Another Veteran's Day Post

I first read about this at Angry Asian Man. What an incredible story!

For Veterans Day, CNN has a crazy story about four brothers who fought in World War II—two for the United States, two on the side of Japan: Veterans in focus: Brothers fighting brothers.

Safe Haven from a Non-Adoption Perspective

Here's a great discussion of Safe Haven (including Nebraska's variation) from a non-adoption perspective.

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/11/11/safe-haven/
Psych services are infamously unavailable to the under- and uninsured unless one is a ward of the state. And sometimes when a child becomes a ward of the state services are over-assigned, so families whose employers aren’t as flexible, who don’t have the money to subsidize sliding-scale services, and have existing priorities for other children in the family, find it exceedingly difficult to move toward a successful family reunion. Moreover, family services are starved for cash and their clients are made to feel ashamed for needing their services in the first place.

Should these laws be revised to remove eligibility for children of a certain age to be admitted by parents as wards of the state, or is it better that kids are safely leaving environments in which their parents feel unable to care for them?

I agree with the position that Safe Haven laws protecting anonymity are a sop to the most regressive elements of the adoption industry. Anonymity does not benefit abandoned children in any way. I totally disagree with it. But anonymity is not the only issue involved here, and it's almost beside the point when it comes to older children.

How should parents be punished for abandonment? The question isn't as easy as it sounds. Yes, ideally, they should be discouraged from abandonment by having services offered to them to help keep their children. But what if those services just aren't there, or can't help? You will eventually end up with some cases where parents forced to keep children will then abuse or neglect that child, and the child might end up in foster care anyway.

As some commenters have noted, people with money can abandon their children easily. They send them off to boarding school or residential treatment centers. The poor don't have that option.

A Veteran Issue

On this day I'd like to post a little bit about my stepfather's service.

He grew up in a very poor family, and many times, the only meat they ate was whatever he and his younger brother could shoot in the swamp. Their alcoholic father was pretty much useless in this regard. He grew up to be an amazing shot, because his life literally depended on it. Sometimes he'd see multiple cottonmouths (a poisonous and very aggressive snake, for those who don't know) swimming through the swamp towards him; he learned to pick them off with incredible precision.

He ran away from home at 15 and joined the merchant marines, then joined the Army during the Vietnam War. He was already a peace-loving hippie, but he didn't have any other way of making a living. They desperately wanted him to be a sniper. He bargained his way into being a medic. He never saw any military action; he spent the war stationed in South Korea, sewing up soldiers with non-critical wounds.

He had it easy. The stories he tells from that time involve wild parties, not bombings and ambushes.

Medics from that time used transfusion and vaccination processes that put them at high risk for contracting blood-borne diseases.

http://www.hcvadvocate.org/hcsp/articles/vietvet.html
Hepatitis C is a major problem in United States military veterans. In several studies of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) Medical Center patients, we find that 8-9% are positive for hepatitis C antibodies. Some VA Medical Centers had 10-20% of patients with hepatitis C antibodies.1,2 The highest rate of hepatitis C is found in the Vietnam era veterans.

Unfortunately, twenty years later, my stepfather began showing some symptoms and was diagnosed with Hep C. It's a strange disease... it can be asymptomatic for decades. It can also completely destroy your liver and kill you with very little warning. There is no reliable cure yet. I won't get too much into the details of Hepatitis C -- you can read more about it here -- but it has really hurt his quality of life in many different ways.

One of the first things I'm submitting to Change.gov, based on a form letter, is this request:

Dear President-Elect Obama:

I am writing to urge you to take a leadership role in the fight against the hepatitis C epidemic.

Hepatitis C is the most common blood-borne chronic viral infection in the United States. Once exposed, most individuals remain persistently infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), with 70% developing chronic liver disease and its often life-threatening conditions. At least 4 million Americans currently have chronic hepatitis C, with 25,000 new infections occurring every year. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the death rate from HCV-related liver disease will triple by the year 2019. No other disease burden is expected to increase as rapidly as that of hepatitis C in the coming decade.

Despite these staggering statistics, the federal government has not provided adequate funding or legislation to mount a comprehensive effort against the disease. Only $17 million is spent each year on viral hepatitis programs. This funding is not enough for states to provide testing, surveillance, prevention, and education services – let alone care and treatment for those in need.

My stepfather has lived with this disease for many years. He contracted it as a medic in the Vietnam War. He receives regular monitoring and treatment at a VA hospital, but his long-term future is frighteningly unknown.

I ask that you address this serious public health crisis in three ways:

-- Add language on your website about the hepatitis C epidemic and how you plan to address it.
-- Support a $50 million in Fiscal Year 2009 funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Viral Hepatitis Programs.
-- Support the "Hepatitis C Epidemic Control and Prevention Act," which would create a comprehensive effort by the federal government to address the epidemic.

Thank you for considering this request. I am counting on you, as our next President, to take leadership on this crucial issue.

Sincerely,
[atlasien]

And speaking of...

