Family History, National History

We spent our family vacation in Washington DC. It was awfully nice. I already know the area fairly well from the time I spent long ago as an au pair working for a family in the Maryland suburbs.

One day, we drove all the way down to Jamestown and its historical museum. I loved the exhibits, which covered the culture of 1) the English settlers 2) Powhatan Native Americans and 3) Angolans of dubious status (perhaps slaves, perhaps indentured) who all once lived in or near Jamestown. One exhibit covered a fascinating bit of history that I never knew before: the colonization efforts were based on a pattern already established... in Ireland. The goal was establish an ethnic enclave while extracting wealth from the natives (Irish cattle-herders/Powhatan farmer-hunters) using a combination of trade and force, then send money back to England.

We watched a museum movie which showed that life in Jamestown was pretty much hell on earth for the first English settlers. During one famine, some people dug their own graves, laid down in them and just waited to die. Jamestown wasn't very successful, which was why the Pilgrims are usually thought of as the first real settlement colony for the United States.

One of my ancestors on my mother's side was a Jamestown settler. His name was William Farrar, and he came over in 1618 from Lincolnshire. That's one of the main reasons I'm interested in Jamestown (although I'm not a full-fledged genealogy person).

Sunny had a vacation journal in which he had to write five sentences for every day. He liked the museum, and the ship we saw in neighboring Yorktown, but also wrote that hearing about all the Indians killed in Jamestown made him sad.

Sunny's favorite museum, of course, was the National Air and Space Museum. There are plenty of cool things to touch and pull and push and climb... it's a wonderland for a kid his age.

We took a tour through the WWII Pacific room. I looked for an exhibit on Japanese soldiers, but all they had was a single one on kamikaze pilots. I don't really blame the museum, since there weren't many exhibits on German soldiers in the other hall, either. But I do wish the Japanese could have been represented by something other than kamikaze pilots. I didn't draw it to Sunny's attention. Too complicated.

I did point to a picture of a Japanese battleship and explain that Ojiichan's father died when American fighter planes sunk his battleship. Because Ojiichan's father, my grandfather, died and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, we never got to meet him. I said that the Japanese were on the wrong side in the war and the Americans were on the right side, so it's a good thing we Americans won, but it was still a very sad thing that Ojiichan's father had to die like that.

Sunny said, "If I was around back then, I would save Ojiichan's father!" What a sweet boy.

Later on, we had dinner with my Guy's colleague who lives in DC. This was the first time I'd ever met her, although she and Guy have been friends for a while. She's a Japanese-American woman one generation older than me. I told her about what Sunny had said in the WWII Pacific exhibit, and she remarked, "My father was probably trying to sink your grandfather's battleship." She explained that in WWII her family had all their property seized in California and were taken to an internment camp, and from there her father volunteered, and ended up in the Pacific translating Japanese communications for American military intelligence.

Some people can't afford to be bitter and angry about the past. We have to remember, but we also have to move on. I thought of grief and letting go, and our strange relationship to WWII, when I read this recent article about the aftershocks of a war that's even further away in time.

Sunny said that he didn't understand hardly anything Guy's friend had just explained. I told him it was all very complicated history, but he would understand more when he got older.

Break Explanation - and Legacy of Shame!

This is the longest break I've ever taken on this blog! But there's no emergency or anything. Well, we did try and take Sunny off his medication, but the attempt failed horribly, so we're going to try again later this summer, and if that doesn't work, hold it off for another year.

Other than that, I've just been extremely busy. I'll be on vacation next week though.

And I did break my blogging hiatus just last night, in a rather incendiary way: David Carradine's Legacy of Shame is up at Racialicious and APA for Progress as well.

Global Day of Action...

... for Troy Davis. Please follow the link to sign a petition.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL - USA Online Action Center
Support Clemency for Troy Davis
Take Action On This Issue

Troy Davis faces execution for the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in Georgia, despite a strong claim of innocence. 7 out of 9 witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony, no murder weapon was found and no physical evidence links Davis to the crime. The Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles has voted to deny clemency, yet Governor Perdue can still exercise leadership to ensure that his death sentence is commuted. Please urge him to demonstrate respect for fairness and justice by supporting clemency for Troy Davis.

Update and Link

We have a lot of stuff going on this week, but I'm too tired to blog it! Sunny's behavior got really bad, then got better again. My health has not been great, either... I have a nasty sore throat right now.

I should mention that I had another guest post on Racialicious called "Geishas and Whores". It's a deeper exploration of an issue I've already touched on in the early days of this blog. The title turned out to be less controversial than the editor and I predicted. I guess I did a good job of explaining my word choices within the body of the piece. Commenters have already added a lot of interesting discussion.

Missing Mothers

I had a very nice day today.

Guy took Sunny out to the country to see his mother (Grandma) and her husband (Pawpaw). By the way, I'm not allowed to use the word "stepfather" because Pawpaw is actually a few years younger than Guy. This is a rule Guy always insists on, although I've never seen an age exclusion clause in any dictionary under the word "stepfather". Pawpaw has a shed in back of Grandma's house with a Harley-Davidson and a four-wheeler/ATV, which he let Sunny ride with him... yikes. Pawpaw isn't very mature and I think he only just barely counts as adult supervision. Sunny definitely had a lot of fun, though.

Meanwhile, I had a quiet day with my own mother. We went to a Korean restaurant on Buford Highway for brunch. I bought her a sewing machine for Mother's Day and we did some sewing together at her house, then I took a long nap, which I really needed. We talked a little bit about her mother, my own Nana, who died of emphysema 15 years ago.

Later on, we came back home, and Sunny spent most of the rest of the day playing outside with his friends. His behavior recently has been great. He hasn't had any violent fits or name-calling for almost two weeks now. He's given me several little presents for Mother's Day... what a sweetheart.

We talked to Sunny's foster mom in the morning. She has two new placements, a newborn baby girl and a 10-year-old girl. BB is doing very well and has been working on his crawling technique. Right now he can only crawl to the right, not the left, so if he crawls around the edge of the playpen and hits an obstacle, he yells until someone comes along and moves him back to the right spot so he can start again.

I did feel a little sad that he's growing up so fast. Even if he's placed with us soon, I won't get to carry him around for very long. Just a little sad though... it's a weird kind of limbo, but I'm used to it and I don't dwell on it much.

I steeled myself for the most difficult part of the day, which is talking to Sunny's bio grandma. It's just that she often says things that I don't feel confident about responding to. For example, every time we talk, she tells me how Sunny's mother's last wish is that we would adopt BB. Since we talk to her every one to two weeks I've heard this a lot, and every time I say a few sympathetic words, but really, it's hard to know what to say.

She told me that her day had been very rough... until she talked to Sunny, and then she felt much better.

Her own mother, Sunny's great-grandmother, has dementia and emphysema, and it looks like she's stopped eating and is going to die soon. I know what that's going to be like because that's how my own grandmother went. It's a hard way. Her brother lives close by, but it's going to be her job to handle the end. That sounds awfully familiar. It's so often that the men in a family don't have the strength when it really counts. I hate to be bitter, I've just seen and heard it happen way too many times.

She told me she made a wreath this morning and went to her daughter's grave and sat and talked to her for a long time.

She hasn't been sleeping well because of the stress. She says she won't take any medication, but when she feels really down, she talks to the parish priest.

We did have some lighter moments during the call. She told me all about the kinds of vegetables Sunny's mom would and wouldn't eat, and we compared them to Sunny's own vegetable ranking. She told me how her children always hated to crawl and how they liked to spend only a few weeks crawling before they started walking and running.

