This Day in Family History

It seems a lifetime ago.

But only six years have passed since we stood in the endless line in the convention-center-dining-room entry hall to Portland International Airport customs with our carry-on baggage and a little girl who had been born somewhere outside Dongguan about seventeen months earlier.

I don't think I can ever forget the awful two weeks we spent in China. And it was less horrible for me than it was for my bride. Mojo - for all that her father's longstanding motto is "Everybody's out to screw ya, so watch yer back..!" - is an optimist at heart, or, perhaps, a justist; she really believes that if you do the right and decent thing and work hard to do it you should get what you work for. The notion that a cold and uncaring world will let you break your heart and then gleefully spit on the pieces is unacceptable to her.

So when our first adoption fell to pieces, and especially the way it fell to pieces, she was shattered in the fall. In some ways I think she will never be mended; I still remember the bitterness in her voice when she looked upon our children and said "We're two-for-four in kids".

Still. We've managed to get this far with our health and two reasonably happy, reasonably healthy kiddos. Our little Miss seems to be growing up with no more than the usual number of kid problems and issues, while some of the other APs we know are fighting with horrors like attachment and emotional maelstroms. So as far as I am concerned we are not "lucky" - call no family lucky until they are all dead of peaceable old age - but we have been lucky so far.

Last night I came home to find the Girl outside under the golden rain tree in the city strip. She was collecting seedpods and shaking the seeds into a jar.

After she had collected a full jar she hopped over and asked me a hundred questions - little Miss Question Time is the Queen of Questions, in case you hadn't noticed from the blog here - about the tree; what it was and why it was where it was and how it had grown and what we planned to do with it.

After I answered her questions - or as many as I could - she pondered the immensity of trees and their future and decided that she would send some of her seeds to the Friends of Trees, so that they would be able to raise more trees and help more families have wonderful trees like ours.

Today I find myself recalling that nightmarish adoption anabasis with a certain detached and bitter amusement. It could hardly have been worse unless we had left China without a little person.

But as it turned out we seem to have managed, through no virtue of our own, to have blundered into a very sweet, very funny, very loving little person who loves ponies and pasta and trees and her mom and me.

Her brother? Well, that might take some time.

I'm not going to get all goopy about fucking red threads and ladybuggery, don't worry. I don't have to, because Gina Biggs, who is awesomesauce, has already said everything that needs to be said about that stuff;

Sometimes.

Sometimes the thread you're desperate to hang on to breaks.

Sometimes you lose that thread, and sometimes you cast it away.

Sometimes, though, you get tangled in a thread that you didn't look for or want, didn't hope or work for, and that turns out to be the one that twines around your heart.

So thanks, little one, for tangling us up. Our happy coincidence doesn't lighten a single step of the hard journey to where we met you. It doesn't take away old sorrows, and it will not forestall the sorrows to come.

But it has lightened many since we met.

Ours is an odd sort of love; we were not born into it, and we didn't happen upon it, and we didn't fall into it. We built it, day by day, word by word and touch by touch, without knowing the shape of what we were building or whether we could build a love that wouldn't fall to dust and ashes with a harsh word or a cruel touch. But we did, and do; every day we live we are a gift of love.

We didn't know we loved each other until we did.

The Moon Sees Me

Today is Moon Festival for much of Asia including China as well as for many folks of Chinese heritage all over the world.

I see from my Facebook that my fellow Families with Children From China are all doing some sort of Moony things; eating mooncakes, going out for moon-viewing, all the good stuff. Even Pobaby gets into the moon in mid-autumn.

Well, we might go look at the moon, providing the clouds hold off. But we ain't eating no goddamn mooncakes until someone comes up with one that tastes like something other than raw bean curd dough. Bleh.

My favorite Moon Festival story took place when we were in Guangzhou in process of adopting Missy. I told it six years ago but it's worth repeating.

