Short addition

I just caught up with what's going on with Tudu over here. I'm feeling heartbroken. Please, anyone who's familiar with the case, let me know if there's anything I can do, or any letter I can write.  I'm checking my atlasien email address in the profile.

Follow-Up

I really appreciate all the comments in the last post. 27 now. I think it's my record here! This post went up on Racialicious today as well, and it's reaching a wide audience, which is what I'd hoped for.

I also want to let any new readers know that if you're frustrated by the comment registration policy, I'm sorry. If you really need to get in touch with me, try email. But I like having the registration policy in place because it means I never have to deal with comment spam or drive-by flaming, and I have limited time to manage my blog. Google registration also keeps comments centered on a regular group of people -- other adoption bloggers -- that have been reading me for years, as I've been reading them for years.

As for a comment policy, I don't have one. If you take the time to type up a negative comment, I'll probably leave it. I will note that I don't hate transracial adoption. I'm a transracial adoptive parent; I have a hopefully-healthy-rather-than-narcissistic love for myself. Also, I reserve the right to judge pretty much everything and everyone. I usually define the word "judge" to mean "think critically". I'm aware that many other people have different definitions of the word "judging", such as "saying anything I don't like" or "being a jerk".

I'm probably not going to revisit the topic for a bit, unless I become aware of an important immigration action item (I'm hoping that a proposal will come up soon to at the very least double the number of Haitian visas).


Again, I really appreciate the comments.  And if you want to stick around, great! Just warning you that most of what I post about regularly is more day-to-day mommyblogging type of stuff.

Personal Update and Blog/Racialicious Comparison

Last week was really exhausting. I need another vacation! My weekends are becoming an extension of the working week... and this is mainly my own fault, since I really need to organize them better.

Sunny has a 101-degree fever this morning. Guy had to pick him up from school yesterday because he had a sore throat, but then his throat quickly got better, so Guy took him right back to school. Last night Sunny's appetite didn't suffer: he ate a huge pork chop, with sides of couscous and grilled asparagus with cheese on top, then some grapes for dessert. It's hard to know how to handle Sunny being sick because 1) he's ridiculously healthy and 2) he's sort of a hypochondriac. In all the time we've had him he's been sick exactly once, and that lasted less than a day. I think he has a very powerful immune system, so when gets sick, the symptoms are light, and go away quickly. Because he's so dramatic, he doesn't exactly lie, but he does exaggerate his symptoms greatly. All kids do this to some extent, but Sunny does seem a bit extreme. His friend J has a much more stoic approach to illness and injury. On the other hand, because Sunny's so energetic and restless, I think he gets up and moves around when he really should be relaxing...

I just hope he doesn't have the swine flu, or the regular flu, for that matter. I've been watching the news and calling our pediatrician to find out when I can get him the vaccine, but I don't have a date yet.

Right now, his cousin (Guy's sister's daughter) is visiting, and they're hanging out on the couch, watching Voltron and playing Legos together. They'd be out running around if Sunny was feeling better.

I just noticed comments from Sarah (hi!) saying, among other things, that I sound a lot different at this blog than I do at Racialicious, where I comment frequently and guest-post occasionally. I haven't thought about it that much, but that's right. I'm much more of a hard-ass at Racialicious, ha ha! It's a good jump-off point for talking about online communities in general, though.

I really don't like using terms such as "safe space" and "triggering" on the internet because I think they're infantilizing. But what I observe is sort of a continuum of environments. The parameters include the following:

1) Who are the members who will interact with you?
2) Who are the members who read what you say, but will not interact with you?
-- For anything posted publicly, 1) is unpredictable and 2) is REALLY unpredictable, and much larger than 1).
3) What's your degree of hard control over who will interact with you? If you're a moderator of a group, you can kick another member out. If you run a blog, you can delete comments. If you're on a forum, you could use the "ignore" feature on someone.
4) What's your degree of soft control (level of respect in you, or your peer group) when it comes to who will interact with you? If you tell someone they're being offensive, are they likely to listen to you and stop? Can you marshal support? If you have a whole posse of people and they all tell that person to stop, will they listen?
5) What is the range of opinions permissible in the environment? Is your perspective inside that range, outside that range or on the edge?
6) What do you want to get from the environment? Concrete bits of useful information? Psychological validation and a sense of human contact? Entertainment and light humor? Establishing lasting links with new people? Revenge? A sense of power over others? With these last two, we're getting into troll territory, although they're negative tendencies that can surface in absolutely anyone.
7) What do you want to give to the environment? Do you think you have anything of valuable to impart, and do you want to educate others? If so, you need to tailor your message to the audience (so we go back to 1 and 2).
8) What is the cost to you of participating in the environment? This is crucial. Navigating all these elements is hard. Just when you think you understand one of them, something changes. You get disappointed, angry, you feel like no one is listening to you, you thought you were in a "safe space" but someone attacks you, someone you thought was your ally disagrees with you strongly, you feel betrayed, you feel unwanted, you feel like you have to maintain a false face and hide your true self in order to gain acceptance, or you become disappointed in yourself because you engaged in negative behavior out of anger... internet drama takes a toll. Sometimes you want to be in an environment, but it's just too damaging, and you're better off turning your back. Sometimes the cost is very high, but what you're learning/getting is so valuable that you need to stay.

