Blood Pressure Rising!

Before I go off and say nembutsu for a while to calm down, here's the interchange that got my blood boiling.

Stage One:
A transracial adoptee writes a post about changing her name to a Korean one at 8asians.com. An elegant piece with what seems like a perfectly understandable viewpoint.

Stage Two:
Supportive comments from some non-adopted Asian-Americans and white adoptive parents.

Stage Three:
Whacko troll calls her an ungrateful communist wretch.

I have a different reaction to people like this than other reform-minded adoptive parents, and also from transracial adoptees. I've been an adoptive parent, or studying to be one, for a few years. But I've been an Asian-American all my life. When I see comments like the one below, adoption is one of the furthest things from my mind; instead, a siren explodes in my head that goes WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP RACIST ATTACK WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP.

By every indication, Chun-Soon Li is American. except for adoption at birth. She has only one family, also American, and by blood only, she has a link to a Korean woman who birthed her, but whom she has never met. And the gifts she brought from Korea to America are limited to her genetic make up, and her life. The articulate nature of her posts, and (those in her support), lead me to believe all of you has benefited from a stable upbringing, significant educational opportunities, and complete freedom from material want, as is the American tradition.

[...]

Such an apt illustration of the soullessness of this horse sh*t movement. The attack is on me and other parents who have had the nerve to adopt internationally. Its implicit, here, though powerfully stated. Unfortunately, there was a time when it was explicit and directed towards good friends of mine. The decision to adopt is by its very nature, extremely personal and soul searching. Theirs is a typical profile, after many years of trying, they exhausted other means to have children naturally, and had recently arrived back in the US with a delightful Chinese daughter, proud and happy parents. A group of us were celebrating, and were somehow introduced to some academics from out of town. After several minutes of small talk, the conversation turned to this very subject, at which time one of the academics proceeded to berate the family with the new arrival; that this baby should have never left China, it was all wrong to take babies from their “culture”. and that it amounted to an act of “cultural imperialism” by the parents (the new mother, now in uncontrollable tears). I noticed a certain satisfaction in this academic woman, a certain smug, “mission accomplished” look about her when she was done.

I’m assuming all of you know better than to try to inject yourself into the private family matters of all-Asian families—that being largely Confucian and conservative—they would hand you your head. Unfortunately, parents adopting internationality tend to liberal, and vulnerable.

I guess it takes academia to elevate every grievance and perceived slight to an equal level with all others, and I really wouldn’t care if the Korean/American adoptee’s plaint were simply: “its all about me” in fact, I’d have some sympathy—but that’s not the case. This movement seeks to inject itself into the very personal and private family decisions of families like mine: “Its all about me, so I want YOU to change”

But there are, as Jackson Brown sings, those: who’s “lives hang in the balance” and their fate is callously, even studiously ignored by this horse shit movement. “Kim, sometimes “politically correct” is, simply, correct.” And Chun-Soon Li, how many times did we hear that last century, and its equivalent—just before the ax fell snuffing out thousands of lives?

Several weeks ago, I got a call from an old friend who had just seen SlumdogMillionare: “you know, I now think I really understand what you’ve been trying to tell me about orphans all these years” —good Kev, except it was staged in India—by Bollywood. Still, the flick does seem to project a certain fundamental truth, as good fiction often does.

So with China in mind, first an account about those who didn’t even get the basic gift all of you adoptees received. Its also noteworthy for those who believe China’s one-child policy is the cause of the massive disparity of boys to girls that these events happened well before PR China:

“Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. For the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. The infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue the ancestral sacrifices.

One mother I met, who was employed by this mission, told the missionary in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her female children within a few days of birth: and, when f fourth was born, so enraged was her husband to discover that it was a girl also that he seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.

Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common among the grave mounds, and be seen there any morning being gnawed by dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child that had been thrown over the wall in the night. Its little arm was crunched and stripped of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately - it died almost immediately.”

Fast-forward now to the current plight of China’s unwanted girls—how bad is it? Its not easy to know, and I’m not going to quote alot more, but to get a perspective, I suggest those interested Google: “The mystery of China’s lost girls” (Asia Times)

Here's my response. I just can't bring myself to present nuanced counterarguments about the voice of the adoptee when the base for his entire worldview is built on a smug white supremacy. I reject it entirely. I think this also shows why I don't involve myself in any kind of environment where people like this are free to spew their verbal abuse. It's way too upsetting. I can't believe how much it sucks that transracial adoptees so often get entangled in arguments with people like this. They don't deserve it... well, no one deserves it, but they really, really, really don't deserve it.

atlasien wrote:

Some points in Kim’s loopy racist rant:

– Asians are inarticulate. Only those who have been sufficiently assimilated can speak English, much less have articulate opinions.

– Adoptees are not allowed to speak about their own experiences. Unlike regular children, they never grow up, and their parents are in charge of interpreting their life forever.

– Being an adoptive parent means you’re white… and Chinese children are never adopted by Chinese or Chinese-Americans. Oh yes, and these adoptive parents are always blameless martyrs whose choices are always above criticism.

