The mail truck just went by and picked up our outgoing mail. A few pieces of business were in there, and this year's letter to the Tiny Tornado's birthmother. It's a short letter this year; I just told K that TT is doing well and will be starting school this fall, but that there are things going on in our lives right now that make both TT and me uncomfortable sharing details or photos. We don't have a fully-open adoption; these annual letters are our only point of contact. Even so, and although I promised to write again when TT turns six, I feel like I have just closed our adoption.
I would expect to feel some regret at this. Again and again, I have fantasized that K would respond to one of my letters, use the enclosed SASE to write to the Tiny Tornado. That she would send a picture. That there would be more connection between us, not less.
This is primarily a self-serving fantasy, wanting K to signal, "I'm healed! Everything is OK and I'm fine with this now!" Just in case you thought I was thinking of some wish of Tiny Tornado's to know his birth mother, or of some desire K might have to be in touch with her third child. Nope. Mostly I just wanted to be relieved of any residual guilt about K's broken heart.
But, today, I don't feel regret. I only feel tremendous relief, that this year Tiny Tornado decided to live as a boy, giving me an excuse not to write a long, friendly letter to a woman I've never met, a woman who hurt my child and lied to us.
I'm glad not to have to do it.
I told K I'd write again in a year, and that maybe we'd be willing to tell her more about the Tiny Tornado's life. And a year from now, I will write. I will write in good faith. If I can, I will tell her details. If I can, I'll include pictures. But today? I feel like being honest about how much I hate this obligation, and how glad I am to have a year off from it.
The incoming mail included an unexpected compliment. I got a form letter thanking me for working at the summer gathering, but it included a personal post-script from the conference coordinator saying she appreciated my "patience, creativity, and initiative." I have a file of unexpected, sincere compliments I've gotten, to counter the occasional negative voices in my head. This one is going in there.
Leftover notes jotted down during the gathering:
A friend says to me, "That's a really cute water bottle. I don't think I've seen [a Kleen Kanteen] that small before."
Me: Well, it originally came with a sippy cup top, if that tells you anything.
I pick up Word Boy and a friend of his from their gathering in the morning. As we stroll along, they are discussing a dead bird they found and closely examined that morning. They used the word "dissect," but I doubt they really did. Anyway, a friend passing in the other direction overhears and says, "Doesn't the impromptu dissection worry you?"
I say, "Eh, I'm getting used to it."
One of a million things I've decided it's not worth fighting about. Word Boy knows: Do not touch any dead animal with your hands. Be respectful of the dead animal: you may examine it but do not whack it brutally with sticks. If possible move the carcass somewhere it won't be further harrassed. Wash your hands after.
I trust him to follow these guidelines. Beyond that, there's just really no stopping a kid who is so fascinated with bodies and how they fit together.
Speaking of trust, I was thinking of the Tiny Tornado this morning. First, as I was sweeping up dog hair clippings from the living room floor, I was thinking about how much easier life is when I just accept that he's going to do things like trim the mats from the dog's ear hair, draw himself a bubble bath, or (as he did the other day) glue his feet to the floor. I'll live longer if I don't go through the roof when these entirely predictable things happen.
On the other hand, I was musing as I listened to him show a friend how to feed pumpkin seeds to the hamsters, there are things he is entirely trustworthy about. For instance, he is allowed to open the hamster cages and play with the hamsters whenever he wants, because he is always gentle and appropriate with them, and reliable about closing the cage. He can be trusted with animals in general; he is interested in how to care for them, and takes the information he's given to heart. The worst sins he commits against the dogs, for instance, involve dressing them up, and sometimes needing to be reminded that even dogs get done playing with their friends and need to be allowed to have some quiet time.
I popped into an old blog of mine earlier, looking for something, and got sucked into reading about life with the Lego Savant when he was a baby. Here are a few things I found fun:
My first day alone with the baby
A Day in the Life: A log of our day at 8 weeks old
A bad day at the dentist. Lego Savant is 2; I am pregnant with Word Boy
On birthing plans
Word Boy's birth story
And this was just kind of funny. The references to Montana: dear friends' home had just been burned down by an arsonist, and I had flown out to help them during the days after the fire.
I think I'll go do something productive. This day is flying away from me. Fortunately, the Lego Savant and I put a pot roast in the slow cooker this morning, so dinner is taken care of.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Posted with Blogsy
Thursday, July 26, 2012
What's Hecuba to Him, or He to Hecuba?
Raider and I have an especially beloved friend; the kids call him Uncle Toots. We have a long history with Toots. Raider and Toots can remember the night they met as college students; they quickly became best friends and, sometimes, lovers. They have so much in common and have been through so much together that we joke that they are the same person; indeed, once when they were young, someone seeing them together at an event did a double-take: this person, knowing them separately, had thought they were one person. (First aside: sometime even I confuse them. One time I said to Raider, "I made a stir-fry for dinner, but I didn't put in any ginger because I know you don't like it." Raider said, "I like ginger. Toots doesn't like ginger.")
I moved to town a few years later and met Toots on our first day working at the same place. We fell in love. I didn't get to know Raider well over the next couple of years, because he was back and forth to North Dakota caring for his parents, but I remember the night I met Raider: he and Toots lived together, and I met Raider when I picked Toots up for our first date. Until Toots and I got an apartment together, there was a room across the hall from his that belonged to Raider; I saw his stuff, I even slept in his bed a time or two, before I got to know him.
Toots and I stopped being lover-lovers after awhile. Two years? I can't remember exactly. But we had this weird inertia--we knew that one of us should move out of the apartment, but somehow we never could bring ourselves to do it. And, after awhile, we found that we had transitioned to a new relationship, something more than friends and other than lovers, although we were still occaionally "lovers" in the technical sense, as were Toots and Raider, once in a blue moon. This was the beginning of our having a relationship there is no name for. (Second aside: I've been re-thinking the expression "break up," because I have had so many relationships with lovers that didn't end, but rather turned into something else. Sometimes that transition is painful; sometimes it's not. But in the long run, it often turns out that nothing was broken.)
Raider's parents died within a few months of each other when he was 25. (Third aside: now that many of my friends and I are beginning to deal with parents who are aging, I have a new sympathy for what it must have been like for him, as an only child, to go through that so young.)
A few months after his mother died, Raider came back to Michigan, to continue work on a library science degree at Michigan. He had a tiny single on North Campus, but during this time of intense grieving, what he needed was to be with his other half, and day after day he would finish classes and drive the hour to our house so he could be with Toots. This is when Raider and I began to know each other; and we got even closer when we decided that it made more sense for him to live with us and commute to school the next semester.
In the years since then, Toots and Raider and I have lived together and apart in a variety of configurations. We all lived together for awhile, then Raider got his own house and Toots lit out for San Francisco. Then Raider and I moved in together. Then some malignant idiot ran a red light and nearly killed Toots, and he came back to Michigan to recuperate while his multiple broken limbs healed. He ended up staying, and we lived together after that for, what, four or five years? Until the Lego Savant was about 18 months old anyway. If Toots comes back to Michigan someday--as he may, to be near his own aging parents, and us--we will most likely live together again.
When the Lego Savant was a toddler, Toots moved to Boston to be with his sweetie, the Crafty Elf. We can tolerate this separation only because we love the Crafty Elf so very much. And we spent some time seriously considering whether we should move to Boston, too.
My point is: What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?
I remember one night when I was pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was very sick, as usual. Raider had tucked me into bed early, and he and Toots were next door in Toots' bedroom watching ST:TNG. I lay there listening to them talk and laugh, and I could feel their intimacy and love for one another, and I felt so warmed by it. Their connection gave me tremendous pleasure. It still does.
Recently, Toots was visiting, and we were hanging out in the living room after the kids had gone to bed. I was crocheting in my big chair, and drifted out of the conversation a little bit, listening to them talk, and it occurred to me: in some ways, Raider is closer to Toots than he is to me. In important ways. I am non-optional for Raider. But so is Toots. I miss Toots when we don't see him often enough; Raider feels his absence profoundly much of the time.
This gets me thinking: are we polyamorous with Toots? Neither of us has had a sexual relationship with Toots in a very long time, but why do we so often use sex to define relationships? Heck, you don't need intimate details of my relationship with Raider to guess that, between two terrible pregnancies, a lifetime of chronic pain, extended illness, and the normal pressures of having young children, we have had some long stretches when sex was a happy memory and a longed-for future. If our relationship had to be redefined every time we went a certain number of weeks or months without sex, we'd have been married, unmarried, married, unmarried, married, and unmarried many times over the past 19 years. (Fourth aside: a new euphemism. "Hey, Raider: Will you marry met? Marry me hard!")
The only thing I know for sure is: this is one of the ways that family looks in our lives.
I moved to town a few years later and met Toots on our first day working at the same place. We fell in love. I didn't get to know Raider well over the next couple of years, because he was back and forth to North Dakota caring for his parents, but I remember the night I met Raider: he and Toots lived together, and I met Raider when I picked Toots up for our first date. Until Toots and I got an apartment together, there was a room across the hall from his that belonged to Raider; I saw his stuff, I even slept in his bed a time or two, before I got to know him.
Toots and I stopped being lover-lovers after awhile. Two years? I can't remember exactly. But we had this weird inertia--we knew that one of us should move out of the apartment, but somehow we never could bring ourselves to do it. And, after awhile, we found that we had transitioned to a new relationship, something more than friends and other than lovers, although we were still occaionally "lovers" in the technical sense, as were Toots and Raider, once in a blue moon. This was the beginning of our having a relationship there is no name for. (Second aside: I've been re-thinking the expression "break up," because I have had so many relationships with lovers that didn't end, but rather turned into something else. Sometimes that transition is painful; sometimes it's not. But in the long run, it often turns out that nothing was broken.)
Raider's parents died within a few months of each other when he was 25. (Third aside: now that many of my friends and I are beginning to deal with parents who are aging, I have a new sympathy for what it must have been like for him, as an only child, to go through that so young.)
A few months after his mother died, Raider came back to Michigan, to continue work on a library science degree at Michigan. He had a tiny single on North Campus, but during this time of intense grieving, what he needed was to be with his other half, and day after day he would finish classes and drive the hour to our house so he could be with Toots. This is when Raider and I began to know each other; and we got even closer when we decided that it made more sense for him to live with us and commute to school the next semester.
In the years since then, Toots and Raider and I have lived together and apart in a variety of configurations. We all lived together for awhile, then Raider got his own house and Toots lit out for San Francisco. Then Raider and I moved in together. Then some malignant idiot ran a red light and nearly killed Toots, and he came back to Michigan to recuperate while his multiple broken limbs healed. He ended up staying, and we lived together after that for, what, four or five years? Until the Lego Savant was about 18 months old anyway. If Toots comes back to Michigan someday--as he may, to be near his own aging parents, and us--we will most likely live together again.
When the Lego Savant was a toddler, Toots moved to Boston to be with his sweetie, the Crafty Elf. We can tolerate this separation only because we love the Crafty Elf so very much. And we spent some time seriously considering whether we should move to Boston, too.
My point is: What is Toots to us? What are we to Toots? The kids call him Uncle, but we could just as easily have decided to call him Papa Toots; he is the closest thing they have to a third parent. I sometimes tell people that they might think of Toots as the third adult in our nuclear family, even though he lives with the Crafty Elf these days. Toots sometimes tries to convey his relationship with the children by telling people he is their godfather; that works pretty well. Sometimes he takes flack from his family for spending more time with our kids than with his biological nephew; would it help people understand the relationship and accept it if we had decided to call him their stepfather?
I remember one night when I was pregnant with the Lego Savant. I was very sick, as usual. Raider had tucked me into bed early, and he and Toots were next door in Toots' bedroom watching ST:TNG. I lay there listening to them talk and laugh, and I could feel their intimacy and love for one another, and I felt so warmed by it. Their connection gave me tremendous pleasure. It still does.
Recently, Toots was visiting, and we were hanging out in the living room after the kids had gone to bed. I was crocheting in my big chair, and drifted out of the conversation a little bit, listening to them talk, and it occurred to me: in some ways, Raider is closer to Toots than he is to me. In important ways. I am non-optional for Raider. But so is Toots. I miss Toots when we don't see him often enough; Raider feels his absence profoundly much of the time.
This gets me thinking: are we polyamorous with Toots? Neither of us has had a sexual relationship with Toots in a very long time, but why do we so often use sex to define relationships? Heck, you don't need intimate details of my relationship with Raider to guess that, between two terrible pregnancies, a lifetime of chronic pain, extended illness, and the normal pressures of having young children, we have had some long stretches when sex was a happy memory and a longed-for future. If our relationship had to be redefined every time we went a certain number of weeks or months without sex, we'd have been married, unmarried, married, unmarried, married, and unmarried many times over the past 19 years. (Fourth aside: a new euphemism. "Hey, Raider: Will you marry met? Marry me hard!")
The only thing I know for sure is: this is one of the ways that family looks in our lives.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
You Put Your Whole Self In
The other day, I talked some about polyamory. I honestly forget sometimes that things like that might surprise some people, or make them uncomfortable. I know that a couple of my readers were uncomfortable with that post, and based on my blog stats, I'm guessing I lost some readers (though that could be a coincidence). I was like, "Oh, yeah, right."
I am lucky to have a diverse group of friends, including, through homeschooling and elsewhere, committed Christians of various stripes. It should be no surprise that there are things we don't share easily with each other. I do forget sometimes that when I write on my blog, I am writing both to some faceless audience of people I haven't met, and also to specific friends and loved ones, and that some posts may be very welcome to some friends, and uncomfortable for others.
I've actually been thinking about this kind of a lot since I posted about polyamory. Right now, my own sexuality and sexual history are things I'm interested in, and if I'm interested in something, I usually write about it, to someone, in some venue. Right now, this blog is my venue most of the time.
I write about a lot of things on my blog. Even before my renewed interest in reflection on sexuality and polyamory, I wondered if my blog was too scattered. I write about adoption; parenting; anxiety; race and class; books; Quakerism and faith; my life; people I love. Perhaps I should have several blogs--one about adoption, one about books, one about Quakerism, one for profiles of my beloveds, one about parenting...
The problem is that I don't have enough to say about any one of those things to sustain a blog. Long-time readers may recall that this blog started as a place to think about transracial adoption. Eventually, though, I found that I had said most of what I have to say on that topic, and the blog was quiet for awhile until I started using it as The Blog of All Things. I seem to be a Blog of All Things kind of person, because I don't have one thing I'm interested in. I'm deeply interested in transracial adoption for awhile; then I'm reading up on economics and globalization; then I'm reading a whole bunch of classic sci-fi, or re-watching Firefly. Lately I've been studying up on homebirth and midwifery, because I realized I didn't have an informed opinion on those things, and I was curious. Sometimes I'm interested in several things at once: right now, I'm very interested in reading and talking about gifted kids; kittens; amigurumi; common birds of Michigan; young adult fiction; marriage; flirting; service; homeschooling; gender-nonconforming kids; and religion. Off the top of my head. And that might mean a blog post on one of those things one day, and on another the next day. Or one post that touches on a couple of those things.
They're not neatly compartmentalized for me. Parenting, gender-nonconformance, anxiety, religion, and kittens, for instance, have some obvious connections in my life right now. I can't see it working for me to have a blog that was supposed to be only about one of those things.
