someone on a board I frequent said, thank heavens the girls who resulted from this IVF aren’t identified, nor are the plaintiffs.  Imagine finding out at 16, googling your own name, that your parents sued for wrongful birth.

This whole thing seems like an attempt to milk some rich reproductive endocrinologist for some extra dollars, frankly.

Jack and Diane bought an acre of land and a house in Alaska in 1987.  They paid about $67,000.  Time went on, their kids grew up, the US went into a housing tizzy, and Jack and Diane looked at their house and realized they could now refinance and get at the equity…maybe fix things up, pay off some debt, buy a nice plasma TV, send the kids to college.

So in 2005 they refinanced using Lending Vine.  They paid off the first mortgage and had money to spend–they had borrowed $135,000, a fairly conservative amount, merely twice what they had bought for, and probably quite a bit less than what their house was worth (on paper) at the time.

Home values were skyrocketing.  People were getting 20% equity increase per year.  All was good.

They got themselves an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage.  Maybe they really looked at the details and decided that the way the housing market was, it was a sure thing that they could sell the house for way more than the mortgage or refinance for way more than the current mortgage when things got problematic.  Maybe they didn’t see the small print until they were signing, and figured it was going to be okay.

They fixed up the house.  They did some other things.

The interest rate on their mortgage changed in 2006 and their payments went up.  The interest rates went up again in 2007, and were probably going to go up again in 2008.

They sat down early in 2007 and looked at the bottom line.

The bottom line was that their mortgage, which was for $135,000 in 2005, was now for $145,000. 

Houses which were selling like hotcakes only a year ago were now sitting stagnant on the market.  Ne