Headache(s), or: Who Am I Without My Pain?

I've been periodically dipping back into my tape flags in Weaving a Family, and I've written many a dead-on-the-page false start in the last couple of months. This morning I sat down and went through my remaining tape flags, and realized that I don't have anything else to say back to that book right now. There are some topics in there, like the idea that we have an obligation to make our children culturally black, that I may find myself writing about someday. But for now, I'm done with that piece of this project.

What I want to talk about now is my health, because I find it interesting. You may not, in which case stop reading now, do something else more fun, and wait for another book post or cute story about my kids.

Many people know that I have chronic pain; I have had a headache for about fifteen years. Not "headaches." One headache. For fifteen years. It gets better and it gets worse, but it never goes away. Headaches are notoriously difficult to treat, but over the years I've had my share of tests and scans and trial medications. I've done physical therapy and had massages. I've meditated. I spent a week at a Pain Clinic ten or eleven years ago; that's where they send you when they decide you're going to be in pain forever, so you can learn how to manage it and live your life.

For a long time, I just lived with my headache, doing the things I knew helped, getting on with my life. My headache seemed complicated to me: my allergies affected it, for instance, but so did muscle tension (or it caused muscle tension--so hard to say). So does my tendency to grind my teeth, and TMJ problems. Getting treated for a vision condition called Vertical Heterophoria last summer was one of the most promising things I ever tried, but the improvement from my fancy new eyeglass lenses, though dramatic, was ultimately short-lived.

And then, in November, I had breast reduction surgery. I had thought about it off and on for awhile, but starting last year, all kinds of people I consulted for my well-being talked to me about it. My Pilates trainer, for instance, who told me that my efforts to improve my posture and mobility would be an uphill battle as long as I was wearing a K-cup bra, and a manipulating osteopath who undressed me, watched me stand and walk, and then said, "How attached are you to your breasts?"

Not very, as it turned out.

Now, I had heard from many women about the joys of breast reduction. "Your clothes will fit better!" they told me. "Your posture will improve! You won't get so many backaches!" So I expected some changes.

What I did not expect was that I would wake up from the surgery, and find that the constant pain, tension, and inflexibility in my neck muscles would be gone. Or that over the next few weeks, I would discover that the left side of my head, which for 15 years had been pain's last stronghold, the place that always hurt even when pain had receded from everywhere else, had also, for the most part, stopped hurting.

My head didn't stop hurting. But a headache that had always centered on my left temple moved to the top of my head.

What's more, it became clearly sinus-related.

This is what is interesting: it's as if removing the millstone I was carrying around my neck cleared away a layer of the pain's causes, like draining a lake to reveal the dead fish and trash heaped on the bottom. This is actually a big improvement; instead of this chaotic and confusing mess of pain from multiple causes, I can now identify pieces of it: this is because I was grinding my teeth; that is because my sinuses are really acting up.

Now, these identifiable pieces also feel more treatable. My doctor and I are beginning a plan to try to deal more effectively with my allergies, for instance--and we'll be able to tell if it really helps, I think, because this sinus piece of the pain will improve. I'm going to ask my dentist to check my bite guard; it might be time to go back to the TMJ specialist I consulted last spring, who suggested I start by getting checked for Vertical Heterophoria before we proceed with addressing TMJ issues.

The other strange thing that has happened since my surgery is that I seem to be having migraines, about one every two weeks. As migraines go, they're really not bad; I've seen really bad ones, taken David to the ER for them, so I know. Yesterday's headache, for instance, responded to migraine medicine and although I felt tired and a little out of it, I had a pleasant evening. Now I wonder if I was always having migraines, too, if they corresponded to some of my "bad patches," if that wasn't the reason that migraine medication sometimes--sometimes--helped if I was having a particularly bad head day.

Finally: sometimes, in the last 10 weeks, if I haven't especially been grinding my teeth and my sinuses are pretty clear, it has almost seemed like I didn't have a headache. "Do I not have a headache?" I would ask myself, and do a little inventory of my head. Always, deep deep in the stronghold of my left temple, I would find a starved and shivering remnant, a little bit of tight muscle or tendon, a spot that hurt if I pressed on it. "Does this even count?" I would ask myself. "If someone who hadn't had a headache for fifteen years had this very same tender spot, would they think they had a headache? I doubt it."

Yet I found--find--myself strangely unwilling, on those days, to say I don't have a headache. This is a very interesting phenomenon. You'd think I'd be dancing in the street, releasing a thousand balloons, calling everyone I know: "I don't have a headache!" You'd be wrong.