... Howard Dean, I just found out he'll be leaving as head of the DNC and hopefully moving on to even bigger and better things.

Here's a short tribute MP3. People made fun of him for this, but it all turned out right in the end. Hey YEAAAAAAARRRRGH!!!

"

Stop Me Before I Donate Again!

I just gave Obama another $50, blowing my carefully crafted budget for the month.

Yes, I know he already won. But this part of the email yanked open my purse strings:

The Democratic National Committee poured all of its resources into building our successful 50-state field program. And they played a crucial role in helping Barack win in unlikely states like North Carolina and Indiana. We even picked up an electoral vote in Nebraska.

The DNC took on considerable debt to make this happen.

Will you make a donation of $__ or more now to help the DNC pay for these efforts? You'll get a 2008 Victory T-shirt.

Not the T-shirt part (the official T-shirts are pretty boring) -- the 50-state part.

There are some Democrats I seriously dislike. One of them is Thomas Schaller, who had a media heyday in 2006 arguing that Democrats should give up the South. Another is Rahm Emanuel. Like many other lefty progressive Democrats, I think of Rahm Emanuel as sort of an Antichrist figure. It's really not that black and white, of course, but I do think he has been a very negative influence on the Democratic party. He's tied to the DLC and AIPAC, both organizations whose goals I disagree with, and he was very, very rude to Howard Dean.

After Obama hiring Emanuel to be his chief of staff, rumors started flying that the DNC was going to kill Dean's 50-state strategy. This latest email reassures me that Obama believes in the strategy, no matter what Emanuel's position is, and is going to give Dean his due. Good for Georgia, good for me.

Oddly enough, I was recently put in the position of defending Emanuel against a weird attack that questioned his loyalty to America because he'd served in the Israeli civil defense force and used to have dual citizenship. I argued very strongly that the accusation was anti-semitic and also personally insulting. I could have Japanese dual citizenship if I wanted to, and that doesn't mean I'm a potential traitor.

Post-Weekend Update

Sunny was very difficult this weekend. On Sunday morning, he showed some very bad sportsmanship and emotional volatility while playing a board game -- he called his Nana a cheater. The consequence was losing ALL games for the rest of the day, including the car-spotting game he's crazy about. The only time he wasn't difficult on Sunday was when we went on an outing (hiking up Stone Mountain) with two friends of his.

It was a lot of fun. I made my husband stop and buy a pack of sugar-free mints before we set out, and the mints worked like a charm to keep the kids safe and in line. "Don't run downhill like that, and I'll give you all one mint when we get to that tree over there." I know there's a lot of parenting experts out there would disapprove strongly... but bribery always gets results, so I love it.

The kids told the silliest knock-knock jokes on the way home.

"Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Chicken!" "Chicken who?" "CHICKEN I LOVE YOU!"

"Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Butt!" "Butt who?" "Butt Cheeks!"

"Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Butt!" "Butt who?" "Big fat butt with four butt cheeks and a banana split on top!"

Otherwise, though, Sunny was being a lot more clingy, oppositional, hyper and volatile than usual. I could barely even have him read at night, he would get so frustrated. Probably some of it was due to the changes in routine of last week. Ojiichan was here, the election was going on, and so forth. This week my dad just left for a while, and Guy will be out on a trip, so there'll be even more changes in routine.

On another note... I'm worried about Sunny's baby brother. I usually don't think about him much. I try not to. I have absolutely zero control over his situation at this point, that's why. But his foster mom recently told me he might have a certain medical condition that is very serious. She'll know more soon after some tests come back. It wouldn't affect our decision to adopt him if we can... but I feel really sad for the pain he may be experiencing now. He lost his mother when he was three weeks old, and he shouldn't have to suffer more.

Georgia Doctor Declares War on Employees

This is hilarious. Talk about class warfare.

WSAV.com
Dr. Karen Kim, the Pooler Pediatricts doctor who wrote a memo that went out to staff on Wednesday morning, declaring war on her employees, "Since slackers have declared war on me by electing evil incarnate as president and guaranteeing that our business will never again expand, I will respond by declaring my own war on slackers..." (you can read the first letter by clicking here) has resigned.

I've taken several classes on management, but they neglected to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of declaring war on your employees.

It reminds me of a restaurant job I had in college. One day, the Italian owner called us all into a special meeting. We sat around a round table, looking downwards. He silently glared at us for ten minutes. Then he suddenly banged his fists on the table and screamed, "WORKING WITH YOU PEOPLE I TELL YOU IS A NIGHTMARE! A NIIIIIGHHTMAAAARE!"

Morale failed to improve after the meeting.

The Next Steps

I'm coming down a bit from my political high.

I'm only now starting to get depressed about California's Prop 8 and the Arkansas "Screw Foster Kids" measure.

Arkansas Times: There are at any one time in Arkansas 3,700 kids needing foster care; there are only 1,000 eligible foster parents. Those who can't be placed in homes go to group homes or emergency shelters; many of those who are placed in foster care must make repeated moves because of a poor fit. Sixty percent of children in foster care in Arkansas are moved to three or more homes and some counties lack foster homes entirely, according to Jennifer Ferguson, deputy director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families.