– All Asian families are “conservative and Confucian”. This is a neat little generalization showing that Kim is not Asian (whew!) and learned all he knows about Asian cultures from a combination of fortune cookie messages and an adoption agency brochure.

– paragaph [5]: combine irrelevant Jackson Browne lyric, insinuation of creeping communism, ludicrous mixed metaphor about axes snuffing out candles (?!?), place in blender, press “liquefy intelligent thought” (I suppose this wasn’t a point at all)

– Some stories about female infanticide from a century ago proving that the HEATHEN CHINEE are an evil race and should not be trusted to raise their own children. Nevermind that around that same time period in the American West, Chinese immigrants were being randomly lynched and murdered by angry white mobs in organized ethnic cleansing programs.

It must severely disturb similar racist troglodytes to hear that China has been increasing domestic adoption to the point where they’ll probably shut down international soon. But I guess they’ll always have their racist stereotypes to comfort themselves with.

Help Finding Japanese International Adoptee

I've wanted to write this post for several weeks, but other things kept getting in the way. More likely, it's a very sad subject for me because it brings up some frustration. But I need to get it out there, so here it comes.

I know a woman from a forum who, just like me, is the child of an adoptee from Japan and also an adoptive parent. She goes by "celebratewewill" on the forum. Her mother is the adoptee. C's mother is dying and C is trying to uncover her roots in Japan.

My father and her mother were both indirect victims of WWII. My father's bio father died on a battleship in the Pacific, his mother died shortly thereafter, and he was sent away to a family in a mountain village that could take him in. C's mother was found/abandoned/given up after the war. She was taken to an orphanage and adopted internationally by an American couple.

My father is 100% Japanese (though he may not be fully ethnic Japanese, but that's another story) both biologically and culturally. C's mother is mixed-race and was raised in America, and was not interested in looking back. What they both have in common is the stoic survivor mentality. The past is past, there's no use talking about it, suck it up and move on.

Being the child of an adoptee with this kind of perspective can be frustrating. We have a major gap in our history. As my father said once as he was in a poetic mood, "my family tree is withered".

To explore our past, we have to travel through our parent's trauma. Do we have the right? Is this partly our story, or does it belong wholly to them? It's hard to weigh all the ethical and emotional factors.

These frustrated yearnings wax and wane over a lifetime. At times of birth and death, they become especially powerful.

C's mother will soon pass away, and the link to her ancestors will become more tenuous.

Here are some details she provided me:

• The details I have are almost all verbal, and who knows how much as been added or subtracted. We do have a lot of "adoption papers" in Japanese, if i can find where they are hidden in my parent's house. Her papers have her name as Misao Okuno (I am going on memory only, I may have mispelled), dob 8-11-52.
• My dad says he remembers my grandpa (mom's dad) mentioning a "Reny Sawada" who ran the orphanage; he thought it was a Catholic orphanage, and they targeted Americans to adopt these children who were half Japanese. I found a Miki Sawada who fits this, the Elizabeth Sanders Home. But i'm thinking if she was just brought to the home by a stranger, no name or dob would be available. I don't know how often the children's mothers brought them directly to the orphanage; anything I can find is that these children were found on the street, sometimes dead. I don't know really how her original name and bday could have remained with her.
• My dad said that a few years ago, he contacted the japanese embassy and forwarded copies of all the papers they have. They couldn't figure out where she got her name (I don't know if that meant they did a search of her name and hometown, though, like you suggested). Next time I'm down visiting, I'm going to make copies of everything for myself.
• My dad does remember my mom's dad telling him that the orphanage told him she was Japanese/Portuguese. How they would have known that is beyond me, if she was indeed found on the streets eating out of the garbage, as the story goes. It would explain my brother's appearance, but perhaps more Brazilian since he's so dark-skinned.

Here's some advice I gave her:

• In Japan there are very detailed family records called koseki. Back in that time period, all facts of birth and adoption would be recorded in the koseki. Today, to access the koseki for the home region you would need to prove your relation and right to access it. I know this stuff in general but I don't write or speak Japanese so I can't help anymore than that. It's not certain C's mother would be in the koseki under that name. When my dad wanted to find out more about his biological parents, all he had to do was go to the koseki and look them up.
  
• I suggested that C get a genetic test. That could at least tell her the ethnicity of her mother's mother. There are millions of Japanese-Brazilians, many of mixed ancestry, but I can't recall circumstances of why they would actually be in Japan during the immediate postwar period. Perhaps for reconstruction work? I am going to ask my dad about that next time he's in town.
  
• Adoption.com is a site I would never recommend because of multiple ethical challenges and censorship issues. Nevertheless, it's one of the highest-traffic adoption sites on the web. At the forum there were several adoptees who said they were adopted from the Elizabeth Sanders home. I suggested that C contact them and see if she could learn from their searches.
  

If you have any suggestions or resources please post them here or email me. You could also contact C directly by registering with Adoption Threads and messaging "celebratewewill".

