Abacus and Quill

I just finished celebrating the first anniversary of my 40th birthday. I’m not freaking out about being over 40, I just didn’t like the way 41 sounded. Whatever.

I threw myself a birthday party, which I haven’t done in years and years. Dinner with husband? Yes. Dinner with friends? Yes. But not a come-over-to-my-house-and-I-will-provide-you-food-and-drink party. I chickened out a little and made everyone bring something to eat, and just for fun, they had to give me the recipe.

Here is a picture of the best, most unexpected dish. The recipe is as follows, and is of unknown origin:

1 box vanilla wafers
sesame seeds
1 box Keebler Grasshopper cookies
3/4 c. coconut
white, yellow and red frosting with decorator tips to dispense
1/4 c. Karo syrup

Place coconut and a few drops of green food coloring in a plastic bag to mix. Set aside.

Place vanilla wafers on wax paper, top side up. Brush with Karo and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Set aside.

Place 40 more wafers flat side up on cookie sheet. Add a dab of white frosting on each, then place a grasshopper cookie on each. Brush cookie with Karo. Sprinkle coconut and swirl red and yellow frosting on each. Take the tops you made earlier and add those to the top. Viola!

me and my burger

YUMMY!

Oh, and I also got myself a Sally Hanson give-yourself-a-french-manicure, polish-in-a-pen kit at Walgreens, and I think for $12 it looks pretty decent (and there’s plenty more for next time). And it wasn’t much more difficult than painting your fingernails with whiteout used to be. But prettier.

I don’t know the real story behind what happened in Tennessee and I honestly don’t expect to. I listened to an adoptive mother on the radio today who said that she could understand the emotions that led to the woman putting her son on that plane to Russia and I was conflicted. I have described the experience of adopting/becoming a mother as “setting your family on fire”, so yeah, it’s hard. I get it too. But what she did with her emotions, and the choices she made from that point are unfathomable to me, and unforgivable.

Approximately 1% of all adoptions are disrupted. That is to say, ended, annulled, undone. For whatever reason, the parent(s) decided they could not continue to parent the child.

Let me be clear. Children do not disrupt adoptions. Their behavior, disability, habits, previous trauma – or anything else they say or do – does not make them unparentable or unlovable. The parents could not continue to parent. Whatever the circumstance, it is an avoidable tragedy. A child, who through no fault of their own and who has already lost ties to one family, is again set adrift.

And let me be clear on this.As the adult in the parent/child relationship, it is our duty to provide this. It’s what we sign up for, in whatever way we become parents.

That being said, nobody can fully prepare for what happens when you bring a child into your world, whether by birth or adoption. Every mom I know did her best to prepare. From “What to Expect when You’re Expecting” to “Toddler Adoption

Every child deserves a loving home and a caring family surrounding him or her. Period.

: A Weaver’s Craft”, from Lamaze to pre-adoption counseling, we sought out information to help us transition.

The reality of parenting is that you are, in the simplest relationship scenario, an adult and a child coming together with two temperaments, personalities, preferences and experiences. This is as true with a newborn as it is for a child of any age. This is why second children/second adoptions seem only incrementally easier. Nothing is different but our expectations.

Human relationships are complex and fluid, and all relationships take work and take time. That is the message we need to be sure that all first time parents get. That and the reminder that the parent is the adult in the relationship and the burden of making the relationship work is on you.

That is what I would like to say to the woman who pretended to be Artyom’s mother. That, and SHAME ON YOU. YOU WERE THE ONE WHO HAD OPTIONS, INFORMATION AND CHOICES.

The truth of the matter is that I never imagined myself the mother of a child with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, and on my road to parenthood I imagined – and let go of – quite a few alternate futures.

The first future that never came to be was the one with the growing belly and the glowing face, the swollen ankles and the saltine crackers. After two years of ‘trying’ I found that I could not, would not become pregnant without medical intervention. After surprisingly little discussion, my husband and I decided to build our family through adoption rather than by birth.

The second future that came and went involved a birth-mom and a hospital, a newborn baby with tiny, beautiful features and a delicate beating heart. There were booties and midnight feedings and very little sleep in this vision. And after meeting with the local adoption professionals, my husband and I quickly said good-bye to this version of our future because it also included a 1-800 line, ads in college newspapers and a great deal of uncertainty.

There were more options, of course, but soon enough China, with its burdensome little girls, came to our attention. And when the agency director said to me, in her imperfect English, “What you want with newborn baby? Like loaf of bread!” a new future opened up to me. And I had tons of help imagining it, because the ’net was full of moms-to-be (and a few dads) imagining a future that looked a lot like mine. Yet, in all the months of waiting and imagining, I never came close to imagining who my daughter really would be – not even after I had her photo in my hands.

The child I met screamed when she was placed in my arms. My daughter was inconsolable, and she did not want a thing to do with the other ten babies she had spent her first months with. “She’s mourning the loss of her nanny,” my husband and I told each other. “It’s a good thing. It’s so obvious that she bonded with a caregiver at the orphanage, so she’ll bond with us so much easier.”