Something I thought about yesterday, during my middle-of-the-night drive home from Ann Arbor, was whether, if I want to write about polyamory and sexuality, I should have a special space for that. A separate blog, or a section of this blog that people could choose to go to, or not. But part of what I'm thinking about is my desire to be wholly known, by which I mean to be in places and with people where I can bring my whole self. One of the things I love about FLGBTQC is that it comes so close to that for me--I've said many times, and here I am saying it again, FLGBTQC is the place in my life where people can best honor and hold both my relationship with Raider and my queer identity. I like that. I want and need more places like that in my life.
As Ragen Chastain says, I am the boss of my underpants. I am also the boss of my blog. And I need and want this to be a place where I can write honestly about what matters to me.
It's not my wish to make anyone uncomfortable; it is, indeed, my regret if I do. But at the same time, it's OK with me if people are uncomfortable. It's OK if some people only read my posts on books, or my posts on parenting. It's OK if some people decide not to read my blog at all. Even people I love. Even people who are my friends and want to stay my friends. It's OK, if you're uncomfortable, to say so. I welcome both "I" statements and Good-Faith Questions on any topic. Tell me what you think and feel; that's fine with me. Ask me more; that's fine with me. Choose to spend your time elsewhere; I'm sorry to see you go, but that's fine with me, too, and when I see you at park day or in the grocery store or at a friend's house, I'll still be glad to see you and I hope you'll be glad to see me.
I am a moral person. I am a deeply ethical person. I am religious in a non-trivial way. I think and ponder and reflect and think some more about everything. The decisions I make about my life are shaped by these things. I don't think I've ever made a decision lightly. So, you know, at least, that if I make a decision that seems dangerous, reckless, immoral, wrong-headed, deeply mistaken, risky, or even just head-scratchingly incomprehensible to you, well, it's probably the best-thought-out, most-thoroughly-processed bone-headed move in history. Perhaps that is a consolation.
I might write some more about sexuality and polyamory sometime soon; I have a couple of things percolating in the Grab-Bag. But I won't write explicity about sex here. Just so you know.
In other news, my notebook went missing yesterday just after I wrote about it. It went missing in circumstances that make me hope it will yet turn up--I remember putting it, and my shopping list, into my bag, but when the Tiny Tornado and I got to the store, I opened my bag and they weren't there. Somewhere in the house, we think. Or maybe the car.
I hope it turns up. This is not just a notebook; it's the notebook my friend Janis gave me a pen quiver for. I love perfect, unexpected gifts (like the time my friend Weaver mailed me a fancy tape-flag dispenser! Clearly office supplies are a theme) and I treasure my pen quiver.
In the meantime, Raider gave me a little notebook he picked up at a conference in May, small enough to carry in my bag. And I have a beautiful journal my friend Uncle Toots bought for me at Walden Pond, really too nice for the kind of disposable note-taking I do. And I remind myself that my brain is always generating more thoughts and ideas than I know what to do with, so anything that stays lost is probably not that important; meanwhile, worthwhile things (and some that aren't) find their way to the surface again. I'm already on the second page of notes in the lovely journal.
And so on.
I am lucky to have a diverse group of friends, including, through homeschooling and elsewhere, committed Christians of various stripes. It should be no surprise that there are things we don't share easily with each other. I do forget sometimes that when I write on my blog, I am writing both to some faceless audience of people I haven't met, and also to specific friends and loved ones, and that some posts may be very welcome to some friends, and uncomfortable for others.
I've actually been thinking about this kind of a lot since I posted about polyamory. Right now, my own sexuality and sexual history are things I'm interested in, and if I'm interested in something, I usually write about it, to someone, in some venue. Right now, this blog is my venue most of the time.
I write about a lot of things on my blog. Even before my renewed interest in reflection on sexuality and polyamory, I wondered if my blog was too scattered. I write about adoption; parenting; anxiety; race and class; books; Quakerism and faith; my life; people I love. Perhaps I should have several blogs--one about adoption, one about books, one about Quakerism, one for profiles of my beloveds, one about parenting...
The problem is that I don't have enough to say about any one of those things to sustain a blog. Long-time readers may recall that this blog started as a place to think about transracial adoption. Eventually, though, I found that I had said most of what I have to say on that topic, and the blog was quiet for awhile until I started using it as The Blog of All Things. I seem to be a Blog of All Things kind of person, because I don't have one thing I'm interested in. I'm deeply interested in transracial adoption for awhile; then I'm reading up on economics and globalization; then I'm reading a whole bunch of classic sci-fi, or re-watching Firefly. Lately I've been studying up on homebirth and midwifery, because I realized I didn't have an informed opinion on those things, and I was curious. Sometimes I'm interested in several things at once: right now, I'm very interested in reading and talking about gifted kids; kittens; amigurumi; common birds of Michigan; young adult fiction; marriage; flirting; service; homeschooling; gender-nonconforming kids; and religion. Off the top of my head. And that might mean a blog post on one of those things one day, and on another the next day. Or one post that touches on a couple of those things.
They're not neatly compartmentalized for me. Parenting, gender-nonconformance, anxiety, religion, and kittens, for instance, have some obvious connections in my life right now. I can't see it working for me to have a blog that was supposed to be only about one of those things.
Something I thought about yesterday, during my middle-of-the-night drive home from Ann Arbor, was whether, if I want to write about polyamory and sexuality, I should have a special space for that. A separate blog, or a section of this blog that people could choose to go to, or not. But part of what I'm thinking about is my desire to be wholly known, by which I mean to be in places and with people where I can bring my whole self. One of the things I love about FLGBTQC is that it comes so close to that for me--I've said many times, and here I am saying it again, FLGBTQC is the place in my life where people can best honor and hold both my relationship with Raider and my queer identity. I like that. I want and need more places like that in my life.
As Ragen Chastain says, I am the boss of my underpants. I am also the boss of my blog. And I need and want this to be a place where I can write honestly about what matters to me.
It's not my wish to make anyone uncomfortable; it is, indeed, my regret if I do. But at the same time, it's OK with me if people are uncomfortable. It's OK if some people only read my posts on books, or my posts on parenting. It's OK if some people decide not to read my blog at all. Even people I love. Even people who are my friends and want to stay my friends. It's OK, if you're uncomfortable, to say so. I welcome both "I" statements and Good-Faith Questions on any topic. Tell me what you think and feel; that's fine with me. Ask me more; that's fine with me. Choose to spend your time elsewhere; I'm sorry to see you go, but that's fine with me, too, and when I see you at park day or in the grocery store or at a friend's house, I'll still be glad to see you and I hope you'll be glad to see me.
I am a moral person. I am a deeply ethical person. I am religious in a non-trivial way. I think and ponder and reflect and think some more about everything. The decisions I make about my life are shaped by these things. I don't think I've ever made a decision lightly. So, you know, at least, that if I make a decision that seems dangerous, reckless, immoral, wrong-headed, deeply mistaken, risky, or even just head-scratchingly incomprehensible to you, well, it's probably the best-thought-out, most-thoroughly-processed bone-headed move in history. Perhaps that is a consolation.
I might write some more about sexuality and polyamory sometime soon; I have a couple of things percolating in the Grab-Bag. But I won't write explicity about sex here. Just so you know.
In other news, my notebook went missing yesterday just after I wrote about it. It went missing in circumstances that make me hope it will yet turn up--I remember putting it, and my shopping list, into my bag, but when the Tiny Tornado and I got to the store, I opened my bag and they weren't there. Somewhere in the house, we think. Or maybe the car.
I hope it turns up. This is not just a notebook; it's the notebook my friend Janis gave me a pen quiver for. I love perfect, unexpected gifts (like the time my friend Weaver mailed me a fancy tape-flag dispenser! Clearly office supplies are a theme) and I treasure my pen quiver.
In the meantime, Raider gave me a little notebook he picked up at a conference in May, small enough to carry in my bag. And I have a beautiful journal my friend Uncle Toots bought for me at Walden Pond, really too nice for the kind of disposable note-taking I do. And I remind myself that my brain is always generating more thoughts and ideas than I know what to do with, so anything that stays lost is probably not that important; meanwhile, worthwhile things (and some that aren't) find their way to the surface again. I'm already on the second page of notes in the lovely journal.
And so on.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Old Notebook Dilemma
The other day, I mentioned my mental grab-bag of odds and ends. In order to keep my brain from becoming overstuffed and untidy, I have a physical grab-bag annex: I always carry a notebook. In my notebook, I jot down ideas I have, interesting things I see, things the kids say and do, books people suggest to me, movies that cross my mind that I'd like to see again, snippets of conversation. As I use these up--order the books from the library, watch the movies, write about the snippets--I cross them out, very untidily.
Eventually, the notebook is full. My notebooks aren't worth keeping--by this point, they're just 50 pages of scribbles peppered here and there with things that didn't get crossed out.
Before I toss the old notebook into recycling, I have to decide what to do with the leftover odds and ends. Maybe there's the name of a book that hasn't been released yet; I'll copy that to the new notebook. Maybe there's an idea I had that I haven't had a chance to write about but that still feels like it has potential. I transfer that, too. But then there are things whose moment has clearly passed, or that have been transferred from notebook to notebook enough times that it seems likely I'll never actually do anything with them--like the pasta maker you bought 20 years ago and have moved to three houses in two states without ever making homemade pasta. As tasty as that pasta might be, it's time to let the machine go.
For some reason, the notebook I just filled is not just peppered with leftovers. It's chock-full of leftovers. Page after page, mostly crossed out but with one or two things I haven't done anything with but am not quite ready to pass on. It feels like too much to transfer, but also like too much to just let go of.
This is my dilemma. It may seem inconsequential to you, but I haven't solved it.
Maybe I'll see if I can clear a few of them now. Here we go, taking them in order:
The note says: "real" amigurumi. You may know that back in April I started learning to crochet little animals. This is a hobby based on a Japanese craft called amigurumi. Here is a bat I made for the Lego Savant the other day:
I was amused, and by browsing on-line I found that there is in fact controversy and arguments about what makes real amigurumi. According to various people, little crocheted animals can be disqualified for, yes, being too big, but also for having a body that is not a simple tube. A dachshund I made, with a shaped torso, wouldn't qualify by this definition, but neither would the bat above because the legs and head are crocheted as part of the body instead of separately and then sewn on. Head/body proportion can be used as a criterion, and one definition I saw says that amigurmi always have "eyes and a mouth," even if they're inanimate objects like a carrot or a cupcake. My poor bat is disqualified again--no mouth.
This is an issue in my whole life. Even as a lesbian, I tended to be femme, so not as spot-able as a butchier woman. And now, roaming the world with my husband and children, absolutely nobody sees us and thinks, "Look at that nice queer family! I'll give them a friendly look of recognition!"
Yesterday in Saugatuck, I saw many men who seemed gay to me. This is not a surprise in Saugatuck. But, as usual, there were no shared glaces with us. I decided that we need more words for "hello" in the English language, and one of them needs to mean, "I think you're probably queer, and I'm glad to see you."
Word Boy wanted to play a game yesterday where we took turns telling each other interesting things we knew about animals. On one of my turns, I talked about some insects I read about that are born already pregnant, and the baby bugs are born by eating their mothers from the inside. Of course, by this time they are also already pregnant, and it is their fate, also, to be eaten alive from the inside.
The Tiny Tornado's comment: "I wonder what it tastes like."
I have a note to write about the Tiny Tornado, race, and urban spaces. That's a big topic. I'll transfer it to the new notebook.
There's also a whole post on the parent support group we attended at TransHealth.
I have a note that, in response to the many many books that reassure children that it is OK to be different or special, I am going to write a book called, "It's OK To Be the Same." It's going to be about how, by discovering things you have in common with people, you can form connections and make community, and how all people have things in common.
Let's see (flips pages)...gender stuff...gender stuff...gender stuff.
At the Chinese restaurant where Word Boy ate his giant crab there was also the biggest lobster I'd ever seen. It is no exaggeration to say that its pincers were as big as my head. We asked our patient and long-suffering server if such a lobster could actually be eaten. He assured us that it could. A large group might order it, he said, but a lobster that big couldn't be cooked, so the chef would prepare it for them raw, as sashimi.
We found this very interesting. I didn't think to ask how much it would cost. Or how they would kill a lobster that couldn't be boiled.
Eventually, the notebook is full. My notebooks aren't worth keeping--by this point, they're just 50 pages of scribbles peppered here and there with things that didn't get crossed out.
Before I toss the old notebook into recycling, I have to decide what to do with the leftover odds and ends. Maybe there's the name of a book that hasn't been released yet; I'll copy that to the new notebook. Maybe there's an idea I had that I haven't had a chance to write about but that still feels like it has potential. I transfer that, too. But then there are things whose moment has clearly passed, or that have been transferred from notebook to notebook enough times that it seems likely I'll never actually do anything with them--like the pasta maker you bought 20 years ago and have moved to three houses in two states without ever making homemade pasta. As tasty as that pasta might be, it's time to let the machine go.
For some reason, the notebook I just filled is not just peppered with leftovers. It's chock-full of leftovers. Page after page, mostly crossed out but with one or two things I haven't done anything with but am not quite ready to pass on. It feels like too much to transfer, but also like too much to just let go of.
This is my dilemma. It may seem inconsequential to you, but I haven't solved it.
Maybe I'll see if I can clear a few of them now. Here we go, taking them in order:
The note says: "real" amigurumi. You may know that back in April I started learning to crochet little animals. This is a hobby based on a Japanese craft called amigurumi. Here is a bat I made for the Lego Savant the other day:
I hadn't been doing amigurumi long, a matter of weeks, and someone saw a few pieces I'd made in person for the first time, instead of in photos on Facebook. "I didn't expect them to be so big," she said. "Aren't real amigurumi supposed to be very tiny?"
I don't care, honestly. I'm tired of arguing about "real" this and "real" that. It's always a form of judgment, and of making yourself feel better by shoring up some identity you've chosen. I shouldn't have been surprised to have it turn up so soon in a new community. I plan to just keep crocheting little animals out of cheap yarn with my "g" hook, and will leave the question of whether any given knitted or crocheted stuffed animal is "real" amigurumi to the expert panelists at the International Tribunal for Settling Amigurumi Disputes.
I have a note from two months ago, when we were at TransHealth. Most people at conferences take their nametags off when they leave the conference venue, and Raider and I were initially doing this when we wandered off into Philadelphia to get lunch. But we found that we often spotted people who were recognizeable as also from TransHealth, but none of them clocked us, so we weren't getting the friendly nods and smiles of recognition we craved. So we started keeping our nametags on.This is an issue in my whole life. Even as a lesbian, I tended to be femme, so not as spot-able as a butchier woman. And now, roaming the world with my husband and children, absolutely nobody sees us and thinks, "Look at that nice queer family! I'll give them a friendly look of recognition!"
Yesterday in Saugatuck, I saw many men who seemed gay to me. This is not a surprise in Saugatuck. But, as usual, there were no shared glaces with us. I decided that we need more words for "hello" in the English language, and one of them needs to mean, "I think you're probably queer, and I'm glad to see you."
Word Boy wanted to play a game yesterday where we took turns telling each other interesting things we knew about animals. On one of my turns, I talked about some insects I read about that are born already pregnant, and the baby bugs are born by eating their mothers from the inside. Of course, by this time they are also already pregnant, and it is their fate, also, to be eaten alive from the inside.
