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.