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Yesterday morning Sparkle was in a hurry to get his clothes on. He wanted to beat Pumpkin and be the first one dressed!
Last night he was running around outside and took his shirt off. (These boys start stripping the moment they set foot in the backyard. What is up with that?) When he came in I noticed that he had on TWO pair of underwear.
In his rush to be first to get dressed, he never took off the previous day's underwear! Doesn't he look all Calvin Klein in these pictures?
I've been going through some old photos, and thinking, "Too bad I didn't have a blog back then, 'cause this photo is too good not to share!" But, hey, I do have a blog now! And sometimes older pictures are fun, too. And I don't feel as nervous about showing older pictures of their full faces. I don't know why.
So anyway, this picture was taken when Sparkle was eight months old. It was one of those classic, "I just turned away for a second!" kind of moments. I have no idea how an eight month old got into the cupboard, got out the ketchup, and unscrewed the lid all in less than a minute. You've got to be impressed by that...
Well, Pumpkin's first mom is having a baby in a few months!
Talking about our experience as an adoptive family has been a big part of this blog, so I feel like I have to write about this, though it would be a lot easier not to say anthing. Just leave it out, like we all leave some real-life important stuff out of view of the whole wide world. I'm not sure exactly what I want to say, so I'll just tell you all how I felt before, how I feel now, what we believe, and how we choose to respond. Please let me know if I need to be set straight on anything, or if I'm not making sense.
(My disclaimers ahead of time are that I'm speaking only for myself, not entirely for Beloved, and certainly not for R. I'm not going to share anything here that I have not or would not talk to R about personally. I'm also very aware that I only know what R tells me, the actual words that she says, but I don't truly know how she feels now or how she will feel in the future.)
Sort of unfortunately for me, my emotional response to learning about R's pregnancy was kind of wrapped up together with my emotional response to deciding not to have any more kids. At the time R told us she was having a baby, I was still kind of "settling in" to our decision, not sure exactly how I'd end up feeling about it. We always knew it was very likely that R would have more children some day. I should not have been surprised, but I was.
What I actually said was, "Wow! That is exciting news! How are you doing?" It wasn't until after I hung up the phone that I felt some anger or frustration or whatever it was. I think I was mostly feeling disappointed that I'm not going to have any more babies, and she is!
Now I'm mostly over feeling upset about it. To be honest, I have had some times of thinking, "She doesn't have a good support system! She doesn't realize how hard this is going to be! She'll quit her classes! She can't do it!" It's hard to imagine Pumpkin's precious baby sibling, who will surely be like him in many ways, not having a childhood filled with all the good things that every child deserves.
But the thing is, I know R loves Pumpkin and this baby. I know it. That's not nearly everything it takes to be a good parent, but it is a start. I believe she is capable of being a good mom, if only the rest of her life will allow her the chance to actually do the other things it takes to be a good mom.
R has never said to us, "I gave up Pumpkin so he could have a better life." She's always said, "I love him, but I couldn't parent him." I think there's a big difference, don't you? Conveniently for me, I guess, I agreed with her on that assessment. It was hard for her to place Pumpkin. (Though as far as we can tell, she was not coerced or threatened. And we did not pressure her-- she relinquished her parental rights before we even knew Pumpkin existed). She doesn't want to do that again. And this time, I think she feels like she does have a choice, and maybe, possibly, probably she really can parent.
I was feeling upset about my lack of control, knowing that in some areas I would make different choices than she will, both as a woman and as a mom.
But it's not my choice! And as frustrating as that was at first, it's actually become kind of a comfort. Even if there existed some objective measure of parenting, and R scored "Adequate" while Beloved and I scored "Excellent"... It wouldn't matter, because it's not my choice, not my child. Even if there was a way to see Pumpkin and his sibling as adults and measure who is more successful, or happy, or educated, or who has the best memories of his childhood... It wouldn't matter, because it's not my choice, not my child.
Not my choice! Not my choice! Not my choice!
So, we choose to be as encouraging and supportive as we can. At least I'll know what to send her as gifts now: the usual photos, children's books, Target gift cards, children's books, kid clothes, and also children's books!