The Tiny Tornado's comment: "I wonder what it tastes like."
I have a note to write about the Tiny Tornado, race, and urban spaces. That's a big topic. I'll transfer it to the new notebook.
There's also a whole post on the parent support group we attended at TransHealth.
I have a note that, in response to the many many books that reassure children that it is OK to be different or special, I am going to write a book called, "It's OK To Be the Same." It's going to be about how, by discovering things you have in common with people, you can form connections and make community, and how all people have things in common.
Let's see (flips pages)...gender stuff...gender stuff...gender stuff.
At the Chinese restaurant where Word Boy ate his giant crab there was also the biggest lobster I'd ever seen. It is no exaggeration to say that its pincers were as big as my head. We asked our patient and long-suffering server if such a lobster could actually be eaten. He assured us that it could. A large group might order it, he said, but a lobster that big couldn't be cooked, so the chef would prepare it for them raw, as sashimi.
We found this very interesting. I didn't think to ask how much it would cost. Or how they would kill a lobster that couldn't be boiled.
Gender stuff...gender stuff...gender stuff...a page of things I think I'm ready to let go of...
Ha, here's a note that parenting the Tiny Tornado is a very good thing, because it frees us of the illusion that we are in control of our kids and the things they will do.
The Tiny Tornado is working on self-control, though. I posted the following two things on Facebook the other day:
I look up to see that the Tiny Tornado has made a stack of three stools and is trying to get to the top shelf in the living room. "Tiny Tornado," I say, "what are you doing? Are you trying to get something that I already told you you couldn't have?"
Tiny Tornado: "Yes."
And a bit later:
Tiny Tornado comes to find me. "Mom, I need a chair."
Me, suspicious: "What do you need a chair for?"
He closes his eyes tight and his lips move. After a moment, I can hear him saying quietly to himself, "Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it." Eventually he opens his eyes and says, "Mom, I just need it."
The other night, I knocked the coffee maker off the counter. Fortunately, I was holding the carafe in my hand, but hot grounds spilled everywhere. Raider told the kids, "Don't come in the kitchen for a couple of minutes. There's a mess, and we want to let it cool a little before we sweep it up."
A couple of minutes later, I see the Tiny Tornado standing at the threshhold of the kitchen. He is putting one foot forward, almost past the threshhold, and then pulling it back. He does this a few times. Catching me looking at him, he says, "I am trying to stop myself."
This is the beginning of something exciting, if he is really trying to work on mastering his impulses. Perhaps it will come to fruition in a few decades.
Someone is nagging the heck out of me to go grocery shopping. We're out of everything but what he cares most about is cookies. Guess I'd better get to it.
Friday, July 20, 2012
The Grab-Bag & The New Normal
Raider likes to make fun of my handwriting on grocery lists, and sometimes it irks me. And then I come upon something I can't for the life of me read, and I have to admit he's not just imagining things. For instance, in the "For my blog" section of my notebook, I find something that looks for all the world like, "hairy ban gars nee dry a hamcat."
I'm sure it's actually about someone or something needing a haircut. But that rings no bells at all.
I'm in the mood to write something that will make people say, "Oh, ha ha Su Penn you are so very funny." But the chickens in my brain are not laying funny eggs at the moment.
I'll take a moment to explain that image. When I was at the Festival of Faith & Writing, somebody asked a panel of writers the classic question about where they get their ideas. One woman--I don't remember which one, a poet. Anyway, she said that she thinks of it like she has a chicken in her brain, pecking around and laying eggs. And every now and then the chicken lays a good one.
My own image is more like I have a big sack in my brain, and sometimes things fall in there, and sometimes I toss things in there. And every now and then, when I root around in the sack, there's something worth pulling out and showing people. Or a couple of the things in there have combined in a new way, and that's worth showing people. Or something in the sack starts to feel heavy, and I have to unload it because I'm tired of carrying it. Or every now and then, something in the sack comes to life and demands my attention.
But I like the chicken image, too.
I actually had a sack-related issue come up at the Gathering the other week. On Wednesday night, I found myself thinking that I was having a really good gathering, but that somehow it just hadn't tipped over into being one of the truly great ones. I decided that the problem was probably that I wasn't getting enough worship. Because I was working at the info desk, I wasn't doing a morning workshop, and my experience is that even if the workshop doesn't include a lot of worship per se, it often feels quite worshipful nonetheless. I had also missed two out of three afternoons of FLGBTQC worship, one from working and one, IIRC, from going to the beach.
So I decided that the solution was to make sure to get to worship on Thursday and Friday.
Accordingly, on Thursday I herded the kids to FLGBTQC childcare and planted my butt in a comfy chair in the beautiful room we had been assigned for afternoon worship. All around me, people were settling into the silence. They seemed peaceful and centered. Few fidgeted. Eventually some vocal ministry was offered. It seemed to speak to people; there were nods and the occasional quiet tear.
None of it reached me. I couldn't center at all. I was restless and fidgety. I wished I had my crocheting to help settle my mind. I didn't feel like I was in worship at all.
Eventually, I decided to peek into my Vocal Ministry Grab Bag--it's right next to the Writing Grab Bag, very handy. And there was nothing in there. Nothing at all.
It's not that I expected to find something I could offer as ministry. You can't open up the grab bag from such an unsettled place as I was and expect to find a little avatar of God holding up a shiny apple and saying, "Give them this!" But I did expect to find something I could think about, meditate on, use to center.
Nothing.
Now, you have to understand that my bags always having something in them: dust, some mice, a peach pit, a faded photograph, a half-remembered Bible verse, a story somebody told me one time. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's generating ideas, and borrowing ideas, and stealing notions, and having thoughts that I want to hold onto in case they're ever useful. The Vocal Ministry grab bag is very like the Writing grab bag--there are odds and ends in there, bits and pieces that are not much in and of themselves. But some of them are seeds that grow, or broken pieces waiting for their other half, or gems that just need the cruft knocked off. Sure, plenty of what's in there is chaff ("What if God is like a Big Mac, and Quakerism is like the sesame seeds on the bun?"), but if you toss enough stuff in there, and let it ferment, and stir it around a bit from time to time, some of it becomes something worthwhile.
You might also know that, prior to leaving my Quaker meeting last November, I had spent more than a year seriously considering, along with friends and elders and clearness committees and prayerful prayer and the whole shebang, the possibility that I had a leading to preach.
So, I've tended to carry around a pretty full Bag of Holding. Sometimes I have pulled something out of there prematurely, I admit it. Sometimes a good story I thought would connect to something deeper turned out to be just a good story; sometimes a fragment I thought had found its mate hadn't. Sometimes it's hard to know for sure what is junk and what is a jewel.
But the bag has never been empty.
Until Thursday, July 5, 2012, at about 5:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, when I decided to root around in the bag. And there was absolutely nothing in it.
I was stunned. I was confused. I was disoriented.
Section 48 of "Song of Myself" can fairly be described as my statement of faith. I won't quote the whole thing to you, though you can find it here, but the last three lines say everything about my experience of God's universal presence and abundance and generous voice:
When my bag turned out to be empty in worship, I knew that I had been wrong about this. That other letters had not punctually come for ever and ever.
God, I thought to myself, has stopped speaking to me.
I needed, right then, an hour or so alone in a quiet and cool place to let the feelings I was having, the despair I felt, wash over me and subside a little. But, of course, I had no hour, no quiet, no cool. With a friend's help, I fetched the younger kids from child care. I took them to the cafeteria for dinner. I tried to hold it together, the way moms do, to keep the emotions at bay until I could have some time and solitude. But, I couldn't. So I handed the kids over to their older brother and his friends, sat down in the quiet dining section, carefully set my glasses on the table, put my hands over my face, and wept.
Eventually, I got up and washed my face. I accepted some expressions of concern, a couple of hugs, a protestation of love. I joined my kids for dinner. I hung out at the rocky stream with them for a little while. I dropped them at their Junior Gathering groups. And I headed over to the student union for my evening work shift at the Information Table.
I was happy to see that my co-worker was my friend Sue, whom I don't get to see often enough. She asked how I was and I acknowledged that I'd been better. She asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I said, "I don't know. I hardly see you, I'm not sure that's how I want to spend this short time with you."
Sue said, "Would you rather I be able to tell people, Hey, I saw Su Penn for the first time in two years, and we made twenty minutes of nice small talk?"
She had a point. I sang like a canary.
She asked me, "Is that how you know that God is speaking to you? By offering vocal ministry? Because I hardly ever offer vocal ministry." And we went on to talk about other ways of experiencing God. And, later in the evening, I got to talk a little more about it with my friend Shani.
I felt a little better. Not a lot. Still pretty unsure. I was curious to see what happened in Friday's meeting for worship. Which is that I fell asleep and woke feeling rested and refreshed. Not the best worship I'd ever had, but certainly not the worst. Entirely inconclusive on the question of whether God was still dropping odds and ends into my bag.
I shouldn't really be surprised by this change. Right now in my life, I shouldn't be surprised by any change. Last fall was a singularity in my life, there's a Before and an After and you can't predict the After from what happened Before. Two things mark this singularity: the beginning of my treatment for chronic headaches with my new neurologist, and laying down my membership in my monthly meeting.
The headache thing is surprisingly far-reaching. Not only have my headaches improved dramatically and my sensitivity to fragrances and chemicals declined, but my mood has improved. One of the medications I take for my chronic daily headache is Effexor. It's an anti-depressant. Taking it solved the problems I was having with severe mood swings before my periods. It has also caused me to be in a good mood for longer than I have ever been in a good mood before. I think I've talked about this before. Cheerfulness is apparrently, for me, a side effect of my headache meds.
The last couple of visits with my neurologist, I've expressed concern that the Effexor was flattening my emotional reactions, that my mood was too good. My main reason for thinking this is that there are many times when I would normally expect myself to cry, but I don't cry. My neurologist, taking me at my word, has been tweaking my meds.
My therapist, when I saw her for my monthly check-in, was more skeptical. "Can you cry at all?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said. "Just last week I read a book about two terminally ill teenagers who fall in love, and cried like a baby at the end."
"Hmmm," she said.
The upshot is that it's entirely possible that what I'm experiencing is perfectly normal. My therapist isn't so sure I need my meds tweaked. She thinks I might just need time to get used to my New Normal. I've been through this before, the first time I had effective treatment for my anxiety. I had to learn the names for all kinds of new emotions I was having instead of panic and fear. I had to learn to live without the constant heightened drama that comes from always being on the edge of freaking out.
Leaving my Friends meeting changed a lot, too. For one thing, it freed all the energy I had been devoting to trying to fix that relationship; like any breakup, once I finally made the split I realized how much the relationship had been holding me back, how much of a drag on my time and energy it had become.
I realized as time passed that it had created a huge blind spot as well, that I had been trying to solve all of my problems within the context of Quakerism. But it turned out that some of the solutions weren't to be found there. I wondered if I was led to preach, but in February I found myself, quite unexpectedly, on stage storytelling for the first time in a decade. I had been having a kind of midlife crisis about wanting an actual job, a profession, say, that had a name people recognized and that perhaps I could even be paid for. After seriously considering seminary, once I laid down my membership I quickly found my way to an idea that had been in my Grab Bag for several years: Speech Language Pathology.
I don't know why I assumed, then, that my relationship to vocal ministry wouldn't change, that things would keep dropping into that bag. At least now, since my talks with Sue and Shani, since letting my emotions simmer down a bit, I don't think the empty bag is necessarily a tragedy. It may simply represent, like the storytelling and the speech pathology degree, that a new conduit has opened up between me and God. Just because I don't know, right now, what that conduit is, just because I don't, right now, recognize what it is that God might be saying to me, doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean God has stopped speaking. Perhaps, sometime, we'll get back in touch. Perhaps, if we're no longer passionate lovers, we can be friends.
Another typical page in one of my notebooks. You can see that I am not the only person who writes in them. The rule for the kids is, "You can write or draw on any blank page." I like the little surprises that turn up for me from time to time. Sometimes it's math problems, sometimes it's robots.
I'm sure it's actually about someone or something needing a haircut. But that rings no bells at all.
I'm in the mood to write something that will make people say, "Oh, ha ha Su Penn you are so very funny." But the chickens in my brain are not laying funny eggs at the moment.
I'll take a moment to explain that image. When I was at the Festival of Faith & Writing, somebody asked a panel of writers the classic question about where they get their ideas. One woman--I don't remember which one, a poet. Anyway, she said that she thinks of it like she has a chicken in her brain, pecking around and laying eggs. And every now and then the chicken lays a good one.
My own image is more like I have a big sack in my brain, and sometimes things fall in there, and sometimes I toss things in there. And every now and then, when I root around in the sack, there's something worth pulling out and showing people. Or a couple of the things in there have combined in a new way, and that's worth showing people. Or something in the sack starts to feel heavy, and I have to unload it because I'm tired of carrying it. Or every now and then, something in the sack comes to life and demands my attention.
But I like the chicken image, too.
I actually had a sack-related issue come up at the Gathering the other week. On Wednesday night, I found myself thinking that I was having a really good gathering, but that somehow it just hadn't tipped over into being one of the truly great ones. I decided that the problem was probably that I wasn't getting enough worship. Because I was working at the info desk, I wasn't doing a morning workshop, and my experience is that even if the workshop doesn't include a lot of worship per se, it often feels quite worshipful nonetheless. I had also missed two out of three afternoons of FLGBTQC worship, one from working and one, IIRC, from going to the beach.
So I decided that the solution was to make sure to get to worship on Thursday and Friday.
Accordingly, on Thursday I herded the kids to FLGBTQC childcare and planted my butt in a comfy chair in the beautiful room we had been assigned for afternoon worship. All around me, people were settling into the silence. They seemed peaceful and centered. Few fidgeted. Eventually some vocal ministry was offered. It seemed to speak to people; there were nods and the occasional quiet tear.
None of it reached me. I couldn't center at all. I was restless and fidgety. I wished I had my crocheting to help settle my mind. I didn't feel like I was in worship at all.
Eventually, I decided to peek into my Vocal Ministry Grab Bag--it's right next to the Writing Grab Bag, very handy. And there was nothing in there. Nothing at all.
It's not that I expected to find something I could offer as ministry. You can't open up the grab bag from such an unsettled place as I was and expect to find a little avatar of God holding up a shiny apple and saying, "Give them this!" But I did expect to find something I could think about, meditate on, use to center.
Nothing.
Now, you have to understand that my bags always having something in them: dust, some mice, a peach pit, a faded photograph, a half-remembered Bible verse, a story somebody told me one time. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's generating ideas, and borrowing ideas, and stealing notions, and having thoughts that I want to hold onto in case they're ever useful. The Vocal Ministry grab bag is very like the Writing grab bag--there are odds and ends in there, bits and pieces that are not much in and of themselves. But some of them are seeds that grow, or broken pieces waiting for their other half, or gems that just need the cruft knocked off. Sure, plenty of what's in there is chaff ("What if God is like a Big Mac, and Quakerism is like the sesame seeds on the bun?"), but if you toss enough stuff in there, and let it ferment, and stir it around a bit from time to time, some of it becomes something worthwhile.
