Sunny was very vocal about wanting me to pack him a lunch for day camp. I wasn't going to in the beginning, since I thought he'd just prefer the free cafeteria lunch. But he says it's "junk food" there and he likes my lunches better! He's always very honest and tells me if he eats the whole lunch or only part of it.
Here's what I cooked him yesterday: a loosely-Afghani-style pilaf dish.
Ingredients: - 1/3 cup bhasmati rice - one small carrot - 1/3 zucchini - a couple tablespoons of Gimme Lean soy sausage meat - EarthBalance or butter for frying - teaspoon of cumin seeds - paprika - salt and pepper - raisins - crushed nuts (such as cashew)
Directions: - start rice in rice cooker. 1/3 cup rice to 2/3 cup water and a dash of olive oil works for me, but if you're making a larger amount of rice you need to reduce the water ratio. - dice carrot and zucchini into tiny pieces. Since Sunny doesn't like zucchini, I disguised it by peeling it first. - form very small balls with the sausage meat - over medium-high heat fry up sausage balls, carrot and zucchini, with spices. At the end, throw in the cumin seeds, which only need to fry for half a minute (longer and they'll burn and lose some flavor). - throw cooked rice into pan, mix together with fried ingredients, turn the heat off, mix with nuts and raisins, put into lunchbox.
He told us it was yummy and he ate all of it except for a little bit. The "little bit" was more like two rice grains. If I was eating this dish I would have flavored it more strongly, with garlic and onions and ancho chile powder, but I'm sticking with the spices and ingredients I know Sunny likes. He is crazy for paprika... go figure!
Today I made him some pasta, also with carrot and zucchini, and tomorrow I think I'll make him something quicker, like a meatball sub. We've been using a lot of the Gimme Lean. I'm not a vegetarian, but it's healthy, we all really like the taste, it cooks quickly and keeps in the fridge for a long time.
A few days ago my husband took Sunny to his Nana's house. He warned Sunny, "your friend might not be home" and asked him to try not to be upset if his friend wasn't home. Unfortunately, he wasn't home, and Sunny had another crying fit.
That was a bit frustrating. But the other day, we had a really positive development! His friend was home this time. We decided to let them play video games for half an hour. But when I walked across the street to pick Sunny up, I heard a lot of shouting from the backyard. I asked their relative what was going on, and she said they got bored of playing video games and were playing out in the yard instead. Yay! I let them play for another half an hour.
I think this is going to be great for Sunny's friend. His mother told me she is worried about him socially... the only other boy in the neighborhood is much older, and she thought that he'd only came by to play video games in their basement, and wouldn't really interact with her son.
Sunny also really likes his cousin, my niece. She's only a year older than him. Maybe we'll set up a sleepover at some point.
The way my sister-in-law raises my niece is opposite from a lot of our views on parenting (my 6-year-old would not be allowed to watch Bride of Chucky or play "Scarface") but I'm never judgmental in front of her. After all, my niece is a sweet little kid and is very loved. She said about Sunny, "he's cute!"
Other kids like following Sunny around because he's so dramatic. He does everything with a flourish, a leap and a yell.
For non-U.S.ians, the voter registration system must be a really messy and confusing thing. The basic principles are that voter registration evolved as a system to make sure only the right people voted. The right people used to be white men with property. The property definition was relaxed over the last centuries, although it went through periods of tightening. For example, literacy requirements excluded a lot of poor people who never learned to read.
Black people were briefly enfranchised (given the right to vote) after the Civil War, but restrictions were quickly put into place to keep them from voting. Women, white and African-American, legally won the right to vote in 1920, but in practical terms African-Americans were still barred from voting. Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Native Americans fell under a complicated maze of laws that barred them from full citizenship and voting until the mid-20th century.
Unfortunately, the voter registration remains as an informal mechanism to make sure that more of the "right people" vote.
I already listed some of the racial differences in rates. Here are the class ones.
National Low Income Housing Coalition However, census data confirms that low income voters are registered and vote at lower rates than higher-income citizens. While 82% of people with incomes of over $75,000 were registered to vote in 2000 and 75% of those registered actually voted, just 59% of people with incomes between $10,000 and $14,999 were registered, and only 44% of those registered actually voted.
Low income people face several challenges to voting: less-flexible jobs that may not allow time off for voting, transportation impediments that may make getting to the polls more difficult, and a greater likelihood of misinformation about their rights as voters that may make people shy away from voting. People experiencing homelessness, ex-felons, and survivors of the 2005 hurricanes may face especially tough barriers to voting.
I'll take the comment in the helpful spirit it was given. But I want to give some more context and also raise another issue.
First of all, the Spiderman website doesn't show 30-minute Spiderman cartoons. What Sunny was clicking on was an Iron Man webgame. I didn't want to spend too much time on the site because the possibility he'd click ahead to something too violent was escalating. Second, he doesn't have enough attention span to watch a 30-minute show. He can watch up to 20 minutes of a show only if I'm sitting next to him also engaging him in an activity such as coloring or stickering.
I don't think that having video games limited is going to mean he ends up with a label of ODD! That's a rather dire warning.
We've visited his foster home over two different weekends and talked to his foster mom quite a bit. We know her house rules, and our rules, to a large degree, are extensions of her rules. For video games, they're about the same. Sunny was not allowed to play them during the weekday and his times during the weekend were strictly regulated.
When it comes to television, our rules are a little bit stricter. I don't like the fact that he was watching so many commercials... one of the first nights he was here he started singing the freecreditreport-dot-com song! It was incredibly cute, but still. So he can only watch PBS Kids shows with no commercials, or certain recorded Nick Kids or Disney shows where I fast-forward the commercials.
When it comes to morning times, we're not as strict. Her house was run like an army, because she had an army of kids. Sunny was always the first awake (he's definitely a morning person) and was told many times he had to stay in his room until the others were up, which often frustrated him. At our house, he gets up when he hears us get up. We give him showers at night so in the morning his routine is pretty simple, and has plenty of time for watching PBS Kids or watching or helping me cook, or coloring.
As an only child, he's now getting a lot more attention than he's getting in his foster home. That's what he needs, more than anything else.
I just would need a whooooole lot more convincing by someone who knew Sunny before I let him engage in all kinds of pleasure-seeking activities without giving him limits. What would the pay-off really be? Most likely I'd see a lot of restlessness, irritability, further inability to self-amuse. I've seen him in "toy rooms" when he gets overstimulated, and he doesn't look happy or pleased at all. He'll flit from one thing to the next, faster and faster, working himself up, getting angry that this or that toy won't work right, the toy is stupid, he's bad at this, he's stupid because he can't get the stupid toy to work, and so on...
He looks so much happier when he's in some kind of social activity, or when he's using his whole body to do something, like his gym class or skateboarding or just plain couch-wrestling.
And that raises a broader issue. Everything I hear from training and therapists is structure, structure, structure. When kids are thrown into a new environment that's one thing they look to for support. And then that has to be balanced against their need for control over the environment. Sometimes the two things seem diametrically opposed but ideally they shoudl work together.
Right now it's hard to give more control because we don't fully know what Sunny can or can't do, but I think it's happening slowly. He loves helping, and chores, as long as they're short. He couldn't help me water my plants outside, for example... he got bored pretty quickly. But anything involving putting things away or taking them out again, and he's on it! When he says "let me do that!" or "let me help!" my first reaction is to say "No" but I keep reminding myself to say "yes" whenever possible.
He also gets control/limited choices over what activities to do, what books to read, what shows to watch.
Also, about having his old life vanish... I understand that it's impossible for him not to feel that way. But as much as we can, it's been minimized. My caseworker, on her first weekly visit, gave him a friendly reminder that people don't just vanish. He talks to his foster mom every other day on the phone, and we have a weekly webcam chat with her and some of his other foster family members. He knows what's going on in their house very weekend and lets them know how his week has been going.
Structure versus control is definitely something to talk about with a therapist, which is going to happen as soon as we get our Medicaid card and schedule appointments. It's also hard to know exactly how to go ahead because of his medication. I am leaning more and more to tapering him off the medication by the end of the year, but we'll need to wait several months and see how things settle down.