On one of our many, many trips downtown Guangzhou to see our pals at the police station we got to talking with our agency guide, the sharp young woman who was Rob the Yob's stand-in.

"So, what's the deal with Moon Festival?" we asked her. "Oh, it's a big family holiday, all families get together and have a big meal and party." she explained. Mojo and I looked at each other.

"Lemme ask you something...are you married?" She admitted that she wasn't.

"When you go home for Moon Festival, do your mom and grandma give you a hard time about not having a man, getting too old, and not giving them grandkids?" Yep, she said, all the time.

"Does your Dad and your uncles drink too much, argue and watch sports on TV?" She said that they usually did.

"Do the kids make noise, raise hell and throw food, and does one of the auntie's kids throw a huge tantrum and/or get sick?" She agreed that was what usually happened.

"And do all the grown-up kids hang out in the back yard, smoking, and complain about having to travel to do this every year?" She just smiled and nodded. Mojo and I smiled back, looked at each other and laughingly explained that we had the exact same holiday in America only in late autumn and instead of the moon we used a made-up story about our native tribes and a bunch of white religious nuts who turned up in a boat, took the land, and eventually killed off all the natives - "Thanksgiving", we called it.

She totally didn't get it.

But she saw the similarity between the two holidays.

Regardless of what you do today, I hope the Moon Rabbit is bringing you and yours a lovely Mid-Autumn Moon Festival!

Pom-pom

Posting has been very sporadic lately largely because of this little guy:

He's a one-year-old beagle-something mix, and his new name appears to be "Pom-pom", both for the jaunty little fuzzball on the top of the old-school matelot cap as well as the rapid-firing light cannon. It's also a corruption of his shelter name, "Pomegranate" (he was imported to the Portland Humane Society from a shelter in Merced County, CA, and the intake volunteer seems to have had a taste for whimsical fruit, because he and his brothers and sisters were all named things like "Pecan" and "Mangosteen") but all in all it seems to fit him.

He's a cocky little bastard, and he's got a lot to learn about getting along with people, and other dogs, and Nitty the Cat. But he seems to be a very gentle and happy little fellow, too, so we're hopeful.

But I'd forgotten how much bloody work a new dog is. Fixing up the fences around the yard so he stays in the yard, trying to arrange the house to cat and dog don't collide catastrophically, if you will. Training wives and kids who have no experience training young dogs. So I apologize in advance for the light posting over the next week or so, but you see how it is.

Here's one last snapshot:

Sit. Pom-pom! Stay!

Fracture Lines

The Boy and I went to see Oz, the Great and Powerful the other night. And this should warn you; if you haven't seen it yet and want to - there be Spoilers About Oz Ahead.



Anyway, the original plan was to go see the film playing down at our local St. John's theater as Family Movie Night. But the Girl felt poorly (she had been fighting a stubborn cold for the past day) and she begged off, asking her mother to stay home with her.



Had it been her brother I would have suspected that he was sandbagging, using the cold as a face-saving way to avoid seeing a film that (from the trailers we'd seen on television) had some fairly frightening moments.



But Missy is a fearless little soul and she seems to have a much firmer grasp of what is fiction and what is fact; she can view films and stories and television that scare her older brother witless without so much as a shiver. "That's not scary." she will announce in that flat tone that little girls who are dead solid certain of themselves can employ.

So, instead, the Boy and I drove to "downtown" St. Johns in the spitty rain and ran inside the arcade that shelters the doors to the old building.

The moviehouse is a great old place; it has been showing flicks since it was built in 1925 (as "McCreadie's Venetian" - see the picture below) and as we waited in line at the small ticket window I couldn't help imagining that some earlier St. Johns father and son - perhaps even the father and son that had moved into our little house when it built just three years earlier - had waited in line for the original Wizard of Oz back in '39.