Like I posted yesterday, I feel very privileged today. I also feel aware of all the missing mothers and all those missing their mothers.

Sentimental about Mother's Day

Sunny has a secret plan for Mother's Day. Plan formulation has been ongoing for several days now. He'll go over to Guy, whisper in Guy's ear, then turn to me and say "DID YOU HEAR THAT, MOM?" "No." "GOOD, IT'S A SECRET!"

Guy let me in on it. Sunny wants to get me a caramel apple for Mother's Day.

I feel really privileged and really sentimental to have someone who loves me like that.

Just this morning we were talking about one of the neighborhood kids. His family situation is a bit fuzzy, but he's not living with his mother. Sunny got confused about the details and said "He must have been really shy when he met his parents, like I was shy when I met you." I explained that his friend wasn't adopted, so he never had a time when he met totally new parents.

It reminded me of the day we first met.

Outside his foster mom's house, I took a deep breath. Guy seemed to be doing a lot better than I was. It took me about half a minute to pull myself together after I got out of the car.

Then the social worker led us in. We met his foster mom. We moved deeper into the house, toward a sofa in the den. Perched anxiously on the sofa was a little boy with huge brown eyes. He looked so fragile, so vulnerable, almost like a fawn. As soon as he saw us, he said "Hi Mom! Hi Dad!"

It's impossible for me to imagine just how important that moment was for him, how much courage it took...

The Power of Triracial Mystification

Guy says he can't wait for me to blog about this, so here it goes.

The other day we had someone in the house trying to repair our washing machine. He was an elderly white man with one of those verra verra gentle Jawja accents. As usual, Sunny was in and out of the house playing with his friends.

At one point, his friends burst in and collected him to go outside and ride scooters.

As he was walking out, the repairman looked at Guy, and then looked at me, increasingly more mystified.

"Excuse me, but I'm wondering... those kids... they're black... and you're Chinese... and you're Caucasian..."

Me: "I'm not Chinese, I'm half-Japanese and half-white."

"I thought you were Chinese."

Me: "I'm not."

Guy, in a cheery voice: "Well I'm 100% white!"

"Your kids... they're black... and you're... and he's..."

I finally soothed his mental anguish by communicating that two of the three kids were neighbors, and that Sunny was adopted. He was quite relieved, and immediately launched into a rambling anecdote about a couple from his church who were both white but their kids they had adopted were both black. Then he made his awkward exit.

I'm used to being called Chinese. As long as people accept my correction gracefully, I don't get angry. I reserve getting angry for those occasions when people actually ARGUE WITH ME after I correct them.

Surprisingly enough, this is the first time I have had to answer awkward questions about race when it comes to Sunny. I think a lot of people assume he's my biological son, or else they're just way too polite to ask questions like "Is he adopted or did you cheat on your husband with Tiger Woods or something?" Guy also doesn't really get a lot of questions. A Japanese-American woman he met in a doctor's lobby ended up quizzing him once, but that was understandable, since Sunny had been telling her about his ojiichan.

Sunny is going to get a lot of questions as he grows up, but I'm not that worried about him. He seems less vulnerable than most kids because of his unique combination of self-confidence, extroversion and stubbornness. He's the kind of kid that's always telling jokes and bossing other kids around too much and in general taking things too far... but who is still incredibly popular because he's so dynamic and fun to be around. Kids are always knocking at our door asking to play with Sunny, even though all of them are actually older than he is.

It reminds me of an anecdote an adoptive parent couple told us during training. The father was black, the mother was white and they had adopted two black sons. Their very different personalities led to very different responses when classmates asked them, "why is your momma white?" One would say, "Because God made her that way" and the other would say, "Because she IS!" I'm more of the introverted type who wants to communicate the reason. Sunny is the type who doesn't have that priority, it just is what it is, and if you have a problem with that, well then... hey look over there, it's something shiny! Watch me do a backflip!

I think we'll all have it pretty easy until Sunny hits the teenage years and starts having a racial identity crisis, but I've got a good therapist on speed dial for then.

Introducing Presente

I'm passing this along at the request of Nezua from The Unapologetic Mexican. He's working on a new online initiative -- Presente-- standing up for immigration justice for Latino communities.

Of course, this is a huge issue in Georgia. There are all kinds of anti-immigrant whacko politicians around here (merely one example). They hate all kinds of "furriners" but Latino immigrants do bear the brunt of it. It's frustrating try to figure out ways how to fight against them.

I look forward to signing up and hearing more about Presente.

Presente.org seeks to strengthen the political voice of Latino communities. Using the Internet, we give our members ongoing opportunities for action on the issues they care about. Our goal is to unite Latinos of all generations, nationalities, and regions, together with allies from other communities. It all starts with the simple pledge below. Join us. ¡Adelante!

The Pledge
Be Counted!

"We, the undersigned, call for an end to immigration policies that divide families, deny educational access, and exploit workers. We agree to stand up and be counted on the issues that matter to Latino communities. With a unified voice we can't be ignored. Together we will become a powerful online community that promotes justice and holds our leaders accountable. We will be Presente."

I'll also mention another Nezua-collaboration site, The Sanctuary, for coverage of the recent disgusting attempts to use swine flu to attack Mexicans.

Close to Home

It's on the national news. Eleven-year-old Jaheem Herrera killed himself because of severe emotional abuse. This story hits close to home because I happen to know a boy who was in the same school and grade and class as Jaheem Herrera. I'm never going to look at him the same way.

I know from my own experience how isolated Jaheem must have felt. If just one single kid in the class had stood up for him, he probably would have been saved.

I never wanted to kill myself, but I was pretty desperate. For years, I used to lie awake at night hoping that aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse I went through was primarily racial, but it had other elements as well... I wasn't good at gender-conforming, and got called a lesbian a fair number of times.

It sounds like what Jaheem went through was primarily about gender-conforming but had racial/ethnic elements as well. I know the school in question is not diverse (almost entirely African-American), and although I don't know how Jaheem's family identified, it's obvious he didn't fit in.

From My bullied son's last day on Earth
Bermudez says bullies at school pushed Jaheem over the edge. He complained about being called gay, ugly and "the virgin" because he was from the Virgin Islands, she said.

"He used to say Mom they keep telling me this ... this gay word, this gay, gay, gay. I'm tired of hearing it, they're telling me the same thing over and over," she told CNN, as she wiped away tears from her face.

But while she says her son complained about the bullying, she had no idea how bad it had gotten.

"He told me, but he just got to the point where he didn't want me to get involved anymore because nothing was done," she said.

Bermudez said she complained to the school about bullying seven or eight times, but it wasn't enough to save him.

"It [apparently] just got worse and worse and worse until Thursday," she said. "Just to walk up to that room and see your baby hanging there. My daughter saw this, my baby saw this, my kids are traumatized."

She said Jaheem was a shy boy just trying to get a good education and make friends.

"He was a nice little boy," Bermudez said through her tears. "He loved to dance. He loved to have fun. He loved to make friends. And all he made [at school] were enemies."

Bermudez said she thinks her son felt like nobody wanted to help him, that nobody stood up and stopped the bullies.

"Maybe he said 'You know what -- I'm tired of telling my mom, she's been trying so hard, but nobody wants to help me,' " says Bermudez.

I feel so sorry for him. But at least he was happy once upon a time, before he came here and started the period of misery that ended his life.

I don't know what to do, but I have a few ideas. I'm going to continue writing about my own experiences with abuse in school and giving advice on the topic where I can. I'm not calling it bullying anymore, because "bully" is too light of a word. I can't be an advocate in any more public sense, however. I can be very articulate in person but not on this subject. I can write about it, but it's almost impossible for me to talk about it.

