A Lightbulb Moment

We visited my cousin a week and a half ago at her psychiatric clinic.  I think I did mention the visit in a previous blog post.  I never had any qualms about the clinic environment, because it's a pretty nice, high-end type of place.  It's bright, airy, the staff are casual and friendly, and I've never heard anyone screaming.  When we go over there Sunny usually plays games with my cousin and anyone else who happens to be hanging out in the lounge area.

Last time, Sunny had some very bad behavior after we left.  We had to spend about ten minutes in the parking lot and back porch.  I always refuse to get into the car with Sunny once he passes a certain point of emotional turmoil.  It's because I don't want him throwing stuff at me while I'm driving (if he gets worked up while I'm driving, I immediately pull over).

Tonight, when we went to visit, I prepped him extensively.  I reminded him that my cousin might not feel well.  "If she has a headache, we have to turn around and go home." I reminded him that the clinic might have an outing, and we might have to leave early.  I told him to try and keep calm when it was time for us to leave.  I gave him all sorts of reminders covering various contingencies.  I was a little nervous of taking him anyway, given the rough week we just had, but he seemed to have recovered, and he'd been begging all weekend to visit my cousin.

So we showed up at 5pm, in the middle of visiting hours.  Luckily, my cousin was feeling well enough for a visit.  She always lights up when she sees Sunny.  He really is a little ray of sunshine (except when he's a thunderclap of doom, of course, but mostly, he's a little ray of sunshine).

We had dinner together, although she didn't feel quite well enough to eat.  She's on a lot of medications that do unpredictable things to her appetite.  He was so happy to see her.  He even repeated, unprompted, what I'd told him earlier: "if we come visit and you have a headache, it's OK.  We'll just come back when you feel better."

Sunny had a fantastic time playing Pictionary with my cousin and three other patients.  I told him we were going to leave at 6:30 and gave him plenty of reminders.  The game wrapped up naturally around 6:30, then we said our goodbyes, signed out, and walked out the back.  Again, out in the parking lot, Sunny started breaking down and picked an excuse to fight with me.  He wouldn't do his deep breathing exercise when I asked him to calm down.  He just got more and more worked up.

"All you ever do is mean things to me."
"I say I'm sorry a million times, but you don't listen to me."
"You just want me to freeze to death" (but this time I had moved back into the heated back porch and I was preparing myself for the breakdown)
"You never listen to me."
"You don't care about me."
"You're mean."
"You're a total idiot."
"You don't listen to me, you don't care about me, I hate you, you hurt me and you never say I'm sorry, you don't listen to me when I say I'm sorry, you're never nice to me, you're mean to me..."

At one point one of the staff came to the back porch and asked if we were having trouble with the door.  I just gave her a forced smile and told her we were going to be on the porch for a little bit because my son was having a tantrum, but he'd get over it.  I'm past the point of being embarrassed when things like this happen.  The only thing I ever worry about is people calling the police or child protective services.  I wasn't too worried about that here.  It's a psychiatric clinic, after all.

He screamed and cried and accused me for a while.  He started pushing and grabbing at me.  Finally, I had to put him in a light basket hold.  His fit wasn't as bad as it could have been.  He wasn't screaming curse words or trying to hit me in the face.  In his worst fits, I can't use a basket hold at all, since I have to restrain him so that he's incapable of head-butting.

Finally, he moved to the inevitable stage: from blaming others to blaming himself.  This is the only point where I talk.  I can't argue with him when he's blaming me.  He just doesn't listen.  But I can argue when he's blaming himself.

"I hate myself for doing stupid things all the time."
- "You shouldn't hate yourself and you don't make bad choices all the time, just some of the time.  You should say 'I'm nice'.  You should say 'I love myself'."
"I'm nice I'm nice I'm nice I'm nice.  IT DOESN'T HELP."

At this point a lightbulb went off in my head.

-"Does saying goodbye to [my cousin] remind you of having to say goodbye to anyone else?"
"Yes! It reminds me of the time I said goodbye to Mommy ___ and it was my last visit ever and I never saw her again and then she died and I'll never see her again ever.  It makes me feel JUST THE SAME."

Oh... my... God...

Sunny loves her deeply.  She suffers from a mysterious disease that adults can never really explain to him well.  Communication and access to her is completely out of his control.  Visitation takes place at a supervised institutional setting.  Of course it's exactly like saying goodbye to his biological mother.

One day, his worker and his foster mom told Sunny that there wouldn't be any more visits with Mommy __.  Termination of parental rights had been completed.  But there would be one last visit.  So they took him to the official visitation room and let him play together with Mommy __ for a few hours, and then he had to say goodbye, a goodbye on the last visit ever.   It brings tears to my eyes thinking about what he must have felt.

Sunny's rage towards me, and towards himself, completely vanished at that point.  He just cried and cried.  We talked a bit more about missing Mommy ___.  I told him that whenever you feel sad, it makes you feel better to tell another person why you feel sad.  And even if there's no one else around, you can tell yourself why you feel sad, and that will make you feel a little better.  Not all the way better, but a little better.  And of course he misses Mommy ___ and it was a terribly sad thing to have to say goodbye to her like that. 

It was 7:00.  We starting driving home.  I reminded him that he could talk about missing Mommy ___ anytime, and he could also call Nana N and talk to her about it, because Nana N missed her just the same as he did.  We did call his Nana N when we got back home, but he didn't feel like talking about it by then, even though I gave him a little reminder.


He was his normal happy self for the rest of the night and went to sleep right at his bedtime.

The difficult part for me is that I can't talk to my cousin about all this.  Her mental state is too fragile.  I'm going to take Sunny to visit her again next week but this time I'll bring someone else as well (Guy or Nana) and make sure we're totally prepared.  I think visiting and then breaking down afterwards is going to suck, but ultimately it's good for him to see that he can say goodbye, but my cousin is still going to be there next week.  I think it would be worse if I didn't take him on visits at all.

If she ever kills herself, I'm going to kill her!


Sunny is dangerously full of need and full of love.

Sunny's Bio Grandma Made It

NN arrived in Atlanta yesterday.  She traveled here with a friend of hers.  She'll be staying for a week in a nearby hotel.

Today, they hung out at our house for a while with Guy and Sunny.  Sunny played lots of games with them and showed off his skateboarding.  Then, when I got home from work, we all went out to dinner together.  As a present, I'd made her a small photo album/scrapbook (I scrap, in a very rudimentary picture+caption+sticker way) covering Sunny's time with us and his major milestones.  We went through that book, and also the larger book I made of all his bio family pictures.

This is a really emotional time for Sunny.  He read through a couple of old cards that his Mommy __ sent, and then he had the same reaction he had the day we told him she died.  He... wilted.  Sunny cries frequently, loudly, and often in a very calculated and melodramatic fashion, but when he's really saddest, he doesn't cry at all... instead, you can see all of his energy leave him, and he gets very quiet all of a sudden. It affects me greatly to see him like that.

NN was so supportive.  She hugged him, reassured him that his mommy would always be with him, said she was happy he has the mom and dad he has now, and that his mommy was happy about that too.  But it was OK he was sad... she was sad too.

At the restaurant he was a little bit manic -- definitely more fidgety and argumentative than normal.  Guy took him outside at one point for a walk to try and cool him down a little bit.  He must have been emotionally overstimulated.  I think he'll be calmer through the rest of the visit.

In the car back, he mentioned at one point that he didn't want to hear about women being pregnant, it made him too sad, because his Mommy ___ was pregnant with him, and she also died.  We reassured him again.  NN told him, "She died because of a heart condition."  Later that night, when I put Sunny to bed, I tried to reassure him, in a roundabout way, that he was not responsible in any way for her death.  I have a feeling that that sort of association might be on the edge of his mind.  I told him that Mommy __ was very happy that she was pregnant with him and gave birth to him, and that it was a wonderful thing that happened in her life.

Then Sunny said that one reason he was sad Mommy ___ died was that it meant she wouldn't ever be pregnant again, and that meant he couldn't have more brothers and sisters.  That sounds kind of weird now that I type it up.... but it makes sense according to little kid logic (which is not selfish per se, but definitely self-centered).  Then we talked about brothers and sisters, and Sunny said he hopes that I can get pregnant with a baby, and we can also adopt BB, and then we could adopt his foster cousins.  I reminded him his foster cousins already have parents!  "But what if something happened to their mom and dad?"  I talked him out of that somewhat disturbing train of thought. 

He needed a lot of hugging and kissing goodnight.  There'll definitely be a lot to process over the coming days.

I'm proud of NN for making it here. 

Losing parents through being fostered or adopted is often compared to parental loss via death, with the analysis that loss through death is somehow cleaner, less complicated and less ambiguous.  But after tonight, I'm not sure where I stand on that distinction.

Back to School - Transitions can be Tough - Fit Update

Today is back to school day for Dekalb County. Sunny will be starting second grade. He has not been taking it well. He's been wetting the bed more and having more fits than usual. He also wet himself during the day a couple times last week, and tried to hide it (we don't punish him for wetting, so that wasn't a motive) . Our new therapist agrees that his behavior is definitely in response to the transition, and represents temporary regression.

