OmegaMom

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

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

Hah.

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

And when she was four:

And five:

Six:

Seven:

Eight:

Nine:

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

Her fall fifth grade school pic:

Her gymnastics team pic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow or other, this little girl:

Has turned into this OMG-how-did-this-happen tween (oh-so-ironic picture taken at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History):

It happens while you’re not looking.

I have been incredibly busy today, zipping to and fro, getting my boobs squished, telling the car mechanic I have to bring the car in on Wednesday, not today, ferrying a boatload of fudgsicles to school, wrapping gifts, dragging the girl off to gymnastics, buying cupcakes for the kids at gymnastics, running home, writing this blog post, then it’s off to pick up the girl and all of us head out to dinner at her current favorite Chinese restaurant.

Oh, yes:  this year, her putative birthday happens to fall on the Chinese New Year.  Happy year of the Dragon to y’all!

I have more to say, but no time to say it in.  Ack!  More later, gotta run!

New Mexico, here we come!

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

As of today, we have been in Alaska for four years.

OmegaDotter has grown from a little girl going off to kindergarten in a strange place, with tears after school for the first week, to being a 9.5 year old mini-diva who is deep into discussions of (ACK!) periods, breasts, and boys with her buddies.  Luckily, these are things I have talked with her about long since, so she comes back to me and talks about her buddy discussions with me.

I’ve discovered that pop music is an excellent “in” to some more tricky topics about sex and drinking and “being pretty” versus “being yourself”.  (“Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack”, for instance, was a good conversation starter…)  There are times when my eyes bug when I’m listening to the songs, and I swear things are Just Too Racy!, but then I think back to the songs my friends and I listened to, in the Dark Ages, and I realize a lot of it was the same stuff, with more drugs in the songs back then and more alcohol in the songs now.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.  The perils of being the mother to an almost-tween.

She is now almost up to my chin in height.  When we moved here, she was still below my breasts.

Speaking of breasts…things are beginning to move in that direction for her, too.  Oy.

Part of me wants her to just stay my little girl for a lot longer.  Another part of me is finding these discussions interesting, and finding her becoming a bit (just a wee tad) more mature and interested in some more almost-adult topics that don’t revolve around sex and puberty.  Alas, she still hasn’t become enchanted by reading, so I am considering a strict bribery-for-reading regime this school year.  A dollar a chapter?  Something like that, to push her past her “Ewww, reading is boring!” stage.  At least, I hope it’s a stage.

She and I went to Arizona for five days in mid-July and had a wonderful time hanging out with my brother and 18-year-old niece.  Niece and dotter adore each other, and almost all the pics I have of the dotter from that trip include pics of K. as well…but here is one where I cropped out K. so you can get a grasp of how leggy my girl has become:

In other news, our puppy is now 50+ pounds and six months old.  Everywhere we go, we get comments like, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”  What they don’t know is that our dog is like one of the brontosaurs of old, the kind that needed an extra almost-brain in the end of their tail.  I call him our lummox, because he is so cute and friendly and goofy and just plain…well…dumb.  I actually think he will turn out not so intellectually challenged as he grows older, but right now he’s got the “I’m a goofy dawg and need to chew things and get tangled up in my leash and whap things with my tail (as HARD as I CAN!) and Bounce Like A Tigger!” stage down pat.  It is trying.  Especially when the shoes get chewed up.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on right now.  More later.

It seems that even though (a) I haven’t been writing much lately, and (b) I certainly haven’t been writing much about adoption, per se, when I do write a post, someone nominated me for the “Top 25 Adoption Blogs” at Circle of Moms.

I know nothing about the website, honestly.  So, for what it’s worth, I toss this out to my (few remaining) loyal readers:

One of the nice things is that I’m in good company.  Malinda of Adoption Talk; AmFam at American Family; Tonggu Mama at Our Little Tongginator; Heather, at Production, Not Reproduction; Shannon at Peter’s Cross Station;  and M3 at Do They Have Salsa In China are all also nominated, plus a smattering of adult adoptees and a whopping two birthmothers.

Go forth and vote for those who you think do best!  (I believe you can vote once each day, but am not quite sure.)  This is not, however, a vote-for-OmegaMom promo, as I think my dearth of blogging lately sort of makes an award like this moot.

In the meantime, I am serving on a grand jury for two days every two weeks and find it promotes a heavy dose of cynicism.  Criminals are stupid.  Teens do stupid things.  Fights get started over stupid things (chipped coffee cups, anyone?!  Dirty sheets?!).  Drunk drivers are stupid.  Lots of people stupidly drink or do drugs or sell drugs.  Women get into stupidly obvious bad relationships.  Most of the cases we see are depressingly banal.

I can see why police officers tend to be world weary and cynical, oh my how I do.  I’m only doing this for three months, very part time; they do it all the time.

Additionally, I am finding lots of things to be worried about vis-à-vis a tween who is much too eager to grow up.  (To her, that means “being a teen and having boobs”.)  Sex!  Drugs!  Creepy dudes!  The thrill of swiping someone’s credit card to buy (wheeeee!) towels!