You might also know that, prior to leaving my Quaker meeting last November, I had spent more than a year seriously considering, along with friends and elders and clearness committees and prayerful prayer and the whole shebang, the possibility that I had a leading to preach.
So, I've tended to carry around a pretty full Bag of Holding. Sometimes I have pulled something out of there prematurely, I admit it. Sometimes a good story I thought would connect to something deeper turned out to be just a good story; sometimes a fragment I thought had found its mate hadn't. Sometimes it's hard to know for sure what is junk and what is a jewel.
But the bag has never been empty.
Until Thursday, July 5, 2012, at about 5:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, when I decided to root around in the bag. And there was absolutely nothing in it.
I was stunned. I was confused. I was disoriented.
Section 48 of "Song of Myself" can fairly be described as my statement of faith. I won't quote the whole thing to you, though you can find it here, but the last three lines say everything about my experience of God's universal presence and abundance and generous voice:
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
When my bag turned out to be empty in worship, I knew that I had been wrong about this. That other letters had not punctually come for ever and ever.
God, I thought to myself, has stopped speaking to me.
I needed, right then, an hour or so alone in a quiet and cool place to let the feelings I was having, the despair I felt, wash over me and subside a little. But, of course, I had no hour, no quiet, no cool. With a friend's help, I fetched the younger kids from child care. I took them to the cafeteria for dinner. I tried to hold it together, the way moms do, to keep the emotions at bay until I could have some time and solitude. But, I couldn't. So I handed the kids over to their older brother and his friends, sat down in the quiet dining section, carefully set my glasses on the table, put my hands over my face, and wept.
Eventually, I got up and washed my face. I accepted some expressions of concern, a couple of hugs, a protestation of love. I joined my kids for dinner. I hung out at the rocky stream with them for a little while. I dropped them at their Junior Gathering groups. And I headed over to the student union for my evening work shift at the Information Table.
I was happy to see that my co-worker was my friend Sue, whom I don't get to see often enough. She asked how I was and I acknowledged that I'd been better. She asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I said, "I don't know. I hardly see you, I'm not sure that's how I want to spend this short time with you."
Sue said, "Would you rather I be able to tell people, Hey, I saw Su Penn for the first time in two years, and we made twenty minutes of nice small talk?"
She had a point. I sang like a canary.
She asked me, "Is that how you know that God is speaking to you? By offering vocal ministry? Because I hardly ever offer vocal ministry." And we went on to talk about other ways of experiencing God. And, later in the evening, I got to talk a little more about it with my friend Shani.
I felt a little better. Not a lot. Still pretty unsure. I was curious to see what happened in Friday's meeting for worship. Which is that I fell asleep and woke feeling rested and refreshed. Not the best worship I'd ever had, but certainly not the worst. Entirely inconclusive on the question of whether God was still dropping odds and ends into my bag.
I shouldn't really be surprised by this change. Right now in my life, I shouldn't be surprised by any change. Last fall was a singularity in my life, there's a Before and an After and you can't predict the After from what happened Before. Two things mark this singularity: the beginning of my treatment for chronic headaches with my new neurologist, and laying down my membership in my monthly meeting.
The headache thing is surprisingly far-reaching. Not only have my headaches improved dramatically and my sensitivity to fragrances and chemicals declined, but my mood has improved. One of the medications I take for my chronic daily headache is Effexor. It's an anti-depressant. Taking it solved the problems I was having with severe mood swings before my periods. It has also caused me to be in a good mood for longer than I have ever been in a good mood before. I think I've talked about this before. Cheerfulness is apparrently, for me, a side effect of my headache meds.
The last couple of visits with my neurologist, I've expressed concern that the Effexor was flattening my emotional reactions, that my mood was too good. My main reason for thinking this is that there are many times when I would normally expect myself to cry, but I don't cry. My neurologist, taking me at my word, has been tweaking my meds.
My therapist, when I saw her for my monthly check-in, was more skeptical. "Can you cry at all?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said. "Just last week I read a book about two terminally ill teenagers who fall in love, and cried like a baby at the end."
"Hmmm," she said.
The upshot is that it's entirely possible that what I'm experiencing is perfectly normal. My therapist isn't so sure I need my meds tweaked. She thinks I might just need time to get used to my New Normal. I've been through this before, the first time I had effective treatment for my anxiety. I had to learn the names for all kinds of new emotions I was having instead of panic and fear. I had to learn to live without the constant heightened drama that comes from always being on the edge of freaking out.
Leaving my Friends meeting changed a lot, too. For one thing, it freed all the energy I had been devoting to trying to fix that relationship; like any breakup, once I finally made the split I realized how much the relationship had been holding me back, how much of a drag on my time and energy it had become.
I realized as time passed that it had created a huge blind spot as well, that I had been trying to solve all of my problems within the context of Quakerism. But it turned out that some of the solutions weren't to be found there. I wondered if I was led to preach, but in February I found myself, quite unexpectedly, on stage storytelling for the first time in a decade. I had been having a kind of midlife crisis about wanting an actual job, a profession, say, that had a name people recognized and that perhaps I could even be paid for. After seriously considering seminary, once I laid down my membership I quickly found my way to an idea that had been in my Grab Bag for several years: Speech Language Pathology.
I don't know why I assumed, then, that my relationship to vocal ministry wouldn't change, that things would keep dropping into that bag. At least now, since my talks with Sue and Shani, since letting my emotions simmer down a bit, I don't think the empty bag is necessarily a tragedy. It may simply represent, like the storytelling and the speech pathology degree, that a new conduit has opened up between me and God. Just because I don't know, right now, what that conduit is, just because I don't, right now, recognize what it is that God might be saying to me, doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean God has stopped speaking. Perhaps, sometime, we'll get back in touch. Perhaps, if we're no longer passionate lovers, we can be friends.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
We Have Decided We Want More Kids
Raider and I (and the kids) attended the Trans-Health conference in Philadelphia in May. In one workshop we attended, a young trans person spoke about the support and love they had received from their mother as they were transitioning. I don't remember the specific details of their story; what I remember was the stillness and concentration in the room as they spoke, and the yearning. "You have the best mom in the world," someone said when they finished. Hearing this young person talk about their mother's love and acceptance filled the room with a mix of grief and tender wishfulness. If it is common for gay and lesbian youth to suffer estrangement from family, it is even more common for transgendered kids. And many people in the room had experienced that.
Another woman, the cisgendered mom of a gender-nonconforming child, said that one of her best resources had been a local support group for transgendered and transsexual people. They were very accepting of her, she said, and really helped her learn what she needed to know. Also, so many had been rejected by their families of origin that she became a kind of "surrogate mom" to many in the group.
There's a real need for people willing and able to be those parent figures for young people who've been cast out. Look at this infographic from the National Center for Transgender Equality:
Another woman, the cisgendered mom of a gender-nonconforming child, said that one of her best resources had been a local support group for transgendered and transsexual people. They were very accepting of her, she said, and really helped her learn what she needed to know. Also, so many had been rejected by their families of origin that she became a kind of "surrogate mom" to many in the group.
There's a real need for people willing and able to be those parent figures for young people who've been cast out. Look at this infographic from the National Center for Transgender Equality:
I recently re-connected with a high school friend on Facebook. When I posted this graphic, she commented,"I'm guessing if we could lower the percentage rejected by families, the homelessness and suicide rates would drop dramatically." I suspect she's right. 57% is too many kids left without resources.
Raider and I have long had a kind of hope that someday we would be in a position to help such a young person. Twice in the last few years, we've taken people into our home who needed a place to stay for awhile, and it has worked out well, the biggest problem being our single bathroom. Last night, we had a wonderful date, sitting on the patio at a local coffee place sipping drinks and having the best kind of talk, and one of the things we talked about was wanting to be more intentional about this, getting the word out that we have a place for someone who needs one. And possibly putting in a half-bath.
Keep us in mind. If you hear of a young person who needs a place for awhile, we have one. If they're not local to us but willing to come to mid-Michigan we'll help with travel. (That's kind of a tall order, we know. We love it here but outsiders tend to see it as the middle of nowhere.) There is very little we can do to change the world, but we would very much like to do what we can to change a life.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
My Vexed Relationship with Giftedness
I mentioned the other day that I had a blog post in me about giftedness, and I'm feeling in the mood to tackle it, although it's complicated and messy in my head. A few years ago, I was talking to my therapist about my own history as a precocious child, and how that was good, and how it was bad, and how it shaped my relationship to school and academic achievement, and she said, "Wow, you really have not got any of this figured out. I can tell because usually you speak so clearly, but when you try to talk about this, you become practically incoherent."
I realized that this was something I needed to work on when the Lego Savant was maybe 20 months old, and we were driving to the library. He had a sippy cup in his hand, with alphabet blocks or something on it, and he was saying, "Letter A...Letter L...Letter B." When he said, "Letter X," I knew he was just saying random letters, because there was no X on the cup.
And then I went to get him out of his car seat, and I saw that the sippy cup said Playtex on it.
"Lego Savant," I said, "Can you show me the letter X?"
And he did.
And I burst into tears.
OK, keeping in mind that I tend to be very emotionally labile, my feelings at realizing that the Lego Savant might be on the bright side made me realize that I had some unresolved issues of my own to work on.
I think I've made some progress.
It helps that I've done some reading on giftedness in the last few years, and learned that my story, which seemed so complicated and incomprehensible to me, is actually an absolutely typical gifted-child story: I was precocious in school, and not served well. In first grade, my teacher made an arrangement for me to go to a second-grade classroom for math, for instance. But when I got to second grade (which happened because my mother refused to let me be skipped to third, because of her own negative experiences being accelerated as a kid), nobody was willing to make an accommodation for me. So I did second-grade math again.
This was the beginning of my disillusionment with school, and was followed by the usual litany: figuring out I was smarter than most of my teachers; being marked down for things that were correct, like using a particular kind of literary device in a piece of writing, because my teacher either didn't recognize it or was sure it was a mistake instead of a deliberate stylistic choice on my part; being restricted to the picture-book side of the library in first and second grade even though I was routinely reading chapter books (my mom got this restriction lifted for me); being put into a completely inadequate pull-out program for a year or two; and so on.
A side story about that pull-out program in elementary school: no one told me why I was being pulled out of class a couple of days a week to go play games with a handful of other kids and a grown-up I didn't know. Based on the other kids in the group, I inferred that I was being pulled out of class because I had trouble making friends. I continued to believe this until I was an adult, when my mother, overhearing me tell a friend that I had been so socially awkward as a child that I had had to go to this special making-friends group, said, "Susan! That was a pull-out program for gifted children!" Maybe someone should have told me at the time.
I got a lot of attention for being precocious and for my academic accomplishments, but I also had a lot of anxiety about it. Being smart mattered so much to me that I was terrified of finding out I wasn't smart, and getting good grades was apparently how you proved you were smart. Any grade less than an A felt like proof that I'd been faking it all along. I adapted to the anxiety by becoming an underachiever. My almost-conscious thought process about this was that if I didn't try, then a good grade proved I was smart--because I'd gotten the A without even trying. On the other hand, a bad grade meant nothing, because it could be blamed on the lack of effort.
Of course, I mostly got good grades anyway, and this led to a long-term strategy of putting in only the minimum effort required to get an A. In my first grad-school foray, after I had turned in my first paper, one of my profs called me into her office. She told me that she had had to give my paper an A, because it was an A paper. At the same time, she could tell that I had put very little effort into it, and that it didn't represent my best work. She wanted me to challenge myself to work harder, to try for my personal best.
This made no sense to me at all. Why would you work harder than you had to for an A? Especially when you'd been told your whole life that the goal was to get an A.
There are many reasons that first grad school foray didn't work out. This was one of them.
I won't digress here to talk about my experience doing an MFA at a school that didn't give letter grades...let's just say it was much, much better.
Anyway, I have learned that all of this--plus my inability to settle on one thing to do with my life--is one of the absolutely typical ways that gifted kids respond to school. I'm not special! I'm like the poster child for Gifted with Academic Anxiety!
So, along comes the Lego Savant, with his "Letter X," and my unresolved issues erupt like a volcano.
My own experiences in school are a big part of why I chose to homeschool my kids. I didn't want them to have the kinds of experiences I'd had. And from my reading, and spending some time on discussion forums for parents with gifted kids, I could see that things hadn't changed much. I didn't want my kids to be bored like I was; I didn't want so much of their time to be wasted; I wanted them to have expansive time to do what they loved, something I got only very occasionally as a child; I didn't want their self-esteem to get mixed up with academic achievement in the unhealthy way mine had.
And, honestly, I was afraid that I'd project my own academic anxieties onto my kids, and pressure them to succeed where I felt I had failed. That I might become the academic equivalent of the guy who pushes his kid to play football because his own football dreams never came true.
(Note: I was not actually an academic failure. But, like Anne Lamott, who says she was in her 30s before she figured out that a B+ is actually a good grade, I was also well into adulthood before I figured out that graduating with High Distinction--but not Highest Distinction--from the University of Michigan actually meant I was successful in college.)
Homeschooling has done much of what I hoped it would for my kids. And one of the things I have liked about it is that I have not had to worry about whether my kids were "gifted" according to any particular definition--they didn't need to score above a certain percentile on an achievement test to qualify for services, for instance. We haven't needed to prove anything to anyone. And I could side-step my own ambivalence about the gifted label by simply not needing to deal with it.
And then...
Some things that had happened to me, that I thought were adaptations to school, turned up in my kids as well. Word Boy, for instance, is such a perfectionist that he will melt down if he doesn't understand his math at first glance. At least I've gotten him past the point of hitting himself over it, but still.
Word Boy and the Lego Savant both suffer from anxiety, inflexibility, high sensitivity, excitability, and a degree of emotional immaturity. I threw tantrums well into high school myself, and I thought this was a reaction to how my parents treated me. Now I know that this is also absolutely typical for some gifted kids. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) Sadly, it is true for the Lego Savant, who one moment can be talking to you about the literary conventions that make movies and TV shows so predictable as if you're in an English literature seminar, and the next minute can be hitting a chair and screaming that he just. can't. cope. and his life is over because we're out of his favorite potato chips and can't get more until payday.
You should see the two of them trying to work across the table from each other. The Lego Savant is talking quietly to himself as he solves some math problems; Word Boy wishes he would just be quiet, already. Meanwhile, the scratching of Word Boy's pencil is driving the Lego Savant mad! And can Word Boy please stop breathing like that?
I make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that one or both of them could go work elsewhere. They both have desks in their bedrooms!
This is when inflexibility kicks in, one of the hardest things we deal with as parents: they can identify a problem, but (especially the Lego Savant) refuse to accept any solutions to it. No, they cannot go work in the other room because they like to work at the table. No, one of them cannot wait and do his seatwork after the other one is done, because they want to do it now. No, they can't just relax and try not to worry about the breathing and the muttering and the scratching of the pencil.
Sometimes, I tell them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20 to 30 kids, all of them writing with pencils! All of them breathing! Some of them with sniffles! Some of them with a tendency to tap their fingers on their desks! Many of them turning pages in books!
This is what passes for a scary story at our house.
What I have been finally admitting the last year or so is that, even though we aren't in school, I can't ignore giftedness as an issue. The kids' constellation of smartness, anxiety, perfectionism, inflexibility, intellectual and social maturity coupled with emotional immaturity--all perfectly typical. And there's a lot for me to learn from the literature on giftedness.
