Fourth Time is a Charm

I really want to write tonight, but it keeps devolving into whining and navel gazing.  It would be like putting my 8th grade diary on the internet.  After three tries, I'm giving up on analyzing my current angst.  Instead of writing about what's on my mind, I'm going to jump back two months and write about something that I'm still mulling over from time to time. 

Part of our adoption situation was that because we were adopting from a country some of my ancestors were from (maternal grandfather emmigrated from there as a baby), we were moved up the line.  Less than a year after we adopted, international adoption was closed entirely, except in cases of large sibling groups and those with special medical needs, so that was a significant help in getting matched with our kids.  The expectation, non-binding yet clear, was that in return, we would have the ability and motivation to help our kids know their birth culture. 

Before adopting our kids, I found a lady who speaks their language, and she tutored me once a week for months.  I didn't learn as much as I'd hoped, given that I already speak a similar language,  but I did get enough to survive those first few crazy months with some small ability to communicate with our kids.  My tutor was also our introduction to the local community of ex-pats and immigrants.  The first year home, I tried to get them involved in the children's program of the Christmas program.  Oak balked, but Linden danced and recited poems with the other kids.  The community's president brought our family onto the stage and introduced us, and suggested that the fund-raising side of the evening's events go towards supporting the Children's Home our kids came from.  This was so well intentioned that I dealt with the embarrassment of standing on a stage being gawked at.  Linden danced again at the Independence Day celebration last spring, and again we were brought onto the stage, and the results of the fund raising campaign and the response of the Director of the Children's Home were shared with the group. 

We missed this year's Christmas event.   Life was too complicated to add that in just then.  Linden and even Oak asked about it though, and Linden insisted that I get her signed up for participating in the independence day event again.  So I did, and she did.  We were on our way there when Oak asked, "Do we have to go onto the stage in front of everyone again?"  I laughed and said, no, I think we are done with that.

The kids danced.  Some big girls danced.  There was a keynote speech, then speeches of thanks.  Then one of the moms who organizes the kids' dancing stood up with a bouquet and directed everyone's attention towards our table.  "We want to thank Wendy and Winemaker for bringing Linden and Oak," she began.  Oak gave me a LOOK.  The Winemaker and I shifted uncomfortably.  She went on for a bit about how wonderful we are to do what we do, then brought me the flowers. 

Awkward.

This is the kind of thing that drives adoptive parents nuts.  Being singled out as different.  Being praised for wanting what every other parent in the room already has--kids.  Being respected for simply parenting your children (even though you know what a shitty job you are doing).  The implications for the kids are squirmy too.  That they are "lucky we took them in."  That we rescued them.  That they are weird. 

That was my knee jerk reaction, anyway.  I'm wondering though, if (like most knee jerk reactions) this was entirely fair or accurate.  As I listened to what the Baltic mom was saying, I don't think the message was "Thank you for rescuing these poor little children."  I think (and hope) that the message was "Thank you for maintaining cultural ties.  Thank you for walking into a situation where you feel out of place in order to provide your kids with a situation where they feel in place.  Thank you for honoring their birth culture in a tangible way." 

I feel more comfortable accepting those thanks.  I could say that this, too, should be part of the basic expectations for parenting internationally adopted kids, not something praiseworthy, but frankly, it's not always possible.  People adopt from multiple countries, or from countries they know little about.  People live far away from communities that represent their kids' birth cultures.  People are wonderful, loving, and therapeutic parents who simply don't have the cross cultural background to integrate a second culture into their family life.  It was and is important to us.  We specifically chose to adopt from a country we knew we would visit again anyway; a place we felt competent to teach our kids about.  Then we overcame a great deal of shyness to reach out to strangers and find ways to stay connected to the local community from their country.  When I discovered that the other moms were all 15 years younger than me, gorgeous blonde marathon runners with marble countertops, I kept coming back anyway.  I think it would be a disaster to force Oak to participate in folk dancing, but we insist that he dress up and show up for the final events.   Maybe it's okay to be thanked for that. 

What do you do to help your kids maintain their roots?  How necessary do you think this is to their overall sense of self?

Things that lift my spirits.