I'm going to talk to Sunny about Jaheem Herrera, and show him his photo, and explain that it happened because other kids called him "gay" and were mean to him. I'll try to find some way of telling him that I don't want Sunny to ever abuse anyone in that way, and more importantly, to stand up for kids who are being abused, because if you don't, you could end up being guilty for the rest of your life. And finally, that if he was ever a victim, I'd pull him out of school and do whatever it takes to protect him.

This story is running together in my head with another story I heard second-hand from my mother, about a discussion she had with a man who had been one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan. Our family has connections to refugee families, including some Sudanese, though I don't want to go into any more identifying detail on the connections.

Anyway, the man said he was willing to share his story because he considered himself an advocate. His story involved some very simple math. His group tried to go Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians expelled them back into Sudan. So on their next attempt, they walked 500 miles from Khartoum into Kenya. There were 800 of them when they started walking. There were 300 when they arrived. Wild animals, starvation, disease and soldiers had killed the rest. He was seven years old.

I couldn't even imagine. The same age as my son...

I actually tried reading "What is the What", the story of former "Lost Boy" Valentino Achak Deng, but I gave up less than 100 pages in because it was making me so unbearably sad. It's hard to say what was worse, going through all the nightmare of the civil war, or being so poorly treated in America, just when he thought he was safe.

And then many of the children of the refugees end up in poorly managed public schools where they suffer tremendous abuse for not "fitting in".

In this country that's supposed to be so rich and civilized, we can't even keep children safe in schools.

Testing

Sunny has the CRCT this week. That's the big important statewide test for Georgia.

I think there's a general overemphasis on testing in public education, especially in the context of the horribly failed policy of No Child Left Behind. However, I'm really pushing for Sunny to do well on these tests. We're promising him some major swag if he gets good scores. I told him that he usually only gets toys on his birthday and Christmas, but he has an opportunity to earn one with the CRCT.

If he had a different personality, I wouldn't be pushing him as much, or at all. But he's got a lot of self-confidence and competitive spirit. He loves competing. He will do almost anything (eat vegetables, put away clothes) if we can frame it as a race.

Right now, his competitiveness is harming him at school as much as it's helping him. He always wants to be the first to finish so he can yell "DONE!" I'm trying to get him to shift his focus and asking him to compete against the test and compete against himself. I've explained that the best achievement is beating yourself... establishing your own goal and then surpassing it, like the "personal best" of a marathon runner. It's a fairly subtle point so I doubt he understands it yet, but if I keep repeating it, it should eventually sink in.

Since he gets so easily frustrated with us over homework, we're not personally doing any test prep. That would be a recipe for blow-ups. Instead, we've increased his tutoring sessions to three times a week.

I know he can do really well if he just slows down and focuses. His tutor is reinforcing that point as well. According to his 504 plan, he'll have special accommodations at testing time, away from the other kids, and I think that's going to help him focus.

I had an interesting talk with my other cousin last week -- the one who used to have severe ADHD. He was in town visiting my older cousin. He got very emotional when he talked about his own education and gave me some warnings based on his own experience. He felt his mother simply gave up on him when it came to school. My aunt is loving, but disgustingly passive, and I could see her accepting without a complaint anything that any authority figure told her needed to be done. He was put into a self-contained classroom. "They just warehoused me with the retards for six years." I would never use that word myself, but that's how he phrased it. He was finally mainstreamed in junior high, but by that point he'd barely learned to read. He's obviously very bitter about it. He wanted me to make sure that I wouldn't do that to Sunny, and I reassured him I wouldn't.

Although I think our schools overemphasize testing, and that approach only serves a minority (as in cognitive skills minority)... I have to admit, I've benefited from it. I'm a great test-taker. There's something about the application of brute intellectual force, problem by problem, that fits well with my psychology. On the other hand, my mother is brilliant with puzzles, as was my grandfather, and I never inherited that. I have no patience for them.

My mother once bought me a Rubik's cube, but she was the one that learned to solve it, not me. For one birthday, she got me a $20-dollar bill embedded in a clear plastic sliding puzzle, and I spent about half a minute trying to solve it before I got so mad I took a hammer and went to the garage and smashed it to bits so I could get the money. And I was great at math up to the algebra level, and then I became hopeless at it, probably because the nature of the problems began to resemble puzzles. I also failed to inherit my father's genius for languages. But I always did great at any kind of standardized test.

Test-taking is a skill you can learn. It doesn't really reflect what you know, although a good base of general knowledge does help. It's a fairly arbitrary skill, but it's an incredibly important one in today's society.

I always approached tests in a hostile manner. I'd glare at the test a while, psyche myself up, silently threaten it, then take out my pencil and begin beating it into submission.

I don't know if Sunny is going to develop good test-taking skills or not. Still, I'm going to keep my expectations high. If he doesn't succeed in this area, I'm sure he will succeed in other areas.

Anyway, according to this article, what I do as a parent doesn't matter anyway. Ha! Seriously, I do agree with the article's premise that parents drastically underestimate the importance of the peer group. I've complained about this tendency innumerable times when it comes to transracial adoption, but it's worth noting again... it's a general parenting issue too.

Joy Luck Hub Submission

This sounds like an interesting project, so I'm submitting my own entry. 299 words...

When people found out I was "half-Japanese" they would always ask me about my Japanese mother. In their minds, my story was already written. My father was a white military man, my mother a Japanese girl he had married and taken away back to the States when his post was finished. In the beginning I was simply confused by how wrong this story was. Later on, it made me angry that people kept imposing it on me.

When they met, my mother was a radical hippie and my father was a hippie radical. He made his own sandals out of used car tires, and was once jailed for punching a policeman in a student riot in Tokyo. He loved retelling the anecdote: "Pig hit me with stick. So I punch pig. Then pig take me to jail!" We lived briefly in England during the 70s, and the Sex Pistols caught his imagination, for obvious reasons. He used to sing me to sleep with "God save the queen, iza fascist regime," which he intoned in a bizarre but somewhat credible imitation of a cockney accent.

My parents raised me with bits and pieces of the traditions they were raised with. They also raised me not accept authority at face value, and to question any claims to an ultimate truth.

So I didn't ever experience a "Joy Luck" clash between a sense of Asian tradition and American modernity. I was always on the outside looking in, no matter where I lived. This wasn't easy. In fact, it was incredibly painful. I had no hometown, no home culture, nowhere to stand my feet... and nothing to rebel against in order to define myself. But I still like my own story much better than the stories other people try to force onto me.

Dope Boys

We had Sunny in a spring break camp for last week. My schedule, Guy's schedule and my mother's schedule were all very busy, so we thought it would be better than having Sunny stay home and mostly complain about being bored during the day.

The organization that holds the camp is pretty close to us and has a good reputation. Sunny had fun and got lots of time playing outdoors... but we're both feeling very ambivalent about the camp and are not going to do it again next year.

This is a difficult subject to talk about, but we don't want Sunny associating too much with some of the children that went there.

The last day, when Guy came to pick him up, he overheard an older boy talking about how some other boy wanted to be a dope boy just like he was. Being a drug dealer (or more likely, pretending to be a drug dealer) is not something elementary-aged kids should be doing!

Also, Sunny told me a girl called him a bitch. He said he went to tell an adult, and I complimented him for that decision. If I was minding kids that age, I would want to know if they started using such bad language so I could go break it up.

A lot of the kids came from a very low-income part of the neighborhood and could pay a subsidized rate for the spring break camp.

