Peter's Cross Station

Sleep When the Baby Sleeps

It's all well and good with that first baby (and assuming you are not working a full-time, paying job), isn't it? But every mother of more than one knows that usually, when the baby sleeps, someone else (or multiple someone else's) are in desperate need of constant service and attention.

I have achieved that magical goal of overlapping naps, folks! Selina has lately decided that one nap per day is just fine for her, thanks, and believe it or not, this is a great relief to me. Now I can put her down at 11:30, put Nat down at 12 and they both sleep until 1 or 1:30.

This has been going on for three days now.

That means I have had a nap myself (even if it was only ten minutes on the couch) for two days in a row! It's amazing the difference ten minutes makes for an insomniac such as myself. All the difference in the world.

I don't know how long this will last. Nat is well over three now and is bound to give up napping at some point sooner rather than later. But I will enjoy it while I can.

Tired but...

I am really too tired to write much of anything these days.  But I had to stop in and tell you something.  I talked a mom today with a six-week old and a 22-month old and she is ready to kill somebody and certain that she is a failure as a mom and doesn't know why she can't handily parent two kids like she sees so many others doing.

I told her, and I'll tell you:  No, you aren't a failure or crazy it just really is that hard.  It is, it is.  It is totally normal to feel like you want to die, and that you'd perhaps even like to take a little person out with you when you go.

Yes, you should get some help--a friend, a relative, the UPS man, anyone!  Someone who can give you a nap for a hour, or a trip to the store alone or something.  Beg if you have to, pick up the phone and call someone you barely know.  And tell yourself that "this too shall pass" because it shall, it really shall.

Won't it, ya'll?  Tell her about it!

Hands

These are Nat's hands.

But I was noticing Selina this morning and thinking that I really love the stage of babyhood when they are still quite little, but their hands start working properly. Selina is getting increasingly dextrous these days. If she reaches for it, she tends to get it. If she aims for her mouth, she makes it. If she grabs for a crumb fallen from her rice cake, she can pick it up with a perfect "pincer" grasp.

I think it melts my heart to watch because the hands seem so ahead of the rest of the child. She's still more or less a helpless, completely dependent being but her hands are a little window into her future as a competent, independent person.

It's a reminder of the fleeting nature of this time when they so easily love me. Who knows what those hands will get up to when they're attached to a 17-year old?

It's Sunday Morning

Nat and I slept in instead of going to church today. I am hoping to use the time change to bump bedtime back by half an hour and thus hopefully, bump waking time up in turn.

Selina and Nat have been sharing a room for about two weeks now and it's mostly going swell. The careful placement of a screen and the judicious use of white noise have worked to cover each others' comings and goings during incompatible naps. I might be able to slip them onto a same-time nap routine when Selina decides to shift from two to one nap per day, but for now, I am just grateful that at three, Nat still willingly takes an hour+ nap every day. She certainly needs it. She's always been an easy and deep sleeper on a very regular schedule. Selina is a little less so, but not by too much. So hopefully the "sister room" as I'm calling it, will work well for them.

Big Home School post TBA. Watch this space!

To a Googler

The sheer desperation of this all-caps search string compels me to answer.

WHEN DO NEWBORNS GET EASIER

Ah, sweetie! Been there (twice). Babies are all different, but I'd say each of ours really turned the corner to sleeping more (which was the key for us) around 8-12 weeks old. Our first was colicky--crying from about 5pm to about 9pm (give or take) almost daily until five months old. That was tough. Putting her in a sling and walking around or bouncing up and down helped, though it was tiring.

But in general, they get easier and easier exponentially as time passes. Every week down is a week closer to easier. Hang in there!

Baby Sitters

When I was a baby sitter (on and off from age 12 until 34), I always just figured that when parents gushed over how great it was to have me, that this was some kind of blah-blah routine thing parents say to baby sitters.

Ha!

I appreciate me more now.