(ETA:  Anyone have any idea why my badge—which I swiped directly from Malinda’s post, where it shows with a transparent background—does not have a transparent background on my blog?)

It was up in the 50s today.  Yay!  Woot!

The rhubarb are beginning to show little red pen1ses, just the very starts of the explosion of greenery to come.  I posted pictures last year from about two weeks later, and you can see how they end up looking like weird red brains before they open up fully.

The snow is almost all melted from the back yard, the sunny side of the front yard, and the driveway.

OmegaDotter has taken to wearing her flip-flops.

The twilight has now extended to about 11 p.m., which means that any opportunities for watching Northern Lights is now vanishing into the mists.  Oh, if there’s a whopper of a solar flare, I might stay up until 1 a.m.  But then again, I probably won’t.  At least this year I finally saw some aurorae, and was totally, absolutely jazzed; all the result of the sun—at last!—gearing up from the solar minimum and producing some flares and plenty of sunspots.

There are pussy willows popping out; I have been watching their spread from the lower regions—which are warmer—up, bit by bit.  The pussy willow line has almost reached the altitude of our house.  (This is not to say that our house is high up; we are at about 700 feet above sea level.)

Many thanks for the virtual “there-there”s about the dotter’s foray into tween-hood and the relationships between the sexes.  I have told her she can be T.’s “girlfriend”, which consists of maybe holding hands and taking walks, but dating waits until she’s 14 or 15.  There are other issues, but they are related to living in a redneck-y, Bible-belt-y area of Alaska, and I may or may not discuss them in another post.

Right now, though, I’m just enjoying the real beginning of spring.

OmegaDotter is now nine years old, and in third grade.

She has a crush on T., who is ten and in fourth grade.

“He’s so beautiful!” she told me one afternoon a week or so ago.  We drove past his house on the way to gymnastics, and he was outside; she was right—he is a very nice looking boy.  At bedtime, I snuggled with her and asked her whether he was a nice boy, and that just because someone looks pretty on the outside doesn’t mean that person is nice.  She rolled her eyes at that, because she’s heard it often enough that she was able to recite the words with me as I said them.

The next day she didn’t have the crush.  T. was mean and a bully.

A few days later, she did.  He was not mean and not a bully.

A few days later I., who lives nearby, came by with T., she went off with them to play, and all the kids hung out.  She danced into the house later that evening and said, “I just went on a sort of…date!”

:: BOGGLE ::

Okay, almost immediately she allowed as to how it was not a real date, that they had all played on the trampoline at T.’s house, and gone for a walk, but boy howdy, did she have a crush on T.

The dotter informed me that night at bedtime that T. “cusses a lot.  I don’t like it.”  (Somehow or other, we have managed to raise a child who, though snotty and sarcastic and an almost classic Queen Bee [ugh], does not cuss.  In fact, she has started taking OmegaDad to task for his “bad language”.  This amuses me to no end, because OmegaDad is, in fact, quite restrained in the cussing department.)  She said she was going to tell him he shouldn’t cuss.

I thought it might be a good idea to phrase it differently—we are working on “I” phrases and explaining how things make us feel—so maybe she should say that she really doesn’t like cussing and would he please try not to cuss around her.

I am, in the meantime, still boggling.

This evening, I. and T. came by just before I was picking the dotter up from gymnastics.  When we got back, I said that the dotter could go over and play, but had to be back by 9:30.  She returned home at 9…when she realized what time it was, she announced she was taking the dog for a walk, she’d be back in a half hour, and went back out.

Of course, she went by T.’s house.

T. walked her home.

The dotter then informed me that T. had asked her if she would “go out” with him.

Oy.

So she has been informed that she can go out with him in a group of friends, hang out, play at his house, etc., but she cannot “go out” with him on dates because she is much (OmegaMom gasps, swoons, places a trembling hand upon her forehead) (did I mention MUCH?!) too young to be going on dates.

OY.  Isn’t this kind of stuff supposed to wait for a few more years?!  I have been rather blindsided by the whole thing.  I am, of course, immensely pleased that she’s sharing the whole dang thing with us, and that she’s been discussing whether he’s a nice boy or not with me, and giving examples.  But for Kozmik All’s sake, I thought we were safe from this insanity until she was 12 or 13 or something like that.

OY.

She told me that she told him her “Two Secrets”.  These turned out to be a) how old OmegaDad and I are, which kind of embarrasses her, and b) that she’s adopted, and it was hard to tell.  When I mentioned that it was pretty obvious that she was adopted, she said that she meant it was hard to talk about being adopted.  Sigh.

Anyway, does anyone have any advice?  Puh-leeze?

So we have, essentially, a baby in the house.  A baby that does not wear diapers.

I never thought I would miss diapers.  But I do.