The Asian Flush Article

This story has spread all over the Asian-American blogosphere. Also, my mother emailed it to me.

NYTimes: Drinkers’ Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: March 20, 2009

People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more than embarrassment. The flushing may indicate an increased risk for a deadly throat cancer, researchers report.

The flushing response, which may be accompanied by nausea and a rapid heartbeat, is caused mainly by an inherited deficiency in an enzyme called ALDH2, a trait shared by more than a third of people of East Asian ancestry — Japanese, Chinese or Koreans. As little as half a bottle of beer can trigger the reaction.

The deficiency results in problems in metabolizing alcohol, leading to an accumulation in the body of a toxin called acetaldehyde. People with two copies of the gene responsible have such unpleasant reactions that they are unable to consume large amounts of alcohol. This aversion actually protects them against the increased risk for cancer.

But those with only one copy can develop a tolerance to acetaldehyde and become heavy drinkers. [...]

Fascinating. It's a little academic for me now, because I don't drink anymore. I'm not sure if I have one copy or two copies, but the flush always gave me massive problems. My father has it and so do I.

When I was a teenager (and I moved away from home at the age of 15, so don't blame my mother for this!) my circle of friends were heavy drinkers. I'm talking malt liquor and Kool-Aid-mixed-with-Everclear type of heavy drinkers. But drinking didn't come naturally to me. I had to work really, really hard to keep up. Here's a chart of my physiological reaction to different levels of alcohol.

1 beer: I turn bright red. My heart starts beating faster. Everyone asks me how I got the terrible sunburn, and I have to explain, "no, I'm just experiencing an allergic reaction to alcohol that some Asians happen to have". This is very irritating.
2-3 beers: I turn a slightly darker shade of bright red. My heart is pounding, and I begin shivering, no matter what the temperature. I get dizzy and have problems standing up straight.
4 beers: I go sit down on a couch and close my eyes, because I feel so bad. This isn't anything like passing out... I'm basically conscious, I just don't feel like moving.
5-6 beers: If I force myself past the napping stage, I finally get to be drunk. This is the part of drinking alcohol everyone actually enjoys, I'm guessing. I'm drunk enough to ignore the pounding heartrate and nausea. I'm actually starting to have some fun.
7+ beers: OH NO... IT'S... GODZILLA!!!!!
The angry mutant lizard brain takes control. I begin staggering around with vicious intent, bouncing off the walls, screaming obscene insults at anyone in range, and flailing my arms at them. Luckily, my depth perception is nonexistent at this point, so I don't hit anyone. Then comes the projectile vomiting.

The worst part of all of this is that I've never actually "blacked out". That is, I remember everything I did the next morning.

Anyway, I gave up on heavy drinking by the time I was in my early twenties. When I was in grad school I'd drink at parties, but I'd never go past the napping stage. At a certain point, I'd just say, "Excuse me, I need to rest for a while, I'll be back in about half an hour". Everyone thought it was bizarre and antisocial behavior, but they should have been grateful to me for stopping the Godzilla attack.

And I can't drink wine at all, or champagne. The effects are much worse than with any form of alcohol. After one glass of wine, I feel paralyzed and on the verge of death because my heart starts beating so fast. I've had people actually get visibly angry at me because I refuse a glass of wine in social situations, even after I explain it's not that I want to refuse their hospitality, it's that I can't. I'll say "I'm allergic to wine" and then they'll deny that it's even possible.

Today, I just don't drink alcohol. Or maybe I'll have one sip of someone else's drink.

Alcoholism makes me really sad. Both my grandparents were alcoholics. My grandfather was a happy drunk. As a child, his drinking never bothered or affected me, and by the time I was an adult he was too ill with cancer to continue drinking. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a mean drunk. I once saw her throw a footstool at my grandfather across the dinner table, just because she was in a particularly nasty mood. She never hit me, but I was always a bit scared of her.

My father also turns bright red. My mother once saw him literally pass out in the soup. He used to be a drinker -- not a particularly heavy one -- but has now quit because of liver issues.

I know that a lot of Asians who have the reaction keep drinking a lot anyway, just like I used to when I was a teenager. Drinking is so much of a social and cultural thing. There's a positive aspect as well as a terribly destructive aspect. All over the world, it's a method for bonding and forming networks. I'm glad I am not a part of it anymore, but being a non-drinker does make me feel cut off and isolated sometimes.

A Picture of Sunny

Here it is!



I love this drawing. A classmate and friend of his drew it. She's very talented. I think it captures Sunny's personality in a wonderful way. The beaming smile! The feet, constantly in motion.

For Sunny, art is not his best subject. He's very imaginative, but it doesn't hold his focus. Whenever I see him doing art with other kids, he treats it like a competition, and he always yells DONE!!! first, so he can get up and run around the room for a while. I'm thinking of signing him up for structured art lessons, not so that he improves technically, but so that he can learn to find more enjoyment in expressing himself through art.

