Literary Groaner

Here's a funny conversation we had on vacation that shows how much Sunny likes to play with words.

We were trying to coax him to write longer sentences in his travel journal than "I like the museum" or "I went on the train". Sunny was arguing for shorter sentences and was getting pretty frustrated.

"But I want to write 'I like the museum'! Why can't you let me write 'I like the museum'?"

"We already explained, it's more interesting for people to read longer sentences. Why don't you use just ONE adjective about something you liked at the museum? Pick an adjective, and then we'll give you a tip for how to use it in the sentence. Besides, you already used 'I like the museum' yesterday."

"But I want to write 'I like the museum'! Why can't you let me write 'I like the museum'?"

Guy: sighing. "I guess we don't have a Balzac on our hands."

Me: "Don't be so pessimistic. Maybe we have a Hemingway instead."

Sunny: "Or a Milky Way!"

I'm a Legal Mom, and Other Updates

Our adoption finally went through last month. Yes, I'm way behind on the news. Sunny is our legal son!

I'd like to report that some pre-adoption behavior cleared up, but things are pretty much the same. I don't think the adoption ceremony meant that much to him. In the future, it's going to end up figuring a lot more in his thoughts, but he'd already accepted us as his permanent parents a while back.

We happened to draw the oldest, palest, gloomiest judge in Atlanta. He said some nice words, but also gave an odd speech about how hard it was to make a success of yourself in this cold cruel world even if you came from a family with two biological parents and no troubles. My mother cried. I videotaped everything. Sunny loved getting to dress up and shake hands with the judge. It's a striking picture... Sunny in his sharp black dress pants and black dress shirt, the judge in his long black robes.

We have to wait a while for the amended birth certificate, and then get a new social security number. The amended birth certificate is a terrible practice and the source of needless injustice for adoptees. It won't harm Sunny, in practical terms (I have several copies of his Original Birth Certificate, which doesn't list his father's name, and he knows quite well who his biological mother was) but I wish it wasn't the common practice.

In practical terms, now that he's officially adopted we can:

• Allow our friends the neighbors to drive him to the pool or to the movies
• Have a babysitter without making them get a drug test, a physical and fingerprinting
• Sublet our basement suite or use it for charitable purposes like hosting
• Go on trips without getting permission first
• Get him a passport so he can visit Japan or Mexico with us
• If anything horrible happens to us, he won't be taken right back into the foster care system

Another thing we are now allowed to do, which we weren't before, is spank him. And this was something we did try, on the advice of our therapist. It's embarrassing to blog it. But I thought it was worth a try. Her argument was that it shouldn't reactivate trauma for him because we know he wasn't ever physically abused. And it would help him internalize that hitting people is wrong. We tried it several times -- three swats on the butt -- when he went into a violent rage and lashed out. At first, it worked. It completely stopped a rage that would normally last 15-20 minutes and made him enter the remorseful crying stage right away, instead of at the very end when he was exhausted from being held down.

Then spanking stopped working. It just didn't affect him at all anymore. The rages -- two or three times a week, 15-30 minutes in duration -- were unaltered. The last time we spanked, he yelled that he wished he was bigger, because then he would spank dad back... "WITH A PADDLE!". We might have gotten another favorable "short-circuit the rage" effect if we'd stepped up the physical punishment beyond three mild swats, but that's something we had agreed way beforehand we wouldn't do. One try, and then we'd move on. But I can see that's how parental abuse gets started. A little works, but then it stops working. So try a little more... and I don't want to go there.

I don't have much experience with physical punishment. My father used to whack me on the top of the head when I was a kid (and tried to do it into my teens, actually) but it never had the effect he wanted.

Scratch that technique off the list. No more spanking, ever.

We're starting to see a new therapist. I don't want to discount our old one, and we'll continue seeing her irregularly. She's given us some great advice in the past. She's a mature African-American woman with a ton of experience who is incredibly insightful when it comes to a lot of stuff, but we're going to try someone totally opposite: a young white guy who lists foster care experience and has a PsyD instead of an LCSW. We'll see how that works. I'm also setting up an appointment with a psychiatrist (a new one, not the icky stupid one) in August to discuss medication.

One technique we're going to start soon, suggested by a friend of my mother's, is audio/video feedback. This means recording the bad language and hitting he uses during a rage and showing him later, when he's calm.

I'm a bit skeptical about the neurofeedback treatment. It doesn't seem to have altered his rage frequency in any way. But the one thing I do believe it has helped with is his sleeping. Since he started neurofeedback, he hasn't woken us up at 4AM anymore, liked he used to do about once a week. And that's really huge once you start thinking about it. It improves our quality of life and mental state tremendously.

He used to have frequent nightmares about a man chasing him with a chainsaw trying to cut his foot off, but he rarely reports those anymore, and I ask him every morning. I'm sure he still has nightmares, they're just not as strong or frequent, and he's learned to put himself back to sleep after waking up to one.