Anyway, the baby is teething.  Which means he is chewing.  Everything.  Boxes.  Shoes.  The used bandaid that somehow OmegaDotter managed to drop behind the living room sofa.  The carpet.  Markers that were under the sofa that were close enough for him to pull out.  Hair ties that were hidden on the floor somewhere.  Some Unnamed Things Under Our Bed (I do not want to know).  He has reached up onto the chest at the foot of our bed and—in seconds—dragged off a scarf and a blankie and started chewing on those.  When I am suiting up to take him out for a pee-and-poop-break, he starts trying to nibble the fur on my boots.

Of course, I am doing my damnedest to each time say “No!” in a firm voice, and then replace the forbidden chew fruit with a Family Approved Chew Toy.  In the meantime, he is a chewing machine.

I am also keeping an ear out and trying to catch the faintest hint of a whimper that indicates pee or poop is about to be deposited.  This means I am missing about half the time.

I had to shut the door to the downstairs bathroom, where the cat food is, because he discovered it today and was like, “Ooo!  Treats!  Yummy!”, even after I took him back to his food bowl and put a bit of puppy chow in it.  Two bites, then it was time to scoot back downstairs and run into the downstairs bathroom.

One of our cats is hiding in our bedroom closet.  He emerges in the middle of the night to settle on my tummy, purr, and lick my fingers, my nose, etc.  But as soon as any out-of-the-norm noise occurs, BAM!, he’s back into the closet.

I have woken up in the middle of the night to haul him out for a piddle break.

So the good things:  Seward is learning to sit.  He’s isn’t learning to stay in a sit, but he does (generally) sit when we command it.  He is learning that being taken out into the yard means it’s time for him to pee and/or poop and have Much Made Of Him.  He is obviously fully recuperated from his Monday surgery to remove his itty-bitty testicles.

I’m too old for this.  Luckily, it will only last a few months.

Aside from that, he’s a sweet, gentle puppy.

Meet Seward.  Seward is two months old.  He’s a mix of Husky and gawd-knows-what.  OmegaDotter’s gymnastics coach, upon seeing his huge paws, suggested he was part Saint Bernard.  Um, I don’t think so.  I also sincerely hope not.  My suspicion is part German Shepherd.

Anyway, he’s a puppy.  He does what puppies do:  He piddles on the floor (though he’s rapidly learning that going outside is for peeing, and we are rapidly learning his peeing cues), he chases the cats (only one of which has decided to emerge from hiding after two days), he chews things.  We are trying to teach him “Sit” and “No” and “Down” and “Leave it” right now, with more advanced stuff—such as “Heel” and oh-my-gawd-it’s-never-going-to-happen “Come”—for later.

(Chewing.  Sigh.  I just intercepted him and OmegaDotter’s hairbrush and her fancy-pants swimming goggles.)

Seward was a bribe.  Specifically, he was a bribe for the dotter.  This is because she had fulfilled the requirements for her previous bribe—no minuses for behavior in gymnastics—which resulted in horse riding lessons.  It also, alas, resulted in an immediate drop in her behavior.  OmegaDad, a firm believer in bribery, immediately put “puppy” into play as a bribe for doing well at the state meet in gymnastics.

Now.  I’m not a great believer in bribery, myself.  I feel like it sets the bribee up for exactly what’s happening:  once the bribe is earned, there’s no motivation for x behavior anymore, and y behavior sets in, instead.  However, OmegaDad had come down the heavy about the state meet, and was insisting she get first place and second place and I don’t know what all, and, naturally, it was Extreme Pressure for the girl.  So, while she was participating in the state meet, and doing fairly well though not as well as her best meet, I was giving OmegaDad the Hairy Eyeball about how he was being a hardass.  The dotter started out fairly good on the beam, but didn’t do so well on her second event, and worse on her third, and she was, at that point, stressed and unhappy.  (Besides, it being about a year and a half since Kai died, I was sort of wanting a puppy, too.)  The dotter produced a second place and two third places in her age group, plus a fourth place overall, and I declared that it was okay, and we would get a puppy.

I had forgotten just how time-consuming a baby animal can be.  Cleaning up the piddle and chasing after him every time I hear him sound like he’s chewing is very distracting.  But!  I have been taking him out for walks in the morning and the evening, and am now looking forward to going for hikes with him and the dotter when the snow and ice is completely gone.

In the meantime, I have a slew of blog posts brewing in my brain, so hopefully it won’t be as long before the next post as it was before this one.  We’ve been off to a Chinese New Year celebration, the dotter has been drawing cartoons, we have baby chicks we incubated and hatched, I finally saw the Northern Lights (but did not get any pictures, wah!), we all got sick for a week apiece, one after the other—it’s been busy.

(OMG.  The puppy found a large piece of foam rubber hidden away somewhere and totally tore it apart in about five minutes.  And I just diverted him from chewing some computer cords.  OMG.  Johnny was right, damn him:  On Facebook, when I announced the puppy’s arrival, he said, “Let the chewing begin!”)

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

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

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

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

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

Ack!

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

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

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

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

It has been a busy week here.