Though people will often say "I just want to express myself", it's never as simple as that. Unless your expression is totally private, "self-expression" will have a social element.

When it comes to 1) and 2) for this blog, I agonize a lot. I control my interactive audience by limiting comments to people with Google accounts. This means most of the people who interact here also have Google blogs. They're more invested in leaving substantive comments. So I almost never get drive-by comments. The trade-off is that I lose out on substantive comments by people who aren't registered and don't feel like registering. For 2), I removed this blog from Google listings for a while, then a few months ago I put it back on, and just now, I took it back off again. I do NOT want people who know me personally surfing in on key words. Especially my mom and dad. I'm very close to my mother. We work on certain projects together, we see each other every other day, but one of the reasons I don't talk about her much on this blog is that I don't want to put down key words that would lead her here, because she's internet-savvy and on more social media than I am! Partly because we're so close, I want to maintain certain barriers so I don't feel smothered. My dad is the opposite of my mom: he's an intensely private person. I am also protecting Sunny's identity and that of his biological and foster family. I have a lot of reasons to want to maintain anonymity.

My control over this blog isn't total, in the soft sense. I care about what other people think. The feelings of regular readers and commenters do factor when I'm writing a post. It's not the number one factor, but it's in there. Number 5 -- the range of permissible opinions -- is also difficult, because I'm blogging at the intersection of some practically incongruous communities. What's held as standard and inarguable inside one community might be totally outside the envelope at another. I flatter myself that in this respect, I'm quite honest, I don't censor myself and I don't avoid controversies. I put that opinion out there and I also analyze why it's outside the envelope to begin with. I've already talked a lot about what I've gotten from being part of a blog community (great, life-changing advice and support) and what I want to give back (more of the same). The emotional cost of running this blog mostly has to do with anonymity-agonizing... other than that, it's very low.

When it comes to Racialicious, all of these factors are different. A lot more people read there, and a lot more people read there that will never comment, but are still very important because what they read there might change their opinions. I don't have any hard control there, but I have a degree of soft control, because I've been hanging out there so long that I've built up respect. When it comes to the range of opinions, I'm mostly on the inside. So although there's a lot of tussling and heated debate that go on, the emotional cost to me is fairly low, because I feel like I'm arguing from a position of greater strength. Plus, there are a lot of posts on topics I have little experience on -- e.g. Native American identity, Islam -- and on those, I'm a member of the passive audience, learning but not necessarily interacting.

I used to participate in more online communities, but I don't have the time for a wide range. And when I analyze the emotional cost, it's often too high. There are a few communities I've participated in where I just wanted very concrete bits of information, in which I made sure to have a race- and gender-neutral handle, and got in and got out again right away. Because otherwise I would have been harassed and it would have been horrible. A few months ago I got burned when I was in a certain community and complained (in what I thought was a mild and reasonable way) about a racist Asian joke and about twenty members just piled on me. Race card, PC, no sense of humor, Asians are all doctors or lawyers anyway, blah blah blah. I walked around for a day in real life while fuming, and that wasn't healthy. Arguing a case in a hostile environment can do a lot of good (remembering, again, the passive audience) but it comes at a high emotional cost.

I don't think I'm really saying anything different at Racialicious, but I am talking about different aspects of the same things, and in different ways. I also let loose my evil sense of humor a bit more over there.

Update: by the time I finished typing this up, Sunny seems to have recovered... he's full of beans again, and playing some kind of high-volume racing game with his cousin.

Anyone know what happened to Baggage and Bug?

I just remembered I haven't seen anything new from Baggage's blog in a while. I went to baggageandbug.com and found the site was dead :-(

I hope she is doing OK.

Intersections

Race
Adoption
Infertility
Parenting

The main reason for my month-long blog absence is that I'm trying to figure out where to speak from the intersections.

