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.

My Writing - Two Links

I'm back from vacation. It was awesome... I'll post some more on it later.

While I was gone, I had two thingies published.

One was a short comment on adoption, in the Minnesota Women's Press, in response to this story, A Feminist Lens on Adoption. It's not a very notable comment that would stand out for regular readers here, except for the fact that it's now printed on dead trees.

The second was a long piece on racist abuse, published at my favorite hangout, Racialicious.com. It's sort of a non-adoption-related expansion on one of my early posts at this blog, Handling Racism as a Child. It's got the unwieldy title of Getting Past the Bears: Racist Abuse in Middle School and the Formation of People of Color Consciousness. I wrote it as part of the Racialicious Things We Do to Each Other/Things We Do to Ourselves series.

I spent a long time working on the Bears post, and I'm pretty happy with it. The edits Latoya suggested were also a great help. I tried to produce something emotionally perturbing, yet measured and analytical, and I think I mainly succeeded. The comments to the post (100+) contain a lot of people sharing experiences very close to mine, or that intersect in interesting ways. I wish I had time to interact with the commenters more, but I was in the middle of the grueling three-flight trip back to Atlanta.

Sunny Journal Days 1-3

Here's my transcription of a journal Sunny is keeping for school assignment during vacation. It's good practice for his handwriting.

DAY ONE
I played in the ocean. Playing in the ocean made me happy. I saw a big sea turtle with my goggles. I made a friend.

DAY TWO
I crossed the hot springs. I got a taco. I went to a rocky beach. I played ping pong with my dad.

DAY THREE
I climbed up a volcano. I walked through a lava tube. I saw a beautiful bird. I am going to have a big fish for dinner.

Here's a picture Sunny took himself.

Worried about Atlanta

Jim Martin's loss to Saxby Chambliss was disappointing. I worked for the campaign, but I still had a feeling he was going to lose. The state of Georgia remains firmly in the control of Republicans who are strangling Atlanta... and local Democratic politicians are by and large a mediocre bunch. At least Hank Johnson and John Lewis are doing a good job, and I'm desperately hoping that Burrell Ellis is going to turn things around in Dekalb County after the embarrassing reign of Vernon Jones.

Georgia's unemployment rate is now higher than the national average. Our crime is rising too. It's been rising for a while, in part due to horrible police leadership, and the economic climate is only going to make it rise much faster. A pizza place near where I live just got robbed during dinner peak.

I've always been upbeat, overall, about where I live: Dekalb County, to the east of Atlanta, a large county with a higher population than quite a few states. Living here means I can afford a nice big solid house with a real yard. My commute time isn't bad. I have quick access to the best food from all over the world, and this is really crucial for my quality of life! My son's friends are also all over the map, and he sees lots of examples of successful African-American professionals.

The downside is the crime, and the bad schools. This area is all over the spectrum not just in race and ethnicity, but also in terms of income. There are lots of apartment buildings and residency hotels, especially around the Memorial Drive corridor, where something bad is always going down. I know people who live in these buildings, and they suffer the worst of it, of course. 95% of the residents are in working families, but since they have to work so incredibly hard, while they're out working their two or three jobs the other 5% runs around drug-dealing and shooting their guns and causing general nastiness. Rising unemployment is only going to make it worse for everyone.

As for the schools, there is one thing I know for sure: Sunny is NOT going to junior high school in any of the local public schools. I may write about this later but things are pretty dire. I'm in the same boat as many other people. My neighbor, for example, is gaming the system by using his sister's apartment as an official residency so that his son can go to a safer, better junior high. That's a very common tactic.

I am going to do what I can politically to try and improve the public school situation, but it's my responsibility to try and help fix things... not Sunny's. In the short term the situation is only going to get worse due to the recession and massive budget cuts, but in the long-term, I'm hoping an Obama administration, combined with better local leadership, may turn things around.

I don't have many alternatives for places to live. I need a big cheap city and I can't stand cold weather. The West Coast is still too expensive. I'm scared of Texas. Culturally, Miami and New Orleans are two places I'd consider. But Miami probably has worse traffic than Atlanta, the same crime, and is more expensive. New Orleans has worse crime and fewer jobs. Guy is even more picky than I am, too. He has never really lived away from Georgia and I think he'd be almost incapable of moving. As a final factor, my mother and stepfather moved halfway across America just to live next to us... so I don't think we'll be moving soon. Anyway, things are going to be tough all over for a few more years at the very least.

ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention one huge advantage Atlanta has over New Orleans and Miami: the absence of killer hurricanes.

Third-Culture Kids in the Obama Administration

The below article is a bit Pollyanna-ish, but still fascinating. Maybe I should apply for a job at the Obama administration! It's just too cold up there in D.C., though.