First up, we had the lunar eclipse.  OmegaDotter had her best bud A. over, and the two of them were running all over the place, but not interested in going out into the cold, cruel backyard, so we managed to steer them to the window on the entryway landing, where they could see it as it happened.  In the meantime, OmegaDad and I were in and out and peering and photographing and trying out my dad’s small telescope (which, lacking a spotting lens, was a bust).  I took many shaky, blurry pictures, but finally wised up and braced myself against the corner of the house to get this view of the almost-totally eclipsed moon and some stars (faint):

Cropped and blown up, it looks like this:

I was pretty pleased.  Not bad for a hand-held camera, though there were a number of truly lovely pictures floating around the web from people who had Real Live Telescopes to photograph through.  Sigh.

Then—then!—We had winter solstice.  Not that we did anything to celebrate, but boy howdy, let me tell you, looking at NOAA’s weather website for Big City, which always shows how much gain or loss of sunlight we have had, and seeing a positive number–all five seconds of it!—thrilled me no end.

“But, but…,” you’re saying.  “OmegaMom—what were the LOLs about?!”

Ahhh.

Well.

Over the past year, I have been propagandizing OmegaDotter about Locks of Love.  This propaganda was my attempt to make her think of others, think of doing things for others, with it being a serious donation, not just a “Oh, well, I don’t like that toy anymore; put it in the donate bag!” approach.  OmegaDotter has adored having long hair, and loved the various hairstyles we can do—French braids, joined ponytails, “French” ponytails, plain braids, buns, high-up ponytail, low-down ponytail or braids, etc. etc.

When I first started talking about Locks of Love, she shied away immediately from the whole idea.

I didn’t push it.  I just mentioned it now and then.

Then, a few weeks ago, a long-time blogging buddy who also adopted from China posted about her daughter having her hair cut for LOL.  I showed OmegaDotter the pictures.

And suddenly—suddenly it clicked.  Firstly, “ooh, a cute short haircut!” clicked.  And secondly, donating her hair clicked.

So we made a date, all three of us.  OmegaDotter would donate her hair and get a short haircut.  A. would get his hair cut shorter for basketball.  I would get mine trimmed so it wouldn’t look so shaggy while I’m growing it out.

So off we went.

Here she is, pre-cut:

Her hair was down to her waist.  The hairties are to separate her hair into ponytails for donation.  The hair stylist took the ponytails and braided the hair, then ::snip!:: off they came:

This is what she looked like post-shearing and pre-styling:

We had researched short hair styles and found her a style she liked—a bob with the hair cut shorter underneath, so it curls under.

This is the end result:

We got it done at Great Clips, and it was free (which I didn’t expect).  They even handled packing it up and sending it in.

OmegaDotter loves her flippy new do, and has even figured out how to pull the top layer back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face for gymnastics.

I’m very proud of her.

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

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

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

Hah!

The first moments:

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

First year:

Second year:

Third year:

Fourth year:

Fifth year:

Sixth year:

Seventh year:

Eighth year:

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

Weeks, months, years.

I am tired of it all, right now.

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

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

Maybe.

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

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

Heh.  Every year, I try it, and every year something happens to keep me from posting one day.  Usually it’s much later in the month, but this year’s NaBloPoMo-interruptus came barely a third of the way into the month.

Nonetheless, I think I will try posting all the remaining days of the month.

What happened?  Well, there was an Epic Scene with the dotter.  OmegaDad threatened her with being taken off the gymnastics team.  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And shouting.  And OmegaDad—that gentle, kind, thoughtful man—lost it to the point where he stormed out of the house.

Um.

Usually, that part of the scenes is mine.  Or at least, I try for it, but am not allowed to by the dotter.  In this case, it was more important for her to be screaming at me and trying to wrench the phone out of my hands as I called the gymnastics facility…

Anyway, she and I ended up snuggled up in the big chair in the living room while I talked with Ling and MeiMei (her Chinese dolls) about what OmegaDotter had done and why Big Scenes are happening more and more frequently and blah de blah de blah.  The end result:  she fell asleep in my lap.  And then we woke up later, and I moved us into our bedroom, and we fell back asleep.  Somewhere in there, OmegaDad returned.  I slept until 8:30 a.m.  The scene was at 4 p.m.

This morning we had a Come To Jesus meeting with the dotter.

She spent the entire morning cleaning—not at our behest, mind you; this is one of her ways of dealing with stress and (silently) apologizing.  So we got rid of all the garbage in the living and dining rooms, and in the garage, and we swept and reorganized and she vacuumed the downstairs and the stairs and cleaned the catbox and and and…

Note to all who do not have children yet:  Raising children can be extremely hard.

And then this evening I had word that a loved one is in the ICU and probably going to die in the next few days.

Did I mention that this has been a shitty year?  Oh, yeah.