I can think of a few reasons why I might be unwilling to declare an end to pain. One is just that it's hard to let myself hope after 15 years. I've had promising stages before--right after my first set of prism lenses last spring, for instance--and the end of a promising stage is crushing. So I am not wanting to look head-on at the possibility of not being in pain; I'm only willing to kind of glance at it sideways. I'm not going to get my hopes up, no sir. I've been down that road before.

Another is that pain has been a part of who I am for a long time. Almost my whole relationship with David, for instance. Constant pain makes everything I've accomplished in the last 15 years: grad school, three kids, 13 years of college teaching, performing, leading workshops, babysitting, traveling, traveling with the three kids--much more impressive. I remember a few years ago, I threw one of the boys a birthday party in the middle of a really bad patch. There were, oh, eight kids at my house, and we did all the usual birthday party things: playing games, opening presents, eating cake and ice cream. When the last of the kids had been picked up, I turned to David, said, "I am a fucking hero," fell into his arms, and burst into tears.

Anybody can throw a party for 8 four-year-olds. Do it with the equivalent of a moderate migraine headache? That you've had for more than a decade? Best mom in the world!

I remember when I was being (very successfully) treated for a pretty serious anxiety disorder. When it was coming up on time to leave treatment, my therapist asked me to spend some time thinking about any reasons why I might not want to let go of my anxiety. That wasn't actually too much of a struggle for me--I was glad to put days when it was a triumph to shower, braid my hair, and walk to the mailbox behind me.

On the other hand, after that kind of drama, normal life, with all its unremarkable hair-washing and mail-fetching, can look a bit...pale.

I actually feel that more now with my pain than I did with my anxiety. Is it possible I actually feel some resistance to giving up being able to say, "I've had a headache for 13 years...14 years...15 years..." What if I never get to say "16 years"? Do I think I will somehow have failed to set a record? Was I planning a big party for our 25th anniversary?

I know that my friends and loved ones are eager to celebrate with me, should I become significantly pain-free. But will I miss their sympathy? Their admiration?

Will I lose some kind of moral high ground? Will I become...ordinary?

Will people expect more of me? Will I be able to live up to their expectations? Will I let everyone down?

What if it turns out that I really cannot do any of the things that I have thought I might be able to do, if only I didn't have this damn headache?

I'm scared that my optimism is misplaced, that this is just going to be another glimpse of sunshine through the endless clouds. I'm also scared that my optimism is not misplaced, that I am on the verge of moving into a new world, and that I will not know how to live in it.

They say I should write a book

I understand that when people say, "You should write a book," they mean, "I enjoy your writing. I enjoy it enough that I would read an entire book full of it. I think other people would enjoy a book full of your writing as well, and perhaps even pay money for it." But what I hear is: "Why the hell aren't you writing a book, you big loser? You are squandering your God-given talent!"

For much of my life, I expected to write a book. When I was about 12, and changed my name to Su Penn, a librarian who was very important to me said, "Wow, that is going to look really good on the cover of a book someday," and I thought that she had somehow miraculously divined this secret ambition I'd had for as long as I could remember. I also thought she was making a prediction that could not fail to come true.

In my 20s, I got an MFA in writing and literature, I published a few things here and there, I performed my work a lot, and I really thought all that was going to lead to a book. I was disappointed that it didn't. And then, at some point, I stopped being a public writer of that kind, for various reasons. And some time after that, I got very peaceful about it, and busy with other things, and didn't really think about it much. I don't usually think about it; writing a book is no longer one of my ambitions.

Until somebody says, "You should write a book." And I have a flare-up.

The thing that's new about this latest flare-up--brought on by several recent "you should write a book" incidents--is that I find that I am not only OK with not writing a book just now, but I am glad not to have succeeded at it ten or fifteen years ago when I was really trying. Some of the writing I did back then was pretty good, and I do not squirm when I happen to re-read it. I spent some time last week re-reading a few things, and mostly liked them.

But a lot of what I wrote back then would have been hurtful to, well, my mother. And right now, I would not hurt my mother for the world. So I find myself feeling glad that the ambition of my twenties never bore fruit, because I am more comfortable now living in a world that doesn't have The Book of My Twenties in it. Maybe this just means I'm a coward; do not all writers, after all, move on from their early work? Well, so be it.

I may yet have a book in me; life is long, I always say, and the road takes many a turning. But I am glad for the book I didn't write, and I am enjoying the book I'm not writing just now, and every now and then I spend some time not planning to write a book any time soon. It keeps me busy.

