Name Changing Post

Posts about changing names have been popular lately so I thought I'd add a short note of my own.

Sunny has a very standard Anglo-Saxon first name, middle name and then his biological mother's last name, which is kind of unusual but also Anglo-Saxon.

By coincidence, his middle name is the same as Guy's middle name and his father's first name.

We never thought about changing his first name, because that's what he's used to. We might have thought about changing his middle name if it wasn't already the same as my husband's. We were originally going to add on (my last name) hyphen (Guy's last name). Our workers said they didn't think that was a good idea, the name was too long then, and we should just drop his original last name. We went along with what they said.

A few months ago, when I talked about names with Sunny, he mentioned that he liked his last name and didn't want it to go away completely. We have the final word over that, so we're going to go back to the original plan and he'll stay with firstname middlename biolastname adoptedhyphenatedlastname. It's going to lead to bureaucratic complications, but what the heck, tons of people with Spanish-style sentence-length names deal with that already.

That's one of the advantages of adopting older kids, I guess. You don't have to make all the tough decisions. If Sunny feels like changing his name later, it's up to him. Right now he's happy with what he has.

As for me, I have an Anglo-Saxon first name, Japanese middle name and Anglo-Saxon last name. When I meet people for the first time, I frequently get a double take. "You're (confused look ) (insert name)?" It's irritating because I like my name and think it suits me just fine. The worst is when I tell someone my last name and then they sort of knit their eyebrows together, sigh, and ask me how to spell it, because since I look Asian of course it's got to have tricky sneaky weird spelling. I can tell when they're doing this to be obtuse as opposed to regular spelling confirmations. My last name should be impossible to misspell! It's like "Miller" or "Cook" but they're expecting me to spell it "Ng".

When I was born, my mother gave me her last name. My father was there, but they weren't married at the time, and weren't even planning on getting married. The hospital staff didn't understand her freewheeling feminist ways, so they gave me my father's last name even though she told them not to. She later corrected them and my social security card was issued under my correct last name. My original birth certificate still has the wrong name on it, and I had to do an official name change five years ago even though I've been using my current name all my life anyway.

All of this makes me very resistant to the idea of having the "right name" and conforming to social conventions on naming.

On the other hand, I've done some career counseling before. And this has never come up, but if I did career counseling with someone with a very "ghetto" name, I would almost certainly float the idea to initialize their name on resumes or applications. There's a difference between what's right, what's ethical and what will actually get you the job. The statistics are pretty grim.

One argument against conforming is that you wouldn't want to work in a racist workplace anyway. I think that's too stark of a choice. We're not comparing working at Office KKK versus Office NAACP. Many hiring managers are subconsciously biased but can make more egalitarian decisions when actually face to face with someone. Also, a lot of people just really need the paycheck right now. For example, given a choice between depressing jobs, I'd rather work in a racist call center than in a non-racist chicken-processing plant.

There are plenty of good ethical arguments against conforming. It's a terrible thing to give up a little piece of yourself like that.

The better off you are, the more control you have over your environment and the less your name matters. I'm lucky I have a decent job and I don't have to worry about it much. And my face-not-matching-name issues are irritating, but they've never really affected me economically.

If I had my father's last name things would have been different. My father's last name is long and incredibly difficult for the average English speaker to spell or pronounce. It inspires panic and can almost produce tears of frustration. It's kind of funny to watch, in a perverse way.

Mellow Yellow

Sunny got to watch the inauguration on TV with his first-grade class at school. I got to watch the inauguration behind a corporate firewall which screwed up the webcast, so I didn't get to watch it at all.

Sunny said his favorite part was when Rev. Joseph Lowery said "mellow yellow."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid the outpouring of inaugural joy over the racial progress represented by President Barack Obama, there was a single, humorous mention of work still to be done.

After the first black president had been sworn in, Rev. Joseph Lowery' ended his benediction with a rhyme familiar to black churchgoers:

"We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around..."

There was laughter from the enormous crowd. The 87-year-old civil rights pioneer continued:

"When yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."

The crowd thundered, "Amen!"

I don't go to a black church but I'm pretty familiar with that rhyme. He used it at the rally we went to last year. I've seen Lowery speak a bunch of times at different Atlanta events. The man is a powerhouse. He's everywhere! I even have a picture of Sunny and him together, although it's not a very good picture and you really only see his back.

I explained to Sunny that the different colors in the rhyme stood for different groups of people. Yellow stood for Asians, like me and Ojiichan. I also added that I normally don't like being called "yellow" but I'll give Lowery a pass on that one. Black stood for black people and African-Americans, red stood for Native Americans and so on.

He asked "What about me?"

I told him he was black and white. He said, "Yay!"

MLK Day March and Inauguration

We marched in the MLK day parade again, this time with Sunny. He had a great time. I didn't take any video footage this year, or I'd post it.

Today he'll be watching the inauguration at his school.

American Family just had an interesting post about "dumbing down" King's message in school. It makes me think about how I teach these issues to Sunny. It's so hard to think of how to balance everything. I feel like he's very fragile. He's just now learning what being African-American means, and that he himself is African-American. I don't want to push him too hard and tell him what he is or how he has to identify himself. I don't want him to think that being African-American means cutting himself off from his multiracial heritage and his white family. I just drop things now and then, such as telling him how Barack Obama is a lot like Sunny because he is black but his mother is white.

Whiteness is an insanely difficult concept to grasp for an adult, much less a six-year-old.

Since Sunny goes to a very diverse, minority-white school, one that I know doesn't tolerate bullying, I don't have to worry so much about direct attacks with racist abuse. I do have to worry about more subtle but powerful problems, like colorism among the black kids.

I also trust his school to teach history. So far he hasn't come home with anything that sounds wrong to me. He knows, in very general terms, about slavery. We're still working on the Civil War. I recently explained that Atlanta was burned to the ground and that's why we don't have any nice older buildings like some other cities do. He wanted to know who the good guys were and the who the bad guys were and which side we were on. I couldn't really answer to his satisfaction. I said the North was right and the South was wrong, so even though a lot of people died in the war, a great thing came out of it: slavery ended.

I didn't tell him that my ancestors on my mother's side fought for the Confederacy. I did tell him, once, that when my mother was born, it was illegal for her to marry my father. I don't think he could grasp that yet -- he looked so confused -- so this kind of family history is something to put off for another year until he's ready. And talking about race in my maternal family is going to be more pleasant than talking about race in his biological family...

In a way, it's easy to teach this kind of history because we're surrounded by it. Today, waiting for the march to start, we were standing next to a Civil War plaque on the ground that commemorated the first civilian death in 1864. At the end of the march, I pointed out to Sunny the church in which Martin Luther King Jr., and his father before him, preached. I'm trying to keep things factual, and also tied to the present day. King's message is relevant to a huge spectrum of social issues, from local to global, represented at the parade yesterday. Stopping the execution of Troy Davis. Union solidarity and the Employee Free Choice Act. Peace in Palestine.

I don't think Sunny is ready to understand how bad things really were/are. I wouldn't take him to any exhibit on segregation or slavery. In a year's time, he might be, and even if he's not he'll start absorbing it anyway, so I have to be ready.

It's so strange the things he tends to focus on. The fact that Lincoln was shot in a theater seems to haunt him, and he brings it up now and then out of the blue. He's fascinated by violence and shooting, the kind you see in video games and children's cartoons (and I don't think it's an abnormal fascination at all, or else these cartoons wouldn't be full of it) but he really has a very low tolerance for realistic versions. "Hide my eyes, mom! Tell me when it's safe to look!" he'll say. I think that's why he likes Scooby Doo so much... it's a safe way to be scared.

I feel torn about the inauguration today. I want him to understand how important this milestone is. But to understand the real importance, he would have to understand the pain. He doesn't now, but he will soon.

