I Have a Sneaking Suspicion About Our Therapist

Well, this sucks.

I couldn't go to therapy today due to my work schedule, but I'd talked extensively to Guy about what we should bring up in today's session. The main points were: 1) our weekend trip to Sunny's home state, which is sure to stir up some strong emotions 2) recurrence of his chainsaw nightmare 3) the way his fits have lately seemed like he's just going through the motions and isn't really feeling them (he had one this week).

Guy and Sunny showed up on time. The therapist was 5 minutes late. He said he was locked out of his office, so he led them into the file storage room for the session. He brought a chair in for himself, sat on it, and rubbed his forehead while looking distracted. Once Guy realized a chair wouldn't be forthcoming, he sat down on a cardboard box. Sunny just stood. They all talked for a little bit, but the therapist seemed very disjointed. He didn't remember the chainsaw nightmare, or much of anything, for that matter. After ten minutes he asked Sunny if he was feeling OK. Sunny said yes, of course. "See you next week!" That was it. Guy left... but as he drove back he got more and more irritated with the therapist's behavior. The therapist has canceled a lot of sessions in the past. The receptionist he shares with another practice has often called us to cancel sessions because she says he's sick.

It isn't a waste of money for us, because he takes Medicaid and we don't pay anything out of pocket for the sessions. But after some discussion Guy and I decided we're just going to "break up" with him in a passive way. Guy is going to cancel next week's appointment and we're not going to make any new ones. I'll start looking for another therapist that takes Medicaid.

All of the therapist's behaviors point me to one suspected root cause: HEROIN. I'll feel bad if it turns out he has killer migraines or a brain tumor or something like that. But he should say so in that case, because otherwise, it looks very, very squirrely.  In the past, when I've seen or heard of behavior like this, it's been caused by heroin. That whole avoiding eye contact thing seems more like a mark of heroin addiction than crack or meth (people on meth make especially horrible and inappropriate eye contact).  I think he left something he didn't want Guy to see on his desk, and that's why he pretended he was locked out.

When I was a teenager, I worked for a junkie boss once, in an ice cream store, and it was a total nightmare. At first, I thought he was just going into the back of the store and getting drunk or smoking pot. Then he started leaving his dirty needles in a paper bag next to the cash register... He used to go into the backroom for ten minutes or so, then come out front staggering and weaving and ineffectually sexually harassing me. I would wave him away and make him return to the backroom to lie down on the cot in the corner. I left after a few weeks of this, but I heard the situation deteriorated quite a bit afterwards.

I'm going to start looking for a new therapist on Monday. All we need is someone who will do simple play therapy with Sunny weekly, or once every two weeks... who will get to know him, establish a consistent program of anger management for all of us, and be able to work through highly emotional issues with as they arise (like this trip we're taking). All I want from a therapist is that they 1) show up to appointments 2) listen to us and to Sunny and remember what we tell them 3) don't use overtly religious therapies 4) have some experience working with children from foster care 5) do play therapy, which is something that Sunny responds well to. That's not so much to ask for, is it? There are a gazillion therapists in Atlanta and I guess I just have to keep plugging through the lists in search of a new therapist, who will be our fourth one so far.  The first one had no clue, the second was great until she recommended spanking, and the third is... umm... potentially way too problematic.

Our neighbor says their family therapist is great and would fit all the criteria, but he doesn't take Medicaid.  I might end up going to him if things keep falling through with other therapists. Perhaps it could fall under my insurance.

BB Timeline Update

I've been talking to BB's caseworker for a while. I have a very tentative timeline. First comes the official matching, which will happen very soon. Perhaps next week. I need to submit a letter requesting a subsidy. The subsidy is going to be a LOT lower than Sunny's, due to budget constraints. I'm just hoping for anything better than zero dollars a month. I don't care about the subsidy as much as I care about making 100% sure we get Medicaid for BB.

The actual cross-state investigation/paperwork process is going to take many months. How many? It took five months for Sunny. Add in a month for the holiday season, and another couple months for the budget crisis, and we should still be able to get full placement before BB turns two years old. I have to look at the bright side, otherwise it's just too depressing.

They won't pay or reimburse for pre-placement visits anymore, since the state ran out of money. The caseworker did say they would pay to fly BB down at least once. This is totally meaningless, since he would have to have someone fly with him, and children under 2 fly for free for anyway.

This translates into a really open visitation schedule... whatever we can afford, basically. We could bring him down to Georgia for periods of up to a week, but that would mean someone flying there, flying back with BB, then flying BB back, then flying back home.

If I figured out some way to work from there, I could go up for a week at a time, and just feed him and sleep next to him for that week... I don't know. It's going to take a lot of planning.

One really worrisome thing is that according to the Georgia adoption rules, an infant older than one year cannot sleep in the same bedroom as an adult. I'm not a believer in full-on attachment parenting, but I've read a lot of convincing stuff that says children like BB who are in danger of attachment disorder need co-sleeping.

Weekend Update with Gun Violence Q&A

I'm closing the weekend on a down note, although it has mostly gone well. Sunny's behavior has been pretty good. He had two rewards he was working hard towards. The first was going to see Astro Boy; I promised I would take him as long as he didn't have a fit or major snit. The second was a candy bar, which he could get if he won the "anger management game". This is just a simple point system where we get a point if he loses his temper and yells or backtalks, and gets a point if we tell him "no" and he doesn't lose his temper.

We spent the whole day together, since Guy was off on a day trip. Sunny ran lots of errands with me and was extremely helpful. He got in some quality play time as well.

I was very appreciative of Sunny today because I had a horrible nightmare the other night. In the dream, my family was vacationing in a city by the beach. The city was full of nightclubs and restaurants and hotels built almost vertically on high cliffs above the beach. The beach was full of swimming vacationers and also full of large sea turtles... it was hard to walk down the beach without stumbling over a sea turtle. Something complicated was happening and I had to run from place to place handling various issues. I ended up in a restaurant balcony on the cliff, watching Sunny play far below. All of a sudden, I saw a huge, 100-foot tall wave rushing out of the ocean -- it wiped the beach completely clean of everything and everyone. Guy and my mother rushed over to the restaurant, I figured out that Sunny had been lost to the wave and I started crying, and kept crying for what seemed like forever.

I have recurrent nightmares involving tsunamis. I don't know why. In real life, I have very little fear of the ocean or even of large waves, and I'm a strong swimmer.

We had an interesting talk about guns in the car today. One of my friends that Sunny knows was once shot in the chest during a failed mugging in Little 5 Points, and Sunny is kind of obsessed with that incident... I think it ties into his long-standing obsession with Abraham Lincoln getting shot. I had to answer a lot of questions about guns today.

If someone shot at our car, would the glass stop it?
- No, because the car doesn't have special bulletproof glass.

If someone shot at our car, what would we do?
- I would yell at you to duck down, then I would duck down and keep driving, and we would get away.

But what about you? I could duck down because I'm little, but you're too big, you wouldn't fit under the seat.
- I wouldn't need to duck down all the way.

How could you keep driving if you were ducked down so you couldn't see out the front?
- I could drive while peeking out of the corner of my eye.

Have you done it before?
- No, I've never driven under gunfire but I'm pretty confident I could manage it if I had to.

Can people who are big get shot and live like your friend who got shot and lived?
- Yes, but it's a better idea not to get shot in the first place.

If you get shot by a bazooka could you live?
- No.

If I was shot would I get killed because I'm little?
- It depends on where you got shot.

If I got shot in the leg I wouldn't die.
- Well, if the bullet hit your femoral artery in your leg, you might bleed out and die. Like I said, it's better not to get shot in the first place. A lot of kids die each year because they play with guns and they shoot themselves or their friends by accident. They think guns are cool because kids see so many movies where guns are cool, but they don't realize how dangerous they are.

So they didn't mean to do it? That's impossible!
- No, it's really easy, maybe they look down the barrel and they hit the trigger by accident.

How come Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and he lived for three days?
- (I should have this answer down cold by now but I don't) Umm, because the bullet caused his brain to bleed, and the doctors couldn't get into his brain to stop the blood, so it took three days but he was bleeding too much in his brain to live.

The brain has a lot of blood in it because we need blood to give us lots of energy to think!
- That sounds right.

I was oddly touched that Sunny was worried about my safety during gunfire.

He also made me a really nice offer later on. I was pulled over by a cop for an annoying reason: not seeing a minuscule "No Turn on Red" sign. Luckily, the policeman didn't give me a moving violation ticket, but instead of letting me off with a warning, he gave me an even stupider ticket: not having proof of insurance (I had an insurance card but it was expired). Georgia has an automated system and they can look up proof of insurance in seconds, so I didn't even know you were still required to carry around a current insurance card! He obviously knew I had valid insurance... this "no proof" ticket is just a stupid nuisance. Anyway, Sunny said he felt bad for me and offered to pay my ticket out for his birthday present money! I told him, "No, it's my responsibility since I was the one driving, but thanks a lot anyway."

Back to the gun stuff... I believe in being pretty graphic about what guns can do. Here in the U.S. we get a ridiculous amount of positive messages about guns. Guns = instant power = instant masculinity, and so on. Gun messages start at a preschool level and just get stronger and stronger. There's no way to totally shield kids from these messages, and the idea of the gun is too powerful to fight against. The pragmatic remedy is to try and balance the idea with the reality. If you just tell kids that guns are evil and leave it at that, I doubt they're really going to take it to heart.

It's also important to know what to do in case of gunfire. I've talked about that with Sunny before. If you hear a gunshot, hit the ground and crawl to cover. I've had to do this more than a couple times in my life. Just last year in Charlotte, actually!

