Laparoscopy Results

I had the result I least expected. My fallopian tubes are 100% normal! During the earlier HSG test, I must have had something called a tubal spasm that affected the results and gave a false indication that my tubes were blocked.

I'm not very lucid right now, since I'm on Vicodin. But we (my husband and I, with input from my mother) have talked about what to do next. We want to conceive a child. If we can do it without IVF, then the sooner the better. On the other hand, we may still have unexplained infertility, in which case we're back where we started.

Either way, we're still set on foster care adoption. We'll need to alter our parameters, though. For example, it's not a good idea to adopt two siblings if there's a chance we might have a baby soon after placement.

The next step is to consult with our doctor and our agency.

Despite soreness and wooziness, I'm basically happy. My uncertainty has expanded, but so have my possible choices.

Graduation I

We had graduation last night. I'm going to miss our classmates. Several of them have already adopted, so I found it incredibly valuable to hear from people who were already experienced in the subject and had great, positive things to say about it. Hopefully I will see many of them again in the support group after we adopt. Everyone loved my lasagna. I have to brag about it and say it was the best dish at the potluck. The only other dish that came close was a jambalaya someone's relative brought in.

I don't feel comfortable telling any of our classmates' stories on this blog, even anonymously, and even though the stories are so illuminating. However, I will tell a little story from a presenting couple. Last night we had a mini-panel with two special presenters: a therapeutic foster mother and an interracial couple (black/white) who had adopted from the agency several years ago. After mentioning how their two adopted sons, who are biological siblings, have totally different personalities, the couple talked a little bit about race; specifically, how their sons handled the same question at school, "Why is your momma white?" One son would say "Because that's the way God made her." The other would say "Because she IS!!!".

By the end of this week we will know for sure whether we're staying with our agency. I really hope we do. It's a very warm environment. The other couple said they'd visited many other agencies during their adoption journey, angrily mentioning they felt some of them were "selling babies". I'm worried because I don't feel comfortable with many of the other choices out there, either. Especially since we're not Christian.

Tomorrow I'm also having my laparoscopy, and I'll be recuperating Friday and all weekend. I plan on catching up on Battlestar Galactica Season I and finishing Jeff Vandermeer's Shriek: An Afterword. My little dog will be so happy to have me hanging around all day. I'm going to draft my mother to teach my ESL class tomorrow night.

Potluck Lasagna

Whew, I'm exhausted. I just spent a straight three hours putting together a vegetable lasagna for tomorrow night's potluck dinner celebrating the end of our adoption class. Here's the recipe. It needs an extremely big, deep dish about 24 inches long. One of those aluminum square dishes designed for roasting large turkeys would work well.

Deep Demanding Grilled Vegetable Lasagna
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3 large red or yellow peppers
7 small eggplants or 2 large ones
1 onion
6 cloves of garlic
2 pounds of spinach
2 large jars tomato sauce, store-bought or homemade
a large bunch of broccoli
2 big containers of whole milk ricotta cheese
grated hard, flavorful cheese (e.g. parmesan, romano, asiago)
small amount of goat cheese
2 containers fresh mozzarella

1. Roll out the lasagna sheets using a manual pasta maker. I use 3 eggs, a little bit of salt and a combination of half semolina flour/half white flour. 3 eggs is the right amount for about 4 layers, although you may need slightly more. Once rolled, separate the fresh sheets with paper towels or sprinkled flour.

2. Do the long, long, laborious vegetable prep. a) mince onions and garlic, fry them in olive oil until translucent, then throw in the spinach and cook it down, adding salt, pepper and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Set aside. b) grill the red peppers under a broiler under medium heat until their skin browns and separates from the flesh. Peel the skin off, cut the flesh into strips, save the pepper juice but throw away the seeds, set aside. c) cut up the broccoli and eggplant, put onto separate trays. Brush them with a combination of olive oil, salt, pepper and maybe some ancho chile pepper. Broil them under high heat until they are cooked and just slightly browned. This will probably take 2-3 shifts under the broiler, and itneeds to be watched very closely. Set aside.

3. Boil the fresh lasagna sheets. They should all be thrown in a very large pot with hot boiling water. Pour in some oil and stir them vigorously to keep them from sticking to each other. As soon as they become loose and flexible (no more than 1-2 minutes) immediately drain and pour cold water on them. Then put some more olive oil on them and slosh them around a bit so they don't stick together while you're getting the layer-building started.

4. Build the layers. Suggested order:

- base layer of tomato sauce
- lasagna sheets
- ricotta cheese, spinach, small amount of crumbled goat cheese, sauce
- lasagna sheets
- grilled eggplant, fresh mozzarella slices, sauce
- lasagna sheets
- grilled broccoli, more ricotta
- lasagna sheets
- grilled red peppers, grated hard cheese, sauce
- lasagna sheets
- top layer of sauce

One Last Post on the Theme of Genealogical Frustration

I think I've been doing these posts as a way to procrastinate on a longer post I have in mind on religion and adoption.