I got myself a beer (a nice dry-hopped IPA, too, to celebrate the repeal of the Prohibition of McCredie's day) and a slice of pizza to go with the Boy's popcorn and soda; the joint is now a theater-pub sort of place, very popular here in Portland since the advent of the McMenamin's chain. We settled in with our snacks through the endless previews (although the Boy did like the looks of the upcoming entry in the G.I. Joe franchise so I may be in for another movie night soon, just me and him...)

And then the film began.

Let me say upfront; it's not a "great movie". Frankly, I loves me some Sam Raimi and expected better of him. It's overlong. It drags in stretches, and the opening Kansas sequence is kind of a bust. And I wasn't able to pin down what the hell Michelle Williams was trying to do as Annie/Glinda. Was she trying to seem flirtatious? Mysterious? I have no idea. She's very good at cute and spunky, though, and that went a long way towards making her Glinda likeable.



But that really didn't make a difference. A Wizard of Oz movie isn't about "good" or "bad"; it's about magic.

And flying monkeys. And even MORE bizarre creatures. And little girls made of porcelain. And wizards, munckhins, and spectacle.

And Oz has all that in job lots.

The Boy liked the heck out of it. He was frightened by a couple of the scarier moments - he really is a very gentle little guy for all that he pretends to be rough and tough. He loved that the Head Witch (Evanora, the future-wicked-witch-of-the-East) could throw lightning like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars,



and (true movie geek - or at least Star Wars geek - that he is) noted that Evanora/Palps both turns her sister into Darth Vader...



...AND has a final throwdown with Glinda/Yoda in the throne room/Senate Chamber complete with lightning sumo.



I enjoyed it, too, for what it was; a sort of simultaneous riff on and tribute to the original. It hit all the canonical nodes (flying monkeys, green witches, munchkins, Winkies marching around chanting "Ore-e-o") while being very much different in spirit. The 1939 Wizard was all about home, and finding your place, and reaffirming the beliefs and loves you'd always had and never appreciated.

The 2013 Oz is about the journey, and exploring new worlds, and finding in them and within yourself new beliefs and loves you hadn't thought you had or ever could have.

But, oddly, the one thing that I really, truly, genuinely loved about the film was China Girl.

I have to stop here and admit something; there's a point in the film where the Wizard and his faithful companion Finley are heading out to the Dark Forest to find and destroy the person that they've been told is the Evil Witch (she isn't, but that's another story). They get to a crossroads, and there's a signpost; one arrow reads "Dark Forest". The other reads "China Town".

And I hate to admit this, but for a moment my mind stopped dead, gibbering.

China Town? In Oz? China Town?

I had a sudden mental image of a pigtailed, squidgy-eyed, bucktoothed cartoon Chinaman - Chink-ee from Gene Yang's American Born Chinese - bowing and chanting "Me doo-ee washee? Velly good washee! Ah-so, Chinkee Chinaman velly good washee-washee!"

I hate it when I do that.

Remember that I was a kid in the Sixties. The popular memory of that time was the Summer of Love and hippies in sandals and VW Bugs. The reality was very different, and included a lot of vicious, open racism. It wasn't just about whites and blacks. I vividly remember hearing a Chinese friend of mine, a slim quiet girl named Anne Kwong, called a "slope" by one of the drumline thugs my freshman year in high school; to my shame I did or said nothing.

But the worst part of that sort of thing is how insidious it is. A lot of that time, and a lot of those thoughts, and words, and images, still live inside my head and struggle to escape, usually at the very worst moment.

But of course, the "China Town" of Oz isn't "Chinatown". It's just what the words say it is; a China Town.

A town made of china.



The China Town sequence was Raimi at the top of his game, and the main character you meet there - the China Girl - was a creation of absolute magic. While I'm an animation fan and a CGI enthusiast in general I'll be the first to admit its limitations. It is very difficult to get a genuine "performance" out of a CGI character; the essential inhumanity of the pixels always seems to force its way through onto the screen.

But when you meet China Girl there is none of that.