Punishing gay people is a higher priority in Arkansas, just as protecting chickens is more important than gay rights in California.

I think we're on the right path now, but there's still a lot of work left to do.

OOOOOOBAAAAAMAAAAAAAA (celebration video)

We left Ojiichan to put Sunny to bed, then headed over to a sports bar in South Dekalb to watch the returns. I'd been there before for a voter registration meeting and knew it was big enough that we'd get a good space.

When we got there at 7:30pm, it was nearly empty, but it started filling up fast. My husband was rather unduly proud he was the only white guy there until I pointed out another one off in the corner.

I took some video, which turned out surprisingly well considering the low light setting and organ-massaging bass. The MC was hilarious. I didn't catch some of his best stuff on camera, like when he sang partisan messages on top of the choruses to Queen songs. I know that Obama is promising an end to partisan division, but the message hadn't reached the MC yet... at one point he asked if there were any McCain supporters in the audience, then threatened to set their hair on fire. All in good fun though!

Early in the night, a family with several young children ended up there... they'd just become homeless that night. The MC took up a collection for them, and they ended up with more several hundred dollars for temporary housing as well as four job offers.



The only low point was the agony of seeing Georgia called for McCain. What about all the work that we did? What the hell was wrong with Georgia, why did it tip so much more for McCain than the polls showed? Bradley effect? Arggh, I shouldn't even think about the Bradley effect, it's an evil term designed to drive Obama supporters crazy. And are we going to be stuck with that horrible Chambliss toad in the Senate?

I went to bed with that issue leaving a small stain on the overall tapestry of extraordinary happiness. This morning, my mother called me and told me that they hadn't counted the early voting in Georgia. As of Wednesday morning, the gap drastically narrowed. Martin still has a chance against Chambliss. YES!!!! Even if we lose Georgia, I'll know it was still a close race, and our efforts showed.

Tired but Still Excited

On Sunday I did some canvassing with family, this time out in the suburbs. This was more difficult because the houses are so far apart and we had to drive everywhere. I much prefer inner Atlanta, where you can park a car and walk down a street of bungalows on a nice cool sunny fall day knocking on pretty much every other door.

Then I did some late night data entry. Then Monday I did some calls and some more late night data entry and flyer stapling.

Last night Sunny asked me if it was OK to vote tomorrow. They're having a mock election at his school. I told him of course it was OK... you can vote however you like! He told me he was going to vote for Obama, and then said, "You know who else we can vote for? Bob Barr! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA". He thought it was hilarious, and I have to agree. I mean, in general I support third parties, but the only appropriate response to Bob Barr is laughter.

Canvassing Experiences: Good, Bad, Nervous, Freaky

I've been doing GOTV canvassing all day. I've done canvassing in the primary too, and in prior elections. In 2004 my husband and I drove to Jacksonville, Florida to knock on doors, but this year -- wonder of wonders -- Georgia could be a swing state!

My first randomly assigned partner was very nice, but frustrating to work with. He'd never canvassed before. He informed me about every other block that because he was a Big Black Man, everyone would be scared of him when he knocked on their door. Even though we were working a 100% African-American neighborhood. I tried to cheer him up, but I thought he was being a bit of a Nervous Nellie... I mean, I've canvassed with large black men before, and they all had a much more positive outlook to the task.

I did understand his basic point. Even in black neighborhoods, people are going to be more willing to open their door to an Asian woman than they are to a "BBM". It just led to very inefficient canvassing because we couldn't split up and cover different sides of the same street. We had to do all the houses together, and he stood behind me when we knocked on the doors. I was too polite to tell him that mathematically speaking, even if more people opened their doors for me than for him, we were getting worse coverage per hour by not splitting up.

However, we still got a lot of good work done. Among the many who were confident about voting, we encountered a few who seemed lost and confused, gave them the right information and therefore drastically increased the chance that they'll show up on Tuesday.

I empathized with his rather severe racism reaction a bit better after I found out he was originally from Miami. We had a frank talk about Miami for a while driving back, and discovered we had similar reasons for leaving, even though we occupied very different positions in the weird racial hierarchy there.

After lunch, my morning partner left for other activities and I was reassigned with an experienced woman who was easy and fun to work with. Our initial run was super-creepy. We ended up at a semi-abandoned apartment complex. Half the buildings were boarded up. It reminded me of a scene from 28 Days Later. Places like that are where you kind of wish you have a "BBM" along! We had to stick close together here for totally different reasons. Most of the people on our list had already fled this pit of despair. We knocked on one typically filthy door and were answered by a surprising figure: a young white guy with a scraggly goatee, pasty skin and jittery eyes surrounded by massive dark circles. He answered our "Hi, we're with the Obama campaign" by telling us that THIS COUNTRY DID NOT NEED A TERRORIST IN CHARGE, THIS COUNTRY NEEDED A SOLDIER. We said, "OK, bye!" and nervously backed off, regretting having aroused him from chemical stupor. Interrupting people who are high on crack or meth (and/or watching a football game) is always the worst part of canvassing.