I've had both friendly discussions and heated arguments with Guy over the subject of class. And class is the looming issue here... of course race is involved, but it's not the most important aspect. Sunny's friends at school are almost all black, his neighborhood block friends are all black, his summer camp is majority black... but they're all also middle-class. They're from families that have enough resources so that they can be really involved with their kids' lives, they can demand high standards in education, and they're able to minimize contact with horrible negative stuff like crack dealing.

I know that the poorer parents living in the dilapidated apartment blocks one mile and another world up the street from us want exactly the same things for their kids... they just don't have the resources to do it.

Guy admits he has a stronger reaction against what he sees as low-class behavior. He grew up in a small-town Georgia setting where his family wasn't at the bottom, but they were a lot closer to the bottom than the top. The bad things that happen to lower-class small-town white kids aren't that much different than the bad things that happen to lower-class urban black kids, except that the drug of choice is meth instead of crack.

People who grow up in protected settings (and this means me, because I also had a solid middle-class existence for a crucial stretch of my life) have a certain freedom from class-related fears. But if you grew up a few rungs from the bottom, and saw some kids fall off that ladder, that's a lesson that's going to stay with you the rest of your life.... and it might cause you to make much harsher judgments than otherwise.

I see a related kind of issue with my stepfather, who did grow up at the bottom of the ladder. Often, he won't want to take advantage of certain disability or insurance claims because he's got this weird idea that that's what lazy white trash does, game the system, and he's not like that anymore, and then my mother has to browbeat him into actually claiming the money he's entitled to.

I think Guy is often too paranoid... when he sees a group of dangerous kids that might shoot us, I see a group of rowdy teenagers, like we used to be a while back.

However, in this case, I agree 100% with Guy. I don't want Sunny to be exposed to any group of kids that thinks being a dope boy is a worthy real-life ambition. It's not like we're keeping him in an ivory tower. We live on the edge of a huge, constantly changing city, and he's going to come in contact with this stuff. I just want to minimize it as much as possible. I don't want him to look down on people from lower-class families, or be afraid of them, but I do want him to have a healthy sense of caution and know how to stay out of trouble. Atlanta is a very dangerous city, especially for a young black man. It's a difficult balancing act... I guess you'll have to check back in 12 years to see how it all works out!

From "Dope Boys" by T.I.

A crack a ki' a crumb do it fifty mo' times
The quarter go for 5 and the half go for 9
Still in the trapp wit them break down dimes
Hit me on the hipper anytime, I don't mind
Why y'all n****s bitching on and whining I'm a grind
Shack it in the winter and the summer I'm a shine (getting mine)
It's plenty of money to be made from Candler Road to Bankhead
It's plenty of room to get paid for those that ain't scared
I got the hard for the j's and dro' for the dank heads
The dope game still strong like pimping ain't dead

Very short update on BB

This is going to be very short because there's not much of anything happening.

We're chugging through the paperwork that will keep us up-to-date as a licensed pre-adoptive home, just in case things with BB start moving faster. The part I hate the most is the drug test. The lab closest to me is a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall with a filthy bathroom, and the whole place smells very suspicious.

The foster mom told me that BB has just started learning how to crawl this week. It's nice to hear that, but it also makes me sad that I'm missing all these milestones.

I may try calling BB's dad again and checking in with him. The last time I talked to him was about three weeks ago. Since then, like I'd told him, I mailed him some pictures of BB from the March visit.

The last time we talked, I told him that he should call the worker and set up visits with BB, but the foster mom said she hasn't heard anything at all from him (he has her number, also).

This weekend I had a great talk with our neighbor about Sunny and his issue. They're a really interesting family. The mom works with teenagers in foster care in a group home. Their son is middle-school aged and autistic (Asperger's syndrome). He's not very physically active and doesn't have a lot of friends his own age, but he gets along fine with younger kids and older kids and adults. The neighbors love it when Sunny keeps knocking on their door and bugging their son to come out and play with him.

I had a frank talk with her about the raging, because I know her son is easily upset by strong displays of emotion. She was really sympathetic and offered to help as much as she could. She's not worried about Sunny, since he's always had great behavior around their house and with her son. Her son has never been aggressive, but she has a lot of experience with aggressive acting out at her job, and with raising an adult stepson who has autism plus bipolar.

Return of the Raging

Sunny has been doing really well for the last several weeks. In fact, last week, his behavior marks in school have been some of the best he's ever received.

He's had a few tantrums where we had to hustle him into the back seat of the car, but they've blown over in a few minutes.

Yesterday night, he seemed really hyper and out of control around bedtime. It took a long time to get him to bed.

Today, he had two rages. The first one was in the early afternoon and took 10-15 minutes. I was driving him to dance class, and he was really angry because I had enforced the "no Legos" rule and told him he couldn't bring his Legos in the car. We only got a few blocks from home before I had to pull over. I don't know if I handled it well, perhaps I could have de-escalated better somehow, but I wasn't thinking on my toes... when I pulled over and just sat there silently for a few seconds thinking about what to do next, the silence wound him up to the point that he started throwing and screaming, and I had to get into the back seat to hold him down for a while.

I ended up driving back to the house because I didn't think he was in a good enough mood for dance class, and we also would have been late because of the altercation anyway. I thought he was doing better. We've established that any attempt at hitting means no TV or DVD for the rest of the day, but I let him play outside for a while instead.

Then, as we were all getting ready to go to my mother's house for dinner, he had another and even stronger raging episode. It started because I asked him to put away the Uno cards he'd been playing with.

I had to hold him down for a long time. This takes so much out of me, emotionally and physically. He would cry and scream that I was hurting him, holding him too tight... I kept telling him "I love you, but I won't let you hurt other people or hurt yourself" and "you're a good boy, I know you don't want to do this, you can calm yourself down" and "I will let you go once you take responsibility for your behavior." If I loosened my hold on his wrists for even a second he would slip free, try to kick out the car windows, try to bite me or punch me in the face. Then when I held on to his wrists harder again, it would be back to the "you're hurting me."

The worst were the few times he fooled me by saying he was sorry, all he wanted was a hug, then when I relaxed my hold, he would try and attack me or scream insults at me.

I knew he was finally coming out of it when he patted me on the arm softly while he was sobbing. I could finally let him go and hug him.

Guy was watching outside the car during this time. I would rather hold Sunny down myself. I can do it showing less negative emotion than Guy, and I'm also much softer, so there's less chance of Sunny actually getting banged or bruised.

When it was all over Sunny was very remorseful. We had a frank talk. Guy asked Sunny what he would do if someone tried to hit him like he tried to hit us. Sunny said he would hold them down or hit them back... we said we would never hit him back, and hitting is wrong.

I told him we all had to do work to control his anger, and that the neurofeedback was part of trying to teach him how to control his anger. I also told him that I would keep holding him down when he started hitting, but in a few years, I wouldn't be able to do that anymore, because he'd be way too strong. And when that happened, and he hurt anyone, we'd have to call the police instead. He asked if they would take him to jail. I said no, little boys wouldn't go to jail, but he would go to the hospital, and it wouldn't be fun at all. Which is why we had to work hard right now to make sure he could control his anger and calm himself down before he started hitting.

He's already very, very strong.

We've already talked about the worst case. Guy was driving me crazy with scenarios when the raging first started... he was literally keeping me up at night worrying about it. My attitude is that we'll worry about it when it actually happens. We have a few years to turn things around before we get to that tipping point. Recently, Guy has arrived at the more pragmatic stage, and we're both maintaining there. In fact he reminded me again, today, "we have several years."