I say I write about books, but it's really mostly about me

I have been reading David Ellis Dickerson's House of Cards, a memoir about his days working at Hallmark. It is funny as all get out; I tape flagged the hell out of it, which is silly for two reasons: 1) It's a library book; 2) the humor and the story both build, so any one thing that I flag doesn't really stand up too well on its own.

Still.

Dickerson is a fun read but he's also a pump-primer for me--reading his book gets me wanting to write; it's a little free-associational, but here goes. One of the things that happens in the book is that Dickerson tries to figure out why he's failing socially with most people at the company: he's told he talks too much; he's told that people are complaining that he makes "too many literary allusions," which baffles him. And then he starts to figure it out. Here's a story from page 300:

I began to figure out some of my problems. One time, for example, in my wanderings, I was on the stairs from Nine to Eight and saw an artist I knew casually coming up as I was coming down. We nodded in passing. Two hours later, while down on the seventh floor, and coming down yet more stairs, I saw him again. My god, I thought bemusedly. It's like one of us is omnipresent.

"You again," he said, chuckling.

And I blurted out the first joke I thought of: "Yeah, I'm just working on my Omnipresence merit badge."

He continued to smile with his mouth, but his eyes froze, and he nodded quietly and we passed in silence.

My initial reaction was to say, Goddammit, that was a good joke! Why didn't he at least laugh? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it had been almost mean of me to spring that on him unawares. He was just saying hi and making social noise, and I had essentially asked him to suddenly process two distant cultural references and respond appropriately, and I'd done it unthinkingly, instead of just saying, "Ha ha."

This is familiar to me because I have killed many a casual conversation in exactly that way, and then I vow not to do it again…and then I do. Because it's hard not to when that's the way your mind works. I did it to some stranger in the toy aisle at Meijer the other day, and it embarrassed us both.

David, on the other hand, is, like me, always tossing off jokes that reference, say, the Norman invasion and simultaneously an old episode of ST: TNG. Years ago, when we were having a rough time, a therapist asked us to make a list of the things we liked about our relationship. #1 was "shared wit"--though, because of certain quirks of my handwriting, it looked like "shared ert" when we tried to read it to the therapist.

(We often have these "what the hell" moments because of my handwriting. The other day I was getting ready to go grocery shopping, and pulled the list off the fridge. "Coffee cake?" I said. "Why the hell would I think I wanted to buy coffee cake at Meijer?"

David said, "That's what I thought it said too."

It said "caff-free Coke.")

On the other hand, the last woman I dated before I got involved with David had no sense of humor at all. This was an eye-opening experience for me because I have always tended to associate quick-wittedness with intelligence, and I do think the intelligence of quick-witted people is flashy and easy to see (though on the other hand, some people might ask of me: "If she's so smart, why doesn't she know when to shut up?").

But this girlfriend could not be accused of not being smart: she was a philosophy professor. And yet, she was not funny, and she couldn't see that I was. Since I tend to think my funniness is one of my most appealing features, I found myself wondering why she wanted to date me in the first place--it would be like a blind person dating someone who had no positive qualities other than good looks.

My attempts at humor--reflexive, spontaneous, and irrepressible--were the source of many an awkward moment in the early weeks of our relationship. And then I would attempt to explain to her why what I had said was funny; she had, at least, a philosophic interest in the topic, and by late in the relationship, we had progressed to this:

Her, just after our dinner has been delivered to our table: We have no silverware!

Me: Well, that's OK. Lasagna is pretty much a finger food, anyway.

[pause]

Her: That was a joke, wasn't it?

No wonder we only made it six months despite all the mutual goodwill in the world.

We had the most amicable breakup in the world, agreeing in bed one Sunday morning that "the girlfriend thing" wasn't really working out for us, and then going out for breakfast as usual. But months later, over lunch, we had our only fight, and I have to say that I do not recommend fighting with a philosopher. Whether you are right or wrong makes no difference; she has spent her entire life thinking, and thinking about how to think, and constructing thoughtful arguments, and she will simply annihilate you with philosophy. I think it was four years before I could go back into that restaurant without sweating and feeling like an ant about to be stomped.

It occurs to me that although I think my sense of humor is one of my more appealing qualities, I suspect that it is also one of my more annoying. As David Ellis Dickerson learned as well.

On his 30th birthday, Dickerson lets the guests at his party vote on whether he should shave his head. He's in among a fairly conservative crowd, and the vote barely passes, but it does. And he shaves his head. "Shaving my head…" he says, "turned out to be a great move. Underneath that shaggy mane, it turned out, was a very nicely shaped skull. Everywhere I went the next day, I'd catch myself in the mirror and think, This is a good look. I might keep this around for awhile" (325).