My mother's family is from West Virginia, although they left the state when my mother was very small. The only time I've ever been to the home state was for a family reunion over the weekend held in honor of my recently deceased grandfather. I was a teenager at the time. I'd met several of my relatives before, so I didn't feel like I was among strangers.

My great-aunt told me some family stories at the reunion. She said with great pride that our family could trace ancestry from General Robert E. Lee, but the records were burned in a house fire in the 1930s, so there isn't any proof. So this was why all my male relatives had "Lee" somewhere in their name! I was quite impressed at this possible connection to such a famous historical figure. When I later asked my mother about it, she laughed and rolled her eyes. She told me that half the population of West Virginia has Lee in their name, but of course their records vanished in (pick one) a house fire/flood/earthquake/sinkhole/meteor strike.

Doraemon

During the one year I spent living in Japan and going to Japanese kindergarten, I fondly remember reading Doraemon comic books/manga. Doraemon is a robot cat from the future who lives with a little boy named Nobita. Nobita happens to be a whiny loser with only occasional flashes of moral fiber and likeability. The diligent Doraemon, armed with futuristic gadgets, tries to help him improve his family and school life.

Although I could read very well in English by the age of 6, I couldn't read Japanese at all. So I would make my dad translate the comic books for me, panel by panel. If it was up to me, I'd have "read" Doraemon like this all day and night. My dad would always get tired after about 20 minutes, though. If he tried to just stop translating I'd command him to continue, so he'd rebel by inventing completely inappropriate translations. "In this panel, Doraemon says he wants to have sex with his sister", he would say. Then I would yell "No he didn't I know he didn't say that that's not what he really said stop doing that just tell me what he really said".

My favorite Doraemon plot that I still remember strongly is one I think of as "Nobita's Loser Ancestor". This is how it goes. In school everyone has to give a class presentation on their ancestors. Two of Nobita's classmates are mean kids who always bully him. I remember them as "Fat Boy" and "Snail" but looking them up on Wikipedia they are actually "Takeshi" and "Suneo". Takeshi's ancestor was a samurai, and so Takeshi gives a loud bragging presentation about how awesome his samurai ancestor was. Nobita goes home and asks Doraemon if his ancestor was also a samurai. Doraemon pulls out one of his time-travelling devices and shows Nobita the past. It turns out that Nobita's ancestor was a hunter. Apparently in feudal Japan hunters were absolutely the lowest of the low. Being a hunter was much, much worse than being a peasant farmer.

Seeing that his ancestor is also on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy depresses Nobita so much that Doraemon has to take pity on him. They travel back in time to see if they can do anything to change the situation. In fact, they find Nobita's ancestor being bullied by Takeshi's samurai ancestor and Suneo's samurai suck-up ancestor. Nobita has two more of Doraemon's high-tech gadgets: a cloak of invisiblity and a glove of power. He uses these devices to help his ancestor. Hijinks ensue, and the samurai bullies are defeated. Before Nobita and Doraemon go back to the future, they give Nobita's ancestor the cloak of invisibility and the glove of power. Nobita also gives him a quick history lesson which probably had something to do with the existence of unprecedented social mobility during certain points in the feudal era. Nobita's ancestor is supposed to take the cloak and glove, leave his forest, kick some samurai ass and turn himself into a lord with his own castle, ennobling his descendants and thereby giving Nobita something to brag about when he does his genealogical class presentation.

As always in Doraemon plots, Nobita's stupid idea backfires. When they check up on Nobita's ancestor using the peering-back-through-time gadget, he's using the cloak to sneak up on wild boar and the glove to bonk them on the head. "These magical devices have made me the greatest hunter of all time!" he brags, holding up and flourishing the wild boar's carcass.

Siblings, Ages and Bedrooms

This blog is now two months old! I'm patting myself on the back.

Here's a short post regarding some rules on ages and bedrooms. This information can be hard to find, and it varies between states and counties. In our county, here are the rules for adoptive placements:

- children under the age of 1 can share the parents' bedroom. After that age, they need to be in a separate bedroom.
- children can be kept in the same bedroom under the age of 3. After the age of 3, if they are of different sexes, they need to be separated.

The rule about 0-3 would make perfect sense for victims of prior sexual abuse, but it applies across the board to all children. I shared a bedroom with my brother until I was 10, so it sounds a bit harsh to me. I was definitely disappointed when I found out about the rule. Since we only have one extra bedroom, it really limits our options for a sibling group to two boys or two girls. We plan on expanding the house and adding a bedroom, but not for another few years.

Every so often (who am I kidding, it's actually every day) I go look at bunk beds online, especially the ones shaped like castles or fire trucks.

Mish-Mash Post: ESL, age range and genetic testing

I had another fun ESL class tonight. The topic was marriage in America. As outside reading I brought in an article on the FLDS and Warren Jeffs' trial for accessory to statutory rape. Not the most heartwarming marriage-related story, but it started off some great discussion.

My husband and I have settled on an age range, sort of. We're now at 0-7. Now I'm wondering about changing it to 1-7. If that range would make the home study and certification easier, I'd probably go for it, since the chances of getting an infant placement are tiny, and it's not an age we particularly want. On the other hand, if there's a sibling group and the youngest is under the age of one, I wouldn't want to rule out that chance.