I'm not angry about it, just mildly rueful, but I've realized that there must have been a tacit conspiracy to downplay Sunny's behavior. Sunny's worker talked about tantrums, but said he was not violent towards other people... that the worst he did was kicking his feet. When you hear that, you imagine "kicking feet at floor" not "kicking feet at glass windows and other people's heads".

Anyway, his foster mom confirmed he had some of the same behavior when he was living with them... in fact, she wondered how long it would take for it to show up with us. The answer was about eight months.

We'll just have to wait and see. There've been only been four sessions of neurofeedback so far. Later, we can also see if going off meds will help, or perhaps even increasing them... if that's what he really, really needs.

I also don't want to get complacent about holding Sunny down. I don't want this to become our new normal. There has to be something else we can do to stop the raging before it erupts. I can see it coming, but so far I just feel powerless to stop it.

His adoption finalization date is within a month. It's hard to know what it means to him. We've talked about it, I've even told him it's OK to feel weird or sad about it, he just doesn't seem to attach any importance to it that I can tell. We're already mom and dad.

This is so depressing. I just want to get back to worrying about more typical things, like the CRCT testing and his soccer team and his next round of clothes and so on.

We went to my mother's house and had dinner and Sunny behaved pretty well, although Guy noticed that his positive and negative reactions seemed to be more intense than usual. And then he went to sleep easily, unlike last night. Maybe he's worked it out of his system for a while.

Blood Pressure Rising!

Before I go off and say nembutsu for a while to calm down, here's the interchange that got my blood boiling.

Stage One:
A transracial adoptee writes a post about changing her name to a Korean one at 8asians.com. An elegant piece with what seems like a perfectly understandable viewpoint.

Stage Two:
Supportive comments from some non-adopted Asian-Americans and white adoptive parents.

Stage Three:
Whacko troll calls her an ungrateful communist wretch.

I have a different reaction to people like this than other reform-minded adoptive parents, and also from transracial adoptees. I've been an adoptive parent, or studying to be one, for a few years. But I've been an Asian-American all my life. When I see comments like the one below, adoption is one of the furthest things from my mind; instead, a siren explodes in my head that goes WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP RACIST ATTACK WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP.

By every indication, Chun-Soon Li is American. except for adoption at birth. She has only one family, also American, and by blood only, she has a link to a Korean woman who birthed her, but whom she has never met. And the gifts she brought from Korea to America are limited to her genetic make up, and her life. The articulate nature of her posts, and (those in her support), lead me to believe all of you has benefited from a stable upbringing, significant educational opportunities, and complete freedom from material want, as is the American tradition.

[...]

Such an apt illustration of the soullessness of this horse sh*t movement. The attack is on me and other parents who have had the nerve to adopt internationally. Its implicit, here, though powerfully stated. Unfortunately, there was a time when it was explicit and directed towards good friends of mine. The decision to adopt is by its very nature, extremely personal and soul searching. Theirs is a typical profile, after many years of trying, they exhausted other means to have children naturally, and had recently arrived back in the US with a delightful Chinese daughter, proud and happy parents. A group of us were celebrating, and were somehow introduced to some academics from out of town. After several minutes of small talk, the conversation turned to this very subject, at which time one of the academics proceeded to berate the family with the new arrival; that this baby should have never left China, it was all wrong to take babies from their “culture”. and that it amounted to an act of “cultural imperialism” by the parents (the new mother, now in uncontrollable tears). I noticed a certain satisfaction in this academic woman, a certain smug, “mission accomplished” look about her when she was done.

I’m assuming all of you know better than to try to inject yourself into the private family matters of all-Asian families—that being largely Confucian and conservative—they would hand you your head. Unfortunately, parents adopting internationality tend to liberal, and vulnerable.

I guess it takes academia to elevate every grievance and perceived slight to an equal level with all others, and I really wouldn’t care if the Korean/American adoptee’s plaint were simply: “its all about me” in fact, I’d have some sympathy—but that’s not the case. This movement seeks to inject itself into the very personal and private family decisions of families like mine: “Its all about me, so I want YOU to change”

But there are, as Jackson Brown sings, those: who’s “lives hang in the balance” and their fate is callously, even studiously ignored by this horse shit movement. “Kim, sometimes “politically correct” is, simply, correct.” And Chun-Soon Li, how many times did we hear that last century, and its equivalent—just before the ax fell snuffing out thousands of lives?

Several weeks ago, I got a call from an old friend who had just seen SlumdogMillionare: “you know, I now think I really understand what you’ve been trying to tell me about orphans all these years” —good Kev, except it was staged in India—by Bollywood. Still, the flick does seem to project a certain fundamental truth, as good fiction often does.

So with China in mind, first an account about those who didn’t even get the basic gift all of you adoptees received. Its also noteworthy for those who believe China’s one-child policy is the cause of the massive disparity of boys to girls that these events happened well before PR China:

“Infanticide in a starving city like this is dreadfully common. For the parents, seeing their children must be doomed to poverty, think it better at once to let the soul escape in search of a more happy asylum than to linger in one condemned to want and wretchedness. The infanticide is, however, exclusively confined to the destruction of female children, the sons being permitted to live in order to continue the ancestral sacrifices.

One mother I met, who was employed by this mission, told the missionary in ordinary conversation that she had suffocated in turn three of her female children within a few days of birth: and, when f fourth was born, so enraged was her husband to discover that it was a girl also that he seized it by the legs and struck it against the wall and killed it.

Dead children, and often living infants, are thrown out on the common among the grave mounds, and be seen there any morning being gnawed by dogs. Mr. Tremberth of the Bible Christian Mission, leaving by the south gate early one morning, disturbed a dog eating a still living child that had been thrown over the wall in the night. Its little arm was crunched and stripped of flesh, and it was whining inarticulately - it died almost immediately.”

Fast-forward now to the current plight of China’s unwanted girls—how bad is it? Its not easy to know, and I’m not going to quote alot more, but to get a perspective, I suggest those interested Google: “The mystery of China’s lost girls” (Asia Times)

Here's my response. I just can't bring myself to present nuanced counterarguments about the voice of the adoptee when the base for his entire worldview is built on a smug white supremacy. I reject it entirely. I think this also shows why I don't involve myself in any kind of environment where people like this are free to spew their verbal abuse. It's way too upsetting. I can't believe how much it sucks that transracial adoptees so often get entangled in arguments with people like this. They don't deserve it... well, no one deserves it, but they really, really, really don't deserve it.

atlasien wrote:

Some points in Kim’s loopy racist rant:

– Asians are inarticulate. Only those who have been sufficiently assimilated can speak English, much less have articulate opinions.

– Adoptees are not allowed to speak about their own experiences. Unlike regular children, they never grow up, and their parents are in charge of interpreting their life forever.

– Being an adoptive parent means you’re white… and Chinese children are never adopted by Chinese or Chinese-Americans. Oh yes, and these adoptive parents are always blameless martyrs whose choices are always above criticism.

– All Asian families are “conservative and Confucian”. This is a neat little generalization showing that Kim is not Asian (whew!) and learned all he knows about Asian cultures from a combination of fortune cookie messages and an adoption agency brochure.

– paragaph [5]: combine irrelevant Jackson Browne lyric, insinuation of creeping communism, ludicrous mixed metaphor about axes snuffing out candles (?!?), place in blender, press “liquefy intelligent thought” (I suppose this wasn’t a point at all)

– Some stories about female infanticide from a century ago proving that the HEATHEN CHINEE are an evil race and should not be trusted to raise their own children. Nevermind that around that same time period in the American West, Chinese immigrants were being randomly lynched and murdered by angry white mobs in organized ethnic cleansing programs.