Another thing we have in common. I shaved my head summer before last, because I had always wanted to. I looked for an excuse, in case it turned out badly, and ended up raising a couple hundred bucks for research into childhood cancers. But it turned out well. "I have a shapely head!" I kept saying for the rest of the day.

Like Dickerson, I haven't gone back--though I don't keep a full shave. I don't like the sensation of actually shaving my head. David trims it close with clippers every few weeks. This has been extraordinary for me. I have always had a very high forehead, and during my pregnancies it receded and my hair thinned; I've always been self-conscious about my hair, and yet entirely disinclined to spend time making it look good. Buzzing it is the perfect solution. I don't know that it's my best look, but I do think it's a good look for me--I like pictures of myself. But best of all, except when it's time to trim it (as it is today--I have let it go way too long), I just don't think about it. A huge part of my self-consciousness about my appearance just disappeared.

The only downside is that I am going gray in a very pleasing silvery way, and it doesn't show much when my hair is very short. I can live with that.

One final Dickerson thing: his explanation of why, after getting an MFA in writing, he didn't pursue it professionally (though now he has a book, so clearly he did eventually). From page 11:

[I]n writing stories for money, the way I was told to go about it was to submit to small nonpaying literary magazines, then get enough published that you could get a story collection with a small press, and then--on the basis of that or whatever small-press novel came next--get a teaching job at some obscure college no one much cared for. Yet even this simple plan seemed impossible. I could barely manage to submit ten copies of a story and send them off to various magazines (writing a different cover letter every time, making sure you got the editor's name right, including the SASE that was properly weighted, etc.). Just thinking about it made my limbs heavy, and my brain gasped for anything more exciting to occupy it. Mailing off stories involved actual suffering. And for what? For ten rejections to trickle in over the next nine months. And even if I made it (I'd succeeded once in the six mass mailings I'd managed to shoulder through), you got no money and no one noticed you were in this stupid magazine that only other MFA students had ever heard of. You were supposed to do years of this. I could barely handle it for two hours.

He took the words right out of my mouth.

2009 Book Report

David wrote a script that checks my library account every day, and if there are new items, downloads the list to my computer. I copy it into an Excel spreadsheet, and then as I finish with books, I rate them from 0 to 4. 0 means I didn't read it; 1 that I didn't finish it; 2 that it was weak; 3 that it was "good enough"; and 4 that something really stood out about it for me.

In 2009 I read 213 books. Of that 213 I gave a a 4 to 33. Here are some of the ones I think might be most interesting to others:

Fiction

Four of the six high-rated books this year were re-reads of the first four novels in the Aubrey/Maturin series: Post Captain, HMS Surprise, Mauritius Command, and Desolation Island. I can't remember whether this is the third or fourth time I've read the series since I first discovered it six years ago; so very good, full of moments so good that even as I read them, I am already looking forward to encountering them again next time. I love the development of the friendship between Jack and Stephen, the way something happens on one page that turns out to be the setup for a joke ten pages later, the depth of characterizations. I treat the technical shipboard stuff as if it were Geordi telling Capt. Picard that he's going to solve their problems by recalibrating the plasma matrix and modulating the shield harmonics; so much placeholder technobabble. But I understand that for people who actually care about the spritsail, the foretop, the ship's knees, the poop deck, and the cable tiers, O'Brien's expert grasp of the technicalities is a real joy.

O'Brien is the only writer besides Jane Austen that I cannot dip into. If I read two pages of Pride and Prejudice, I will not stop until I've been through all six novels; likewise, I will probalby not stop reading O'Brien until I've set down Blue at the Mizzen--the 20th novel--with a bittersweet sigh. So much left unfinished by O'Brien's death partway through the 21st novel! If only our favorite writers could live forever.

I also gave a 4 to The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos. I only started reading mysteries a few years ago, and this is one of the best I've read. Pelecanos also wrote for the TV series The Wire, and you will recognize style and theme--and even the occasional plot element, such as the recovering junkie living in his sister's basement and not allowed upstairs. Good stuff.

One of only a couple of books that kept me up reading past bedtime, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is a young adult novel that is full of respect for its young readers, and for its characters. It is the story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who decides to transfer to a white school off the reservation in search of a better education. It's a small-ish book, a quick read, and yet so much is laid bare for us, with sympathy and humor. With terrific cartoon illustrations by Ellen Fornoy.