Here's the part about our faith, too. We trust that God is good, and that He wants the best for R, Pumpkin, and this coming baby. I do not believe that it is somehow God's will, His best possible plan, for children to be relinquished, for families to be separated, for the wealthy to raise the children of the poor, for women to struggle raising children on their own (if that's not what they have chosen), or for children to grow up without intact families, access to education and health care. But! God is still good! I hesitate even to mention faith and adoption together in the same paragraph because a distorted picture of "God's will" has so often been used to gloss over social and personal injustice in adoption. But it's part of how I've processed everything, and it's important to us.
So once again, we're in new territory. We're thinking now about how best to encourage R, and I'd like to talk about that sometime. I wonder why now that she's having a child, I suddenly feel a passion for her well-being that I didn't feel before. Shouldn't I have been this anxious to find the best way to support her before? (Not that we didn't support her, but we didn't put in this much energy and effort.) Shouldn't I be just as passionate about caring for all potentially struggling moms? Somehow the fact of a child, my sweet Pumpkin's brother or sister, makes everything seem more real, and more urgent.
1. This is what my couch has looked like for most of the week. I've been telling the kids to keep off the couch so the laundry doesn't get dirty.
2. I was mean to a lady in line at the grocery store last week. She asked if she could go ahead of me because she was on her lunch break and needed to get through quickly. I said it was okay, but in a tone that made it clear it was not okay. What I was really thinking was, "Hey, Lady, I'm shopping with toddlers here. What kind of emergency do you have?" She said, "Never mind, I'll go to another line." And then I felt horrible. Is my heart so selfish that I can't handle someone else going ahead of me in a stupid grocery store line?
3. I paid a lovely woman $30 to pamper my feet and paint my toenails. Not such a big deal, but it is such an unnecessary expense. Purely for myself. But it's nice to not worry about my feet looking nasty, and I love the little flowers on my nails. They make me happy.
4. We pay another lovely woman to clean our house every two weeks. In between, we vacuum occasionally and wipe down anything that is obviously gross, but I have not scrubbed a toilet or dusted the ceiling fan in over two years. Every once in a while she leaves a note telling me that we're almost out of Pledge, and I very happily buy another giant can and think, "This is so totally worth it."
(We used to do all of the cleaning ourselves. It was impossible to keep up. I would come home from work and feel angry as I walked in the door. Not angry at anyone in particular, but pissed off that my choices were to either 1) clean instead of hanging out with my family, or 2) try to enjoy my time with them, getting increasingly distracted and cranky by the day. It was not pretty-- the house or my bad mood.)
5. I have not ever taken either of my children to a dentist.
6. I forgot to even get a card for Beloved on our last anniversary.
There. So now you know.
We have quite a bit of lawn around our house, and Beloved still mows it all with a push mower. It's really hard work and it takes him forever. The boys love to be outside while he mows. They play with the mowed grass and bring their Daddy glasses of water. They also have a toy mower that Sparkle got for his very first birthday, which they take turns pushing around, following after Daddy. They are excited to be able to mow the lawn themselves when they are "grown up men!" We'll see how long that enthusiam lasts once they are old enough for lawn mowing to become their chore!
Watching them "mow with Daddy" every single time he mows our lawn reminds me of just how literally children model their values and behavior after those of the adults they love. It's very humbling!
Oh my yumminess! The peaches are ripe! We went to our favorite "you-pick" orchard this weekend, and the boys picked peaches almost as big as their heads. They had peach juice dripping off their chins within minutes.
Pumpkin decided he really needed to just sit right down and focus on the eating.
When we got home, I made a peach cobbler. (Oh yes, I did, because I am Super Woman.) The house smelled like peaches and butter and sugar and nutmeg and cinnamon. The children were tired and filthy and happy, and ate up the peach cobbler with gusto. Beloved, though, shrugged and said he didn't care for any. He said he'd already eaten some peaches today. Darn skinny husband with no sweet tooth... I had to eat his share.
(See here for Part 1.)
5. The family tradition I most want to pass on is: You mean, besides our basic values and our faith tradition? Does the importance of education count as a tradition?