People who don't understand these simple lessons, perhaps because they were lucky enough to grow up somewhere without a strong gun culture, are really vulnerable. For example, I remember a party I went to a long time ago in Miami, where a friend of a friend publicly announced that someone had taken his .22 out of his backpack. He spent an hour trying to find it, then went to the police station at 2 in the morning to report it stolen (otherwise, if someone had shot someone with that gun, he might have gotten blamed for it). It turned out a drunk German backpacker who had washed up at the party had taken it, thinking it was a toy pistol, and was passed out on top of it in a bedroom corner somewhere.

I've heard a lot of anecdotes about young Europeans getting into serious trouble in Miami. In a lot of European countries, if you get in a bar fight, people hit each other, and the worst that happens is a bloody nose. But people are more polite in places like Miami, where everyone and their grandmother has a gun, because you should take for granted that your opponent isn't going to start a fistfight... instead, they'll just go out to the parking lot, get their gun and wait for you. Drunken soccer hooligan type behavior in a gun culture is a disaster waiting to happen.

Sunny's Pawpaw (Guy's mother's husband) has a gazillion rifles but he keeps them carefully in a safe. J's father (J is Sunny's friend, the pinecone lighter) also has a gun and keeps it in a safe. But realistically speaking, someday Sunny is going to end up in a house where somebody is not responsible, and kids/teenagers can get hold of the gun...

I've spent so much time writing about guns I'm too tired to talk about the reason I'm feeling down today. It's all about my dad. I was relying on him for something and he let me down. He can be such a jerk sometimes. Maybe I'll write about it later.

On all other fronts, things are going well. I feel pretty good about my health. Today was a day of rest -- relative rest, that is, considering all the stuff I did with Sunny. Yesterday, I finished my 5th consecutive Level 1 Slim in 6, did weight training at the gym and got an extremely painful but effective massage. There was a scapula pop involved. I'm not sure if I'm going to get all the way through Slim in 6 in 6 weeks, simply because my arm strength is not very good... I'm fine with all the leg work but I can't follow along 100% with the arms. At one point I think you're suposed to do about 16 push-ups and I can barely do 6. It's going to take me a while to build up the arm strength, and I'm going to be conservative and not start the next level until my arms are ready for it.

I also need to write a post about Astro Boy and adoption. The movie has huge, huge adoption issues, including a portrayal of two extremes of bad adoptive parenting: 1) the parent who wants to force an adoptee to fit their image of the fantasy child 2) the Fagin-type parent who takes in and exploits the orphaned.

Although, when you think about it, adoption issues are all over children's and fantastic and superhero stories. Superman? Transracial adoption. Spiderman? Relative adoption. It's rare to encounter a story without it. It's like a reliable motor to drive a story with.

I'll leave with some Twitter stuff. The hash tag #oneletteroffmovies has been really popular lately, and all the funniest one letter off variations have been done already. I contributed my own variation, #oneletteroffWernerHerzogmovies, though I warn you it will only be somewhat humorous if you're German, a film geek, have a juvenile sense of humor or some combination of those three qualities.

Aguirre, the Wrath of Cod
Bad Lieutenant: Poot of Call New Orleans
Cabra Verde
Fescue Dawn
Nosferatu the Vampire
Little Dieter Needs to Fry
My Best Friend

I love Werner Herzog. I can't wait for the Bad Lieutenant remake that's coming out next month. I don't know if it's going to be good, but it's going to be extremely something.

Link Post: The Many Ways that Asian Adoptees are Vulnerable

This is so sad. But these are such important stories to hear. I'll let the links and quotes speak for themselves.

From girl4708:

Screening for Woody Allen

Today I’ve got no insights, revelations, or provocations. Today I am merely asking questions. The question I mainly want to ask is: How do we screen out Woody Allen? There are a few of us molested Korean adoptees who have come out of the shadows to speak about the traumatic consequences of latent yellow fever combined with the ability to adopt yellow.

Do these men KNOW they have yellow fever when they adopt? Is that why they choose Asian countries to adopt from?

Are these men pedophiles before they adopt?

What is it about these men that allows them to cross personal boundaries, morals, and ethics?

How is it these men are so infantile and self-absorbed they ultimately can not control their urges?

WHY WERE MY FATHER’S WHITE, BIOLOGICAL CHILDREN NOT MOLESTED, BUT I WAS?

[...]

From O Solo Mama:

Adoption: When Satan doesn't want you to

It’s been brewing for some time but now appears somewhat official: there is a Christian duty to adopt. Christian evangelicals are being commanded to “be at the forefront of the adoption of orphans close to home and around the world.”

[...]

Andrea says:
October 22, 2009 at 7:19 pm

Check out this story from a Christian family adopting:

http://jdavis2.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/the-cultural-advantage/

"we also have the advantage of understanding our host culture’s worldview and their very deep superstitious beliefs. thus, we were not surprised that sterling was given to us with a jade luck charm – a buddhist charm meant to bring good luck, fortune and protection. we, however, know that this charm is associated with spiritual forces meant to keep people in bondage. thus, we smiled and accepted it as we should, and then later went to the park, broke it, and threw it into the pond, and prayed for our sterling that all spiritual bondage over him would be broken. these spiritual forces are alive and real, and manifest themselves in more obvious ways (but with the same degree of power) than in the west, but we know that the power and grace of the God who created the heavens and the earth is infinitely greater than the forces of evil."

From AdoptionTalk, also discussed at American Family:

Eyes Wide Open: Surgery to Westernize the Eyes of an Asian Child
One of my colleagues told me about this article -- she teaches it in Bioethics. It is a horrific must-read:

The speaker was a proud father. To illustrate his comments about a piece of art that celebrated the wonders of modern medicine (and which he had just donated to a local hospital), he told a story about his adopted Asian daughter. He described her as a beautiful, happy child in whom he took much delight. Her life, he told the audience, had been improved dramatically by the miracle of modern medicine. When she joined her new Caucasian family, her eyes, like those of many people of Asian descent, lacked a fold in the upper eyelid, and that lack was problematic—in his view—because it made her eyes small and sleepy and caused them to shut completely when she smiled. A plastic surgeon himself, he knew she did not need to endure this hardship, so he arranged for her to have surgery to reshape her eyes. The procedure, he explained, was minimally invasive and maximally effective. His beautiful daughter now has big round eyes that stay open and shine even when she smiles.

Sex and Scoliosis

What does scoliosis have to do with sex?

There are a lot of connections. I guess I'll need to start by explaining scoliosis. It's a common disorder, but one that is often very misunderstood by the general public, as well as many non-orthopedic doctors. Most people vaguely remember a scoliosis check from their school days. Sometimes the kids are lined up in a row, and told to take off their shirts and bend over while a medical professional inspects them from the back. The experience is obviously rather humiliating and tends to cause a lot of nervous laughter.

Scoliosis -- a sideways, left-right asymmetry of the spine -- is the most common form of spinal deformity. It can also be accompanied by other forms of spinal deformity, like kyphosis (AKA hunchback) and extreme lordosis (AKA swayback). It sometimes comes as a package deal along with disorders of connective tissue, or with cerebral palsy and spinal bifida. In those cases, scoliosis is often diagnosed at a very early age.

The other kind of scoliosis, the much more common kind, seems to come out of nowhere. It's known as adolescent idiopathic scoliosis or AIS. "Idiopathic" is from the same Greek root as "idiot" and basically means "we have no idea what causes it." Though recent research has shown that it's actually genetic, and they've even tracked down the genetic location (but only if you're white, which is bizarre, because there isn't any significant racial/ethnic difference in prevalence rate). Someone with this kind of scoliosis (usually a girl, as the incidence of more serious curves among women is 7-10 times that of men) is born with a normal-looking spine. Before puberty, the spine begins to bend and curve. Maybe it stays there... maybe it gets worse through puberty. Then maybe it stays there, or maybe it gets a lot worse close to menopause. Without major surgery, it's essentially a one way road. In scoliosis vocabulary, when curves get worse, it's called "progression". "Progression" is bad. Arresting progression is good.

According to this NIH resource, "Of every 1,000 children, 3 to 5 develop spinal curves that are considered large enough to need treatment." If you adjust for sex, the rate climbs up to almost 1% of all girls. I don't know of any source that says actually how many girls receive treatment of which types. Treatment means to watch, take lots of x-rays, determine progression, and if it looks like progression is, well, progressing, to brace. Or in very serious cases, go directly to spinal fusion.

That's the "Milwaukee" variant of brace. It's the kind I had. It's made from hard plastic and steel. It's expensive, ugly, frightening, and extremely uncomfortable. The family nickname for my brace was "The Iron Maiden". You can climb into it and strap it on and off, and adjustments of the screws will accommodate changing body shape during puberty. I think you're supposed to wear it until a few years past puberty, when your spine growth finally halts. The brace is an old form of treatment and it's shown to be moderately effective at arresting progression.



Many girls experience horror and anger when they find out what bracing is going to mean for their lives, and that it won't even fix them, it will just probably keep them from getting any worse.

It was easier for me to accept my fate. First of all, my mother also has idiopathic scoliosis, and her curve was fairly serious. Hers is comparable to the woman pictured above. She had not been treated as a girl, and her scoliosis had slowly progressed as she went into middle age. She eventually had a spinal fusion -- two long steel rods screwed into her spine -- and was in the hospital for two weeks. So I had a strong motivation to make sure my curve didn't progress as far as my mother's. She was also a positive role model for me. I saw her as an active, glamorous woman who refused to be limited by scoliosis. I tried to adopt the same stoic attitude toward my own scoliosis. Second of all, my orthopedist said it was OK to only wear my brace 12 hours a day, which meant I slept in it, but I didn't have to wear it to school. I think he may have subscribed to the philosophy that although the brace should really be worn 23 hours a day, there's so much social stigma attached to it that many girls rebel, and won't wear it at all, whereas a private bracing regimen has more likelihood of consistent follow-through.

I don't know if it would have made school any worse. I've written before about the extensive racist abuse, and sexualized racist abuse, I got in late elementary and middle school.