We're definitely tightening things up and getting stricter. Some upcoming changes we've talked about:

-- no video game time on weekdays
-- no playing or going outside until homework is done on weekdays
-- no going inside the neighbors' house on weekdays until he can be trusted not to wheedle them into letting him play video games
-- going back to reading books at night. We had slipped into the habit of reading him classic Spider-Man. From now on, reading Spider-Man to him is conditional on first reading something else on his own.

There are a few more "consequences" we're instituting:

-- When I 'm talking to him and he puts his hands over his ears, I will assume he doesn't want me to speak to him, therefore I will not say anything at all to him for five minutes (I don't have the heart to do this any longer, he is generally crying his eyes out after a couple minutes).
-- If he refuses to read a book at night in bed, we will go out in the hallway and read the book there.

I've started up a formal behavior chart again. The five entries are: Do Homework with No Complaining, No Fits, No Backtalk, Flush Toilet and Read Books Nicely. Flush Toilet is the "gimme". He usually does it anyway, it's just really nasty when he forgets.

He already lost the "No Backtalk" star for today. This morning, while I was making breakfast, he got to the screaming point about a class he's taking at school. I could tell it wasn't really about the class. He was really casting about to find something that he sort of wanted, but I wouldn't immediately give him, so that he could have an excuse to blow up.

He's been having 1-2 fits every 7-10 days. We're both very used to them. When he gets to that point of cold rage, there's nothing else to do but tackle him and pin him down. It sounds horrible, but there's no other option. The only variant is that if he's not on a carpeted surface, we carry to him to a surface that is carpeted, and then we pin him down. This variant is often quite painful, since it gives him a chance to get in some kicks and punches.

I used to softly reason with him during these fits, but our new therapist, who has experience working with kids in a residential treatment facility, tells us not to say anything at all until Sunny calms down, and the rage will fade away a little faster. It turned out to be good advice. He's not listening to a word I say during that time, anyway.

Guy is learning how to handle the fits better. He used to almost go into a rage himself. It was the cursing. When he came to us, Sunny's strongest curse was "poopoohead". His neighborhood friends taught him a lot more. Now during fits we get random strings of really nasty curse words, including M-F. I had no problem ignoring these but it took my husband a while to develop tolerance.

He had a fit just last night. The names he uses during fits are bad, but oddly enough, the threats are awfully mild. I've heard of much, much worse threats from other foster/adoptive parents. For example, he doesn't say "you're not my real parents". He'll say, "I hate this crazy house!" or "I wanted to stay with (foster mom)!" or my favorite threat (I've got to find the humor where I can): "When I'm 18 I'm leaving this house!"

After the fit, when he's truly remorseful (sometimes he fakes it, then tries to hit or bite me when I let him go), I hug him and rock him for as long as he needs, then he goes and hugs Guy and apologizes. The only bright side is that they're a bit shorter than they have been in the past. They're rarely longer than 15 minutes now, whereas in the past, they've lasted up to an hour. Then we talk about how he needs to work on controlling his anger, and not let his anger control him, and to try harder next time to fight back his anger and take a deep breath instead. We've had the exact same talk a gajillion times but hopefully at some point it will sink in.

I don't think that negative consequences after the fact do much to stop them. So we don't punish him for them, other than sometimes taking away DVD time or video game time for the night. We're trying to reinforce positive consequences for "No Fits" instead.

We also talk candidly about the things we're doing to stop the fits, such as neurofeedback and medication. I told him yesterday that it was especially important to help him stop the fits now, when he was young, because when he was an adult, if he had a fit, the police might shoot him. He said, "that's not very nice of them!" and Guy said, "No, but it doesn't matter if it's nice or not when you're dead."

I know that sounds pretty bad. We shelter him from a lot of negative things in the world but I believe in total honesty in this area. I so often read news like this -- Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile Justice System -- and it scares me so much. I could barely stand to read that article.

If he still has behavior like this as a teenager, we'll be in a Catch-22 situation. I would have to call the police on him, but then I'd have to make sure the police didn't shoot him.

Obviously, that is the worst-case scenario. Ideally, he'll grow out of it... and these are just extra-strength tantrums that will pass once his brain develops more. Or maybe he does have some variant of bipolar disorder, but will learn how to control it with a combination of medication and therapy.

Anyway, I worry about this stuff, but it doesn't consume me. I was just saying to Guy last night that we have to be happy in the present -- there is no other time to be happy! That sounds a bit sappy, I know...

I'm hoping that some of Sunny's stormy behavior will turn around after the first week. He says he hates school, but when I ask him what he doesn't like, it's 1. having to do homework 2. having to do "boring stuff" in class sometimes. He has a ton of friends and loves most of the stuff he does in class.

We're working out rewards for the behavior chart this week. I'm trying to work out a few things that aren't just treats or extra minutes of video game time, but involve him getting more control over his environment in some way. I know control is very important and lies close to the root of much of this behavior.

This stuff sounds like a battle. It can be... but I think of it more as a game of chess. In fact, I've been playing some computer chess just to make sure I can keep beating Sunny at chess. He got very good at the game very quickly after chess camp! At the ending tournament, he won second place (4 out of 5 games) in his age division. Sunny is very smart, uses aggressive tactics and would quickly overwhelm a less prepared opponent. Beyond that, the parenting/chess analogy breaks down because he doesn't really know what he's playing for, but I do.

Also, I added the "Nurtured Heart" book that zunzun has been recommending to my wish list, and I'll get it in the next batch of books I order. I'm looking forward to reading that. Guy also took Sunny to see a new psychiatrist. They gave us an order for a blood test to get baseline chemical levels and make sure his atypical antipsychotic wasn't causing any serious imbalances. The test came back all clear. We'll be taking him back to the psychiatrist in a month or so for a follow-up. I like the cautious approach.

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.

Happy New Year!

I'm not going to bother making any resolutions for next year. I'd like to exercise more, learn how to dance the samba, volunteer more, study up on investments, do a bunch of craft and home improvement related stuff, start on a new degree, get a new certification, blah blah blah. Maybe I'll do a few of them... I'm keeping my expectations low, however.

We're ending this year in a pretty good mood. Our vacation in Hawaii really calmed everyone down.

Sunny has been a joy lately. I think I've figured out his cycle. He takes about a week to get adjusted to a major change in routine. During that time, he acts like a jerk, but by now, he's using to being out of school. He's spending a lot of time during the day playing with his legos (often by himself!) going on nature walks with Nana, running errands with dad, playing outdoors with friends.

In fact, he almost got a "no complaining all day" award yesterday. He messed it up shortly before bedtime by having a micro-fit when I told him it was time to take a shower. A micro-fit consists of loud wailing while hurling himself on the floor, and lasts about 15 seconds. In all his gym classes, he's learned how to jump up and safely hurl himself to the ground in the absolutely most dramatic fashion, but it would probably terrify a lot of parents if they saw it.

Shortly after Christmas I got some great footage of Sunny. He received some Ed Hardy temporary tattoos as a stocking stuffer, and we put a tattoo of a panther fighting a python on his chest, then he kept his shirt off and starting singing "We Will Rock You" while dancing vigorously in the kitchen. He was totally rocking out! I wish I could put it on Youtube but I'm too concerned about privacy. Instead, I'm going to hold on to the footage and email it to his future college roommates or something like that.

I hope everyone has a good New Year. I hope that next year will also see an improvement in the welfare of our city, state, country and planet, that the horrible killing in the Gaza strip will stop (please see this link and this link for ways to help) and that we'll get out of Iraq AND Afghanistan.

For our family, I hope that we'll get Sunny's baby brother soon. I'm going to give him a new blog name here: BB for Baby Brother. Sunny's grandmother told me that his mother's wish was for
BB to be raised by us, with his brother, if anything happened to her. Apparently the pregnancy had some serious complications, and his mother, in the delivery room, was worried about what would happen if she died... Sunny's grandmother said she was so concerned about getting those wishes on the record that after the death she went back to the hospital and spoke with the anesthesiologist and nurse that had been present when those words were said.

Lastly, I made a decision (which my husband is on board with) to try and get pregnant. I'd like to give it a shot while I still have good eggs and while my insurance still covers a few thousand dollars of fertility treatments. IVF is too invasive (and too expensive) but I'm willing to try cycles of IUI without major drugs. I definitely wouldn't want to have twins... getting three babies in one year would be too much to handle.

I'm not really conflicted about the decision. If it happens, it happens, and if I go next year without getting pregnant, that will almost certainly be my last try. I know balancing adopted and biological children adds an extra layer of complication, but families do it all the time. Sunny already has plenty of experience being a member of a large family with some bio children, some adopted children and some foster children, and I think he'd be a great big brother.

We'd probably get more stares as a family. With Sunny, I have never had anyone ask me if he was adopted. They just assume he's my biological child from a previous relationship with a black man. Sunny's eyes look superficially Asian, and like mine, are very prominent (not deep-set) but the shape is quite different if you look closely. However, all the rest of our facial features totally match up: full lips, mouth not very wide, high but not prominent cheekbones, bow-shaped eyebrows, medium nose bridge with soft nose shape, strong chin in a slightly rounded square shape.

BB looks a lot like Sunny, but BB's biological father is light-skinned, unlike Sunny's father. At his young age, BB looks white in terms of complexion, but I think his facial features are not going to look Caucasian. Like Sunny, he has very beautiful, large eyes that are shaped like teardrops laid on their side, with the rounded part toward the center of the face.