It must severely disturb similar racist troglodytes to hear that China has been increasing domestic adoption to the point where they’ll probably shut down international soon. But I guess they’ll always have their racist stereotypes to comfort themselves with.

Help Finding Japanese International Adoptee

I've wanted to write this post for several weeks, but other things kept getting in the way. More likely, it's a very sad subject for me because it brings up some frustration. But I need to get it out there, so here it comes.

I know a woman from a forum who, just like me, is the child of an adoptee from Japan and also an adoptive parent. She goes by "celebratewewill" on the forum. Her mother is the adoptee. C's mother is dying and C is trying to uncover her roots in Japan.

My father and her mother were both indirect victims of WWII. My father's bio father died on a battleship in the Pacific, his mother died shortly thereafter, and he was sent away to a family in a mountain village that could take him in. C's mother was found/abandoned/given up after the war. She was taken to an orphanage and adopted internationally by an American couple.

My father is 100% Japanese (though he may not be fully ethnic Japanese, but that's another story) both biologically and culturally. C's mother is mixed-race and was raised in America, and was not interested in looking back. What they both have in common is the stoic survivor mentality. The past is past, there's no use talking about it, suck it up and move on.

Being the child of an adoptee with this kind of perspective can be frustrating. We have a major gap in our history. As my father said once as he was in a poetic mood, "my family tree is withered".

To explore our past, we have to travel through our parent's trauma. Do we have the right? Is this partly our story, or does it belong wholly to them? It's hard to weigh all the ethical and emotional factors.

These frustrated yearnings wax and wane over a lifetime. At times of birth and death, they become especially powerful.

C's mother will soon pass away, and the link to her ancestors will become more tenuous.

Here are some details she provided me:

• The details I have are almost all verbal, and who knows how much as been added or subtracted. We do have a lot of "adoption papers" in Japanese, if i can find where they are hidden in my parent's house. Her papers have her name as Misao Okuno (I am going on memory only, I may have mispelled), dob 8-11-52.
• My dad says he remembers my grandpa (mom's dad) mentioning a "Reny Sawada" who ran the orphanage; he thought it was a Catholic orphanage, and they targeted Americans to adopt these children who were half Japanese. I found a Miki Sawada who fits this, the Elizabeth Sanders Home. But i'm thinking if she was just brought to the home by a stranger, no name or dob would be available. I don't know how often the children's mothers brought them directly to the orphanage; anything I can find is that these children were found on the street, sometimes dead. I don't know really how her original name and bday could have remained with her.
• My dad said that a few years ago, he contacted the japanese embassy and forwarded copies of all the papers they have. They couldn't figure out where she got her name (I don't know if that meant they did a search of her name and hometown, though, like you suggested). Next time I'm down visiting, I'm going to make copies of everything for myself.
• My dad does remember my mom's dad telling him that the orphanage told him she was Japanese/Portuguese. How they would have known that is beyond me, if she was indeed found on the streets eating out of the garbage, as the story goes. It would explain my brother's appearance, but perhaps more Brazilian since he's so dark-skinned.

Here's some advice I gave her:

• In Japan there are very detailed family records called koseki. Back in that time period, all facts of birth and adoption would be recorded in the koseki. Today, to access the koseki for the home region you would need to prove your relation and right to access it. I know this stuff in general but I don't write or speak Japanese so I can't help anymore than that. It's not certain C's mother would be in the koseki under that name. When my dad wanted to find out more about his biological parents, all he had to do was go to the koseki and look them up.
  
• I suggested that C get a genetic test. That could at least tell her the ethnicity of her mother's mother. There are millions of Japanese-Brazilians, many of mixed ancestry, but I can't recall circumstances of why they would actually be in Japan during the immediate postwar period. Perhaps for reconstruction work? I am going to ask my dad about that next time he's in town.
  
• Adoption.com is a site I would never recommend because of multiple ethical challenges and censorship issues. Nevertheless, it's one of the highest-traffic adoption sites on the web. At the forum there were several adoptees who said they were adopted from the Elizabeth Sanders home. I suggested that C contact them and see if she could learn from their searches.
  

If you have any suggestions or resources please post them here or email me. You could also contact C directly by registering with Adoption Threads and messaging "celebratewewill".

The Asian Flush Article

This story has spread all over the Asian-American blogosphere. Also, my mother emailed it to me.

NYTimes: Drinkers’ Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: March 20, 2009

People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more than embarrassment. The flushing may indicate an increased risk for a deadly throat cancer, researchers report.

The flushing response, which may be accompanied by nausea and a rapid heartbeat, is caused mainly by an inherited deficiency in an enzyme called ALDH2, a trait shared by more than a third of people of East Asian ancestry — Japanese, Chinese or Koreans. As little as half a bottle of beer can trigger the reaction.

The deficiency results in problems in metabolizing alcohol, leading to an accumulation in the body of a toxin called acetaldehyde. People with two copies of the gene responsible have such unpleasant reactions that they are unable to consume large amounts of alcohol. This aversion actually protects them against the increased risk for cancer.

But those with only one copy can develop a tolerance to acetaldehyde and become heavy drinkers. [...]

Fascinating. It's a little academic for me now, because I don't drink anymore. I'm not sure if I have one copy or two copies, but the flush always gave me massive problems. My father has it and so do I.

When I was a teenager (and I moved away from home at the age of 15, so don't blame my mother for this!) my circle of friends were heavy drinkers. I'm talking malt liquor and Kool-Aid-mixed-with-Everclear type of heavy drinkers. But drinking didn't come naturally to me. I had to work really, really hard to keep up. Here's a chart of my physiological reaction to different levels of alcohol.

1 beer: I turn bright red. My heart starts beating faster. Everyone asks me how I got the terrible sunburn, and I have to explain, "no, I'm just experiencing an allergic reaction to alcohol that some Asians happen to have". This is very irritating.
2-3 beers: I turn a slightly darker shade of bright red. My heart is pounding, and I begin shivering, no matter what the temperature. I get dizzy and have problems standing up straight.
4 beers: I go sit down on a couch and close my eyes, because I feel so bad. This isn't anything like passing out... I'm basically conscious, I just don't feel like moving.
5-6 beers: If I force myself past the napping stage, I finally get to be drunk. This is the part of drinking alcohol everyone actually enjoys, I'm guessing. I'm drunk enough to ignore the pounding heartrate and nausea. I'm actually starting to have some fun.
7+ beers: OH NO... IT'S... GODZILLA!!!!!
The angry mutant lizard brain takes control. I begin staggering around with vicious intent, bouncing off the walls, screaming obscene insults at anyone in range, and flailing my arms at them. Luckily, my depth perception is nonexistent at this point, so I don't hit anyone. Then comes the projectile vomiting.

The worst part of all of this is that I've never actually "blacked out". That is, I remember everything I did the next morning.

Anyway, I gave up on heavy drinking by the time I was in my early twenties. When I was in grad school I'd drink at parties, but I'd never go past the napping stage. At a certain point, I'd just say, "Excuse me, I need to rest for a while, I'll be back in about half an hour". Everyone thought it was bizarre and antisocial behavior, but they should have been grateful to me for stopping the Godzilla attack.

And I can't drink wine at all, or champagne. The effects are much worse than with any form of alcohol. After one glass of wine, I feel paralyzed and on the verge of death because my heart starts beating so fast. I've had people actually get visibly angry at me because I refuse a glass of wine in social situations, even after I explain it's not that I want to refuse their hospitality, it's that I can't. I'll say "I'm allergic to wine" and then they'll deny that it's even possible.

Today, I just don't drink alcohol. Or maybe I'll have one sip of someone else's drink.