Tonight a conversation at SOA reminded me of my on again, off again interest in genetic testing to find out all my ancestry. On my mother's side, I know where we come from. Just using publicly available web databases, I can go back to 17th century Virginia, and then back to England from there, with a few branches leading into Germany instead. But my father was adopted in Japan in the waning years of WWII. He knows some of the history of his biological family, but mostly it's a blank spot. His mother's family had connections in Hokkaido but he grew up with his adoptive family in Nagano prefecture, which is a mountainous and very beautiful place about three hours west of Tokyo. Because of the Hokkaido connection, and also certain anomalies of our appearance (height, squareness of face), I've often wondered if the family is partly Ainu. I asked my dad once but he put me off and obviously isn't interested.

One of those expensive genetic tests like they did on the African-American Lives show could tell me for sure. This was an absolutely fascinating show, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, that used a combination of genetic analysis and historical research to explore African-American geneologies. It was especially interesting to me that many of the celebrities who signed on to the project, like Oprah Winfrey, had family legends that there was Native-American blood in the family, but when tested, the only one who actually did (Chris Tucker) was the one who least expected it.

Other than this question of ancestry I have, I honestly don't feel a very strong connection to Japanese people in Japan... besides my father, that is. I do feel a strong connection to the land, especially the mountains and volcanoes. I'm not even a spiritual person, much less religious. But I get the feeling of spirits under the surface there. I also think a lot of my negative perceptions of Japan were shaped by Tokyo, a city I hate more each time I visit. It would be wonderful to go back to Japan on my own and visit other places like Hokkaido, Okinawa and Osaka.

Our Prospects

I feel so much better now. We had a consultation and I put all our issues down on the table (see my earlier post for details). I heard pretty much what I expected to hear, but actually hearing it was really important.

The worker agreed that my race might be an unstated factor in matches, but also said she doubted it would be a very important factor. She didn't think we would be really at a disadvantage compared to a white couple, especially once we articulate ourselves as a couple prepared for all aspects of transracial adoption. She also said that our position was decent, overall. In short, I heard, "you're not paranoid, but you don't need to worry quite so much."

Apparently all the applicants at the agency get very realistic assessments of how other caseworkers in the system are going to view them as potential matches for a child. She told us that opposite sex couples are in the first tier, then singles, then same-sex couples. It's unfortunate that our privileged position as a heterosexual couple comes at the expense of same-sex couples.

We're still not sure about the age issue. We won't need to decide until a week from now. I'm thinking of possibly going up to age 8 from our original 0-5. My mental picture of a child has always been that of a toddler. I just love toddlers. I think I could adjust, though.

Unconscious Bias

Here's a fascinating article about unconscious bias and stereotype threat. It shows how much the primal emotions of pride, shame and fear influence intellectual achievement.

Positions of Power: How female ambition is shaped

"Meanwhile, studies of what psychologists call "stereotype threat" demonstrate that awareness of negative stereotypes about one's group diminishes performance. Toni Schmader, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, conducted a study in which undergraduates were asked to memorize words while doing math; one group was told this was a problem-solving exercise, the other, that this was a test comparing men and women. Women's performance suffered only when they believed they were being compared to men—this prompted the stereotype that men are better in math. Another study examined how stereotype threat affected Asian-American women's performance on math tasks. When subjects were asked questions related to Asian identity before taking the test (prompting the stereotype that Asians are good at math), their performance went up. When asked questions related to gender (prompting the stereotype that women are bad at math), their performance went down."

Thinking Ahead to School

I found a great resource today: an organization called LEAD (Learners & Educators of Atlanta & Decatur). I haven't made any decisions yet about school for our future children, but I like knowing what's out there. LEAD is an association of secular homeschooling parents that teach classes for each other's kids.

I would probably start them out in public school, but if they don't thrive there I would pull them out in a heartbeat. One argument I often hear is that if children have social problems in school, you need to support them so they work their way through it, because they'll gain valuable life experience in dealing with adversity. Whenever I hear that argument I usually keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to attack another person's parenting choice. But I violently disagree with it. I had a lot of social problems at school, especially in junior high, and I didn't learn any valuable coping skills. It just made me feel more angry, depressed, shy, fearful, bitter and resentful. It prepared me for absolutely nothing, since I never faced as many problems later on in life; the older I got, the more civilized other people behaved towards me. I'm just glad I went into that very trying time with enough self-confidence that I could build myself back up again afterwards. The only useful lesson I learned is that I don't want any other child to suffer through the same problems.

Wonderful Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving yesterday was fantastic. I cooked collard greens and sweet potato pone for dessert. My mother made an entire armada of dishes including brussels sprouts with chestnuts and oyster mushrooms, okra with tomatoes and cornbread stuffing. My stepfather deep-fried two turkeys. The guests were my husband and me, my mother and stepfather, my uncle, aunt and two cousins, my stepfather's mother, brother and brother's girlfriend/partner, my father-in-law and two family friends for a grand total of 14.