Did you know that voter registration drives, like the one I am working for the Obama campaign, are a bad thing? They encourage too many undesirable people to vote!
That's what they're already arguing in Louisiana. I'm sure we'll start seeing mirror complaints in Georgia, because we're essentially doing the same thing: targeting black, Latino and/or low-income areas in order to increase voter registration percentages. The goal -- challenging, but achievable -- is to make Georgia a swing state in the general election.
I am absolutely disgusted with the arguments against voter registration drives. Everyone should automatically be registered anyway, the day they turn 18... our current inefficient, corrupt and racist voter registration system is an international shame, and yet these %^&$*#s dare to complain about people trying to register to vote, even when they follow all the rules of this system!
I'll just mention one of the ways it's so screwed up in Georgia. Recently, it became possible to register to vote at the DMV. But due to a massive computer error, many people who registered at the DMV were dropped from the rolls. The Obama campaign staffers warned us about that. I have personally met several young people who thought they had registered at the DMV, but they were getting worried because they never received their voter registration cards...
A Democratic voter registration drive in largely black neighborhoods of Louisiana has swamped the state's voter registrar offices, forcing them to hire new staff members and work 12-hour days to process thousands of applications.
Buoyed by the popularity of Senator Barack Obama, the drive has raised complaints from registrars about large numbers of duplicate, invalid or incomplete applications, and has led to an investigation by the Louisiana secretary of state, Jay Dardenne, a Republican. Election officials have expressed concern that large numbers of people who believe they are registered will show up at the polls in November, only to find that they cannot vote because their application had been improperly submitted. [Fix your systems then! You are not worried about them not being able to vote, you just don't want them showing up to the polls at all!]
Much of the enthusiasm, and some of the chaos, may be repeated in the months to come in other states where Democrats and liberal groups are planning similar drives in an effort to change the demographics of the electorate. Nationally, 39 percent of eligible blacks and 46 percent of eligible Latinos are not registered to vote, compared with 29 percent of eligible whites, according to a 2006 study by Project Vote, a nonpartisan group that promotes voting in low-income and minority communities. [Very telling statistics. There are a lot of historic AND contemporary reasons that produce these numbers. I only wish they had included Asian-American and Native-American numbers as well. According to APIAVote, "Among minority youth groups, APIA youth have the lowest rates of voter registration".]
Project Vote and Acorn, a left-wing national organizing group, have teamed up to conduct large voter drives across the country, with the goal of registering 1.2 million people by Labor Day. They have already submitted 600,000 applications, said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote. Acorn is among several groups registering voters in Louisiana. The Obama campaign itself has announced a 50-state registration drive known as "Vote for Change."
It remains unclear whether election officials will be prepared to handle more registrations and the potential for overwhelming turnout on Election Day, Mr. Slater said. "Party politics is driving up registration at unusually high rates," he said.
He added that it was too soon to tell how much of the gap between black and white registration had closed before the primaries, which produced record turnouts in many states.
Democratic officials said the Louisiana drive, which was called Voting is Power, had produced 74,000 applications by the time it concluded last week. Registrars in the four main parishes where the drive operated report numbers closer to 50,000, but there is no breakdown of how many were submitted to other parishes.
Registrars have reported that as many as a third of the applications cannot be entered into the system, and many of the rest require more information. The state Republican Party called the operation "the Dems' phony registration drive."
Democrats say the burden is on the registrars to double-check and verify application information. [Exactly!]
"Instead of throwing up complaints, they should be working to get as many people as possible registered," said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington, which paid for the drive because Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, is up for re-election and her voter base in New Orleans was eroded by Hurricane Katrina.
Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, said high numbers of incomplete applications were not unusual in such drives. He said as a rule of thumb, 35 percent of voter drive applications were new voters, 35 percent were change of address, and 30 percent were duplicates or incomplete.
In Louisiana, voting drive canvassers are required by law to submit the applications they collect, even if they are obvious pranks, like two cards in Shreveport that listed George Bush as the name of the applicant and 1600 Pennsylvania Drive as the address.
But Jacques Berry, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said canvassers should be "educated enough to not leave the house until the card is in order."
John Maginnis, a political analyst in Baton Rouge, pointed out that the federal motor-voter law, which allows people to register when they get a driver's license, had already raised registration to near-saturation levels. The key to winning the election, he said, will rest more on turnout than registration.
"You're getting down to people that are just hard-core disengaged," he said. "If you get these voters on the rolls, the question is how many of them are likely voters." [I'm thinking this election is going to break the trend. People are mad, and also scared. Whenever anyone tells us "I don't vote because it doesn't matter" I've been asking, "do you care about the price of gas, or food, or rent, or education? Then you should vote!"]
But Mr. Slater said a component of the motor-voter law designed to reach low-income people who do not drive remained largely unenacted. That provision requires social service agencies to offer people the chance to register. [People who are poor and get social services are not supposed to register to vote, because they might vote the wrong way, and this is why the law has never been enforced]
In Louisiana, the biggest complaints about the drive have come from Republican registrars in Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport; East Baton Rouge Parish, which includes Baton Rouge; and Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans.
The registrar in Jefferson, Dennis A. DiMarco, said that about 35 percent of the 4,000 cards his office had sorted were invalid because they had no address, the applicant was already registered or was a felon, or the signature did not match one on file at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Another group of cards, he said, was missing information that the office hoped could be obtained by mail.
In Caddo, the registrar, Ernie Roberson, said his office had sorted 6,000 cards, of which only about 2,200 had enough information to be entered into the computer. Many of those, he said, had been kicked back because of nonexistent addresses or duplicate registration.
Normally registrars try to correct such problems. But, Mr. Roberson said, "It's hard to send a letter to people whose addresses don't exist in the parish."
"I have one lady, I have five applications on her," he continued. "A lot of people, we'll receive the application and then we'll receive another one with the same name but one day off on their birthday or one digit off on their Social Security number."
The East Baton Rouge registrar, Elaine Lamb, reported that she had received 22,000 cards, of which 13,000 could be added to the rolls.
The registrars expressed concern that many of the invalid cards represented real people who might try to vote. "You'll just have utter bedlam at some of these polls," Mr. Roberson said. In Orleans Parish the registrar, Sandra Wilson, said she had received more than 19,000 Voting Is Power applications and had problems with only about 400 of them. There are 4,000 to 5,000 that have not yet been sorted.
If the card is missing information but has a phone number, she said, "We immediately call that person and get what we need." [A woman who believes in doing her job! Wonderful!]
The weekend is a rollercoaster. Sunny's behavior has been extremely mixed. He's happy most of the time but when things don't go his way, he falls into the pit of utmost despair. Then he bounces right back out of the pit, but it's still exhausting to bounce down and up with him.
He had his longest episode yesterday. I told him we could play on the Spiderman website for five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, I closed the website, and he started sobbing and screaming . We never let him do anything. We never give him any minutes to do anything in. We always have to be mean to him and tell him what to do and it really hurts his feelings. And so on... the Spiderman website is continuing to prey on him. This morning, I told him absolutely no more Spiderman website because it upsets him too much. He is going to have to earn it back. Video games are the bane of our existence!
My mother has a next-door neighbor with two nice kids. But the boy Sunny's age is very subdued. My mother says she never sees him outside. I don't think he has any friends and he looks depressed and physically not very fit. All he does is play video games in his basement all day long. His mother told me she can't tell him "no"... the dad is the one who does any disciplining, and the dad is also a video game lover with all three systems in multiple places in their house. I watched Sunny play video games with their son. His mother had to remind him how to be social. As they were playing together Sunny kept up a constant stream of chatter -- "I'm good at this! Watch this! Hey, your turn now! Show me how to do that! Wow, that was awesome! I'm going to die, OHMYGOD!!" -- but the boy hardly said anything. I am actually beginning to think Sunny might be a good influence on him, especially if I can get them outside playing together.
Time to go buy some food for our party now. Sunny and Sunny's Dad are at the skate park. Soooo tiiiired... in the last several years I'd cut myself back to no more than one cup of coffee a day, but that's gone right out the window.
My dad hasn't been around due to some important appointments he needs to keep in Japan, but he will be visiting in August. We've been updating him on Sunny.
