OmegaMom

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…

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.

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.)

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.

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".

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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Angelina Jolie to adopt yet again?!  So soon?!

Okay.  I tried, but I can’t restrain myself.

Look, I love adoption.  It brought us our darlin’ girl who is a constant source of amazement and amusement.

But…but…

Oh, man.  Give those babies a chance to settle in, learn their new homes and families, let the familial orbits have a chance to stabilize.  Please. 

Even if we could toss money around like so much confetti and run hither and yon collecting whatever babies and children caught our fancy whenever we felt like it…

We wouldn’t.

We’d let whatever child we adopted take the time to find a fit, to realize that this is home, give our child the time to bond and attach.  So many things I’ve read from so many places on attachment emphasize that it takes as long as a child has been in an institution to form a real, permanent attachment.

I hope it’s just a rumor.

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