Sunny's drawing below loosely represents an illustration of a poem we talked about. It's a caravan in a desert, and they're passing each other water from the oasis. The top got truncated a bit, but it's cut-out heart with the words "Love You" written on it. He loves to write things like that.

How Blogging Communities Can Help Kids - Neurofeedback Example

As anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows, our long-term goal is to get Sunny off his atypical antipsychotic medication. We tried at the end of last year, but his performance at school plummeted. Right now we're trying neurofeedback. I've researched it extensively, I understand the mechanism and I think it might work for him.

The diagnostic testing has already confirmed what I already thought. Sunny doesn't have "typical" ADHD. He has overactive areas of his brain that hurt his ability to focus on a task without becoming distracted or emotional. They also hurt his ability to self-soothe. The goal is to teach him to consciously or subconsciously lower the frequency of his brainwaves. It's like showing him a series of exercises for his brain, and the more he does these exercises in the sessions, the more he'll be able to flex those muscles (thereby calming himself) in real-life situations.

Sunny loves it, of course, because it involves playing video games.

We hit a major roadblock on the first week, though. We were planning on two sessions a week. Apparently, one of these sessions is going to use a neurofeedback variant called the "LENS System". Instead of the usual passive sensors reading brainwaves and displaying them on a screen, part of this system involves feeding low-voltage electric waves into the brain via a sensor cap.

Whoah!

This was not explained to me well. After I did the research, the whole thing sounds fishy. For example, one website claims "Symptoms associated with ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD, migraines and Asperger’s can improve significantly with LENS". Where is the study? I realize it's difficult and expensive to do truly good double-blind studies, but I can't find anything.

I'm extremely suspicious of alternative therapies, especially ones marketed to parents of special needs children. I know about the placebo effect and I don't trust anecdotal evidence. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I also want to know how something works before I try it.

I'm suspicious of traditional medicine as well, considering that Sunny is on his current medication not because a caring expert made an informed decision, but because some psychiatrist who met him for less than five minutes kept prescribing him a rainbow of different medications and finally stuck with the one that happened not to have too many apparent short-term side effects.

Anyway, the main neurofeedback doctor assured me that the LENS System treatments administered by the other doctor are safe, effective and would speed up the treatment process. I told him I had to do some more research and would get back to him. These were my concerns:

1) the LENS system was feeding electricity into my son's brain. That doesn't sound safe.
2) but if it is safe, and the voltages are so low that he can't even feel it, then they're too low to do anything at all, which means I'm paying a huge amount of money to watch my son sitting in a chair with a funny hat on.
3) Unlike regular neurofeedback, I do not understand the basic mechanism for how the LENS system functions.

Later that day I thought of Brenda McCreight, a neurofeedback therapist and adoptive parent of many special needs children. She wrote the scariest book in the world, which is how I knew of her in the first place. It's an awesome book, it's just very scary. If you've read it, you know what I mean. Then she started up a great blog focused on her adoptive parenting.

So I emailed her. I introduced myself and described my situation in detail, then asked, "Can you please tell me if you have any experience or knowledge, for good or bad, of the LENS system? I would be very appreciative of whatever advice you would care to give. Thanks!"

Here is her email response:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting me. I use neurofeedback extensively in my practice but I have chosen to not use, or get training in, LENS at this time. I am always concerned about putting anything into the vulnerable brains of our childen and although I have read extensively on LENS it has yet to sell me on the safety or even the efficacy- there simply isn't enough research to back it up at this time. For older children and adults with anxiety, I am now using HeartMath http://www.heartmath.com/ but I find it's too challenging for most 6 year olds so I stick to NF with them as well.

You will be able to find thousands of practitioners who swear by LENS, and maybe it's my own lack of understanding, but I won't use it on my own children or my clients. Maybe in a few years when there is more research, but not now.

I can only give you my opinion as I am not an expert in LENS, but you asked for my opinion - so there it is.

Good luck with your adoption - 6 is a wonderful age.

Brenda

I asked her for permission to post this response on my blog, and she consented.

I told the doctor that I am not comfortable with the treatments at this time. We're going to have to reschedule or go to once-a-week treatments. If I see some studies, I could change my mind.

I'm really glad that I was able to get such helpful and reasonable advice from Brenda McCreight. I'm also grateful that she is so forthright about putting her advice out in the open. So many professionals like to keep things behind closed doors for fear of offending their peers.

I've lost some trust in the main doctor. I feel like he sprang this on me. But I'm going to stick with the regular treatments.

Blogging, Anonymity, Trolls and Hatred of Motherhood

T0rina has just had to make Busy Intersection private because of a troll.

I've seen this happen before. Navigating the Maze is another foster care blog that closed to the public.

In a different but related happening, at Heart, Mind and Seoul (a blog by a transracial adoptee blogging honestly and forthrightly about racial issues) the blogger had someone threaten her children. She went private but then came back public.

All of this makes me so angry, and at the same time fearful.