My mom did a great job of making little things into something special, and I'd like to pass on some of those traditions. There are lots of them. For example, getting to chew gum when we turned three was a big deal. So on Pumpkin's upcoming third birthday, our family will gather around his bed on his birthday morning to wake him up by singing, "Happy Birthday." And at the end of the bed will be a gift, and it will be gum! He knows he can have gum when he's three, so it will be really exciting! Partly we do this for safety (no hard candy or gum until three years of age), but also because it's fun to make a milestone of it.
6. The family tradition I least want to pass on is: I think my family of origin (immediate and extended families) are too quick to blow off more subtle racism. This has gotten better, but maybe sometimes we're too conflict-avoidant, so it's more comfortable for us to ignore it. When my boys tell me that they sense racism or they interpret racist attitudes as the source of tension or a comment or whatever... I will believe them.
7. My child's first word in English was: This is really sad, but I'm not sure. Other than Mama and Dada? I think Sparkle maybe said, "Ball" (or maybe "Bawh") first. One of Pumpkin's earliest words was "Baaaaah!", as in the sound a sheep makes. He was very excited about it, and it was so funny.
8. My child's first non-English word was: Sparkle's was "more" in ASL. He did lots of signing, which he still remembers, but Pumpkin was never interested. Pumpkin's first non-English word was "boca" because we'd say "Abra la boca!" to him a lot when we fed him.
9. The non-English word or phrase most used in my home is: probably "Kgothatso." This is Sparkle's name from his first mom. It's a Tswana name. We often call both boys by the names their first moms gave them, but for some reason we use Sparkle's more than Pumpkin's. (Here is a link to more background on Sparkle's name and Pumpkin's name.)
10. One thing I love about being a parent is: the sweet and funny things my kids say every single day. Tonight Pumpkin took my face in his little hands at bedtime, pulled my face close, looked into my eyes and said very seriously, "Mama, I lud'jew all da times. All da times, I lud'jew." And last week, when I was blustering around trying to quickly deal with a small toilet training crisis (will it never end?), Sparkle stood in the bathroom door and told me, "I love you, Mama, even when we have a poop problem!" (I think he was copying our pattern of telling him we love him even when we're upset or when he's upset about something. You know, like, "Sparkle, we always love you, even when you're feeling cranky!")
11. One thing I hate about being a parent is: how bottomless their need for our time and attention is. I wish we had the energy to be at our 100% best and most engaged with them all the time, but we don't.
12. To me being an anti-racist parent means: I like what Heather said about teaching our kids that it's the world that is crazy; they are not crazy. It also means searching myself for wrong attitudes toward other people and choosing to change them.
Cloudscome at Sandy Cove Trail, Heather, and several others have inspired me to do this meme from Anti-Racist Parent. I'm not a great "meme-er," but this is a good one. It's long though, so I'm going to split it into two parts.
This blog is also a year and a half old now, so I have included a number of links within the blog to past posts that discuss some of the topics brought up by the meme or by my answer.
1. I am: a white woman. I think my genetically related relatives are mostly Swedish and Dutch. My extended family is mostly from Minnesota now, where there are lots of Swedish and Norwegian folks. We ate lots of lefse, frut sup, and lutefisk, especially around Christmas time.
2. My kids are: African American. They are transracial adoptees and soon to be grown up Black men in the United States. Sparkle is four years old, and was five months old when we met him in South Africa. Pumpkin is almost three years old, and was three weeks old (but still an itty bitty 31 week gestation baby) when I met him in Indianapolis.
3. I first started thinking about race, culture, and identity when: I took a course on social justice in college. My immediate family is a transracial adoptive family, but I was born to my parents. So it's sad that I wasn't thinking about race and identity earlier. Actually, the experience of growing up in an adoptive family really shaped my current thinking and my choices as a parent. But it wasn't until young adulthood that I realized how much privilege my whiteness gave me. I think it was in this college class that I was first introduced to the idea of "honorary whiteness" and thought, "Holy crap, I've been thinking of my brother and sister as honorary whites! What the...?!?!" From then on, I think my radar for issues of race, culture, and identity has been up. I've learned a lot, but clearly I'm still working on myself, and hopefully letting other people's experience work on me!