Then, if I have a birth child with my husband, they'd be three-quarters Polish/Irish/Anglic and one-quarter ethnic Japanese. My husband's round eyes (which are also very nice-looking eyes) will get thrown into the mix. Who knows, maybe it's possible all the kids will sort of look like each other.

I hate the stereotype "multiracial people are pretty" and I also don't believe in the naive cliche that all the problems of the world will be solved once we all interbreed and look like each other. With that disclaimer... I can tell Sunny is going to get a LOT of positive attention for his looks as he grows up. It's going to be interesting.

I also think he's going to be OK in the self-confidence area. He's naturally very confident. I remember many months ago he hinted that "dark skin" was something he "didn't like". But recently, he's been saying "cafe" is his favorite color. He loves that word that he learned in his Spanish class. It means "brown" in Spanish as well as "coffee". Hopefully, with the right reinforcement, he can keep his positive attitude about being a "cafe" color. I still try to shield him from hearing too many negative things about black people; recently I had to turn off NPR when they were discussing something about incarceration rates. I don't want him to live in a bubble, I just want to make sure he gets more positive messages than negative messages while he's still in this "absorb-everything" learning mode. I want him to have a space (part school, part neighborhood or friends) where blackness and African-American culture are just normal, unexceptional, not overwhelmed with messages about tragedy. We can't give him that as a nuclear family, but at least he has access to that space and moves through it every day.

Wrapping up... I know a lot of readers have been reading this blog for years. Remember when we got matched? Whether you're lurkers, commenters, current bloggers or mothballed bloggers, thanks for sticking around. Have a great new year, everyone. May your dreams come true!

Big Holiday Update Post

Our vacation was great.

It was a bit stressful being with Sunny 24/7 in my father's studio apartment. Luckily, the apartment does at least have a shoji divider, so we had 2-3 hours of semi-privacy every night after Sunny went to bed, which we mostly used to watch Season 2 of Prison Break on our portable DVD player. We ate a lot of great food, went to beaches every day and drove all over the island, although we couldn't afford any inter-island or boat trips.

Since Sunny was missing almost two weeks of school, he had a fair amount of make-up work, including a daily journal of at least four sentences per day. Getting him to do his work for an hour every night wasn't fun, but we didn't have any major homework blow-ups.

Sunny quickly learned how to make the shaka sign. There was a guy in the apartment building who kept running into us and saying to Sunny, "what up, li'l bruddah!" and Sunny just loved flashing the sign back at him. As usual, he was treated like a miniature rock star everywhere we went.

Sunny was a lot more interested in the ancient Hawaiian village than I thought he'd be. I tried my best to explain the difference between "people who live in Hawaii" and "Hawaiians". I told him that the Asian people he saw mostly came from Japan, the white people came from the mainland, the Hawaiians were already there before anyone else and got the raw deal, a lot of people were mixed ancestry, but everyone was an American.

I went to a very nice Jodo Shinshu service. The reverend had a thick Japanese accent and at first I thought the sermon would be rather impenetrable and arcane, but I was quite wrong. About halfway through, the reverend broke out the props -- a balloon and a sign reading "G.A.S." -- and used those to illustrate a point about joyful daily living and how we need to be filled with "good gas" not "bad gas". He had everyone laughing in the aisles.

It looks like Hawaii is in for a lot of pain due to the economy. The newspapers were full of dire statistics about hotel residency figures. I feel really bad for the people there. I used to work in the tourist industry... it's highly unstable, the jobs don't get a lot of respect and the tourists you depend on drive up your cost of living to the point that you can barely afford to live in your own home.

Sunny was not too bad on the three-leg airplane flights there and back. He didn't sleep very much, but kept occupied with his PSP.

We made a good adjustment back to Atlanta. It helped that we had a nice warm snap, and last week the temperature was in the 70s... hardly any colder than Hawaii.

The next time we go on vacation, we definitely need to do a combined trip with my mom and stepdad. It would be nice to have just one day to ourselves! By then, at the end of next year, I hope we'll have Sunny's brother as well. There's still no major update on that front. The biological father is refusing to get in contact. He's established paternity but isn't answering calls or showing up in court.

According to ASFA I imagine it could take 18 months to do a TPR if he consistently avoids every contact. If he or a relative doesn't want to parent, he needs to act. My worker tells me they are probably going to threaten him with paying child support if he doesn't move one way or the other, so that might cause a resolution.

Meanwhile, Sunny's baby brother is doing well with his foster family. We sent him a present: a little Hawaiian fleece robe. He's visited every week by his (and Sunny's) bio grandmother. I'm in regular contact with her now, and we'll give her a call tomorrow on Christmas Day.

Sunny misses his foster family a lot.

He had a blow-up last night that was probably related. It all started over the PSP (AKA the PCP). The PSP is going to be off limits for several weeks as a consequence. He pushed his dad, slammed doors and yelled a lot of things like "I hate you".

He was very, very sad afterwards. As he was crying in my lap, he said "I'm so dumb! I don't know why I said those things! I said all the good times we had together were ruined!"

"You didn't mean that, did you?"
"No!"
"Nothing could ruin the good times we have together. I know why you say things you don't mean, you say them to try and hurt us. And you wanted to hurt us because you're angry. It's okay to feel angry, it's just not okay to show it like that."

We talked about alternate ways to show anger. He already knows about taking a deep breath. When he can remember to do that, it helps. I also suggested a new one: going to his room, closing (not slamming) the door and yelling into a pillow.

I just realized his inability to be alone presents a real conflict with anger management. If you're angry, the fastest, easiest way to cope is to temporarily remove yourself from the person or situation causing the anger. But that route is closed to him. He moves away, but then snaps right back like a rubber band because he fears solitude so much.

I think without that problem, his tantrumming would not be a serious issue. He's actually more emotionally articulate than most children his age. I recently talked to another parent from our agency who's also having problems around this time (pretty much everyone is, which is why the agency holds a workshop on holiday coping) and unlike Sunny, his daughter doesn't say what's on her mind and who she misses and why she feels bad... she acts it out.

Sunny has already gotten a ridiculous amount of presents from one set of grandparents. He got multiple Transformers, Pokemon figures, remote controlled truck, air-rocket-launcher, slinkies and Hot Wheels. I wish they hadn't bought him so many toys. He loves getting them, but he plays with them for five minutes and then rarely uses them again. He just doesn't know how to play with toys by himself.

It's sad hearing about kids who come from foster homes with nothing but a trash bag. That's about the complete opposite of Sunny's experience. His foster family shipped us EIGHTEEN BOXES of his clothes and toys. We donated many of those toys, since he'd outgrown them. We just tell him that he needs space for new toys, so he needs to fill a box with the ones he doesn't want anymore so that other kids can play with them. He's always quick to do it and happy to help drop off the box.

We keep trying to downsize toys so his room can stay cleaner, but this Christmas is going to be a challenge. We were planning on having a small Christmas and de-emphasizing gifts, but grandparents got in the way. Also, it's his first Christmas with us...

He's getting about five presents from Santa. We've bought him a pair of inflatable swords that he can share with his friends, a flashlight that straps to your head (he loves flashlights), more Hot Wheels, a calculator, a hoodie with a flaming skull and guitars on it, a PSP game, Greatest Hits of Queen and Best of the Rockin' 70s CDs (he likes classic rock a LOT more than we do), a dinosaur sticker book and a chess set for beginners. On top of that there will be presents from two more sets of grandparents and foster family.

He's going to have to live without the PSP for a while, but we found him a great alternate game. It's at fantasticcontraption.com. Using a limited set of building blocks and the laws of physics -- gravity, friction, etc. -- you have to build contraptions to accomplish a simple task.

Right now, we severely limit any video games. I noticed even the educational ones were just encouraging button-mashing and shortened attention span, but this game looks like an exception. It's not too stimulating: simple shapes, slow motion, calming music. There's no time limit. You create a design, test it, then try to fix it when it fails, then test it again... failure isn't as emotional as in a life-based game like Super Mario Brothers. Sunny loves Fantastic Contraption, and he can keep his focus on it up to half an hour. I think it's helping stretch his attention span, so I don't mind if he plays it. He's solved it up through Level Five.

I hope everyone who reads here has a happy holiday season! Also, an extra thanks to Christine for commenting on my Racialicious post, because I think your perspective added a lot to the discussion.

I'll close on a negative note by mentioning one of the only things I HATE about Hawaii... the godawful Hawaiian Christmas reggae the radio stations there love to play. Hawaiian music, great; reggae, great; Christmas, great... but put all three together and you get a form of music guaranteed to make your brain bleed out your ears.

First Full Day of Placement

Long day... too tired to blog... Sunny is in great spirits!

Quick Message About Anonymity

So far I know of two blog readers who found out they're connected to me in real life.

This is a little disturbing, since I try to stay as anonymous as possible here, with no pictures and no work/educational/organizational discussion.

Both these readers strike me as extremely nice and thoughtful people, so I'm not worried about them, I'm just worried that more and more people may start to connect my real-life and internet identities. I'm not a supersocial person, or any kind of public figure, but I am kind of conspicuous.