I was harassed so much in the locker room my first year of middle school that I refused to change my clothes at all. P.E. was a living nightmare full of verbal attacks and physical threats from larger girls. I spent much of my time desperately thinking of ways I could get a medical excuse. Unfortunately, aside from my scoliosis, I was healthy as a horse. I refused to participate in activities anyway, and sat with the asthma-sidelined section. I'm still bitter about this experience because it taught me to associate healthy athleticism with emotional trauma and racist bullying. Maybe if I'd had my brace on, I could have gotten my coveted medical excuse.

It was something I never, ever thought of at the time, though. The orthopedist's word was the word of law. And the brace was something to be hidden. I think this is a common tendency among brace-wearers. Girls that age don't want to be seen in a brace. For photos, they'll take off the brace. If they're told to wear it to school, they're mocked and stared at. At the time, I considered myself very lucky that I was able to hide my brace from other kids my age.

I don't know much about disability theory and disablism, but I've been reading through blogs about it, and it's very interesting in relation to scoliosis. I don't identify as a disabled person/person with disabilities, and I don't think many other people with idiopathic scoliosis do. But many of us have also gone through an intensely emotional adolescent period where we're viewed as disabled.

One of the hallmarks of disablism is that it strips away sexuality. The prejudice against disabled people includes thinking they are not supposed to exist sexually, have sexual desire or be desired.

Being braced means going through puberty strapped and screwed in to a weird exoskeleton that incarnates the negation and emprisonment of your sexuality. Your breasts and hips are starting to grow. They might start to bump painfully against the brace. So you have to visit the doctor -- often an older man -- who adjusts your screws to accomodate your new growth.

The brace seems anti-sexual, but it also has positive sexual connotations. The light at the end of the dark tunnel is that the brace will "keep you normal". You'll get through puberty and enter into sexually desirable womanhood without too much spinal deformity... the brace will preserve you. The brace probably becomes the most significant physical object in your life, for good and for evil.

I certainly didn't receive any counseling about my scoliosis. I don't know if it's common today to have counseling as part of the bracing process. If it's not, it should be. Girls who have gone through bracing feel like it's them, alone, against the world. Although it's quite a common experience, by medical and social tradition, the disorder is isolated and hidden.

This study showed that bracing doesn't affect self-image much. However, it also takes places in Sweden, where school environment I'm sure is quite different than in the U.S. This other U.S. study tells a somewhat different story: "Scoliosis was an independent risk factor for suicidal thought, worry and concern over body development, and peer interactions after adjustment. CONCLUSION: Scoliosis is a significant risk factor for psychosocial issues and health-compromising behavior. Gender differences exist in male and female adolescents with scoliosis."

After bracing, scoliosis, and deformities of the spine in general, become almost invisible. It's extremely rare to have a spinal deformity so pronounced that anyone can tell by looking at you when you have clothes on. People with idiopathic scoliosis "pass". People have known me for years, even decades, without knowing I had scoliosis. Then one day they'll see me in a bathing suit -- and not even the first time they saw me in a bathing suit, but maybe the first time they really focused on my back -- and they'll burst out with something like, "OH MY GOD DID YOU KNOW SOMETHING IS REALLY WRONG WITH YOUR SPINE!!"

Once it stops being invisible, it's all of a sudden very, very visible. I guess it's sort of like shaking hands with someone and suddenly realizing they have six fingers.

If I'm not experiencing any back pain, I rarely think about my scoliosis, although I sometimes worry about my future. Pregnancy is not a risk factor for progression, but menopause is. Right now, my thoracic curve is 36 degrees. If it gets past 40, I might need spinal fusion surgery. This is a mostly safe procedure, but it's still really scary, and involves weeks in the hospital. Click on the following link if you've seen enough David Cronenberg movies that you think you can handle it (link to nightmarish spinal fusion surgery image). Spinal fusion partially reverses the curve, arrests or slows down further progression and relieves chronic pain. You're still reasonably flexible afterwards, but there are potential complications, and I'm not considering surgery at this stage. If I refused surgery, and my curve happened to progress further, I would start to have more pain and diminished lung capacity. Past 60 degrees, I might start to experience severe and constant pain in my back and/or ribs, and my internal organs would get squeezed together and I might start to have breathing problems. Past 80 degrees I might have lung AND heart problems.

But I don't stay up night worrying about the risks of progression. Many people have more uncertainty about their medical future than I do. For example, if I had diabetes, I might worry about having a foot amputation.

Since I grew up with scoliosis, it's taken me a while to understand how it looks from the outside. Aesthetically speaking: not good. We're conditioned to associate left-right symmetry with health and general wellbeing. People with moderate scoliosis, like me, often look symmetrical from the front, but assymetrical from the back, and I suppose that seems eery and perhaps even deceptive and sneaky. There's a lot of really negative associations in popular culture (e.g. Hunchback of Notre Dame). When mean-spirited people do "retard" imitations they'll often hunch up one shoulder and stagger in order to simulate a deformed spine.

I don't talk about scoliosis casually because a) I don't have any major health problems because of it, so there's not that much to talk about b) I'm afraid of it being used against me. I'll put it on medical history forms when I know I can be assured of privacy. It was used against me recently when I applied for private disability insurance. I thought it would be a good idea to have a separate private policy in case I lost my job for any reason. I did a ton of research, spent a lot of time talking with the salesman, and ended up with a quote that specifically excluded anything going wrong with my reproductive system AND my back. I changed my mind and decided it wasn't worth buying since so much of my body was apparently uninsurable. They excluded my ENTIRE BACK. Hypothetically speaking, if I got in a minor car accident, and as a result developed the exact same kind of back problems that anyone without scoliosis would develop, nothing would be covered. What a terrible deal. No thanks!

The health implications of my scoliosis are not that extreme, and I don't need any accommodations to perform any major life activities, which is why I don't consider myself disabled.

- I have foot pain in my arch if I don't wear comfortable shoes. I can wear platforms, but I can't wear high heels.
- I have to be a bit careful doing things like yoga and pilates.
- I have to stay reasonably active in order to be 100% pain-free. When I get too sedentary, I start having back pain and rib pain. If I ever had an illness that forced me to rest all the time, I'd be in big trouble. Exercise and stretching are highly effective for scoliosis back pain. Other options I would consider to control pain if it ever got worse include drugs, physical therapy and adult braces. There are a gazillion alternative health "cures" for scoliosis back pain suffering, but they strike me as being of very dubious efficacy.
- I have to watch my posture
- I have to watch my weight. Excess weight leads to back pain. Being underweight might be even worse, because being underweight is connected to bone density loss, and people with scoliosis have lower than average bone density anyway.

None of these problems are really unique to scoliosis. Plenty of able-bodied and disabled people have back pain or foot pain.

This link from Eurospine.org sums it up: "Progression of scoliosis can involve an aesthetic problem and lead to functional problems. Respiratory disorders may develop in large curves greater than 80º. Nonetheless, the mortality rates and vital prognosis in individuals with scoliosis are comparable to those of the general population."

It's the "aesthetic problem" of scoliosis that's unique. Like I mentioned before, left-right symmetry is wound up with definitions of health and beauty across many different cultures. People like me are aware of this on a subconscious or barely conscious level. 99.99% of the time I forget that I don't fit that symmetrical standard. Every so often I'm reminded, and it feels a bit painful. There are subtle psychological effects. Vague feelings of being a secret curved impostor in a straight-backed world. Times when I feel like my spine is an enemy working against me... times when it hurts to breathe and the pain makes me feel angry at my spreading rib bones, and I wish I could reach inside of myself and squeeze them back into place. Sometimes I'm bitter about the inches of height I lost to scoliosis.

Back to sex. Even without bracing, there's still a sexual paradox when it comes to scoliosis. Have you ever seen a picture of a woman with scoliosis and/or kyphosis that was not anonymous, depersonalized, clinical, grim and depressing? Like the photos I included above? Scoliosis is profoundly unsexy.

On the other hand, when women pose provocatively, they often throw one hip to the side and put one shoulder forward.Why is that pose sexy? Maybe it makes us look femininely defenseless and vulnerable, as opposed to a masculine, stick straight pose. That's going along with a typical sexist definition of "femininity". There's another less sexist possibility... the pose is also highlighting the flexibility of the spine. So in that sense, the woman is showing off her body's capacity by bending in a certain way.

There's a comic book artist, Rob Liefeld, who was (in)famous starting in the 1980s for drawing unrealistic women. The conventions of drawing women are in comics are easy to criticize, but Liefeld's stuff is... well...I guess you'd have to see the spinal curvature to believe it.

That's supposed to be sexy. For the audience of predominantly young men who made Liefeld very popular, it must have been sexy. This is a funny analysis of the above drawing by a group of women comic book artists:

Take note of Avengelyne’s waist and how it is thinner than her head. Minus the hair. Note how it hangs beneath her ribcage like a suspension bridge, rather than actually supporting the top of her body. (Her torso must be kept afloat by those helium breasts.) Note the scoliosis gone grossly untreated. Note the little leather bags which wouldn’t fit around a normal person’s wrist. Especially note that the artist put her in the most obvious POSE to exaggerate the spine: a profile shot with negative space between her back and arm. That’s correct - our intrepid heroine’s spine would appear yanked. Avengelyne is a SWAYback™.

The humor is partly at my expense. But I can't help laughing. It's a highly sexualized image, but not one that I identify with in any way.

But here's a poster image I ran across that uses stupid sexist humor to make fun of a real woman, and I don't find it funny at all.

It really illuminates the double standard that women are subjected to. You're supposed to be sexy so that you please men. But if it looks like you're trying TOO hard, men (and other women) will make fun of you. If you don't wear makeup, you're a [insert homophobic slur]. Wear too much makeup, you're a [insert transgender-phobic slur]. Curve your back, look sexy. Curve it too much, it looks like you're deformed. Argh!