4. People think my name is: Amanda. And they're right. Many people don't know that I kept my original last name, because it's not hyphenated with Beloved's last name. But it's in there! And it's important to me.
(Part 2 later this weekend! I bet you're just on the edge of your seat!)
The decision is made. No more babies.
Actually, the decision was made about six weeks ago, but I have avoided blogging about it.
(If you have missed the many previous posts on this subject, here's a link to catch up.)
Beloved really doesn't want to have any more kiddos. I knew that, but maybe I didn't realize that he felt as strongly as he does. He has lots of good reasons. Time is a big one. He really wants to be able to parent the children we have as well as possible, and he feels like another child would mean giving up time he'd like to be able to spend with the boys, doing so many of the fun things they can do now, like riding bikes and playing ball and traveling.
Have I mentioned how hard Beloved works? He is really very, very smart and works as a scientist. He has arranged his schedule so that he drops the boys off and at school at 9 AM and picks them up a 4 PM. This means that he is actually in his office and lab for less time than his peers, but he's made it work because it's good for the boys. He usually ends up either working from home or going back to his office after they go to bed. And he still has managed to be more than fabulous at his job, with funding and publishing and all those things that are important to scientists.
Anyway, he's working really hard and isn't sure he can add anything else without sacrificing his work, himself, or his family more than he's willing to do.
And the thing is, I agree with him. I agree with him about needing to make sure we do our best for the kids we have. I agree that we feel maxed out most of the time already. And of course there are concerns about money, housing, and adoption to think about too.
I've been avoiding writing about this decision for couple of reasons. One is that I want to be able to talk about it in a way that makes it clear that we made the decision together and I didn't give up my desire because Beloved just casually dismissed the idea, or that he pushed me to make a decision with which I'm not comfortable.
Another reason I haven't written about it is because I'm still not totally sure how I feel. Mostly it's fine, and I agree, and I'm happy with our family. But I'm not being able to force myself to be completely at peace with never having any more children.
Beloved knows that I'm not totally ready to say for sure that we're done. He knows that I'm still trying to arrange things in my head, trying to figure out a way to make it work without this whole house of cards that we've built so carefully coming tumbling down around us.
Who knows... Maybe we'll adopt an older child in a few years?
For the indefinite future, we are not planning to pursue adding another child to the family.
So we made this decision several weeks ago. And I was just letting it all kind of sit for a while, not sure where my emotions and thoughts would land, exactly.
And then R. (Pumpkin's first mom) told us the big news that she is expecting a baby in a few months!
I really need to write about that, but again, my thoughts have been a little scattered and I have not been exactly sure what I think or how I feel. Clearly, though, I need to write about it. I don't know how I could share as much as I have about how adoption affects our family and then not write about this...
So that's coming soon...
Today is my day off, our "Stay Home Day" for the boys and me. We have our dear friend's daughter E at our house today. (They had a minor day care crisis and we were happy to have her for a long play date.)
So E's dad dropped her off in the morning just as I was helping Sparkle get stuff out for his breakfast cereal. By the time E and I came back to the kitchen, Sparkle was eating his cereal. He had gotten everything out, poured his own milk, and put the cereal and the milk away. I was a little surprised!
Then about the time Sparkle was finishing breakfast, Pumpkin woke up so I ran upstairs to get him to the bathroom and dressed. When I got back, Sparkle had rinsed his bowl and put both his bowl and spoon into the dishwasher.
Obviously, he's more capable than I've been giving him credit for!
Usually when meals are done the boys ask, "May I be excused?" And I say, "Yes. Please clean off your plate and put your dishes in the dishwasher." And they say, "Thanks for the dinner, Mom!" (Or Dad, depending on who was cooking.)
I've been pretty pleased with our routine so far. (Politeness! Age-appropriate responsibility!) But now I'm thinking I need to acknowledge that Sparkle, at least, has got the pattern down and I can just expect him to know what to do without reminding him of every step.
What a wonderful boy! I can't believe how grown up he is now! (Here he is, drinking his morning South African rooibus tea.)
Yeah, he's grown up, but he's still four!
