Smallness of Spirit

I'm going to start by saying that today may have been, in some ways, about the worst of my life. I was going to say more, and typed some, and then deleted it. The details are complicated and you have to go back almost three years to get to the start of it. But I wanted to say something about how when I'm writing a blog post or hanging out at Facebook, I can seem like my usual cheerful, smart, chatty, funny self, but there's some stuff I'm struggling with right now that's being very hard, and that can end up being invisible. I'd welcome good thoughts and prayers from any and all directions, though.

So, Yehva turns 3 in a couple of weeks. And that means that, in addition to buying her the roller skates she claims to want, and planning a birthday party that, if left up to her, would include ice cream, cake, bowling, swimming, more ice cream, and a bike ride, it's time to write the annual letter to her birthmother.

I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, when it occurred to me that I ought to order prints of a couple of good pictures to include. And in the back of my mind, I started working over what this year's letter might say. Last year, we were just a few months past the final decision of the appeals court in our favor in our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, and I was feeling generous-hearted. This year, I spent a week or so feeling stingy and mean and wondering what would happen if I just didn't send the letter this year. After all, Kimberly has never sent anything to us or Yehva, even though every letter I've written, I've ended with a reminder that the agency will forward letters to Yehva if she wants to write one, and that there is a place in Yehva's baby book for a picture of Kimberly if she wants to send one.

I almost went back to a forum for adoptive parents I used to hang out at, to ask if anyone there had just stopped doing the letters, and what consequences there were, if any. The law can't mandate contact; we signed a document that reminded us we'd made a moral and ethical commitment to send letters and pictures. But I was kind of in a "fuck moral and ethical commitments!" for a few days there. I was tired of what seems like a lack of reciprocity, and annoyed that this hangs over Yehva's birthday every year.

And then somebody at the summer gathering asked me how things had turned out with our custody dispute, and then followed up by asking whether we'd been happy with our agency.

And I remembered that our agency really let us down in some ways. That poor communication within the agency and with us led to a whole variety of problems, large and small. That they never took responsibility for certain things that were pretty much entirely their fault and that cost us a lot of money to fix. That, in retrospect, we weren't given guidance I thought we could have used in understanding Kimberly and what she said in her intake form--that to some extent I think the agency down-played her mental instability to us, perhaps deliberately (?). I remembered that I was so disgusted with certain things that by the time we were about a year into the custody fight, I had stopped taking the director's occasional phone calls. I would let them go to voice mail, listen to the message when I felt strong and had David nearby, and then answer, if an answer was needed, by e-mail, and as briefly as possible.

My point is: it got to the point that I didn't even want to talk with our agency. And yet somehow I think I'm being Lady Magnanimous to invite Kimberly to use the agency as a go-between to send letters to us and to Yehva, just as they forward my letters to her. Why would Kimberly want to talk to anybody at the agency? She can't have good feelings or warm memories about them--she thinks they stole her baby.

"Send a letter through the agency," I chirp at her every year (four times the first year!), and then blame her for not taking me up on it. Consider it proof she's not interested, hasn't moved on, hasn't stopped using, hasn't gotten her life together, is still too unstable for us to risk opening the door even a crack.

Jesus, that's mean.

Now, Yehva's birthparents don't know our names or where we live. We were in any court documents they saw as John and Jane Doe. And there have certainly been indications that it is better for us that they not know. So I'm not going to put a return address on the envelope this year, or include my cellphone number or e-mail address, or anything crazy like that. It's not that we can't be easily found--I could write, "Dear Kimberly, How are you? Yehva is fine. Yours truly, Su," and that would be enough. After all, this blog is the first hit if you google "Yehva Su." One of the effects of having unusual first names. She could find us easily enough if she decided to look, but even so I'm not comfortable, yet, with painting a great big arrow for her to follow.

I am, though, going to ask a friend who lives in another state to let me include his address, so that Kimberly could write to Yehva without having to contact the agency first, in case that would be easier for her.

And I'm going to tell her that next year, she should look for my letter early, around late May or early June. We said we'd send a letter every year; that doesn't mean it has to be part of the run-up to Yehva's birthday for the next decade and a half. For my own sake, I'm doing to de-couple those two things. But for Kimberly's sake, and maybe Yehva's too, I'm going to try to be just a little bit bigger-hearted.

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For your amusement, from an e-mail to friends written January 30, 2008, when Yehva was about six months old and the custody fight was just warming up and we still thought it would be resolved quickly. It actually took me less than a year to decide talking to Margaret was a bad idea:

Margaret, the director of our adoption agency, just called to see how we're doing. I appreciate that she's concerned and takes the time to call, but talking to her is really frustrating. She's the kind of person who never lets you finish a sentence, so it's never clear whether she understands what I'm saying or not. Also, she is an anxious person, and she tends not to call so much to let me talk to her as to vent her own anxieties. Today's gem: "I'm just so scared because Illinois judges tend to be on the side of birthfathers. They're known for it." Thanks, Margaret. That helps.

She also got all worked up about whether the birthfather had been at the hospital during the birth. "Noreen! Was he at the hospital?" Noreen said no. I said, "Margaret, if he'd been at the hospital and anyone from the agency had known it, you'd never have accepted Kim's claim that she didn't know who he was, would you?" Jeesh.

Next time she calls, I'm just going to let the machine get it, sending my appreciation for the thought into the ether but not actually subjecting myself to the conversation.