What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

Well...that'll be an interesting day.

I spent the last couple of days re-watching the entire series of Firefly, Joss Whedon's love-it-or-hate-it story of outlaws eking out a living on the edges of a galactic civilization. Well, not quite the entire thing--I finally had to go to bed last night about 10 minutes into Objects in Space, the final (on the DVD, anyway) episode. It's a creepy one, so I'll wait until after the kids are asleep tonight to finish watching it.

All over the internet, people have said everything that needs to be said about Firefly, so I won't try any deep analysis. Just a few observations:

I still love it.

I was really struck on this watching by how charming I find Morena Baccarin (Inara) when she smiles.

I will go to my grave thinking Inara and Chiana would make great names for twin girls. (Hey, it's better than my other first choice: Scylla and Charybdis.) 80% of the people you met would just say, "Oh, that's pretty"; and the remaining 20% would be divided between people who would do a slow double-take and then high five you; and those who would think "You named your daughters after intergalactic space whores? You're going to the special hell."

Simon Tam's character arc really stood out for me on this watching. He goes from sheltered, arrogant, and kind of hapless to strong and a little bit ruthless (the medical-supply heist he comes up with on Ariel, for instance), yet at the same time more relaxed and easy-going; it's only in the last couple of episodes that we get to see him wearing a pullover sweater and smiling with Kaylee. And his scene with a paralyzed Jayne, after he finds out Jayne called the feds on Ariel to try to get the reward, is just masterful. Boy-to-man all the way for our Simon.

I will always love Badger, and his very fine hat.

Eric and Carl watched "Jaynestown" with me. It's like a test of developmental stages; Eric and I were rolling on the floor laughing, while poor Carl kept saying, "Why is that funny? Why is that funny?"

One of the problems I always had with Star Trek: Voyager was how quickly the Maquis crew integrated with the Federation crew; the show didn't do a good job of maintaining the tensions there. Firefly comes off pretty well by comparison, especially in maintaining the tension Jayne brings to the crew. But when you think about all the various tensions swirling among the nine people on Serenity, it goes a lot deeper than "Jayne would cut your throat for a dollar."

I love that Kaylee complains in the very first episode that they need a spare compression coil, and Mal says they can't afford it and will have to make do. "That coil busts, we're drifting," she tells him. Seven episodes later, it busts, they're drifting, and this is what sets the action of "Out of Gas" going.

Other extended foreshadowing, from the end of the pilot: Mal: How come you didn't turn on me, Jayne? Jayne: Money wasn't good enough. Mal: What happens when it is? Jayne: Well... that'll be an interesting day. When they get to Ariel, eight episodes later, it is indeed an interesting day.

The developing friendship between Jayne and Book is very well done in the incidental bits before and after more important business.

"River, you don't fix the Bible." [River: "It's broken! It doesn't make sense."] It's not about... making sense. It's about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you."

In "Trash," when Mal calls Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda "YoSaffBridge," a mashup of the three names he's known her by, it was captioned as "speaking Chinese." Heh.

When Wash and Mal are taken by Niska, what follows is the most hilarious extended-torture scene in the history of filmed entertainment. But it's really just a riff on what got to be a pretty tired Buffy meme, the Scoobies combining doing something really mundane (arguing about their relationships, studying for the SAT) with something heroic and/or supernatural (fighting demons, sitting around the cemetery waiting for a newly-spawned vampire to emerge from the grave so Buffy can stake it). Amazing they could dust it off and make it work again.

Like every other fan, I want more Firefly. And yet I think the show did just about everything it needed to in these 14 episodes; Inara and Mal were even dangerously close to getting together (likewise Simon and Kaylee), and we all know how the life goes out of a show once the sexual tension between the bickering leads is resolved. Jayne was humanizing, too. Maybe it's better to have 14 strong episodes and a bit of longing than to have to suffer through a sub-par second season. This is how I try to comfort myself.

You should all be glad I don't have a smartphone or my Facebook page all afternoon and evening yesterday would have been an endless stream of Firefly quotes.

Smallness of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, that's mean.

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

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

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

*****************

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

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

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

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

The Surprisingly Vexed Issue of Birth Certificates

On an unschooling list I'm on, somehow the issue of adoption came up, and the issuing of revised birth certificates that name the adoptive parents, rather than the biological parents. We don't tolerate a lot of off-topic chatter on that list, but I found the brief conversation thought-provoking, so I thought I'd bring my thoughts here.