The next run was a much more normal neighborhood, and we breezed through the list. Most everyone had early voted. The campaign messages about early voting have been consistent and and have really blanketed Atlanta. Voting in Georgia is so much harder than it should be, but we're doing everything we can to fight against that.

All of us volunteers are pumped about Georgia's chances. If we go blue, it's going to be sweet. Sweet revenge on the politicians who screw up our voter rights, starve our public transportation and schools, keep our air polluted, spread racism, pimp the horrible Fair Tax, and I could go on for a while longer but I won't. Even if Obama doesn't win Georgia, there are a lot of local races where high Democratic turnout is going to make a big difference for my family's long-term quality of life.

More canvassing tomorrow.

The Bully

I got up early this morning, went to early voting, got in line at 6:30AM and was out of there by 8AM. If you're in Atlanta and need updated early voting wait times, check here. Dekalb County has been pretty good compared to some others. My cousin in Gwinnett waited five hours on Wednesday.

Sunny is still in a hair trigger pouting mode when it comes to the PSP, but he's getting better. Guy is not in a good mood. This is a very stressful time and Sunny is obviously picking up on that. I'm also going to be gone most of the weekend doing political volunteering, and I'll have to miss his soccer for the first time, which I feel terrible about. I think Sunny understands; he's a big Obama fan. Even though we don't talk about the war that much at home, Sunny has really seized on that issue and often pipes in to political discussions calling McCain a "meanie" or a "bully" "because he wants to keep the war going".

I used to gently say, "we don't hate McCain, we just think his ideas are wrong."

Right now, that would be a lie. I'm usually very good at managing negative emotions about public figures who happen to be evil dicks. But not this morning. I was just listening to some news about McCain tying Obama to someone who is guilty of the terrible crime of being born into a Palestinian family.

From Washington Post
Sen. John McCain today compared the director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute to a "neo-Nazi" and called on the Los Angeles Times to release a video of a 2003 banquet at which Sen. Barack Obama talked about the professor, Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American scholar and friend of Obama's from Chicago.

"What if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?" McCain asked in an interview with a Cuban radio station Wednesday morning. "I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different."

This attack makes McCain lower than pond scum. No, wait, that's not low enough, he's lower than toilet scum in a gas station restroom.

Khalidi is a respected academic who holds beliefs that to me are commonsense, mainstream and fair. Trying to smear him as comparable to a neo-Nazi is racist, islamophobic, hateful, dishonorable, irresponsible, and of course opportunistic and hypocritical:

It turns out that McCain is treading on tricky ground when he cites the Khalidi case as an example of Obama consorting with terrorist sympathizers. The Obama campaign was quick to point out that an organization co-founded by Khalidi has received large sums of grant money from the International Republican Institute, chaired by McCain since 1993. One such grant was for $448,873 in 1998 to assist the Center for Palestine Research and Studies in its work in the West Bank.

This is a bit personal for me, because one of my friends is a Palestinian-American. We roomed together for at least a year in college. He couldn't cook, so my other roommate and I used to cook dinners for him. Oh no, I was contributing sustenance and aid on a regular long-term basis! That probably makes me a gazillion times more suspicious by association!

By the way, since my friend might be reading this, I'm sure all this stuff is getting you down terribly. All I can say for encouragement is... it has to bottom out at some point.

Important News Story That Could Alter the Course of the Election...

Or not.

I found that post linked from several humor sites, but the original blogger is dead serious. As well as barking mad.

In case you get tired digging through the mounds of "evidence" there, here's the argument in brief. Barack Obama... is... Malcolm X's love child.

I thought that after terrorism, socialism and islamunism, alien abduction charges were going to be the next stage. I guess I was wrong!

PSP Creates Devil Child

This was a rough morning.

Ojiichan flew in from Japan last night for a visit. He brought me something I really wanted and can't find here: tiny plastic sauce containers for Sunny's lunches. Something we didn't want: he gave Sunny his used Sony PSP, which blindsided us. At least it doesn't have any games on it.

Sunny has kind of freaked out over it.

This morning, he jumped out of bed at 6AM because he heard Ojiichan puttering around in the kitchen, then got Ojiichan to show him some kind of weird dancing cat costume video on the PSP. Sunny knows his morning time is supposed to be no earlier than 7 and no later than 7:30.

When I told him he needed to go back to bed he had a crying fit. He stayed in his room for a few minutes, but there was no way he could have really gone back to sleep, so Guy and I just had to get up as well. We told him 1) that was it for the PSP today unless he came home with a good behavior mark in school 2) extra morning time means extra time to do homework after breakfast.

Sunny had ANOTHER crying fit. He told me he wasn't crying about his PSP, he was crying because he missed his foster Mom, and he was mad about his PSP. I gave him a hug and said I'm sorry you're sad, but if you're going to cry about the PSP, you can cry outside the kitchen so I can make breakfast. I just closed the kitchen door and made breakfast and let him do his thing... that is, loud dramatic crying wails punctuated by occasional Brando-esque shouts of "WHYYYYYYYYY?" and appeals to an invisible judge, "MOM'S NOT BEING VERY NICE TO ME!"