I'm not sure why. Some combination of the character design itself, the voice acting of Joey King as well as the way the other actors play off her, and Raimi's direction. But the overall effect is winning, and winsome, and very poignant. I defy you not to love the little character. She's terrific.

And this is where I link to my friend Maia's blog. Because her little girl QQ was another person who fell in love with China Girl.



QQ is a lucky girl; her mom and China Girl got together to make some real magic happen. Go ahead and read her blog post; it is achingly sweet.

But the thing that makes it as touching as the character herself is the teardrop at the heart of the story of the little girl in Denver who is going to sleep tonight with her new friend. As Maia says;

"I'm sure that it did not escape her that this character is an orphan, left without a family or a country, and that she is desperate for a family. Also that she is fragile and injured, but also stubborn, tough and brave."

And - in very different but very similar ways - both are China Girls, who have to find a way to find a new belief, and a new love, with a new family they never expected or hoped to find.

I won't pretend I didn't tear up reading about little QQ's quest for, and meeting with, her little china doll friend.

The other night, though, there was none of that sweet sentiment.

The Boy and I rode home having a discussion of near-critical geeky mass about the parallels between Star Wars and Oz (we agreed on Palps-Evanora-Yoda-Glinda-Vader-Theodora but never could decide who was the Luke Skywalker character; Boy held out for the Wizard, while I insisted that there was no direct match).

The house was dark and silent; we brushed our teeth together barging against each other quietly. He washed his face and gave me a hug and I breathed in the boy-and-popcorn scent of his hair against my cheek. And he went into his bed to burrow into the immense pile of stuffed friends inside, and I went to the computer to blog-read and wait.

And, surely enough, about an hour later I heard the sound of crying.

At first I wasn't sure whether he was awake or not. He's had "night terrors" before; horrific things that simulate nightmares but are far, far below the dream-layer. This wasn't one of those. Boy was barely asleep, frightened by the afterimage of some frightful moment in the film. He was shaking, and crying, and (unlike the night terror state) scooted quickly over into my arms.

I kissed his forehead, still slightly damp with fear, and told him that I had stayed up to watch over him. I asked him if he was frightened by the scary parts of the movie and he nodded, shrinking deeper into my arms. I suggested that, instead, he might dream about how he could make a place for a puppy we might foster over the summer; how he could build a house for the puppy, and make a place for it to play, and all the ways that he could show the puppy that it was safe and loved and welcomed.

And, whether it was the pleasant thoughts of pets, or the sound of my droning on, or the steadiness of my arms around him, the Boy's eyes started to droop. He roused himself to give me a final hug, and tunneled back below the top layer of stuffed critters.

The bare leg that remained exposed looked very fragile and unprotected, like China Girl's as she lays shattered amid the ruins of her family. For we all have our fractures, don't we? Our planes of weakness, the mend-lines of our old breaks like the patterns of ancient porcelain that run across our limbs, like China Girl's.

Or sometimes across our minds, or our hearts.

I stood in the twilit doorway listening the the sound of the Boy's breathing, peaceful again, gently closed his door until just the faintest pillar of light remained streaming out of the room and turned back into the darkened hallway.

Songs in Red and Gray

I had an odd and revealing moment this afternoon.

I had just finished up doing some text edits and stopped off to see if my friend little X in Tucson was doing better after his surgery (amazing, isn't it, that our epistolary friendships now take place in realtime? I think we often take for granted the miracle of digital electronic communication...) when I came across a post from another friend, a young woman who has adopted not just one but two little girls from China.

Her younger daughter is dealing with attachment issues and this woman had simply had a trying morning and couple of weeks and wanted to tell us about it.

I went to her blog and read her post and, well, just felt badly for her and her daughters and her husband. Attachment disorders are hell, and there's no disguising or ameliorating that. When the normal human connection between childish needing and parental giving is broken, well...

But the sharp stick that it prodded into my back was the thought of my own little person that came with us to rainy, cold Portland these five years gone by.