One person said that she thought the creation of new birth certificates for adopted children was "the most horrible abuse of public records I can imagine."

I said that I could think of worst abuses (people use public records to stalk ex-girlfriends, for instance, or to commit identify theft, both of which seem worse to me). But I also said:

I have mixed feelings about re-issued birth certificates, but it's really standard now. We were not presented with any option to do anything but have Yehva issued a new birth cert with our names as her parents as part of the process. It makes many things easier--it's one document I have to present for proof of ID and relationship, rather than 2 (birth certificate and stack of papers from the court finalizing the adoption). It does seem strange to me, though. I would have been very happy with a birth certificate that reflected both birth and adoptive parents, and then, too, that would be a record that an adult adoptee, or her descendants, could use to trace both adoptive and biological families. It would be both more honest and more complete.

I was thinking more this morning as I was on a long drive, and reflecting that a non-revised birth certificate would reflect a different name for Yehva as well as her birthparents' names. That wouldn't be the end of the world at all; we have a single document from the court that uses her old name but that both finalizes our adoption and legally changes her name. So, for the purposes I can think of that we might need a birth certificate--to prove identity, prove her age for school enrollment, or prove our parental relationship to her--it would be easy enough to show both documents, and would only take any reasonably intelligent bureaucrat an extra minute or two to put it all together.

On the other hand, I was thinking of other instances where birth certificates don't reflect biological parentage, or have been revised in such a way that they show a later truth rather than the truth at the moment of birth.

One instance involves certain reproductive technologies. David, for instance, is not the boys' biological father. An anonymous sperm donor is. Under the law a married man is presumed to be the parent of his wife's children, so we didn't have to take any extra steps to have him named the boys' parent, and he appears on their birth certificates as their father. (And some studies show that a surprising percentage of married men are not the biological parents of their children, so while our path was different, David is by no means alone.)

This is different from adoption because there was never a thought in anybody's mind that anybody but David was, and would be, their father. Some nice young grad student in Detroit donated sperm to a place with the warm and fuzzy name of International Cryogenics, presumably because he needed cash. They assigned him a number and put him in a catalog, and when we were sperm-shopping, we picked his. We didn't want to know him, and he made it clear in his intake forms that he didn't want to know us, or any children who might be conceived with his sperm.

I know that some kids conceived with donor sperm are curious about their donors, and even look for them. When there are proposals for laws that would un-seal these records when kids turn 18, I understand that the intent is to give children more information, and yet I worry that such a law would make men less likely to donate sperm. And even though these children are curious, it seems a great deal different to me than the curiosity adopted children have about the men who fathered them "in the old-fashioned way," who must have had some kind of relationship, however brief, with the women who carried them and gave birth to them, and perhaps cared for them for some period of time after birth as well.

I just don't feel the same way about Donor # F006, as grateful as I am to him, that I do about Yehva's birthparents. When I imagine Yehva's granddaughter, say, curious about her past, wanting to know where she came from, it seems to me that she might want to know not only about my family history, and David's, but Yehva's birthparents' histories as well. Perhaps she would want to know that even more. I don't imagine Eric's granddaughter having the same curiosity about the sperm donor. This could be a failure of imagination or empathy on my part.

Even as I am curious about that branch of my family that came to the US during the Potato Famine, or the branch that came (via Canada) because somebody was heading to Australia and got on the wrong boat, Yehva's granddaughter might be curious about the forces that brought Yehva's biological family to Chicago. Were they the descendants of free blacks, who had a community in Chicago even before the Civil War? Did they come north in the early 20th Century to work in the slaughterhouses, or seeking industrial jobs during WWII?

Perhaps most interesting to Yehva's granddaughter mght be the question of how her grandmother came to be adopted into a white family in Michigan.

We happen to have quite a bit of information about Yehva's birthparents, and her maternal grandparents. But what I have in a file is not a public record; it might not be available for Yehva's granddaughter when she wants to answer these questions, even if I am careful to save it and hand it down. I understand that Yehva's revised birth certificate creates a disjuncture in the record, and I know that it felt strange and uncomfortable to hold the revised birth certificate in my hand and see my name on it as if I had birthed her. I wondered whether that birth certificate violated the Quaker testimony of Truth.