Memoir

I have always been a fan of the memoir, so the recent memoir trend has been very satisfying to me. Yet only one memoir made my hit list this year:Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner (click on the link and look at that picture: gay, gay, gay!). Hilarious and poignant.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

I don't actually read a lot of fantasy, but I really liked Brandon Sanderson'sMistborn Trilogy, although in some places it was too gruesomely violent for me. David enjoyed it, too.

And another re-read: Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, about which I can not say enough good. I find Willis a very uneven writer: Passage was barely readble, Promised Land is a favorite guilty-pleasure bad book for me, but Doomsday Book is a masterpiece. I would like to put together a reading group on sci-fi books that deal well with faith; Doomsday Book and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow would be the first two: a time-traveling historian encounters the Black Plague; and Jesuits make first contact on an alien planet.

Picture Books

I see that I have a few picture books in this category; I don't usually rate picture books because that would be silly--I don't think you can really count the approximately 700 picture books I read to the kids as "books I've read." But I do flag any we especially like. This year I flagged Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett; Duck! Rabbit!, an optical-illusion book that had the kids over the moon with glee; Brown Angels, a collection of found photographs of black children from around the turn of the 20th century;The Brain by Seymour Simon; and The Top of the World: Climbing Mt. Everest, which is one of the best non-fiction books for kids I've ever read.

Religious

I read 25 books on religion this year, and gave my highest score to four. Two are actually pamphlets: Arthur Larrabee's Experiencing God: Three Spiritual Practices, which I remember just electrified me when I heard him deliver it as a plenary speech at the FGC Gathering in (I think) 1998; and Reflections on Quaker Worship by Esther Greenleaf-Murer, a collection of articles she wrote for her yearly meeting newsletter on the experience of worship. A note in the "comments" field in my spreadsheet says I thought it was worth further study.

Another Quaker book I gave a 4 is Liz Oppenheimer's Writing Cheerfully on the Web: A Quaker Blog Reader. Liz (I can call her by her first name because she's actually a friend of mine) has been involoved in Quaker on-line community for awhile, and earlier this year she followed a leading to collect writings from Quaker blogs into a print anthology, which was released last summer. Like all anthologies, it's uneven, but overall it's very strong. I appreciated the inclusion of Quakers from more than just my own liberal unprogrammed tradition, and the expression of various viewpoints. There is a lot here to chew and savor--I expect to re-read my much-flagged copy this year, and I think it would be a great text for an adult religious ed group. I was happy to hear recently that it is one of the year's 10 best sellers at Quakerbooks because it is a book that I think can be edifying for Friends as individuals and as a body.

Finally, I gave a 4 to Sara Maitland's A Big-Enough God: A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology and commented that I thought it was "worth revisiting" and yet, even after peeking at a couple of reviews, I remember almost nothing about it. One of the hazards of reading so much, I suppose.

Non-fiction

If I had to limit myself to just one genre, it would be non-fiction. I love learning about things, and although I am now abstinent from higher education (for over 8 years now, after spending 12 of my first 18 years after high school as a full-time student at one institution or another), I fill that need with non-fiction. Usually fiction is only about 25% of what I read. This year my non-fiction reading was blessed with a number of humdingers:

Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. About the people who were so inspired by Whitman they put him at the center of their lives, including John Addington Symonds, who wrote to Whitman for 20 years trying, desperately, to get Whitman to admit that his poetry was about same-sex love (WW never did). A great read; good insight into Whitman and into the culture of the late 18th Century.

Class by Paul Fussell. Re-read after being inspied by this Atlantic article. I read it probably 25 years ago when it first came out, and remembered it--which is saying a lot, since, when you consider that I have been reading close to a book a day for most of the last 38 years or so, it takes a lot for something to stick with me. Back then, I read it as a spoof; this year, after I've spent a couple of years studying social class, it was more resonant.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. Stunt journalism at its finest: unable to get access as a journalist, Conover went through training and became a corrections officer at Sing Sing. A great example of a book that is sympathetic to its subjects, and not what you expect when you go in.

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington. Snake handlers are the butt of many a religious joke; Covington goes so deeply among them that he is led to hadles some snakes himself. The result is a very sympathetic, enlightening portrait.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeces of Martin Luther King, Jr. 'Nuff said.

Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption by Barbara Katz Rothman. The topic of this blog so far, mostly. I've been very unwell for about two months, but I do mean to get back to it in 2010. One of the few books I thought was worth buying after I'd read it (yeah, I know it's backwards, but that's how I do things.)

How to Keep Kosher: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Jewish Dietary Laws by Lise Stern. if there is anything more interesting than the vexed question of whether Israeli marshmallows are really kosher, I don't know what it is!