I definitely would have enjoyed it more without the adoption-related stress. Because of the concerns that popped up on Tuesday, I feel like I can't see the path forward because I'm surrounded by a thick fog. I keep trying to beat it off by waving my arms, even though I know that won't really do anything to make the fog go away. There were a few points throughout the day when I felt very unsociable, but thankfully I was able to work these off by doing cleanup and washing dishes.

I've had some good conversations with my husband about our current situation. We're having an individual meeting soon with one of the workers at the agency, and that should also help clear up some of my concerns.

Family Recipe: Pressure Cooker Collard Greens

Here's a recipe I modified from a great original vegetarian recipe. You could easily make it vegetarian again by taking out the meat, and it will still have a decent flavor. I don't have exact measurements, since the proportions are totally based on the size of the pressure cooker.

The great advantage to the pressure cooker is that the greens takes less than an hour to cook, as opposed to the traditional method, which can take all day. Also, collard greens have a bad reputation as the smelliest green. While they're cooking, they give off an unpleasant liver-like smell, but once they're done, they taste divine. Cooking collard greens in a pressure cooker greatly reduces the amount of time that they give off this unpleasant smell.

I've gotten a lot of compliments on this dish!

Ingredients
- a large amount of collard greens. Rule of thumb: they should look like twice the volume of your pressure cooker.
- canned or cartoned tomato chunks. Rule of thumb: including liquid, they should be a quarter of the volume of your pressure cooker
- two onions
- six cloves of garlic
- malt vinegar (European or Chinese, doesn't matter)
- liquid smoke
- 1-2 ham hocks
- bacon
- black pepper
- chili powder (not too hot... I recommend ancho chile powder, not cayenne)
- salt
- molasses and/or maple sugar

Directions
1. First, you need to cook down the collard greens in order to get them to fit in the pressure cooker. This may need to be done in batches, or in more than one frying pan. In a large frying pan or wok, cut and fry bacon, onions and garlic so that the onions and garlic cook a little bit in the bacon fat, just enought to turn translucent
2. Add the collard green pieces, salt, chili powder and black pepper, and cook them down a bit over medium heat, stirring vigorously. The greens should reduce in volume after 10-15 minutes. If you need more oil add some olive oil or vegetable oil.
3. Put the tomato chunks in the pressure cooker with the ham hock(s). Add the collard green mix from the frying pan. Put more spices if you want. Add about three tablespoons of malt vinegar, one teaspoon of liquid smoke and a quarter cup of something very sweet and flavorful like molasses or maple syrup.
4. Cook for 30 minutes at a high pressure setting.
5. Release pressure by running cold water on pressure cooker. Check greens for doneness. If not done, cook 5-10 minutes more. Repeat if necessary.
6. When you determine they are cooked to tenderness, take them off. Discard the ham hock from the bottom of the pot. Eat the greens or store in fridge. They will only taste better next day.

Apocalypto!

That last post was so depressing, I feel like ending the night with something more light-hearted.

I saw a teaser last night for Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's new movie. I'm pretty excited about it. Believe me, I'm not a Mel Gibson fan. I used to think of him as an unpleasant person with a weird torture fixation. Now I think of him as an unpleasant racist with a weird torture fixation. But the trailer for Apocalypto just blows all of that out of my mind. It's a big budget movie about the Mayan empire. Even if it was produced by Satan, written by Osama Bin Laden and directed by Uwe Boll, I would still have to see it. I do feel a bit bad about putting money in Gibson's pocket, but for recompense I'll donate the ticket price to a humanitarian Jewish organization.

In order to explain... no matter what the message is, the visuals in the movie are demanding that I absorb them further. The actors, almost all indigenous Mexicans, are wearing a wide variety of Mayan dress and also the typical huge piercings. This is going to be a must-see for anyone seriously interested in the world history of jewelry and body adornment. The colors are also striking. I've travelled along some of the Mayan route and seen the large ruins in Mexico -- Chichen Itza and Palenque -- and imagining them fully painted in glorious color was one of my favorite sightseeing activities.

A few years ago I briefly considered going to see that movie Memoirs of a Ho (ahem, excuse me, Memoirs of a GEISHA) just to see the costuming. Ultimately, I couldn't bring myself to do it. There are many Japanese movies that already feature beautiful traditional dress. But can you say the same about the Mayan empire? Visually, the movie seems like a revelation. It's going to be a monster hit in Mexico and very popular with Mexican-Americans too.

Here is an article from the Mexican newspaper La Jornada predicting great success for Apocalypto. It has an especially deranged picture of Mel.

Down Again

We just had a unit on transcultural adoption in our class. The facilitator made the excellent point that even within the same race, an adoption is often transcultural when it crosses socioeconomic lines. In a class where the large majority of parents are black, the discussion (mostly about black placements with white parents) was very interesting. I'd write about it more, but I'm feeling too down about a brief conversation we had before class. We're being gently but firmly pushed to move up to 8 from our current range of 0-5 years. Next Tuesday we'll have an individual consultation and get some more information about where we stand on this.