Thanks to my brief readings of disability theory, I realize that making fun of people with spinal deformities isn't something I should just accept as the natural order of things, especially because this humor is connected to moral judgments of disability. That is, the idea that physical body difference reflects some kind of moral failing. When it comes to scoliosis, I think the general public halfway believes that scoliosis is the fault of the person's family. There's a myth that giving young kids backpacks that are too heavy will make their spines curve (totally not true). When people are adults, "she should have had that corrected" is sometimes an assumption. A lot of people don't realize that the only sure way to even partly reverse a curve is spinal fusion, which also leaves a giant seam-scar running up your back. Another judgment is that a person with scoliosis must be poor. It's true that I'm very lucky I had access to bracing; if I wasn't born into a middle-class family in a rich country, my curve would be a lot worse by now. So there are major class differences in scoliosis, but ultimately, we're all in different positions on the same boat because there is no way to permanently and completely reverse adult scoliosis.

Thanks to flickr, I did actually find some images of scoliosis that I think are beautiful and help affirm positive self-image and sexuality. I wish I'd found a greater variety of body types, but these images are great to start off with. Some are post spinal fusion.

First, here's the typical clinical picture. It shows everything that's wrong with the body.

Now here are the flickr pictures. They show the open possibility and vitality of a body with scoliosis.

It's heartening to see a bunch of pictures like that. There are more at this link.

When I walk, my right hip swivels a bit higher and wider than my left hip. I've had people tell me it looks sexy. I've had people ask if I've hurt my foot. Neither reaction bothers me anymore. The way I walk is just the way I walk. It gets me where I need to go.

Acknowledgements for this post: thanks to Thorn for commenting about this issue, and mentioning how it negatively affected your adoption homestudy due to ignorance on the part of the social worker. Also thanks to Deesha Philyaw on Twitter for mentioning the Judy Blume book about a girl who goes through bracing: Deenie. I wish I'd gotten a chance to read that book when I was a girl, and it sounds really interesting.

Health Plan

I hesitate to write this, because I might jinx it, but I feel like I'm starting to climb out of a hole in terms of my physical health.

The last month I've been depressed.  There are several factors but the largest one is the situation with BB.

I'd call this a mild functional depression.  I had truly deep depression only once in my life, when I was 19. It lasted about a month and was something I don't think I could ever handle again.  When I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, I just had one thought: how I could ration and kill time until I went back to sleep. I could only talk in monosyllables and was constantly on the verge of crying. At the time, I was feeling terrible isolation staying in Tokyo that summer... I'd flown there soon after sitting for a month at my grandmother's deathbed in Florida, waiting for her to die slowly of emphysema. She weighed about 60 pounds at the end. I held up well during the time, because I was supporting my mother, but fell apart shortly afterwards when I was on my own and didn't have an emotional "job" anymore.

If something that bad ever happened to me again, I'd go to a doctor and get some kind of antidepressant. My only experience with medication has been the time I tried Wellbutrin to quit smoking. I couldn't take the side effects and stopped taking the pills after a week.  I ended up quitting a year later on the patch.  The Wellbutrin gave me dry mouth, I needed to pee all the time because I had to drink so much to get rid of the dry mouth, I couldn't get to sleep at night, and I kept looking over my shoulder all day because I had a low-level paranoia that people were sneaking up behind me. But at least I was getting stuff done!  Being miserable with side effects while getting stuff done would be my preference over being miserable while vegetating.

Anyway, because I've been depressed recently, and very inactive, I'm about 15-20 pounds overweight.  This is turning into a disaster.  I'm not healthy at this weight.  My bra size has gone from 36A to 38B, which freaks me out.  Even though a lot of boys and girls made fun of me when I was younger for having small breasts, I've never felt bad about them, and I love the freedom of almost never having to wear a bra.  Now I've had to buy a bunch of new ones, and wear one every moment I'm upright, or else I'm in pain. I HATE IT.  Second, the weight might be aggravating my scoliosis.  I have rib pain that comes and goes because the 36-degree sideways curve of my spine squeezes some ribs together and spreads the other ones apart too much, and it's been getting worse recently. 

I'm adding different things to a regimen of trying to get healthier and get to my optimum weight.

- Going back to taking the supplements that I had unwisely started to skip.  I also have mild anemia and need a multivitamin with extra iron.  Of course, the extra iron gives me (ahem) digestive issues and I have to take fiber powder to counteract that.  So I've got to take 1) SAM-E in the morning for mood 2) multivitamin, fish oil and primrose oil capsules, plus fiber, in the evening.
- Going back on the South Beach diet.  I'm doing a modified Phase I. My only problem with the South Beach Phase I food guidelines is that they don't include a lot of Asian dishes... I'm sticking with 90% of the guidelines, but substituting in fairly low-carb things like miso soup and curried lentils. The main part is cutting out all bread, all rice, and all added sugar.  I've been making sure to cook dinners where there are still rice and potatoes and pasta for Guy and Sunny, but I can be full eating everything else.  And also remembering to eat 5 times a day and not let myself get hungry.
- Starting an exercise program.  I've started the "Slim in 6" home program and did the first set last night. I felt great afterwards!  I'm going to try add in a gym session once a week, on the weekend, for weight training, which I think is a realistic goal.  Three times a week is setting myself up for failure.  I was going to buy a rowing machine, but I realized that would be murder on my back because of scoliosis, so I'm going to stick with fairly low impact fitness videos like Slim in 6, and yoga.

Beyond just getting back to normal, here's my extra motivation! I have a naturally blocky build - broad shoulders, wide hips but not much waist - here are some actresses (Michelle Rodriguez and Katee Sackoff) rocking the body shape I'd like to achieve after some major fitness work:

I've hardly seen any Asian women with a body type like mine.  Although I have the typical long Asian torso/short legs (I have to buy petite-size pants even though I'm 5'8"), it seems like I'm a lot wider from shoulder to shoulder than any East Asian woman of my comparable size.

Anyway, here goes.  I hope to be in pretty good shape by the end of this year.

I fondly remember the best shape I was ever in... when I spent several weeks in a small beach town in Mexico in my early 20s.  I ate lots of awesome seafood, street tacos, fresh fruit and French pastries.  I spent all day bodyboarding and snorkeling, which builds the upper arms, and all night dancing to reggae, which is like doing a gazillion squat exercises.  Sigh... I wish being fit nowadays could be that fun.  Atlanta right now seems rather cold and grim.

BB and Sunny Update

I haven't posted in a while. I just haven't felt up to long-form writing.

I finally spoke to BB's adoption caseworker... this is the same woman who was also Sunny's caseworker. I got a bit emotional on the phone with her and told her that this process was very hard on everyone, especially Sunny, who often asks us when he's going to be a big brother. I told her I was totally aware of the budget crisis, and that I was also aware that BB's case plan had moved to adoption many months ago, though we had no communication from the state about it. I asked her if things would be easier if BB went to his grandmother (NN) and then we adopted him from her in a private adoption (NN had raised this idea herself a while back). I even asked her if it would make things easier if we hired a lawyer... I added that I didn't mean this in any antagonistic sense, but was posing it as a sincere question.

She didn't have a lot of answers for me, and she didn't have good news either. Things have changed since they did the contract to place Sunny with us; because of the budget crisis, it's even harder for their state to work with private agencies like ours. If they don't have budget approval to do the contract with the agency, our agency would have to transfer our homestudy to Dekalb County and have them do placement and post-placement supervision. That would present another roadblock and potential area for delays.

We'll find out in the next few days whether this county transfer has to happen or not. BB has been in limbo for 14 months already.

At this point, if the ball ever gets rolling, they'll also determine subsidy information if he's special needs. I'm sure that by now he really is "special needs" according to the state definition. For those who aren't familiar with foster adoption terminology, special needs doesn't necessarily involve any defined mental or physical handicap. Special needs really just means "it's harder to find adoptive parents for this child than it would be for a healthy white infant". There are almost no general adoptions that aren't "special needs" according to some definition.

But BB might have real special needs. His foster mom says she's a bit worried that he can't use the fingers on the right side of his body to grasp things. He still grasps using only his entire right fist. Since she's raised double digits of bio and foster kids over several decades I trust her opinion on his development. And she believes he's behind, though not so behind that needs physical therapy... yet.

The longer he stays with her the more difficult his transition is going to be. It's tough at any stage, but some stages are probably worse. A toddler is more aware of different people than an infant, but they're not able to express the emotions they're feeling, like Sunny was when he came to us at the age of 6.

We're going there for Halloween -- just Sunny and I -- so I'll get a chance to see BB. This quick weekend visit is a big treat for Sunny, because he loves talking about how much fun the great big foster family has doing Halloween stuff together. However, the visit also represents a major break in structure, and that's had some negative effects. He had more fits, got mad on several occasions because I wasn't letting him do things that his foster mom let him do (and he almost never uses that complaint), has been especially needy, and regressed in terms of what he wants to watch and read. He's been watching Dora cartoons that are way below his level, but they're obviously comforting him, so we don't discourage that.

I'm a big believer in openness, and I don't think the visit itself is having these negative effects. Instead, it's the break in structure. If we had already established a clear schedule of exactly when we would visit his family, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. I think in the future we'll have to establish a single date and stick to it on a yearly basis. I can't afford much more than that... each visit means at least two plane tickets, a hotel room and a rental car.

Sunny has had some rough episodes recently, but this weekend, we also had some wonderful times with him. On Sunday, we went walking on the trails at the Chattahoochee Nature Center, and Guy taught Sunny how to skip stones into the beaver pond. Later that day, when they were driving together, Sunny wrote Guy a note:

"You are the best dad I love you and I will love you forever"

Dark Sarcasm in Adoption

Guy recently reminded me of a conversation he had last year, when he was proudly telling his friends and colleagues about Sunny's placement with us.  I wasn't with him at the time.