Adoption Tax Credit Clarification, Plus Some Obnoxious Opinions

I got a lot of comments on the last post, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit.

First of all, the tax credit isn't really $10,000; it's increased every year and I had an older figure in mind. For tax year 2007, it's $11,390 and it should be $11,650 for adoptions finalized in 2008. This link at NACAC does a good job of summarizing the situation for foster care adoption families.

Basically, you can get the whole credit if you've finalized a special needs adoption. If you're getting any kind of state adoption subsidy, that means it's a special needs adoption. It doesn't matter if the adoption was free. You don't have to claim expenses. If your adoption in 2007 was free, you get $11,390. If your adoption cost $5,000, you get $11,390. This is in the form of a tax credit. So if your tax liability is less than $11,390, the rest of it rolls over to another year. NACAC has some examples and a link to the IRS publication.

I'm going to pay some money for my adoption finalization, which should happen this year very soon, so I'll expect to get this tax credit money next year. My finalization isn't going to cost anything at all, because I get a reimbursement from Sunny's state. My trip expenses for the first trip visiting him are also going to be repaid at that time.

One thing I don't understand very well is the situation for non-special-needs adoptions from foster care. I suppose these would be children who were fostered from birth. In foster care, "special needs" is a very inclusive category and encompasses plenty of kids who are quite healthy. Here's the definition from Georgia:

In the State of Georgia a child who is considered special needs for the purpose of adoption meets the following criteria:

a. Any child eight years of age or older.
b. Any child of African-American heritage who is one year of age or older.
c. Members of a sibling group of three or more who are placed together.
d. Members of a sibling group of two where one is over the age of eight or has another special need.
e. Any child with documented physical, emotional or mental impairments or limitations.

People who do private domestic adoptions and international adoptions get the same tax credit, but they have to file expenses. So if they paid $5000 for an adoption, they would only get $5000 back. So at least in that one way, special needs foster care adoptions are privileged.

Here's my first obnoxious opinion in response to Sang-Shil's comment/question. I don't believe people who are not independently wealthy should be encouraged to adopt internationally using short-term lures like the tax credit. It's just too dangerous.

This doesn't mean that working class and middle-class people can't be great adoptive parents. It's not a judgment on parenting skills. It's a judgment on the terrible state of children's healthcare in this country. I've just heard too many horror stories.

It's not easy for families who have adopted from foster care to get services, but at least we have Medicaid and subsidies. When things go wrong for international adoptive families, there's no safety net. When they start off, they don't think anything will go wrong. The agencies certainly don't have any vested interest in telling them scary stories about attachment disorder and PTSD and fetal alcohol syndrome. If they're lucky, and they usually are, things will go reasonably well from a health perspective. If they're not lucky, they will end up shattered, bankrupt and their children will be taken away and age out in foster care.

I've heard so many of these stories. Here's a comment that a person just now left at the link I gave for my tax credit policy suggestion:

derinever
1/15/2009 10:44 AM
I adopted a child internationally. There is no social suport for these children He is not able to be educated in America's failing education system. These orphaned children have a risk for learning disabilites and psychological problems from neglect abuse malnutrition and lead posoining. Stop the adoptions until America can commit to helping these kids. My son has NO school. He is eight years old. We have tried to get him help paying more than fifty thousand dollars of failed therapies and tutoring. Tax credits wont change his future of less hope due to poor education help

Just another example. Sunny's foster mom has adopted several children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I want to do a detailed post about some of these children later, so I won't talk about them much more. I was shocked when I found out that one of the girls was 14, because she looked and acted like she was 10 years old. She was also an incredibly sweet, caring and peaceful girl. Sunny's foster mom worries about their future, obviously. But she knows a lot about their disorder. Their medical care doesn't cost her anything... and one of them was hospitalized for months, at death's door, when he was Sunny's age.

His foster mom told me that one of her neighbors had adopted a girl from Russia, and sort of sadly shook her head. She had severe FASD. The family put the girl in an institution when she was 12 years old and she's been there ever since. I wonder what kind of toll that took on their family.

I think that a lot of parents adopt internationally, realize they're in over their heads, then pull it together and scrape up all their resources and work through it. But the ones that don't... I wish there were more statistics about the intersection of international adoption and the foster care system.

There have been about 20,000 international adoptions a year in the past decade. So the tax credit is costing the government $200 million a year. I think this money could be better spent 1) regulating international adoption agencies and preventing corruption 2) ensuring potential parents are educated about the psychological AND cultural needs of international adoptees 3) scaring the hell out of them (the same treatment foster care adoptive parents get in trainings) so that they know for sure what they might be getting into 4) ensuring better healthcare, or at least educating parents about what services are available.

I realize that a lot of what I'm saying could be taken as pathologizing international adoptees, so I feel like I should apologize for that. But I'm coming from a background where you assume an adopted child will have issues due to a traumatic background, so that you're pleasantly surprised when they don't.

Take my dad, the international (non-transnational) adoptee. He's incredibly strong, tough, brilliant, humorous and independent. He's also got some attachment issues. The more I learned about adoption as we were researching, the more I realized how losing his parents in the war affected my father and could have caused him to behave in some really extreme ways that almost permanently alienated me from him when I was a teenager. Ah, the fistfight episode. I'll save that for another post someday.

Anyway, I think that ALL children and families should receive the best care. In a better system (and I hope an Obama administration gets us there as quickly as possible) all families will never have to worry about giving up custody of their children because they couldn't afford residential treatment. Ultimately, this is a problem that affects adoptive AND birth families of all varieties.

Second obnoxious opinion: I am not quite so sure about removing the tax credit from private domestic adoption. Ultimately, I don't think the tax credit there is a good thing. But I've heard one convincing argument that it ultimately relieves strain on the foster care system and helps some children, because otherwise some of these children would end up in the foster care system, with all the huge delays and potential for disrupted attachment that the system entails.

I hesitate to put out that argument. Private domestic adoption is not a subject I blog about, but I do know that there is a lot of stigma on women who voluntarily give children up about adoption... popular ideas that they do it because they're hopelessly dysfunctional and drug addicted and so forth. It's a stigma I don't want to contribute to. I think that today, women decide to relinquish for really diverse reasons that are linked to a lot of factors involving class, race, ethnicity and religion.

However, stating the opposite -- that there's no overlap between mothers who voluntarily relinquish and mothers who get involved with CPS and go through involuntary termination of parental rights -- would be false. There is a small degree of overlap. I've heard many cases of women who "voluntarily" relinquish via a private adoption, because they've had other children who ended up in foster care, and if they didn't do a private adoption, they know they'd have their baby taken away by CPS anyway. At least with private adoption, they have a greater degree of choice.

(This certainly wasn't the case with Sunny's mother. She had a case open with CPS because of Sunny, but everyone, especially her caseworker, was pulling for her to keep BB. If she hadn't died, she certainly would have kept him, and I like to think they would have been very happy together)

So the countering argument is that maybe the tax credit for private domestic adoption does serve a societal purpose. It can also help encourage African-American parents to adopt privately, thereby increasing intraracial adoptions. I've heard a lot of African-American parents are leery of paying any money at all for private adoption because of moral reservations as much as financial ones.

Ultimately, I still don't agree with it. I think it should be replaced by more specifically targeted tax credits and subsidies. And private adoption agencies are so poorly regulated that I wonder how much of the adoption tax credit really goes to the parents. Like I said in the original post, I wouldn't be surprised if an agency would just build the subsidy into their fees and treat it as pure profit on their end.

Also, when it comes to private domestic infant adoption, there's no shortage of parents due to money. There is a deeply disturbing hierarchy where healthy white babies cost the most, and black and/or disabled babies cost the least. There are only a few infants that are in danger of ending up in foster care because their potential adoptive parents can't afford to adopt... and these babies are the ones that cost the least. I don't blame private adoption. I'm pretty neutral on it, from a perspective of policy. It simply reflects the screwed-up values of our society, no more, no less.