I think I'm going to establish a back-up password-protected mirror blog. I do promise I won't "go dark" entirely, but if I start feeling really conspicuous, I may need to turn down the lights a little bit and remove some of the more personal information.

First Impressions of Our Son

This is going to be a really hard post to write! Excuse me if it's not that long... I'll try to write more later.

We had our first visit this weekend.

Sunny is the cutest, sweetest, funniest little boy in the world! I wish I could post pictures. I sent one to my dad -- AKA the bitterest, grumpiest, contrariest man in the world -- and his immediate response was: "a beautiful child!"

Sunny is smart! When we went to visit a restaurant, he was really excited because our GPS system told us to turn right, but he knew it was on the left (he had visited it only once before) so he "beat the GPS". He's proud he can spell blue and red (but not yellow yet). He figured out the zoom button on my videocamera, and explained the concept of a DVR/Tivo to me; his foster mom doesn't have one, but they do at his friend's house.

When we all first met, he was happy but a little anxious. He dealt with it really well. Every once in a while he would say "hugs!" and run and hug me or my husband or his foster mom. He calls us his mom and dad to differentiate from the other mom and dad, the ones that he shares with the rest of a large, rambunctious (but also nice and well-behaved) group of kids.

His foster mom says his current medication is doing well, and has really cut down the tantrums and improved his school behavior. Unlike the other drug, bad side effects haven't shown up yet. He didn't have any tantrums at all while we were with him. He has a short attention span and gets frustrated easily, but if we tell him "no" he only goes into a dramatic pout for about 5-10 seconds and then moves on.

We haven't 100% decided our approach to the medication yet. We'll see how things go after placement.

When he moves in, we're not going to have any kind of video games or even electronic games. I noticed that with these games, all the other kids in the house are older, and he thinks he's at their level when he's not, so he gets frustrated and wants to move on to another game after playing one for 15 seconds. Having a lot of brothers and sisters is good, on one hand, because he has practice with social skills. He's great at sharing. He'll play for a little bit then say "you play now!" But being the youngest is hard on him, too. He loves jobs and chores and being in charge of things.

I think we're really lucky he's had such a good placement... his foster mom is great. Naturally our family will do things differently, but I instantly agreed with more than 90% of the things she is doing and took a lot of mental notes to try and parent in a similar way.

I've decided he's either going to be an engineer or a lawyer.

We went to Cracker Barrel for dinner, and due to heavy volume, we got trapped in the store section for ten minutes. Here's an example of lawyer-like behavior involving the exploration of multitude of possible interpretations:

"Can I have that?" (points at Moon Pie)
- "No. Too sweet."
(pouts) "Can I have a snack"?
- "Maybe a little cracker"
"Can I have that little cracker?" (points at Moon Pie, which is gigantic)
- "No. It's not a cracker and it's too sweet."
(pouts) "Can I have a sandwich"?
- "Maybe at dinner"
"Can I have that sandwich?" (points at Moon Pie)
- "No."
(pouts)

I could see that kind of tenacity working in a courtroom, if you take out the pouting parts!

The adults that know him agree, he has "a light inside him". When he smiles or laughs or yells "OH YEAH!" it's just so powerfully contagious.

I Think We're Matched!

As it happened, the other family did back out. It's just us now.

We had a presentation where more information was given to us. Many of our questions were answered. All of this information is hard to process, so excuse these choppy paragraphs.

He's a vivacious and energetic five-year-old boy. He loves playing with cars and trains. He likes to help around the house and he gets along great with all adults and with other kids. On pre-K academic tests, he's in the high range. He has a wonderful smile. My blog nickname for him is going to be "Sunny", for his sunny smile.

He was removed for neglect and has been in the same foster placement for several years. He calls his foster parents "Mom" and "Dad" and is very attached to them. He's had visits with his biomom, and he calls her by her first name. I don't know what he would call us. Maybe "Mommy" and "Daddy"? I don't want to confuse him by taking anyone else's title, but first names don't seem quite right either.

He's been diagnosed with ADHD and possibly bipolar. He's on a mood-stabilizing drug right now. I'm horrified by the particular drug, which is very strong, has at least one nasty side effect and has not been approved for small children. The first thing after placement would be to see if the doctor can take him off that. I'm not anti-med and it's very likely that he will need at least one ADHD drug on an ongoing basis, but if at all possible, I want to get him off the drug he's on now.

According to his therapist, he often engages in power struggles. He has a strong sense that the world should be fair. He can be redirected and understands consequences. He has a great memory but a short attention span. He has an IEP for behavior in the classroom, mostly concerning defiance towards authority, impulsivity and hyperactivity. He doesn't do well on the school bus and hates to sit down and be quiet. He doesn't sleep well, and he wets the bed, two things likely having to do with approaching anxiety about what will happen to him. He knows he's being adopted, even though he doesn't fully understand what it means. He has mood swings and tantrums lasting up to an hour... not aggressive, but with heel-kicking and screaming.

The workers were happy that we were very open to continuing contact, both with the foster parents and his biomom. There's an older half-brother on his father's side that he's never met. His father is in and out of jail. He's not dangerous on the level of the "Schillinger"-dad in Maerlowe's story, but without going into too much detail, he's not a safe person to have contact with. With the mother, there would be information sent through the caseworker (no addresses revealed). For the foster parents, we'd hope to have a lot of contact, plus yearly visits. The social workers said they often had to deal with situations where the adoptive parents were not as open to contact in the beginning. I said, "there's no point in being jealous". This is something our agency has always stressed: keeping positive contact alive.

Sunny's mother is white and his father is black. His foster family is white and they live in an upper-class, primarily white neighborhood. The social workers said that they liked the fact that our family and neighborhood is very diverse. He won't have to grow up being the only black kid, or alternately, being the only kid who doesn't look or sound as black as the other kids. When he starts to have questions and concerns about his identity (which will be just around the corner) we'll try to help him answer them in positive ways.

We didn't need time to discuss it privately... we went ahead and said yes.

The next step is a lot of paperwork. Then there'll be a visitation period. The workers want to do this fairly quickly. Dragging it out over a long period would only increase his anxiety.

I'm always thinking about the worst-case scenario, so I'm still worried that things could fall through in the stages to come. Is it time to give myself permission to feel like a mom? I don't know. "Sunny," who used to be a still, ghostlike figure, is gradually assuming emotional shape and form and color, and is about 80% opaque now, but still translucent.

Since I'm anonymous, I'm free to be very open on this blog. But I also need to establish what I'm not going to reveal:

- the state where Sunny is from
- intimate details of the stories of bio relatives
- medication names
- school details
- first or last names of anyone
- proper names in general

If I happen to know you, and you mention any of this in passing in comments, I'll have to delete the comment. Apologies in advance, and I'll send you an email too.

My husband seems completely unperturbed by this turn of events. It's odd. But he was already more in tune with the reality of this placement happening. He said he just knew it was going to happen. He's busy now thinking of names to give to grandparents, grandmothers and step-grandfathers.

We can start getting the room ready now. We're going to get a playset for the backyard.

This is so exciting!

We're going out tonight to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant to celebrate.

The Good News Is...

... I got religion!

I attended a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist church during my trip to Hawaii. This was a really good experience. Since then I've been doing a lot of research, preparation, thinking and planning. I think this is the right path for me. This is not quite a conversion, since my family background is sort of Buddhist. In fact, when I was a little kid we once lived in a Buddhist monastery/mission.

It's very hard to explain my reasons and what has brought me to this particular decision. There are both rational and emotional factors. I will go into one major rational factor in a future post. Until then, I'll explain myself in a form of a Q&A.

What is Jodo Shinshu?
A form of Buddhism started in 13th-century Japan. Here's the Wikipedia entry. It comes from the broader Mahayana Pure Land tradition of entrusting yourself to Amida/Amitabha Buddha.

Why does it have a "church"?
In America Jodo Shinshu was first practiced almost exclusively by Japanese-Americans, and during the internment it was decided to call the American organization "Buddhist Churches of America" in order to make it seem less foreign. The BCA is still very directly connected to the home organization in Japan. Here is some more info. Today the BCA is becoming more multi-ethnic.

Is there a church or congregation in Atlanta?
No, unfortunately... There is a Chinese Pure Land organization here, however, and I'm going to make a visit to their library soon. The philosophy is close, but there are a few important differences, so I don't anticipate actually joining them, although I do want to learn more. Until then I'm on my own, except for internet contact. Maybe a group will start up here in the future.

What's the next step?
Reading more, studying more, fixing up my home altar (I had a very basic one before but never did a lot with it), chanting "nembutsu", listening to chants, incorporating more principles into my life. Eventually I'll want to go through the confirmation ceremony at a center such as Kyoto (or possibly New York City) and receive a "dharma name". Or I could just stay an independent practitioner.

What about your family?
I haven't talked to a lot of people about this. I want to take things pretty slow and make sure I know what I'm doing.

Does this mean you believe in reincarnation?
I don't feel the need to believe in literal reincarnation. I'm still an atheist. Perhaps there is a conflict there, but I'm not too worried about it.

Does this mean you're not a Unitarian-Universalist anymore?
No, I'm still a UU. No conflict there at all.