The thumb swelled up.  The blood pooled under the fingernail.  Whenever the ibuprofen or acetaminophen wore off, the throbbing began and the tears woke her up.  At 3 a.m., she was half asleep, the pain hadn’t gotten too bad, and I was able to convince her to take medicine.  At 6 a.m., I was asleep, the pain woke her up all the way, and getting her to take the medicine was a pain in the butt.

Sigh.

I suppose by the time she’s a grown up, she’ll realize that it’s just plain easier to take the pain meds right away, rather than fritter away an hour throwing a hysterical fit about how much it hurts and how much she hates taking meds.

Yah, right.

Anyway, we hauled her in to the doc-in-a-box, who promptly wanted an x-ray, just in case.  There was talk about the growth plate being injured.

Now, I had heard about kids and bone growth plates, but never seen them or understood them, quite.  I always thought it was some sort of medico way of talking about growing outwards.  Well, duh—of course, it’s something that lets kids’ bones grow lengthwise.  And, amazingly enough, you can see them quite clearly on an x-ray.  So we asked for a CD of the x-rays just because they were so cool.  (And, luckily, they didn’t show anything broken.)

See those thing flat parts at the bottom of each bone, that look like bones themselves?  In an adult hand, they aren’t there.  What you’re looking at is a growth plate—“Growth plates are areas of developing cartilage tissue near the ends of long bones.”  The bones grow from the ends, where those growth plates are.  As the kid matures and the bone stops growing lengthwise, the growth plates fuse with the end of the bone.  You can already see how some of her palm bones (metacarpals) are beginning to fuse.

After the x-rays, we had the doc put a hole in the fingernail to drain the blood, which immediately released the pressure and made the dotter a happier camper.  She was fitted with a splint, which she thought was just about the coolest thing ever, and we headed home.

I, no longer being accustomed to the sleep deprivation of having a child wake up multiple times during the night, spent the next few hours remedying my sleep deficit.  I am amazed, looking back, that I was capable of coherency during those four years of the dotter’s ongoing sleep problems.  Thank heavens these days she sleeps like a log through the night, and if she doesn’t, she comes in, snuggles up at the foot of the bed, and lets us sleep in peace.  I do not miss those nights of constant interruption, believe me!

And then we spent the evening watching old movies and nature documentaries on Netflix.

Last week, the dotter brought home yet another of the endless reams of handouts you get from school.  Science Fair coming up in March!  Elocution contest!  Tryouts for hockey!  Early release day!  Election bake sale!

This one was for auditions for the school Christmas play.

OmegaDotter wanted to try out.

She was nailing it at home—speaking with expression, hitting the loud points, varying the voices.  And she sang her heart out for her dad and me.  She wanted to do the singing audition, too.

There was the obligatory lecture about how if you audition and get a part, then you have to be responsible for the part.  How she needed to know the lines pat days before the audition and then practice daily.  I also emphasized that the handout said that anyone who memorized the lines and did the audition would get a part.  (Hey, it’s elementary school!)

The audition was today, after school.  I cleared the snow off the car and drove (very carefully) the few blocks to school.  I located the dotter in her classroom and escorted her to the music room.  There were fewer kids auditioning than I had expected—for some reason, I thought there would be lots and lots, but there were only about ten kids trying out.  As each child came up, the dotter wiggled and mouthed the lines with them and (alas) gleefully whispered to me about where each one skipped lines.

She had decided during the week that she wasn’t going to audition for the singing part.  Now, when she tries, she can sing quite nicely, and I figured it would be a good part of an audition for her to do, so I kept encouraging her (quietly) to try the singing part.  The first few, she kept repeating that she wasn’t going to.  Then she decided maybe she would.  Then she decided she definitely would.

Then she got up to do the audition and decided she wouldn’t do the singing part.

When she sat back down next to me, she thought maybe she should have, after all.

I said she could always raise her hand and ask to do it now.  It was difficult trying to be balanced, to push gently for her to stretch her wings without PUSHING overboard, if y’know what I mean.

She dithered.  I reminded her that if she got a singing part, she would have to sing in front of people, and maybe it would be better to start practicing now.

Then she waited until everyone left, went up to the two teachers and asked if she could sing for the audition, too.

Which she did, and much, much better than all the other kids.  (Ahem.  I am not being partisan here; she really is a good singer when she tries.)

But Ms. Firmhand, the librarian, asked if there might be a problem with stage fright.  On the side of my body away from the dotter, I flipped my hand back and forth.  Once she gets going, she’ll do well, but it’s passing that point that is the hard part.

So:  Tomorrow, we find out what part she got (remember, the handout said anyone who memorized the lines was IN.)  In two weeks, I’ll be ferrying her back from school to gymnastics or home as she spends the 1/2 hour practicing until December 2, when the performance is.  Part of me hopes she gets a singing part.  Part of me hopes not.

So OmegaDotter is starting third grade today.  Ah, me!  How the time is flying!  We recently looked at some pictures from just two and a half years ago, and she looked so much younger.  Now she’s swiftly moving into the “tweens”.