One colleague gave him the standard "which country?" question, assuming international adoption. We both have the same attitude about that question: answer with a single direct sentence, ignore any looks of resulting embarrassment and just move on with the conversation.  So Guy told his colleague we were adopting from Sunny's home state.

The colleague responded, "Well, you didn't have to adopt from a third-world country!"

This would have been horribly insulting... if his colleague hadn't been Chinese-American. So the joke was really on everyone. Guy thought it was hilarious, although we won't be repeating it with any sort of frequency.

Personal Update and Blog/Racialicious Comparison

Last week was really exhausting. I need another vacation! My weekends are becoming an extension of the working week... and this is mainly my own fault, since I really need to organize them better.

Sunny has a 101-degree fever this morning. Guy had to pick him up from school yesterday because he had a sore throat, but then his throat quickly got better, so Guy took him right back to school. Last night Sunny's appetite didn't suffer: he ate a huge pork chop, with sides of couscous and grilled asparagus with cheese on top, then some grapes for dessert. It's hard to know how to handle Sunny being sick because 1) he's ridiculously healthy and 2) he's sort of a hypochondriac. In all the time we've had him he's been sick exactly once, and that lasted less than a day. I think he has a very powerful immune system, so when gets sick, the symptoms are light, and go away quickly. Because he's so dramatic, he doesn't exactly lie, but he does exaggerate his symptoms greatly. All kids do this to some extent, but Sunny does seem a bit extreme. His friend J has a much more stoic approach to illness and injury. On the other hand, because Sunny's so energetic and restless, I think he gets up and moves around when he really should be relaxing...

I just hope he doesn't have the swine flu, or the regular flu, for that matter. I've been watching the news and calling our pediatrician to find out when I can get him the vaccine, but I don't have a date yet.

Right now, his cousin (Guy's sister's daughter) is visiting, and they're hanging out on the couch, watching Voltron and playing Legos together. They'd be out running around if Sunny was feeling better.

I just noticed comments from Sarah (hi!) saying, among other things, that I sound a lot different at this blog than I do at Racialicious, where I comment frequently and guest-post occasionally. I haven't thought about it that much, but that's right. I'm much more of a hard-ass at Racialicious, ha ha! It's a good jump-off point for talking about online communities in general, though.

I really don't like using terms such as "safe space" and "triggering" on the internet because I think they're infantilizing. But what I observe is sort of a continuum of environments. The parameters include the following:

1) Who are the members who will interact with you?
2) Who are the members who read what you say, but will not interact with you?
-- For anything posted publicly, 1) is unpredictable and 2) is REALLY unpredictable, and much larger than 1).
3) What's your degree of hard control over who will interact with you? If you're a moderator of a group, you can kick another member out. If you run a blog, you can delete comments. If you're on a forum, you could use the "ignore" feature on someone.
4) What's your degree of soft control (level of respect in you, or your peer group) when it comes to who will interact with you? If you tell someone they're being offensive, are they likely to listen to you and stop? Can you marshal support? If you have a whole posse of people and they all tell that person to stop, will they listen?
5) What is the range of opinions permissible in the environment? Is your perspective inside that range, outside that range or on the edge?
6) What do you want to get from the environment? Concrete bits of useful information? Psychological validation and a sense of human contact? Entertainment and light humor? Establishing lasting links with new people? Revenge? A sense of power over others? With these last two, we're getting into troll territory, although they're negative tendencies that can surface in absolutely anyone.
7) What do you want to give to the environment? Do you think you have anything of valuable to impart, and do you want to educate others? If so, you need to tailor your message to the audience (so we go back to 1 and 2).
8) What is the cost to you of participating in the environment? This is crucial. Navigating all these elements is hard. Just when you think you understand one of them, something changes. You get disappointed, angry, you feel like no one is listening to you, you thought you were in a "safe space" but someone attacks you, someone you thought was your ally disagrees with you strongly, you feel betrayed, you feel unwanted, you feel like you have to maintain a false face and hide your true self in order to gain acceptance, or you become disappointed in yourself because you engaged in negative behavior out of anger... internet drama takes a toll. Sometimes you want to be in an environment, but it's just too damaging, and you're better off turning your back. Sometimes the cost is very high, but what you're learning/getting is so valuable that you need to stay.

Though people will often say "I just want to express myself", it's never as simple as that. Unless your expression is totally private, "self-expression" will have a social element.

When it comes to 1) and 2) for this blog, I agonize a lot. I control my interactive audience by limiting comments to people with Google accounts. This means most of the people who interact here also have Google blogs. They're more invested in leaving substantive comments. So I almost never get drive-by comments. The trade-off is that I lose out on substantive comments by people who aren't registered and don't feel like registering. For 2), I removed this blog from Google listings for a while, then a few months ago I put it back on, and just now, I took it back off again. I do NOT want people who know me personally surfing in on key words. Especially my mom and dad. I'm very close to my mother. We work on certain projects together, we see each other every other day, but one of the reasons I don't talk about her much on this blog is that I don't want to put down key words that would lead her here, because she's internet-savvy and on more social media than I am! Partly because we're so close, I want to maintain certain barriers so I don't feel smothered. My dad is the opposite of my mom: he's an intensely private person. I am also protecting Sunny's identity and that of his biological and foster family. I have a lot of reasons to want to maintain anonymity.

My control over this blog isn't total, in the soft sense. I care about what other people think. The feelings of regular readers and commenters do factor when I'm writing a post. It's not the number one factor, but it's in there. Number 5 -- the range of permissible opinions -- is also difficult, because I'm blogging at the intersection of some practically incongruous communities. What's held as standard and inarguable inside one community might be totally outside the envelope at another. I flatter myself that in this respect, I'm quite honest, I don't censor myself and I don't avoid controversies. I put that opinion out there and I also analyze why it's outside the envelope to begin with. I've already talked a lot about what I've gotten from being part of a blog community (great, life-changing advice and support) and what I want to give back (more of the same). The emotional cost of running this blog mostly has to do with anonymity-agonizing... other than that, it's very low.

When it comes to Racialicious, all of these factors are different. A lot more people read there, and a lot more people read there that will never comment, but are still very important because what they read there might change their opinions. I don't have any hard control there, but I have a degree of soft control, because I've been hanging out there so long that I've built up respect. When it comes to the range of opinions, I'm mostly on the inside. So although there's a lot of tussling and heated debate that go on, the emotional cost to me is fairly low, because I feel like I'm arguing from a position of greater strength. Plus, there are a lot of posts on topics I have little experience on -- e.g. Native American identity, Islam -- and on those, I'm a member of the passive audience, learning but not necessarily interacting.

I used to participate in more online communities, but I don't have the time for a wide range. And when I analyze the emotional cost, it's often too high. There are a few communities I've participated in where I just wanted very concrete bits of information, in which I made sure to have a race- and gender-neutral handle, and got in and got out again right away. Because otherwise I would have been harassed and it would have been horrible. A few months ago I got burned when I was in a certain community and complained (in what I thought was a mild and reasonable way) about a racist Asian joke and about twenty members just piled on me. Race card, PC, no sense of humor, Asians are all doctors or lawyers anyway, blah blah blah. I walked around for a day in real life while fuming, and that wasn't healthy. Arguing a case in a hostile environment can do a lot of good (remembering, again, the passive audience) but it comes at a high emotional cost.

I don't think I'm really saying anything different at Racialicious, but I am talking about different aspects of the same things, and in different ways. I also let loose my evil sense of humor a bit more over there.

Update: by the time I finished typing this up, Sunny seems to have recovered... he's full of beans again, and playing some kind of high-volume racing game with his cousin.

Geisha Blog Tiff

I've been twittering a fair amount lately. Here's a twitter-inspired microblogpost:

It's a Geisha blog tiff, not quite a war.

I'm glad to see that Jenn at Reappropriate is back to regular blogging, at least for now.

An Adoption Opinion I Totally Agree With

I just started reading this adoptive mother's blog (foster care plus adoption from international disruption). I don't find her adoption opinion to be controversial at all. It strikes me as simply practical! However, I realize it's a minority opinion among some strongly Christian-oriented communities, so I think it's great that she's linking her argument to Christian teaching.

I think adoption is best when there is no other option for a child's life. Like when the birthparents pose a death risk. Or when they are dead themselves. If adoption were not so glamorized, perhaps more young mothers who don't feel prepared and "selflessly" choose adoption so she "can move on with her life" would simply step up to the plate and become the person God created her to be. Perhaps their families would value supporting and helping the young/addicted/immature/etc. mother. The Bible is very clear: children are a blessing. All children. The world teaches the antithesis of that fact. People are being lied to. The Bible is also very clear that if God gives us a job to do, he will provide the strength and wisdom to do it. Where is the church today? Why is it so silent on this issue?

[...]

Where is God in this equation? Are we willing to decide for him that people will not change? In a lot of cases, neglect and verbal abuse are probably not worth adopting out a child. It doesn't matter how wonderful your home is.

The way I like to phrase it is that adoption should not be imagined as a method for moving a child from a Grade D or C family to a grade B or A family. It should be thought of more as a last-ditch resort for cases in which the original family is either dangerous, non-existent or completely unable to parent the child.

I'm absolutely horrified by Christian arguments that uphold adoption as some kind of wonderful, win-win solution to abortion. The proposed license plate below was recently held to be unconstitutional by Illinois, and I'm quite relieved about that.

From their website:

Adoption is a positive choice
The Donaldson Institute and the Dave Thomas Foundation performed a survey showing that Americans have a very favorable impression of adoption. 40% of Americans have considered adoption and 60% have been personally touched by adoption. The number of people seeking to adopt children makes every child a wanted child. Many people involved with adoption are supporting Choose Life plates.

I feel like waving my hands and screaming "NOT ME NOT ME NOT ME!"

And I wish I could make them change every instance of "child" in that paragraph to "healthy (preferably white) infant." There are layers upon layers of manipulation and exploitation at that site.