What I hope is that as our country improves its safety nets, there'll be less of a need for things like adoption subsidies. Also, the need for adoption will decrease and there'll be less waiting children. Poverty isn't the single driving force behind adoption, but it's frequently a major contributor. For example, if you're a mother with a combination of mental health and addiction issues, and you come from a family with resources, you'll probably keep your children. If you have the same set of problems and come from a family with no resources, or grew up shuttled between foster homes, you'll probably lose them.

In the short-term, until we get to that better place, special needs adoption subsidies are vital. I don't know what would happen if I had to pay for Sunny's medication on my own. The very thought gives me shivers. Right now, I'm proud that what we give Sunny is not too far away from the very best. Non-generic-available medication, therapy, a tutor that specializes in ADHD, the prospect of experimental neurofeedback treatment, a college savings fund, all the way down to organic fish oil vitamins. I'm lucky because Sunny's needs are really not that severe, but if they were, we would be able to pay for much more treatment without bankrupting ourselves and driving ourselves to the limit emotionally.

Vote For Me!

If you're signed up at http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov and have few spare seconds, vote up or comment on my ideas.

They're too focused and specific to make it into the finals, and I also stuck to creating ones that hadn't already been mentioned. However, the site is going to give them a LOT more exposure than they would have had otherwise.

Encourage Foster Care Adoption - End Tax Credit For Private/International Adoption

I am an adoptive parent of an older child from state foster care. Our adoption costs nothing, and he will receive a subsidy until he is 18 and I will also get a one-time $10,000 tax credit.

This is a good incentive for people to adopt from foster care. There are many older children in the system waiting to be adopted. In the case of my son and many others, the option of placing him with birth relatives was explored for many years, but it did not happen because they were not willing.

The incentive makes sense because if these children are not adopted, the government will spend even more money maintaining them in foster care. The outcome is worse for the child and for the taxpayer.

However, what doesn't make sense is that private adoption (people who pay adoption agencies money for infant adoption from birth mothers) and international adoption parents also receive this $10,000 tax credit.

I am not against these forms of adoption, although I do think they need to be regulated more. However, I don't think they should be subsidized by the government, especially when there are so many older children in state systems waiting to be adopted. The money would be better spent improving and reforming our foster care system.

The private adoption agencies that charge money for adoption just pass the cost of the tax credit on to the parents anyway. They may market babies to parents by saying, "oh, this adoption is going to cost $25,000 but since you get the tax credit it's really going to be 'only' $15,000". Without the tax credit, maybe they would just charge $15,000 anyway.

This tax credit is only a sop to the adoption agencies. It should be ended, and this will save the government money. It should also encourage people to look into FREE adoption of waiting children from the foster care system who might not otherwise have an adoptive home.

Standardize College Accreditation and Regulate "Rip-Off" Colleges

College accreditation in the U.S. is a confusing mix. The highest standard is actually regional accreditation*. Six regional agencies establish accreditation of every school from Harvard to two-year community colleges.

National accreditation is something quite different, and regionally accredited schools usually won't accept nationally accredited credits. Many diploma mills and for-profit schools take advantage of this situation to rip off students.

Many for-profit technical colleges are owned by corporations who spent most of their money on marketing and advertising, not on teachers and students. Their targets are working-class and minority and military and immigrant students. They promise that they can help get student loans to pay the overinflated tuition (when the student could go to a less-flashy, government-subsidized community college for 5% of the tuition). They use “hard sell” tactics, walk the students through taking out large loans telling them they are guaranteed to get some wonderful job with NASA if they sign on the dotted line. Once in, they will attempt to pass you through even if your work is not up to college level. Teachers are encouraged never to fail students in order to keep the tuition stream (composed mainly of student loans) flowing. If students graduate, they graduate with a substandard education that many employers don’t even respect, plus crushing student loans. Many default.

College accreditation needs to be tightened up, federalized and made simpler. And then higher education marketing should be much more regulated. You shouldn’t be able to promise some of the crazy stuff those people promise.**

I suggest that the regional accreditors should be combined into a new federal standard. No matter whether you are studying for a PhD in Philosophy or a community college certificate as an Automotive Technician, you should be guaranteed a minimum standard of education.

All for-profit colleges should be required to provide students with impartial information about tuition, college budgets and probability of credit acceptance. If they make claims about future employment, they must be able to back up these claims. Any college making outrageous promises or using "hard sell" techniques should be fined out of existence.

America is falling behind in many educational areas, and improving our accreditation system should be a low-cost, high-benefit element of any higher education plan.

* read more about accreditation at http://distancelearn.about.com/od/accreditationinfo/a/regional.htm

** Here is one example, among many, of a lawsuit involving such false claims.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DR

Fully Fund Efforts to Combat 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. It is estimated that at least 10% of all Vietnam veterans have Hepatitis C. 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 *" or similar Act which would create a comprehensive effort by the federal government to address the epidemic.

*http://olpa.od.nih.gov/legislation/109/pendinglegislation/hepatitisc.asp

Tantrum Report

This last week has been a bad one for tantrums.

Thursday night, at bedtime, he had one of the worst tantrums I've ever seen. It lasted an hour but felt like an eternity. Screaming, crying, door slamming, "mom and dad aren't being very nice to me! If Mom and Dad aren't nice to me, I'm not going to be nice to them! Butthead farthead poopoohead peepeehead idiot jerks!"

He went into this "must have control" mode around bedtime. The first demand was that I sleep in the same bed as him, and of course I reminded him I couldn't do that. He knows that. And I would let him go to sleep in the same bed as me, on special occasions, if not for the fact that it's against foster care regulations in the state of Georgia and he could conceivably be removed for it, which is something I am never, ever, ever going to risk. So he basically used the refusal of an impossible request as the trigger to start a huge tantrum. We tried talking it out, we tried ignoring, I tried locking myself in my room... nothing seemed to work. Finally, after an hour, when he was much more tired, we laid down the law and told him he was just about to lose his Gameboy, his 6-year birthday present from his foster mom. We were going to mail it back to his foster mom and she could give it to one of his brothers or sisters. That snapped him out of it and we were able to put him to bed.

He was fine the next day and had pretty good behavior in school and then through the weekend.

Then this morning he had another fit. It started with him having a nightmare at 5:30 in the morning and wetting the bed. He came in our bedroom to tell us. I just told him to put his pad in the basket, change his pajama bottoms and go back to sleep. No one was angry at him. I gave him a big hug.

Then he kept yelling "goodnight!" and "see you in the morning!" at us. For half an hour. And knocking on our door to ask us questions. Could he listen to the radio. Sure, whatever he wanted as long as it wasn't too loud. What time were we getting up. Seven. Did he have to take a shower in the morning. Yes. The last time he knocked on our door we both yelled "STOP YELLING AT US!" and then it was on. "Mom and dad aren't being nice to me! Idiot jerks!" And the door slamming... we'd turned on the house alarm the night before, and he slammed his door so hard that it set off the alarm and a piercing siren woke up half the neighborhood before Guy could race to the panel and turn it off.

As a consequence, after school today he is going to have to knock on the doors of our closest neighbors and apologize for waking them up at 6 in the morning.

What a crappy morning. He apologized and was subdued for a while, then had another mini-fit when it was time to go to school. I always refuse to take him to school when he has an issue like this (it actually isn't very common). I just tell him I won't take him to school -- I'll simply wait -- until he has calmed down and made up, and if we have to be late, we'll be late, and we'll go to class together and tell his teacher exactly why he's late.

There's a song he likes from Wow Wow Wubbzie that goes "don't lie, don't lie, don't blame it on the other guy." I told him that he needed to take responsibility for not controlling his anger better. When he blamed his tantrums on "Mom and Dad not being nice to me" that was like lying and blaming the other guy.