• Goofy dancing in the kitchen
• Hot coffee
• Talking to my sisters.  Even when we're talking about depressing things, like the end of one sister's marriage, our father's memorial service, or our inability to stop stuffing cookies into our faces.
• The tenderness with which my son interacts with his stuffed animals
• Birds at the feeder outside the kitchen window.
• Call me evil, but the knowledge that my niece, well-loved and well-parented since day one, blessed with health and intelligence and charm, can and occasionally does out-brat my own kids. 
• Zoloft.  I missed two days in the chaos of last week, and Saturday I was immobilized by headache and misery.  Now I'm back on track, and feeling fine.
• Spooning.
• The way my kids scream "Daddy!" and race to bear hug him whenever he walks in the door.
• Reading to my kids. They have rejected every chapter book besides the "early reader" types, but right now we are reading the first Harry Potter, and apparently it IS magic, because despite the lack of pictures, Britishisms, and very different pace than, say "Mr. Putter and Tabby Ride the Train," they are listening intently and asking for more. 
• Being known.  Last night my husband and I watched a movie together.  Afterwards I was sitting on the couch with my laptop.  He wandered past and, without looking at the screen, asked, "What do the reviews say?"  So I told him.
• Getting outdoors.  
• The clock on the mantle.  The tick-tock and bonging on the hour drive my husband and son nuts.  But it's the clock that was in the kitchen as I grew up, so the sounds are old friends to me.  I like the ritual of winding it each week, and I appreciate being reminded of the time each half hour.  
• Time with friends.  
• Getting into the car and realizing my husband filled the tank.
• The incredibly soft sweatshirt my husband got for Christmas.  Purr.  It's a win-win, since he loves me to rub his shoulders.  
• Singing my daughter to sleep.
• Payday.  Times are tough, and there's a palpable sense of relief each time the bank account gets replenished.
• Red wine, chocolate, and reading.  Duh

Things I Am Not On Top Of

1.  Clutter.  It's everywhere.  Mostly paper, or at least that's the format I find most annoying, yet have no solutions for.  The toys I can work around, and then say, "Everything you don't want tossed needs to go upstairs in the next half hour!" and it all magically moves to their rooms.  Jackets--I've accepted that I'm the only person who is both tall enough and invested enough to hang up the coats, and it takes me less than a minute to do so.  But the paper is EVERYWHERE, and CONSTANT, and ALL OF US generate it and NONE OF US know what to do with it. 

2.  My weight.  Four years ago, I joined Weight Watchers, rather self-consciously, because philosophically and emotionally, I am anti-diet.  But I'd gained 15 lbs a year, 3 years in a row, and a friend of mine (who has diabetes, and knows that diabetes runs in my family) was brave enough to point out that I should probably change my habits.  I lost a satisfying amount of weight, then put a little back on, but was still comfortable with myself.  I don't need my body to look like it did in my teens and 20s.  I'm okay with being soft around the middle and having sturdy thighs and actually needing a bra for the first time.  But something changed in the past school year, and my consumption of sweets, always high, because obsessive.  I stop in the car on the way home from work, buy candy and/or cookies, eat most of them in the car, hide them in my bag, eat the rest at work the next day, then repeat.  Not surprisingly, I no longer own any comfortable pants.  The button on my favorite pair of jeans popped off.  The button that is RIVETED to the pants. 

3.  My internet usage.  Blah.  I don't even want to talk about this one.  Not because it's porn or anything, just that it's dumb and such a waste of time--not just time I could be productive in, but time I could have fun in.  Pinterest, Candy Crush, FB, TV tropes...seriously?  Why do I do this?  If I were blogging, or reading the handful of blogs I really feel connected to, or researching for work, that would be okay.  But I get on the computer telling myself I'll do one of those things, and three hours later...it's two hours past my bedtime.

4.  Which is one reason I am blogging so little.

5.  And it's also one reason I'm not getting enough sleep.

6.  #3 + #5 combined are making me less effective at my job too.  Teaching takes a lot of energy.  I have been put into a new position three years in a row, and this year my whole school is undergoing a massive changeover to new technology, so the learning curve has been steep.  I love my job, but I'm tired, and I'm not putting as much into it as I need to be successful. 

Luckily, I have an indomitable optimism. 

No, really.  I also have a healthy amount of self deprecating snark, but despite being stressed and anxious and angry and sad about all of the above, I am still basically okay.  Maybe that's just the anti depressants talking, but honestly, once I survived the ages of 12-15, I've always felt like I'm basically okay.  I screw up, and fail to live up to my ideals, and act selfishly, and am lazier the older I get, and forget to follow up on things...but it's okay.  I'm human.  I'm re-joining weight watchers.  I'm eyeing some simple organization ideas.  I'm thinking of making myself a schedule, so time wasting activities fill in around the edges instead of replacing things I actually care about. 