I'd advise anyone connected to my blogging community: take as many precautions as you can. Heart, Mind and Seoul once used her real name. Busy Intersection posted multiple pictures. Pictures focus the attention of trolls and reveal vulnerability. It's like a deer flashing their underbelly to a wolf. Then again, Navigating the Maze stringently followed anonymity rules, and still got zapped. I'm not blaming any of these people for being victimized, I'm just trying to find a pattern and analyze the situation and predict the behavior of their attackers.

I don't use my real name or the real name of anyone I know. I don't post pictures. I do give my location, which is a major vulnerability. At first I thought it wouldn't be a problem, since I live in a county with a population of 700,000. However, two totally separate people have recognized my real life identity from my blog. After all, I'm an Asian hapa woman with a white husband and a black son. That's pretty damn conspicuous. The world is smaller than one might think. But I can't hide my racial vulnerability without removing the entire reason for this blog to exist.

Other things I do: last year, I changed a setting in Blogger that makes my posts not come up near the top of Google searches. I was getting too many hits from people looking for stuff like my collard green recipe. I comment a lot at Racialicious and have guest-posted there and Rachel's Tavern, but in future, I'm not going to link back to my personal blog. I enjoy participating in some really controversial topics at anti-racist and feminist sites, but I think I might need to change my nickname and not guest-blog or comment anymore as "atlasien".

Trolls love to vampirically suck as much mental energy as possible from their victims. I'm already a victim just because of all the time-consuming crap I listed above. For anyone interested in finding out more about troll psychology and strategies, check these two articles: one a deceptively light-hearted but insightful list, and the other a long journalistic investigative report.

There's a special kind of troll that attacked T0rina (and by attacked, I mean threatening to report her to CPS for having a "bad attitude" and a "potty mouth"). I've noticed they seem to always be men. They're motivated not by nihilistic sadism, but by a warped sense of righteous anger. They have the virgin/whore complex applied to mothers: the perfect mother/bad mother dynamic. The perfect mother is endlessly self-sacrificing, has undying love for her children and exists only so much as she loves her children. Nothing as corruptible as mere human nature would ever threaten her identity as a perfect mother.

The bad mother is anyone who is not a perfect mother. Bad mothers need to be put in their place and ground into the dirt. A lot of them are of the wrong race, or the wrong sexuality or the wrong social class. They don't deserve to have children.

Bloggers like T0rina -- prolific, honest, comprehensive -- perform an invaluable service for current and prospective foster care parents. She is parenting a child with RAD, FASD, cerebral palsy and sexual predatory behavior. A child with severe special needs that will probably never love her back. Her experience reinforces a very important truth: love is not enough. This is something that got pounded into us during our foster care training. They even had each one of us pour water into a cup with a hole in the bottom. "The water is your love. The cup is your child. What happens if the hole isn't closed by the time the water runs out?"

The answer is commitment. I'm much more of a selfish American than I am Japanese, and I'd be miserable in Japanese society, but I do really appreciate the value that Japanese place on commitment, duty and obligation. According to the fuzzier American pop-psych thinking, the right thing to do is feel, and you have to feel what's right. This ideology fails miserably when it comes to caretaking. If you love and love and don't get any love back, your love is not going to stay the same... because we're human beings, not freaking robot love fountains. You have to have something else that keeps you going, and by extension, keeps your child going.

One of the most difficult parts of being the parent of a special needs child is how much it isolates you. One of my friends told me, a few minutes after meeting Sunny, "he's just a normal 6-year-old!" and kept repeating how wonderful, happy and healthy and normal he was. I live in a more complex reality, but she doesn't want to hear about it.

And my case is easy. Sunny's special needs are not severe. He has some anxiety, some irritating behaviors; at infrequent and not-unpredictable intervals, he'll freak out and try to punch me in the face. Otherwise, he soaks up love and gives back love... it's not hard to be proud of my son and happy when he's around.

Parents of special needs children find online communities literally life-saving and life-changing. Finally, there are people who will listen. People who can give advice and suggest therapies and tell you you're not crazy and a bad mother for feeling or thinking the things you do. People like T0rina who explain how commitment works and what it looks like.

I'm not saying they're utopias. I've written before about online communities that create group-think, and an attitude that everyone is above criticism. I've given advice before (to international adoptive parents) that was received as an attack on someone's motherhood when it really wasn't. But giving someone honest advice, or criticizing certain institutional practices of parenting and child welfare... this is not the same as telling someone they are a bad mother and should have their children taken away because they don't fit your deranged fantasy of a perfect mother.

Adoptive parents of children from foster care do need to be held to a higher standard. But this higher standard should not be about us, or our value as human beings... it should be focused on the children. Not "am I good enough?" but "am I good enough to raise this child?" This is not about what we are, or even what we feel, it's about what we do. A child doesn't care about your individual moral worth or deservingness. That's not a step on Maslow's hierarchy.

Being involved in this world long enough will usually make you less judgmental of any kind of parent. For example, my sister-in-law's parenting choices are ones that often make me cringe. She feeds my 7-year-old niece a steady stream of soda and Cheetos and lets her play Grand Theft Auto all day on the weekends. But my niece is also safe, and loved with a fierce commitment. If only all children were so lucky... for the first years of his life, my son was not.