We finished her new bedroom look, and she is thrilled.  Zebra stripes, bright pink, orcas everywhere, and her most favorite stuffed animals clustered by the headboard of the new bed: 

This is probably the last year I’ll be taking her into her classroom on the first day of school.  I asked her on the drive in (all four minutes of it!) whether she wanted me to keep doing it, and she was rather firm on the subject.  So we marched in, meeting her teacher from last year acting as traffic cop in the hallway; Mr. Snows was pleased that she got the particular teacher she got and amused that her partner in crime and best friend A. was in her class but carefully placed at the opposite end of the room.

Here she is, all dressed in her new teal outfit (it’s more teal-y in person):

You can’t see it, but she is sporting brand new pierced ears.  I had been saying she could do it when she was twelve, but this past weekend, when we were buying new school clothes, we stopped into Claire’s as usual, and another girl about her age was getting her ears pierced, and…well…there you go.

But, while she’s getting bigger and more grown-up by the day, she also still likes to play hard.  She spent the other day “sneaking” around the house as a ninja.  As she’s wearing a pair of my sweats that she begged to have as hers, she looks like a droopy-bottomed gangster:

It’s been a busy few weeks.  Lots of things going on.  I may pull myself together to post on a current “hot issue” over at the Rumor Queen.

Then again, I may not.

The Chinese name request lasted two days, tops.  She’s still interested; there was an interesting discussion about how she figured she would still be her even if she had a different name (Shakespeare, anyone?), but the question of having friends call her OmegaDotter and others call her ChineseName bothered her.  I suggested that when she starts school we could talk with her teacher, and maybe her teacher could call her by her Chinese name.  She’s dubious at this point, but she realizes that we can do this any time she wants.

Maybe that’s all she was after—that reassurance?

Chinese camp was a blast for her.  There was a performance on Saturday that included a demonstration of Chinese yo-yoing by a one-time Taiwanese yo-yo champion (who had been teaching the kids), a variety of dances that were quite well done and very long for 7-10 year olds, and a potluck. 

Here’s the “Happy Farmer” dance the kids performed.  It’s –>six<— minutes long, so only watch if you’re really interested!

I was overjoyed at the prospect of no longer driving an hour to Big City, an hour back, working, then driving another hour to Big City and an hour back.

So now that Chinese camp was over and done with, the next big project began.  OmegaDotter has been agitating for redecoration of her bedroom.  Sunday, she and I went to the local bedroom furniture shop and purchased a new bed and mattress for her, and then went off to Target and bought a zebra-stripe comforter and bright pink sheets…the original plan was to do her bedroom in orcas, but she decided she loved the zebra-stripe and that her stuffed orca collection would go well with it.

Every day since then we have been going through the (HUGE.  MONSTROUS.  APPALLING.) mess conglomeration of stuff in her room, sorting it into “keep”, “donate”, and “throw out” bags, a couple of hours a day.

It has been emotionally wrenching for me.

She put her Polly Pockets into the donate bag.

She said, “None of my friends my age plays with My Little Ponies any more,” and *poof* went the MLP collection into the donation pile.

She went through her collection of horsies with ruthlessness, culling her herd to half its size.

Tonight, we went through a box of her old schoolwork and artwork.  All I can say is: “WAAAAAAH!!!!”

There were kindergarten projects.  Pictures.  Old notes to and from friends.  A sign she had designed for the TV cooking show she and OmegaDad were going to do.  An illustrated “mennyoo” with idiosyncratic spellings.  Various stories.  She was ruthless there, too—keeping much less of it than I had expected.  Some things I grabbed for myself, many she “gave” to me to avoid saying she didn’t want to keep them but sort of did want to keep them at the same time.

The old bed gets listed on Craigslist for this weekend; the new bed gets delivered soon.

Folks, it’s the end of an era…

The dotter and I went to the bookstore a week ago; I wanted a specific title.  She kept asking if we could buy her a book, and I kept grumbling that she didn’t bother to read the ones she already had, so why should I buy her a new one?!  But, in the end, I bought her…

A Hannah Montana “what’s your rock star style?” activity book, to wit, the Hannah Montana My Secret Superstar Syle Book.  (This is, interestingly enough, not locatable on the Amazon site by searching on “Hannah Montana Secret Superstar Style” (no quotes), or “Secret Superstar Style” (again, no quotes), but only by searching on “Secret Superstar”.  No, I can’t explain it, but did find it very frustrating.)

Much to my surprise, she is actually wanting to do the things in this book.

One of the activities was (of course) a quiz to determine your rock star style, just like well-known and loved Internet memes!  As I was reading the questions, I knew what her answers would be, though she surprised me with a few.  (For instance, she chose the “golden sling purse shaped like a guitar” over the “pink rhinestone and glitter handbag”.)  She ended up being “Rock Royalty” instead of “Pop Princess”—which, if I had to peg her pre-quiz, would not have been my choice.