When I read stuff about third-culture kids, I recognize a lot of traits I have myself. But I don't feel like embracing the term. It seems like it's most often applied to the children of upper-class parents and intellectuals, although it should really apply to a much broader group, including the children of just-plain immigrants who work in places like restaurants and construction zones. My upbringing was somewhere in the middle. I definitely didn't get an elite early education, although I eventually ended up at a good college.

I think the phrase "1.5gen" is something I can embrace more. Even though I'm only half of a 1.5gen... or perhaps the square root of one?

I do agree that with this kind of background, you end up with a thick skin because you get used to cultural rejection and being treated like an alien. It either completely screws you up or makes you very independent.

Obama's 'Third Culture' Team

Obama has packed his staff with so-called “Third Culture Kids”—people who grew up outside the U.S. New research suggests this group shares common psychological traits that could shape his administration.

John Quincy Adams lived in France, and young Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Europe often enough to master French and German, but Barack Obama is the first modern American president to have spent some of his formative years outside the United States. It is a trait he shares with several appointees to the new administration: White House advisor Valerie Jarrett was a child in Tehran and London, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was raised in east Africa, India, Thailand, China and Japan as the son of a Ford Foundation executive, and National Security Advisor James L. Jones was raised in Paris. (Also, Bill Richardson, tipped as Secretary of Commerce, grew up in Mexico City.)

This is more than a trivial coincidence. So-called “Third Culture Kids”—and the adults they become”—share certain emotional and psychological traits that may exert great influence in the new administration. According to a body of sociological literature devoted to children who spend a portion of their developmental years outside their “passport country,” the classic profile of a “TCK” is someone with a global perspective who is socially adaptable and intellectually flexible. He or she is quick to think outside the box and can appreciate and reconcile different points of view. Beyond whatever diversity in background or appearance a TCK may bring to the party, there is a diversity of thought as well.

But TCKs can also feel rootless and detached. The great challenge for maturing Third Culture Kids is to forge a sense of personal and cultural identity from the various environments to which they been exposed. Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, could serve as a textbook in the TCK syllabus, a classic search for self-definition, described in living color. Obama’s colleagues on the Harvard Law Review were among the first to note both his exceptional skill at mediating among competing arguments and the aloofness that made his own views hard to discern. That cool manner of seeming “above it all” is also a classic feature of the Third Culture Kid.

The TCKs’ identity struggles can be painful and difficult. The literature documents addictive behaviors, troubled marriages and fitful careers. But meeting this challenge can become a TCK’s greatest strength. Learning to take the positive pieces from a variety of experiences and create a strong sense of “This is who I am, no matter where I am” gives a steadiness when the world around is in flux or chaos”—which helps explain “no-drama Obama.”

Among those of us who study Third Culture Kids (almost always because we are TCKs), it has been both gratifying and frustrating to watch “one of us” run for the White House. We began obsessively pointing out to each other the telltale signifiers of the TCK that so often went unremarked in the mainstream press.

“I laughed when I heard a commentator call Barack exotic and elitist,” says Lois Bushong, an American who grew up in Costa Rica and now works a therapist for internationally mobile families. “How exotic or elitist can it be to go home to visit your grandmother, even if she lives in Hawaii? She’s still your grandma. This TV guy seemed to forget that the world many see ‘exotic’ is simply home for TCKs.”

But we also despaired when his opponents denigrated the importance of Obama’s childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii. “How can they say his international childhood doesn’t count when it comes to foreign affairs?” sputtered my friend and colleague, Paulette Bethel. “That’s just crazy. Barack’s been negotiating between cultural worlds since the day of his birth. No one will have to teach him this skill. It’s already second nature to him!”

Bethel feels vindicated by the collection of strong personalities that Obama has invited into the new administration. “He’s lived with so many differences around him in his lifetime, they don’t threaten him anymore,” she says.

In 1984, Dr. Ted Ward, then a sociologist at Michigan State University, called TCKs “the prototype citizens of the future,” anticipating a time when a childhood lived in various cultures would be the norm rather than the exception. It seems that time is now.

And the characteristics derived from an expat childhood may be well suited to the challenges facing the new administration. The economic crisis, for one, demonstrates how interdependent world cultures have become, and its solution will undoubtedly require the unconventional thinking that comes more easily to a Third Culture Kid. Even though Tim Geithner is not an economist by training, he apparently demonstrated such a keen problem-solving skills in the financial arena that the stock market jumped 500 points on the news of his appointment. Returning to Japan as an adult and speaking the language he learned as a child have given him an unusually deep understanding of the global economy.

As TCKs, we have had the joy, and the challenge, of being raised in many places and cultures. Now we get to see whether the values of the TCK can be a force for good on the world stage.