Alcoholism makes me really sad. Both my grandparents were alcoholics. My grandfather was a happy drunk. As a child, his drinking never bothered or affected me, and by the time I was an adult he was too ill with cancer to continue drinking. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a mean drunk. I once saw her throw a footstool at my grandfather across the dinner table, just because she was in a particularly nasty mood. She never hit me, but I was always a bit scared of her.

My father also turns bright red. My mother once saw him literally pass out in the soup. He used to be a drinker -- not a particularly heavy one -- but has now quit because of liver issues.

I know that a lot of Asians who have the reaction keep drinking a lot anyway, just like I used to when I was a teenager. Drinking is so much of a social and cultural thing. There's a positive aspect as well as a terribly destructive aspect. All over the world, it's a method for bonding and forming networks. I'm glad I am not a part of it anymore, but being a non-drinker does make me feel cut off and isolated sometimes.

A Picture of Sunny

Here it is!



I love this drawing. A classmate and friend of his drew it. She's very talented. I think it captures Sunny's personality in a wonderful way. The beaming smile! The feet, constantly in motion.

For Sunny, art is not his best subject. He's very imaginative, but it doesn't hold his focus. Whenever I see him doing art with other kids, he treats it like a competition, and he always yells DONE!!! first, so he can get up and run around the room for a while. I'm thinking of signing him up for structured art lessons, not so that he improves technically, but so that he can learn to find more enjoyment in expressing himself through art.

Sunny's drawing below loosely represents an illustration of a poem we talked about. It's a caravan in a desert, and they're passing each other water from the oasis. The top got truncated a bit, but it's cut-out heart with the words "Love You" written on it. He loves to write things like that.

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.

Back from the visit

I'm still exhausted.

The visit was a lot of fun for Sunny, and mostly fun for my mother and me. Sunny's foster mom organized his birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and his grandma and all his foster brothers and sisters and his foster cousins and some of his friends from his old school came over. He received a ridiculous number of presents. Most of them are being shipped back to Atlanta.

BB is doing great. His personality is a lot like Sunny, even at seven months. He likes to cry, he likes to laugh and he likes to jump up and down. I learned how he likes to be held and all about his habits. I know nothing about babies, so this is all important stuff.

The most stressful part was (not) meeting BB's dad. He wanted to meet at the restaurant where he worked at 1pm. I was there at 1pm, he wasn't. I called and he told me he worked a double the night before and had the day off, but couldn't tell me in time.

It seems part of a pattern of general avoidance and shirking. Like not visiting his newborn son for seven months. He could have left a message for me. He could have gone to the meeting even if he wasn't scheduled to work at that time. He could have met later... I floated the idea of meeting him somewhere else shortly before we left, but he couldn't do that either.

Then when we talked on the phone later, he said he wanted to start the procedure to give up custody at his next court date. He wants BB to be placed with us and wants to have an open adoption. His goal is to get a job as a truck driver and move to Atlanta, where he already has a lot of relatives living.

I thanked him and said I just wanted to see BB in a committed home. If he could commit 100% to parenting, that would be great as well, but if not, we would commit to BB and to raising BB and Sunny together. Also, I warned him that open adoption was not a guarantee of anything. It would be a relationship mostly between us at the early stages, but then it would become a relationship between him and BB, and I have no way of predicting what's going to happen 5 or 10 or 15 years in the future. Finally, I told him that the process was going to drag on for a while, so if he wanted BB to be placed with us he would have to be firm about it and definitely show up at all his court dates.

It sounds like I badgered him... it really wasn't that bad. I gave him positive encouragement and said I knew this was a really hard time for him. It's just that he was really very vague, and I was forced to take the lead. I do wish we could have met. I have no idea what he even looks like. It's hard to believe he came to this decision without even meeting us! I did leave him an envelope at his work with some articles on open adoption and some pictures of us.

I felt like I got two body blows over the weekend. The first was when BB's worker told me that even if BB's dad is in full accord and moves quickly, we might get placement at the end of this year. It depends on interstate paperwork more than anything. The second blow was when I realized BB's dad wasn't going to show up to meet me after I'd been psyching myself up for the visit the whole weekend. It's all very stressful, but I just have to keep an even keel. Having my mother there was very helpful.

At least I know BB is in a great place right now.

Sunny and BB's foster mom always fights for what's best for her kids, even when they're not "her" kids. That weekend, she had two children staying with her who weren't even foster kids. She had fostered the 3-year-old from when he was a little baby, but the courts had ruled for reunification. This boy also happens to be Sunny's old buddy and Sunny always talks about him. Sunny was so happy to play with him on this visit... he doesn't know quite how he feels about BB yet, but he's full of love and affection for the 3-year-old. Anyway, after reunification, this boy went to live with his mom in another county, but she still has a lot of problems and has been dropping both of her two younger children off with ex-foster-mom for weeks at a time. For a year. BB's foster mom could easily report her, but she doesn't want to, because then the children might end up at a different foster home and might not receive the best care. The 3-year-old's little sister was staying there too, plus another 3-year-old she's officially fostering. That's a total of four under-fours including BB. And she seems to handle it all effortlessly in a bright, cheerful, spotless house.

The talk with BB's worker (who was Sunny's original worker) was also helpful, despite the body blow. She knew their mother very well. In fact, the workers seemed to be the only people in her life that gave her consistent positive feedback and structure. I'm never going to know exactly why their family was so messed up that they allowed both Sunny and BB to go into foster care. Both BB's worker and foster mom warned me that the grandmother's stories changed with the wind. Race was definitely an issue, but not the only one. Sunny's mom's cousin has children whose fathers are black, and Sunny's grandmother is very close to all of them.

According to the worker, the underlying issue was that Sunny's mother's family was very much like the one ruled by my egomaniac uncle. Family members were played off against each other, constantly measured and found wanting, expelled and embraced in alternating patterns according to the latest power play.

At least Sunny's women maternal relatives tried. Sunny's grandma wasn't very effective at keeping the family together, but she cares deeply. The men are a more disappointing bunch. Educated, able-bodied middle-class white men with more resources than 99% of the people on this planet, but they just can't be bothered to drive ten minutes to visit... or even look at a photo. Sunny's grandmother said she tried to send some pictures of BB to Sunny's grandfather (they divorced a while back) but when he replied, he just accused her of "being morbid". He pays for a lavish funeral for his daughter but won't stretch a finger for his daughter's children.

We spent a lot of time with Sunny's grandma over the weekend. It was a bittersweet for her, especially at Sunny's birthday party. She often cried quietly to the side.

The visit helped me put a lot of the pieces together. I didn't go out investigating or ask probing questions, I just listened to what a lot of different people told me.

BB's father is older and has several other children including a teenager. He's not parenting any of them, but he pays child support on some. No one knows him well, for good or for bad. He doesn't have the kind of criminal record that would bar him from parenting BB, but his position in life isn't very good right now either. When I talked to him, he pinned a lot of his hopes on moving away and becoming a truck driver. I hope things are going to work out for him.

Sunny's mother's cousin, who raised Sunny for at least a year, knew Sunny's father. He has a very bad mark on his record and was also totally incapable of parenting, but other than that, she says he wasn't all that bad, or currently dangerous. If we ever want to contact him, it would probably be easy because you can look him up in a web database... I think that says everything you need to know about the Very Bad Mark. I'm filing this away for future reference. Far future, perhaps when Sunny is 16.

Hopefully BB's dad will follow through. Apparently it's very common for people in these situations, especially men, to simply refuse the responsibility of deciding. Instead of saying "I can't/won't parent", they do nothing at all, and that way let the courts make the decision for them. But I think BB's dad is ready to take at least some responsibility.