I'm also starting to get paranoid about where I stand because of my own race. After making it crystal clear that I don't care about getting a same-race placement, I've had several people tell me "I've seen Asian kids in Northwest states and Alaska, maybe you could look there." The kids in Alaska are Alaskan Natives, not Asians, and the Indian Child Welfare Act makes their adoption just as difficult for me as for any other non-tribal member. Once we're all certified we can adopt from out of state, but I know the agency strongly encourages us to stay within Georgia, for practical, financial and logistic reasons. I've already seen the photolisting sites in question and know there is a vanishingly small number of Asian children on them (as opposed to zero in Georgia). So what I'm hearing when people tell me there are kids available in the Northwest is "I'm ignoring what you say about not needing a same-race placement, and so state adoption will be a hundred times harder for you than for a black or white parent, but hey, don't lose hope!". I know the people who've told me this mean well. They really do. Like I said, maybe I'm just paranoid and hearing the wrong things. I do intend to get a clearer understanding of our situation by next week. Luckily my husband is maintaining an optimistic attitude.

All Look Same: C, K, J link

I'd encourage anyone who hasn't already tried it out to go take the All Look Same test. It's been on the internet for a while, and the editor keeps adding other tests, like the food test and the architecture test. The basic test simply gives you an Asian face and three choices: Chinese, Korean or Japanese.

I've explained the difference many times in my life but I think people don't always listen to me. Non-Asians so often feel either undeserved guilt or undeserved pride over the subject. Here's one way to sum it up:

1. If you think you can always tell Asians apart, you are not as smart as you think.
2. If you can never tell Asians apart, you might be as ignorant as you think.

Another way is to use a European metaphor. Take a Frenchman, a German man and an Englishman. Let's say they are all very average-looking people of average height, white, and dressed for a casual evening. You see them in a train station and try to guess their nationality. If you have any familiarity with Europeans, your chances are pretty good. The German's fashion sense is just a bit off. The Englishman has ears that stick out. The Frenchman does a unique kind of shoulder roll and holds his cigarette at an especially jaunty angle. There's a combination of dress cues, body language cues and genetic facial cues that separate the men.

Then, take facial profiles of these men with neutral expressions and try to distinguish them. Your chances will go way down. There's a facial type that's more typical of Germans, English and French -- the kind of face that you would see on a travel poster advertising the country -- but the majority of the white people in that country are in a wider range. There are plenty of Englishmen with ears that lie flat against their head, blond Frenchmen and brown-haired Germans.

There are more "typical" Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces, but even these faces could easily belong to a different group than the group they supposedly typify. From my perspective, I never try to tell any Asian apart if they're not foreigners or first-generation immigrants. The only thing I do is look at their name, and even that can be misleading sometimes.

One fascinating thing I've learned about human genetics is that there's more genetic variety within the African continent than there is outside of it. In other words, a Japanese, Norwegian and Cherokee have much more in common genetically than an Ethiopian, a Nigerian and a South African. If you look at someone of Khoisan descent (most famously, Nelson Mandela) and compare their facial features to a typical West African, there are very, very few similarities. Skin color, bone structure, feature size, everything is different. The human species has lived in Africa longer, and we've had more time there to grow apart.

Anyway, getting back to my perspective, I can tell Chinese, Japanese and Koreans apart only under certain circumstances. They have to be nationals or first-generation immigrants. If I hear them speak, I can distinguish Japanese easily and Chinese somewhat easily, mostly from watching so many Chinese martial arts movies. I can’t always distinguish Cantonese from Mandarin. I can tell Korean speech mostly by process of elimination, since I've never lived in a place where there were many Koreans and don't really have a feel for the language. If there are other Asian countries in the equation, especially countries that have more cultural diversity than Japan or Korea, I basically throw my hands in the air.

If I don't hear them speak, I can always distinguish Japanese by body language. Japanese often use a very distinctive posture that I call "ready-to-bob" mode. In any given social situation, unless a Japanese person is a) very relaxed b) very absorbed in something c) very drunk, they will hold their shoulders, neck and head in ready-to-bob mode. Head-bobbing is a natural part of a Japanese conversation and it's hard to describe when it's done… it can be a sign of social deference and politeness, of greeting, of nervousness and discomfort, of acknowledgement, of happiness, of agreement or of determination. And when someone else bobs their head, you respond by bobbing your head. It's infectious. If you're not used to this and you do it all day, you'll actually get a crick in your neck.

I believe Chinese and Korean people also have head-bowing in their repertoire of body language, but nothing that approaches the frequency of Japanese head-bobbing. They also have less of a physical comfort zone. When I went to China, I was initially shocked at how people would get up in my face during conversations, and how they would elbow and jostle each other. The group dynamics are completely different.

It's better not to make assumptions in the first place, but it's understandable that someone with little knowledge of Korea and Japan would mistake who is from where. Going only from facial cues, I think it can be just as easy as mistaking an American for a Canadian, or a Mexican for a Guatemalan. But the consequences of that mistake are more severe.