What's not on this list?  Parenting.  Maybe that's why I'm not beating myself up more for all these failures.  I am putting my energy where it counts most.  It's still a struggle, but it's a struggle I am actively engaged in.  We aren't where we want to be, but the progress is visible.

A Proposal

I just put Linden to bed.  She was asking a mix of existential and scientific questions, as she often does at bedtime.  "What would happen if the world was spinning really fast, like good morning! Good night!  Good morning!" 

I came downstairs and transferred the 4th of the laundry loads that the Winemaker started today into the dryer, just so I could say I helped.  He and Oak were spinning tops on the kitchen floor, counting out the seconds the tops spun depending on their spinning technique.  I was thinking about our first IEP meeting tomorrow morning, which is at 8:00, a half hour before school starts, but twenty minutes after the kids usually catch the bus.  I pictured myself saying, "I have a proposal--let's take the kids to the bus stop, then go get a cup of good coffee on our way to the meeting."  Then, because we have such a predictable sense of humor, I was imagining me first saying, "I have a proposal...will you marry me?  I love you more than I ever could have imagined, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you." 

Then I paused, hands deep in the dryer, and thought--well THAT'S all true.  Lately I've been lazy,  and he's been crabby with the kids, and we've both been sick and spending far too much time on our respective computers....and I love him to pieces.   It was so swooningly romantic those dozen years ago, when we were in that crazy hormonal stage of love.  Now it's more about getting behind on laundry and taking kids to Tae Kwon Do and running out of TP and asking him to be sure to pick up my dad's ashes at the post office because I keep forgetting to on my way home from work--but the love is even more central to my life.  I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I love him more than I could ever have imagined. 

Sun Breaks

Much like the apocryphal hundreds of ways to say snow in Eskimo, those of us in the Pacific Northwest linguistically differentiate between all sorts of rain events.  Pouring, drizzling, misting, showers, spitting down, steady rain, etc.  Then there are the sun breaks.  Do you have sun breaks where you live?  In case it's not obvious, a day with sun breaks is a day with mostly wet weather, but when the rain pauses, it's not just a sullen dampness that replaces it, but actual sunshine.  Clouds blow around, blue sky peeks through, and for five, ten, even fifteen minutes, we get a sun break.

Then, usually, it starts raining again.

The skies here have been steadily grey the past several days.  It hasn't rained all that much, but we haven't had the relief of any sun breaks either.  However, the internal weather, ah, that's a different story.

February was bad, man.  Death and a sinus infection and a snowstorm I couldn't enjoy.  I didn't work a full week all month, and I didn't do anything else either.  There were a few days when things were quiet enough that I could read mindlessly--YA fiction, mysteries.  But there were more days when I dragged myself from the bed to the couch and back again.  I couldn't be bothered to figure out what to cook, since I had neither energy nor appetite.  I didn't vacuum once all month.  My kids developed a sense of entitlement regarding screen time that I suspect we'll be regretting until June.  My husband has been struggling with his own crap--depression and losing a job, which really really really helped with the depression, as you can imagine--but he did get some medication adjusted towards the end of the month and stepped up, making sure we all had clean underwear and hot food.  

Last weekend I finally got some antibiotics.  Monday afternoon I looked around and said, "Hey, I think I'm ready to go back to work."  I was pretty exhausted each day when I came home, but I worked the rest of the week, and while it was horrifying to see how little my students had gotten done all month, it was good to start regrouping.  I even spent some time Friday working on a complicated list of students to sort out for a big project for the team of teachers I share students with.  It wasn't much, but it was the first time in a while I'd been able to think bigger than "What am I teaching next period?" and actually carry my weight with my colleagues.

This weekend there were more such moments.  I baked salted caramel brownies for a potluck dinner party.  I showed up for the damn party, after bowing out of social engagements for weeks on end.  Today I'm making dinner from a cookbook, instead of falling back on spaghetti or baked chicken.  I finally pulled out the stack of torn stuffed animals and mended did surgery as needed.  I had some free time and looked at my stack of mindless reading, then reached past the genre fiction to pull out "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which is not mindless reading.  (Boy, is it not!) I let the neighbor girl come over and showed her how to set up an embroidery hoop and outline her initial, and I helped my own girl organize the art supplies, which we store in her bedroom just because that's where there's room.  I helped my husband apply for jobs, and celebrated with him when one winery contacted him to say they think he's overqualified for the job he applied for, so would he please come in next week to talk about a different job?