I was worried he would be too extreme when it comes to food. Sunny is not a picky eater according to his foster family's standards -- after all, he'll eat salad and broccoli -- but he is a very picky eater when it comes to our family's standards.
I don't want to turn it into a battle. At each meal, I cook at least one thing I know he'll eat. Then he gets more of that thing if he eats the rest of his food, or alternately, he'll only get dessert if he tries a few bites of the new food. If he complains, I'll just say, sympathetically, "that's too bad you won't get any dessert then!" If he doesn't eat any of it, I just clear his plate and we finish dinner.
Let me present, as a contrast, the way my dad used to discipline me at the table whenever I stayed with him in Japan.
- "Dad, I really don't like konnyaku, could you leave out the konnyaku chunks on my plate please?" - "No." - "Please Dad!" - "GO TO HELL!"
- "Hold your o-hashi correctly! Your technique is embarrassing!" - "" - "You stupid American! GO TO HELL!"
- "Dad, please remember I'm a vegetarian now, so can I have soup without minced lamb please?" - "It's not lamb, it's mutton!" - "Well, if you have to put it in the soup, could you please not mince it up so finely, so that I can actually pick the pieces out of the soup?" - "YOU ARE A HOPELESS STUPID CLUMSY DAUGHTER! I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR VEGETABLE STUPIDITY! GO TO THE HELL!"
I hope this goes to explain why I was a bit nervous about having my dad and Sunny at the same dinner table.
Tonight, my father asked me if Sunny was eating well and if I was cooking for him. I told him things were going pretty well, but Sunny didn't eat everything on his plate and he didn't even try his squash. Then my father said:
"Go slow! Be patient!"
My jaw dropped open. Then he asked me if Sunny was in bed. I said yes, his bedtime was 8:30pm.
"Don't be too harsh with him!"
I guess I don't have to worry about Ojiichan yelling at Sunny. But I feel sort of bitter... damn, I wish he could have been that mellow when I was a kid.
I'm sorry I can't address everyone's comments... I'm blogging as much as I can, but my time is obviously somewhat limited!
@Maggie: that makes a lot of sense. I don't want to do anything to turn the bedwetting issue into a capital-I Issue.
@Eos: the store meltdown wasn't too bad. I just had to pull him out of the checkout line for less than a minute. And as I was telling my husband earlier, I am so thankful he's a clinger and not a runner-offer. My little cousin was a runner-offer, and his parents were in a constant state of panic whenever they left the house with him.
@Lena (a few posts back): I appreciate your dissenting opinion, but I still have a very strong antipathy to Bartholet's position. It's not that she's making stuff up. She's looking at the same info that more objective people -- like the ones at NACAC and Evan B. Donaldson -- are looking at. But she's twisting it to suit the narrow interests of upper-middle-class white adoptive parents. In her world, adoptive parents of color might as well be chopped liver.
She also does one thing that absolutely infuriates me.... she exploits the older special needs children in the foster care system in service of an argument that does not really benefit them. Again and again, her argument is that these kids could all get adopted so much quicker if race-matching became absolutely illegal. There is no such silver bullet. I have made a lot of recommendations on this blog about how to increase adoption rates, and I'm really just parroting things I've read on other blogs and forums. The solutions are already out there. But they're complicated and require a lot of funding. Some examples: subsidized home loans for lower-income parents to adopt larger sibling groups; targeted outreach to non-traditional parents with special needs experience; training social workers better and reducing their placement caseloads.
Here's my theory on what would happen if there were a radical "colorblind" approach in the foster care system. White parents would get placed with slightly more black infants and toddlers, predominantly girls, at the expense of black adoptive parents. And that's basically it. The effect on older child adoption would be almost nil.
I hate this kind of exploitation. I've seen it in anti-adoption arguments as well, via the rhetorical question, "why are you adopting an infant from ___ when you could be adopting an older child in the U.S.A.?" Some people do have the right to ask this question... that is, the people who do have a connection to foster care in some form. But often I see that question and wonder, well then, what are YOU doing? Have you fostered or adopted from the system? Are you a social worker? Foster care alumni? Volunteer with kids in the system? Or are you just self-righteously exploiting the existence of these children in order to make a point about infant adoption?
Anyway, Bartholet is definitely a persona non grata in my books. As someone who has been negatively impacted by racism, negatively impacted by race-matching and negatively impacted by the LACK of race-matching (when it comes to Asian kids), I have a fair amount of experience in this area, but I don't appreciate her brand of "help". I believe in racial reform in the foster care adoption system, but my version would work a lot differently.
I took Sunny to day camp today. I met up with him there for lunch, and he seemed very sad that I wasn't going to be there with him for the rest of the day, so I cut it short and took him home.
He had a great time in the morning. He told me had made not just one but THREE new friends, and he says the gym teacher is also his friend.
We're going to try for a full day tomorrow and see how he feels at lunch. I think we should be able to transition to a full day by the end of the week.
In the afternoon he was very testy and cranky again. He had a smaller meltdown while we were in a store. But by the end of the day, he had earned enough "no pouting" points to play his Gameboy for 15 minutes... and he gave it up at the end of 15 minutes without complaining.
A funny thing happened when he heard me on the phone making his dentist appointment. "NOOOOO!!!! I don't want to go to the dentist because they rip out all your teeth!" We persuaded him it wouldn't be so bad... he's stubborn, but often responds well to logical arguments.
He skateboarded for almost 30 minutes straight today. His progress in that area is amazing! I didn't witness it, only because I was taking a desperately-needed nap. My husband is pretty happy about it. He used to be a very serious skateboarder when he was younger.
I made a bonehead mistake last night. We try to restrict his liquids at night, since he still wets the bed. I made some Jello for the first time ever, because I wanted to start a tradition of healthy desserts. I was so proud it turned out right that I served him a heaping bowl just before bedtime. The concept that Jello is 99.99% LIQUID quite escaped me. Of course he wet the bed.
We're not going to take any measures about the bed wetting, other than mild liquid restriction and congratulating him for dry nights. It's not worth it right now, and he could grow out of it any time. We've got a good sheet protector system set up.
I've been warning my husband that it could get worse before it gets better. We're now past the length mark of a visit time and edging into unknown territory. Consciously, he knows we're his "home base" now. But he must also be thinking "if I act up then maybe this mom and dad will send me back to my other mom and dad" and this idea must be very attractive when we tell him things like "you can't watch Spongebob now or eat that cupcake or buy that slinkie".
I always had respect for single parents, since I was raised by one, but my respect has increased even more over the last few days. Taking care of a child that cannot be left alone for more than a few seconds is exhausting even working as a tag team.
We heard two new, earth-shattering words tonight, 20 minutes before his scheduled bedtime. "I'm tired". Wow...
I'm even MORE tired than I was last night, if you (or I) can believe it!
I think Sunny could be in testing mode now. He had a mini-blowup this afternoon because we asked him to put his train set away.
It was dramatic but not terribly severe. He slammed his toys, screwed his face up, moaned, threw his body down as if he was having a heart attack. After a few minutes the worst was over. I asked him to look at me, told him I loved him and I wasn't mad, but the behavior was not acceptable, and we couldn't play with him at all until he stopped, and this meant he lost a circle on his chart. I told him we weren't going away, we just couldn't play with him until he calmed down and apologized.
He did. Later on, after my husband left, he apologized again spontaneously. "I'm sorry I was mean then." Then he said that he was sad because he missed Mommy ___ (foster mom) "and all the good times we had" and wanted to know when he could have a sleepover with her.
I told him that after the summer, we might be able to have a visit and he could spend the night, but definitely we would have a visit before his next birthday. Then I reminded him that the next time he talked with her, he could tell her that he missed her and all the good times they had. We could also talk about those times whenever he wanted to.
Later on, he asked, "Have I been a good boy today?" He's done this before, so we know how to answer. "Of course you're a good boy, we love you and we're always going to be a family. Sometimes your behavior isn't good, but you're always a good boy."
He tried something he must have developed from his play therapy. He'll look very sad and serious, and say, "it really hurts my feelings when you won't play Uno with me."