For example, in a Spanish class I took in Mexico, we had several Korean students. We were doing a unit on national holidays. The teacher asked a young Korean woman what they did in a typical holiday in Japan. The response was an immediate explosion of "¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡NOOOOOOO, NO SOY JAPONESA!!!! ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡NO SOY JAPONESA!!!!! The teacher staggered back a little bit and never made the mistake again.

Laparoscopy Pre-Op

I had an appointment with my doctor today to talk about my upcoming diagnostic laparoscopy. Although I have an "unremarkable" uterus (this is good) and my hormones and ovaries are fine, there's an issue with both my fallopian tubes. The laparoscopy will use a camera to determine the exact extent of the issue. If there's any non-trivial blockage, I've asked the doctor to go ahead and remove the tubes. There's no reason to leave them in if they're damaged, and having them taken out would completely take away any risk of ectopic pregnancy, which I'm absolutely terrified of.

After the laparoscopy, I could find out that my reproductive system is just totally normal, or else that I'm incapable of natural pregnancy. If it's the latter, there won't be much of an impact. But I don't know what I'd do if I find out I'm normal. I told my husband and mother in that case I'm leaning towards birth control for a year or until a first adoptive placement gets settled. My husband is very intelligent but handicapped at "emotional multitasking" or thinking in two different ways at the same time, so his only response to that was "we'll just take it as it comes and see what happens". I guess this is the drawback of deciding on adoption before my infertility is 100% determined.

Otherwise it was a pretty good day. We had an amazing rabbit stew for dinner at my mother's and are settling in to watch "Heroes" tonight.

Adoption/Foster Blog Roundup

I was ecstatic to find so many blogs about the foster care system when I first started looking. Following them has turned into an addiction. Some of them are updated more frequently than others, some of them have high drama and others concentrate more on daily routine, but they're all very valuable to me.

If you're noticing all the funny names, keep in mind that all these blogs use fake names or nicknames in order to protect the privacy of the children.

Adventures with Toots and Noodles: This woman's 12-year-old daughter (Toots) is going through some terrible times. Toots had just been released from a psychiatric hospital, but after the latest episode it looks like she cannot stay home because she is too self-destructive. The mother is heartbroken. This is the saddest point of any story I have been reading on these blogs.

"Don't Underestimate Baked Goods" at WRAL.com: This woman's daughter, Hayley, has been through a lot before adoption, but seems to be doing very well now. Her daughter talked about her sexual abuse with other children at school, and now her mother is dealing with the emotional implications and wondering how to protect her in future.

The Open Window: This is a waiting mother blog. This post describes an anxious day spent waiting to see if she would be approved to adopt the little boy she had applied for.

Spotted Dog Turn: Another waiting blog… until a week ago! This mother now has the placement of her little boy and is going through the daily happy turmoil of being a new parent.

Pre-Midlife Crisis: This woman has already had several foster-to-adopt placements, but now her baby daughter is scheduled for adoption very soon. This post describes her relief on hearing about the generous adoption subsidy she'll be receiving and how much it will help their family.

Navigating The Maze: This is not strictly an adoption blog, since the couple are currently fostering only. They were given the emergency placement of a young girl found in a motel with a known child predator (given the great nickname of "Burt the Pervert"). The girl has lots of discipline problems and was 5 whole grade levels behind, but her academic progress so far has been very encouraging to read about.

My Chosen Child: This blog is by a foster-to-adopt mother. She just finalized the adoption of her toddler daughter. This post describes running into her daughter's biological mother, the conversation they had and how happy the mother is now that she knows and can tell her daughter the name of her biological grandmother.

The Transracial Adoption of Children with Special Needs

This is from a paper called "Outcomes of Transracial Adoption" by Arnold R. Silverman, Ph.D.

I found this today surfing the web. The 6^th section is on special needs adoption and jumped out at me, so I skipped ahead to that, although I'll go back later today and read the whole paper.

Recently, Rosenthal, Groze, and colleagues reported on the outcome of transracially placed special needs children and, most important, compared these children with both inracially placed minority children and inracially placed white children, all with special needs.44,45

The study focuses on the adoptive outcomes of 760 children with special needs who had been placed by three public and one private agency in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois. Of these, 293 were minority or mixed-race children, 78% (230) of whom were placed inracially and 22% (63) of whom were placed transracially in white families. A total of 460 placements were of white children placed inracially with white parents. Data were collected by means of a mailed survey sent to the adoptive parents.

Here are some of the conclusions. After listing them, I'll try to relate them to the current situation in Georgia as I understand it.

- The average age at placement differed: "5.0 years in the transracial group, 4.6 years in the minority inracial group, and 6.0 years in the white inracial group."

- The inracially placed children had a family life that scored better in measures like cohesiveness and family satisfaction, and this difference grew with age of placement. In other words, children placed when 12-18 years old seemed to do much better inracially than transracially.

- "Of the children in the transracial group, 39% were disabled as compared with 14% in the minority inracial group; 23% of the transracial group had been in group homes or psychiatric placement prior to adoption in contrast to 7% in the minority, inracial group; 33% of the transracial group had experienced sexual abuse prior to adoption in contrast to 15% in the minority inracial group. All of the differences listed are statistically significant."