So one evening this week, we managed to dig out two single-color T-shirts and do the “Tear ‘Em Up!” “punk” look mixed with the “sassy” look.  I thought it turned out pretty well!  When I wanted to do pics, the dotter insisted on putting on her ratty old capri jeans, which she adores and I refuse to let her wear to school or summer camp.

Here are the results; this pose shows the cute rucked-up sides:

Another view, showing the asymmetrical sleeves (one side was laced, the other side was plain):

And then a third view, where the dotter did a back bend into a bridge, just because:

She wore it to sleep that night.  She wore it to summer camp the next day.

BUT.  She wouldn’t take her sweatshirt off.  By the time I picked her up late in the afternoon, the sweatshirt had come off, and her 20s-ish camp counselor gushed over how rockin’ the style looked.

Anyway, the end result is that the Sekrit Superstar Style book is actually kind of fun.  Who would’a thunk it?

(ETA:  Oh, just an FYI.  The price of the Amazon Kindle has dropped to $189—the result of competition from the Apple iPad.  Anyway, if you’re interested in a Kindle now that it’s almost worth while buying, if you use my Amazon search link, or the links above, I get a leetle referral $$.  Hint, hint.  )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um.  Okay.  Was that all?  Hm.

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

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

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

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

Her eyes widened, and she shook her head.

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

“No.  Why?”

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

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

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

“No matter how bad I am?!”

“No matter what, kiddo.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why didn’t this woman ask for help???

Was she unprepared?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OmegaDotter bounced in the garage door, letting it slam shut behind her, kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jacket, tossed her book bag on the futon and was talking a mile a minute.

“Mom!  Mom, Joey’s family next door is moving out, and they want to sell the goat, can we buy the goat, please, please, I promise I’ll take care of it and it needs a home, puh-leeeeeze!”

Last fall, Joey’s family moved into the house next door.  We were delighted; the people who had lived there before had Mean Dogs that would chase me and the dotter as we walked back from the bus stop, that had invaded our other next door neighbor’s yard and chewed up one of their dogs, and would regularly raid our garbage can.  They also didn’t clean their yard at all, so it was totally overgrown and weedy—they didn’t even pick up the deck fencing that had fallen down onto the former lawn.  We were so glad to see that family go!  But Joey was a classmate of the dotter’s, he had brothers, they were a quiet(ish) family, and they cleaned up the property right away so it looked…decent…again.

And they bought a goat, Dottie.  The idea, I suppose, was that in time, as she grew, they could milk her.  The dotter was charmed.

At odd times during the winter, I’d be sitting in the dotter’s bedroom reading after we had done our bedtime routine, and hear her going “Maa-aah-aaah!  Maa-aah-aaaah!”  It would startle me until I remembered:  There’s a goat next door.  I’d worry vaguely about how she was doing in the cold, but other than that she didn’t impinge upon my life.

Until yesterday.

“No.  No goat!” I said.

“Moooom!  Puh-leeze!”

“NO GOAT.”  I said.

“Why not?!”

“Because I said so.”  Oh, what a great comeback!

She kept tossing various reasons why we should buy the goat, then reverted to calling me a meanyhead, and then her flighty attention got caught by something else and the subject was dropped.

We bought the first chickens after a bout of OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trying to wheedle me into a goat.  This came after years of OmegaDad trying to wheedle me into a llama.  No llamas, I said for years.  No goats! I reiterated when that particular flight of fancy caught their mutual attention.  But when they finally scaled back to something more reasonable—to wit, chickens—I finally said yes.

A goat, I know, would end up being Yet Another Responsibility.  Yet Another Animal to care for during those long, dark, icy cold winter days and nights.  Yet Another Reason to emerge from the warm house and go trudging across the snowpacked back yard.  Yet Another Expense in terms of food and shelter.  And, oh Kozmik All above use, Yet Another Reason for Vet Bills!

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter did not mention the goat to her father.  But I knew it would come soon, so at bedtime, when I had crawled into bed and snuggled up against OmegaDad in the dark, I muttered, “Are you awake?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Joey’s family is moving out and they want to sell their goat.  NO.”  I said.

There was a silence for a moment, then he turned to face me in the darkness.  “Wait a minute.  I’m confused.  If it’s ‘NO’, then why are you telling me about it?!”

“Because I know that the dotter will try the classic end run where she asks you because she knows you’ll say ‘Yes’.  And I’m saying ‘No’.”

“I thought you were telling me because you wanted the goat.”

“NO!  I don’t want the goat!”  O panic.  No, no, NO, that’s not what I meant!

“Oh.  Okay.”  He turned back over and snuggled up against me again.

Then, in the dark, he sharply turned his head back towards me, in a silent version of a comic, “Are you sure?!”

I snickered.

He did it again, as if to say, “Now, y’know, a goat would be cool!”  I snickered again and poked him in the back.  He did it one final time, and I whapped him gently on the head.  “Enough!  No goat!”

We fell asleep.

Goatless.  Thank heavens.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

Peach said, in response to my Dear Diary post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the joys of Teh Intarwebz is that you can hover on the cusp of current culture, dip in and out like a hummingbird, and still live your own old boring everyday life.