Are you a vegetarian?
I was a vegetarian for three years when I was a teenager. It was hellish. Every single night I dreamed of eating barbecue ribs. You'd think I'd stop having dreams about pork after the first year, but they just kept coming. Today I'm a light meat-eater and I almost never eat beef, but I still wouldn't make a good vegetarian. I might start following a traditional practice of not eating meat on the 16th of every month.

What are the benefits?
As many readers know, I've been really stressed lately. Also, I feel a lingering sense of disappointment over not getting enough things accomplished. My failed PhD attempt. Mysterious infertility. Adoption roadblocks. A job I never blog about because it's so damn boring. I want to be an effective person that creates positive change in the world. At my age (getting into mid-30s) I've only just realized I'm never going to achieve all my goals under my own power. This has been very liberating. At times I've been misguided, fearful, selfish and petty. I accept that. This may sound fatalistic and pessimistic, but believe me, it's not. Instead, I feel like I can finally stop beating myself up. I need to stop throwing up barriers to appreciating the many positive things in my life. I'll still keep trying for my goals!

Will you make any changes to the blog?
I don't foresee any major changes. I'm going to try and balance truth and compassion more, so I won't be quite as sarcastic towards ignorant whackos such as populate our state government, or if I am really sarcastic towards them, I'll at least include a hope they will eventually become less ignorant.



Finally... here's something I could have filed in the "benefits" section. Our family was presented in a staffing this morning. My caseworker emailed me to tell me we should know the results within an hour of the time I write these words. I'm currently not crying, throwing up, constructing elaborate fantasies, gnawing my keyboard or banging my head against the wall. Que será, será.

Violence, the Pathologies of Identity and a Desperate Longing for the Islands of the Mind

Warning: this piece is extremely long and rambling. It's about the things mentioned in the title, illustrated through some of the more unpleasant aspects of the lives of three people, including myself. It's revisiting a lot of things I've written about over the past year of this blog.

The most painful part of this piece was trying to write about Central Florida. I haven't done it very well. Every time I try to paint a picture in words I usually give up and starting sputtering and yelling things like "the pit, the pit."

So as a quick preface, sorry, Central Floridians. I hate that place. But there are some beautiful things there.

-------

When I was young I was always under attack in school. Whenever I left the safety of my home I had to put my head down and got ready for the inevitable.

I don't know exactly what to call what I went through. The word "bullying" minimizes it too much. It brings to mind a heavyset, mouth-breathing boy shaking other kids down for their lunch money… Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons. The kind of boy who rules the playground, but won't get very far in adult life.

A more accurate word would be "racist abuse." The scary part was that the abusers were completely unpredictable. One day I'd sit next to a girl or boy and have a nice conversation about dinosaurs, and the next day they'd follow along me singing "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these." These weren't sadistic kids from abusive homes. There were too many of them for that to be the case. Most of them were totally average.

I tried a lot of things to get it to stop: logical arguments, emotional appeals to stop hurting me, pretending that I couldn't hear or see them. For a little bit I thought if I could wear clothes from Benetton and The Limited, they would stop. My family's financial situation was comfortable, but we weren't that well off, so I never found out if wearing more expensive clothes would have helped. The only thing that helped, a little bit, was physical violence. The one time I used my fists and knocked down a girl, that made them keep their distance. They didn't yell in my face anymore; they stayed at a distance or left notes on my locker instead.

Recently I've wondered whether part of my psychic survival was due to my body. I've always been tall and broad-shouldered. I got my height from my Japanese father. Being tall made me stand out as a target, but it also made me look more powerful. They never managed to make me feel ashamed about my own body, although in the girl's locker room, they tried hard enough.

When I went to college in Miami, for a brief time a young woman lived next door to me and we ended up having an intense talk once that touched on all this. She was Latina, from the north, tall -- even taller than me -- and dark-skinned. I usually didn't talk about what I went through in school, and she was one of the first people I'd ever met who had some of the same experiences and was willing to talk about it. Like me, she was raised surrounded by white children who abused her. She told me she was so full of rage that when she was a teenager, she used to go nightclubs, pick fights with white girls and beat them up. She would pretend they had spilled a drink on her, or looked at her the wrong way. She said she was ashamed now, but also in a better place. It had taken her a long time to "find herself" and stop raging.

For women, the price of wielding violence is often heavier than receiving it. We're taught from an early age that boys who fight are natural, but girls who fight are vicious and freakish. Anyway, I left that intense conversation incredibly thankful that beyond that one time, I'd never used physical violence.

Both of us felt that those children had stolen something from us, and we had to fight to get it back. The second and truly healing step was to stop fighting to get it back. What we were looking for was not in their power to give back. We had to find it in ourselves.

The third person with identity issues I want to talk about is an old friend of my husband. This friend, who is white, used to live in Atlanta but he's moved far away and we don't talk to him much anymore.

He grew up near the same Florida town that I did. His family was a wreck. He ran away from home to escape his abusive father and was taken in by a group of skinheads. Unlike Miami, where white-power types understandably keep a very low profile, I knew that the skinheads in that other Florida town would be of the Nazi type. They'd taken over the scene and run off the anti-racist skins during that time period. The friend, who was painfully and exhaustively honest about everything else in his life, didn't like to talk about that time.

Later on, after he moved to Atlanta, he had a year-long relationship with an out gay black man. Then he decided he was straight and they broke up but stayed friends.

My husband's friend was a short and small-framed man. He loved to read books, drink, get into fistfights, talk about his emotions, cry, and discuss his Irish heritage. It's the Irish heritage thing that truly fascinated me. My husband told me all about his friend before we met for the first time. He told me his friend had a large IRA tattoo on his arm. Had he ever visited Ireland? Nope. I was astounded. I was even a bit mean to him the first time we met. "Why do you have the Italian flag tattooed on your arm?" I asked.

My husband, who has just as much Irish heritage as his friend, had gone through many long arguments about the IRA before. He was so sick of the topic that he never brought it up anymore.

I thought the tattoo was completely insane. A healthy way to explore your heritage would be through positive things like joining an Irish-American historical society, learning Gaelic, visiting Ireland… it's what I would think of from my perspective as a Japanese-American. Why jump into a conflict whose struggles you haven't lived? It seems patronizing to the people who have lived those struggles, the ones who stayed behind.

I believe it makes a huge difference whether your ancestors arrived as entrepreneurs, indentured, enslaved, rich, or starving and desperate... but it makes a huge difference in the new country. In the old country, the division is simpler. Some stayed, some left.

Japan and Ireland have an interesting emigration history in common. In the 19th and early 20th century, they were poor countries. Many left for a better life. Now, they're rich. Irish and Japanese nationals are not in much danger of being exploited by the descendants of those who left. Still, I think it's disrespectful for me to assume I know what's best for Japan because I have Japanese heritage. I have a lot of opinions on their politics as a human being and global citizen, but unless I actually move there and exercise my citizenship, I don't want to go beyond that.

In Miami, many of the ones who left another island - Cuba - thought they would be going back. But their children are already forgetting their Spanish. I visited Cuba once, and I noticed the feelings that Cuban nationals have for Cuban-Americans are very complicated. There's love, because many of these people are friends and relatives. There's also anger. "We've lived here. We stayed. We know what's best for our own country, not you, the ones who left for a richer one."

The Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro left Japan at the age of two. He said once in an interview that he thought he would be going back when he was a child, and he built up an imaginary Japan that was very precious to him. As he became an adult and realized he could never really go back, and that England was his home, he had to say goodbye to that imaginary Japan, and did so by putting it in his book An Artist of the Floating World. I never had that. When I left Japan I was old enough, at six, to remember it more as reality than fantasy, and to understand I was never coming back. My parents never gave me any illusions on that point… I'm not saying that bitterly. I'm actually glad. I had enough problems without having to deal with an imaginary Japan floating just beyond reach. Still, Ishiguro's words are very moving for me.

My husband's friend, a very intelligent man, had a blind spot when it came to his own claimed island. He had to defend it from the English. It gave him a purpose, a goal, an identity. He had mellowed out a lot by the time I met him, but my husband said he used to see him get into bar fights all the time. He could destroy men twice his size because he moved so fast and hit so hard.

Luckily, there aren't many Americans, especially in Atlanta, who have strong feelings for the other side. He may have wanted to get into fights over Ireland, but that wasn't likely to happen here, thank goodness. Now he's married with a kid and I don't think he fights anymore.

The idea of Ireland must have given him a lot of comfort over the years. Perhaps it was also part of a reaction against the Nazi skinheads who idolized England. We grew up in the same horrible, horrible place, but we knew there was something else out there beyond the Central Florida suburbs and strip malls. I had the luxury of growing up in a supportive family; he had to break a pool cue over his father's head. I had part of my childhood stolen by racist abuse; he had almost all of it stolen. I could go on like this for a while. Our similarities and differences are endlessly fascinating to me. Perhaps it's because he was so open about how he formed his identity, when most people, especially white people, are ruled by shame and defensiveness when it comes to this topic.

All three of the people I've talked about are lucky. We came out the other side. Instead of abusing other people and abusing ourselves, we're moving forward. Sometimes I wonder if I'm really a whole person, but then again, even if I'm not, so what? Human beings can go through life missing huge chunks of themselves. Wholeness can mean healing, or it can mean the impossibility of change and growth.