Columbine by Dave Cullen. One of the things I love about non-fiction is finding out how wrong or skewed what you thought you knew was. That can be especially true of anything that has been a media circus. I was inspried to read this after Susan Klebold broke 10 years of media silence with her essay in Oprah's magazine. The New York Times review the link goes to gets it right: "What intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con."

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriageby Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. I can't do two sentences on this book; would have to be a whole essay at least. Here is someone else's short essay on it.

And, finally, The Book of the Year: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. A fascinating and readble book about, of all things, cholera: specifically, the last big cholera outbreak in London, in 1854. Two million people crowded together with terrible sanitation; a model of the spread of disease that doesn't take into account poop in the water supply; and two men who start to have a new idea. It's a story about sewage, certainly, and politics. It's also a story about developing notions of how data can be collected and used. Sewage! Contaminated wells! Rice-water stools! Miasma! Maps! This page-turner has it all.

A Little Side Trip About Social Class

I’ve been keeping a little list of things that come to me that don’t fit into an entry I’m working on, and this is one: the Federal Adoption Tax Credit, and who it benefits.

The Federal Adoption Tax Credit provides almost $11,000 in tax credits to families who adopt. All adoptions are eligible. It was designed to make adoption more affordable, to help people who might not otherwise have been able to afford to adopt. Most states also offer adoption credits; Michigan’s is about $1100, and can used after the federal credit has been exhausted.

$11,000 is a lot of money. Our original estimate of our adoption expenses was only about $15,000: $11,000 for agency fees, about $1500 for our home study, around $2000 for birthmother expenses, plus travel costs to Chicago, four hours from home, to take custody of the baby and stay until receiving Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children clearance to remove the baby from the state. A federal tax credit of $11,000 would have paid for most of that.

However, the structure of the credit limits its usefulness for many families. It’s not a refundable tax credit; this means that in any given year, you can only receive as much of it as you have paid in taxes, with the remainder of the credit carrying over to future years. Originally, the credit was also time limited—you could only use as much of it as you accessed in four years.

By contrast, for instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit—this means that you get the whole credit even if it exceeds your withholding for the year. When I was eligible for the EITC, I often got, say, $4000 back on my taxes despite having paid only $1000 in withholding, The adoption tax credit doesn’t work that way; If a family has only paid $2500 in withholding, that’s the size of the refund they’ll get that year, with the remaining $8500 of the credit carrying over to future tax years.

Also, for mysterious reasons, expenses that quality for the credit cannot normally be claimed in the year in which they’re incurred, but in the next tax year. This is unlike every other deductible expense or tax credit; a friend of mine who does taxes for a living says she can't think of another instance where an expense can't be applied in the year it's incurred.

For our family, this meant that we paid adoption expenses as early as January of 2007—and received federal tax credit money to reimburse us for them in March of 2009. Furthermore, until three years ago when David’s income increased dramatically, our family had not had any federal tax liability for the better part of a decade. If we had tried to adopt during that time—and we weren’t poor, we were living on about $55,000 a year—we would not have been able to access the federal tax credit at all.

I know families who have not been able to use the tax credit because their federal tax liability is too low. I know families who have not been able to use the full credit because the time limit passed before they’d used it all (time limits have since been extended, or possibly done away with completely).

But even families for whom the credit is useable have to be able afford to pay expenses up front and then wait anywhere from 2 to 5 years for reimbursement.

The effect of the credit is, therefore, to make adoption more affordable for families who already could afford it, while continuing to exclude lower-income families.

People I know who’ve been involved with adoption since before the credit was instituted report anecdotally that agency fees went up across the board in the few years following its enactment. If agencies responded to the tax credit by raising fees, that means the money is probably going mostly to people who could, and would, have adopted anyway, rather than making adoption more accessible to lower-income families.

This is not about race; it’s about social class, and the way government either structured the credit to steer children into families with more money, or carelessly allowed it to happen. Either way, it’s a commentary on who deserves children and who doesn’t, especially when you consider that there is no corresponding Keep Your Baby Tax Credit, at least not for women like Yehva's birthmother.

One exception to the sweeping generalization I’m guilty of here is that the credit is available to families who adopt from foster care even if they have not incurred adoption expenses; out-of-pocket expenses for foster care adoptions are usually low, if there are any at all, so this could indeed be a big help to families interested in adopting some of the most hard-to-place kids.

Kicking the tires before you buy (p. 71)

Just as one would take a car off to one's own mechanic before purchasing, some potential adopters take the baby in for testing before final papers are signed. in a thoughtful and wide-ranging panel discussion on the ethics of genetic testing in adoption...a number of issues arose. One, of course, was the parity with prenatal testing: if parents by birth can test for and avoid a particular condition, then surely adoptive parents have equal rights, too?