(I understand, too, that genealogy can be especially difficult for black people, because records are sparser and less complete--I was looking at a website with some old census documents awhile ago, for instance, and some places submitted documents that listed every single white person by name, but then only "10 free blacks, 27 slaves," or a list of first names for black people. Marriages among slaves might be informal, or not recorded. And so on. So, in Yehva's case and the case of other transracial adoptees, the revised birth certificate can throw up an additional barrier to her black or mixed-race descendants who want to trace their history, and don't want it to disappear into the history of my (mostly) white family, and David's.)

On the other hand: there are times when it seems entirely right and proper to me for a revised birth certificate to be issued. Neither David nor I uses the name we were given by our parents; David has a revised birth certificate, but I have never bothered to get one although I did legally change my name. These certificates are similar to Yehva's in that they reflect a reality that was not true at the time of the birth.

Likewise, some states allow transsexuals to receive amended birth certificates. Some of these are marked as amended, and some aren't. It seems entirely good and right to me that transsexuals should receive amended certificates; they are an aid in getting other documentation with the correct name and gender on them, and it is a gesture of respect.

These changes can also create gaps and confusions in the historical record. But one thing that seems different about my name change, and various friends' gender transitions is that it was their own choice to make the change and request an amended certificate.

Yehva, and other adopted children, aren't given that choice. That makes a difference to me, that question of choice. As one person on the unschooling list pointed out, it's even stranger when a child is adopted at the age of 3, or 10, and a new birth certificate is issued. How might it feel to a child who remembers her birthparents, to have them removed from her documentation?

I have protected the name Yehva's birth mother gave her; as a person who doesn't use her birth name, married to a person who doesn't use his, I have had too many instances of people pushing to know my "real" name or David's to toss that kind of information around freely. Yehva may or may not be comfortable with people knowing the name she was given at birth and carried for four short days, but I tend to think it's up to her. From that perspective, I welcome a revised birth certificate that doesn't disclose information she might not want to disclose.

And yet--the revised birth certificate hides information that may not need to be hidden. It erases Kimberly and Cordelro. It pretends to hide an adoption that is plain as day to anyone who sees our family together. Some adopted people feel that revised birth certificates are one way that adoption is still shown to be shameful and loaded with stigma.

I haven't spent a lot of time reading up on what adopted people or other adoptive families think and feel about this. I haven't talked at all, or thought much, about what the preferences of birthparents might be; I imagine they would vary. These are just my own thoughts, and there are undoubtedly aspects I haven't considered. There's a lot going on with these apparently simple pieces of paper.

Anticipation

I'm really excited about leading my Song of Myself workshop at the FGC Gathering next week. This will be the fourth time I've done it; twice previously at Gathering and once for a group in my monthly meeting. I love reading the poem again--it's like a favorite old movie, I find myself all excited thinking about when we get that that part--and that other part--and then the one part that....

It's also a mystery, doing this. My system is to simply read the poem together; we read it aloud, stopping at the ends of the 52 numbered sections, and then discussing what we've read, asking and answering questions. It's a big poem and the whole world is in there (dinosaurs, even!), and what rises to the top for any group depends on who's there. One year, I had someone very versed in scripture, for instance, and from him we got a lot of insight into scriptural echoes. Or there might be someone who knows a lot of 19th-century or Civil War history, or who is familiar with other poetry written during the same era, or who knows more about Whitman's biography than I do, or who knows very well the Eastern religious texts that had recently been translated for the first time and were lighting Western thinkers on fire.

Much also depends on what happens in the room as we read, which is always unpredictable. One year, my group got to the end of section 45 and was so moved to be at that place that we stopped and re-read the section chorally, in unison, and then just sat there in stunned, emotional, worshipful silence together. Here's some of it:

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,

The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,

The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

Gives me shivers.

So the next time I led the workshop, I couldn't wait until we got to this piece! And people would be amazed and moved! I quivered with anticipation.

And the group blew right past it. It just didn't particularly speak to their condition.

That group, on the other hand, went nutso for the sex parts (this was also the group that really went deep into the scriptural references--what a great week that was. My ignorance of scripture is vast, so I learned a lot). They thought section 28, in which the poet's "other senses" abandon their sentry posts and leave him at the mercy of "villain touch" was absolutely the best description of sexual abandon and orgasm they'd ever heard, and they really wanted to talk about it:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

"Unclench your floodgates," indeed. Walt, you sexy old guy.