Day in, day out, my feet are burning holes in the ground

I felt very low yesterday. Things are just not going along as they should. I got myself out of a bad mood yesterday by going to see a semi-crappy vampire movie. I'm reminding myself I have a pretty good life and a great family. I'm also a member of an eccentric blog community that includes fantastic people (some of you comment!) from whom I've learned a lot. So please keep the below laundry list of ills in perspective.

MAKING ME MAD AND BRINGING ME DOWN

-- my previous caseworker, the lying backstabber

-- my current caseworker, who never apologized for the previous one

-- The fact that we've made ONE HUNDRED INQUIRIES and have received nothing back on them, and a lot of that had to do with my previous caseworker putting inaccurate numbers in the homestudy

-- And when I ask for feedback on our corrected homestudy I can't really get anything. Maybe as new parents we're too inexperienced for the older children, and the younger children are too in demand for our homestudy to even make it to the top of the pile. If someone knows, they're not telling us. I believe we'd make a good family, a good home for so many different kinds of kids, but with every month this belief erodes.

-- That no one can tell me if my race is counting against me in the matching process, or if they do, I don't whether to believe them, because how many Asian adoptive parents in a black-dominated county in a white-dominated country are there…

-- When people tell me "there are Asian kids in the system" when there are not, or they're Alaskan Natives or Hawaiians, a TOTALLY DIFFERENT people and culture, and anyway, the Asian kids are probably "snapped up" by white parents, who for complex, depressing and racist reasons statistically prefer them over black kids.

-- Hearing parents talking about how it's perfectly OK to raise kids where they're the only minority of their type, surrounded by white kids, when that's exactly what happened to me between the ages of 6-14 and it was pretty much a nightmare hell on earth

-- How every discussion of about transracial adoption immediately turns into a discussion blaming, shaming or praising white parents, then sometimes gets turned around to discuss the actual children involved, but never makes it into a discussion of adoptive parents of color, which means I have to constantly fight against internalizing the idea that I either don't exist, am completely irrelevant, or can be mistaken for a white parent.

-- Ugly-ass geisha costumes on sale for Halloween. Dress your little girl like a yellowface ho!!

-- Hypocritical pro-adoption nativists who believe importing tons of children from other countries is great and should be subsidized while adults from those same countries who want to become Americans should be turned away at the border or their families ripped apart if they make it in and get caught.

-- People who say they are anti-adoption, then say they want to foster a teenager or support a pregnant mother in the foster care system, which is an incredible thing to help break the cycle of abuse and make sure the next generation keeps their babies, BUT they never seem to take that first tiny step of going down to the county office and signing up… maybe because it's so much easier, and cheaper, and more personally satisfying to just insult the characters and child-rearing practices of adoptive parents in online discussions.

-- The screwed-up foster care system in general, and specifically in the state of Louisiana

-- Hearing about foster parents getting insulted and persecuted by bad social workers, and not being able to complain and organize or unionize because, after all, if they're troublemakers they'll get their kids taken away and maybe put in a worse place

-- The Japanese government for pretending child welfare problems don't exist in Japan and sequestering abandoned and abused kids in institutions and denying them a chance at the college education that is even more crucial there than it is here

-- My dad for pretending adoption doesn't exist in Japan anymore, when he was my only chance to help me do the Japanese-heritage adoption I qualify for, and the only kind of international adoption I believed was right for me

-- Going through the photolistings day after day and reading the impersonal intimations of horrible pain and loss, feeling sad, feeling sorry for myself for feeling sad, then feeling weirdly guilty because however bad I feel reading and looking, it's nothing compared to LIVING it

-- Feeling inadequate when I emotionally involve myself in the subject, then feeling more depressed when I emotionally withdraw, because then the sense of forward progress and learning vanishes.

-- Thinking what I'm going through now might be much easier than going through what's to come.

-- Feeling like giving up, then feeling guilty for feeling like giving up.

Sigh... comments off. Next post I'll concentrate on something more positive.

The Weird Hell of Honorary Whiteness

The great thing about talking about race on the internet is that people feel so much more free to express their true opinions. Of course, it's also this same thing that brings all kinds of horrifying words and ideas to the surface, and the reason why great sites like Rachel's Tavern have so many creepy trolls. It's a challenging subject, but ultimately very rewarding.

When I was young, dealing with racism threatened to dominate my life. How often have I talked about it since? Not very much. Only with a few family members and close friends... though not my father or mother. I haven't lived much around other Asian-Americans but I certainly haven't avoided them either. My best friend when I first went to an out-of-state school was Filipina. We didn't talk about it on any level other than the most superficial: "I had to deal with some stupid crap in school". "Yeah, me too." Part of it was getting the message pounded into me from all sides that it wasn't a subject anyone wanted to talk about. The rest of it was simply not wanting to appear weak or show any vulnerability.

Therefore, I'm glad I can discuss it here on my blog. I've wanted to do a continuation of my "Handling Racism as a Child" post for a while, because although I did a good job on that post, I need to take it further, relate it to the experience of others and explore some of the fallout.

I was motivated partly by a great, intensely introspective post I read at the Heart, Mind and Seoul about the author's experiences with "indirect" racism, and her thoughts on the phrase "just as good as white". The author lists many examples. Among the more indirect were jokes in her presence about black people. Some less indirect ones...

When I was in 8th grade, I was at a friend's birthday party. One girl named Julie was talking about a group of Chinese boys and ended her rant with "Freakin' chinks - what do they know?" A few people immediately looked at me, trying to gauge my reaction. Julie stammered a bit and finally said, "Ohmygosh, Paula. I didn't mean you, I mean you're not even Chinese are you? I hope you're not upset. I was totally NOT talking about you."

My experience was different. I didn't get the indirect stuff. When other kids ching-chonged and pulled their eyes, they were doing it right to my face.

At an early age, I never felt the ambiguity or nebulous fear that Paula describes in her piece. I just knew everyone was out to get me, because they were. There were some exceptions, but sometimes kids I trusted not to mess with me started hanging out with the kids who did, and then they changed.

I had the feeling from the very beginning that kids who were different, who were vulnerable like me, could be trusted more. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way. Getting abuse from black and Hispanic kids... well, I'll have to save that for another interesting but very depressing post.

When I started getting older, and especially when I went to college, it was almost like stepping into the light from a dark tunnel. Random racist abuse levels dropped from daily to yearly! Wow! I knew things could get better. I'd been going to a great summer school with a lot of international students, so I'd already had a glimpse. I just didn't know it would get better so fast.

By that time I was already pretty conscious about racial issues. I didn't talk about them much, but I read and studied what I could.

And this is really where Paula's post hit home for me, because it was also the point I realized people weren't treating me that much differently from other white people. Was that good, or bad? Both, really... it was definitely confusing. Like I said, I had a "people of color" consciousness from a very early age. I'd always felt like the social world was made up of white people, and everyone else, and I was in the everyone else. Definitely a different path than some of the more common alternatives: a) not understanding why I wasn't white from an early age b) transitioning from a culture where I grew up among the majority.

Had the world really changed, or was this new acceptance a dangerous mirage? How should I think of myself now? Where was I?

Here's a figurative description of what it felt like:

Being an "honorary white" is like not receiving a formal invitation to the party, but at the last minute, another invitee says you might as well tag along.

You show up at the party and stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame. You have a drink. You'll have a great time, you tell yourself.

You notice that in the center of the room, people are dancing and having a really good time. You think about getting up moving further inside, but that might draw too much attention to yourself. Maybe they'd figure out that you don't really belong.

People walk up and talk to you. Normal, normal, normal.

You notice there are some people outside the party who can't come in, and they're glaring at your back. It makes you nervous. Maybe you should give up on the party and go outside and talk to them instead. Some of them look like nice people. But it doesn't look like they want to talk to you. And if the people inside see you talking to the people outside, they might slam the door on you.

Then someone inside the party slams the door shut on you anyway, with no warning. Damn, that hurt. Your fingers got mashed. You're outside now. CHING CHONG!

Then someone opens the door again, and you resume leaning against the doorframe, nursing your bruised fingers. You mention that someone slammed the door on you, but no one wants to talk about it.

The party continues. You're sick of it by now. But you can't just walk away... it's your job/school/life.

It's a really extreme example of how I felt about the situation. I wasn't that passive, and not even that tormented and confused, because after a certain point I made myself stop analyzing it. I had a lot of things on my mind and being in this hyper-aware state about my racial identity didn't help. After some point you just have to decide what's right and wrong, live by that, and walk away from the rest. By walking away I absolutely don't mean abdicating responsibility for social change. But it's not my responsibility to define exactly who I am and exactly where I stand at any given moment, no matter how much I myself might feel the need for that level of certainty.

That's why I like talking about these extremely uncomfortable and painful subjects. Ultimately, I find they lead to increased resolve about the need for a better and more honest future.

Follow-Up to Frustrating Adoption Conversation

Since no one's biting on the financial advice post, I thought I'd address some comments on the post from a few days ago. I dashed off that post fairly quickly, so now I'll go back and try to explain my reaction a little bit more.

I suppose I'm using a framework of foster care adoption to look at private adoption. Removing a child from their parents is not about judging a family as grade C or D and improving the situation by placing the child in a new, grade A or B family. It's about (or should be about) removing the child from an "F" situation because it would be almost impossible for things to get worse.