"When it comes to playtime you have to think about other people's feelings too. And right now I don't feel like playing Uno but we can color in the book together instead."
I feel like the training and reading of other people's blogs are all paying off. Validation of feelings of "complicated loss"? Check. Stopping manipulation by maintaining rules and boundaries? Check. Separation of behavior from person? Check.
I'm not so good at the natural consequences stuff. But I'm skeptical about that system anyway. It sounds awesome in theory, but is fiendishly difficult to apply. For example, Foster Cline gave this example several times in the Love and Logic book: the kid says they don't need a jacket, so you let them go out into the cold Denver morning without their jacket, and voila, they receive a natural consequence. But that's not much help here in the muggy mornings of Georgia! I'm going to save "natural consequences" for big decisions that I can actually spend lots of time thinking about in advance.
I also had lots of chances today to catch him being good. He'll get a circle on his chart, or I'll tell him "pat yourself on the back". The big thing this morning was his R.E. class. He was in a class for an hour with a group of rambunctious kids his own age. I was there too, sitting on the sidelines and helping with some arts and crafts. He was INCREDIBLE. He sat when he was supposed to sit. He paid attention to the teacher reading the story, even as other kids interrupted her to ask questions or to make loud buzzing, screeching and honking noises. At the end of the story, he raised his hand to ask questions. He did not, unlike some other kids, show off his inchworm imitation all across the rug, or stagger around with eyes shut yelling "I'M BLIND" while windmilling his arms. I made a big deal out of how well he behaved in class the whole rest of the day.
I'm torn about putting him into day camp next week. He's happy about the idea. On one hand, with my leave, I have the opportunity for a week of nonstop bonding/attachment, so maybe I should wait until next week for day camp. But Sunny has a complicated set of needs. He's used to constantly being around other kids. His number one fear about moving to be with us is that he wouldn't have any more kids to play with. His foster mother was constantly having to reassure him he'd make new friends. Being around other kids at day camp would do a lot to make this transition easier, as well as helping burn off his energy. The attachment situation seems to be so good, anyway... like I said before, he's clingy, but not fearfully clingy.
I think I'll put him in day camp this week, visit him during lunch and see how he takes it.
As great as his foster home has been for him, they just did not have the resources, in terms of time, to have him doing any kind of organized physical activity at all. We're definitely going to make sure he gets that. My husband is teaching Sunny how to skateboard. I noticed he can practice at the upper limit of his natural attention span -- about ten minutes. This is pretty big! I can see it becoming a successful pursuit. Gym is also in the future (Sunny loves to jump and spin), and soccer, once school starts in the fall.
I've already taken him to a swimming lesson a few days ago. He did well in the first half, not so well in the second half. He was too scared of the deep water, and I had to pull him out to the side of the class, because while the teacher was coaxing him, all the other polliwogs were getting held up.
I told him that next week he wouldn't be quite as scared, and he wouldn't have to do any swim kicks that were too scary. I reminded him that the first time he visited us, he was scared of sliding down the fireman's pole on his playset. But now, he loves sliding down the pole. When you do something little by little you get less scared of it. I think he buys my theory so far; he's not too anxious at the idea of going back to swim class next week. Thank goodness... because whether he likes it or not, he has GOT to learn to swim. He doesn't have to do it right now, and if he's still scared we'll postpone until later, but it has just got to get done. I'm a great natural swimmer, and I think that great swimmers are more frightened for bad swimmers than anyone else is. A friend of mine who couldn't swim almost drowned... he said he was "just splashing around" but ended up in the hospital with his lungs full of saltwater. If Sunny is going to be anywhere near pools or lakes or oceans anytime for the rest of his life, he's in terrible danger unless he learns how to swim. Pardon me for alarmism, but the thought really does terrify me!
Thanks for all the comments on the last post. I really appreciate the feedback and advice. By the way, we bought a game called Cranium Hullabaloo on his first visit, and it's very good. It's recommended for ADHD kids because you play it with your whole body. I have thought about DDR and Wii Fit and so forth, but I want to keep anything video game related to an absolute minimum until I understand his attention span better.
I'm wondering about the connection between physical exertion and emotional stability. So far, it's seemed obvious that tiring him out makes him calmer. But then I noticed how good he was in class this morning, and how cranky he was in the early afternoon after some fairly strenuous exercise. It could be the change of environment as well -- I'm talking massive heat, humidity and polluted Atlanta air. I think we'll just have to wait and observe and see how it goes.
On the food front, today for lunch, Sunny greatly enjoyed a REAL MEXICAN TACO (de pollo) packed with cilantro and onions. He is really expanding his horizons!
Sunny is having a smooth transition. He misses his foster family, of course. We had a webcam with them already and we'll have another one tomorrow. He seems at a loss for what to say, so I'll need to remember to encourage him somehow. We played a game once on the webcam called "Copycat", where you have to mimic the hand motions of the other person... silly little games like that. He also said, "I miss Mommy ___ (bio mom) but we're not allowed to have visits." I told him next week I'll help him write her a letter, and that made him happier.
Sunny stays very, very close to us, but he's confident enough to go off on his own for short periods. Today he splashed in the kiddie pool at a picnic with some other kids, and played soccer with them.
He's laughing and smiling like crazy. He has an infectious smile... when he smiles at random people, I see their faces light up in return.
He's enjoying meeting new people. "So-and-so is nice, I like them!" he'll say.
I helped work voter registration for a few hours while my husband took him on errands. After the errands, the pair stopped by to say hello. Sunny helped me register voters for about five minutes. There was another little girl there, almost as young as Sunny, and she gave him a quick pointer. "Hold up your sign like THIS and say sir-or-maam are-you-registered-to-vote thank-you!"
He's big enough where he likes to do a lot of things on his own, like pushing the shopping cart and putting away his dishes.
He's young enough to cuddle and hug all the time! Sometimes he wants a hug just because he wants a hug, and that's fine with me.
He's very mindful of his routine. At night he reminds me that he needs to have his pull-ups and jammies, he needs his medicine and vitamins, he needs to brush his teeth, and so on. Then he's up bright and early every morning. He asks me "when can I leave my room in the morning? In ____, my mommy says I have to stay in my room until everyone else gets up." I'm telling him 7:00 for now. This morning I woke up at 7am, cooked him breakfast and then did some work in the garden for two hours. I set him up to watch Sesame Street with headphones on so Dad could get some extra sleep.
He likes soy milk now! This is huge. I'm not a vegan or even a vegetarian but I cook with a lot of soy milk and meat substitutes.
He's really great with his new grandma.
He sings to himself in the bathroom. He makes up the songs himself, stuff like "putting on my underwear, putting on my underweeeeeaaaaaar".
The Bad
His regular attention span is about 2-6 minutes. If we stretch it with focus reminders, we can get it to about 12-15. It takes truly heroic measures to get to 25-30.
He simply cannot play by himself. He needs constant attention. It's as if whatever he's doing doesn't matter unless we see him doing it or unless we're doing it with him. The only things he can do by himself are playing on his Gameboy, but we're severely restricting that to 15-30 minutes a day on weekends only, because he gets way too emotional about it. Video games exert an evil fascination on him. The constant visual feedback is like a drug, but he gets more and more upset and starts beating up on himself verbally the longer he's allowed to play them. "I'm terrible at this! I'm terrible! I hate this!" "That's enough playing for now" "But mom, I really really really like this level" (starts pouting and fake-crying)...
That boundless physical energy. He was up at 4:30AM on Friday morning, since his social worker needed to pick him up then for his flight to Atlanta. After the placement ceremony we had a day full of activities including lots of running and jumping and wrestling. We told him his bedtime is 9pm at night on weekends, wondering if he would crash way before then, but he stayed strong the ENTIRE DAY. Our friend said at 7pm, wow he must be very excited today, and we said nope, he's actually like this all the time! We have to tire him out physically to extend his focus. He's more emotionally stable after physical exertion.
I'm already looking at other kids his age and thinking wistfully about the things that Sunny can't do. The little girl at voter registration was there for three hours helping her grandma. She helped register people, and when she got bored she went off in a corner and looked at the ground and daydreamed and did little dances. I was used to spending time by myself at that age as well. I could amuse myself with a piece of string and some rocks. Sunny needs people, shiny things and constant movement. It's always "I want this, I want that, I'm tired of that, I'm bored, let's do this, can I have that, no if I can't have that can I have that instead, let's go, I want that..."