Everytime I hear of a troll attack like this, it reminds me of an experience I had in my childhood.

I was 11, and I was alone at home. I'd had dinner with my grandparents. My mother was out on a business trip and would not be returning until 9pm. I'd been trusted to stay home alone for a few hours.

The phone rang. I picked up and said hello. A man with a deep voice breathed heavily for a few seconds. He said "little girl, I'm coming to get you" and then hung up.

I called my grandfather, but I was so scattered when I talked to him on the phone, he didn't understand the urgency. I thought about walking twenty feet over to the neighbor's house, but the man might "get me" on the way there. So I turned off all the lights, grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen and crouched hidden under the desk next to the front door. If he came in that way, I'd at least go down fighting. I crouched under the desk, holding the knife, quietly crying and shivering, for the next half hour, until I heard the most welcome sound in the world: my mother's bracelets jangling as she walked up the sidewalk towards the front door.

The man who called on the phone got a fleeting amount of pleasure, took no risk, and made me experience some of the worst fear of my life. It's a simple equation. It taps deeply into the corrupt part of human nature, and I wish I knew the cure.

Back from the visit

I'm still exhausted.

The visit was a lot of fun for Sunny, and mostly fun for my mother and me. Sunny's foster mom organized his birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and his grandma and all his foster brothers and sisters and his foster cousins and some of his friends from his old school came over. He received a ridiculous number of presents. Most of them are being shipped back to Atlanta.

BB is doing great. His personality is a lot like Sunny, even at seven months. He likes to cry, he likes to laugh and he likes to jump up and down. I learned how he likes to be held and all about his habits. I know nothing about babies, so this is all important stuff.

The most stressful part was (not) meeting BB's dad. He wanted to meet at the restaurant where he worked at 1pm. I was there at 1pm, he wasn't. I called and he told me he worked a double the night before and had the day off, but couldn't tell me in time.

It seems part of a pattern of general avoidance and shirking. Like not visiting his newborn son for seven months. He could have left a message for me. He could have gone to the meeting even if he wasn't scheduled to work at that time. He could have met later... I floated the idea of meeting him somewhere else shortly before we left, but he couldn't do that either.

Then when we talked on the phone later, he said he wanted to start the procedure to give up custody at his next court date. He wants BB to be placed with us and wants to have an open adoption. His goal is to get a job as a truck driver and move to Atlanta, where he already has a lot of relatives living.

I thanked him and said I just wanted to see BB in a committed home. If he could commit 100% to parenting, that would be great as well, but if not, we would commit to BB and to raising BB and Sunny together. Also, I warned him that open adoption was not a guarantee of anything. It would be a relationship mostly between us at the early stages, but then it would become a relationship between him and BB, and I have no way of predicting what's going to happen 5 or 10 or 15 years in the future. Finally, I told him that the process was going to drag on for a while, so if he wanted BB to be placed with us he would have to be firm about it and definitely show up at all his court dates.

It sounds like I badgered him... it really wasn't that bad. I gave him positive encouragement and said I knew this was a really hard time for him. It's just that he was really very vague, and I was forced to take the lead. I do wish we could have met. I have no idea what he even looks like. It's hard to believe he came to this decision without even meeting us! I did leave him an envelope at his work with some articles on open adoption and some pictures of us.

I felt like I got two body blows over the weekend. The first was when BB's worker told me that even if BB's dad is in full accord and moves quickly, we might get placement at the end of this year. It depends on interstate paperwork more than anything. The second blow was when I realized BB's dad wasn't going to show up to meet me after I'd been psyching myself up for the visit the whole weekend. It's all very stressful, but I just have to keep an even keel. Having my mother there was very helpful.

At least I know BB is in a great place right now.

Sunny and BB's foster mom always fights for what's best for her kids, even when they're not "her" kids. That weekend, she had two children staying with her who weren't even foster kids. She had fostered the 3-year-old from when he was a little baby, but the courts had ruled for reunification. This boy also happens to be Sunny's old buddy and Sunny always talks about him. Sunny was so happy to play with him on this visit... he doesn't know quite how he feels about BB yet, but he's full of love and affection for the 3-year-old. Anyway, after reunification, this boy went to live with his mom in another county, but she still has a lot of problems and has been dropping both of her two younger children off with ex-foster-mom for weeks at a time. For a year. BB's foster mom could easily report her, but she doesn't want to, because then the children might end up at a different foster home and might not receive the best care. The 3-year-old's little sister was staying there too, plus another 3-year-old she's officially fostering. That's a total of four under-fours including BB. And she seems to handle it all effortlessly in a bright, cheerful, spotless house.

