Forward Motion

"Forward motion" is my motto in the adoption process. I'm dealing with some abrupt challenges to forward motion right now.

The major one is that my father has just decided he wants to go ahead with major orthopedic surgery in February or March. This is great news, especially since I'm the one who researched the procedure and strongly suggested that he go through with it. He's covered under Japanese national insurance, which even pays for surgery in foreign countries; he'll just have to pay out of pocket, and then the government will reimburse him for it later.

This surgery has a very long recuperation period during which he won't be able to walk without aid. This period will last anywhere from six to twelve weeks. He'll need to stay with us for his recuperation period. The recuperation period is the major reason he's getting the surgery done here in America instead of Japan. It will also mean we'll have to delay possible placement. We just don't have the space, plus we can't bring a child to a household where there is a recuperating invalid. The child(ren) will at the very least have grief and loss issues, need our undivided attention, and it wouldn't be fair to my father or to them to try and cram both into the same house at the same time.

I was anticipating us to be fully certified with a home study and open for placement by the end of January 2007. Of course, I don't expect an immediate placement at the end of January. One of the agency workers has suggested to us that nine months is a realistic timeframe.

In practical terms, my father's recuperation almost certainly will not delay any possible placement. In emotional terms it is quite a setback. Plus, my mother is pressuring me to help campaign for Democratic candidates this weekend, when I just want to spend the whole time working on our paperwork and getting the physicals (including a mandatory and dreaded pap smear) out of the way for the adoption application.

All these concepts and urges - duty/family/future of country/children - are sort of swirling around in my brain right now, fighting or forming weird alliances.

I think I'll take a break at some point this weekend and re-watch one of my favorite movies: Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Aguirre had a lot of character flaws, but he was very good at the whole forward motion thing.

Getting Started 3+3

Hello! I hope this blog will be of interest to people in the adoption community. Ultimately it is really to exercise my brain a little bit while I am taking classes, preparing and thinking about our future placement. I have already been participating on some adoption boards and reading lots of adoption blogs. This has helped me learn incredibly valuable things and also helped me to discharge the nervous mental energy that I find building up during the adoption process.

I also want to use this blog to practice my writing skills. During my academic years I became fluent in a very ornate and formal style, so that I now have to force myself to use contractions. Nowadays I mostly write business memos and IMs. I really want to get back to communicating in a more natural, fluid and expressive style.

To get started out, here are three Asian thingies about myself and three adoption links I recommend.

1. I am an Angry Asian. Asian-Americans can basically be divided into Angry Asians and Mellow Asians. I received some pretty awful treatment from white people (and a few black and Hispanic people) when growing up. Partly because of this treatment I have a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things. Since I live in a very diverse place and have a small, "with-it" circle of friends, my racial issues rarely come up in day-to-day life, but are much more apparent when I communicate on the internet. Mellow Asians mostly grew up in places like Hawaii and don't feel the need to spend much time worrying about racial issues. The lucky bastards!

2. I don't usually call myself an Asian-American or a Japanese-American. I don't mind at all if other people call me that, or call themselves that. I will occasionally use the term, but only to distinguish myself from Asians who are not Americans. I just don't like the implication that I am only 50% American. When white people start calling themselves an unwieldy hyphenated name like Caucasian-American, that's when I will change my attitude.

3. I am a very untypical Japanese-American (there I go breaking the rule!). I have deep roots in America but not on the Japanese side. On my mother's side, our ancestors came over from England to Virginia in the 17^th century. My father is a full Japanese citizen (he and my mother divorced when I was fairly young). Therefore, no one in my family had any connection to the concentration camps. My biological Japanese grandfather died on a battleship in the Pacific fighting against the American fleet; my maternal grandfather served in the army in West Virginia but was never sent overseas.

1. Soul Of Adoption is my favorite adoption forum. When I first started out, I began looking through Adoption.com. This is the board with the most traffic on the web. I lurked and found a lot of great posts, but something about the site was bothering me. I realized they had kicked off anyone who mentioned gay adoption. There were different complaints about too much censorship; plus, Adoption.com is part of a media venture and includes commercial links. Soulofadoption.com is less-trafficked, but still very busy, and designed to be inclusive of everyone. There are also many adoptees and parents of origin who post on there, and they present a very broad spectrum of experiences and beliefs about adoption. Two of my favorite boards there are the African-American and the Debate board. The African-American board is a combined board for African-American parents and parents of African-American children.

2. American Family is a blog I discovered very recently. The family is like my parents: Asian dad, white mom (although I hope they don't get divorced like mine!). They have a hapa child and are in the middle of adopting a girl from China. I look forward to reading about their progress.

3. My favorite foster care adoption blog is Big Mama Hollers. This woman has 39 children, wow! Her writing skills are so great that she actually explains how she can pull it all off. She is really that one in a million mother. She recently had some major surgery and her family is going through some tough emotional times, but I'm sure they will pull through.