My husband feels terrible. He knows he's not supposed to let his buttons get pushed, but says getting called things like "poopoohead" by his son is unavoidably painful. He gets really, really hurt and angry. I don't lose my head, but I've noticed I have a tendency to go into a cold, resentful state, like this morning. I didn't hug Sunny goodbye before school, and I should have. I know it's going to bother him that I didn't.

I don't know if there's anything we can do to prevent the tantrums. They're a difficult mix of calculation and uncontrollable emotional surges. They can't consistently be hugged away or reasoned away or bargained away. They're exhausting, but they don't fill me with despair like they do to my husband. We're having family therapy tonight and I think most of it is going to be for Guy.

He keeps worrying that Sunny will have violent rages as a teenager and physically attack us. I think that's really unreasonable. You also have to understand, Guy has also worried about the future too much. This is someone who gave a two-year leave notice at his last job. Oh yes, and he started worrying about getting divorced before we ever got married. We didn't even have any relationship problems, he just had this premonition we might get divorced, and to this day has the occasional nightmare about it. It's a character trait I've gotten used to.

Nevertheless, the last thing I want to hear when I'm in bed at night worrying about Sunny is Guy's detailed scenario of how Sunny is going to start punching holes in our wall as a teenager, we'll have to spend all this money on fixing the holes, then we'll have to call the police on him, and we'll want to send him to military school but they won't take him and blah blah blah.

I'm a fatalist, not a pessimist. I expect things to muddle through. If something bad happens, it's going to happen, so I might as well not worry about it. I've made it clear to Guy that I think all his scenarios do is send him off down a depression spiral.

Plus, military school is not going to happen and I find the whole concept bizarre. I used to be in an environment where I heard a lot of gossip from military boarding school, and the gossip was all about -- can you guess? -- homosexual rape and prostitution! Military school is almost as bad as prison or a freaking pirate ship! I think whether you're actually gay or straight is irrelevant in those environments... it's all about unhealthy power imbalances and hierarchies. Anyway, this is probably more detail than I intended, but I'm against single-sex education, even for girls. It's true there are certain advantages for girls that there aren't for boys, but ultimately, children need to learn how to have friendly, respectful, diverse kinds of relationships with the other half of the world that doesn't share their sex. I think that's a crucial goal, and sex segregation does not lead towards it.

Anyway, rant about military school aside, Guy is a a great husband and a great father and needs to stop tormenting himself, and in the process, exhausting me because I keep having to tell him to stop tormenting himself. However, on the positive side, at least we talk about this stuff between the two of us. It's a simmering pot but the lid isn't clamped down.

Sunny has been doing well, it's just these tantrums really color my perception.

His 1st grade ITBS scores came back, and they were pretty good. The majority were in the top 25th percentile. The scores that were bad all had to do with listening. I'm sure he's capable of much better when his focus increases.

I've decided on a place for neurofeedback and am setting up an initial appointment.

First Protest

I almost forgot to mention that Sunny had an important milestone this weekend: he went to his first political protest. This is a long-standing family tradition; my mother has been taking me to protests ever since I was a baby.

The AJC article is here: Pro-Palestinian protesters march on CNN headquarters

My mother helped Sunny make his own pro-peace sign. He was pretty excited about it. When we got there, he was initially a bit nervous because of the shouting, but once he saw there were a lot of other little kids there, he was fine, and really enjoyed the marching part.

Comments closed on this post because I'm not interested in sparking a debate on this topic. The AFSC/Quakers have the right idea, that's all I'll say.

Six-Year-Old Humor

One of my favorite comics (Tom the Dancing Bug) had an awesome capsule explanation of six-year-old humor.



Sunny is always cracking himself up with his potty humor. He takes his vast knowledge of classic rock and uses it for evil purposes. Here's a recent example of one of his songs:

"You're still the fart
That can itch my back
Still the fart
That can farty fart fart
We're still having fun
And fart fart fart!"

Maybe I'll get him a Weird Al Yankovic CD for his birthday. I think he'd really appreciate "Another One Rides the Bus".

Sunny's Getting Bigger (Another Medication Post)

Sunny has gained quite a bit of weight since coming to us. He's about ten pounds overweight for his age. The scary thing is, it's all muscle. He doesn't look particularly big... he's just very, very solid.

His old swim teacher explained to me that he had a tough time teaching Sunny because of his muscular build. Skinny kids float, chunky kids float, but Sunny sinks unless he forcefully uses his arms.

I think the 15% weight gain is turning his medication into a proportionally lower dose. It was already a very low dose... now I'm forced to consider the horrible prospect of raising it.

The medication is just so closely linked to his school. When he forgets it in the morning, or when we were trying to get him off it last year, his school performance just falls apart, and he can't write at all. He becomes so much more unhappy. He keeps falling into a cycle... frustration, anger, attempt to leave the situation that's making him angry, rebound back because he's scared of being alone, getting angrier, melting down, blaming himself. He still goes through those cycles on the medication, they're just a lot more frequent and severe when he's not on it.

Last night it was a simple request "please come over here, it looks like you need some chapstick" that started it off.

I don't want him to have to take medication for the rest of his childhood. He doesn't have any side effects now, but what if we raised the dose? What if he stays on it for years?

I'm going to try something new... neurofeedback. I've been researching it a lot. I'm not a believer in alternative medicine at all -- I think scientific trials are better proof than anecdotes or tradition. Neurofeedback seems like it's in a different category: promising, though not fully proven. The medication carries just as many if not more unknowns, however. With neurofeedback, the beneficial effects are supposed to be permanent.

The medication is free, because of Medicaid. A full treatment of neurofeedback might cost more than $5000. It's not covered by any insurance. The cost makes me nauseous. What if it doesn't work and turns out to be a complete waste?

I'm just thinking out loud. I haven't come to a decision yet, but I'm leaning toward giving the neurofeedback a try.

It's not like we're completely at the end of our rope. Sunny's behavior can be annoying at times, and I'm very worried about his future in school, but most of the time he's just a great little peppy kid.

On the plus side, he's had times recently when his focus is fantastic. Honestly, I never thought he would be able to play with his Star Wars Lego kits. Their boxes even say they're really for ages 8 and up. After a few rocky starts, he's starting to get the hang of it. He can focus and work on putting them together for up to half an hour at a time.

Sunny also spent more than half an hour yesterday taking apart a coffee machine. Guy likes to give Sunny small broken appliances to take apart, using real tools (hammer, miniature power screwdriver, pliers, wire cutter). Guy says the trick is to cut off the power cord first so Sunny won't be tempted to plug it into anything. Every ten minutes or so, Sunny would run into the house, show us a piece of the coffee machine, and breathlessly explain his theory behind why it worked.

We're also considering child modeling for Sunny. It's something he might really enjoy, because he's a total camera ham. Maybe we could pay for his neurofeedback that way! Errr... that sounds unethical, but I have to be honest, it's crossed my mind. Anyway, that's an easier decision. If he likes it, we do it; if he doesn't like it, we don't.

Happy New Year!

I'm not going to bother making any resolutions for next year. I'd like to exercise more, learn how to dance the samba, volunteer more, study up on investments, do a bunch of craft and home improvement related stuff, start on a new degree, get a new certification, blah blah blah. Maybe I'll do a few of them... I'm keeping my expectations low, however.

We're ending this year in a pretty good mood. Our vacation in Hawaii really calmed everyone down.

Sunny has been a joy lately. I think I've figured out his cycle. He takes about a week to get adjusted to a major change in routine. During that time, he acts like a jerk, but by now, he's using to being out of school. He's spending a lot of time during the day playing with his legos (often by himself!) going on nature walks with Nana, running errands with dad, playing outdoors with friends.