That tiny burr-headed voiceless toddler is buried so deeply within the busy little wriggling girl who loves ponies and kitties and sparkly jewelry that I can barely remember her.

I know she's still in there; when my daughter collapses under my scolding that's the little girl running to cry on her wubbie. When Missy responds to gentle teasing with angry tears, that's the little girl weeping.

She had her own hardships with learning to love us and be loved. Somewhere inside that little girl still mourns the mother she never knew.

But that little girl has gone far away now. Bright-eyed Missy, with her bottomless craving for sweet sesame seaweed and Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, with her silly giggle, with her artless questions, has pushed that little girl far inside the rooms of the shiny playhouse life she's built since the day she met us in that chilly room in the big hotel on Shamian Dao. And I realized that her present and her future; her life as a Chinese-American girl in the United States, as a first-grader in Portland, as a daughter and sister, as...well, as herself has become the Missy that we know. We have almost lost that other, frightened, little girl that cried herself to sleep in the makeshift crib.

And I paused for a moment and flicked back over to this blog and sat chin in hand looking at the link to the China Center for Adoption Affairs; the website that almost ran our lives, Mojo and mine, back in those terrible and nervous days as we waited for news of our daughter. And realized that I hadn't looked at, or cared about, that connection for years.

And I opened the dashboard and deleted the link.

Those of you that have followed me and my daughter through the past five years know that our past is our present and our future; we carry the scars and the gifts of the past through our days as the seeds of our future.

But those scars - and the gifts that sometimes gentle and heal them - are not changeless. Just as our faces and bodies change those marks of our pasts change as well. Where we are going takes us around the corner from where we have been, and the sightlines to those places are lost.

The road my little girl travels will always lead from China and her lost mother and the life that she lost such a short time ago.

But her face is set firmly forward, and her hurrying steps are taking her on that road the leads - I hope, I dearly hope - to a busy, bright tomorrow.

Sayings of Chairman Missy

We had some dear friends come to visit this past weekend. They and we go back to our wait for referrals from the CCAA, so we both have adoptive kiddos from China.

You know our little Miss. Their son, let's call him X, is about the same age but is as different from Missy as little boys are from little girls. He's funny and energetic but he's also a prankster, always trying for a tickle or a joke, and always on the lookout for something and someone to spoof on.

Our Miss was unimpressed. She confided her distrust in her parents' obvious interest in trying to to enlist her in entertaining the guest to her mother.

"I hope you don't expect me to play with that boy," she hissed, "...even if he is one of my kind."

But don't think that Missy is completely ungrateful for her family. Just the other day she brought home something she wrote for a Thanksgiving assignment titled "What I'm thankful for".

"I am thankful for...my family, because I lost my birth family. I am thankful for at least HAVING a family."

"I like spending time with my family so I won't have to be a bored orphan."

Boredom.

It's worse than being an orphan.

Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

Please, sir, I want some more.

The other day the kids were a complete, utter pain in the fucking ass for the better part of the morning. By noon Mojo had just about had it as they were loading up the car to go home from downtown.At which point Missy decided she had had just about enough, too.Missy: "I wish I was an ORPHAN so you couldn't tell me what to do!"
Mojo: "Fine. You can stay here, then. Somebody should come along in a while and maybe they'll take you home with them." (Missy's eyes go wide) "So, Peep, do YOU want to be an orphan, too?"
Peep: Naw. The food sucks."For once, I was wise enough to say absolutely nothing.

Lost Daze

It was somewhere around this time in September four years ago that we were lost in Guangzhou in a muggy haze of exhaustion, confusion and grief.We had just lost the first little girl we had hoped to adopt. No, not lost. Abandoned.