... One participant in the discussion...compared this kind of testing with kicking the tires of a used car, or... taking a used car to one's own mechanic before buying it.

I don't think I know anyone who subjected their baby to extra testing or genetic screening before an adoption. But I do know that when our adoption agency called us with a possible match with Yehva's birthmother, they were honest with us about K.'s drug use. "She denies drinking," the director said, "and I'm inclined to believe her. Most people tend to choose one or the other--pot or booze. Of course, you don't have to make a final decision until after the baby is born; you'll be able to get medical information then and see how she's doing."

I got off the phone feeling a bit uncomfortable with the idea that we could change our mind about this baby after she was born and we were able to find out whether she seemed "defective" or not. A friend of mine described to me, a few months ago, one of her conversations with her daughter's birth mother, saying, "we told her we were committed to the baby, so long as it didn't have any disabilities we felt we couldn't deal with."

That sounds crappier than I mean it to--I don't mean to pick on my friend at all, only to say that this is one of the realities of adoption: that you get to meet the baby before you make a commitment. It's a luxury biological parents don't have.

I didn't want to face that decision, and was glad we dodged it by virtue of Yehva being perfectly healthy and sound. I did not want to discover that I was a person who would discard a baby for imperfection. And yet, at the same time, I recognize the many forces that would go into the decision, and sympathize with any parent who chose not to proceed with an adoption. Let me tell you a story.

When I was pregnant with Eric, I could not imagine terminating the pregnancy for any reason. I had an acquaintance who'd carried a baby to term knowing he wouldn't survive long past birth; he spent his entire short life outside the womb cradled in her arms and died peacefully there. I could see myself making that choice, too. I could not imagine myself terminating a baby for having Down Syndrome, or even more severe disabilities. David and I are committed to disability rights and generally comfortable with disabled people; we, especially David, would be good parents for a disabled child.

And then I got pregnant with Carl, and I felt differently, for a couple of reasons. One was that I was 38 years old and really wanted a second child. If I waited out a doomed pregnancy, and then waited to recover enough to try again, I might significantly reduce, or lose, my chance for a second baby. The second time around, I probably would have terminated a pregnancy if had I learned the baby could not survive past birth.

But the disability question became more vexed as well. I had a child already, and a responsibility to him. What if I found out my second child had a disability that would require extraordinary care, a hugely disproportionate measure of our resources of time, energy, and money? Again, with Eric in the picture, the equation shifted. I didn't know what I would do--I didn't think, "Oh, I would definitely have an abortion in those circumstances." But I didn't think anymore that I definitely wouldn't either. A family that learns the baby they plan to adopt is severely disabled has similar factors to weigh, as well as listening to their hearts. This doesn't make them bad people.

No one is allowed to make a binding commitment to adoption until after the baby is born; in most states, there's a waiting period after the birth before the birthmother can surrender her parental rights. And adoptive parents aren't committed until later than that. Even after we'd taken legal custody, when it became clear that problems with our home study were going to delay our clearance to bring Yehva home to Michigan (she and I spent two weeks and about $3000 correcting the problems, during which we had to stay in Illinois), the director of our agency asked me, "Do you want to give her back?" I was affronted. "We didn't promise to be this baby's parents only as long as it was convenient and didn't cost money," I fumed to friends.

But we could have. At some point--finalization, maybe? I don't really know-- the commitment is irreversible, it becomes the same commitment biological parents make. Of course, the commitment becomes irreversible in our hearts long before it reaches that point legally. But the gap between the birth and that point of no return introduces the possibility for adoptive parents to look for perfection, for the baby who is not inconvenient and doesn't cost money.

Both prenatal testing, and the evaluation after birth of babies placed for adoption, cut two ways. On the one hand, they allow parents, both biological and adoptive, to opt out, at least some of the time. On the other hand, they make the birth or the adoption of a disabled child, or one with a genetic predisposition to disease, a choice.

Rothman goes on to say, "In other words, it's not just that parents can choose not to raise a disabled child; it's that they can be judged for doing so."

I have seen this in action second-hand, in the community reactions to a couple who had a third child while their first was in treatment for leukemia. The new baby was severely disabled, and there seems to have been little compassion in many people's responses. Rather, there was a mix of "what business did they have having another baby," and "they got what they deserved." I have actually heard people say, "How did a baby like that get born, in this day and age?" about disabled children. That thought actually went through my own mind when I met a family at the park whose youngest son had no arms or legs.