I have very mixed feelings about this. My first attempts to connect with other parents of gifted children were unsuccessful. I couldn't deal what seemed to me a culture of one-upmanship ("My child read at 3." "I'm not sure your child is truly gifted. Mine was calculating cube roots at 2."). And, to be honest, hearing about these kids' achievements threatened to trigger some of my old anxieties about not being smart enough if I wasn't the smartest, now projected onto my kids.
Another digression: How this plays out in my relationship with Raider: Last night, I read him this quote from Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: "It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers." (p. 101)
Me: That is a great quote. It encapsulates his argument really well and is a perfect description of the problem.
Raider: It's also an example of chiasmus.
Me: I know what that means, but I couldn't have come up with that word off the top of my head.
A pause.
Me again: I love how smart you are. Except at those moments when I suspect you're smarter than me.
Raider laughs.
Raider, for his part, managed to be a gifted kid and grownup with none of the kinds of baggage I have had. He didn't seem to get the anxiety part. He never over-invested in academic achievement; he never thought his grades proved anything one way or another. He knew he was smart, but he didn't over-value being smart. He didn't invest his identity and self-esteem in it. Periodically he gets a newsletter for people who got the same prestigious scholarship he did to college; the "where are they now" section shows that he is almost literally the only one who isn't a college professor. This bothers him not at all. I'm glad to have him around as a model of what is possible.
Back to my kids.
In my efforts to help them deal with their various issues (and to make parenting them easier, which may be a pipe dream), I started reading up on giftedness. I stuck it out on some of the parenting forums. I read some of the parenting blogs even when they make me roll my eyes ("People think we're so lucky to have gifted kids! Ha! They should see our book budget! They should count their lucky stars they don't have to try to keep up with a kid who wants to study quantum physics at age 8!" The faux-plaints are strong in this community). I tried to be patient with the strings of letters and credentials people put after their children's names ("My daughter Snow, 8, 2e, intellectually OE, IQ 146, Lexile 940..."). And I learned more and more about how absolutely typical my very special unique snowflakes are.
Not that all gifted kids are alike, I should be careful to say. Just that mine are good examples of Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A.
One thing that pushed me into being willing to engage with this whole vexed notion of giftedness was when the boys' excellent therapist, who got the Lego Savant over his elevator phobia and had great rapport with the boys, admitted to me in so many words that he was in over his head and didn't know what to do with my kids. I think this was partly a narrowness of focus on his part--he loves the "behavioral" part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and much of what my kids deal with doesn't respond to behavioral interventions. Partly I think it reflected a lack of experience with kids like mine. I loved that he was willing to admit he wasn't sure what the next step was, and willing to try to educate himself, but at that point, we decided to take a break from therapy.
And things have stagnated. Behavioral interventions have helped, but I think my kids really need to get into the "cognitive" part of CBT. They need help understanding what's going on for them, and how they can choose to change their thoughts and behavior, rather than simply have us impose behavioral restrictions on them. We've used an audio program called Turnaround that I highly recommend, but we need more help than that. And I need to know whether what I want from my kids--that understanding, that internal motivation to change--is realistic at this time in their lives.
This is why, on Monday, I have an appointment two hours away from home with a therapist who specializes in gifted kids with anxiety. Just five minutes on the phone with her the other day felt like a deep relaxing breath--she knew what I was going to say almost before I said it. She is very familiar with Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A (a designation I made up, in case you wondered). She has experience with them. And she knew exactly what I meant when I said that I wasn't sure whether what we needed was therapy for the kids, or parenting guidance for us.
She's too far away for us to work with very regularly. But I can imagine her helping us in lots of ways: parenting consultations for me, consulting with our local therapist, meeting with the kids occasionally, pointing us to the most useful resources. I have high hopes for this meeting. I will be keeping my fingers crossed.
Her office is right over by Lake Michigan, so Raider took the day off work and we're making this Family Beach Day as well. A fun and ediftying day, I hope.
(You may be thinking: You talk about Word Boy and the Lego Savant. What about the Tiny Tornado? Do you think he is gifted as well? I do. But in very different ways. His path is going to play out very differently from his older brothers', I predict, and I'm excited to help him follow it.)
I realized that this was something I needed to work on when the Lego Savant was maybe 20 months old, and we were driving to the library. He had a sippy cup in his hand, with alphabet blocks or something on it, and he was saying, "Letter A...Letter L...Letter B." When he said, "Letter X," I knew he was just saying random letters, because there was no X on the cup.
And then I went to get him out of his car seat, and I saw that the sippy cup said Playtex on it.
"Lego Savant," I said, "Can you show me the letter X?"
And he did.
And I burst into tears.
OK, keeping in mind that I tend to be very emotionally labile, my feelings at realizing that the Lego Savant might be on the bright side made me realize that I had some unresolved issues of my own to work on.
I think I've made some progress.
It helps that I've done some reading on giftedness in the last few years, and learned that my story, which seemed so complicated and incomprehensible to me, is actually an absolutely typical gifted-child story: I was precocious in school, and not served well. In first grade, my teacher made an arrangement for me to go to a second-grade classroom for math, for instance. But when I got to second grade (which happened because my mother refused to let me be skipped to third, because of her own negative experiences being accelerated as a kid), nobody was willing to make an accommodation for me. So I did second-grade math again.
This was the beginning of my disillusionment with school, and was followed by the usual litany: figuring out I was smarter than most of my teachers; being marked down for things that were correct, like using a particular kind of literary device in a piece of writing, because my teacher either didn't recognize it or was sure it was a mistake instead of a deliberate stylistic choice on my part; being restricted to the picture-book side of the library in first and second grade even though I was routinely reading chapter books (my mom got this restriction lifted for me); being put into a completely inadequate pull-out program for a year or two; and so on.
A side story about that pull-out program in elementary school: no one told me why I was being pulled out of class a couple of days a week to go play games with a handful of other kids and a grown-up I didn't know. Based on the other kids in the group, I inferred that I was being pulled out of class because I had trouble making friends. I continued to believe this until I was an adult, when my mother, overhearing me tell a friend that I had been so socially awkward as a child that I had had to go to this special making-friends group, said, "Susan! That was a pull-out program for gifted children!" Maybe someone should have told me at the time.
I got a lot of attention for being precocious and for my academic accomplishments, but I also had a lot of anxiety about it. Being smart mattered so much to me that I was terrified of finding out I wasn't smart, and getting good grades was apparently how you proved you were smart. Any grade less than an A felt like proof that I'd been faking it all along. I adapted to the anxiety by becoming an underachiever. My almost-conscious thought process about this was that if I didn't try, then a good grade proved I was smart--because I'd gotten the A without even trying. On the other hand, a bad grade meant nothing, because it could be blamed on the lack of effort.
Of course, I mostly got good grades anyway, and this led to a long-term strategy of putting in only the minimum effort required to get an A. In my first grad-school foray, after I had turned in my first paper, one of my profs called me into her office. She told me that she had had to give my paper an A, because it was an A paper. At the same time, she could tell that I had put very little effort into it, and that it didn't represent my best work. She wanted me to challenge myself to work harder, to try for my personal best.
This made no sense to me at all. Why would you work harder than you had to for an A? Especially when you'd been told your whole life that the goal was to get an A.
There are many reasons that first grad school foray didn't work out. This was one of them.
I won't digress here to talk about my experience doing an MFA at a school that didn't give letter grades...let's just say it was much, much better.
Anyway, I have learned that all of this--plus my inability to settle on one thing to do with my life--is one of the absolutely typical ways that gifted kids respond to school. I'm not special! I'm like the poster child for Gifted with Academic Anxiety!
So, along comes the Lego Savant, with his "Letter X," and my unresolved issues erupt like a volcano.
My own experiences in school are a big part of why I chose to homeschool my kids. I didn't want them to have the kinds of experiences I'd had. And from my reading, and spending some time on discussion forums for parents with gifted kids, I could see that things hadn't changed much. I didn't want my kids to be bored like I was; I didn't want so much of their time to be wasted; I wanted them to have expansive time to do what they loved, something I got only very occasionally as a child; I didn't want their self-esteem to get mixed up with academic achievement in the unhealthy way mine had.
And, honestly, I was afraid that I'd project my own academic anxieties onto my kids, and pressure them to succeed where I felt I had failed. That I might become the academic equivalent of the guy who pushes his kid to play football because his own football dreams never came true.
(Note: I was not actually an academic failure. But, like Anne Lamott, who says she was in her 30s before she figured out that a B+ is actually a good grade, I was also well into adulthood before I figured out that graduating with High Distinction--but not Highest Distinction--from the University of Michigan actually meant I was successful in college.)
Homeschooling has done much of what I hoped it would for my kids. And one of the things I have liked about it is that I have not had to worry about whether my kids were "gifted" according to any particular definition--they didn't need to score above a certain percentile on an achievement test to qualify for services, for instance. We haven't needed to prove anything to anyone. And I could side-step my own ambivalence about the gifted label by simply not needing to deal with it.
And then...
Some things that had happened to me, that I thought were adaptations to school, turned up in my kids as well. Word Boy, for instance, is such a perfectionist that he will melt down if he doesn't understand his math at first glance. At least I've gotten him past the point of hitting himself over it, but still.
Word Boy and the Lego Savant both suffer from anxiety, inflexibility, high sensitivity, excitability, and a degree of emotional immaturity. I threw tantrums well into high school myself, and I thought this was a reaction to how my parents treated me. Now I know that this is also absolutely typical for some gifted kids. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) Sadly, it is true for the Lego Savant, who one moment can be talking to you about the literary conventions that make movies and TV shows so predictable as if you're in an English literature seminar, and the next minute can be hitting a chair and screaming that he just. can't. cope. and his life is over because we're out of his favorite potato chips and can't get more until payday.
You should see the two of them trying to work across the table from each other. The Lego Savant is talking quietly to himself as he solves some math problems; Word Boy wishes he would just be quiet, already. Meanwhile, the scratching of Word Boy's pencil is driving the Lego Savant mad! And can Word Boy please stop breathing like that?
I make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that one or both of them could go work elsewhere. They both have desks in their bedrooms!
This is when inflexibility kicks in, one of the hardest things we deal with as parents: they can identify a problem, but (especially the Lego Savant) refuse to accept any solutions to it. No, they cannot go work in the other room because they like to work at the table. No, one of them cannot wait and do his seatwork after the other one is done, because they want to do it now. No, they can't just relax and try not to worry about the breathing and the muttering and the scratching of the pencil.
Sometimes, I tell them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20 to 30 kids, all of them writing with pencils! All of them breathing! Some of them with sniffles! Some of them with a tendency to tap their fingers on their desks! Many of them turning pages in books!
This is what passes for a scary story at our house.
What I have been finally admitting the last year or so is that, even though we aren't in school, I can't ignore giftedness as an issue. The kids' constellation of smartness, anxiety, perfectionism, inflexibility, intellectual and social maturity coupled with emotional immaturity--all perfectly typical. And there's a lot for me to learn from the literature on giftedness.
I have very mixed feelings about this. My first attempts to connect with other parents of gifted children were unsuccessful. I couldn't deal what seemed to me a culture of one-upmanship ("My child read at 3." "I'm not sure your child is truly gifted. Mine was calculating cube roots at 2."). And, to be honest, hearing about these kids' achievements threatened to trigger some of my old anxieties about not being smart enough if I wasn't the smartest, now projected onto my kids.
Another digression: How this plays out in my relationship with Raider: Last night, I read him this quote from Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: "It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers." (p. 101)
Me: That is a great quote. It encapsulates his argument really well and is a perfect description of the problem.
Raider: It's also an example of chiasmus.
Me: I know what that means, but I couldn't have come up with that word off the top of my head.
A pause.
Me again: I love how smart you are. Except at those moments when I suspect you're smarter than me.
Raider laughs.
Raider, for his part, managed to be a gifted kid and grownup with none of the kinds of baggage I have had. He didn't seem to get the anxiety part. He never over-invested in academic achievement; he never thought his grades proved anything one way or another. He knew he was smart, but he didn't over-value being smart. He didn't invest his identity and self-esteem in it. Periodically he gets a newsletter for people who got the same prestigious scholarship he did to college; the "where are they now" section shows that he is almost literally the only one who isn't a college professor. This bothers him not at all. I'm glad to have him around as a model of what is possible.
Back to my kids.
In my efforts to help them deal with their various issues (and to make parenting them easier, which may be a pipe dream), I started reading up on giftedness. I stuck it out on some of the parenting forums. I read some of the parenting blogs even when they make me roll my eyes ("People think we're so lucky to have gifted kids! Ha! They should see our book budget! They should count their lucky stars they don't have to try to keep up with a kid who wants to study quantum physics at age 8!" The faux-plaints are strong in this community). I tried to be patient with the strings of letters and credentials people put after their children's names ("My daughter Snow, 8, 2e, intellectually OE, IQ 146, Lexile 940..."). And I learned more and more about how absolutely typical my very special unique snowflakes are.
Not that all gifted kids are alike, I should be careful to say. Just that mine are good examples of Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A.
One thing that pushed me into being willing to engage with this whole vexed notion of giftedness was when the boys' excellent therapist, who got the Lego Savant over his elevator phobia and had great rapport with the boys, admitted to me in so many words that he was in over his head and didn't know what to do with my kids. I think this was partly a narrowness of focus on his part--he loves the "behavioral" part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and much of what my kids deal with doesn't respond to behavioral interventions. Partly I think it reflected a lack of experience with kids like mine. I loved that he was willing to admit he wasn't sure what the next step was, and willing to try to educate himself, but at that point, we decided to take a break from therapy.
And things have stagnated. Behavioral interventions have helped, but I think my kids really need to get into the "cognitive" part of CBT. They need help understanding what's going on for them, and how they can choose to change their thoughts and behavior, rather than simply have us impose behavioral restrictions on them. We've used an audio program called Turnaround that I highly recommend, but we need more help than that. And I need to know whether what I want from my kids--that understanding, that internal motivation to change--is realistic at this time in their lives.
This is why, on Monday, I have an appointment two hours away from home with a therapist who specializes in gifted kids with anxiety. Just five minutes on the phone with her the other day felt like a deep relaxing breath--she knew what I was going to say almost before I said it. She is very familiar with Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A (a designation I made up, in case you wondered). She has experience with them. And she knew exactly what I meant when I said that I wasn't sure whether what we needed was therapy for the kids, or parenting guidance for us.
She's too far away for us to work with very regularly. But I can imagine her helping us in lots of ways: parenting consultations for me, consulting with our local therapist, meeting with the kids occasionally, pointing us to the most useful resources. I have high hopes for this meeting. I will be keeping my fingers crossed.
Her office is right over by Lake Michigan, so Raider took the day off work and we're making this Family Beach Day as well. A fun and ediftying day, I hope.
(You may be thinking: You talk about Word Boy and the Lego Savant. What about the Tiny Tornado? Do you think he is gifted as well? I do. But in very different ways. His path is going to play out very differently from his older brothers', I predict, and I'm excited to help him follow it.)
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
"You're a writer? What do you write?" "Letters."
Since my daily blog-a-thon in May, my pageviews have increased from 20-30 to about 125-150 per day. More and more of them are people I haven't actually met. I like this. I enjoy having an audience. If you like something I write, tell a friend. Now that I've broken the triple digits, I'm full of crazy ambition. Like, what if I had two hundred devoted readers?