I know a lot of people who grew up having less than ideal family lives... as I suspect do most people from all walks of life. For example, my stepfather grew up under the thumb of a narcissistic, abusive alcoholic. I've only met a very few who really think that being placed into a new family should definitely have been their fate.

So I'm fairly set in my belief that giving up your child should only happen in an "F" situation. This doesn't mean an "F" mother. The quintessential "F" situation is that you have a terminal illness and no trustworthy relatives. If that was the case with me, I would start making an adoption plan in a heartbeat.

I don't think it should happen if you're in a "C" or "D" scenario and just think it might get worse.
I've heard a private adoption reform slogan -- "adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" -- and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't want to sound too judgmental about women who relinquish children not out of massive desperation or psychological pressure. I don't agree with it, but I don't agree with a lot of things people do. Private adoption needs serious reform. But if a woman is determined to relinquish her child, then that child absolutely deserves a new and loving permanent family, not to be held in limbo for years. Replacing all private adoption with the foster care system would be a disaster (especially since the foster care system is practically a disaster anyways). I guess it's a fine line... children shouldn't have to suffer to prove a point, or to satisfy the ego of an adult, but they also shouldn't have biological connections severed out of fear of potential suffering.

There are a lot of examples in my own family that push me towards thinking this way... although other people from nontraditional backgrounds won't necessarily share my point of view.

My mother wasn't married when she had me. She was drifting aimlessly throughout South Asia and Africa with occasional pit stops in Europe and a later stay in Japan. My father sent some money now and then, and dropped in on us for weeks or months in periods between jobs, and my grandparents wired $20 a month. This went a long way in countries like India and Afghanistan and Kenya. She stayed with friends she met on her travels. My mother carried me on her back. I had almost nothing, just a little crocheted bear and a set of wooden blocks. As for drugs... well, she was a hippie, it was the 1970s, enough said.

I remember that time as a kind of privileged paradise. Constantly exposed to new people and places and things and food... I was happy all the time. I had one of the happiest childhoods imaginable. In fact, I don't think I knew what it meant to be unhappy until I started to go to school in Japan and then later in America. During the rough times to come, at least I could always look back and think about what a wonderful life I had lived.

I don't think the life we had was ideal for everyone. We lived in a monastery outside of New Delhi for a while, and my mother told me that Western heroin junkies washed up there like human flotsam, because the monks never turned anyone away, and a few of the junkies came with sad scrawny children.

In short, my mother lived an extremely irresponsible life. She eventually settled down and started to earn a living. But I didn't suffer for that period of irresponsibility, and I'm fact I'm extremely glad for it.

And again, there's my relative who had the baby with the (failed) crack dealer. I wish she hadn't done certain things in certain ways, yes, but today her baby is wanted, loved and well cared for.

"V" has less good sense than my mother or my relative, but at this point in her life "V" could and should pull herself together and start being a good mother instead of a mediocre-to-bad one. However, I doubt anything I say will affect whatever (probably bad) decision she will make.

Foster Care Adoption ARRRRRRRRGH

We have a meeting with the senior caseworker/agency head on Wednesday to address our concerns.

This has been brewing for the last few weeks.

Basically, our caseworker up and quit. This is a woman I trusted, with whom I felt an emotional connection, and I told a lot of very personal things to her, including my worries about how my race would affect the placement process. I learned about her quitting from a third party. I have also been learning that she hasn't done a very good job with us. Our homestudy still says "mild emotional needs" only, and it should say mild to moderate. Basically, any not-too-violent behavior that doesn't require one full stay-at-home parent, we can handle. Our homestudy does not reflect that. It also had an inaccurate younger age range. Remember the ongoing saga Response to a Rejection and Response to a Response to a Rejection? Well, our caseworker's response was also inaccurate. I received the real response this weekend. We were out of the running not because of geography, but because of the age range and because the sibling group presented "more than minor" emotional needs. Everything else in the homestudy was fine, apparently.

I feel stabbed in the back. My normally optimistic husband is also feeling the hurt. Perhaps most of the inquiries (50+) I have sent out for the last five months have been for naught.

My negative feelings start with the fact that we're being treated poorly. No one has bothered to apologize to us yet. I've just heard "turnover is high in this field" as if that was an excuse for not sending us a simple email like "hey your caseworker is leaving". Then when I start to feel aggrieved it triggers guilt instead... it has been hinted, in not so many words, we're selfish for wanting a young (under 8) child. Thank goodness I know people who have already done this. Otherwise I would have dropped out a while back, like I suspect the majority of my class already has, because of the lack of moral support. There's only so far you can push people.

A while back, last year, I wrote a long post based around the Evan. B. Donaldson report on overcoming barriers to adoption from foster care. A lot of my thoughts on the report still apply. I ended it by saying it was important to remind myself that social workers are human beings, not almighty telepathic gatekeepers. However, I am currently in the mindset of reminding myself that social workers are human beings, not lying backstabbing incompetent scum.

I know the root problem is really the low value placed on human services in our society.

I have an online friend who thinks I should switch to the county. There would be a lot more placement opportunities. According to what I have heard locally the drawbacks of the county are: high turnover of workers, low advocacy, chaotic bureaucracy, high probability of being lied to. Since I'm already experiencing those things at my current agency, how much worse can it get? Maybe a little, maybe a lot.

In our meeting Wednesday I am going to politely but honestly lay out all our concerns, ask for an updated homestudy, to have a copy of our updated homestudy, and tell her that if we feel no progress has been made on our behalf we are going to switch to the county (or MAYBE another public agency) at the end of the year. I'm sick of the endless round of fruitless inquiries. I can't feel any positive thoughts about making a home for potential imaginary children in the middle of all this mess.

Last week was a dual anniversary. In early September 2006 my husband and I got married in the courthouse, and then went to drop off our application form at the agency. For our anniversary we celebrated by going to a great Vietnamese restaurant. I thought we would be farther along now. These events cast a shadow on our night but did not ruin it.

On the bright side, I feel confident that both of us are handling this well. I haven't broken down crying or anything; it hasn't destroyed our resolve. I know we will likely face harsher tests in future and will pass them.

I'll have an update soon!

Interview Meme

Yondalla at the excellent blog Thoughts From a Fostering Family gave me five interview questions, and homework to come back in a year and answer numbers three through five again after we've been matched and placed.

1. How did you meet your husband?

He worked at a neighborhood store. I always thought he was cute and wondered if there was some way I could get to know him better. I'm not shy, but I am kind of geeky.

I ran into him at a book sale, and noticed he was reading a book by Jean Baudrillard. I thought to myself, "Great! A way to start a conversation!" so I walked up to him and said "So I noticed you're reading Baudrillard. I hate his writing." To me, that was an icebreaker, but he was crushed... he didn't care about the book one way or the other, but he thought I was attacking him! He didn't really engage.

Months later, my then-roommate told me that he'd been hanging out with my future husband at the local bar. He said "that guy has a serious crush on you". I started going to the bar, even though I don't drink, and we socialized and developed a romance very quickly. A few months after that, we were living together, and then five years later we got married.

I believe strongly in same-sex marriage rights, so I was holding out to get married in Canada or somewhere that gay marriage is legal. But we realized we needed to get married right away in order to file an adoption application, so we went down to the basement of the Dekalb county courthouse, looked around, followed the "Pistol and Marriage Licenses" sign to the right desk and got hitched.

2. How should race issues be addressed in foster parent training?

That's a huge question. I feel like I'm still in the early stages of learning. One of my pet peeves is that racial issues are often turned into "white parents with black children" issues, when the landscape is really much more complicated. Our curriculum was standardized, and it was focused more on transcultural issues. After all, most of the parents in class were black and all of them said they would be adopting intraracially. So another question that stems from the first question would be... is it necessary, or advisable, to separate training curricula by the race of the foster or adoptive parent? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I tend to think "no".

I do know that white parents are often resistant to discussing race and racial identity. Many become overly defensive when asked to think in racial terms. Training has to start with their identity first, not that of the children. A good classroom environment would have 1) a safe space to talk about racial identity 2) a space that challenges parents to think about their own race and how they would relate to the racial identity of their children. There's a lot of possible conflict there.

Another question: in the training, should black parents be challenged to be more open to transracial placements? On a national level, that seems like a crazy question, because there's a greater need to find families for children of color. But it's very much dependent on local demographics. For example, there are many older white children with severe problems that desperately want and need homes due to the meth epidemic. And there's a rapidly growing number of Latino children entering the foster care system in Georgia leading to a crisis because there are hardly any Spanish-speaking foster parents. Some black people who have lived in homogenous black neighborhoods all their lives have hesitancy and unhelpful stereotypes about communicating with certain members of other races, so in that area transracial training would be very important and beneficial.

Perhaps there should be separate curricula for transracial and intraracial adoptions. Every parent would get general transcultural training... but then a special transracial qualification would have to be earned. It's such a crucial area that I see the need for extra training. Then again, sometimes transcultural differences can be greater than transracial differences.