I took the Christmas wreath off the door and deconstructed it so the boughs went into composting and the bones into the trash.  Yes, I took down my Christmas wreath on March 1 this year.  It was time.

Rain will come again, but I'm turning my face to the sun while it lasts.

It's true, thank goodness!

 There are some very charming PSAs on the slogan "You don't need to be perfect to be a perfect parent.

That's all.  Watch a bunch.  Smile.

Grief, snow, laziness, photos.

In the past 10 days, in roughly chronological order, I found out that my husband was about to get fired, my dad went into the hospital, my husband got fired, my dad went into hospice, my kids both got vicious ear infections, and my dad died.  Catching a cold and the snowstorm arriving were pretty anticlimatic. 

Strike that.  The snowstorm has been a blessing.  I'd taken the first two days of the new semester off when my dad died, which of course resulted in chaos (middle schoolers being especially poor at CHANGE and also SUBSTITUTES), so I went back in on Wednesday.  Thursday we were sent home early, and Friday wasn't even a question.  My kids were mostly over their crud by then, and it turns out that snow is an even better babysitter than electronics.  For one thing, it involves them leaving the house, which allows me to read and nap.  For another thing, they can indulge all day long, and I don't feel like a terrible parent.

But then I go on Facebook (I know, I know), and see all these photos of laughing families playing in the snow, and I'm all, "Why am I just sending my kids out into the snow all day without me?  This would be such a great bonding experience!  Think of all the attachment I'm not doing!  I bet all the other parents are out there going, 'Gee, why don't Linden and Oak's parents ever come out and play with them?' What if it doesn't snow again for five more years and by then they won't want to hang out with me?"

And then I realize that merely standing up makes my head hurt, and the wind blows a spray of snow and ice off the neighbor's roof, and I'm all, "Nope, I'm good.  At least they're having fun instead of stuck inside with the two gloomy grown-ups."

I think a lot about my mom.  We all do, right?  She's our example of Mom and Wife and Woman, and we can't help but to compare ourselves.  Mine was tough.  Indomitable.  In my mind, she would have gotten out there and played, plus the bathrooms would have been clean, and she wouldn't have plaintively asked friends to bring her dinners, and she would have already figured out what to do about death certificates.  Then again, I will always remember waking up to the sound of her shrieking and wailing when she got the call that her mom had died in a house fire, so you know, grief.  It fucks you up.

Grief plus head colds?  Blech.

During these past ten hard days I've napped off and on, stayed up too late scrolling Pinterest, and eaten food other people brought us.  The kids have gotten no craft projects or library trips; I've only read aloud once.  The Winemaker and I have spent too much time on separate computers instead of actually with each other.  We lay on the bed, unable to wake ourselves up, and when we hear a kid come stomping noisily onto the back porch, we groan.  "Okay, I'll take this one if you get the next time." 

And then I read this, and even though it's about much more than that, the point I pull out of it is that it's okay to not be productive every single minute of every single day, that I can pull back from my life and not be a bad person.  

I'm still, after all, a mom and a wife and a person.  I've shown up at work, washed four loads of laundry, played cards with the kids, and made cookies.  I insisted on 20 minutes of schoolwork this morning, I wrote my dad's obituary, and I talked my son through his hurt feelings about sled hogging to lead him towards a resolution that involved him starting with an apology for his own earlier sled hogging.  I helped bottle five cases of wine and made my husband's favorite breakfast.  I sat on the couch with sisters and friends and looked at family photo albums.  I read a book.  I wrote those goddamn sub plans, which is always a hellish experience, made worse by the knowledge that the sub is pretty much screwed no matter how hard I work at the plans, and I will just have to come back and start over again anyway.  When the kids swing by the house, I supply them with dry clothes and hot snacks, and I bite my tongue to keep from bitching about the mess they strew behind them.

Two friends brought bouquets, so like my mom always said when she put fresh flowers out, "There.  I cleaned house."

I'm going to close with a bunch of pictures of my dad.  That kind of breaks my privacy policy, but he's in no position to complain.  (Too soon?  Sorry.  But he'd think it was funny, so I'm okay with it.)

Since he was, obviously, a photographer, here are a few of his shots.  I don't have many on this computer, but trust me, he was great.

 And finally, this super hot picture of my parents on Sept. 10, 1955.