For example:  I have taken to watching shows on Hulu.com.  Alas, I am also aware that Hulu.com is talking about becoming a subscription-only (that means $$) service come sometime in 2010; having found Hulu, I am about to lose Hulu.  Anyway, enough grief; I have found that I can watch Glee and Stargate: Universe on Hulu if I miss those shows the night before, and am happy.

In addition, when brouhahas such as Kanye West’s drunken outburst disrespecting Nice Girl Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Video awards occur, I can scour the web the day after to (a) see what actually happened, and (b) get down with all the nominated music videos.

Which leads me to my headline.  Actually, “led me to my headline”–I watched the nominated videos and found…

There’s a new Star (use your joisey accent on that:  “Stah!”) in the pop music firmament name of Lady Ga-Ga.  Lady Ga-Ga sings catchy pop songs that drip sexual innuendo in music videos that are pop art celebrations of out-and-out (::gasp!:: ::OMG!:: ::catch me while I blush and faint::) lewd sexuality.  She wears nude body suits.  She feels herself up.  She feels up guys.  They feel her up.  She wears outre makeup.  She wears outre clothes.  It is a wild Warholian act; it’s also a wild dionysian act.

And damn.  I love her.

I am aware that some of my readers absolutely positively thoroughly despise her.  (I’m talking to you, PAgent!)  I am aware that my cachet as an intellectual pseudo-counter-cultural ex-almost-hippie is tarnished beyond repair by saying it, but there it is.

I think she’s hilarious.  I love her over-the-top persona, her over-the-top hair, her over-the-top makeup, and her over-the-top music videos.  (I will admit, however, that these are music videos I do not want the dotter seeing.  When the dotter arrived home one day humming the tune to “Poker Face” and saying she had to show me a video, I practically plotzed.  Who the #@!& was showing this smutty stuff to my seven-year-old daughter?!?!  And then she started singing the words, and I realized that she was smitten by a parody video.  Whew.  Crisis averted!)

Then I discovered some interviews of her.  And I loved those–she’s snarky and snotty and playing the interviewers and leaps upon sexism.  And I discovered plenty of YouTubery where she’s doing her hit songs in live venues, small clubs or radio stations, one-on-one, just her and her piano.  I loved those, too–she sings like a torch singer, then switches off into a staccato singing silliness, then back to the torch singer.

Lady Ga-Ga is a mix of early Madonna, Elton John at his most flamboyant, and…and…oh, damn, give me a name of a torch singer from the forties, please.  She is a character and a half, and I go ga-ga over her.

Here’s the parody:

Here’s the original–no embedding, bah.

And here’s a live version:

November keeps going, and I keep posting.  But by this point in time, it starts dragging.  I open up the blogging software and stare at a blank page, thinking, “There must be something interesting to blog about!”

Oh, there is.

I have my little list of questions to answer, from earlier in the month.  There’s still the “did you ever think of a sibling for OmegaDotter?” and the “There are people who deliberately cut off the culture of heritage?!?!” questions.

There’s also the comments on my “Dear Diary” post, which I do mean to respond to.

I also have a “great ladies of the family” series of posts in mind, talking about my great-aunties and how really nifty they were.

Plus a few more book reviews.

But right now, here’s the reality:

OmegaDad is out of town, at Chena Hot Springs (very cool place, by the way!), doing a work retreat/training/study combo.  I am left at home, holding down the fort.  This makes me realize just how very nice it is to have both of us here, together, functioning as a family, each of us (including the dotter) doing different things to keep the family rolling right along.  Not necessarily a lot, mind you, but each of us contributing enough to keep the rest from feeling like there’s just too much to do and not enough time to do it.

For instance, when OmegaDad is at home, I can take an hour earlier in the evening to putter about, think about things, and have something to start with when I face that blank page.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the parenting schtick, which takes time away from the blogging schtick.

With OmegaDad away, I have to do the whole of the pet schtick.  Right now, that means checking on the chickens to be sure none of the other girls are coming down with The Chicken Plague.

With OmegaDad away, if I have a sick headache (like I did this afternoon), there are only two choices:  suck it up and deal with things while I’m feeling like puking and crying, or else (which I did) retreating to the bedroom, napping, and (a) letting the dotter play ToonTown and (b) letting the dotter watch TV until I wake up feeling better.  The dotter was a dream, making sure that she only did ToonTown for an hour (the Rule) and making sure that, when she turned on the TV, she turned it down and closed our bedroom door so it didn’t bother me.

It all boils down to one word:  Wah.  Or a command:  Pity me!  Har.  As if.  The world is full of single moms, and I salute them, because I don’t think I could do it all on my own, all the time.

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

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

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

Tonight, she made me read her latest entry.

It started out:

Dear Diary - I relly miss my birth mom.”

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

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

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

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

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

I suggested we could write a letter to the orphanage.

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

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

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

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

But still.  Deep.

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.