Nat's most consistent baby sitter (aside from Uncle David, of course) leaves soon for a semester abroad in Spain (I encouraged this crazy idea and am now kicking myself!) and we are all heartbroken. I now know just how fabulous it is when someone loves your kid and your kid loves her and she's someone who you can just totally leave your kid with and trust completely and she even feels a bit like the baby sister you never had to boot (English major!).

To get all those elements to gel is nothing short of a miracle.

Now it seems her best friend would like to step up to the plate and try to fill her shoes. I'm hopeful it will go well. But there's just no such thing as a true replacement for someone like Nat's Sarah.

We will miss her!

Nice While it Lasted

Everyone said Nat would love Selina until Selina got big enough to steal her toys and crawl around in her space. But Selina isn't that big yet and Nat is already taunting her by putting a toy up for Selina to grab, then, if Selina touches it, grabbing it back and saying "No Selina, it's my turn!"

Tonight we were all cozied up in a chair together, watching the news and Selina's foot brushed Nat's leg. "No Selina, that's my leg!" Nat chided her. Then again in reference to her elbow and her arm. I told Nat that if everyone was going to sit on top of Mama Shannon at the same time, some touching would be inevitable.

sigh

But Nat is still sweet with Selina a lot, too. She calls her "Seena Babeena" and "Baby Sister" and "Sister." The other day, Selina was doing a baby stand-up on Cole's lap and holding her head up quite proudly and Nat applauded, "Good job, sister!" When Selina cries, Nat will say "Aww, what the matter, sister?" A few days ago I left the room for about 45 seconds and when I returned, Nat was trying to spoon-feed Selina some cashew butter left over on a plate from Nat's breakfast. I had to deliver a stern reprimand about only grown-ups feeding the baby after rushing Selina to the kitchen to swab out her mouth with wet paper towels and pray she wasn't allergic to cashews (no reaction--not that time, anyway). But I think Nat meant well. I think. While I was busy swabbing, Nat turned her attentions to a doll whose face was covered with cashew butter when I returned.

When Selina came home, I had a chat with Aunt Nancy about how now I would find out more about what "babies" are like, versus what Nat is like. I realize it's kind more that I'm finding out what Nat and Selina are like, but the similarities and differences are still interesting.

So far, Selina, like Nat, loves to be held, slung, wrapped, Bjorned and otherwise carried. Like Nat, she prefers to sleep with people, but unlike Nat, she is not settling happily into sleeping alone in her hammock on a predictable time schedule. By this time, Nat was on a fairly regular sleeping and eating schedule and by six months (Selina is about 4.5) she was on an unshakable one. Nat would eat exactly 4 oz exactly every four hours. She took a 10 am-12 and a 2 pm-4 pm nap every single day without fail. She did that until well after she started solids, until I forcibly night weaned her by refusing the bottle at 2 am when she was ten months old.

Selina is pretty unpredictable. She sometimes eats 4 oz of formula. Sometimes she polishes off a 6.5 oz. bottle and I wonder how much more she would have wanted. I never know how to fill them for her maximum happiness and the least waste. She sometimes naps and sometimes doesn't. That is, of course she sleeps during the day, but often it's in snatches here and there and almost never in her hammock, though I got lucky a couple of days in a row here. Sometimes she wakes to eat at 11 pm or 1 am and sometimes she eats at 7:30 pm, goes to bed and sleeps soundly until 6 am. (That would be a good habit to get into, of course, but she only does it occasionally.) Basically, she's guaranteed to take a good long nap only if I wrap her on me. And then she'll do the two-hour morning nap or the two-hour afternon nap. But in her bouncy seat or the hammock, it's a crap shoot. Nights, if she does wake up in the middle, she's done sleeping on her own. I can fight it and keep getting up every 15-45 minutes to bounce the hammock and stick her binky in her mouth or I can kick Cole onto the couch and put Selina in bed with me and she's happy until 6 or 6:30.