- "It is important to note that children in the white inracial group had the highest incidence of behavioral problems (47%) and the highest incidence of sexual abuse prior to adoption (43%)."

One thing that instantly jumps to mind is how damaged the white children are. The study puts the word "damaged" in quotes because it's a horrible word to use for children. I can’t think of any other word to use myself, though, that would be honest enough to describe the lasting effects of the abuse they have suffered.

There is another side to the institutional racism that leads to more black children being removed from their homes. Since often (at least in Atlanta) the removing social workers themselves are black, I think the imbalance has more to do with the economics of racism and generational poverty. Anyway, the other side to the imbalance is that white children are removed less frequently from their homes, and at older ages. By the time they're removed, they've suffered worse damage.

Meth versus crack may also be a big factor. At least here in Georgia, there's a weird segregation of drug addiction. White people smoke meth; black people smoke crack. More white people cross over and smoke crack than the other way around. In the black community, meth is looked down on even more than crack. I've also heard that meth addiction is worse than crack addiction. No child would want to have their parents addicted to crack, but apparently meth is even more threatening to life and sanity.

The study also shows that the minority inracial group children had suffered much less damage than the minority transracial group. In basic language, the black children placed in black homes had fewer problems to begin with. The black children placed into white homes had more problems to begin with.

"Rosenthal and colleagues offer the following explanation: "The large numbers of minority children among those waiting for adoption provide minority applicants greater opportunity to adopt a younger child or one with minimal handicaps. Thus the older or handicapped minority child loses in the supply-demand market and may face delay in adoption or the possibility of not being adopted at all."47

Rosenthal's explanation is that black parents are more in demand by the system, so they are given the children with the least problems.

This dynamic points out that social workers cannot simply assign a waiting child to the parents with the right resources and background. They have to match the needs of the parents as well. Workers will always push parents to adopt older children than they were looking for, or children with greater handicaps, but there's a limit to how much pushing can be done.

The dynamic is also morally somewhat disturbing. It doesn't really serve the needs of the older child with more problems. According to Rosenthal's study, transracial placement for special needs children has a neutral or at most slightly negative effect on outcome. Let's say it does have a significant negative effect. Wouldn't it be better to place the children with more damage inracially, so as not to add on another burden? On the other hand, speaking practically, that might drive away minority parents.

I will keep an eye out for more studies like this and see if I can find the original Rosenthal study. This summary doesn't really break down the minorities a lot, or talk about minorities adopting different minorities, so minority basically equalled black.

My general opinion is that race should be a factor, along with culture, in all adoptions, but should never be the single determining factor. If there is a special needs child out there and my family is being considered as a transracial placement, along with another family as in inracial placement, and our families are similar in most respects, I would totally understand if the other family was deemed more suitable. But if the child was black and that other black family lived somewhere like Idaho (far-fetched, but let's use that as an example), things would be less clear-cut. Peer interaction is pretty important too, especially as a child gets older. Where I live, we'd be choosing between schools that are 50% black, 95% black or 99% black.

I really wonder how my being a (different) minority is going to affect our placement. I feel like my family may be in a better position than the other few white couples, but I also feel kind of gross about considering any part of this process as a competition. There are so many competitive aspects -- the application, the screening, the classes, and so forth -- I can't help thinking of it that way sometimes, but I keep trying to talk myself out of that mode. After all, I know we don't want the healthiest child or the youngest child, just the one that is somehow "right" for us.

Punishment for Cursing

I had a hilarious ESL class last night. We did part of a unit on Thanksgiving that talked about the Pilgrims coming to Massachusetts. The chapter mentioned that many of them were "Separatists" from the Church of England, a concept which I had to explain at length. I also mentioned that these people were very religious and lived by a strict code.

One of the students -- a young Brazilian woman who is both a fervent Christian and irrepressibly curious -- was fascinated and wanted to know lots more. "Like what?" she asked, which is her favorite question.

"Well, if they thought a woman had relations with another man outside of marriage, the woman had to wear a red letter on their clothes, and everyone would point at them. People were also punished for cursing."

"What is cursing?"

I wrote "curse/cursing" on the board. "Cursing means to say curse words or bad words. For example, we say 'damn' a lot nowadays, but back then the word 'damn' was a very bad curse word."

"Like this, 'damn'?"

"Right, you'd get in trouble for that. Maybe they would tie your hands."

"So what if I say 'shit'?" the Brazilian woman asked.

"Um, oh boy, maybe they would throw you into the ocean or something" I said (I make up stuff like this all the time in class).

"So what if I say 'c*cksucker'?"

The whole class explodes laughing.

"Hahahahaha, they would fall over dead I guess..."

The same day I was given a teacher form that asked me to note any really memorable events in the class so that they could be turned into little stories and put in the newsletter. Unfortunately, I don't think I can use this Thanksgiving story. I wonder if there are any historians out there that know the appropriate level of punishment for the word in question.