The talk with BB's worker (who was Sunny's original worker) was also helpful, despite the body blow. She knew their mother very well. In fact, the workers seemed to be the only people in her life that gave her consistent positive feedback and structure. I'm never going to know exactly why their family was so messed up that they allowed both Sunny and BB to go into foster care. Both BB's worker and foster mom warned me that the grandmother's stories changed with the wind. Race was definitely an issue, but not the only one. Sunny's mom's cousin has children whose fathers are black, and Sunny's grandmother is very close to all of them.

According to the worker, the underlying issue was that Sunny's mother's family was very much like the one ruled by my egomaniac uncle. Family members were played off against each other, constantly measured and found wanting, expelled and embraced in alternating patterns according to the latest power play.

At least Sunny's women maternal relatives tried. Sunny's grandma wasn't very effective at keeping the family together, but she cares deeply. The men are a more disappointing bunch. Educated, able-bodied middle-class white men with more resources than 99% of the people on this planet, but they just can't be bothered to drive ten minutes to visit... or even look at a photo. Sunny's grandmother said she tried to send some pictures of BB to Sunny's grandfather (they divorced a while back) but when he replied, he just accused her of "being morbid". He pays for a lavish funeral for his daughter but won't stretch a finger for his daughter's children.

We spent a lot of time with Sunny's grandma over the weekend. It was a bittersweet for her, especially at Sunny's birthday party. She often cried quietly to the side.

The visit helped me put a lot of the pieces together. I didn't go out investigating or ask probing questions, I just listened to what a lot of different people told me.

BB's father is older and has several other children including a teenager. He's not parenting any of them, but he pays child support on some. No one knows him well, for good or for bad. He doesn't have the kind of criminal record that would bar him from parenting BB, but his position in life isn't very good right now either. When I talked to him, he pinned a lot of his hopes on moving away and becoming a truck driver. I hope things are going to work out for him.

Sunny's mother's cousin, who raised Sunny for at least a year, knew Sunny's father. He has a very bad mark on his record and was also totally incapable of parenting, but other than that, she says he wasn't all that bad, or currently dangerous. If we ever want to contact him, it would probably be easy because you can look him up in a web database... I think that says everything you need to know about the Very Bad Mark. I'm filing this away for future reference. Far future, perhaps when Sunny is 16.

Hopefully BB's dad will follow through. Apparently it's very common for people in these situations, especially men, to simply refuse the responsibility of deciding. Instead of saying "I can't/won't parent", they do nothing at all, and that way let the courts make the decision for them. But I think BB's dad is ready to take at least some responsibility.

I'll probably have another post on open adoption soon... time to try and wind down a bit more from the visit.

Sunny's behavior since the visit has been pretty good considering all the emotions that must have been brought up. Who knows what the fallout is going to be. Right now, he's concentrating mostly on all the loot he picked up from his visit. I think one of the most positive parts was seeing his little 3-year-old buddy. He's been away for almost a year, but everyone is still there... that must mean a lot to him.

ETA: I forgot to include medical stuff amidst the parental info dump. My ankle burn has not healed. It got better, then it got worse, and now it itches horribly. I went to a walk-in clinic today and got a tentative diagnosis of a fungal infection. I'm waiting for lab results, but at least it's probably not MRSA. I got some antibiotic pills and antifungal cream. My medical expenses for this burn are now approaching the triple digits and I'm seriously thinking about calling Sunbeam and threatening to sue unless they give me money for burning me with their stupid heating pad. On the reproductive front, my RE tried to put me on 225cc of Follistim a day for my next IUI, but I just flat-out refused. I'll take my lower chances with a vastly cheaper and less stressful non-medicated cycle.

How the Talk Went

It went sort of as I expected.

He says he's feeling very confused.

I'm going to meet him this weekend at the restaurant where he works to talk some more. He said he wanted to find out more about open adoption, so I printed out some articles I found on the internet.

There's very little that applies specifically to his situation. Most of the stuff that's not for adoptive parents is geared toward young pregnant single mothers. I searched for articles written from a male or African-American perspective and couldn't really find anything.

I don't think he plans on parenting... it's more a case of choosing between relatives. The fact that some of his relatives live in Dekalb might be a major factor.

When I meet him, I'm just going to talk a little bit about ourselves and Sunny and give him some pictures. I'll say again that I can't tell him what the right thing to do is. The only advice I would give him is that whatever he decides for his son should be a situation that's as committed as absolutely possible. If BB starts getting bounced around between different relatives and foster homes and caseworkers, he'll end up with the same psychological scars as Sunny, or even worse.

He did say that he agrees with me that BB and Sunny should have a relationship whether they live together or not.

I'm off to the airport in an hour with Nana and Sunny... I'll update in a few days.

About to Talk to BB's Dad - Any advice?

THE RECAP:

I met Sunny's first worker at Sunny's mother's funeral in August. She became BB (Baby Brother's) worker soon after that. Since the funeral, I have had no contact with her. We've just been waiting, waiting, waiting to hear of any word on BB's case.

BB's grandmother has been very supportive of us adopting BB. She tells me again and again that Mommy ___ wanted BB to go live with his brother and us if anything happened to her. In fact, every time I talk to her on the phone, she tells me the same story about her daughter's dying wish, and starts choking up and crying a bit.