I also think foster children and in fact all children should get special classes about race and teaching tolerance. It's such a hard subject and it will affect their lives in so many ways! How can you explain "this is something integral to who you are, you have almost no choice in it, it deeply affects the way you think about yourself and the way you relate to other people, it's connected to your culture but not the same thing as culture, and it doesn't really exist (in a biological sense)?" I feel like I've been studying it for decades and I barely understand it. If children start learning about it as early as possible, there would be less uncomfortable silence and less racist bullying. It would not solve all our social problems by any means, but it would definitely improve things.

"And how about some risky questions. You haven't started parenting yet, so:"
3. What do you predict will be the most challenging for you personally?

I'm the breadwinner right now, and my husband is going to the work-at-home dad. I know it's going to drive me nuts sometimes being at work and thinking "well he should be doing X, Y and Z with the kids so let me make sure he is doing it EXACTLY the right way". I'll need to quash that urge to micromanage!

4. What strength or skill do you have that will be most valuable to you as you parent?

I'm also worried about not saying the right things when the children are hurt and crying. I'm not good at that. When crises happen, I like to step up and get things done and make sure everyone is fed and be the strong, quiet one. That's an important strength, on the flip side. I have confidence in myself that no matter what happens, no matter what problem we face, I can cope with it and be the person everyone else in the family leans on.

5. How do you imagine you and your husband working together as parents?

I like to be very thorough; I come up with big ideas and plan them all out. I'm not good at following through on those plans! That's where my husband steps in. He's great at staying focused and on track. This pattern should help when we're doing things like tutoring the children or working out a behavior modification plan.

I'm not good at talking about other people's emotions. He is. I'm better at explaining the world and the way it works. We both like to hug. I like to cook, he likes to clean.

Since a lot of my background is in teaching, I tend to look at parenting through a teaching lens, or a "creating a space to learn and grow" approach. I know he's going to have more of a "play around, enjoy yourself, act as silly and goofy as you want" approach. I'm sure parenting will be much more complicated than either of us imagine, so I'm looking forward to answering these questions again on April 18, 2008.

I'll be thinking about who to tag and interview...

Handling Racism as a Child

This is a long post I've been working up to for a while. I want to take a very close look at the statement that "parents of color are better equipped to teach their children how to handle racism". It's a statement that's very important for transracial and intraracial adoption. It often gets dropped into a debate or a conversation and just left there.

I'm going to relate a lot of my personal experiences growing up with racism and ultimately agree with that statement. But in the process, I want to point out some things that make it a bit more complicated. What bothers me most is the subtle way the statement shifts "handling racism" as a burden onto the child or the parent. I understand that this is totally not the intention, and it might just be my own paranoia. But I just have to stress, dealing with racism is not something that any child or any parent should have to do. And it's not something any child or parent can truly accomplish to perfection. At best, they can fail less than others fail.

To clear up my own intentions: talking about my own experiences, I don't want to compare myself in a harmful way to a transracial adoptee. I remember sharing a little bit about my experiences in my adoption class, and noticed other parents reacting in two different ways:

1. "Her experience of racism shows that growing up as a person of color with a white mother is very difficult. Adding adoption on top of that would have made things even more difficult."
2. "Her experience shows that biological families can have racial identity issues as well as adoptive ones."

The second reaction is just as valid as the first, but it's also more dangerous. I don't want people to think that my issues made other peoples' issues any less serious by comparison.

Here goes.

We moved to America when I was 6. I saw my father a few times a year, a few weeks at a time. Almost every summer he flew me out to Japan.

We moved in with my grandparents. My mother rented her own house after a while, then started up a home business with my grandfather. It turned out to be successful. The business moved to a separate office and she was soon comfortably supporting us as a single mother. In the recession of the late 80s/early 90s she was fired from her own business and had to start all over again, but that's another story.

Our neighborhood was suburban and rootless. I feel zero nostalgia for that place, and when I tell people where I grew up I usually follow it with the term "armpit of America". In the schools I went to, I was the only Asian. There were exactly two exceptions: one Korean-American boy who was in my 1st-grade class and a Chinese-American girl who was in my 9th-grade art class. I never spoke with the Korean boy and exchanged maybe one sentence with the Chinese girl. We were terrified of each other. To explain why is difficult. I'd have to use the analogy of a school of fish. I was a fish with a stripe that the other fishes didn't have. If I swam carefully the other fish wouldn't notice. But if I swam close to another fish that had the same stripe, the other fish would see it, and they'd go into a feeding frenzy and turn us into sushi.

Things started getting bad for me, socially, around 2nd or 3rd grade. When I was 10, I thought they couldn't get any worse, but they did. I hit a low point when I was 13, in my last year of middle school. I remember every night hoping aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse would wax and wane in intensity, but it never went away. Sometimes it would be a note on my locker saying "GO BACK TO CHINA". Throwing things at me on the bus. Pulling their eyes. Other times it would be a group of kids following me down the hall, breathing down my neck, singing "ching chong, ching chong, chinky chinky ching chong". It seemed wrapped up in a lot of other things: being nerdy, being a girl. I kept thinking that if I could just improve myself, wear the right clothes, say the right things, then I could make it stop.

My life, in every other respect, was pretty good. I loved most of my classes at school; I did very well and competed in a lot of academic tournaments. I played soccer and climbed trees and went on trips to the beach and awesome family vacations and summer camp, where there were international students.

Here's how several adults in my life reacted to my problems. I didn't tell them the worst of it, because I didn't have the language. Rather, I carefully selected episodes.

• Guidance counselor, middle school: "Toughen up and come back when you have a real problem."
• Dad: "When I was your age, we had to walk over a mountain pass covered in snow to get to school every day. There were bears in the mountain. We rang bells to scare off the bears so they wouldn't eat us. Life is hard. Shut up. Study harder."
• Mom: "The people who say things like that to you are damaged. You should feel sorry for them. You are better and smarter than them and should never believe the ignorant things they say."
• Grandmother: "Give them a sharp backhand slap to the face". She then proceeded to show me exactly how I should slap them, guiding my arm into the proper position. It was like a tennis move. I loved my grandmother but I was always a bit scared of her. She could get very mean, although never towards me, when she had too much Dewar's.
• Grandfather: I never told my grandfather because I wanted to protect him. He was very sensitive. I thought he might start crying if he knew how much I was hurt.

Guess which approach to "handling racism" was most effective? If you're guessing my grandmother's approach (backhandling racism) you'd be right. The day I turned around and faced the kids who were breathing down my neck and hit one in the face and knocked her to the ground, they stopped. I still got insults at a distance, and notes, but they were much more careful from then on.

At the time, I felt a lot of guilt because I couldn't deal with the situation nonviolently. From my mother I'd absorbed a philosophical belief in nonviolence and developed it and made it my own, and the incredible efficacy of violence was a huge shock to that belief system.

A lot later on, I realized I couldn't have really dealt with it. It was beyond me. It was too much to ask. It wasn't my responsibility that I broke or failed; it was the failure of the kids who abused me and the parents who didn't teach them not to abuse other kids and the whole system of unchallenged racism in America.

The guidance counselor was a complete dickhead. Other than that, I can’t blame any of the adults I listed. They did their best. My father had a lot of other problems in his childhood, but he never experienced racism.

He helped me in other ways, which he was oblivious to.

When I was growing up in the 80s there was a very limited range of Asians in the media. A limited and horrible range. Keep in mind that I knew no other Asian-Americans at all, my entire childhood, but I remember watching my first and only episode of that TV show Kung Fu with David Carradine and feeling nothing but sheer blinding rage. This guy was supposed to be Asian? They were cheating me. And then there was the cringing Hop Sing on Bonanza reruns.

I remember a few times staring at my face in the mirror and trying to make eyes look bigger, but I just ended up looking surprised. I've read accounts of this mirror moment in other literature about Asian-Americans, and it also features in an even more terrifying form in accounts from transracial adoptees.

At the moment I was doing it, I felt very divided. I felt a strong urge to do it, and to examine my non-whiteness as if it were something I could cast out; at the same time, I knew it was wrong and deeply harmful. And I was angry at myself for wanting to do it. Looking back at those moments, I think I was wrestling with a demon.

It was because of my father that I won. I knew that the images they showed of Asians were vicious lies. My father was a physically powerful and completely fearless Asian man. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with those lies.

The other adults in my family helped me in some way: even my grandfather, being so sensitive and compassionate. My mother helped by giving me the skeleton of an intellectual framework so that I could step back and analyze what was really going on.

When I was 13 I gave up my horribly unsuccessful project of fitting in. The next year, the first year of high school, for my one elective I signed on to be a teacher's aide for the TMH class (Trainably Mentally Handicapped, the clinical/educational term in use back then). I did it for selfish reasons. Since I didn't care about my reputation anymore, I thought I might as well spend my elective time with people who were guaranteed not to call me racial insults. In the beginning I wasn't a very good aide, but I learned how to be a better one. I flipped the social value system and only tried talking to D&D geeks, goths and punks. The decision I made ended up giving me a strong, positive identity, but I sacrificed a lot to get there; I have no natural ease in social situations. I had to train myself not to care what people think about me, so I come off as not being very empathetic, even when I really do care.

I can't imagine my personality without going through what I went through! I think I've done a good job turning the negatives into positive learning experiences for myself and others. Still, as I touched on in my very first post, sometimes I think about how it could have been so less painful, so much better.