I'm really working on feeling like blogging is "real" writing. It feels more real if there's an editor and your work gets accepted and published. Except that I have more readers at my blog than I had in most of the little magazines I used to sometimes publish in back in the day!
Also, blogging is really my genre. I do essays, sure. Almost never fiction. But from my first opportunity, I've had a knack for writing letters--I used to write very long, very detailed, very funny letters to friends in college. And I did my first "group letters" --which later evolved into a small e-mail list -- after I had left my Ph.D. program at Rutgers. I started writing long letters, making multiple copies, adding a cover, and sending them off to my group of friends from New Jersey. One of my friends, who was then living in Florida, told me that she read my letters out loud to her friends at parties. "Has anything come from Su?" they would ask when they saw her. And when it had, they would all get together at her place and kick back with a cold beer while she read to them.
It can be hard--well, it was hard for me--to accept that my special writing talent lies in writing letters. But it does. Even when I spent a month at a writing retreat many years ago, my main output was long group letters to Raider and some other friends. I sent one almost every day. Sometimes two a day. This was before people had e-mail access routinely; it cost me a mint in stamps.
I wrote a lot of other stuff, too. But what I really loved and could not get enough of was writing letters.
Blogging is like that. When you read one of my blog posts, you might be interested to know that they read very much like my letters do. A typical letter might include some funny stories about my kids; some fretful processing about something that's on my mind; a snarky book review (or a non-snarky one); a story or two about people I've met. Pretty much like the blog, except that I don't tend to do all of those things in a single blog post, and I have to be a bit more discreet about storytelling.
I thought I was going to go on to talk about something else, but I think that's it for now. Your takeaway: Feed my overweening ambition! Point interested friends in my direction!
(Edited to add: Apparently this is my twelve-dozenth post! Woo-hoo!)
I'm really working on feeling like blogging is "real" writing. It feels more real if there's an editor and your work gets accepted and published. Except that I have more readers at my blog than I had in most of the little magazines I used to sometimes publish in back in the day!
Also, blogging is really my genre. I do essays, sure. Almost never fiction. But from my first opportunity, I've had a knack for writing letters--I used to write very long, very detailed, very funny letters to friends in college. And I did my first "group letters" --which later evolved into a small e-mail list -- after I had left my Ph.D. program at Rutgers. I started writing long letters, making multiple copies, adding a cover, and sending them off to my group of friends from New Jersey. One of my friends, who was then living in Florida, told me that she read my letters out loud to her friends at parties. "Has anything come from Su?" they would ask when they saw her. And when it had, they would all get together at her place and kick back with a cold beer while she read to them.
It can be hard--well, it was hard for me--to accept that my special writing talent lies in writing letters. But it does. Even when I spent a month at a writing retreat many years ago, my main output was long group letters to Raider and some other friends. I sent one almost every day. Sometimes two a day. This was before people had e-mail access routinely; it cost me a mint in stamps.
I wrote a lot of other stuff, too. But what I really loved and could not get enough of was writing letters.
Blogging is like that. When you read one of my blog posts, you might be interested to know that they read very much like my letters do. A typical letter might include some funny stories about my kids; some fretful processing about something that's on my mind; a snarky book review (or a non-snarky one); a story or two about people I've met. Pretty much like the blog, except that I don't tend to do all of those things in a single blog post, and I have to be a bit more discreet about storytelling.
I thought I was going to go on to talk about something else, but I think that's it for now. Your takeaway: Feed my overweening ambition! Point interested friends in my direction!
(Edited to add: Apparently this is my twelve-dozenth post! Woo-hoo!)
Monday, July 16, 2012
For Your Edification: What is a Good-Faith Question?
So, one of the things on my list for this week is to make an appointment to talk to the Tiny Tornado's teacher and principal about TT's gender. I have a very clear agenda for this meeting: making sure they understand that TT is to be treated as a boy, and that under no circumstances are they to disclose his status to other parents or children. I intend to be friendly, but this stuff isn't negotiable. He is starting school as a boy; that's his choice and we're going to honor it.
A couple of people have asked me "what if" questions about this plan. What if he decides, a couple of years down the road, that he isn't a boy? Are we setting him up for trouble if we let him identify as a boy now?
I have a few thoughts about that. One is that, as an anxious person, I have a lot of experience with "what if" thinking, and it's rarely productive.
Also, I don't see that we have much of an option other than to have him start school as a boy. He's very clear about his boyness right now; he's not going to want anyone calling him a girl or using female pronouns. And, as one friend pointed out, his gender presentation is so strongly coded "male" that it could only be harder for people to be trying to think of him as a girl. I had to submit his birth certificate to enroll him, and it says he's female. I think that a box checked on a piece of paper filed away in a drawer in the office is going to fade into insignificance next to the reality of the Tiny Tornado standing right in front of you.
At the same time that I try not to engage in "what if" thinking, I have done enough of it to know we have lots of options if the Tiny Tornado chooses to identify as a girl somewhere down the road. For one thing, being a homeschooling family gives us a lot of power--we're perfectly prepared to homeschool him if school doesn't work out in one way or another. In fact, he wants to homeschool, and right now our best guess is that we will homeschool him after this school year. To be honest, our primary motivation for sending him to Begindergarten (a Young Fives program for kids with summer and fall birthdays who are not ready for Kindergarten) is the free respite care. So "how will he cope in school if X happens?" is not something we worry too much about. I have lots of other things to worry about, and don't have a lot of energy to spare for that particulr one just now.
The summer gathering was very interesting with the Tiny Torndao. It was the first time I've been somewhere with him where lots of people just assumed he was a boy, and there was no tension at all between that and who he "really" is. It felt peaceful.
Of course, lots of people there did know him before, and they seemed to adjust very well. Some of his teachers in Junior Gathering had him last year, and they just cheerfully adapted to the new pronoun. It really is easy when you're face-to-face with him. A couple of years ago, we had an intergenrational retreat at our Quaker meeing, and one of the facilitators kept calling Tiny Tornado "he" even after being corrected several times. Because the evidence of your own eyes is very strong.
But the Gathering was also the first place I've fielded people's questions and comments. I've talked about TT's gender journey on my blog and on Facebook, and it seems that, if some of my readers have doubts or concerns about how we're handling it, they're keeping it to themselves. I've gotten only a mix of silence and positive comments about my writing on the subject. But several people at the Gathering--some of whom had been following his story on-line, and some of whom had just learned about it there--took the opportunity to talk to me about it.
Sometimes this went very well. Sometimes it went...less well.
One friend, who just learned about the new pronouns at the Gathering, expressed her interest in what has to be just about the perfect way: "You must have had quite the journey with the Tiny Tornado this past year. I'd like to hear more about that sometime, if you're comfortable talking about it."
Another friend started by expressing a concern about us making an apparently irrevocable decision based on the wishes of a 4-year-old. That's a little less pleasant, but we ended up having a good talk. She was interested to hear me talk about why we don't see this as irrevocable at all ("Irrevocable? All he's done is wear boys' underwear and ask us to call him He. That can be reversed with a trip to Meijer and the letter S."), and then I talked to her about how we are trying to be very in the moment about stuff--we don't imagine that we know the outcome of this.
At TransHealth Raider and I had opportunities to hear from doctors and psychologists who specialize in treating gender nonconforming children. And, statistically, there is a really good chance that the Tiny Tornado will identify as female when he gets older--maybe a little more than 50%, based on their experience with other kids. We're not holding him to anything. We're just doing what seems best to us right now. And right now, it's clear that he is happiest living as a boy.
So, we talked about that some, and it went really well. This friend had been concerned that we were making a terrible mistake, and I think by the end of our conversation she at least felt that, if we were making a mistake, it was at least a thoughtful mistake and not a reckless one.
Other folks... *sigh*
I've had a few things in my life that people were persistently curious about: our two oldest being conceived with donor sperm; Tiny Tornado's adoption; fat acceptance; homeschooling. Things that people are naturally curious about. I have often wished that people would understand that even perfectly natural curiosity ought to be suppressed sometimes; just being curious doesn't entitle you to information about someone else.
But, since I am generally happy to share my experiences, it's not so much that I wish people would suppress their curiosity as that I wish they would learn two things:
1. To recognize when they don't know much about something, and withhold judgement until they do.
2. To ask actual questions.
One thing you find when you homeschool is that most people don't know much about it, but have very strong opinions anyway, and they want to share these opinions with you. I wish we could all learn to recognize our ignorance, and remedy it before making judgements. But I'm pretty sure that's a pipe dream.
The other thing is that I encountered more than one person who said, "I have a question about the Tiny Tornado," and then went on to talk about their own feelings and "concerns." I am proud of myself that I actually did a good job of getting out of these conversations--I'm not a very direct person but I actually said to two different people, in so many words, "I'm not willing to have this conversation with you," when it became clear that "Can I ask you a question?" was actually code for "May I share my ignorance and judgement with you?"
I always say, "I will answer any good-faith questions about this," whenever any of these kinds of topics come up. "I don't think you're thought about the implications of this down the line," is not a good-faith question. "Kids as young as four don't even understand gender, so I'm concerned that you're making a mistake letting the Tiny Tornado choose" is also not a good-faith question. Nor is, "Don't you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" No, I don't. Clearly you do. But you probably wouldn't think that if you lived in our house.
So, what does a good-faith question look like?
Well, it's not a statement, for one thing. "I'm concerned that..." is almost never actually a good-faith question. It's usually actually a lecture or commentary. If your "question" doesn't end with a question mark, it's not a good-faith question.
A good-faith question should actually ask for information. "Don't you think..." for instance, is also almost never a good-faith question. It's an expression of opinion disguised as a question. It's putting words in my mouth. It's telling me what I should think. It's asking for my agreement with your opinion.
How do you know if you're asking a good-faith question?
Well, one way to think about it is to go back to high school journalism class and the classics: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How. If you can re-phrase what you want to say so that it begins with one of these words, it's harder to turn it into a statement of your own opinion (not impossible, I'm sure. But harder). Think about how different these sound from the examples I gave above:
"How did you decide to use male pronouns for the Tiny Tornado?"
"Where have you gotten information to help you make these decisions?"
"How do you think you'll handle it if he decides, somewhere down the road, that he is a girl?"
"How are you feeling about all this?"
"What kind of support system do you have as you're dealing with this?
You can fix a "don't you think" bad-faith question by dropping two letters and an apostrophe: "Do you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" is a good-faith question, because it implies the possiblity that I'll say, "No, I don't think that, and here's why."
A good-faith question should reflect the questioner's desire to know more. That's why I loved Peggy's, "I'd like to hear more if you're comfortable talking about it." I'm going to be remembering her as a model when I'm dealing with my own curiosity. Her comment could also be rephrased as, "What has this past year been like for you and the Tiny Tornado?"
See how that works?
I try to be patient with people. Their intentions are generally good; they're watching out for the Tiny Tornado. As I said, their curiosity is perfectly natural. And they are offering me an opportunity, however awkwardly, to share what I know. I found at the Gathering that it was easier to be patient with people now that I've figured out how to be blunt; in the past, I've had a tendency to not recognize my own discomfort, to let other people set the parameters for discussion, to share more than I was comfortable sharing when people approached me this way. Knowing that I can say, "I'm not going to have this conversation," or "That's not really a question. Do you have a question I can answer?" really helps.
Maybe I'll make a little card, "What is a good-faith question?" that I can hand to people. I could say, "I'm not going to have this conversation right now, but I'd be happy to have a different conversation with you after you've read this." A little control-freaky, sure. But also an invitation. Because I really am happy to talk to people about just about anything. If I have reason to think they're actually listening.
A couple of people have asked me "what if" questions about this plan. What if he decides, a couple of years down the road, that he isn't a boy? Are we setting him up for trouble if we let him identify as a boy now?
I have a few thoughts about that. One is that, as an anxious person, I have a lot of experience with "what if" thinking, and it's rarely productive.
Also, I don't see that we have much of an option other than to have him start school as a boy. He's very clear about his boyness right now; he's not going to want anyone calling him a girl or using female pronouns. And, as one friend pointed out, his gender presentation is so strongly coded "male" that it could only be harder for people to be trying to think of him as a girl. I had to submit his birth certificate to enroll him, and it says he's female. I think that a box checked on a piece of paper filed away in a drawer in the office is going to fade into insignificance next to the reality of the Tiny Tornado standing right in front of you.
At the same time that I try not to engage in "what if" thinking, I have done enough of it to know we have lots of options if the Tiny Tornado chooses to identify as a girl somewhere down the road. For one thing, being a homeschooling family gives us a lot of power--we're perfectly prepared to homeschool him if school doesn't work out in one way or another. In fact, he wants to homeschool, and right now our best guess is that we will homeschool him after this school year. To be honest, our primary motivation for sending him to Begindergarten (a Young Fives program for kids with summer and fall birthdays who are not ready for Kindergarten) is the free respite care. So "how will he cope in school if X happens?" is not something we worry too much about. I have lots of other things to worry about, and don't have a lot of energy to spare for that particulr one just now.
The summer gathering was very interesting with the Tiny Torndao. It was the first time I've been somewhere with him where lots of people just assumed he was a boy, and there was no tension at all between that and who he "really" is. It felt peaceful.
Of course, lots of people there did know him before, and they seemed to adjust very well. Some of his teachers in Junior Gathering had him last year, and they just cheerfully adapted to the new pronoun. It really is easy when you're face-to-face with him. A couple of years ago, we had an intergenrational retreat at our Quaker meeing, and one of the facilitators kept calling Tiny Tornado "he" even after being corrected several times. Because the evidence of your own eyes is very strong.
But the Gathering was also the first place I've fielded people's questions and comments. I've talked about TT's gender journey on my blog and on Facebook, and it seems that, if some of my readers have doubts or concerns about how we're handling it, they're keeping it to themselves. I've gotten only a mix of silence and positive comments about my writing on the subject. But several people at the Gathering--some of whom had been following his story on-line, and some of whom had just learned about it there--took the opportunity to talk to me about it.
Sometimes this went very well. Sometimes it went...less well.
One friend, who just learned about the new pronouns at the Gathering, expressed her interest in what has to be just about the perfect way: "You must have had quite the journey with the Tiny Tornado this past year. I'd like to hear more about that sometime, if you're comfortable talking about it."
Another friend started by expressing a concern about us making an apparently irrevocable decision based on the wishes of a 4-year-old. That's a little less pleasant, but we ended up having a good talk. She was interested to hear me talk about why we don't see this as irrevocable at all ("Irrevocable? All he's done is wear boys' underwear and ask us to call him He. That can be reversed with a trip to Meijer and the letter S."), and then I talked to her about how we are trying to be very in the moment about stuff--we don't imagine that we know the outcome of this.
At TransHealth Raider and I had opportunities to hear from doctors and psychologists who specialize in treating gender nonconforming children. And, statistically, there is a really good chance that the Tiny Tornado will identify as female when he gets older--maybe a little more than 50%, based on their experience with other kids. We're not holding him to anything. We're just doing what seems best to us right now. And right now, it's clear that he is happiest living as a boy.