Little Yun-yun had been afflicted with some sort of brain damage, and, already shell-shocked by the stillbirth of our daughter five years before we broke off the adoption rather than go forward into an uncertain future with a child whose ability to grow might have been unimpaired...or might just stop completely at five, or nine, or fourteen, to be with us as a toddler or an adolescent for the rest of our lives.So we were in pretty bad shape when the neatly dressed director of the Social Welfare Institute in Dongguan (东莞) showed up at our room at the White Swan Hotel with a tiny crewcut little girl in a white jersey and teeny plastic sandals.And that's how it went for the next week or so; she silent and distressed, we harassed and barely functional as we replayed all the miserable routines we had already gone through the first week of the journey with a different child.It is difficult now to look at the rude, chatty pixie who loves Beefaroni and "My Little Pony" and remember that silent misery.But she is still there, that sad little girl, locked four years in the past, and so are the we of then.We've come far since that day, though, Little Miss, you and I and your mother, and now I can't imagine being without you, or your artless chatter, or your wriggly back-scratching confidence. Or, as tonight, when you fuss and fret and cry yourself to sleep over a foolish lost trinket. In content and in contention you are ours and we are yours, now, until we go on before you to our long sleep.From a stony beginning we have begun to create a soil of love, and from there I hope you will grow straight and bloom brightly. For the road ahead is long and for all that there will be stony places again, and storms, and darkness I believe that we will have times to walk together in the light of love and the sun of happiness.Happy Family Day, daughter.

We love you very much, indeed.

Orphan out of Carolina

I wanted to point you to a very good essay about adoption.

I've followed Lorrie over at Clueless In Carolina for years. She's that rare blogging combination of thoughtfulness and literacy that makes for genuinely good reading. She's hit a rough patch lately, and I hope things look up for her, but she's still a good read.

And her latest post was about adoption - her own.

I blog about adoption quite a bit. I have to; when a quarter of your public is adopted it kinda gets in your face. So it was painful to read;

"Today I realized for the first time that there is an unbridgeable gap between an adopted child and a person who can pick up the phone and call the people who brought them into the world and point to the bed where they were conceived. "I dread Father's Day," I told Roger tearfully. "I've lost two fathers."

And realize that there's really nothing you can say beyond that.

You know our story; we lost a daughter. Lorrie lost a father. Twice. Which is more heartrending, to lose the future, or to lose the past? I don't think that grief bothers keeping score.

I once wrote something about the effects of grief, and said;

"I realize anew reading "We must never limit the universe." from my friend's blog that what this old grief scar does do IS limit my universe. I'm perfectly functional, but I've taken the big wound. I can't ever again KNOW that something good is on the way. Because it was once and what arrived was pain and loss and sorrow. And nothing I could do - and I once foolishly said that anything that wanted to hurt my family would have to kill me first - was enough to stop the awful emptiness that still exists, a tiny universe of nothing but Dark Matter, in the locked room at the top of the stairs in the back of my head."

And now Lorrie knows that she, too, has that locked room where she can climb the stairs, and stand in the doorway, and see the face of Loss and say, welcome, old friend, old enemy.

Have you come to stay with me for a while?

I think you can sum up the entire business by remembering that every adoption begins with tragedy.

We Americans are especially bad at tragedy. We're the ultimate shiny happy people, and in a lot of ways that's a good thing. But not here.

I wish I had some words of wisdom or consolation for Lorrie. I don't. Some things are just pure grief.

The loss of her fathers, like all losses, like all griefs, can be softened by time and distance. As they are for all of us; the grieving parents, the harrowed soldiers, the bereft adoptees.But they will always be there, waiting, at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently to ask us if we want to sit with them on the top step and remember all the pain and heartache of the end of our yesterdays, and our tomorrows.

A Poor Black Child

OK, here's an oddity. Maybe you can help me figure this one out.My little girl doesn't like talking about her pre-adoption life. She does the three-year-old version of sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "la-la-la-la-la!" when you bring the subject up. She violently objected when I tried to talk about her birth mommy in China, pointing at Mojo and declaring "That's my mommy!".