His foster mom said he used to wake up the whole house at 5AM on Saturday morning, just running out in the hall and screaming and screaming until he made sure all 10+ family members were awake.

I'm not sure if we're going to continue with the full course of neurofeedback, and my high hopes for it have adjusted somewhat. Still, I think the sleep improvement was worth it.

We're arranging a visit with his bio grandma in a few months. She'll be driving over and staying with us for several days. I think this will be a good chance for them to bond a bit more and talk about his maternal family.

She sends us pictures of BB every Wednesday, which is when she has visitation. And BB is doing well, but it's gotten so depressing for me to even look at the pictures. Is this my son, or not? He's going to be walking soon. He's going to be a year old soon and I wasn't there for hardly any of it. It's not important to him that I love him now. It will be in the future, whatever happens, but not now.

In happier news, although it hit a stifling 96 degrees this weekend, Sunny was having the time of his life at the water park. He loves the water so much. He spent almost all this weekend having aquatic fun. The last four days have all been fit-free, and if he makes it to seven he knows he's getting a nice bonus from his sticker chart.

Edited to Add: I reread this post and realized how negative it all is. I should have just done a separate "We did the adoption ceremony and it's great we're officially legally a family." If I put up a picture of the event, you'd see we're all smiling, even the gloomy judge.

Family History, National History

We spent our family vacation in Washington DC. It was awfully nice. I already know the area fairly well from the time I spent long ago as an au pair working for a family in the Maryland suburbs.

One day, we drove all the way down to Jamestown and its historical museum. I loved the exhibits, which covered the culture of 1) the English settlers 2) Powhatan Native Americans and 3) Angolans of dubious status (perhaps slaves, perhaps indentured) who all once lived in or near Jamestown. One exhibit covered a fascinating bit of history that I never knew before: the colonization efforts were based on a pattern already established... in Ireland. The goal was establish an ethnic enclave while extracting wealth from the natives (Irish cattle-herders/Powhatan farmer-hunters) using a combination of trade and force, then send money back to England.

We watched a museum movie which showed that life in Jamestown was pretty much hell on earth for the first English settlers. During one famine, some people dug their own graves, laid down in them and just waited to die. Jamestown wasn't very successful, which was why the Pilgrims are usually thought of as the first real settlement colony for the United States.

One of my ancestors on my mother's side was a Jamestown settler. His name was William Farrar, and he came over in 1618 from Lincolnshire. That's one of the main reasons I'm interested in Jamestown (although I'm not a full-fledged genealogy person).

Sunny had a vacation journal in which he had to write five sentences for every day. He liked the museum, and the ship we saw in neighboring Yorktown, but also wrote that hearing about all the Indians killed in Jamestown made him sad.

Sunny's favorite museum, of course, was the National Air and Space Museum. There are plenty of cool things to touch and pull and push and climb... it's a wonderland for a kid his age.

We took a tour through the WWII Pacific room. I looked for an exhibit on Japanese soldiers, but all they had was a single one on kamikaze pilots. I don't really blame the museum, since there weren't many exhibits on German soldiers in the other hall, either. But I do wish the Japanese could have been represented by something other than kamikaze pilots. I didn't draw it to Sunny's attention. Too complicated.

I did point to a picture of a Japanese battleship and explain that Ojiichan's father died when American fighter planes sunk his battleship. Because Ojiichan's father, my grandfather, died and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, we never got to meet him. I said that the Japanese were on the wrong side in the war and the Americans were on the right side, so it's a good thing we Americans won, but it was still a very sad thing that Ojiichan's father had to die like that.

Sunny said, "If I was around back then, I would save Ojiichan's father!" What a sweet boy.

Later on, we had dinner with my Guy's colleague who lives in DC. This was the first time I'd ever met her, although she and Guy have been friends for a while. She's a Japanese-American woman one generation older than me. I told her about what Sunny had said in the WWII Pacific exhibit, and she remarked, "My father was probably trying to sink your grandfather's battleship." She explained that in WWII her family had all their property seized in California and were taken to an internment camp, and from there her father volunteered, and ended up in the Pacific translating Japanese communications for American military intelligence.

Some people can't afford to be bitter and angry about the past. We have to remember, but we also have to move on. I thought of grief and letting go, and our strange relationship to WWII, when I read this recent article about the aftershocks of a war that's even further away in time.

Sunny said that he didn't understand hardly anything Guy's friend had just explained. I told him it was all very complicated history, but he would understand more when he got older.

Break Explanation - and Legacy of Shame!

This is the longest break I've ever taken on this blog! But there's no emergency or anything. Well, we did try and take Sunny off his medication, but the attempt failed horribly, so we're going to try again later this summer, and if that doesn't work, hold it off for another year.

Other than that, I've just been extremely busy. I'll be on vacation next week though.

And I did break my blogging hiatus just last night, in a rather incendiary way: David Carradine's Legacy of Shame is up at Racialicious and APA for Progress as well.