After sucking down some extra coffee, I finished a quick breakfast for all of us and also lunch for Sunny. He perked up, then had another pout when he had to do homework with Guy, but it was a minor one. Then, when we were leaving for school, he decided he didn't like his jacket, he couldn't get his jacket on, no he didn't want me to help him get it on, and then it escalated to the point where he needed another time-out, this time for back-talking, even though it almost made us late for school.

Ugh.

He'll get used to the PSP eventually, but right now it's more like the PCP.

Letter to a Prospective Adoptive Parent Part II

I didn't scare her off with Part I! She emailed me back with lots of questions about the photolistings, some questions about foster care and a few remarks about people she knew who had done international. Here's my response.

Hi [],

I'm happy to help as much as I can. I'll go through your questions with as much detail as possible.

Children who have been neglected and abused have emotional and behavioral problems. Sometimes these problems are too much for a regular foster care home. The next step up is "therapeutic foster care". Therapeutic foster parents have had special training to work with children and help them heal. The next step up after that is residential treatment. For example, if a child is very depressed and harming themselves, they might be placed into a therapeutic foster home, then if the therapeutic parent says the child doesn't seem to be getting better, they are placed under intensive treatment in a residential setting.

As they get better, children are stepped down in the level of care. Children are generally not put up for adoption if they're still in a residential setting or a therapeutic foster home. Ideally, when children are put up for adoption, they are emotionally ready for adoption. Their foster parents and therapists will have prepared them over a period of time about what adoption means.

Unfortunately, things don't work according to the ideal sometimes. If the child is not ready for adoption, or the social worker places them in an adoptive home that turns out to not be compatible, then the adoption is going to disrupt and the child is going to have to go back into foster care. This represents a terrible setback and makes it that much harder for the child to trust anyone ever again. Many of the children in the national photolistings will have been through disrupted adoptions.

Especially if it's a large sibling group or really older children, like teenagers, the standards for matching tend to get relaxed. It's so difficult to find parents for these children that the social workers will take anyone they can get and hope for the best, because otherwise they might not get adopted at all.

The workers want to match children with homes that are prepared for them. This is where it gets complicated:

Parents with no children are at a disadvantage. How can they prove they can handle a lot of the special needs that children in foster care have? On the other hand, I've often heard that parents with no children are a blank slate because they don't have expectations of how a "normal child" is supposed to act, whereas regular parents may have some unrealistic expectations.

We went in one direction. We decided we had a pretty high requirement and could take no more than moderate special needs -- no FASD, ODD or RAD (you'll find out what all these mean if you stay on the path). We ended up with a child who probably has less special needs than stated. However, it took us a year of waiting and applying. We submitted short applications for many children. Many of the children we were applying for had a lot of other parents who wanted to adopt them, so that's why it took so long.

The workers are looking for parents with past success and special experience. For example, if a child has autism or cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis, maybe one of the parents grew up in a family where there was autism or cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.

Our son is doing great and I think the match was really good. But if he had been placed in a home with elderly parents, or a single parent who had to work out of their home a lot, the match probably wouldn't have gone so well. He's extremely active and needs lots of exercise; emotionally, he needs a lot of attention. He has ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms, and I was prepared for that because I have a cousin who had a much more severe form of ADHD.

The photolistings really soft-pedal the issues that the kids have. They don't want to frighten off potential parents too much. Also, it's not a good idea from a privacy perspective to list all the issues a child has on a public website. Once you're approved for foster care adoption, you should be able to access a little more realistic information about the children in the photolistings. Sometimes the language is very coded. "Needs to be the only child" could mean that the child has been sexually aggressive to other children as a result of sexual abuse they have suffered.

On the other hand, it was suggested (but not required) that our son be placed in a smaller family, and he actually does very well with younger children and can play gently with them... but there were so many older children in his foster family that he felt like he had to compete for attention all the time.

Descriptions can underplay issues the children have, but they can also exaggerate and define the children by their diagnoses way too much. Some unscrupulous foster parents will exaggerate the problems their child has in order to get a higher subsidy payment.

Anyway, moving on to foster-to-adopt:

Bio parents often get their children back. Also, their relatives often get the children back instead. Reunification happens much more than adoption. To get your head around the dynamic, imagine if one of your relatives had a baby and then freaked out in some major way, got addicted to something and was sent to jail. What would happen? In the majority of families, a relative would step in and foster care would not be involved, or would only be involved for a short time.

People who do foster-to-adopt with the goal of adoption have to return more babies than they adopt, and they have to deal with that emotionally. I've heard it's very difficult, especially if you don't already have children. The reward is that you made a positive difference in a child's life. I should put you in touch with my son's foster mom, because she's really great, and she's been fostering for a long time. She has adult kids (biological), younger adopted kids and then also foster kids.