Adoption Disruption Unfolding

I feel really sorry for this family. Although this is an international adoption, I believe it could have happened -- and does happen fairly often -- with traumatized sibling groups adopted from foster care. Training and support help. But they're not magic shields.

I don't believe in saying "I won't judge". The word "judge" can mean many different things to different people... too often, I think it means a lack of critical analysis. For example, it's really sad for me to hear that the boy did not get therapy for so long because no one spoke his language. This is a problem, and it's connected to institutional issues, and more people need to be aware of it.

But I'm not going to "judge" in the sense of weighing moral worth. It sounds like the family is trying to do their best to keep their other children safe, while living up to their responsibility to their son.

I left some general advice, and I hope anyone else with any good advice or resources could leave a comment as well.

Family Needed

"Relationship Not Behavior" Advice

This seems like such a good piece of advice for older child adoption. I really encourage everyone to read the whole post if you haven't run across it already.

When I was a college administrator responsible for discipline I learned the concept, "Get them to respect you first, and later worry about them liking you." I took this principal into adoption and parenting and it ABSOLUTELY DID NOT WORK. Some of the kids never really came to love me as their mom and respect never came either.

Focus that first year on getting the kid to fall in love with you. If you do, you can worry about behavior. I'm not saying to ignore rule violations, but under-react. Keep the focus on the child, on attachment, on learning to understand your child and years down the road you'll be much farther ahead than those who started tackling behavior the day the kids moved in.

When it comes to Sunny's first year, I think we did some things right on purpose, and other things right purely on accident. But mostly, we were just lucky. Sunny attached to us quickly and strongly. His attachment issues are centered around separation and anxiety... not trust and physical closeness. He loves hugs and kisses and tickling and wrestling. He cares deeply about what we think of him. He draws pictures of us together as a happy family, and spontaneously writes notes that say things like "I LOVE YOU MOM AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY".

I read a lot of blogs by parents who have adopted older children who have not attached so easily. I feel so bad for them (the parents and the kids). It would be such a hard road. I even feel bad writing this post because I don't want to rub it in their faces. But I think this issue sometimes falls under the banner of blog negativity syndrome (people blogging about when things go wrong, but not bothering to blog when things go right) so I just want to add another data point with this post. Sometimes children with a history of inconsistent caregiving in the early years DO NOT have issues with physical closeness and showing affection.

The hard part for us, of course, is dealing with Sunny's fits and rages. When he's trying to bash me in the face, it drains my emotional reservoir very rapidly. But in between fits, it fills up quickly, because he's so loving. If this were not the case, I'd probably be a semi-zombie by now.

We're also lucky that we have such a good relationship with his foster mom, that his foster mom is brilliant, and that his foster mom was Sunny's only placement for almost four years. That made understanding his personality and needs a lot easier as a learning process.

In the above post, I don't think that Claudia is saying that you should let the child do whatever they want, and bribe them, in order to manipulate love. That doesn't work. We started off with pretty strict rules for Sunny, and he still has most of them: for example, I don't know many kids his age who are only allowed to play video games for 15-45 minutes a week. But the rules were a natural continuation of rules he already had in his foster mom's home. I just agree with her totally, based on our experience with Sunny's first year, that the first priority is understanding what behavior can be changed, and what behavior you should just learn to live with somehow because trying to change it is going to make everyone miserable.

I thought we could have family reading nights together. I thought I could help him with his homework. I thought I could easily teach him how to play by himself. I thought we could transition him into waking himself up at night to go to the bathroom. I've had to abandon all these expectations, at least for the short term.

Again, looking back on our first year, I think we're very lucky. I always like to expect the worst, so that I'm pleasantly surprised when the worst doesn't quite happen.

Podcast Criticism Response

Here's my response to a comment I just received:

Kathleen said...

Hello, I have been following your blog for quite a while.

I am not surprised, but I am disappointed that this blogcast further stigmatizes international adoptive families.

Not all people who adopt internationally who live in the US are white, nor are they are all American born. Believe it or not, some people who chose to adopt internationally are people who immigrated to the US who were actually born and grew up in the country where they chose to adopt from. Not all people who adopt internationally adopt babies. Some actually adopt older children, sibling groups, and children with special needs and disabilities. Not all people who adopt internationally are elite, rich, entitled white people. Believe it or not, some people who adopt internationally actually have lots of family in the country they adopting from and are very well educated and informed about adoption procedures and are very very careful about avoiding corruption.

I am so tired by how often international adoptive families are clumped together as if they are homogenous.

Hi Kathleen. I don't believe that all international adoption should be stopped, and I have never said that. Neither have I said that all international adoptive parents are white and rich. In fact, I've posted before about problems facing Chinese-American parents adopting from China, and also talked about some research I did about adopting from Japan. And I would adopt from Japan if the conditions for it were better.

Are you sure your reaction isn't a part of something that is being discussed extensively in the Racialicious thread... responding to an institutional critique with an individual defense? It's just a pattern I see a million times when any critique of international adoption comes up.

There are now several blogs by white international adoptive parents that take more critical views of international adoption... they can handle critique of the practice, and even perform their own critique to various degrees, without taking it personally. E.g. chinaadoptiontalk.blogspot.com, thirdmom.blogspot.com, american-family.org.

Honestly, I do not have a huge amount of sympathy for international adoptive parents who are mad about being stigmatized. A small amount, yes, but not a huge amount, because the stigma doesn't really stick all that much. Parents who adopt from foster care have our own, arguably greater issues. Basically, because of international adoptive agency marketing, there's this idea out there that IA is the Cadillac of adoption and foster care is the freaking Yugo. There are ten times more weird myths and misconceptions about foster care adoption than there are about international adoption.

I can't lump together all parents involved in foster care adoption. My opinions exist on a scale. Some of us have opinions against international adoption that are way more negative than mine. Some of us are very pro-IA, and happen to be international adoptive parents as well. What I'm saying is a generalization based on observations in real life and in blogs... it's that many of us seem to have much thicker skin than the average international adoptive parent when it comes to institutional critique.

Is there corruption in the foster care system? Absolutely. I knew that going in.  I will not listen or enter into discussions with extremists who believe that every single removal is unjustified and children should always be left with their biological parents.  But I'll listen to almost any other critique, and look for statistics to back it up, and think hard about it.  Although it's public and state-controlled, there are still plenty of market-type issues in foster care adoption, there's a hierarchy of who is the most desirable child and who is the most desirable parent, and I've talked about those problems also. Many social workers or local systems are full of bias: racial/ethnic bias, bias towards removal, bias against warranted removal.

My problem is that a) the existence of corruption and inequality in international adoption is GREATER b) there is LESS impetus to admit that fact among international adoptive parent communities c) there is GREATER incidence of immediately jumping from "you are judging me and mine" when institutional critique emerges. Why is that? And why is international adoption the "default" in so many environments, even though the national incidence of foster care adoption is 2.5 times higher than international? It should be possible to talk about these questions and try to answer them without activating defense mechanisms.

I agree with you that focusing on elite white IA parents of non-special-needs children makes other types of parents invisible. So how do we help those parents? I have a lot of suggestions for that.

• Not being defensive about racial discussion so as not to drown out the voices of adoptive parents of color (e.g. Chinese-American adoptive parents). 
• Supporting adoption reform that encourages training mandates for all international adoptive parents so that they are truly educated about "invisible" special needs such as FAS and RAD.
• Supporting healthcare reform and mental healthcare parity so that these families can get the treatments they need without becoming bankrupt and falling apart. 
• Supporting transparency, a greater degree of statistics collection and open records: trying to figure out how high international disruption rates really are, and how many of these kids end up in the foster care system, then trying to figure out how to lower that rate.
• Until that support is there... not subsidizing these adoptions with tax credits or church grants, so that families don't bring home children without adequate resources in place to treat their special needs.
• Criticizing narcissistic attention-grubbers like Anita Tedaldi who exploit adoption disruption to sell books and look pretty on TV, when she could have used to the media attention to spotlight the need for support for specific special needs
  

And these are just things that I believe help families.  There are plenty of other suggestions of reform that are primarily centered on adoptees available at international adoptee blogs. I don't have a good track of recommending these types of reforms myself in communities with a lot of adoptive parents. For example, suggesting that non-Asian families should not be allowed to adopt Asian children unless they live in a demographic circle that has a high enough percentage of Asian-Americans. "That's too hard!" "That's unrealistic!" or "That would lead to more children dying in orphanages!" are the typical responses. Sigh...

I've heard many times about how a particular individual international adoption was justified. I believe my adoption was justified too. But I would never say that I was absolutely, positively, 100% certain of that... I'll quote myself from the Racialicious thread for my reason:

In my own adoption, I talk to my son’s foster mom and biological maternal grandmother every week on the phone. We share language, and a lot of culture. We get along great. My son’s life has been extensively documented and recorded and we have access to those records. And there are still weird mysteries surrounding how my son came into foster care that I don’t think are ever going to be resolved… there are stories that conflict, and relatives bending the truth as they try to present themselves in the best light. When you have this kind of situation in another country, the mysteries can become much deeper. Part of adoption reform means trying to show people that they are NOT certain, that the current standards of diligence are NOT enough, and that we should combat this by demanding open records, transparency and accountability.

I get tired too, of recycling bullet points and argument points and so on... but I've got enough energy to do it here on my own blog.  So I honestly appreciate that you expressed your feelings here without attacking me, and gave  me a good opportunity to respond.  But I'm too tired to actually hang out in larger adoptive parent communities and do this kind of stuff.

Podcast and Update

I was on the Racialicious/Anti-Racist Parent podcast this week!