In fact, he almost got a "no complaining all day" award yesterday. He messed it up shortly before bedtime by having a micro-fit when I told him it was time to take a shower. A micro-fit consists of loud wailing while hurling himself on the floor, and lasts about 15 seconds. In all his gym classes, he's learned how to jump up and safely hurl himself to the ground in the absolutely most dramatic fashion, but it would probably terrify a lot of parents if they saw it.

Shortly after Christmas I got some great footage of Sunny. He received some Ed Hardy temporary tattoos as a stocking stuffer, and we put a tattoo of a panther fighting a python on his chest, then he kept his shirt off and starting singing "We Will Rock You" while dancing vigorously in the kitchen. He was totally rocking out! I wish I could put it on Youtube but I'm too concerned about privacy. Instead, I'm going to hold on to the footage and email it to his future college roommates or something like that.

I hope everyone has a good New Year. I hope that next year will also see an improvement in the welfare of our city, state, country and planet, that the horrible killing in the Gaza strip will stop (please see this link and this link for ways to help) and that we'll get out of Iraq AND Afghanistan.

For our family, I hope that we'll get Sunny's baby brother soon. I'm going to give him a new blog name here: BB for Baby Brother. Sunny's grandmother told me that his mother's wish was for
BB to be raised by us, with his brother, if anything happened to her. Apparently the pregnancy had some serious complications, and his mother, in the delivery room, was worried about what would happen if she died... Sunny's grandmother said she was so concerned about getting those wishes on the record that after the death she went back to the hospital and spoke with the anesthesiologist and nurse that had been present when those words were said.

Lastly, I made a decision (which my husband is on board with) to try and get pregnant. I'd like to give it a shot while I still have good eggs and while my insurance still covers a few thousand dollars of fertility treatments. IVF is too invasive (and too expensive) but I'm willing to try cycles of IUI without major drugs. I definitely wouldn't want to have twins... getting three babies in one year would be too much to handle.

I'm not really conflicted about the decision. If it happens, it happens, and if I go next year without getting pregnant, that will almost certainly be my last try. I know balancing adopted and biological children adds an extra layer of complication, but families do it all the time. Sunny already has plenty of experience being a member of a large family with some bio children, some adopted children and some foster children, and I think he'd be a great big brother.

We'd probably get more stares as a family. With Sunny, I have never had anyone ask me if he was adopted. They just assume he's my biological child from a previous relationship with a black man. Sunny's eyes look superficially Asian, and like mine, are very prominent (not deep-set) but the shape is quite different if you look closely. However, all the rest of our facial features totally match up: full lips, mouth not very wide, high but not prominent cheekbones, bow-shaped eyebrows, medium nose bridge with soft nose shape, strong chin in a slightly rounded square shape.

BB looks a lot like Sunny, but BB's biological father is light-skinned, unlike Sunny's father. At his young age, BB looks white in terms of complexion, but I think his facial features are not going to look Caucasian. Like Sunny, he has very beautiful, large eyes that are shaped like teardrops laid on their side, with the rounded part toward the center of the face.

Then, if I have a birth child with my husband, they'd be three-quarters Polish/Irish/Anglic and one-quarter ethnic Japanese. My husband's round eyes (which are also very nice-looking eyes) will get thrown into the mix. Who knows, maybe it's possible all the kids will sort of look like each other.

I hate the stereotype "multiracial people are pretty" and I also don't believe in the naive cliche that all the problems of the world will be solved once we all interbreed and look like each other. With that disclaimer... I can tell Sunny is going to get a LOT of positive attention for his looks as he grows up. It's going to be interesting.

I also think he's going to be OK in the self-confidence area. He's naturally very confident. I remember many months ago he hinted that "dark skin" was something he "didn't like". But recently, he's been saying "cafe" is his favorite color. He loves that word that he learned in his Spanish class. It means "brown" in Spanish as well as "coffee". Hopefully, with the right reinforcement, he can keep his positive attitude about being a "cafe" color. I still try to shield him from hearing too many negative things about black people; recently I had to turn off NPR when they were discussing something about incarceration rates. I don't want him to live in a bubble, I just want to make sure he gets more positive messages than negative messages while he's still in this "absorb-everything" learning mode. I want him to have a space (part school, part neighborhood or friends) where blackness and African-American culture are just normal, unexceptional, not overwhelmed with messages about tragedy. We can't give him that as a nuclear family, but at least he has access to that space and moves through it every day.

Wrapping up... I know a lot of readers have been reading this blog for years. Remember when we got matched? Whether you're lurkers, commenters, current bloggers or mothballed bloggers, thanks for sticking around. Have a great new year, everyone. May your dreams come true!

Big Holiday Update Post

Our vacation was great.

It was a bit stressful being with Sunny 24/7 in my father's studio apartment. Luckily, the apartment does at least have a shoji divider, so we had 2-3 hours of semi-privacy every night after Sunny went to bed, which we mostly used to watch Season 2 of Prison Break on our portable DVD player. We ate a lot of great food, went to beaches every day and drove all over the island, although we couldn't afford any inter-island or boat trips.

Since Sunny was missing almost two weeks of school, he had a fair amount of make-up work, including a daily journal of at least four sentences per day. Getting him to do his work for an hour every night wasn't fun, but we didn't have any major homework blow-ups.

Sunny quickly learned how to make the shaka sign. There was a guy in the apartment building who kept running into us and saying to Sunny, "what up, li'l bruddah!" and Sunny just loved flashing the sign back at him. As usual, he was treated like a miniature rock star everywhere we went.

Sunny was a lot more interested in the ancient Hawaiian village than I thought he'd be. I tried my best to explain the difference between "people who live in Hawaii" and "Hawaiians". I told him that the Asian people he saw mostly came from Japan, the white people came from the mainland, the Hawaiians were already there before anyone else and got the raw deal, a lot of people were mixed ancestry, but everyone was an American.

I went to a very nice Jodo Shinshu service. The reverend had a thick Japanese accent and at first I thought the sermon would be rather impenetrable and arcane, but I was quite wrong. About halfway through, the reverend broke out the props -- a balloon and a sign reading "G.A.S." -- and used those to illustrate a point about joyful daily living and how we need to be filled with "good gas" not "bad gas". He had everyone laughing in the aisles.

It looks like Hawaii is in for a lot of pain due to the economy. The newspapers were full of dire statistics about hotel residency figures. I feel really bad for the people there. I used to work in the tourist industry... it's highly unstable, the jobs don't get a lot of respect and the tourists you depend on drive up your cost of living to the point that you can barely afford to live in your own home.

Sunny was not too bad on the three-leg airplane flights there and back. He didn't sleep very much, but kept occupied with his PSP.

We made a good adjustment back to Atlanta. It helped that we had a nice warm snap, and last week the temperature was in the 70s... hardly any colder than Hawaii.

The next time we go on vacation, we definitely need to do a combined trip with my mom and stepdad. It would be nice to have just one day to ourselves! By then, at the end of next year, I hope we'll have Sunny's brother as well. There's still no major update on that front. The biological father is refusing to get in contact. He's established paternity but isn't answering calls or showing up in court.

According to ASFA I imagine it could take 18 months to do a TPR if he consistently avoids every contact. If he or a relative doesn't want to parent, he needs to act. My worker tells me they are probably going to threaten him with paying child support if he doesn't move one way or the other, so that might cause a resolution.

Meanwhile, Sunny's baby brother is doing well with his foster family. We sent him a present: a little Hawaiian fleece robe. He's visited every week by his (and Sunny's) bio grandmother. I'm in regular contact with her now, and we'll give her a call tomorrow on Christmas Day.

Sunny misses his foster family a lot.