What I like is the "happy until 6 or 6:30" part. I don't like sleeping with her because I just don't sleep well with her in the bed and Cole has to go on the couch because the bed just isn't big enough for me not to lay there all night worrying that we're going to smother her. Fortunately, Selina doesn't insist on sleeping on me. She's happy enough to sleep beside me. But still. I don't sleep so much like this, myself.

But all this is really just to say that as cuddly as Nat was and still is, Selina is, if possible, even cuddlier. I think that's just dumb luck, though. I don't believe all babies are this cuddly. I do think all babies probably prefer to stick as near to people as they can though.

I am starting to think that maybe we will not use a crib for Selina like we did for Nat when she outgrew the hammock. I think I might just get another twin futon and put it on the floor in what will be the girls' shared room. Then they can crawl into bed with each other if they like. As long as Selina is big enough and mobile enough by then to get away from Nat if she wants to, a sibling bed might work well for my cuddly girls. Anyone out there do a sibling bed?

Speaking of crawling, that's another difference. Nat loathed tummy time. She would not tolerate it for 2 seconds and screamed bloody murder the whole time. Selina had 30 minutes (!) of tummy time today, next to me on the floor while I worked on the laptop beside her. She kicks and coos and grins and laughs at the toys hanging just over her head out of reach and tries to move from here to there. Nat never crawled until long after she walked. Until she was eleven months old, I could sit her in the middle of a floor, run to the bathroom and return to find her right where I left her. Selina is going to be a crawler for sure and possibly quite soon. She is itchin' to crawl.

Selina also loves to sing. Nat is just now starting to sing along with me when I do lullabyes at night (or "bedtime songs" as we call them). Selina is already singing along. Her face is all smiles and round little toothless "oh!"s in various musical pitches while I sing "Amazing Grace." It almost doesn't work to put her to sleep because she's so worked up and excited about singing. But I keep doing it anyway, because, duh, how cute!

Last week was the 4 month check up and Selina came in at 13lbs, 14 oz, up to 50th %ile for weight from last month's 12th. She's still low--in the 6th %ile--for height. The doctor told me she would need to catch up in height or we should worry.

"Oh, she's probably just going to be short" I blithely answered.

"Oh no, she can't be this short," the doctor tried again "at this rate, she'd only be about five feet at adulthood." (Mind you, the doctor is only about 5'3" herself.)

"Yes," I said, "her mother told us she was five feet tall, but when I met her I was thinking she was probably closer to 4' 10". And Selina's father is only 5'7".

"Oooooh..." said the doctor making a note (perhaps: "all adopted babies are not completely unknowable biological mysteries from nowhere.").

Ha! My girl is perfectly healthy. If just about perfectly round. She's a little round ball of baby sweet enough to eat up with a spoon!

Atavistic

One of the coolest things to me about babies is how I can look at them and see ancient ancestors. Little Selina clings to me, even when I'm already holding her tight, and if I make a sudden move (or sneeze!), she grabs tighter, as if to insist "don't drop me out of the tree!" I lay her down for thirty seconds on a soft, warm bed and her face scrunches up and she prepares to wail as if she'd been left on a rocky hillside like Baby Oedipus, just waiting to be plucked away and carried off by eagles.

Baby care is such a physical task, whether you gave birth or not; whether you're breastfeeding or not. I'm always hearing biological mothers blithely refer to "hormones" as if that is what drives them to hear phantom cries, or wake when the baby's breathing pattern changes slightly, or to have eyes in the back of their heads. But I have all these things too, so if it's hormones, they must be triggered by motherhood as a state, rather than necessarily pregnancy or nursing per se.

I am convinced that adoption is as "natural" as anything can be said to be.

I used to date an OB/Gyn who had delivered thousands of babies (plus one of her own) and she told me that human beings' tendancy to anthropomorphize everything from goldfish to cars is an evolutionary atavism that reflects our "adoption gene." She said that given the high number of fatalities our ancestors experienced in child birth, the willingness--even desire--to pick up a baby unrelated by blood, to see ourselves in it and care for it as our own was a survival necessity.