There's always a day when we end in the darkest part of the poem, where the poet has let himself get caught up in the contemplation of evil, and feels lost, degraded, hopeless. He sees himself imprisoned, impoverished, ill to the verge of death; he feels himself united in every sufferer:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side,

(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

I don't plan for us to end a day's session at that point, but somehow we always do. And as the group shuffles out, discouraged, cloud-covered, hag-ridden, I call out after them desperately, "It gets better! We're not stuck here! Trust me!" The next morning, they are impatient to get started, to hear the poet's next words:

Enough! Enough! Enough!

I think it's good to break there; it's only 10 lines from the poet as degraded beggar to the resurrection ("the grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves/ corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me."), and it's possible to come up for air too quickly, to dash past the dark place the poet has led us to. It's good to carry it for an afternoon and evening.

I could go on and on--about 85% of the poem falls into "OMG I love this part!" territory for me. And that's really why I lead the workshop, because it's a chance to inveigle 20 or so people into listening to the poem, to all the parts I love so much, and I get to see them fall in love with it, too (and get angry at it and frustrated at Walt and suffer from bafflement and all the other things that always happen alongside the loving it part), and sometimes--always, at some point during the week--the thing they fall in the love with and the ways they love it illuminate the poem in a new way for me, and it becomes a new poem and I love it even more.

Stop this day and night with me [says our Walt] and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

I wasn't sure about reading Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practices by Christine Ward Gailey. I've read a lot of books about adoption, and as has happened to me with some other topics, although I remain interested in the subject, I've reached the point where I've heard the information and arguments so many times that a new book is not likely to yield a lot that's new.

I'm so glad I decided to give this book a try. For one thing, it's an academic book, and Gailey is more interested in reporting her findings than supporting an argument, and that's refreshing--it doesn't feel like I have to try to read through her biases as I have had to do in other books.

More importantly, though, Gailey addresses some adoption scenarios that no other book I've read has touched on (this may be a function of my own interests; there could well be a whole adoption literature out there that I'm not familiar with). One is public (from foster care) adoptions by working-class families, especially single mothers. Gailey talks about the forces that bring the least-adoptable children--those who have been traumatized and may be displaying behavioral problems--with the least-desirable adoptive parents--those who have few resources and no partner to share the work. She describes the bitter irony that leaves parents of the most challenging children, who need the most support, with the least. These parents often experience significant downward mobility after an adoption, in some cases losing jobs because of the demands of caring for their children, or flirting with bankruptcy, or losing homes.

I'm only 40 pages in, and I'm in a section right now where Gailey discusses the adoption of black children by black families. You wouldn't know it from the kinds of adoptions stories that get media play, but most black children available for adoption are in fact adopted into black families, and Gailey is (uniquely, in my experience) interested in the experiences of those children and families, both in their own right and in contrast with transracial adoption.

After a long section in which she has discussed the various strategies white adoptive parents use to address their child's race (ranging from denial of the child's race, interestingly enough, by such techniques as asserting that a child is mixed-race, not black, or by commenting on the lightness of the child's skin; to active efforts to create a more racially-integrated social circle), Gailey moves on to looking at how black adoptive families deal with their adoptive children's race--and this is fascinating.

Gailey found that adoption researchers had been almost universally unwilling or uninterested in looking at issues of color preference among adoptive families. But she wanted to know if, and how, that played a role, and so she asked both adoptive parents and adoption workers about it. She says, with what I can only take to be monumental understatement, that these were uncomfortable conversations:

For African-American social workers and adopters, it meant having to confront patterns of color preference and racial stereotyping within black communities in front of a white person who was going to be writing a book. It meant deciding or not deciding to speak or not to speak to an audience that would include whites. For some of the white adopters, it meant finding the words to talk about their children having been rejected by potential adopters who were black, without condemning a racialized community or appearing self-righteous or entitled. I could sense their struggles, and some expressed their discomfort to me. (38-9)

One African-American social worker was willing to talk about her experiences placing black babies, but only after talking about her own experiences growing up, in which her family privileged her brother over her because of his lighter skin and "better" hair. "It's a problem, but it's not much compared to what happened to me because I was a black woman in this society. Just get that down: I want that in the book." (39)