So the other night, we were coming home from the Nickel Arcade after giving Mojo Mommy's Night Off and talking about what the Peeper is learning about Dr. King. The conversation turned to how people who come from different places look different, and upon being informed that she was Asian, Missy said:"I was born a poor black child am NOT Asian!"

Her brother - cartoon Scotsman as he is all red hair and freckles - insisted that she IS. Is NOT! Is!

I had to shut down the Peep before the tears arrived.The thing I can't figure out about this is:

Is Missy saying this because she hears "Asian" as "not like my mommy and daddy and brother" and is saying this just to insist that she is - i.e., she doesn't understand the entire concept of race and is just demanding her place in the family?

Or does she understand, and is she doing a Steve Martin and insisting she is TOO Caucasian like mommy and daddy and brother?I want Little Girl to like herself and be happy with who she is. And if what she's saying means the first expression then it's just a question of development and understanding. But the second argues a degree of dissatisfaction with her own appearance and ethnicity, which makes me a little saddened and a little worried, and I'm not quite sure which it is...

I'm Rubber, You're Glue.

Read an interesting post today at an adoptive-parents blog.Yeah, I know. There'd a blog for everything, isn't there? There's probably a blog for people afraid of scary clowns, probably another for folks with a plumbing fetish, tons (I suspect) for plushies, shoe fanciers, barbershop singers and Trekkies (sorry...TrekkERs.)

Well, this ain't no adoption blog. Yes, my little girl was born in China. But where this blog is about her it's about HER. Her past, her birthparents, our adoption, that's all part of her. But, honestly? When I think of her, the first thing that jumps into my mind is "giggly". Or "cute". Or "happy". Or "energetic". Somewhere in there is "Chinese-American" and "cleft" and "adopted". But they're definitely behind "Barbie girl", "loves to sing" and "tell me a story about me and Dora the Explorer" in the Missy queue.

What we don't think much about are the things that many adoptive parents talk about (and worry about, stress over and, I suspect, look for).Things like "attachment issues" and maladaptive behaviors that you're supposed to be concerned with as an adoptive parent. The stresses we have and had (and we did have a tough time; go back a skip through my entries for the autumn and winter of 2007 and spring 2008 if you doubt me) were, as much as not, the stresses of having two kids instead of one. The fact that the little one had sleeping problems sucked, but it didn't suck any worse than the sleeping problems that the big kid had when he was her age. The fact that little wanted to be carried everywhere was an additional stress, not a unique one - although in retrospect, I'm sure it was an attachment thing...

Anyway, we have bumbled along for two years and change now with the two little peeps hardly distinguishable in their fears and loves, in their tantrumy gusts and their sudden flurries of hugs and kisses. I won't say we don't see the differences between them. But we see the similarities much more.And over that time, we've lost a lot of our contact with other adoptive parents.

We returned from China with another family that, over time, cut us dead. The young woman we knew through our "adoption group" drifted away after never really bonding with us. I'm still in touch with some friends from an on-line adoptive parents group through Facebook, but often as not we talk about food or movies and anything but adoption.

We just don't seem to have the adoptive parent magic. One evening back in '08 Mojo was hanging out with the other two women I mentioned above (the younger was still awaiting her referral) and was laughingly describing how Little Girl was chewing on us; in her view (and mine) it was a kid thing, the same sort of thing that the Peeper went through when he was two. She finished the story, chuckling, and looked up into two very, very concerned faces."Have you considered the possibility that this may be the sign of an attachment problem?" asked the young adoptive-mom-to-be.

Mojo thinks about that for a moment.

"No," she says, "honestly, I haven't. I just think she's two and she likes to bite people. After all, we're tasty."

I think she lost some points for that.

Is that why the other adoptive parents backed away? Is it us? Are we being terrible parents? The blogging adoptive mom wrote that her bond with other adoptive parents "was magically strong, like superglue." Are we - am I - just not right for superglue, covered in emotional teflon or PVC or whatever it is that superglue won't stick to?I don't feel that way. But perhaps teflon never does...