Selina is certainly eager for me to pick her up these days. She won't sleep anywhere during her daytime naps but on a human being. At night she is sleepy enough to go down in her hammock, but she is spending about 16 hours of 24 on a person (me, Cole, David, one of a couple of helpful friends) every day lately. She snuggles down, finds a fist of clothing to grab and holds on for dear life and I can hear her little self pleading to be kept close and protected from wolves and it hits me somewhere in my reptilian brain.

I know childhood is culturally constructed and its definition shifts over time, but I can't help but think that when we did live in trees, and of course didn't put the babies down at all, well, that was somehow the essence of true infancy. I know babies can survive and thrive though they are parented in many different ways, but it just kills me to have this back problem that keeps me from being able to just strap Selina on and go about my business. I get stuck in the rocking chair a lot so as to hold her as much as she craves. And when people suggest that I shouldn't hold her so much or even say I'm "spoiling" her, well, the adoption hormones (or whatever they are) almost drive me to growl and snarl like a wolf myself. So clear is it to me that my baby needs to be held.

I did get to start the physical therapy with my chiropractor last Thursday. Here's hoping that by the time we are slogging through multiple airports next week, it will not be completely forbidden for me to wear that baby wrap.

Help?

If you were going to read ONE book about childbirth--not pregnancy, but just childbirth--what would it be?

Mothers

Our meeting with Ivy was lovely except that Ivy was really ill with swollen tonsils. She shouldn't have come at all, she should have stayed in bed, but she told us she didn't want to let us down, since we'd driven so far (3.5 hours ish). So we only chatted for 15 minutes or so before she needed to get home and take her antibiotics and sleep.

We talked about names, we talked about birth She is absolutely certain she absolutely wants us in the delivery room. The very first thing she said to Cole upon shaking her hand was "did she tell you I want you there?" She even wanted to talk logistics--should we come up and stay near her close to her due date? Should she come down and stay near us? Her babies tend to come early and within 4 hours, so if we're going to be there, we need to plan it out. So that is that. These are her strong wishes. I am not interested in condescending to tell her she is wrong about what she thinks she wants. We know that baby isn't ours until the papers are signed and we know that even after (if) papers are signed that baby is still hers. As I told someone else today, I can't change the law, but I can bend over backwards to honor her moral rights. And she has, at this point not only a moral, but a legal right to decide who is allowed at her birth. If she changes her mind between now and then, that's fine. But as long as she feels this way, it's her decision.

Separate from all that, we of course, are delighted to be there, whether the baby comes home with us or not. I have always wanted to attend a birth and have not had the chance yet. It will be an honor to be there for her regardless of our ultimate relationship to the child. And if the baby does come home with us, it will have been a blessing to have all three moms there for its birth.

On "it": Ivy still doesn't know the gender. I think she gets one ultrasound and she says she'll send us copies of the photos and let us know gender if they can tell. So we're still airing both girl and boy names.

Naming.
There's a thorny one. Lots of adoptive parents talk about it.

Cole and I have been talking names for months. We thought we had first names all figured out and would leave a middle name for the first mother. Well, that's not how Ivy sees it. She wants us all to talk names together. So we are back to the drawing board. I want to keep the first names we picked out but move them to middle names and pick new firsts with Ivy. But Ivy is not all that keen on the girl name we picked. So we'll see how it all comes out. I'll have to let you know. I do know that I feel quite differently about this now than I did before I had Nat, which brings me to...

Already Being a Mother while Planning to Adopt.
When we did this with Nat, we had no idea what we were doing. Rose was an abstraction to us. We didn't know her before Nat's birth and after we heard about her on the phone from the social worker, we still didn't feel we knew her. We respected her, we wanted to know all about her, but we didn't know her.

When we met her we loved her instantly. That was because by the time we met her, Nat had been home with us for two days and we loved her instantly, and so we loved Rose, the flesh of her flesh.