The way she approached getting [Sunny] ready for adoption was moving from a mother role to a grandmother kind of role. She told him she will still be in his life, just orbiting at a greater distance.

She lives in another state so we've only visited once so far. We plan on visiting maybe once a year. He talks to her on the phone at least once a week, and we sometimes chat on the webcam for special occasions.

We were planning on establishing a relationship with his biological mom. We had exchanged several letters through the agency. She had problems with addiction but had been doing well lately and everyone said she was on the right track. Sadly, she passed away recently, very unexpectedly. That is why we will probably be adopting [Sunny]'s brother. We've met his maternal family and we'll keep in touch with his grandmother. His father is not a positive person for [Sunny] to know, and he doesn't have any good memories of his father, so we have had no contact there. Once [Sunny]'s a lot older, maybe 16-18, it's going to be up to him if he wants to track down his father and initiate contact. Right now his old foster family is the family that figures most fondly in his memory, and he also misses his biological mom.

Social workers establish the parameters of visitations with bio families until the point of termination of parental rights. Sometimes children have been abandoned and parents will not show up at all, but usually there is some kind of contact. After adoption, the relationship is all up to you. If you foster to adopt, you would probably meet parents during supervised visits. But we didn't meet anyone besides his foster family before getting placed with [Sunny], because their parental rights had already been terminated.

It's rare, but it does happen, that some bio family members are dangerous criminals and in that case foster and adoptive families have to stay anonymous and make sure no identifying info like last names or phone numbers is given out.

Often they are just very depressed and passive people who were trapped in a cycle of abuse themselves as children. Contact with them should be dictated by whether or not it's healthy for the child. If the child was seriously harmed by them, it's better to have a clean break and a fresh start... but there are often other extended family members who can still maintain healthy contact and keep the child connected to their roots. Also, sometimes a parent will turn their life around and become a positive person for the child to have contact with.

As far as wanting to help out bio family, I think the boundaries are made pretty clear to all parties. As a foster parent you're taking care of their children and probably helping reunify them with their children, so asking you for money or non-child-related help is totally out of bounds of the relationship.

As for support: after adopting from foster care, support level really varies. I went with a private (non-county) agency that has great support. We have support group meetings every month and special activities for the children on a quarterly basis. If you go through local counties or states, they will often have nothing and you're on your own. The major help that you get is the subsidy and Medicaid. The subsidy pays for a lot of stuff you need. Medicaid means that if your child develops expensive problems, you usually won't have to pay for the treatment. My son is on a prescription that would have cost us EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS to fill, but with Medicaid it's free. Medicaid coverage for psychiatric or behavioral issues is much more comprehensive than what you get would get in a company-sponsored health plan... however, the quality of the providers is not as good and the choice is restricted.

International adoption: I think there are a lot of myths about it. A lot of people believe that children from foreign countries are safe to adopt whereas children from the U.S. are "damaged"... that's totally false. All children are damaged in some way when they're removed from the family they were born into; it never happens for a happy reason. You just have less transparency in a foreign country than you do in America. For example, [Sunny]'s foster mother said a neighboring family next to her adopted a baby girl from Russia. When the girl was 12, she was institutionalized for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. [Sunny]'s foster mom adopted a child with the same issue... but she knew what she was getting into beforehand, and she had financial support from the state, and her adopted child is doing well enough that I think he'll probably graduate regular school and live independently. International adoption families don't get the education that foster adoptive families here do, they're not as prepared, and they pay vast sums of money and wait many years for uncertain outcomes out of foreign bureaucracies.

Also, like you mention, a lot of people go that route because they don't want to deal with birth families. Frankly, I think that's a very selfish and consumeristic attitude. Many international adoptees feel terrible pain because they will never know who their biological parents are. Especially when they grow up and become parents themselves, they miss knowing that. Being happy about that lack of knowledge does not seem fitting. I am not against all international adoption, but the way it's practiced in America really disturbs me for many reasons.

I'd like to put you in touch with [Sunny]'s foster mom, she could answer a lot of questions about fostering. Since she's not in your state, please keep in mind some legal things are different. Here's a good link for your state:

http://www.nacac.org/ [state profile]

The subsidy levels they list are basic levels. Any special need, even a mild one, will be added on top of that.

Here is a forum with lots of personal stories about adopting from foster care, and tons of FAQs.

http://fosteringandadoptingolderchildren.yuku.com/bfosteringandadoptingolderchildren

Here's a very active Yahoo Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/A_O_K/

If you read through the last two you'll hear all kinds of horror stories about what can go wrong. It's important to go into it with eyes open. However, also keep in mind there are many families, like many of the ones I know through my agency, who haven't encounterd a lot of speed bumps and don't post their stories because they have nothing beyond the normal level of family drama.

What kind of times are you available on the phone? If you send me your number, I can ask [Sunny]'s foster mom to give you a call.