Take adoption and infertility, for example. I'm doing things backwards, adopting before infertility treatments. There's no social pattern for doing so. There's a lot of positive stuff focused on "moving past infertility" into adoption. There's also a lot of negative stuff focused on how the framing of adoption as a second choice hurts and commodifies adoptees. By switching the order of the choices, and talking about it, am I already situated inside a noble frame, or a villainous frame? It depends on the reader, of course. I'm a very independent person, but I'm also somewhat affected by my projections of what other people might think about me. If I wasn't, I'd be a robot.

So I say to myself, "if I talk about infertility treatments, does that mean that other people will think that I'm not satisfied with Sunny because he's adopted, and when I have a "REAL" child, I'd ignore Sunny? Will they think that Sunny will be hurt?" I don't think that's the case. Of course, Sunny was adopted as an older child and he's already very familiar with the concept of a blended family -- foster, adopted, bio -- all living together.

I don't feel like a hero or a villain. I do feel guilty in one area... the best choice for Sunny would probably be to adopt another child around his age or slightly older. He loves playing with other kids so much. But he also gets along well with younger kids, and I think he'd still be happier as an older brother than an only child. Neither Guy nor myself can face entering the process again for the short-term future. It was so grueling. In comparison, infertility treatment is a walk in the park. It's had its low points... about three weeks ago, very low indeed. But it just doesn't shake and batter me the way that waiting to matched with Sunny did. Besides, we're already in a semi-agonizing waiting period for BB. That goes under "Parenting"... if I do get lucky soon, and BB comes to live with us, we'll be raising two children under the age of two at the same time. I think we're up for it, but realistically, it would be pretty challenging for a while.

I don't blog much about my infertility treatments. It's too personal. I'm OK talking about some very deep emotions on this blog, but talking about my body just feels weird. I probably have a fair number of readers who know a lot about infertility already, though! I will say, I'm staying on a very hormone-light road. In fact, I left my first RE because they kept on ramping the injectables up.

Also, I've probably internalized a lot of negative stereotypes about women dealing with infertility. We're supposed to be selfish, narcissistic and hypersensitive. I should try to explore this more, because those stereotypes are based on nasty misogynist stuff. But whenever I start, I bump into the fact that "infertility solidarity" can have disturbing consequences.

Here's one example. I hold a heretical position in infertility circles... I'm against anonymous donation of sperm and eggs, because I believe children have a right to their genetic heritage, and medical and state institutions should not be allowed to deny children that right. I think anonymous egg and sperm donation should be a topic held open for debate. In infertility communities, it's not. I've run across posts where mothers (who are anonymous, of course, like me) say very frankly that they're not even going to tell their children about the egg or sperm donation. I keep my mouth shut about my belief, although I've tried to hint at it in gentle ways. I wish I was braver about it, but I just don't have the energy for a full-scale fight on that front.

Here's another example where I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Someone on one board told a stupid racist Asian joke. I didn't even say anything about it initially. Yes, I'm a race blogger and I ignored an Asian joke, I've done it before and I'll do it again, because Asian jokes are EVERYWHERE and I can't invest my time in complaining about all of them. Someone else did object, very mildly, and then the defense came up... "well, we're infertile, so as a member of an oppressed group it's OK to blow off steam by making this joke..." At that point, I had to pop in... "AHEM so there aren't any infertile Asian women? Your argument denies my existence and is highly offensive!" At which point someone else who claimed to be Asian then claimed not to be offended (these cowardly excusers make it so hard for the rest of us) , then I rolled up my sleeves and it snowballed from there.

The idea that infertility communities are "safe spaces" is pretty much a joke for me. They're more like minefields. It also bothers me that negative coping is often encouraged by these communities, mainly, the constant accounts of freaking out and collapsing in psychic agony when a friend tells you they're pregnant. Call me a heartless bitch, but I find this very disturbing, and infantilizing, and I don't think it should be encouraged with choruses of "me too!" and "it's OK to feel that way!" In what other areas of life is this acceptable? If you lose your legs in an accident, is it OK for you to freak out whenever you see someone walking? If your mother dies, is it OK to feel constant bitter envy that your husband's mother is still living? Expressing pain, yes; collapsing and blaming other people, no. I guess this goes back to my hatred of the word "triggering". Even when we're discussing clinical PTSD, the person suffering PTSD ideally has a goal of working through PTSD. The shellshocked soldier wants to get to the point where they can just wince a little when they hear a car backfiring... not throw themselves on the ground, or demand that all cars stop backfiring. I think these women would advance farther and ultimately experience less suffering if they treated themselves with a communal mixture of sympathy AND honesty .