Not as easy to explain was why she would only relax while being held over a shoulder and rocked from side to side. But still, we congratulated ourselves on being such good parents and figuring out what our new daughter needed.

To soon, baby became toddler and I no longer had time to imagine the future. As anyone who has spent time with a two-year-old can attest, the future is NOW and you’d better be in it. And I was, and I was happy. And I was confused, resentful and sad. My baby was whip smart, fast on her feet and seemed to be thriving, but she couldn’t handle the separation of two hours at pre-school, once per week. She could not manage the singing and dancing required in Chinese class. Waking unexpectedly from a sound sleep often involved two hours of holding and calming. Fourth of July was a nightmare. Playgroups were overwhelming for her. And her favorite activity was jumping off the ottoman onto a beanbag chair, over and over and over again.

But thank goodness for the mom’s I knew, who threw me an amazing baby shower, met us at the airport with signs, and held my hands and cried with me while I tried to figure it all out. And thanks so very much to my friends on the ‘net, a core group of 15 or 20 of us, all with children of a similar age and similar background, and most of us parents for roughly the same amount of time. Once we had all returned from our trips to China, we had each other to hang on to. “Does your baby do this? Have you ever seen that? What do you do when X happens or when Y doesn’t?”

When I posted with news of her diagnosis (almost two years into parenting her), I got lots of love and understanding in return. Those friends, from California to Colorado to Arizona to Michigan to Finland of all places, were with me all the way, and they helped me to imagine a new future with the daughter I had.

So while I could have spent time imagining myself as a mother of a child with a very big problem, I chose not to. From that moment forward, I imagined myself as the mother of my child, who would reveal herself to me in each moment of every day.

And like every other child on the planet, she has.

It really was the universe, but it was delivered by RSS. Read it here.

True story. Once I wrote a series of blog posts about how frustrated I was in the job market, and then I freaked out. That wasn’t who I wanted to be! Sure, it’s who I was in that particular moment, but isn’t that what blogging is all about? But I just figured that out (possibly again – sometimes I catch my self ‘figuring things out’ and then I have to figure it out again and again and again*) and unfortunately, the person I was in that particular moment deleted the posts. Can you believe the gall of me? And my counterpart on this blog was really generous about it. I only got one email which said “Um, what happened to your stuff?”

Anyhow, today I realized that I could see all those deleted posts in my newsreader. And everyone knows that stuff on the internet doesn’t ever REALLY go away. And then the UNIVERSE spoke to me and here I am. Blogging. I’m very excited.

I’ll leave you with a question: Once you have used the frozen bag of mixed peas and carrots to ice a muscle pull, is it really ok to feed it to your family? I hope this doesn’t keep me up tonight.

*I have a series of entries in my journals I will call OMG, it’s 198_/199_/20__ and I just figured out why I eat too much. Only the year keeps changing. (Apparently I was good in the ’70s.) I will be doing this once a year for the rest of my life until I actually do figure it out. And that reminds me, I saw a trashy magazine with the headline “Oprah finally puts to rest her battle with weight” (or something like that) and my first though was “Did Oprah DIE?” So, some things just take a long time.

My frustrated child sat at the table the other day and bowed her head. “I’m so stupid!”

My giggling back-up-daughter* sat next to me in the car and exclaimed, “I’m so blonde sometimes.”

I gave them both the same advice. “Be careful of the names you call yourself, especially if it’s a name you wouldn’t let anyone else call you!” The names we call ourselves create psychic grooves – ruts for your thoughts to flow. Better they should flow to more positive things, like smart, lovely, wonderful, thoughtful, strong, talented, giving… you get the idea.

Now, give them their due, the 7-year-old and the 13-year-old both offered the same basic response of the slow eye roll and the silent “whatever”.  Why should they listen to me? What could I possibly know? But it’s worth exploring. What are we calling ourselves, and what do these names say to us, about us and for us?

Abacus & Quill.

My sister chose ‘Abacus’ because it’s somehow representative of her. Our discussion about what to call the blog was quick. She knew she wanted to use Abacus and I immediately came to ‘Quill’ for myself because of how I see myself in comparison to her. As the younger sister, I’ve never NOT thought of myself in comparison to her in one way or another, and literally, I am Quill because she IS Abacus. She’s all math-y and smart, and I’m the writer – the creative, arty, frothy, flighty one. Each of us also shares the qualities of the other, but I definitely created that groove of myself as the writer long ago and have been flowing in it ever since.

All in all, it’s a good groove that has served me well. Though I wonder how much of my identity is wrapped up in “reaction to/different from”. Bears further thought. I’ll be back to this later.

*I realize not everyone has back up kids, but I do. In addition to my own two girls, for the past five years, I’ve been backup mom to my friend’s two girls and a boy, while she plays backup for my girls. Much of the time, all five kids enjoy the benefits of our sometimes communal family, and having a BUM (as the oldest calls me) and their own backup sibs. It’s a good arrangement for the mom’s and the dad’s have come to embrace it too. We figure, the more people that have your back, the better. More on this later too.

kids and backup kids @ the beach