Regards,
[atlasien]

Troy Davis Stay of Execution Granted, Thank Goodness

From Amnesty International:

Please double the impact of your action by spreading the word to your friends and family about Troy Davis. Ask them to visit www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis to help prevent a monumental injustice.

Cuentos de Fantasmas

Another mixed weekend. Sunny behaved very badly this morning, but I think he learned a good lesson from his consequence. He was pretty good the rest of the day. He seems to be a little more agitated and jumpy than usual, and perhaps this is linked to his medicine stabilizing on half dosage. We're going to leave him on that until at least the end of this year and the start of school in spring.

We went to "A Tour of Southern Ghosts" at Stone Mountain the other night. It was a walking tour with different storytellers dressed in 19th century costumes telling ghost stories about haints and boo-hags on the old plantation grounds, linked by the really hokey refrain of BOO Y'ALL! I wished there was more than one African-American storyteller, but other than that it was pretty good. It was just Sunny's level; a real haunted house would have freaked him out. He was more scared than the other kids, and needed a lot of hugs during certain parts of the stories, but he really enjoyed the experience. I'm also impressed that he was able to focus on the storytelling so well.

He told me an encouraging story today. He either dreamed it last night or made it up in the morning. The story was that a boy named Sunny (himself) was walking in a haunted house. A skeleton came up behind him. But then Yoda, who was really Sunny, came by and fought off the skeleton with his lightsaber, and then warned Sunny to leave the house before he got hurt.

I told him I was proud of him for turning a nightmare around and taking control over the situation. I think the therapist is going to look on this as a positive development.

We received his progress report, although I really don't know how to read it. As far as I can tell, it confirms what we already know: he's not deficient in any area, but his lack of focus is keeping him from living up to his potential.

Spanish is a bright spot. He loves his Spanish class and is doing very well there. Vocabulary, either English or Spanish, is his great strength. Sometime he irritates me by saying that such and such is the right way to pronounce a word when I know it's not. I've taught him it's OK to have different opinions as long as he expresses it politely (he's now saying "I disagree with that statement!" which is really cute) but arguing about the right way to pronounce a Spanish word usually gets him a lecture that learning Spanish is not about opinions; there is a right way and a wrong way to pronounce a word, and I'm right and he's wrong. Anyway, my stubbornness is one of the reasons it's best that I leave the majority of his academic development to other people.

I did get a chance tonight to do some fun education about the history of Spanish, a topic I love. In the car, Sunny was asking me about different words for fruits. We did "banana/banana" (there is a very important pronunciation difference involved) "apple/manzana" and "pear/pera". Guy asked me how to say "carrot". Since my Spanish is so rusty, that took me a few seconds. "It's... umm... I remember it sounds absolutely nothing like carrot. A-ha: zanahoria!" Sunny claimed he was never going to be able to say that, but after breaking it down and practicing a little bit (sah-nah-oar-yah) he got it.

I told them that the word "zanahoria" sounds like nothing Latinate or even Indo-European because its origin is Arabic. Sunny thought I meant Aladdin when I said Latin, which gave me the chance to explain that like in the movie Aladdin, people who spoke Arabic live in the Middle East and Northern Africa, but many of them also used to live in Spain, which is how some words in their language got mixed together with Spanish.

Then I explained that so many people speak Spanish today because a long time ago some people from Spain came to the southern part of America and had a fight with the Native Americans and killed many of them and made them speak Spanish, even though the Native Americans fought back and some of them still speak their original languages.

Sunny said, "Thank you for that advice, Mom, especially because we're learning about Spain in music class!"

Ah... I love it when he appreciates me going off on a history whirl like that. And it's fun explaining things in a way a child can understand. Last month, he asked me what England was, and I told him "England is an island off the coast of France". My mother almost had a fit laughing. She said she wished she could have seen the face of an English person hearing me describe England that way. "But it's true!" I protested.

What can I say? I believe in literal geography. If it were up to me, I would delete Europe as a continent and rename it "Northwest Asia".

Scary Stories

The election is giving me a stomachache!

I've been following a depressing story about an Obama canvasser in Wisconsin getting attacked. Her last name is Takehara, so she's either Japanese-American or married to one (I think it's been confirmed she is JA now). A recent post from Asian Americans for Obama outlines a lot of my feelings.

Finally, it seems fair to ask to what extent this attack might have been racially motivated, not just because it was an attack on an Obama volunteer but because the target was an Asian American woman. This is especially true given what Takehara reported Goetsch said to her: "we're not his people." As an Asian American, hearing those words gives me a chill; it echoes those familiar phrases Asian Americans are so used to hearing, like "you don’t belong here" and "go back where you came from.” Let’s hope that the statement "you're not our people" was just misguided partisan rhetoric and not something more insidious.

Aside from one terrifying close-quarters encounter in college, I haven't been harassed in that kind of nakedly hostile way since the age of 15 or so. But hearing about the Takehara encounter gives me a sense of atavistic dread wrapped up in my childhood experiences of racist bullying. And I don't think the Takehara encounter will ever be resolved. The full reasons are never going to come to the surface.