He can't sit still, of course. He'll sit at the dinner table but he'll be constantly slipping on and off his seat. I'm not going to say anything, because I know he's doing very well just to be staying at the table, but I can tell it's disconcerting to other adults.
Eating vegetables and new food is still a bit of a struggle.
What to Do, Where to Go
My mother and husband and I have all read Brenda McCreight's adoption book, so we love using the phrase "but it's only ADHD"! That's some dark humor there, by the way. Seriously, we know about 90% of what we were in for with that. My stepfather probably has ADHD, my cousin certainly has it, my uncle does as well.
His focus is like a muscle... we just have to keep helping him stretch it.
Some things we just have to live with and work around. In the right setting they'll become strengths.
Keep him away from video games as much as possible.
We'll see if behavior charts can reduce the pouting and bargaining when we say "no". We're trying a method where every time he just says "OK" after hearing "No", and doesn't do the ten-second-pout-fake-cry routine, he gets a sticker.
Give him the attention he needs and don't worry about the inability to self-amuse for now. He's missing a lot of people in his life so he needs a lot of presence.
We're putting him in day camp and hoping it will be a right fit. I have second thoughts about the day camp I found now. The academic portion might be too difficult to maintain focus. We'll see. He absolutely needs strenuous physical activity, and if we're the only ones giving it to him, we'll be dead by the time he's a teenager. And we're a fairly young and energetic couple.
Keep realizing his strengths. He's such a great little kid. He trusts us, he trusts himself, he trusts other people. We're off on a fantastic voyage together! And I really feel like I'm not dragging him along, or stumbling behind... instead, we're walking right beside each other, hand in hand.
Sunny had gotten mad at his foster mom this weekend, and said "I hate you!"
She simply replied that it wasn't a nice thing to say, and he hurt her feelings. He immediately said, "I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! Sorry!"
I think that little anecdote sums up a lot of his personality traits. He's expressive, impulsive and touchingly empathetic. He's so sweet to his younger ex-foster brother. I've seen them on the webcam together; he props up the toddler and coaches him how to wave hello.
She thinks our webcam setup is going to help him immeasurably. It's much more real than a telephone call, and it reinforces what she's been telling him: that the people in his life aren't going to disappear after his transition. We're planning on having at least one set webcam time every week so he can chat with his foster family.
Thanks so much to the people who have left reassuring comments in the past couple days :-)
From Yonhap News: SEOUL, May 30 (Yonhap) -- Ku Ji-hye celebrated her 25th birthday this week in bed at a Jerusalem hospital, continually fighting for her life with extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
Ku has acute lymphocytic leukemia. If she does not receive a bone marrow transplant she will die, doctors say. There is not any member in her family, who has human leukocyte antigens, the components in blood that indicate marrow compatibility, suitable to hers. And it is because she is an adoptee.
I was very saddened at the news, and upset on her behalf.
As an Asian-American, hearing of her death spurred me to register as a bone marrow donor here. I encourage all others to do the same. There is a desperate need for more donors of minority and multiracial descent.
And as an adoption blogger, I want to use this "opportunity" to decry the culture of secrets and lies that so often surrounds adoption. Having the ability to contact her relatives would have meant a much better chance for survival, and this chance was denied to her. Adoptees should always have the right to know where they come from. Anyone who tries to deny them this right may end up with blood on their hands.
Courtesy of Youtube and the Dirty South, here's a few highlights with my comments. Please keep in mind a lot of these songs don't have bad words bleeped out.
I moved to Atlanta 12 years ago, just when Outkast released ATLiens. Me and you, your mama and your cousin too... This song says it's about movement, but then refuses say where it's going. It's an aimless, winding, cruising song. It's like a sequence of incomplete impressionist paintings.
ATLiens was a huge landmark. Other Atlanta rappers started getting noticed. A friend of Outkast and the Goodie Mob, rapper Cool Breeze put out this massive local hit, packed with guest stars, in 1999. You may recognize Cee-Lo, now with Gnarls Barkley. I cannot stress enough how awesome this song is. It's frenzied and bursting with energy but in complete control at the same time. It's ridiculously ambitious and richly cinematic. You get an amazing sense of multiple stories all weaving back and forth, destinies colliding, a crisis upon us. Brotherman!
In 2002 Nappy Roots, a Kentucky/Georgia group, has a breakthrough summer hit. This is a beautiful, soulful, plaintive song. It's intellectual and earthy at the same time; deeply southern, anti-materialist, multiracial. It's not just all about fast life in the big city. Them country boys on the rise...
Here's the last flowering of truly good and innovative Atlanta hip-hop. The Dungeon Family album is full of incredible songs. This happens to be my favorite, mainly because of the monstrous beat with the scratching.
Here's another Dungeon Family offshoot, the Purple Ribbon All-Stars. The hook spirals into your brain, and from there the song goes straight to the lungs and the groin.
The Ying Yang twins are good at party anthems. Their music is rather brainless and clownish. I have a soft spot for this early song of theirs, however. I think it's because it's about being stupid and jerk-ish solely for the sake of being stupid and jerk-ish. Plus, the part in the video where Big Gipp is rapping on top of plastic-covered furniture is hilarious. If you're getting tired now, skip the video.
This is Bonecrusher (what a silly name), T.I. (recently jailed on a machine gun charge) and Killer Mike. It's one of those really violent songs where the whole point is bragging about big, big penis-guns. Nevertheless, I'm going to include it because it was a huge hit, and represents the newer kind of Atlanta song. I hated this song when it was on the radio, but sometimes I feel a bit nostalgic for it. Why? I guess it's the cinematic feel, and the bells. This song is about urban violence, but it could just as well be a gothic tale... the hero standing outside the ruined mansion under a full moon with a shotgun in one hand and a chainsaw in the other, screwing up his courage to kick down the door, yelling to himself, "I AIN'T NEVER SCARED"...
Here's an earlier Ludacris song. I don't think he's ever done a truly excellent or important song, although he gives it a good try here, but his delivery is always perfect and his stuff is really, really fun. This is his funnest and most Atlantaest song.
Here's T.I.'s newest song. I heard he's going to fulfill his 1000 hours of community service by going around telling kids not to make the same kind of mistakes he made. That's the kind of stupid decision we've come to expect from the Dekalb County criminal justice system. That's not punishment, that's a publicity tour! I'd like to see him in an orange vest by the side of the highway picking up trash. Then I'd roll down my window and bonk him on the head with a well-aimed apple core. That being said, I actually like his new song. It's the organ sample and the drumbeat that make it good.
I was recently contacted by a representative from Ethica who told me about a lot of good things the organization is doing. I was at first a bit wary of donating since I usually donate to bigger organizations that publish exactly how they spend their donated funds, or else very local charities. But all nonprofits have to start out small!
Although I'm not involved in international adoption, I have some strong opinions about it. I don't believe it's always wrong, and I've said several times on this blog I would have liked to adopt from Japan if certain conditions were better. But it's horribly unregulated and full of corruption. Ethica is trying to do something about that, and I support their approach. Please go to this link to find out more and donate to their efforts.
You're about to read some lazy blogging here. But I'm still mustering up my energy for that other "barriers" post. I've been slammed recently... we're moving into our new house in a few weeks, Sunny's placement date is coming very soon and I'm in the middle of an exciting political volunteering initiative.
A key recommendation in the new report calls for amending the law so race could be considered as a factor in selecting parents for children from foster care. The change also would allow race-oriented pre-adoption training,
"We tried to assess what was working and what wasn't, and came to the conclusion that preparing parents who adopt transracially benefits everyone, especially the children," said Adam Pertman, the Donaldson Institute's executive director.
"The view that we can be colorblind is a wonderful, idealistic perspective, but we don't live there," Pertman said. "If we want to do the best for the kids, we have to look at their realities."
Pertman's stance is sound. Counterbalancing him is the idiotic gibbering of this woman:
Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who directs the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, believes the concept of striving for color blindness is sound. She foresees problems if race once again becomes a key determinant.