I'll probably have another post on open adoption soon... time to try and wind down a bit more from the visit.

Sunny's behavior since the visit has been pretty good considering all the emotions that must have been brought up. Who knows what the fallout is going to be. Right now, he's concentrating mostly on all the loot he picked up from his visit. I think one of the most positive parts was seeing his little 3-year-old buddy. He's been away for almost a year, but everyone is still there... that must mean a lot to him.

ETA: I forgot to include medical stuff amidst the parental info dump. My ankle burn has not healed. It got better, then it got worse, and now it itches horribly. I went to a walk-in clinic today and got a tentative diagnosis of a fungal infection. I'm waiting for lab results, but at least it's probably not MRSA. I got some antibiotic pills and antifungal cream. My medical expenses for this burn are now approaching the triple digits and I'm seriously thinking about calling Sunbeam and threatening to sue unless they give me money for burning me with their stupid heating pad. On the reproductive front, my RE tried to put me on 225cc of Follistim a day for my next IUI, but I just flat-out refused. I'll take my lower chances with a vastly cheaper and less stressful non-medicated cycle.

How the Talk Went

It went sort of as I expected.

He says he's feeling very confused.

I'm going to meet him this weekend at the restaurant where he works to talk some more. He said he wanted to find out more about open adoption, so I printed out some articles I found on the internet.

There's very little that applies specifically to his situation. Most of the stuff that's not for adoptive parents is geared toward young pregnant single mothers. I searched for articles written from a male or African-American perspective and couldn't really find anything.

I don't think he plans on parenting... it's more a case of choosing between relatives. The fact that some of his relatives live in Dekalb might be a major factor.

When I meet him, I'm just going to talk a little bit about ourselves and Sunny and give him some pictures. I'll say again that I can't tell him what the right thing to do is. The only advice I would give him is that whatever he decides for his son should be a situation that's as committed as absolutely possible. If BB starts getting bounced around between different relatives and foster homes and caseworkers, he'll end up with the same psychological scars as Sunny, or even worse.

He did say that he agrees with me that BB and Sunny should have a relationship whether they live together or not.

I'm off to the airport in an hour with Nana and Sunny... I'll update in a few days.

About to Talk to BB's Dad - Any advice?

THE RECAP:

I met Sunny's first worker at Sunny's mother's funeral in August. She became BB (Baby Brother's) worker soon after that. Since the funeral, I have had no contact with her. We've just been waiting, waiting, waiting to hear of any word on BB's case.

BB's grandmother has been very supportive of us adopting BB. She tells me again and again that Mommy ___ wanted BB to go live with his brother and us if anything happened to her. In fact, every time I talk to her on the phone, she tells me the same story about her daughter's dying wish, and starts choking up and crying a bit.

I don't handle conversations like this well... at least I don't think I do. I get very uncomfortable and don't know what to say. This is a big reason I'm bringing my mother with me on this visit. My mother always knows what to say. Her emotional IQ is at supergenius level.

I have been hoping to talk to BB's worker for a while. Everything I hear of the case comes secondhand, from BB's grandmother or foster mom. For example, BB's grandmother told me that BB's dad said that maybe his mother could take care of BB. Then she said she investigated and had a background check run on BB's other grandmother. According to the investigation, she would not be a good candidate, and was neither able nor probably willing, especially since BB's dad already had other kids that he wasn't taking care of, and neither was she.

When Sunny's mom died, BB was in limbo. His dad had the right to raise him, but he equivocated. He didn't come to the funeral and never went to visit his child. His relatives had a say in what would happen to him, so Sunny's grandmother asked that he be placed with Sunny's old foster mom, which is what happened. Sunny's foster mom already had a baby placement, but she was willing to take BB as well because of the special circumstances.

Seven months later, the state is about to file for permanent custody. BB's dad needs to make his decision. Today, he met his child for the first time.

That's what BB's caseworker just told me.

We have no legal standing at this point, of course. But if BB's dad decides not take care of BB, and if his close blood relatives don't make a vigorous case, we're the default.

My position throughout this is to say that yes, of course we want BB. I really had no expectations of adopting a baby going into all this, but we're willing to do it because it would be important to keep Sunny and BB together, and because their mother wanted that.

NOW:

BB's caseworker told me that BB's dad would like to talk to us. He's still making up his mind. She's not happy that it's taken him seven months to get to this point, but also says that he's exhibiting more care and concern than many other parents she's worked with in the system.

I know basically what I'm going to say to him. I'm not going to tell him "this is right" or "this is wrong". He has to make his own decision; we can tell him how we'll act according to that decision. If he signs away his rights and lets us adopt BB, we'd be willing to have the same openness we have now with Sunny's grandmother. Calls/emails/pictures, plus a visit once a year. And if he decides to raise BB, we would hope that he does a similar thing and encourages the brothers to keep in touch and have a relationship even though they live apart.

Sunny's grandmother says he's a marijuana dealer. I know his first name, and his race (black). That's all I know. I'm not going to make any hasty judgments. It's not impossible for people to pull their lives together quickly. But it is kind of improbable.

The worst case is if he decides to raise BB, starts the process... then backs out and stops visiting or won't take care of BB. BB would get shuttled around, leading to the same kind of baseline anxiety that has plagued Sunny's life.

I'll be calling him tonight or tomorrow night. First I'll call BB's foster mom and ask her input, and I'll also talk to Sunny's grandmother again.

My mother, Sunny and I are leaving for his birth state visit in a few days. We might be visiting with BB's dad as well, now.

Got any advice for me? This is kind of nerve-wracking.

I didn't sign up for this!

Atlanta thundersnow? I've lived here for more than a decade but I still haven't come to grips with the fact that we do sometimes have a snow day in winter. It just doesn't seem fair.

Guy phoned me last night to ask, "do you think it's really going to snow tomorrow?" I said, "No way. It's 60 degrees right now, the weatherman must be on crack." Then around noon today a bunch of nasty wet snowflakes started cascading down. Argh!

I HATE snow. I prefer climates where there are only two seasons, a wet season and a dry season, and absolutely no "winter" allowed. Sunny wanted me to play with him in the snow... ha! Not likely. I watched him play for a while, but the snow was so muddy and slushy that he and the other neighborhood kids couldn't really do much with it.

We couldn't do any more activities today because the roads are a huge mess. In order for Sunny to get his requisite physical activity, I had to resort to chasing him around the house in endless circles while trying to "whip" him with a fleece scarf. We tried it the other way around, but he's too fast. It's exhausting, but since my alternative is being woken up at 4 in the morning, I had a strong motivation to keep staggering after him.

Besides the snow, another annoying aspect of this weekend is the nasty little burn I got on Friday. That's when I went to sleep with a Sunbeam electric heating and massage pad at the foot of the bed to keep my toes warm. Something horribly wrong happened and I woke up the next morning with a second-degree burn on my ankle. It soon swelled into a burn blister the size of a dollar coin, protruding about half an inch upwards. To keep the blister from painfully bursting I've been jury-rigging protection for it. I create a thick square of padding from tissue and gauze, cut a hole in the center the size of the blister, tape the padding over the blister and onto my ankle, tape a carefully-cut-out plastic lid onto the padding and onto my ankle, then wrap a flexible fabric bandage around my ankle. I air it out for an hour every morning and night, replacing the whole thing each time. I'd put up a picture of the burn blister, but it's just too freaky.

I've decided what we're getting Sunny for his birthday. Infrared stealth goggles (surprisingly cheap!) and a keytar. Soon, he'll be able to sneak up to people in the dark and assault them with loud, tinny power chords.