This social worker went on to talk about the reasons she sometimes had problems placing black children with black adoptive families. Often, the reasons are what makes children hard to place in any case: developmental delays, a history of abuse, behavioral problems. These children are often refused by black and white adoptive couples and end up with the "least desirable" adoptive families: single white women. But the worker talked about how these factors intersected with the darkness of the child's skin and the type of hair the child had. One baby, who had been born prematurely, was turned down by two black families before being placed with a white family, one because she had "bad" hair, and the other because they expected her to "darken up" too much to fit into their family.

As a white adoptive mother, this kind of story feels a little bit like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a little bit like a point of solidarity, if that makes any sense. For good or ill, according to Gailey, black adoptive families wrestle with some of the same questions white adoptive families do, and are just as imperfect in their responses to the multiple issues raised by adoption.

She goes on to quote a number of social workers at length, who thoughtfully consider the issues and talk about how placing black children with white families, while being an option of last resort, is nonetheless an option they turn to more often than they'd like. And then she gets this refreshingly "curt" response from one adoption worker:

They're not kidding when they say these kids are "hard to place." We're lucky to get anyone to adopt them. I should, but I don't even bother about whether it's transracial or not anymore. The ones [social workers] I know who handle the crack kids would tell you the same. If [the prospective adopters are] alive and not child molesters, we'll place 'em. (40)

Only one of the adoptive families in her study said they'd had a color preference for their adopted child; in that case, an interracial couple wanted a child who would not be obviously adopted, but who might plausibly have been their biological child.

Gailey points out that transracial adoption is less common in public (foster) adoption. Private adoptions are common in the US, and take many overlapping forms. One is "facilitated" adoption (adoptions arranged by a person who might or might not be an attorney but whose role is to match adoptive parents with babies). Another is adoptions in which prospective adoptive parents are primarily responsible for making contact with birthmothers, through placing ads, posting websites with contact information, and so on. There are also private agency adoption, like our adoption of Yehva, where an agency maintains a pool of potential adoptive parents and is also the contact point for prospective birth parents; the adoptive families do not advertise or attempt to find birthmothers. [Many potential adoptive families pursue more than one of these paths at a time.]

Gailey points out that all of these forms of adoption are illegal throughout Europe, where they are seen a constituting a market in children. [I am curious about the details of this, as I know that, for instance, our agency places babies with European families, but Gailey didn't go into detail.] And I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she talks about how much easier it is to get approved for private adoption than for public adoption, even though private adoptions often deal in the most "desirable" children: newborns, especially white ones, with no health problems or risk factors. For instance, a family seeking approval to work within the foster system, either as a foster family or in hope of adopting, needs to complete a course: a 3-hour class once a week for 12 weeks is typical. On the other hand, David and I were required only to take a course in "Becoming an Interracial Family" that lasted for, IIRC, 3 2-hour sessions.

The point Gailey is trying to get at, I think, is that private adoption skews more toward meeting the demands of potential parents for babies, while the public adoption system has no choice but to wrestle with meeting the needs of children, including the challenging ones. There are not a whole lot of white babies placed for adoption, compared to the number of families who would like to adopt a healthy infant, so, even though Gailey reports that adopters are less likely to cite "the long wait for a white infant" as a factor than they were 30 years ago, there are certainly "market forces" driving the higher number of transracial adoptions in the private adoption arena.

There's a part of me that does agree that private adoption and international adoption constitute a market in children and babies. I think it's naive to not take that into account. On the other hand, I think the private agency option was a good one for Yehva: she was drug-exposed in utero, and her birthmother was on drugs when she arrived at the hospital to give birth. K.'s decision to place Yehva for adoption allowed Yehva to bypass the foster care system, where she might have moved through multiple placements before being either reunited with her birthmother, or released for adoption. Gailey cites research that has found that 8 out of 10 black girls over the age of four have been sexually abused while in foster care [edited: this was her finding in her own research for the book. She was unable to find any other research that tracked this statistic, and hoped that her sample for the book was somehow anomalous]; although Yehva might have entered foster care as a newborn, it's a risky system that is not often able to provide stability for children, and I'm glad she, and other newborns like her, didn't have to spend time in it.