As Yu makes sure to note, the recent race-baiting hoax by a McCain volunteer throws this case into sharper perspective, although the McCain case is going to get much more media coverage.

This might sound like a counterintuitive thing to say, but I'm not too upset at the woman who lied. Like anyone who makes up an outrageous charge and claims to be a victim of liberalism or racism or sexism or what have you... 1) they're mentally ill and don't carry their plan out in a logical way 2) they gain nothing from it in the long-term because they almost never get away with it anymore 3) it backfires and they suffer hugely from the negative attention.

On the individual level, that woman made her bed and is going to have to lie in it. There's little more to say. But I do blame elements of the media, the RNC and gullible racists in general for promulgating her story and getting so disgustingly excited about it. Whipping up hatred and fear of black men is something that has real consequences for millions of people. The race-baiting and Muslim-hating has reached a horrific level.

I was joking with out therapist today that if McCain got elected, she'd get a lot more business. She agreed, but then said that nobody would have enough money to pay for those sessions.

Moving back to personal stuff, Sunny had one very bad day last week in school. He got the lowest mark for behavior and was doing the opposite of what the teacher told him to do. It reminded me of what he did last weekend, when I told him not to take his socks off and he did the opposite. For getting a bad mark at school, Sunny got the pre-established consequence: the weekend video game time he earned for previous good marks all got wiped out. He was also grounded for the day and had to make an apology to his teacher the next day.

Talking to the therapist gave us some general insight into why he was misbehaving. She says it's probably revenge, and the revenge is because of not having enough control. He did receive a lot of disappointing news last week. Apparently the most disappointing is that the teacher told him testing week is over. Sunny LOVES testing. Part of his IEP states that he needs separate testing accommodations. From his point of view, testing is a wonderful, wonderful thing where he gets to go to a special room, gets special attention by a teacher's aide, gets to bubble-in fun worksheets, and when he's finished, play Uno with the teacher's aide (since he finishes the tests twice as fast as everyone else, he has plenty of spare time).

We already know he needs more control, it's just difficult to work out specific measures. The therapist recommended more work with art, which we're going to try over the next weeks. She also agreed with me that I shouldn't do too much academic work with him. I can leave that to the tutor in order to concentrate more on bonding and fun stuff.

Sunny really wants to go to a haunted house. We were actually going to go to one last weekend, but his behavior wasn't good enough. It's also tough finding the right place. Given that he has a recurring nightmare about a man with a chainsaw chopping off his foot, I don't think any of the adult-oriented ones would be a good idea. We finally found a good one that we're going to this weekend. It's geared around ghost storytelling and dark spooky places, not monsters and gore.

Here's a picture of Sunny getting into the Halloween spirit! He's wearing the scary, scary cereal box mask he made with his dad.

A Moving Post...

...about Obama's ailing grandmother.

Ta-Nehisi Coates
I hope this is in good taste

[...]
Likewise, I was looking at this picture of Obama's grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I'd bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn't give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do. But the fact is that, in the 60s, you could be disowned for falling in love with a black woman or black man.
[...]

Coates' post is already followed by a ton of complimentary comments. I can really empathize with what he says. My grandparents initially had a lot of issues with their daughter marrying a Japanese man, but they also did the right thing, and I'm proud of them.

Sunny At His Worst

As a treat, we took Sunny to a large indoor jungle gym he'd been asking to go to for a week. He saw a boy taking his socks off and asked me if he could take his socks off. I said, "definitely not, no way."

Five minutes later, I saw him running around in the gym with no socks on! "But I forgot," he said.

I made him stop playing, put his socks back on and leave immediately. He was pretty upset about this, of course, and went into a big fake cry, which my husband and I ignored. I can always tell a fake cry because he sort of looks out of the corner of his eyes as he's doing it.

I gave him a mini-lecture that he had just made a very bad choice and was just compounding it by fake crying. Not only did he ignore what I'd told him to do, he was endangering his poor feet! Sunny has a case of athlete's foot, and every morning and every night we clean his feet, put Lamisil cream on his toes and put them in clean socks. He's normally very good about putting up with this, even though the creme tickles him.

Sunny is usually good at following directions, but boy is he stubborn. You can't give an inch because he'll take a mile. We could tell that from the first day we met him. I have to be strict with him in a lot of ways.

I don't see him as manipulative, though. He doesn't manipulate for the sake of manipulation. He does it because he sees something he wants, then a switch flips in his brain, and he has to make sure all routes of getting what he wants are exhausted. It's amazing how imaginative and logical he can be at imagining these routes. He also has a great memory for all the possible precedents and exceptions that could apply to the case at hand.

I don't see any solution to this pattern of behavior. I think we're always going to have occasional clashes and storms. However, the other side of the coin is positive. He's confident. He knows what he wants. He's incredibly articulate when it comes to expressing this. Even though he's impulsive, he's open to reason and is always looking for reasons and asking about the reasons of things... and that's going to be a good foundation for developing critical thinking skills.

I think I'd have a much harder time raising a child who was more of an uncertain and indecisive type.