He had a blow-up last night that was probably related. It all started over the PSP (AKA the PCP). The PSP is going to be off limits for several weeks as a consequence. He pushed his dad, slammed doors and yelled a lot of things like "I hate you".

He was very, very sad afterwards. As he was crying in my lap, he said "I'm so dumb! I don't know why I said those things! I said all the good times we had together were ruined!"

"You didn't mean that, did you?"
"No!"
"Nothing could ruin the good times we have together. I know why you say things you don't mean, you say them to try and hurt us. And you wanted to hurt us because you're angry. It's okay to feel angry, it's just not okay to show it like that."

We talked about alternate ways to show anger. He already knows about taking a deep breath. When he can remember to do that, it helps. I also suggested a new one: going to his room, closing (not slamming) the door and yelling into a pillow.

I just realized his inability to be alone presents a real conflict with anger management. If you're angry, the fastest, easiest way to cope is to temporarily remove yourself from the person or situation causing the anger. But that route is closed to him. He moves away, but then snaps right back like a rubber band because he fears solitude so much.

I think without that problem, his tantrumming would not be a serious issue. He's actually more emotionally articulate than most children his age. I recently talked to another parent from our agency who's also having problems around this time (pretty much everyone is, which is why the agency holds a workshop on holiday coping) and unlike Sunny, his daughter doesn't say what's on her mind and who she misses and why she feels bad... she acts it out.

Sunny has already gotten a ridiculous amount of presents from one set of grandparents. He got multiple Transformers, Pokemon figures, remote controlled truck, air-rocket-launcher, slinkies and Hot Wheels. I wish they hadn't bought him so many toys. He loves getting them, but he plays with them for five minutes and then rarely uses them again. He just doesn't know how to play with toys by himself.

It's sad hearing about kids who come from foster homes with nothing but a trash bag. That's about the complete opposite of Sunny's experience. His foster family shipped us EIGHTEEN BOXES of his clothes and toys. We donated many of those toys, since he'd outgrown them. We just tell him that he needs space for new toys, so he needs to fill a box with the ones he doesn't want anymore so that other kids can play with them. He's always quick to do it and happy to help drop off the box.

We keep trying to downsize toys so his room can stay cleaner, but this Christmas is going to be a challenge. We were planning on having a small Christmas and de-emphasizing gifts, but grandparents got in the way. Also, it's his first Christmas with us...

He's getting about five presents from Santa. We've bought him a pair of inflatable swords that he can share with his friends, a flashlight that straps to your head (he loves flashlights), more Hot Wheels, a calculator, a hoodie with a flaming skull and guitars on it, a PSP game, Greatest Hits of Queen and Best of the Rockin' 70s CDs (he likes classic rock a LOT more than we do), a dinosaur sticker book and a chess set for beginners. On top of that there will be presents from two more sets of grandparents and foster family.

He's going to have to live without the PSP for a while, but we found him a great alternate game. It's at fantasticcontraption.com. Using a limited set of building blocks and the laws of physics -- gravity, friction, etc. -- you have to build contraptions to accomplish a simple task.

Right now, we severely limit any video games. I noticed even the educational ones were just encouraging button-mashing and shortened attention span, but this game looks like an exception. It's not too stimulating: simple shapes, slow motion, calming music. There's no time limit. You create a design, test it, then try to fix it when it fails, then test it again... failure isn't as emotional as in a life-based game like Super Mario Brothers. Sunny loves Fantastic Contraption, and he can keep his focus on it up to half an hour. I think it's helping stretch his attention span, so I don't mind if he plays it. He's solved it up through Level Five.

I hope everyone who reads here has a happy holiday season! Also, an extra thanks to Christine for commenting on my Racialicious post, because I think your perspective added a lot to the discussion.

I'll close on a negative note by mentioning one of the only things I HATE about Hawaii... the godawful Hawaiian Christmas reggae the radio stations there love to play. Hawaiian music, great; reggae, great; Christmas, great... but put all three together and you get a form of music guaranteed to make your brain bleed out your ears.

My Writing - Two Links

I'm back from vacation. It was awesome... I'll post some more on it later.

While I was gone, I had two thingies published.

One was a short comment on adoption, in the Minnesota Women's Press, in response to this story, A Feminist Lens on Adoption. It's not a very notable comment that would stand out for regular readers here, except for the fact that it's now printed on dead trees.

The second was a long piece on racist abuse, published at my favorite hangout, Racialicious.com. It's sort of a non-adoption-related expansion on one of my early posts at this blog, Handling Racism as a Child. It's got the unwieldy title of Getting Past the Bears: Racist Abuse in Middle School and the Formation of People of Color Consciousness. I wrote it as part of the Racialicious Things We Do to Each Other/Things We Do to Ourselves series.

I spent a long time working on the Bears post, and I'm pretty happy with it. The edits Latoya suggested were also a great help. I tried to produce something emotionally perturbing, yet measured and analytical, and I think I mainly succeeded. The comments to the post (100+) contain a lot of people sharing experiences very close to mine, or that intersect in interesting ways. I wish I had time to interact with the commenters more, but I was in the middle of the grueling three-flight trip back to Atlanta.

Sunny Journal Days 1-3

Here's my transcription of a journal Sunny is keeping for school assignment during vacation. It's good practice for his handwriting.

DAY ONE
I played in the ocean. Playing in the ocean made me happy. I saw a big sea turtle with my goggles. I made a friend.

DAY TWO
I crossed the hot springs. I got a taco. I went to a rocky beach. I played ping pong with my dad.

DAY THREE
I climbed up a volcano. I walked through a lava tube. I saw a beautiful bird. I am going to have a big fish for dinner.

Here's a picture Sunny took himself.

Worried about Atlanta

Jim Martin's loss to Saxby Chambliss was disappointing. I worked for the campaign, but I still had a feeling he was going to lose. The state of Georgia remains firmly in the control of Republicans who are strangling Atlanta... and local Democratic politicians are by and large a mediocre bunch. At least Hank Johnson and John Lewis are doing a good job, and I'm desperately hoping that Burrell Ellis is going to turn things around in Dekalb County after the embarrassing reign of Vernon Jones.

Georgia's unemployment rate is now higher than the national average. Our crime is rising too. It's been rising for a while, in part due to horrible police leadership, and the economic climate is only going to make it rise much faster. A pizza place near where I live just got robbed during dinner peak.

I've always been upbeat, overall, about where I live: Dekalb County, to the east of Atlanta, a large county with a higher population than quite a few states. Living here means I can afford a nice big solid house with a real yard. My commute time isn't bad. I have quick access to the best food from all over the world, and this is really crucial for my quality of life! My son's friends are also all over the map, and he sees lots of examples of successful African-American professionals.

The downside is the crime, and the bad schools. This area is all over the spectrum not just in race and ethnicity, but also in terms of income. There are lots of apartment buildings and residency hotels, especially around the Memorial Drive corridor, where something bad is always going down. I know people who live in these buildings, and they suffer the worst of it, of course. 95% of the residents are in working families, but since they have to work so incredibly hard, while they're out working their two or three jobs the other 5% runs around drug-dealing and shooting their guns and causing general nastiness. Rising unemployment is only going to make it worse for everyone.

As for the schools, there is one thing I know for sure: Sunny is NOT going to junior high school in any of the local public schools. I may write about this later but things are pretty dire. I'm in the same boat as many other people. My neighbor, for example, is gaming the system by using his sister's apartment as an official residency so that his son can go to a safer, better junior high. That's a very common tactic.

I am going to do what I can politically to try and improve the public school situation, but it's my responsibility to try and help fix things... not Sunny's. In the short term the situation is only going to get worse due to the recession and massive budget cuts, but in the long-term, I'm hoping an Obama administration, combined with better local leadership, may turn things around.