"Giving social workers the chance to do that produced very rigid race matching," she said, referring to pre-1994 policies. "That's one of the reasons to say race can't be used at all... there's no other way to be sure it doesn't become the overwhelming factor."
Current policy allows standardized pre-adoption training, but wisely prohibits specific screening for parents seeking to adopt transracially, Bartholet said.
"What cannot be done is have a pass/fail test that turns on whether you give the politically correct answers," she said. "If social workers are allowed to use training to determine who can adopt, there's lots of experience showing they abuse that power."
She also questioned whether attempts to boost minority recruitment would succeed.
"Black people are significantly poorer than white people and less likely to be in a position to come forward," Bartholet said. "Recruitment efforts bump up against that fact."
ARRGH! I'll tell you why this makes me so mad. First of all, she references the racist myth that black people don't adopt as much as white people (see here for the truth). Second, she uses the buzzword "politically correct", which I despise because it's completely meaningless in any real ethical or political sense. Third, she creates a bogeyman of social workers "abusing their power". This should be hilarious to any foster or adoptive parent with experience in the system. Social workers already abuse their power CONSTANTLY. The only way to fix the problem is to create institutional change so that bad social workers don't keep on clogging up the system while the good ones mostly burn out after a few years.
- I don't believe in any strict form of race-matching. I believe it's foolish and cruel to children, and also fails to account for the existence of interracial couples and multiracial people (like me). However, race and ethnicity need to be factored into placement decisions. In fact, they are already factored into placement decisions. This "color-blind" system that Bartholet refers to is a complete fantasy. It's just common sense to be able to have more consistent training and placement standards when it comes to transracial placements.
For example, let's say a black child is placed with a white family as an emergency short-term placement. They end up staying there for years. The child seems to be doing well. The opportunity comes up to move the child to a black family. Should the child be moved? If race is the only factor, then no, definitely not. Give the white family some extra transracial training, and as long as they're willing to take it, sign off on the placement and move on.
Let's say there's a Latino child and a choice of two placements. One is out in the country with a white family. The other is in the city, in a diverse neighborhood, with a Latino couple, but of a different national ethnicity. However, the child is used to living in the country, loves the outdoors and their greatest wish is to live on a farm. Who knows? That's a tough one... but just because race or ethnicity should be a factor doesn't mean it has to be the determining factor.
- Here are a couple reactions to the report from other foster/adoptive parents:
My problem with the situation is that from my experience with foster care adoption, MEPA/IEPA does almost nothing to address the prejudices of social workers. If the social worker really wants to do race-matching, they're going to do race-matching anyway.
I think if there were CONSISTENT standards for training, the situation would be a lot better. Right now, it's just all over the map. I've heard horror stories about social workers who have jumped in, in the middle of a case, and moved a child solely because of race. Or else the opposite... that a child is placed because of favoritism, when there was a much more culturally appropriate home waiting.
I have noticed (often bitterly) how the current situation works against me. I'm not complaining as an adoptive parent as much I'm complaining as an Asian. Who thinks about the needs of Asian kids to be placed in Asian homes? Neither white nor black social workers have much of an understanding of that.
If new standards are going to be truly child-centered, they need to be consistent but also flexible when it comes to the needs of the children. Teenagers looking for a home should be allowed to make their own decisions, of course. Kids are coming from all kinds of backgrounds and some are going to be very secure in their cultural identity, others are terribly fragile.
And in my opinion, demographic standards are even more important than training. Something like "at least one area within a 5-mile radius has a concentration of greater than 10% of child's race/ethnicity". I think a diverse area or school compensates for family background much more than vice versa. It hardly matters what positive message the child is getting at home if they're assaulted and abused every day at school.
I have little interest in placing blame on white adoptive parents. It's just pointless. The problem is a lot more widespread and complicated. If you want prospective parents to behave better, you have to make them better, via the use of carrots and sticks. Otherwise, it's like an Army recruiter complaining about the poor quality of their recruits. You've got to work with what you've got! I do, however, blame "experts" like Bartholet who should know better, but choose to use their platform in order to mystify the public.
I'm working up to a longer post about the relationship between international adoption, private adoption and foster care adoption.
In the meantime, here are two important links I came across.
Eos linked to Brenda McCreight's blog. I didn't know she had one, so I'm looking forward to reading through it. McCreight wrote Parenting Your Adopted Older Child, which is one of the books I first read when we started along our road. I recommend it to everyone. It'll scare the bejeezus out of you. It's an incredibly depressing book because it's organized as a series of fictional problems, or issues, and none of them really have clear-cut solutions. One of the most terrifying was a scenario in which a couple adopted a child with no special needs except for ADHD, and they kept saying "but it's only ADHD!" as they slowly lost their sanity and their marriage fell apart.
The release of the latest AFCARS data shows that even more foster children and youth—129,000 in FY 2006 up from 114,000 in 2005—are waiting for a permanent, loving family. Sadly, the data also shows that more than 26,000 youth aged out of care in FY 2006 without finding a family—higher numbers than we've seen before. Adoptions from foster care remained steady at 51,000, and the overall number of children in care dropped slightly.
Clearly, there is a need for increased federal and state attention to finding and supporting families for foster children who cannot return home. It's time for legislative action that provides federal support of subsidized guardianship, increases access to adoption assistance, and enhances post-adoption support. Changes such as these would all help ensure that every child finds the permanent, loving family he needs and deserves, and that eventually no child leaves care without a legal connection to a family.
My husband sent me a link to this video. At first, I was terrified that this preacher was from Atlanta because he claims to be from "ATLAH". Luckily, he's not. "Atlah" is his special code word for Harlem. So you can't blame this guy on us!
The video is actually jaw-droppingly funny. Just when you think it can't get any more surreal, it does. You would think this preacher would be isolated from any reasonable public discourse, but apparently, he's made numerous appearances on FOX News shows. Oh wait, that doesn't count as reasonable public discourse.
I'm going to lay off the political posts for a while after this, but I couldn't resist posting the link... it's just too bizarre.
Mulligan's selling shirts with 'Curious George' picture By CHRISTIAN BOONE - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 05/13/08 Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he's peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with "Obama in '08" scrolled underneath, are "cute." But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.
1) They show a human or animal engaged in some unique or extreme activity 2) They exhibit noteworthy artistic skill or cleverness 3) They greatly reinforce prior beliefs 4) They greatly challenge prior beliefs 5) Newsworthy: they show something that connects with our sense of the local and the current, the here and now. We can relate the narrative of our lives to what happens in the video.
These videos also generate mountains of racially-based commentaries wherever they're posted. Actually, it's often more a spittle-flecked monologue than it is a dialogue.
I'll talk about two other viral videos before I show the Soulja Girl one.
I remember a video from last year that showed a high school fight. Two young men take off their shirts and square off. It's a white kid and a smaller, shorter Asian kid. The crowd is yelling their support of the white kid; they're on his side. It begins. Whoever uploaded it has added a soundtrack: Rick Ross' "Everday I'm Hustlin" booms over the fight. The Asian kid moves like greased lightning and after a few punches, the white kid is down. He gets up and walks off. The Asian kid drops him again; this time he can barely stagger away, blood and bits of teeth spraying from his mouth. The video ends.
This video was popular among Asian-Americans, for obvious reasons. A narrative built up around it. The white kid was the bully. The Asian kid was the hero. The narrative had dubious authenticity, but it felt right, it fit with the video and it fit with many of our experiences. I've certainly had the experience, multiple times at school, of being surrounded by a circle of hostile white kids screaming at me. I watched the video several times. It created a strong surge of mixed emotion. I couldn't think straight while watching it. I loved it and hated it at the same time for making me romanticize the violence.
Another example is a popular video I saw last year that's much less violent but seemed to arouse equally strong emotions. A young, pretty, blond white girl sits in front of the camera and talks about her infatuation with Arab men. Nothing is pornographic or poetic; her tone is quite flat and even bland. Arab men are handsome. They're sexy. They're romantic. They know how to treat women well. They're fun to hang out with. She only goes out with Arab men now. Her current boyfriend is Arab. She's learning Arabic. She's converting to Islam. That's it, really.