I don't handle conversations like this well... at least I don't think I do. I get very uncomfortable and don't know what to say. This is a big reason I'm bringing my mother with me on this visit. My mother always knows what to say. Her emotional IQ is at supergenius level.

I have been hoping to talk to BB's worker for a while. Everything I hear of the case comes secondhand, from BB's grandmother or foster mom. For example, BB's grandmother told me that BB's dad said that maybe his mother could take care of BB. Then she said she investigated and had a background check run on BB's other grandmother. According to the investigation, she would not be a good candidate, and was neither able nor probably willing, especially since BB's dad already had other kids that he wasn't taking care of, and neither was she.

When Sunny's mom died, BB was in limbo. His dad had the right to raise him, but he equivocated. He didn't come to the funeral and never went to visit his child. His relatives had a say in what would happen to him, so Sunny's grandmother asked that he be placed with Sunny's old foster mom, which is what happened. Sunny's foster mom already had a baby placement, but she was willing to take BB as well because of the special circumstances.

Seven months later, the state is about to file for permanent custody. BB's dad needs to make his decision. Today, he met his child for the first time.

That's what BB's caseworker just told me.

We have no legal standing at this point, of course. But if BB's dad decides not take care of BB, and if his close blood relatives don't make a vigorous case, we're the default.

My position throughout this is to say that yes, of course we want BB. I really had no expectations of adopting a baby going into all this, but we're willing to do it because it would be important to keep Sunny and BB together, and because their mother wanted that.

NOW:

BB's caseworker told me that BB's dad would like to talk to us. He's still making up his mind. She's not happy that it's taken him seven months to get to this point, but also says that he's exhibiting more care and concern than many other parents she's worked with in the system.

I know basically what I'm going to say to him. I'm not going to tell him "this is right" or "this is wrong". He has to make his own decision; we can tell him how we'll act according to that decision. If he signs away his rights and lets us adopt BB, we'd be willing to have the same openness we have now with Sunny's grandmother. Calls/emails/pictures, plus a visit once a year. And if he decides to raise BB, we would hope that he does a similar thing and encourages the brothers to keep in touch and have a relationship even though they live apart.

Sunny's grandmother says he's a marijuana dealer. I know his first name, and his race (black). That's all I know. I'm not going to make any hasty judgments. It's not impossible for people to pull their lives together quickly. But it is kind of improbable.

The worst case is if he decides to raise BB, starts the process... then backs out and stops visiting or won't take care of BB. BB would get shuttled around, leading to the same kind of baseline anxiety that has plagued Sunny's life.

I'll be calling him tonight or tomorrow night. First I'll call BB's foster mom and ask her input, and I'll also talk to Sunny's grandmother again.

My mother, Sunny and I are leaving for his birth state visit in a few days. We might be visiting with BB's dad as well, now.

Got any advice for me? This is kind of nerve-wracking.

I didn't sign up for this!

Atlanta thundersnow? I've lived here for more than a decade but I still haven't come to grips with the fact that we do sometimes have a snow day in winter. It just doesn't seem fair.

Guy phoned me last night to ask, "do you think it's really going to snow tomorrow?" I said, "No way. It's 60 degrees right now, the weatherman must be on crack." Then around noon today a bunch of nasty wet snowflakes started cascading down. Argh!

I HATE snow. I prefer climates where there are only two seasons, a wet season and a dry season, and absolutely no "winter" allowed. Sunny wanted me to play with him in the snow... ha! Not likely. I watched him play for a while, but the snow was so muddy and slushy that he and the other neighborhood kids couldn't really do much with it.

We couldn't do any more activities today because the roads are a huge mess. In order for Sunny to get his requisite physical activity, I had to resort to chasing him around the house in endless circles while trying to "whip" him with a fleece scarf. We tried it the other way around, but he's too fast. It's exhausting, but since my alternative is being woken up at 4 in the morning, I had a strong motivation to keep staggering after him.

Besides the snow, another annoying aspect of this weekend is the nasty little burn I got on Friday. That's when I went to sleep with a Sunbeam electric heating and massage pad at the foot of the bed to keep my toes warm. Something horribly wrong happened and I woke up the next morning with a second-degree burn on my ankle. It soon swelled into a burn blister the size of a dollar coin, protruding about half an inch upwards. To keep the blister from painfully bursting I've been jury-rigging protection for it. I create a thick square of padding from tissue and gauze, cut a hole in the center the size of the blister, tape the padding over the blister and onto my ankle, tape a carefully-cut-out plastic lid onto the padding and onto my ankle, then wrap a flexible fabric bandage around my ankle. I air it out for an hour every morning and night, replacing the whole thing each time. I'd put up a picture of the burn blister, but it's just too freaky.

I've decided what we're getting Sunny for his birthday. Infrared stealth goggles (surprisingly cheap!) and a keytar. Soon, he'll be able to sneak up to people in the dark and assault them with loud, tinny power chords.