I don't have many alternatives for places to live. I need a big cheap city and I can't stand cold weather. The West Coast is still too expensive. I'm scared of Texas. Culturally, Miami and New Orleans are two places I'd consider. But Miami probably has worse traffic than Atlanta, the same crime, and is more expensive. New Orleans has worse crime and fewer jobs. Guy is even more picky than I am, too. He has never really lived away from Georgia and I think he'd be almost incapable of moving. As a final factor, my mother and stepfather moved halfway across America just to live next to us... so I don't think we'll be moving soon. Anyway, things are going to be tough all over for a few more years at the very least.

ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention one huge advantage Atlanta has over New Orleans and Miami: the absence of killer hurricanes.

Third-Culture Kids in the Obama Administration

The below article is a bit Pollyanna-ish, but still fascinating. Maybe I should apply for a job at the Obama administration! It's just too cold up there in D.C., though.

When I read stuff about third-culture kids, I recognize a lot of traits I have myself. But I don't feel like embracing the term. It seems like it's most often applied to the children of upper-class parents and intellectuals, although it should really apply to a much broader group, including the children of just-plain immigrants who work in places like restaurants and construction zones. My upbringing was somewhere in the middle. I definitely didn't get an elite early education, although I eventually ended up at a good college.

I think the phrase "1.5gen" is something I can embrace more. Even though I'm only half of a 1.5gen... or perhaps the square root of one?

I do agree that with this kind of background, you end up with a thick skin because you get used to cultural rejection and being treated like an alien. It either completely screws you up or makes you very independent.

Obama's 'Third Culture' Team

Obama has packed his staff with so-called “Third Culture Kids”—people who grew up outside the U.S. New research suggests this group shares common psychological traits that could shape his administration.

John Quincy Adams lived in France, and young Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Europe often enough to master French and German, but Barack Obama is the first modern American president to have spent some of his formative years outside the United States. It is a trait he shares with several appointees to the new administration: White House advisor Valerie Jarrett was a child in Tehran and London, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was raised in east Africa, India, Thailand, China and Japan as the son of a Ford Foundation executive, and National Security Advisor James L. Jones was raised in Paris. (Also, Bill Richardson, tipped as Secretary of Commerce, grew up in Mexico City.)

This is more than a trivial coincidence. So-called “Third Culture Kids”—and the adults they become”—share certain emotional and psychological traits that may exert great influence in the new administration. According to a body of sociological literature devoted to children who spend a portion of their developmental years outside their “passport country,” the classic profile of a “TCK” is someone with a global perspective who is socially adaptable and intellectually flexible. He or she is quick to think outside the box and can appreciate and reconcile different points of view. Beyond whatever diversity in background or appearance a TCK may bring to the party, there is a diversity of thought as well.

But TCKs can also feel rootless and detached. The great challenge for maturing Third Culture Kids is to forge a sense of personal and cultural identity from the various environments to which they been exposed. Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, could serve as a textbook in the TCK syllabus, a classic search for self-definition, described in living color. Obama’s colleagues on the Harvard Law Review were among the first to note both his exceptional skill at mediating among competing arguments and the aloofness that made his own views hard to discern. That cool manner of seeming “above it all” is also a classic feature of the Third Culture Kid.

The TCKs’ identity struggles can be painful and difficult. The literature documents addictive behaviors, troubled marriages and fitful careers. But meeting this challenge can become a TCK’s greatest strength. Learning to take the positive pieces from a variety of experiences and create a strong sense of “This is who I am, no matter where I am” gives a steadiness when the world around is in flux or chaos”—which helps explain “no-drama Obama.”

Among those of us who study Third Culture Kids (almost always because we are TCKs), it has been both gratifying and frustrating to watch “one of us” run for the White House. We began obsessively pointing out to each other the telltale signifiers of the TCK that so often went unremarked in the mainstream press.

“I laughed when I heard a commentator call Barack exotic and elitist,” says Lois Bushong, an American who grew up in Costa Rica and now works a therapist for internationally mobile families. “How exotic or elitist can it be to go home to visit your grandmother, even if she lives in Hawaii? She’s still your grandma. This TV guy seemed to forget that the world many see ‘exotic’ is simply home for TCKs.”

But we also despaired when his opponents denigrated the importance of Obama’s childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii. “How can they say his international childhood doesn’t count when it comes to foreign affairs?” sputtered my friend and colleague, Paulette Bethel. “That’s just crazy. Barack’s been negotiating between cultural worlds since the day of his birth. No one will have to teach him this skill. It’s already second nature to him!”

Bethel feels vindicated by the collection of strong personalities that Obama has invited into the new administration. “He’s lived with so many differences around him in his lifetime, they don’t threaten him anymore,” she says.

In 1984, Dr. Ted Ward, then a sociologist at Michigan State University, called TCKs “the prototype citizens of the future,” anticipating a time when a childhood lived in various cultures would be the norm rather than the exception. It seems that time is now.

And the characteristics derived from an expat childhood may be well suited to the challenges facing the new administration. The economic crisis, for one, demonstrates how interdependent world cultures have become, and its solution will undoubtedly require the unconventional thinking that comes more easily to a Third Culture Kid. Even though Tim Geithner is not an economist by training, he apparently demonstrated such a keen problem-solving skills in the financial arena that the stock market jumped 500 points on the news of his appointment. Returning to Japan as an adult and speaking the language he learned as a child have given him an unusually deep understanding of the global economy.

As TCKs, we have had the joy, and the challenge, of being raised in many places and cultures. Now we get to see whether the values of the TCK can be a force for good on the world stage.

Thanksgiving Contacts

We had a nice Thanksgiving. It was smaller than last year's, so it was a lot easier to cook for. My stepfather is off on a business trip, my uncle is staying away due to family drama, and so on and so forth. We did have two extra Obama staffers who showed up at the last minute.

Before Thanksgiving, I finally emailed Sunny's bio grandmother. I probably should have done it before, but I have a lot of conflicted feelings about her. After actually meeting her at the funeral, I have a much more positive impression than I originally did.

I imagine Sunny has conflicted feelings too. He loves her, and she made promises to him about taking care of him that she didn't keep. But he recently saw a picture of her and said he wanted to talk to her, so that's what we're doing. I don't think I'm ever going to be satisfied as to why she couldn't take care of him; however, the future is what's important here.

Sunny talked to her before Thanksgiving. She asked me what to get him for Christmas and I gave her a good idea, and we talked about visiting next year. We also talked about Sunny's baby brother. She has visits with him at their foster mom's. She told us again that it was Sunny's mother's wish that Sunny and his baby brother would grow up together if anything happened to her, and that hopefully, this would come to pass soon. I told her that I wanted to make sure Sunny and his brother always had a relationship with her. She has a lot of sad things going on in her life right now, so talking to Sunny was really important for her and cheered her up a lot.

Sunny's bio family and foster family have a fair amount of history together, although they're not related in any way. They even go to same family doctors.

Sunny also got to chat with his foster family on the webcam on Thanksgiving. He saw two foster cousins he really missed... they had a great time making funny faces and "peace out" signs at each other.

The other person I'd like to get in touch with eventually is Sunny's bio uncle. Sunny was so attached to him that he thought his uncle was his father; I've had to gently correct him about that several times. His uncle took care of Sunny for a while when Sunny was very young, and he wanted to adopt Sunny, but his father threatened to disown him if he did that, so he didn't. By the way, Sunny's maternal grandmother and grandfather have been divorced for a while, and his stepgrandmother was yet another relative who used to talk care of him.

Sunny's uncle hasn't made contact on his own through his mother, but I imagine he would like to talk to Sunny.

Charity and Finance

I thought I'd do a post about how I handle charitable giving, since I know it's a big topic this time of year. I'm actually really disorganized in some areas of my life, but when it comes to charitable giving, I run a tight ship.