You can imagine how the typical anti-Arab commenter reacts to this. Her positive stereotyping sends them into a frenzy. What she believes is the exact opposite of what any white, presumably Christian woman is supposed to believe about Arab men. It's a huge challenge to their own beliefs, and they have to deal with it by turning her into a non-representative freak, someone who's not deserving of the title of woman, even.
If it was a more common fetish – for example, a white man giving similarly bland reasons for liking Asian women --- there is no way the video would have gotten the same attention and reaction.
I first saw the Soulja Girl video at the Creative Loafing blog. It's a local Atlanta blog. There are other local sources for the video. It's viral because it's current, it involves something that almost all Atlantans are familiar with (the MARTA train), it shows an extreme of human behavior and it reinforces some prior beliefs for a lot of people. I have to warn viewers, the video is quite depressing and is going to arouse a lot of negative emotions. I'm going to talk much more about those reactions than about the video itself.
Here are some comments from the initial Creative Loafing post. There's a good dialogue in that the stupid comments do not go unchallenged.
# Jill Chambers Says: May 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm It's just one more reason why MARTA needs to have their police actually riding on the trains. How sad that someone would so rudely disrespect the elderly woman and that all those other riders did not even try to come to her defense.
# Cricket Says: May 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am This is a perfect reason that people with concealed carry permits SHOULD be allowed on MARTA. If I had seen this, and it had escalated to actual physical violence, I would have no problem giving that ghetto wh*re two in the hat.
# Ken Edelstein Says: May 8th, 2008 at 8:06 am Cricket, you make the point of gun control advocates everywhere.
# DaleC Says: May 8th, 2008 at 9:47 am Cricket it DID escalate to physical violence when the guy finally stood up and stopped the aggressor. No weapons needed. That poor old woman. I can't believe it took that long for SOMEBODY to stand up to her being assaulted. Notice how rapidly Soulja Girl's attitude changed when she was confronted by someone who showed force in an appropriate manner. Bullies fold when someone calls them on their crap. It's a shame it took someone that long to stand up to her. As an aside, don't you just LOVE the beautiful world of Hard Core Hip Hop culture.
# Roxie Says: May 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am Dude, Dale, did you just call "superman" Hard Core HipHop? Please, appropriately hang your head in shame. The woman in the video was not a life threatening individual. Although, she is severely testing sanity and patience, being horrendously disrespectful, aggressive, and antagonizing..It was NOT dealt with appropriately by the young man, as you can see, it only escalated the situation. There are better ways to deal with something like this that do not involve HITTING. Of course, armchair quarterbacking is so easy. It took so long for ppl to respond b/c they couldn't believe what was happening and certainly didn't expect it to last as long as it did.
Hilarious. # nast Says: May 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm Seeing as how this incident was defused by a simple act of wig pulling, perhaps Gov. Perdue should sign a bill that protects individual rights to pull others' wigs in restaurants, parks, churches and other public places. "A wig-pulling society is a polite society."
In the next update to the story, the spittle-flecked monologue begins.
# troy c Says: May 9th, 2008 at 6:06 pm Is she an Obama superdelegate?
# LMM66 Says: May 9th, 2008 at 9:03 pm Not one of those losers tried to help an elderly woman. Everyone there was dumb*** you-know-what. As people have mentioned here already, THIS is how stereotypes are formed. And whether folks like it or not, THIS is the norm for "them".
# Weary One Says: May 10th, 2008 at 9:52 pm M.A.R.T.A. Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta
# Roxie Says: May 11th, 2008 at 1:02 am Wow. I didn't know so many racists liked CL.
MARTA actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (although everyone knows the other five words). It's a contentious intersection of race and politics in Atlanta.
Compared to better-known train systems, such as New York City, the trains are very limited in the ground they cover. The crime rate is low and the trains and stations are extraordinarily clean. Everyday users of the MARTA trains are predominantly working-class/middle-class African-Americans. All other Atlantans take the trains periodically, usually to go the airport or to attend special events held downtown.
Central Atlanta is a diverse mix, with the largest bloc being native (Atlanta-born) African-American. White people who live inside Atlanta are comparatively progressive in their politics, especially because of the huge GLBT community. They're not a choir of enlightened angels, by any means, but one thing is sure: if they were scared of seeing and talking to black people every day, they wouldn't be living where they do.
The suburbs to the east are where many richer, non-Atlanta-born African-Americans have settled. And to the far north, the suburbs trace the arc of white flight. The iron claws of the northern suburbs have had a pretty bad effect on the development of public transportation in Atlanta. Their politics, plus the road-construction lobby's dirty money, ensures that Atlanta's traffic congestion and air quality get worse and worse every year. MARTA's system is funded only by the two counties of metropolitan Atlanta, although people from the surrounding counties frequently use it for park-and-ride. The counties of the northern suburbs refuse to link their own systems to it, for fear of getting too many undesirable people in their neighborhoods. A well known fact: "MARTA is unique in that it is the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding."
The comments to the video illustrate an intense fear and loathing of public transportation. This fear and loathing feeds from racism, then back into racism, in a vicious feedback loop. "If only I could never leave my car," they pray. But parking is limited at their sporting events and their centers of bureaucracy. Every once in a while, they have to bravely step onto a MARTA train. And they're not even allowed to carry their guns on board! They resent that.
Anyone who is passionate about Atlanta and knowledgeable about Atlanta and lives inside it, no matter what their race, knows about this dynamic. We're all hostages to it.
Getting back to a more personal level, what do viewers feel about the woman?
I didn't think that drugs were involved. It definitely wasn't crack. People on crack aren't that fluid and expressive and coordinated in their movements. I think a lot of people on the train had the same visceral reaction I did… the fear and awe of the mad. If you don't look at them, maybe they won't notice you.
In fact, that's what happened. I read it first at local videojournalist A.Man.I's blog: Soulja Girl Turns Herself In. The fuller story was reported here and on local radio stations.
She's only 25 years old, but the dark bags under Nafiza Z.'s eyes tell the story of a young life blighted by psychosis, delusions, hallucinations and mania that are the hallmarks of her mental disorder.
Yesterday afternoon, Nafiza, was in the DeKalb County jail receiving the psychiatric treatment she desperately needed. But on April 7th, Nafiza was spiraling out of control on a MARTA train traveling through Atlanta's east side.
The scenes captured on another passenger's cell phone of Nafiza aka "Soulja Girl" terrorizing an elderly passenger - caused a sensation on the Internet and embarrassed MARTA officials who quickly issued a warrant for her arrest.
People with bipolar disorder aren't usually that violent or aggressive even in their manic phase. They are usually more of a danger to themselves than they are to others.
Nafiza's boyfriend Dee, with whom she has a baby son, said it more eloquently when he called into the Ryan Cameron Show on Friday, "If she wasn't bipolar she would be the good a person on earth," said Dee.
"That girl got a good heart. The city don't help her, man! They just kick her back out on the streets. The city don't help [black mentally ill] folks like that. Once you get in that [manic] stage you can't help yourself. It mess with your mind, man. Once your mind gone it's a wrap!"
I don't know exactly what it's like to be in the grip of clinical mania, adrenaline coursing through your body, other strange chemicals surging through your brain. But I know what it feels like to be a witness to something like that. Perhaps the awe and fear of the bystander is partly because of our empathy with mania... as if we're seeing the dial turned up to 10 on an experience we've felt at level 3 or 4.
It reminds me of a bizarre experience I had when I was in college in Miami. I was at a donut shop late at night, studying with some friends. An older white man walked in and set down at the booth next to us. He started talking very loudly to the air in a sharp, agonized tone. It was a monologue about being a Vietnam vet and how he was betrayed and how it was all the fault of the gooks. That sentiment, those words, over and over again.
My friends were shrinking into their seats. They were all foreign students and terrified of getting into trouble and getting deported, especially the one from Iraq. I had the opposite reaction. My skin was on fire, there was a buzzing noise in my ears, my body started shivering and trembling as if someone had plugged me into an electric current, and everytime he said the word "gook" the current spiked. After a couple minutes of this, I couldn't take it anymore. I got up and faced him and started yelling back.