50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People

1996, Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. Racial Experiences Questionnaire and 2003 In The Multiracial Child Resource Book. Seattle, WA: Mavin Foundation.

50 Experiences of Racially Mixed People
Maria P. P. Root

"The 50 questions or comments and experiences evolved from a questionnaire I developed for a study on biracial siblings I conducted from 1996 to 1997. These questions and comments provide an introduction to the way in which race consciousness is brought up directly, sideways, and from all sides for people of mixed heritage. These comments and questions, though not an exhaustive list, provide a window into how this country internalizes assumption about race, belonging, and identity. They socialize the mixed race person to understand as well as question race American style. It is a monoracial system; one race per person. Not everyone experiences these questions or comments the similarly. One person might enjoy being asked, "What are you?" whereas their sibling might dread and resent the question. This list provides a launching point for sharing, discussing, laughing, debriefing, and educating."

1. You have been told, "You have to choose; you can't be both." No
2. Your ethnicity was mistakenly identified. Yes
3. People assumed your race to be different by phone than in person. Yes
4. You are accused of not acting or wanting to be Latino, Asian, Black… No
5. You have been told, "Mixed race people are so beautiful or handsome." Yes
6. Strangers looked between you and your parent(s) to figure out if you were related. No
7. You have been told, "You don't look Native, Black, Latino…" Yes
8. You have been asked, "What are you?" Yes
9. People say things they might not otherwise say if they knew how you identified racially. No
10. You have been asked, "Where are you from?" Yes
11. You have repeatedly been the recipient of stares or longer than passing glances from strangers. Yes
12. You have been told, "You look exotic." Yes
13. Your choice of friends has been interpreted as your "selling out" or not being authentic. No
14. You have been accused of "acting or wanting to be white." No
15. Judgments of your racial authenticity have been based upon your boyfriend/s or girlfriend's (partner's) race. No
16. Comments are made about your hair or hairstyle, skin color, eye shape etc. Yes
17. You have been subjected to jokes about mixed race people. No
18. You have been told, "You think you're too good for your own kind." No
19. Grandparent(s) or relatives don't accept you because of your parents' interracial relationship. No
20. Your parents or relatives compete to "claim" you for their own racial or ethnic group. Sometimes
21. You have been told, "You have the best of both worlds." Yes
22. You have been asked about your racial or ethnic heritage as an object of curiosity. Yes
23. Upon meeting you, people seem confused by your last name. They do not think it "matches" you. Yes
24. People assume you are confused about your racial identity or have had a hard time figuring it out. Don't Know
25. People speak to you in foreign languages because of how they interpret your physical appearance. Yes
26. You have been told, "Society doesn't recognize mixed race." Not in America
27. You have been told, "You aren't really Black, Latino, Asian…" No
28. You have been mistaken for another person of mixed heritage who does not resemble you. Yes
29. You have been told you must be full of self-loathing or hatred because of how you racially identify yourself. No
30. You have been told, "You are a mistake." No
31. Different people perceive your race differently based upon the company you keep. Don't Know
32. The race people assign you varies in different parts of the U.S.A. Yes
33. You have difficulty filling out forms asking for a single race. Yes
34. You identify your race differently than others identify you. Yes
35. You are told, "You aren't like other Indians, Asians, Latinos…" Yes
36. Your siblings identify their race differently than you do yours. N/A
37. You have been called racial slurs of groups with which you do not share heritage. Yes
38. Friends suggest that you date someone based upon the race or ethnicity with which they think you should identify. No
39. Your parents identify your race differently than you identify. Yes
40. You are told, "You aren't Black, Latino, Asian…enough" No
41. Your mother was assumed to be your nanny or babysitter. No
42. A stranger assumes that your father is your "older boyfriend" or your mother is the "older woman." No
43. You were treated differently by relatives or your parents than a sibling on the basis of racial features. No
44. You were well liked by peers but were not asked for dates. Yes
45. You wish you were darker and try to get as much sun as possible. No
46. People assume your father was in the military. Yes
47. You have enrolled in Spanish language classes in order to develop the ability to say "Yes" to the question, "Do you speak the language?" and remove one of the blocks to authenticity. No
48. Your otherwise friends become more distant when they think associating with you will make their racial authenticity or popularity questionable. No
49. You have been knowingly approached and asked, "Your mother's white (black, Asian), huh?" Yes
50. You have tried to hide one or both parents from view of people who know you but are not your closest friends because you anticipate they will treat you differently. No

This was a great questionnaire to fill out for myself. It showed me how much I share with other multiracial people and also how much my experience may also be unique and separate from everyone else.

I look very Asian. Most non-Asian Americans look on me first as Asian and then on second glance think that I might be multiracial. I don't look quite Asian enough to be mistaken as full Asian by other Asians.

I have never had to struggle to be perceived as an authentic member of an ethnic group or race. I was always ruled out of group membership from the very beginning, so I never bothered trying very hard.

Even though most of my most visible racial features are like my father, I also closely resemble my mother. No one seeing the two of us together has ever thought we were not related.

The question about the military did indeed make me laugh. It's amazing how often I get that.