So, we talked about that some, and it went really well. This friend had been concerned that we were making a terrible mistake, and I think by the end of our conversation she at least felt that, if we were making a mistake, it was at least a thoughtful mistake and not a reckless one.
Other folks... *sigh*
I've had a few things in my life that people were persistently curious about: our two oldest being conceived with donor sperm; Tiny Tornado's adoption; fat acceptance; homeschooling. Things that people are naturally curious about. I have often wished that people would understand that even perfectly natural curiosity ought to be suppressed sometimes; just being curious doesn't entitle you to information about someone else.
But, since I am generally happy to share my experiences, it's not so much that I wish people would suppress their curiosity as that I wish they would learn two things:
1. To recognize when they don't know much about something, and withhold judgement until they do.
2. To ask actual questions.
One thing you find when you homeschool is that most people don't know much about it, but have very strong opinions anyway, and they want to share these opinions with you. I wish we could all learn to recognize our ignorance, and remedy it before making judgements. But I'm pretty sure that's a pipe dream.
The other thing is that I encountered more than one person who said, "I have a question about the Tiny Tornado," and then went on to talk about their own feelings and "concerns." I am proud of myself that I actually did a good job of getting out of these conversations--I'm not a very direct person but I actually said to two different people, in so many words, "I'm not willing to have this conversation with you," when it became clear that "Can I ask you a question?" was actually code for "May I share my ignorance and judgement with you?"
I always say, "I will answer any good-faith questions about this," whenever any of these kinds of topics come up. "I don't think you're thought about the implications of this down the line," is not a good-faith question. "Kids as young as four don't even understand gender, so I'm concerned that you're making a mistake letting the Tiny Tornado choose" is also not a good-faith question. Nor is, "Don't you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" No, I don't. Clearly you do. But you probably wouldn't think that if you lived in our house.
So, what does a good-faith question look like?
Well, it's not a statement, for one thing. "I'm concerned that..." is almost never actually a good-faith question. It's usually actually a lecture or commentary. If your "question" doesn't end with a question mark, it's not a good-faith question.
A good-faith question should actually ask for information. "Don't you think..." for instance, is also almost never a good-faith question. It's an expression of opinion disguised as a question. It's putting words in my mouth. It's telling me what I should think. It's asking for my agreement with your opinion.
How do you know if you're asking a good-faith question?
Well, one way to think about it is to go back to high school journalism class and the classics: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How. If you can re-phrase what you want to say so that it begins with one of these words, it's harder to turn it into a statement of your own opinion (not impossible, I'm sure. But harder). Think about how different these sound from the examples I gave above:
"How did you decide to use male pronouns for the Tiny Tornado?"
"Where have you gotten information to help you make these decisions?"
"How do you think you'll handle it if he decides, somewhere down the road, that he is a girl?"
"How are you feeling about all this?"
"What kind of support system do you have as you're dealing with this?
You can fix a "don't you think" bad-faith question by dropping two letters and an apostrophe: "Do you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" is a good-faith question, because it implies the possiblity that I'll say, "No, I don't think that, and here's why."
A good-faith question should reflect the questioner's desire to know more. That's why I loved Peggy's, "I'd like to hear more if you're comfortable talking about it." I'm going to be remembering her as a model when I'm dealing with my own curiosity. Her comment could also be rephrased as, "What has this past year been like for you and the Tiny Tornado?"
See how that works?
I try to be patient with people. Their intentions are generally good; they're watching out for the Tiny Tornado. As I said, their curiosity is perfectly natural. And they are offering me an opportunity, however awkwardly, to share what I know. I found at the Gathering that it was easier to be patient with people now that I've figured out how to be blunt; in the past, I've had a tendency to not recognize my own discomfort, to let other people set the parameters for discussion, to share more than I was comfortable sharing when people approached me this way. Knowing that I can say, "I'm not going to have this conversation," or "That's not really a question. Do you have a question I can answer?" really helps.
Maybe I'll make a little card, "What is a good-faith question?" that I can hand to people. I could say, "I'm not going to have this conversation right now, but I'd be happy to have a different conversation with you after you've read this." A little control-freaky, sure. But also an invitation. Because I really am happy to talk to people about just about anything. If I have reason to think they're actually listening.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
That Time of Year Has Rolled Around Again
The Tiny Tornado's birthday is coming up, and that means it's time for me to write the annual letter to his birthmother. This is often a challenge for me; sometimes old feelings about the lies and the drama and the custody fight and the drugs come up. Some years, I feel charitable, generous, and loving; some years, I feel put-upon, like having this ethical obligation when K. has no reciprocal obligation is just not fair.
This year, I just don't know how to write an honest letter. Since I wrote to her last year (a very nice letter in which I included an SASE in case she wanted to write to the Tiny Tornado), the Tiny Tornado has chosen to live as a boy. I am not comfortable telling K. about this, for a variety of reasons. One is that I have no reason to believe she has any goodwill towards us, and I don't choose to tell her anything that she might, in some way, use against us. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense--she couldn't possibly gain custody, for instance. But she could conceivably cause us some kind of trouble if she chose to.
On the other hand, I'm not comfortable writing a letter with female pronouns, either. And when I have tried to write mini-drafts in my head without using pronouns at all, it gets a little weird.
I have been thinking some about the agreement I made. We were asked to commit to writing a letter every year for 18 years, but I wasn't willing to make that commitment. I had heard from other adoptive parents that their children sometimes came to feel that letters to birthparents who were not otherwise in touch--not writing back, for instance--were an invasion of privacy. So I said, "I will commit to writing an annual letter until and unless the baby decides he doesn't want us to anymore."
This isn't exactly that circumstance, though I suspect that if I asked the Tiny Tornado, he would not want me to write to K. He doesn't like to talk about her, and last year when I asked him to help me think about what to tell her and what pictures to include, he vehemently declined to participate.
There's no legal obligation to write her. But I'm thinking about what my ethical obligation is, and how to weigh that against what seems best for my family.
I won't simply not write; but I might write a letter saying that the Tiny Tornado is doing well but I can't go into details this year. And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that there is a place in the Tiny Tornado's baby book for her picture, and that the Tiny Tornado would probably love to have one, or to hear from her. I'll enclose an SASE again. Maybe one of these years she'll use it.
And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that we are praying for her, and for the Tiny Tornado's half-siblings. Because we are. I do hope to hear from K. sometime. I hope to hear that she is doing well.
This year, I just don't know how to write an honest letter. Since I wrote to her last year (a very nice letter in which I included an SASE in case she wanted to write to the Tiny Tornado), the Tiny Tornado has chosen to live as a boy. I am not comfortable telling K. about this, for a variety of reasons. One is that I have no reason to believe she has any goodwill towards us, and I don't choose to tell her anything that she might, in some way, use against us. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense--she couldn't possibly gain custody, for instance. But she could conceivably cause us some kind of trouble if she chose to.
On the other hand, I'm not comfortable writing a letter with female pronouns, either. And when I have tried to write mini-drafts in my head without using pronouns at all, it gets a little weird.
I have been thinking some about the agreement I made. We were asked to commit to writing a letter every year for 18 years, but I wasn't willing to make that commitment. I had heard from other adoptive parents that their children sometimes came to feel that letters to birthparents who were not otherwise in touch--not writing back, for instance--were an invasion of privacy. So I said, "I will commit to writing an annual letter until and unless the baby decides he doesn't want us to anymore."
This isn't exactly that circumstance, though I suspect that if I asked the Tiny Tornado, he would not want me to write to K. He doesn't like to talk about her, and last year when I asked him to help me think about what to tell her and what pictures to include, he vehemently declined to participate.
There's no legal obligation to write her. But I'm thinking about what my ethical obligation is, and how to weigh that against what seems best for my family.
I won't simply not write; but I might write a letter saying that the Tiny Tornado is doing well but I can't go into details this year. And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that there is a place in the Tiny Tornado's baby book for her picture, and that the Tiny Tornado would probably love to have one, or to hear from her. I'll enclose an SASE again. Maybe one of these years she'll use it.
And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that we are praying for her, and for the Tiny Tornado's half-siblings. Because we are. I do hope to hear from K. sometime. I hope to hear that she is doing well.
Friday, July 13, 2012
The Things You Find Out About Yourself
I had a couple of surprises at last week's FGC Gathering of Friends. One was that one of the highlights of my week was being invited to meet with a group of polyamorous and kinky Friends. A small group of us met early in the week, and enjoyed it so much that we met again a few days later. That second meeting was one of the deepest, most worshipful parts of my week.
I was surprised by how much meeting with these folks meant to me, because I hadn't thought of polyamory as a central part of who I am. If anything, I see myself as something of a poser--Raider and I claim to be in an open relationship, but it's only been actively opened up a couple of times, and that before we had kids.
Indeed, we've spent most of our 19 years together too busy with other things to have relationships on the side. For the first few years, we were so busy enjoying each other we actually thought we were monogamous. Then, one day in the car, we engaged in one of those "what if" conversations--what if you were at a conference and it was someone you'd never see again? what if it was an ongoing relationship with someone out of town? what if it was someone in town and you wanted to date them in a clearly secondary-to-our-relationship way? what if it was someone in town and you got very serious with them?
And we discovered that none of these scenarios was a deal-breaker for either of us. "Huh," we said. "I guess we're not monogamous. Who knew?"
It was another four or five years before either of us acted on it, though. We got busy with figuring out how to stay in a relationship past the first couple of years, and then in dealing with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder I'd had since childhood, and with one thing and another, there was never a good time. For one thing, we were too darn busy to have time to date. For another, it's never a good idea to start a second relationship when your first one is vulnerable. It's too easy to use the new lover as an excuse to opt out of the work you need to do with the old one.
I'm sure some people do it and make it work. It's not a risk I'm willing to take.
And then, after awhile, all the drama and hard work was behind us. We were stable, settled, happy. And over several months in the summer of 2000, we both had some outside adventures, and it was fine. It was fun, and it was fine.
And then, a few weeks later, I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, and there followed another decade of being just too darn busy. Most parents can attest that nurturing your own relationship during the years you're raising young children is hard enough; I couldn't imagine having the energy or patience for a girlfriend.
In general, for the last decade, I've seen myself settling into life as a very conventional middle-class stay-at-home mom. I felt like I clung to my theoretical polyamory the way I clung to my nose piercing--something that signalled that I wasn't boring and middle American. Or, at least, not just boring and middle American.
I need to digress to say that I don't mean to suggest that heterosexual, monogamously married moms are dull or unworthy. I know many women who are, so far as I know, HMMMs, and they are all awesome. They make mothering into a loving art, they like their husbands, they all have something that isn't their children that they are passionate about, whether that's gardening, art, religion, political and social activism, bread-baking. There's no shame in being one of them, and to the extent that I am one of them, I'm proud to be. This is just a holdover from some anxiety from my youth; it's about me, not about them.
It never occurred to me that I clung to my "theoretical" polyamory because polyarmory is actually part of who I am. That I might not be a poseur trying to be more interesting than I am, but a polyamorous person who just hasn't had the inclination or opportunity to practice much these last two decades.
But I had a lot of time to reflect on the long car ride home, and realized that nearly all of my relationships have been non-monogamous. I've done it well, and I've done it badly. I've done it with women whose care and respect for their lovers were a model to emulate, and I've done it with women whose behavior was a red flag I should have let myself see sooner. I've gotten it so badly wrong that I've hurt someone I care about very much (long since forgiven!), and I've gotten it so right that my girlfriend and I could double-date with her lover and her lover's other lover.
But I've always done it. My first woman lover and I broke up in 1988, and I don't think I have committed to be exclusive with anyone since then (that first few years with Raider, when we mistakenly believed ourselves to be monogamous, are a special case).
Anyway, I wanted to say that until I walked into that room for that meeting last week, I hadn't realized how isolated I have felt among Quakers as a polyamorous person. (And as a person with some unconventional sexual preferences, but I'm not going to talk about that in any detail.) It felt good to be in a circle of folks where I knew I wouldn't be judged, though it actually took us some work to get to that point, because you never know. Unconventional people can be just as prone as anybody else to think that everything on their side of some self-defined line is OK, and anything on the other side is just plain wrong. Nobody wants to face that moment when you make yourself vulnerable only to find out that you were not safe from judgment in that space. But we got there. And it was a good, deep, and worshipful place to be.
I might have another post on this topic in me--thinking about this brought up so many memories: good, bad, funny, sexy. I might write about what, in my experience, works and what doesn't. What are some of the common blunders? What are the red flags you should look for in a new relationship? How do people of good will take care of each other in multiple relationships? I'm no expert, but I spent a few intense years in my 20s learning by trial and error, and I might have a few words to say.
I usually do.
I was surprised by how much meeting with these folks meant to me, because I hadn't thought of polyamory as a central part of who I am. If anything, I see myself as something of a poser--Raider and I claim to be in an open relationship, but it's only been actively opened up a couple of times, and that before we had kids.
Indeed, we've spent most of our 19 years together too busy with other things to have relationships on the side. For the first few years, we were so busy enjoying each other we actually thought we were monogamous. Then, one day in the car, we engaged in one of those "what if" conversations--what if you were at a conference and it was someone you'd never see again? what if it was an ongoing relationship with someone out of town? what if it was someone in town and you wanted to date them in a clearly secondary-to-our-relationship way? what if it was someone in town and you got very serious with them?
And we discovered that none of these scenarios was a deal-breaker for either of us. "Huh," we said. "I guess we're not monogamous. Who knew?"
It was another four or five years before either of us acted on it, though. We got busy with figuring out how to stay in a relationship past the first couple of years, and then in dealing with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder I'd had since childhood, and with one thing and another, there was never a good time. For one thing, we were too darn busy to have time to date. For another, it's never a good idea to start a second relationship when your first one is vulnerable. It's too easy to use the new lover as an excuse to opt out of the work you need to do with the old one.
I'm sure some people do it and make it work. It's not a risk I'm willing to take.
And then, after awhile, all the drama and hard work was behind us. We were stable, settled, happy. And over several months in the summer of 2000, we both had some outside adventures, and it was fine. It was fun, and it was fine.
And then, a few weeks later, I got pregnant with the Lego Savant, and there followed another decade of being just too darn busy. Most parents can attest that nurturing your own relationship during the years you're raising young children is hard enough; I couldn't imagine having the energy or patience for a girlfriend.
In general, for the last decade, I've seen myself settling into life as a very conventional middle-class stay-at-home mom. I felt like I clung to my theoretical polyamory the way I clung to my nose piercing--something that signalled that I wasn't boring and middle American. Or, at least, not just boring and middle American.
I need to digress to say that I don't mean to suggest that heterosexual, monogamously married moms are dull or unworthy. I know many women who are, so far as I know, HMMMs, and they are all awesome. They make mothering into a loving art, they like their husbands, they all have something that isn't their children that they are passionate about, whether that's gardening, art, religion, political and social activism, bread-baking. There's no shame in being one of them, and to the extent that I am one of them, I'm proud to be. This is just a holdover from some anxiety from my youth; it's about me, not about them.
It never occurred to me that I clung to my "theoretical" polyamory because polyarmory is actually part of who I am. That I might not be a poseur trying to be more interesting than I am, but a polyamorous person who just hasn't had the inclination or opportunity to practice much these last two decades.