There was chaos after that point. Another older white man came over, said he was also a Vietnam vet and then took my side of the loud, disjointed argument. The staff of the donut shop got involved. There were numerous threats of ass-kicking. The police came. They tried to talk him down but eventually arrested him after he got into his car, because he was obviously in no condition to drive.
My friends, who hadn't moved during the whole time, told me I was crazy. Yes, my actions were pretty irrational, but I didn't feel like I had a choice. I'd waded up to my knees in something that the mentally ill man was drowning in. I suppose I won, but my victory was pretty hollow.
This was the first narrative that I connected to the video I watched today. But after that man went out into the parking lot, I have no idea how his story began or ended.
After I read a bit more of Nafiza Z.'s story, I feel almost guilty for writing this analysis. I still empathize with the bystanders and the poor elderly lady, but I also empathize with her terrible struggle. I hope these words will go to show how the hatred expressed toward her has more to do with a complicated web of politics, race and resentment than it does with her actual actions. I hope she can transcend the person shown in that video and become the person she wants to be.
I talked to Sunny today over the webcam. He gives me a kiss by kissing the computer screen. I can't see him doing it, of course, I just see the top of his head approaching the camera. It's still really sweet. Then we all make funny faces at each other, and he laughs.
I usually don't get so sentimental over holidays, but this is my first mother's day as a mother, even if I'm a currently a quasi-mother, or perhaps a virtual telepresent mother.
I wondered whether to send a card to Sunny's biological mom. I decided against it. I don't know if it's my place yet to do so, and I don't know whether she wants to remember this day or not. I did send something to Sunny's foster mom.
This is a great organization I support. They have been working on many initiatives, including aid to Burma.
This Mother's Day give the mothers in your life a gift with meaning, a Doctors Without Borders e-card. Sending a Mother's Day e-card is fast and simple. You can choose the photo to feature in the card, like the one displayed here, and customize your personal message.Your Mother's Day gift will help Doctors Without Borders deliver medical aid where it is needed most. Women and children are disproportionately affected by humanitarian crises like armed conflict, displacement, disease and malnutrition. Our teams reach out every day to help them and other vulnerable people in nearly 60 countries. Let them and the mothers in your life know that you care this Mother's Day.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. New York Office: 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
Anyone who's bitter about media coverage of Obama will love this cartoon. I'm still chuckling about it. I love the "transitivity of blackness" definition, the church sign, and the depiction of "throwing his grandmother under the bus".
I have an exciting opportunity this weekend. I can't talk about it now, but maybe later I will.
We have a date for Sunny's placement! It's not as soon as we'd like, but at least we have it. I just hope they'll stick with it.
I feel exhausted recently. I need to get back on my vitamins and exercise.
Also, I'm terrible at posting the right things at the right time. But I should mention that May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, as well as National Foster Care Month.
At one point in my life, I needed to take my Spanish to fluency level in order to accomplish an important goal. I spent a year working to save money in order to go to a private immersion school in a Latin American country. I picked the capital of Costa Rica, San José. I wanted to stay in a relatively big city, and I was worried the smaller towns famous for language schools in Mexico and Guatemala would have so many other Americans that the immersion wouldn't be as effective.
The school lasted 9 weeks, 8 hours a day. I was placed with a Costa Rican family. My señora was an older woman living with her adult son. They had a beautiful house in the suburbs. My boarding price included a breakfast and dinner. Breakfast was often a fried pork chop accompanied by rice and beans and a vegetable, with a side of fresh tropical fruit, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a steaming thermos of world-famous Costa Rican coffee. The first time she presented me with this spread, it was pretty intimidating. But I ate every delicious bite, thanked the señora and staggered off to school.
Some of my American fellow students drove me crazy. There was a teenager who kept complaining about the breakfasts. She made her señora fix her a special breakfast: Captain Crunch cereal. Then she complained because her señora wasn't fixing it right. The cereal was too soggy. So she made the señora wait to put the cereal into the milk until the exact proper moment.
I didn't want to be an ugly American. I tried to understand the customs of daily life, and did some research before I went. I also knew from living in Miami that people would call me "chinita" or "Chinese girl" without regard for my real ethnicity, but that "chinita" didn't carry the same negative baggage as it would in the U.S. In my own country there's a thin but persistent layer of enmity towards Asians, based on a long history of immigration scares, economic competition, and wars. That history wasn't the same in Costa Rica, obviously. Asians were simply stereotyped as "exotic" and "foreign". It was actually a breath of fresh air. I had to deal with being "foreign", and I had to deal with explaining that yes, I really was an American even though I didn't look like one. Nothing especially difficult or painful.
I didn't think about other racial stereotypes, but I had a rude awakening.
In class, we were doing a unit based on cartoons and jokes. We were shown cartoons and asked to comment on them. It was going well. Then I turned the page of the photocopied course packet for the next cartoon. There was a black boy with exaggerated black features, crying, sitting by the side of the road next to huge watermelon slice. An older man (white/criollo) asks him, "why are you crying, negrito"? The boy says something like, "there's too much watermelon and not enough negrito".
It was horribly offensive. I went to the teacher right away. It was hard for me to articulate myself in Spanish, so I switched to English, which the teacher spoke very well. I told her, "this is a terrible cartoon, it's very offensive to black people. It really needs to be taken out of the course packet."
The teacher smiled and chuckled. She explained several things. In the U.S., we had lots of problems with race relations. Even riots! But things just weren't the same in Costa Rica. In her country, black and white people got along. In fact, she had an in-law who was part black. No black Costa Rican would see anything wrong with that cartoon. How would I know it was offensive, when I myself wasn't black? What's wrong with enjoying watermelon?
She was implying, very politely, that I shouldn't be an ugly American. I was imposing my own ideas about race relations in a realm where I was ignorant.
I'd lost some clarity, but I stayed on track. If I couldn't win the argument on moral grounds, I'd switch to practical.
"I'm sorry I can’t explain why it's so offensive. But if you have a black student from the United States, and they see the cartoon, I promise you they'll be very offended. In fact, they'd probably ask for their money back and say bad things about the school when they got back home."
That did the trick. The teacher promised to remove the cartoon from the next course packet.
I felt bad about going this route and, in essence, threatening their livelihood. The teachers were women with multiple degrees in the humanities, who worked harder, for much less pay, than their U.S. equivalents. Costa Rica has a high standard of living for the region, but America is a much more powerful country and casts a large shadow.
My guilt didn't last long. I found out that everything the teacher told me about black Costa Ricans was wrong. When I went to the black Caribbean coast (which every criollo Costa Rican warned me against doing) and actually met black Costa Ricans, I realized that Costa Rican society was extremely segregated. There was strong institutionalized racism against black people. The tourist dollars were diverted from their beaches; their language (English patois) was disparaged and dying out.
The most graphic illustration I had of this flavor of racism was in another part of Costa Rica, when I was watching television next to a friend of my señora.
They were showing a Richard Pryor movie on TV. She quickly changed the channel and said, in a normal conversational tone, "I don't like black people. I don't know why, I just don't. My mother was the same way!"
I maintained a stunned silence. I didn't say anything, because the woman was much older than me, and I felt physically incapable of confronting her. I just sat there, confused, frustrated, depressed, inadequate and culpable.
So my attempts at dealing with anti-black racism in Costa Rica were definitely a mixed bag: one partial success, one abject failure.
It's very difficult determining where to intervene or how to stand when it comes to unfamiliar forms of racism. People defending American racism (or denying that it exists) often point to other countries and say, triumphantly, "well, they're just as racist!" When done from an unquestioning perspective, condemning the practices of other countries has little effect other than asserting American moral superiority.
I still believe it has to be tried.
I learned a lot about racism in my own country from traveling and living in Latin America. In parallel, the most insightful accounts of racism in Korea and Japan have been the ones I've read from African-Americans. Different forms of racism are often not as separate and distinct as they first seem, and comparing them shows the weak spots where they can be challenged.
I'm the mother of two brothers who came to us through the foster care system. I'm also a Nikkei hapa. This is a blog about transracial adoption from an unusual point of view, combined with some politics and ATL living.
Foster Care System Perspectives