I set aside 6% of my gross income for year-end charitable giving. I donate a bit more on top of that throughout the year, and that number doesn't count political campaign contributions. I used to feel terribly guilty not having any money to give to charities at the end of the year, until about six years ago, when I switched to an awesome system that lets me meet my goals with no pain.

Basically, I use direct deposit to withdraw 6% of my paycheck (and any bonus) and that 6% goes to a separate online savings account at ING Direct. It never hits my checking account and I don't include it in my budgeting.

At the end of the year, I line up all my charities, go to networkforgood.com and spend all the money in that account. I put the charges on my frequent flyer credit card, then pay it off immediately from the charity account, because that way I earn a lot of frequent flyer miles. Network For Good charges you a credit care processing fee which is also tax deductible. That means the charities don't have to pay processing fees, and they also don't have to expend money or labor to physically deposit the check. Network for Good also gives me a central record for my charitable tax deduction.

The way the system works, I don't have to agonize that I can't afford to give money. As long as we don't have a huge crisis, I can leave the money untouched and building up all year.

Here's the year-end list of charities I donate to. I've taken three or four off and added some more this year, but it's a lot like last year's list. Some guidelines:

1) I like legal defense funds because they help create lasting social change. However, I didn't donate to the NAACP this year because I'm not happy with their organizational effectiveness right now. I use Charity Navigator ratings and news stories to check that organizations are effective. Some organizations that don't have a perfect rating there -- like the Southern Poverty Law Center -- I'll donate to anyway because I'm very familiar with their work.

2) I like environmental organizations that work with local people to create sustainable conservation. For example, Wildlife Alliance has done a lot of stuff to try to stop Chinese people from eating threatened and endangered animals. They don't just say "stop it because white people think it's bad"; they sign on celebrities like Jackie Chan and Yao Ming who then try to persuade people using local media campaigns.

3) I try to use charitable donations to make amends for some of the horrible things my tax dollars have unwillingly helped cause. For example, giving to American Near East Refugee Aid.

• AHIMSA House, Inc.
• American Near East Refugee Aid
• Atlanta Community Food Bank, Inc.
• BUDDHIST CHURCHES OF AMERICA-ENDOW
• Center for Asian-American Media
• Center for Pan Asian Community Services, Inc.
• Children's Defense Fund
• CHRIS Kids, Inc.
• Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Inc. (CARE)
• DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS USA INC
• EcoLogic Development Fund
• Hands On Network
• HOSEA FEED THE HUNGRY AND HOMELESS PROGRAM INC
• International Rescue Committee, Inc.
• Japanese American Citizens League
• Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.
• MADRE
• MEXICAN AMERICAN LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND
• Nature Conservancy, Inc.
• PACHAMAMA ALLIANCE
• Save the Children
• SEVA FOUNDATION
• Sierra Club Foundation
• Southern Center for Human Rights
• Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc.
• THE CORAL REEF ALLIANCE
• Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Inc.
• United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, Inc.
• Wildlife Alliance, Inc.
• World Wildlife Fund, Inc.

You Will Be Absolutely Disgusted With Me For Having This Problem

My problem is... what to do in Hawaii with a rambunctious kid?

We're going there on a 10-day vacation. It's going to be cheap. We've been accumulating frequent flyer miles via credit card offers throughout the year and just cashed them in for the airfare. We're staying at my dad's place; he'll be in Japan instead during that time. The biggest expense is going to be the subcompact rental car.

I love this area of Hawaii. Last year, we went on a similar trip, and Guy and I just spent most of the time cooking awesome seafood dinners, reading and going on short tours around the island. This year I plan on making a go at reading 2666. I can also attend a Jodo Shinshu service, which I'm really looking forward to.

But I don't think Sunny is going to be down with any reading-six-hours-a-day schedule. So we're bringing a laptop and a portable DVD player with us and lots of stuff for him to watch. We can go swimming every day for a few hours. But then what?

I've also been looking for some kind of local class or activity for kids so Sunny can have other kids to play with and we can get a few hours of privacy (it's a studio apartment so we'll all be sleeping in the same room).

I'm sure it's going to be absolutely great once we get there. It's just taking a lot more mental effort to plan out.

Sunny is really excited about seeing sea turtles, waterfalls and climbing up a volcano. It's going to be the first time he's ever seen the ocean.

The Obama People in the Basement

We've had some Obama staffers staying in our basement. It's a very nice basement, by the way, fully finished with its own bathroom and a separate entrance. We were thinking of finishing it up a bit more and renting it out, but we realized that's going to have to wait until after Sunny's adoption is finalized, or else any prospective tenant will have to take a drug test and send their fingerprints to the FBI.

The Obama staffers were sent to Georgia to work on the Jim Martin campaign. They sure work hard! One has been staying for almost a week, but I've only seen her once for about ten minutes. They don't get in until midnight, and they leave shortly after I've taken Sunny to school.

Sunny did very well this weekend. He watched a lot of his favorite shows on the computer yesterday -- Backyardigans and Transformers -- the ones I've been promising to get him. By the way, the new Transformers animated series looks awful. The one I grew up with in the 1980s was vastly superior. Sunny also had a fun exploration session with the kids in the neighborhood and practiced some soccer kicks.

He wet the bed last night -- the first time since starting the no diaper regimen. Guy had woken him up at 11PM, but Sunny wouldn't pee, and I explained that that's why he wet the bed.

He put his sheets in the washing machine, took a shower with very little complaining and says he is going to try harder tonight. He had a good attitude: a little disappointed that he wet the bed, but not devastated.

It's very difficult to wake him up to get him to the bathroom. One night, he kept on diving for the bed and I had to block him while Guy tackle-grabbed him from behind. I felt like we were playing rugby. Of course, he never remembers any of this stuff the next morning. We just have to be firm, get him to the bathroom and get him to count to ten slowly while trying to pee, which seems to work. So far, as long as we can do that, he's had dry nights.

A Milder Challenge

Sunny's behavior has improved a lot since returning to full dosage. He's still often pouty, of course, but no more meltdowns.

We're working on a new front this week: bedwetting.

We were so worried about his self-confidence in the beginning that we didn't want to focus on bedwetting at all. He wears pullups and he has two layers of sheet protectors. When he lived with his foster family, he had dry nights 50% of the time, and during his visit he also had 50%, but that soon changed to 100% wet once he moved in. We weren't giving him any positive or negative feedback about wetting, just making sure he threw away his diaper in the morning and then wiped with wet naps (he has his regular shower at night, not in the morning).

Since then, we've realized that lack of self-confidence is not one of his issues, and that taking a very hands-off approach to bedwetting is not getting us anywhere. Recently, I noticed that he's peed in his pullup even before going to bed! These modern-day diapers are so comfortable that there's very little motivation not to pee in them.

We had a talk with him a few days ago. We said we're all going on vacation soon. He might also want to go on a sleepover at some point. Maybe it's time to try going without a diaper. It's not going to work right away, but if he keeps trying, we know he can do it. He seemed to be very receptive to this message.

The new routine is that Sunny's not going to wear a diaper, and we're going to wake him up at 11PM to use the bathroom. If he wets the bed, in the morning he needs to put the sheet protector and maybe also the sheet in the washing machine, which is across from his bedroom. Then we'll have to shower him off and re-lotion. This is going to make the morning more difficult and we'll all have to get up a bit earlier.

He wet the bed last night, but it was only a very little bit. We'll see how it goes. I think he can do it. We were having a lot of problems with light daytime wetting several months ago, but that all cleared up when we really focused on it and talked a lot about how to make sure he made it to the bathroom on time. Nighttime wetting is going to be harder; we just have to be patient. The wet sheets should be a simple natural consequence against peeing in bed.

Sunny did a very nice thing the other day. I gave him some money to buy a book at his school book fair. He bought a book for himself, and then bought another book for a classmate who didn't have enough money. What a sweet kid!