But I had a lot of time to reflect on the long car ride home, and realized that nearly all of my relationships have been non-monogamous. I've done it well, and I've done it badly. I've done it with women whose care and respect for their lovers were a model to emulate, and I've done it with women whose behavior was a red flag I should have let myself see sooner. I've gotten it so badly wrong that I've hurt someone I care about very much (long since forgiven!), and I've gotten it so right that my girlfriend and I could double-date with her lover and her lover's other lover.
But I've always done it. My first woman lover and I broke up in 1988, and I don't think I have committed to be exclusive with anyone since then (that first few years with Raider, when we mistakenly believed ourselves to be monogamous, are a special case).
Anyway, I wanted to say that until I walked into that room for that meeting last week, I hadn't realized how isolated I have felt among Quakers as a polyamorous person. (And as a person with some unconventional sexual preferences, but I'm not going to talk about that in any detail.) It felt good to be in a circle of folks where I knew I wouldn't be judged, though it actually took us some work to get to that point, because you never know. Unconventional people can be just as prone as anybody else to think that everything on their side of some self-defined line is OK, and anything on the other side is just plain wrong. Nobody wants to face that moment when you make yourself vulnerable only to find out that you were not safe from judgment in that space. But we got there. And it was a good, deep, and worshipful place to be.
I might have another post on this topic in me--thinking about this brought up so many memories: good, bad, funny, sexy. I might write about what, in my experience, works and what doesn't. What are some of the common blunders? What are the red flags you should look for in a new relationship? How do people of good will take care of each other in multiple relationships? I'm no expert, but I spent a few intense years in my 20s learning by trial and error, and I might have a few words to say.
I usually do.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Story I Didn't Tell Shani On the Golf Cart
Yesterday, I said that I had three additional blog posts queued up in my brain. I was wrong. All day yesterday, things would come back to me and I would jot them in the "blog ideas" section of my notebook. There aren't three of them. There are ten.
I'd better get to it, then.
We'll start with a relatively light-hearted one, because I have much to do today and don't want to have to think too hard.
The University of Rhode Island campus doesn't have many hills. It pretty much has one. One big hill that the whole place is built on. I found the campus disorienting in general, but as the week wore on, "uphill" and "downhill" became my most useful means of visualizing where things were.
The campus wasn't large, but because of the hill, I ended up using the golf carts quite a bit. Early in the week, I walked everywhere, but after a couple of days I found that my plantar fasciitis was acting up in a very painful way, so I started rationing my walking.
Man, that was two dull paragraphs. I'll try to spice things up.
Anyway, one afternoon my sweet friend Shani and I were taking a golf cart somewhere together--business meeting, maybe? I can't remember. And we were chatting. Being on the golf cart reminded me of a story about a previous golf cart ride I'd taken, and I was about to start telling it when it suddenly occurred to me that our driver might have been the driver of that golf cart, too. Looking at him, it began to seem quite likely, in fact.
Had I told the story then, it would have been a delicious but excruciating irony. As you will understand when you have heard it.
Four years ago, I had injured my knee quite badly and couldn't walk any distance. Somehow, as the gathering grew near, I was able to connect with someone who lent me a scooter for the week. I loved my scooter so much. I could zip around anywhere, I didn't have to wait for golf carts, and with some judicious squeezing (and Baby Tornado in a sling), all three of the kids could ride it with me, which they thought was fun.
I did a lot of FLGBTQC childcare that week. The campus had this wonderful quad with criss-crossing paths that the kids loved to ride their bikes and scooters (the push-with-your-foot kind) around. They were all so enamored of my power scooter that, when I was doing childcare, I also let them drive it around the quad. This was a very popular pastime.
Now, I know that there is a school of thought that mobility tools and accessibility aids are not toys. I get those arguments--they're tools, not playthings. But I also think that they belong to the person who owns them. I've helped my kids understand that it's not OK to touch someone's chair or crutches without permission, for instance. People with disabilities often talk about having their bodily autonomy violated by people who touch them without permission. This is also a thing that happens to children all the time. And so we've worked on making sure that our family knows that curiosity is a fine thing, questions are usually a fine thing, but respect for other people's bodies--and the accessibility aids that they use--is foundational.
I've also noticed that people often give permission when asked--the Tiny Tornado's preschool teacher, for instance, showed the class the lift in her van, and let them try out her daughter's wheelchair, because they were very curious about it. This kind of response to curiosity is healthy, I think. It helps create connections instead of leaving people with disabilities "over there" on the other side of an invisible line.
So, anyway.
Four years ago, I crossed over from temporarily able-bodied to temporarily disabled, and I had a power scooter. It was a wonderful tool for me during that gathering, when I was, as usual, there alone with my three kids and also couldn't walk much. But we also played with it.
Now, this playing was accompanied by conversations with every single kid about respecting individuals' choices about their gear. Yes, I'll let you drive my scooter, but that doesn't mean anybody else with a scooter will let you. They may feel that it's inappropriate, and they get to choose. And, by the way, let me remind you that you should never touch anyone's mobility aids without permission--even if they're not using it right then. (All the kids: "Yeah, we get it already." *eyeroll*)
That was a lot of caveats. Perhaps too much Big Dull Buildup. I just wanted folks to know where I was coming from when I let the kids drive around the quad.
One day, though, I took a golf cart. I don't remember why. Maybe the kids had run down the battery and my scooter was charging. Who knows? But I had this conversation with the driver, which started out awkward and only got worse:
As we drove along, we kept passing people I knew, and I would exchange greetings with them. So I said to the driver, "Do you ever feel like you know everybody here?"
Driver: No.
Me: Oh. Well, I've been coming for a long time, 12 or 13 years.
Driver: I've been at every gathering since 1984.
Me: Oh. Well, I meet a lot of people through my kids.
Driver: My four adult children have been at the gathering every year of their lives.
Me: Oh.
*awkward pause*
At this point, we pass a woman using a power scooter.
Driver: That woman drives me crazy. She has no respect at all. She drives around on her scooter like it's a motorcycle, all these kids hanging off her, and she lets kids drive it around. She has no idea that it's completely inappropriate to do that. It disgusts me.
Me: Actually, that's me you're talking about.
*even more awkward silence until we get to my destination*
I was very amused by this interaction. I know the point of view he ascribes to; I just don't agree with it entirely. "People like that take all the fun out of being disabled," I fumed to David. (Yes, I was joking. Just in case you can't tell. Sometimes people can't.)
I'd never before had someone complain about me, to my face, without realzing it was me they were complaining about. It was a fascinating thing to have happen.
I was also amused by the irony of being lectured on appropriate behavior with regard to the disabled by a person who couldn't tell me and a Black woman with dreadlocks apart. I mean, really: Scooter Woman #2 and I resembled each other not at all. Anyone could tell us apart with the most superficial of glances. There is no excuse for mistaking us for each other except a failure to look past the machine.
So, I was on the golf cart with Shani, and this story came to mind, and then I looked at the driver and realized that he might very well be the same man. In fact, I'm reasonbly sure he was. So I did not tell the story, though it would have been a satisfying conclusion to tell a story about a person not realizing he was talking about me while not realizing I was talking about him.
This man was also, later in the week, the first golf cart driver to question my need for a cart. I have other friends who've had this happen to them, some of them routinely, because they have an invisible disability. But it had never happened to me until this week.
This gentleman was parked outside the dining hall, and the kids and I walked up and asked if he was free to take us somewhere. The kids were excited about riding the golf cart, and he said to me, "The golf carts are not for riding just for fun. I'm not going to take you just because you want to ride and then not be here when someone really needs it."
I said, "It is fun to ride the golf carts. I also need it. But we will wait for another driver."
I was sorry right then that I hadn't taken the time to get a priority rider card--I hadn't done it early in the week because I didn't expect to use the carts, and then I was just too lazy even though I walked past Golf Cart Central every morning on my way to my job at the Info Desk. But I'd have been glad to be able to flash it at him just then.
I hope this man isn't as joyless in general as he has seemed in our interactions. He reminds me of a roommate of mine in grad school who was very involved in several political causes, and she would come home from meetings frothing with anger because people had been having fun. "As if they're at a social event!" She wanted her political activism to be serious, and couldn't see that, for many people, such work is both serious and a social outlet. She disapporoved of chatting and laughter while planning direct action.
If I had a power scooter again--even permanently--I would still let children drive it around. Because I am pro-fun, I am indulgent with children, and I do not believe that my decision to let kids drive my scooter disrespects anyone else, or the decisions they make about their own bodies and their own tools. And I trust children to understand that just because I let them do this doesn't mean they should assume that anyone else will.
That's my choice. I respect that other people make different choices. And I hope that this man has, somewhere in his life, an outlet for frivolity and fun.
I'd better get to it, then.
We'll start with a relatively light-hearted one, because I have much to do today and don't want to have to think too hard.
The University of Rhode Island campus doesn't have many hills. It pretty much has one. One big hill that the whole place is built on. I found the campus disorienting in general, but as the week wore on, "uphill" and "downhill" became my most useful means of visualizing where things were.
The campus wasn't large, but because of the hill, I ended up using the golf carts quite a bit. Early in the week, I walked everywhere, but after a couple of days I found that my plantar fasciitis was acting up in a very painful way, so I started rationing my walking.
Man, that was two dull paragraphs. I'll try to spice things up.
Anyway, one afternoon my sweet friend Shani and I were taking a golf cart somewhere together--business meeting, maybe? I can't remember. And we were chatting. Being on the golf cart reminded me of a story about a previous golf cart ride I'd taken, and I was about to start telling it when it suddenly occurred to me that our driver might have been the driver of that golf cart, too. Looking at him, it began to seem quite likely, in fact.
Had I told the story then, it would have been a delicious but excruciating irony. As you will understand when you have heard it.
Four years ago, I had injured my knee quite badly and couldn't walk any distance. Somehow, as the gathering grew near, I was able to connect with someone who lent me a scooter for the week. I loved my scooter so much. I could zip around anywhere, I didn't have to wait for golf carts, and with some judicious squeezing (and Baby Tornado in a sling), all three of the kids could ride it with me, which they thought was fun.
I did a lot of FLGBTQC childcare that week. The campus had this wonderful quad with criss-crossing paths that the kids loved to ride their bikes and scooters (the push-with-your-foot kind) around. They were all so enamored of my power scooter that, when I was doing childcare, I also let them drive it around the quad. This was a very popular pastime.
Now, I know that there is a school of thought that mobility tools and accessibility aids are not toys. I get those arguments--they're tools, not playthings. But I also think that they belong to the person who owns them. I've helped my kids understand that it's not OK to touch someone's chair or crutches without permission, for instance. People with disabilities often talk about having their bodily autonomy violated by people who touch them without permission. This is also a thing that happens to children all the time. And so we've worked on making sure that our family knows that curiosity is a fine thing, questions are usually a fine thing, but respect for other people's bodies--and the accessibility aids that they use--is foundational.
I've also noticed that people often give permission when asked--the Tiny Tornado's preschool teacher, for instance, showed the class the lift in her van, and let them try out her daughter's wheelchair, because they were very curious about it. This kind of response to curiosity is healthy, I think. It helps create connections instead of leaving people with disabilities "over there" on the other side of an invisible line.
So, anyway.
Four years ago, I crossed over from temporarily able-bodied to temporarily disabled, and I had a power scooter. It was a wonderful tool for me during that gathering, when I was, as usual, there alone with my three kids and also couldn't walk much. But we also played with it.
Now, this playing was accompanied by conversations with every single kid about respecting individuals' choices about their gear. Yes, I'll let you drive my scooter, but that doesn't mean anybody else with a scooter will let you. They may feel that it's inappropriate, and they get to choose. And, by the way, let me remind you that you should never touch anyone's mobility aids without permission--even if they're not using it right then. (All the kids: "Yeah, we get it already." *eyeroll*)
That was a lot of caveats. Perhaps too much Big Dull Buildup. I just wanted folks to know where I was coming from when I let the kids drive around the quad.
One day, though, I took a golf cart. I don't remember why. Maybe the kids had run down the battery and my scooter was charging. Who knows? But I had this conversation with the driver, which started out awkward and only got worse:
As we drove along, we kept passing people I knew, and I would exchange greetings with them. So I said to the driver, "Do you ever feel like you know everybody here?"
Driver: No.
Me: Oh. Well, I've been coming for a long time, 12 or 13 years.
Driver: I've been at every gathering since 1984.
Me: Oh. Well, I meet a lot of people through my kids.
Driver: My four adult children have been at the gathering every year of their lives.
Me: Oh.
*awkward pause*
At this point, we pass a woman using a power scooter.
Driver: That woman drives me crazy. She has no respect at all. She drives around on her scooter like it's a motorcycle, all these kids hanging off her, and she lets kids drive it around. She has no idea that it's completely inappropriate to do that. It disgusts me.
Me: Actually, that's me you're talking about.
*even more awkward silence until we get to my destination*
I was very amused by this interaction. I know the point of view he ascribes to; I just don't agree with it entirely. "People like that take all the fun out of being disabled," I fumed to David. (Yes, I was joking. Just in case you can't tell. Sometimes people can't.)
I'd never before had someone complain about me, to my face, without realzing it was me they were complaining about. It was a fascinating thing to have happen.
I was also amused by the irony of being lectured on appropriate behavior with regard to the disabled by a person who couldn't tell me and a Black woman with dreadlocks apart. I mean, really: Scooter Woman #2 and I resembled each other not at all. Anyone could tell us apart with the most superficial of glances. There is no excuse for mistaking us for each other except a failure to look past the machine.
So, I was on the golf cart with Shani, and this story came to mind, and then I looked at the driver and realized that he might very well be the same man. In fact, I'm reasonbly sure he was. So I did not tell the story, though it would have been a satisfying conclusion to tell a story about a person not realizing he was talking about me while not realizing I was talking about him.
This man was also, later in the week, the first golf cart driver to question my need for a cart. I have other friends who've had this happen to them, some of them routinely, because they have an invisible disability. But it had never happened to me until this week.
This gentleman was parked outside the dining hall, and the kids and I walked up and asked if he was free to take us somewhere. The kids were excited about riding the golf cart, and he said to me, "The golf carts are not for riding just for fun. I'm not going to take you just because you want to ride and then not be here when someone really needs it."
I said, "It is fun to ride the golf carts. I also need it. But we will wait for another driver."
I was sorry right then that I hadn't taken the time to get a priority rider card--I hadn't done it early in the week because I didn't expect to use the carts, and then I was just too lazy even though I walked past Golf Cart Central every morning on my way to my job at the Info Desk. But I'd have been glad to be able to flash it at him just then.
I hope this man isn't as joyless in general as he has seemed in our interactions. He reminds me of a roommate of mine in grad school who was very involved in several political causes, and she would come home from meetings frothing with anger because people had been having fun. "As if they're at a social event!" She wanted her political activism to be serious, and couldn't see that, for many people, such work is both serious and a social outlet. She disapporoved of chatting and laughter while planning direct action.
If I had a power scooter again--even permanently--I would still let children drive it around. Because I am pro-fun, I am indulgent with children, and I do not believe that my decision to let kids drive my scooter disrespects anyone else, or the decisions they make about their own bodies and their own tools. And I trust children to understand that just because I let them do this doesn't mean they should assume that anyone else will.
That's my choice. I respect that other people make different choices. And I hope that this man has, somewhere in his life, an outlet for frivolity and fun.