I didn't mean to digress; Gailey doesn't need to be argued with. She's thorough and clear-eyed and, so far at least, doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. This is a really worthwhile book. At least, the first third of it is.

Understanding Normal

My Facebook status this morning was: I feel so sorry for the mothers of only children. They'll never experience the joys of the extended, passionate, knock-down, drag-out fight over a toy nobody had previously touched for six months.

A friend commented that mothers who are only children will never understand such fights. Which reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately: David's and my efforts to understand what's normal when it comes to kids fighting.

David was an only child. I have an older brother, and for most of my childhood our relationship was so terrible that for, for awhile in my 20s, I actually considered myself to have been abused (I have a much more nuanced view of things now, and a lot of respect and affection for the man my brother is, but growing up in the same house with him was such a crap experience that when he left for college, I felt like I was being let out of prison. [Second parenthetical: apparently growing up as my sibling was no bed of roses, either. I just want to be clear that I'm not trashing my brother here.]).

My brother and I, in our mid-to-late 40s, have only in the last couple of years tentatively begun to have a relationship that goes beyond showing up at our parents' house at the same time twice a year on major holidays. Because of the way my relationship with him played out, I have never quite believed it when people told me, "My sister and I fought like cats and dogs the whole time we were growing up, but now we're the best of friends." I have always thought one of two things:

1. This person does not really understand what it means to "fight like cats and dogs," and did not in fact do it with her sister. Or,

2. They're not actually best friends.

So, because of David's lack of experience with siblings, and because of my bad experience with my sibling, we are at a loss when the kids fight (and my buttons are pushed big-time, especially if Eric does something that leverages his bigness and older-ness).

You can imagine, then, how tremendously helpful it was to me to read recently a report of a study that followed siblings through childhood into young adulthood, and tried to understand the factors that led to good or bad adult relationships. One finding was that all the siblings fought, to more or less the same degree. What made the biggest difference in predicting the quality of their adult relationships was what they were doing when they weren't fighting. Siblings who ignored each and spent time apart when not fighting tended to grow up to be estranged, like my brother and me. But siblings who had positive experiences together when not fighting grew up to be close, like my hypothetical "you" and her hypothetical sister.

I now believe you when you tell me that you fought with your sister but are best friends now. Because I'm guessing that when you weren't fighting with your sister, you were spending at least some time hanging out with her having a good time.

I'm also pretty sure, too, that my kids are doing OK. This morning's knock-down drag-out between Carl and Yehva, for instance, was followed by a half-hour or so of cheerful quiet pretend play together. A balm to the motherly heart.

That study reminded me of some of the findings in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, a book that, first, you have to respect for having the most straightforwardly descriptive title of the 20th century. You're probably familiar with some of the study's findings even if you haven't read the book; it's the source of the datum that children of professionals hear 5-8 million more words in the first three years of life than children of working class parents or of parents receiving welfare benefits, which I still see cited all the time, and which has led educators to really wrestle with the question of what kinds of interventions, if any, can make up for the deficits even preschoolers can bring with them to school.

But another piece of info I carried away with me from reading it a few years ago is that all of the children heard "No" and its variants--"Don't touch that," "get down from there," "come away from that"--at roughly the same level. But one of the class-based differences researchers found is that for working-class and welfare kids, that's often the vast majority or even the only speech directed at them by parents, whereas the children of professionals also heard a great many positive statements--"I see you," "Good job," "Go ahead, try it," "Wow, I like that picture."

Both of these findings--about siblings fighting, about saying No to children-- have helped me as a parent to relax about the moments when things aren't as smooth and good as I wish they were, either between the kids or between me and the kids, by reminding me that these moments exist within a greater context that makes a world of difference.

Oh, man, I would so much rather keep writing, which I am really in the mood for, than put laundry in the dryer, load the dishwasher, update the checkbook, call the vet, and take the kids grocery shopping. I have a blog post in my head about my upcoming chore of writing the annual letter to Yehva's birthmother, and another one about something else I forget right now but that will come back to me [Edited: I remember! It's about portrayals of adoptive parents in the media]. Also, the parrots remind me I have not fed them breakfast.

On the one hand, if I didn't have the kids, I could write as much as I wanted. On the other hand, if I didn't have the kids, what would I write about?