I loved having the conversation with Carmen and Tami. But I stuttered too much, and compensated with too many "likes" and "you knows". I'm very self-conscious about stuttering. I've had a problem with it since I was a young child. I always try not to use it as an excuse or crutch, so I force myself not to turn down tasks and jobs where I have to speak before groups, like teaching. I usually manage to compensate fairly well. I asked Guy today if he ever notices me stuttering, and he said, "you have a stuttering problem? I never noticed!" It's just so obvious to me whenever I'm in any sort of new situation... sometimes I'm introduced to people, they'll ask me, "what's your name?" and I get stuck for a few seconds in open-mouth-freeze-arrested-head-bob mode and I feel absolutely awful. So I'll pretend I'm distracted by something off in the distance, and once I turn my head back around I'll be ready to actually say my own name. I'm often a worse speaker on the phone than I am in person because I can't use that kind of compensating body language on the phone.

Anyway, enough neuroticism about stuttering. I think the discussion went really well. The main part for me was the transracial/transnational adoption and capitalism topic. I went over some things I'd already outlined in comments on this post. People who read this blog frequently will be pretty familiar with my positions. The other parts of the discussion were also interesting, although I wasn't really prepped for the black Barbie portion, so I feel like I trailed off on a tangent instead of focusing and tying into Tami's analysis.

As for the update, Sunny's behavior was absolutely wretched on Sunday. I think it was mostly fall-out from the flaming pinecone episode. He backtalked all day and had TWO fits. We were really stressed out by the end of it all.

Today, his behavior was a lot better. He had his chess club tonight. Sunny loves this so much that he put a lot of creative thought into getting into the exact right frame of mind to play chess. He started running laps indoors... a circuit at full speed through the hallway, then through the den and kitchen and dining room, into the computer room, jumping onto an ottoman then doing a flying leap back into the hallway, and had me help count off the laps, first in even numbers 2-4-6-8 and then in odd numbers. After about 15 minutes of intense running, leaping and yelling numbers, he was sweaty and out of breath. "I got out my energy so I can focus when I play chess!" he said. This was all his own idea, which is pretty cool. He ended up winning only 1 game out of 3, but since he beat a 13-year-old on the winning game, he was very proud of himself.

The Sordid, Easily-Solved Mystery of the Flaming Pinecones

Driving home from work on a Friday afternoon in Atlanta is always hellish. When I drove into our carport, I was exhausted.

To the right of the carport, on the yard, a feet away from our grill, I noticed two small flaming pinecones.  The weeds around them were also on fire.  Since Dekalb County is now a federally designated flood disaster area, the yard is rather waterlogged, and the flaming areas struck me as extremely unnatural.

My first thought was, "Am I hallucinating?" My second thought was, "what the f*%#ing f#$%!" My third thought was "Is this some weird, miniature woodland elf version of the KKK burning crosses?" My fourth thought was, "the kids must have done this." My fifth thought was, "Is my husband criminally negligent enough to have started this with the kids as some kind of science project?" I was almost totally sure the answer to the last question was "No," but it still crossed my mind.

I yelled for Guy. Then J and Sunny came running around the corner from where they must have been hiding. J was dancing around the pinecones and crying.  "I did a bad thing! Please don't tell my mom! Sunny made me do it!" His shoelaces were getting pretty close to the flaming pinecones, and I yelled at him to move away. Then I put out the fires using a thick, wet doormat.

J is a good kid. He's 10 years old and usually mature for his age.  When Sunny gets frustrated, J often gives him lectures about controlling his temper. His family is strict with him. They're very religious, and his mother is some kind of Baptist deacon. We don't have that much in common with them, unlike our other across-the-street neighbors, but we get along nicely, since our kids are such good friends.

Usually J is a good influence on Sunny. He's calmer than Sunny, and he's older and bigger, so Sunny can't really boss him around. But like Sunny, he's often too smart for his own good. When he sets his mind on doing a bad thing, he carries it out. Now I've discovered that when both of them decide to do bad things, they turn into some kind of freaking supervillain team.

Here's what happened. They were playing inside for a while, but since the weather is nice, Guy told them they had to go play outside. His usual rule, which I agree with, is that unless the weather is nasty, kids should be playing outside before dinner. There were a lot of mosquitoes outside. Instead of dealing with the problem by using the readily available mosquito spray, one of them -- we're not sure which, and we don't really care anymore -- had the bright idea of starting a fire to keep away the mosquitoes. The first thing they did was to douse the pinecones with the lighter fluid next to the grill. Then J asked Sunny where the lighter was. They snuck into the house quietly and Sunny got the lighter from the drawer. Then Sunny gave it to J, then J set the pinecones on fire.

At first, Sunny was screaming that it wasn't his idea, that J did it everything on his own.  Contradictions soon appeared in his version of events, and I told Sunny I didn't believe him. But J wasn't telling the truth either. A 7-year-old "made me do it"... ahem... maybe he was confusing Sunny with, I don't know, SATAN?

Guy took J across the street to face the music with his mother. Sunny started to have a meltdown, so I had to take him inside the house and hold him down for a couple minutes. He screamed and cursed at me but it only took a minute until he became remorseful, began crying and admitted everything. He was sorry for lying, he was acting like an idiot, he always made mistakes... at this point I reminded him he wasn't an idiot, everyone makes mistake and the important thing was to learn from those mistakes. He got a light consequence: grounding from outside play and from TV for the rest of the day. We also told him all the things that could have happened as a result: he could have burned the house down, he could have burned his face off and gone to the hospital, he could have burned to death, he could have burned his friend and felt guilty for the rest of his life, and so on.

As we were eating dinner later this night, Sunny said he had a stomachache.  He barely ate half of his dinner. Sunny usually eats like a horse; I always give him a regular adult-sized portion. Guy put two and two together, made the accusation, and Sunny admitted it... before they snuck into the kitchen to get the lighter, they had also used a step stool to steal from the candy bag in the high cupboard, then gorged themselves on Laffy Taffy.

Before this, Sunny was allowed to have one candy every night from the candy bag as long as he ate all his dinner. The consequence for the theft is pretty simple: we're giving away the candy bag tomorrow. He was really upset about that and spent a few minutes crying for his lost candy.

Honestly, we have to laugh a bit at this whole episode now that the drama has died down. It's like they went on a crime spree.

Guy does think Sunny got off too easily for this. We know that whatever J is facing is going to be much worse. He's probably going to get grounded for a week. I'll check with his mother again tomorrow... I also want to reassure her we're going to keep the lighters and lighter fluid locked up from now on.

I think I'm also going to print out a few clinical pictures of burn victims to show Sunny. But other than that, we're not going to give him any more consequences. He's already remorseful. I'm disappointed in J and Sunny, and I have to revise my estimate of their maturity downwards... but I'm hoping that we've nipped this in the bud.

Comment on Expatriates Post

Here's a comment from Christie that's worth quoting in full:

Nice post... I have to stay away from expat message boards, etc., as they are so poisonous.

One thing I've noticed is that young white men who have been here just a couple of years are often still in the "adventure, interesting!" phase, and the really poisonous & bitter ones are the ones who married Japanese women and settled down here. I think it gets to them being powerless, often not speaking Japanese well, having to take a back seat in the extended family, being the only "foreigner" in the family & having their cultural ways marginalized, etc... and they end up wanting to leave the country, but cannot for whatever reason, leading to a trapped feeling. The bitterness just builds, and they end up seeing problems everywhere and hating their lives here.

My husband is not white, and he is *much* *much* more balanced about the good points vs. bad points of living here as a foreigner. He was often bullied and made to feel like a foreigner when he was growing up in England (his parents are from India). He really likes Japan and doesn't stress about the "oh no I am no longer the center of the world" thing. He is also well accepted and liked in Japan, although he looks middle-Eastern. He has not had any higher level of annoyances than I have (a white woman from the U.S.).

I was sorry to learn that you never have had the opportunity to really feel liked and accepted by Japanese people. I know so many nice people here that I think you would like. Partly though, the region I live in is very laid back and accepting.

My negative experiences have been in Tokyo. I'm not very fond of Tokyo. But I love the countryside, where my father's adoptive family originally lived. Sometime in the future I'd love to experience more diversity in Japan, including Okinawa and Hokkaido.

My feeling on the current state of mixed race or foreign children in Japanese schools is that they can do well in many schools & communities, especially if they are naturally sociable (and can overlook or get past initial comments & the occasional bully). However, if they have socialization issues, etc., then their "foreignness" will be used as yet another thing against them, resulting in a double whammy.

I can imagine that. Also, there seem to be several multiracial Japanese celebrities nowadays. It really sounds like Japan is on the verge of a new paradigm of race and immigration. I've become especially interested in following developments of Nikkeijin organizations. I'm always on the lookout for those types of news sources or blogs in English or Spanish. I ran across a neat documentary recently, though most of it is in Japanese and Portuguese.

Some Thoughts on Racial/Ethnic Hatred Sparked by Expatriates in Japan

Why do some American expatriates in Japan hate the Japanese so much?

If you're not familiar with this hate... it's some of the most virulent hatred I've ever seen in my life. I've witnessed some of it personally, as a bystander, and indirectly heard of much more.

This isn't all expatriates, of course. For example, my mother was an expatriate for a period of time, and she certainly wasn't like that. She has a lot of critical things to say about Japanese culture, but in a balanced way, in much the same proportion as she would criticize any other culture, including her own.

The most vocal expatriates are young white men on stints teaching English, and it's this group that also has the most evil reputation. But other expatriates types also exhibit this hatred sometimes.

Honestly, people like this are one reason I've never seriously considered going to Japan for any length of time longer than a couple weeks. A long time ago, when I was having a rocky time in college, my parents pressured me psychologically into applying for the JET program. I sabotaged my own application so that I could tell them honestly that I was denied. As someone who is not fluent in Japanese, and doesn't really belong to any community in Japan, I knew I would have to be in close contact with this type of expatriate, and I could not stomach the thought of that.