This has gone all over the place, as so many of these entries seem to. But you see how tangled the skein is--pull on a thread and you don't know what you're going to get. I thank you for thinking about this with me.

Markers of Ethnicity (p. 50)

A baby is removed from its country of origin, an act that one of my graduate students...has pointed out to me is a form of forced migration, and the parents/purchasers work on turning that act into something cute. Something vaguely identified as "culture" or "ethnicity" displaces race and class... That may work for Asian children brought to the United States--but not for our own black children. Can you picture the motif white parents could use for their African American babies that would be the equivalent of pandas for Chinese babies? Watermelons, anyone? You could turn to Africa and kente cloth, but anything that would mark American black would be automatically offensive.

Rothman often has a tone when talking about parents who adopt internationally that suggests she has little sympathy for them; she almost seems disdainful. I hesitate to quote some of these passages because her tone can seem so judgmental, and I have many friends who've adopted internationally and I would not like to offend them. It seems hard for Rothman to see these parents as caught up in the same kind of web of good intentions, doubts, love, and sorrow that those of us who adopt Black American children are. Look at that sentence up there: "Asian children brought to the United States," versus "our own Black children." Who does she imagine herself speaking to? Why do our Black children get to be our own, while Asian children are spoken of differently? Why does she not see adoptive parents of Asian children as part of "us"? I know I do.

At the same time, I take her point about markers of ethnicity. A friend of mine recently referred to her daughter on Facebook as "the Khmer Princess," and I found myself wondering what similar nickname I could possibly give Yehva that would have the same note of playful acknowledgment of where she came from, without being horribly offensive. I won't tell you any of the things I came up with, because none of them seemed playful and they were all horribly offensive. It can't be done.

I did briefly play with calling Yehva "shorty" after we got the birthfather's deposition during which he called her "the shorty" or "my shorty" much more than he called her a baby or his daughter, and I would say to Yehva as I changed her diaper or combed her hair, "You're my shorty." But "shorty" is one of those expressions from Black Vernacular English that you just can't say in a white Midwestern accent without sounding stupid and pathetic, so I gave it up.

I wonder what it means to reference our children's ethnicity when it's different from our own? Is it empowering or distancing to call a daughter "the Khmer princess"? Is it both? Should comments about ethnicity or background be saved for serious discussion, or can they be playful? Should I correct Carl when he announces that Yehva is made of chocolate? How will our children hear comments about their racial and ethnic background? How will they hear our silence?

I think one thing Rothman is getting at is that when we adopt from Cambodia or China, we don't automatically overcome our cultural tendency to exoticize that part of the world and its people. At the same time, though, we don't have the same kind of direct and complex, ongoing relationship of living in a divided society with them--we may know what damage America has done in those parts of the world, but that's mostly history to us, perhaps. Race relations in America are something we struggle with and think about--or, if we don't, they're something we're aware of, we know we're choosing not to grapple with them.

Rothman talks in this chapter on "Motherhood in the Marketplace" about the commodification of babies. She seems to see parents who adopt internationally as complicit in that--look at that "parents/purchasers" comment there, something I don't think she'd ascribe to those of us who adopt in the US. And yet Black babies are commodified here; we have a similar relationship to our children and their culture. I'll try to say a little bit about that.

When David and I were preparing to adopt, we had to take a course on "becoming a transracial family." When the materials for it arrived in the mail, he and I looked through them and were frankly offended. They seemed to assume that we had never thought about race at all, that we had to be told that race was a vexed subject. There was a list of "bad reasons to adopt a black baby" ["because little black babies are so cute," for instance] and another list of nicknames you should not call your black baby ["brown sugar" is one I remember].

Then we had our first class, and except for one lesbian couple, the parents were overwhelmingly clueless about race. "Well, there are no black people where we live, but racism really isn't an issue here," one woman said. "We figure people are just people." And I realized that the teachers of the class, knowing who their students were, had made the class for them.

Last year, a woman said to me guilelessly that she and her husband were thinking about adopting interracially "because little black babies are so cute." That's a piece of the commodification of black babies--this idea that they are something cute we can acquire, like a doll or a Pomeranian. And I sometimes feel, uncomfortably, that there is a little of that even among those of us who know better. Yehva gets a lot of attention everywhere we go--much more than Eric or Carl ever did, cute as they were--and a friend who has also adopted transracially and I were talking about the suspicion that, in a primarily white community, there's a element of not just "what a beautiful baby" but "what a cute black baby you have there."

Rothman's going to have a chapter on The Trophy Child in a bit, and we'll revisit some of these themes in a bit of a different way.