Then, I think, am I being a hypocrite... support for me, but not for thee? Ahh, it's so complicated. Maybe I really am a heartless bitch. I'm currently taking a break from infertility AND adoption communities.

I'm in a privileged position to be able to do so. Parenting, on the other hand, isn't something I can ever take a break from anymore. And I'm having a difficult time blogging about how parenting intersects with race. Again, there's no frame that fits my stories, and I also feel sort of inadequate. I don't have many teaching moments with Sunny about race. He overhears adult family conversations about race, but he doesn't fully understand, and in fact he gets a bit bored. He's just not interested in hearing complicated stuff about institutional racism and I'm not interested in teaching him anything before he's really ready for it.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is that the concept of "black/African-American" is especially difficult for him to comprehend. He has a sense that people with his medium skin tone are like him, but light-skinned black people (like the across-the-street neighbor kid) and dark-skinned black people (like the next-door neighbors) are different. And in a child's literal imagination, of course they're different!

I want him to grow into a positive sense of black solidarity... that is, the idea that black people 1) face a set of common problems 2) should support each other in facing those problems 3) while realizing their common strengths 4) but not minimizing their diversity. This isn't an easy lesson. Colorism is a major negative force against the formation of this solidarity. Since his peer group is mostly African-American, I worry about him picking up colorist messages... it's something I have absolute zero background in dealing with.

Most stuff about race and parenting deals with reinforcing the self-confidence of minority children in predominantly white environments. I have an overlapping but different set of concerns.

He asked me last week, "Am I black?" My answer sucked. I talked a lot about who his mothers and fathers were and what other people saw him as... I basically said "Yes, maybe, sort of, it's complicated."

I just don't want him to feel forced into any identity before he's ready. It was only last year that he kept telling me his bio father was white. In fact, he'd been confusing his mother's brother with his father. And then he would ask me if his mother was black.

So I don't want to force him into establishing an identity right now, but I also want him to develop a sense of solidarity, and I don't see these two goals fitting together very well at the moment. At least we've gone a long way towards establishing that race and identity are safe to talk about.

On the bright side of blogging, I've embarked on a major, ambitious blogging project at Racialicious: a series called "The Surface of Buddhism" (introduction and Part One here). I don't talk about my religion much. I don't even talk about it with friends and family. Yet again, I don't have a frame. I'm trying to draw one and fill it in at the same time.

How Blogging Communities Can Help Kids - Neurofeedback Example

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

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

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

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

Whoah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is her email response:

Hi,

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

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

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

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

Brenda

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

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

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

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

Blogging, Anonymity, Trolls and Hatred of Motherhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Class of 2006

I feel a bit sad that Maggie at The Open Window has halted her blog.

When I started blogging in 2006, she was one of the first foster care adoption blogs I found. We were at a similar stage in the placement process.

Like other foster care adoption blogs I started reading religiously around that time -- Toots and Noodles and Spotted Dog Turn come to mind -- the blog is going dark.

Foster care adoption is sort of like jumping into a rough ocean. The waiting stage and the placement stage is full of uncertainty and terror. Then you adapt to the ocean (hopefully) and start swimming. At this point, I guess the natural question comes up... why keep blogging?

It's too bad. I really wish there was a more central system of archiving and linking all these kinds of blogs, because they're a more valuable resource than the official training classes you get. But they're more like organic entities forming a fragile ecosystem.

I plan on continuing for a while. I might let things slide for a few weeks or even a month, but I'd like to keep updating as frequently and as long as I can.

Sunny is doing well enough that our current problems are actually rather boring. Nose-picking, for example, and an abortive attempt to slip the dog his vegetables. But I think I'll still have interesting things to talk about here and there, especially since I didn't really start this blog to be 100% adoption. I'm not bored with blogging yet. Also, if I stick around long enough, maybe some of the blogs that have gone dim will light up again...

Nicknames

I realized, after almost two years of blogging, I badly need a blogname for my husband.

This is a difficult step because I'm allergic to the commonly-used internet acronyms. PAP, POC, WOC, DH, DD, ugh, ugh, ugh.

My dad is now Ojiichan, of course. My mother is Nana. Sunny is Sunny and I'm Atlasien. My husband is... I'm coming up with a blank. I'd like something simple, unpretentious, reminiscent but with no clue as to his real identity. Mildly humorous would be OK, but nothing vaguely insulting, such as Kielbasa.