This hatred seems especially disturbing to me because I understand where it comes from. I've been treated badly by Japanese. The first time I was aware of race, and being racially different, was in Japanese kindergarten. In general, Japanese are not particularly friendly to me. To Japanese, I don't look Japanese, I don't dress Japanese, I don't even walk like a Japanese, and in Tokyo, I'm treated with distant politeness or ignored as if I don't exist. My own father sometimes casually insults my identity and accuses me of not being Japanese enough.

As a result, I often don't like Japanese. I enjoy having casual conversations with Japanese tourists in other countries about stuff like food, but I don't purposefully seek them out or go looking for deeper friendships with them. There are some exceptions, like my roommate in Mexico that I felt very close to. He was considering immigrating permanently to Mexico, and had different ideas about identity than the vast majority of Japanese.

But I don't hate Japanese. Based on my personal history I have some hang-ups and neuroticisms about Japanese that I wish I didn't have, but I do, so I compensate in practical ways. Otherwise, I just think of Japanese as human beings... flawed, complicated human beings, like all other groups of human beings.

I'm not going to provide lists and examples of bad expat behavior. You're either familiar with it or you're not, and if you're not, then you're lucky. But here's the basic arc:

Stage 1: I love Japan. Japan is so cool. It's so different over here. I can't wait to meet some samurai and geisha. I'm fulfilling my lifelong dream. This is going to be awesome.
Stage 2: Japan isn't what I thought, but it's still really cool. All these Japanese girls are having sex with me just because I'm an American. Sometimes I get the feeling people are looking down on me. Oh well, if I just smile a lot and speak Japanese better, I'm sure they'll accept me.
Stage 3: Culture shock, aching loneliness and deep depression
Stage 4: Retreating and retrenching in a safe womb-like environment with other expats
Stage 5: F%#@ these racist, xenophobic Japanese. Japanese women are manipulative stuck-up $%!@s. I wish we'd bombed ALL of Japan. I'm rude to them all the time now so I can get back at them for treating me like they do. And I can't wait to get home.
Stage 6: Now that I'm home, the bad memories of Japan are fading a bit, thank goodness. I have returned a much wiser person. I know all the weak spots of the Japanese now. In fact, I'm an expert on Asian culture. I explained this to an Asian-American once but they violently disagreed with me. Oh well, they're not a real Asian anyway.
(Alternate Stage: Stay in Japan, let hatred die down to a bilious rumbling with occasional explosions.  Post regularly on f*ckedgaijin.com).

Sexuality and misogyny and the legacy of imperialism are big parts of all of this. Imagine the expat arc as a dysfunctional romance, with Japan as the woman, and you could encapsulate most of those stages in the immortal words of Marion Barry: "Bitch set me up!"

The sex/imperialism is also an angle that's been covered by theorists quite extensively. I'd like to approach the issue from another angle, a more comparative and personal one, based on my experiences with born citizens and immigrants as well as expatriates.

Have I ever encountered the same level of hatred toward Americans? No, but I came close, once in Mexico, and once in the U.S.

When I was in Mexico, I met a lot of people who criticized the U.S. I largely agreed with the criticisms, and they were stated in a fair way. In fact, Mexican leftists who had problems with U.S. politics were always MORE charitable than U.S. leftists. They would often talk about aspects of the U.S. that they admired, such as our history of relatively fair elections. I never saw this criticism spill over into hate, though.

I also met a lot of Mexicans who were treated very badly in the U.S. and still didn't develop hatred. For example, I met a taxi driver in Guadalajara who told me that he risked his life to cross the desert to find work in Dallas, but the people there were so racist and unfriendly, it took him only three weeks to decide to go right back to Guadalajara. Maybe they're nicer in other parts of the U.S., he noted optimistically, though he had no further plans to ever leave Mexico again. Another Mexican I met spent six years in prison in Florida for a crime he claimed he didn't commit, and he still had a lot of good things to say about the U.S.

And I don't think that people leashed any hatred simply because they didn't want to offend me, an American tourist. If I was white, I might think that. But Mexicans often find it hard to believe I'm an American, even after I state it quite clearly. I don't "look American". It's a reaction I encounter frequently anywhere outside the U.S., and I've developed a pretty thick skin about it.

Anyway, one night while I was traveling in Mexico by myself, I ended up in a crowded taxicab going to a nightclub. Since we had to go a long way on a dirt road, and most of my fellow taxi goers had already had a few drinks, the conversation was heated and lively. There were a couple Mexicans and an Austrian tourist. The Austrian tourist, on hearing I was American, launched into a diatribe against American cultural imperialism. We made crappy movies, and crappy music, and crappy food, our American crap was drowning out everyone else's culture, all our entertainment was vulgar, and so on.

I got angry. I was prepared to hear this sort of thing from a Mexican, but not from an Austrian. Most Europeans have enough money and power to consume their own crap if they want; they happen to CHOOSE to consume ours. I tried to argue back, but he kept interrupting me. So I dropped the bomb. "Well what's your native way of having fun on the weekend in Austria? Burning Jews?" The Mexicans all gasped. The Austrian visibly wilted, and said in a small voice, "that was a long time ago". The conversation shifted. We'd put on a good show for the Mexicans, though: they looked like they were really enjoying the argument from the sidelines.

To this day I feel a little bad for cutting down the Austrian like that. But only a little.

Although I said I was prepared to hear this kind of diatribe from a Mexican, I never did. My overall impression was that Mexicans were rather light on the criticism when it came to the U.S. For every thing they hated, they knew something that they loved. Sadness, disappointment, anxiety, yes; hatred, no.

When I lived in Miami, I worked in a series of restaurants and bars. There was an informal but very powerful racial/ethnic hierarchy pretty much everywhere I worked in the service industry. White Anglos, upper-class Cuban-Americans and diverse upper-class immigrants/expatriates (usually European) were at the top. They were the owners and managers. The middle was composed of more Cuban-Americans and Anglos. Halfway between the middle and bottom were native African-Americans and whiter-looking Latinos. On the very bottom, recently arrived Carribean black people (Haitian, Jamaican) and other Latinos (such as Central Americans). Your place in the hierarchy was determined by 1) money 2) degree of whiteness 3) degree of blackness 4) kind of English spoken 5) kind of Spanish spoken 6) citizenship and documentation status. Since Miami is such a diverse and chaotic environment, new arrivals often weren't quite sure where they fit in the hierarchy. I know I was never sure, myself.

One day, I was outside my restaurant having a smoke break with the Jamaican janitor/busser. We struck up a conversation that quickly took a disturbing turn. She started on a rant about how the American black people were all thieves, liars, drug abusers, could not be trusted, made her people look bad, and so on. I just told her I didn't think that was a fair thing to say, but I didn't want to get in an argument with her. I felt sorry for her because she was facing a horrendous level of racism from the manager, a white Frenchman who was racist against everyone who worked there, but picked on her the most.

I wondered later, why did she hate African-Americans so much? Why not hate white people or white Europeans? After all, the manager truly was an evil worm of a person (full story of his evilness here).

One reason is that it's not very common to hate upwards. It's more common to fear the people who have power over you. If you can't separate from those people (people with separatist ideologies can hate in any direction), you have to learn how to get along with them.  And you don't have the energy to spare for hate.

When I was dealing with racist abuse in school in the U.S., I felt the same way. I didn't have time to hate the people who abused me. All my emotional energy was wrapped up in trying to answer two questions: "Why are they doing this to me?" and "How can I make them stop?" In order to try and stop the abuse I had to think like my abusers, I had to put myself in their shoes, I had to imagine how they saw me, I had to imagine how they would react if I did certain things as opposed to doing other things.

I could not afford to hate them.

I think it's much more common to hate downwards. And a subset of hating downwards is hating sideways. My Jamaican coworker was financially on a lower level of the hierarchy than African-Americans, but she also realized she was on a higher level when it came to stereotypes of morality and culture. That is, she observed that there were more negative sentiments against African-Americans than there were against Jamaicans. So hating African-Americans was a way to claim a higher position in the hierarchy, a way to claim that no, she was not on the same level or lower, she was really on a higher level.

Whenever someone is insecure about their position in a hierarchy, a way to stabilize your position is 1) find someone who is on the same level or slightly lower 2) hate them.

I think this works in the area of class, as well. Often, the people who say they hate the poor the most are the people who have escaped poverty, or who are lower-middle-class and almost in poverty. Really rich people rarely hate the poor. They can ignore them and/or exploit them without going through the bother of hating them.

An expatriate in Japan, once they hit the culture shock stage, becomes incredibly confused about their place in the hierarchy. This confusion is compounded by the fact that they don't even understand, on a visceral level, that the hierarchy even exists. The ideal of egalitarianism is very strong in the U.S. When that egalitarianism actually works, I love it. It's what makes my country great. But it's an ideal, not a reality. If you believe it's already a reality, you become blind to the existence of totally real hierarchies lying underneath the mask of egalitarianism.

People from countries with more formalized race, caste and/or class systems have more experience, more cynicism and more ability to notice parallel structures in foreign countries. They'll have a more practical attitude. "OK, I've landed. Where am I? Near the bottom... darn. Can I work my way up? Oh, it looks like this system is really rigid. Only a few rungs? What about my kids? Well, I'll adjust my expectations and see if it's worth the trade-off."

The Japan-hating expatriate has huge privilege from being some combination of white, American and male. Japanese give them a lot of room. When they act badly, Japanese will simply ignore it. The expatriate senses weakness. "They let me get away with bad behavior - that means I am better and stronger than them - I hate them because I am better than them - I am better than them because I hate them." But the expatriate also starts to understand that the Japanese don't really need them. Japan is pretty much the richest non-white country in the world when it comes to economic power and median living standards. The expatriate may start penning angry rants about Japan, but there is nothing they can really do to get any kind of meaningful revenge in a collective sense. Though they can be very cruel to individual Japanese, and then later, to Asian-Americans.

They realize the sheer uselessness of their hate, and it makes them hate even more.

I wish I had a better note on which to end this piece!