But in this case, Ivy is not an abstraction. Even before we met her, she was less an abstraction than Rose had been, because now we are parents and we weren't back then. I know what it feels like to be a mother now in a way that I didn't quite know before (I have parented before, but not with a legal commitment). Now I know how it feels to have someone put a baby in your arms and say, "this is your daughter." In short, it felt to me like "this is my daughter." Done and over and I am a mother unchanging forever and that is that. If, five minutes later, someone said "that's not your child," I would have thrown myself under a car to prove otherwise.

So without knowing what someone else feels per se, I do know that a woman who's grown a baby in her body for nine months is a mother, unchanging forever. And I knew that, intellectually before Nat, but I feel it, viscerally now. And whatever formal, legal power imbalances there might be between us, if we parent Ivy's baby, there are no moral imbalances as I see it. I know that not all adoptive parents would agree with me, but that's how I see it. So Ivy has as much right to name this child as we do. "Saving" the middle name for her is not really equal. It's tossing her a bone. That's how I feel about it. And if it were Nat in question here, I'd want to be an equal part of the process. Not handed some little piece of it that the people with the legal power condescended to give away.

I think Cole is feeling at least this way about it. Maybe even more strongly. So, like I said, we're back to the drawing board and that is why.

Not Twoo Terrible

I sometimes fret about whether or not ya'll will think I brag too much about Nat.

Aunt Nancy, whose people skills are considerably more advanced than mine suggests that if I'm worried about it, perhaps it would help to tell you about her naughtiness.

Well, I don't mean to brag, but she just isn't all that naughty.

However, she is two. Sort of all of a sudden.

It is clear that she is hitting the "I love you--I hate you" stage of toddlerdom, as regards her primary parent (oh goodie, that's me!). Half the time she's clinging and demanding I "sit dog! read book!" (translation, "sit with me on the big, stuffed dog chair and read a book"). Forty percent of the time, she's puttering around happily on her own doing a variety of important work, from laughing because she put a stuffed pig on top of the toy piano (you have to be two to get it, I guess) to counting the coils on the radiator in her room, after asking me "how many hot?" (I was so confused. I thought she meant how hot and I kept correcting her and saying "very hot." Finally, she counted the coils and announced "10 hot!")

Then there's that 10% of the time when she is practicing having a will that is in utter contrast to mine. I will say, "be gentle with the toys, we don't throw toys," (after she gets a little too rambunctious) and five minutes later, with a gleam in her eye, she'll catch mine, raise a toy over her head, make sure I'm watching and drop it, with a look that clearly says "now what are you going to do?"

Aunt Nancy asks, "well, so what do you do?"

Mostly I ignore her. I definitely retrieve the toy, repeat, "we must play carefully with toys, we don't want them to break" and put the toy out of reach. If a tantrum ensues (it does about half the time), I pretty much ignore it while moving onto an activity I know she'll want to join me in. Tantrum over, Mama Shannon and Nat reunited. To such an extent that she will usually throw herself all over me, smacking kisses, hugging (with "awwww" sound effects) and declaring "I love you!"

You would think she was a big manipulator with all that love, but I really don't think so. She pours it on after the drama, not in the midst of the drama in an attempt to change the situation in her favor.

So that's the best I can do.

I guess I am still bragging. But honestly, right now, she's a pretty enjoyable person to hang out with.

I really worry about impending baby sib, though. I think she's going to be livid that a new baby is constantly in my arms making them unavailable to her. She gets jealous when her friends sit in my lap to read books, or even if I'm on the phone or busy cooking with my back turned from her too long. I think a lot of her pleasantness is based on the fact that things go the way she wants them to, most of the time. They go that way because most of the time, her way and mine aren't in conflict. But with a new baby, I'm going to have to do things that aren't her choice. I think ultimately, this will be really good for her growth as a person--to learn to share and wait for turns and such, within reason. But initially, I think it's going to be a nightmare.

Ah, we will see what we will see!

Mamaversary

I have been a parent for two years today. This is the day we met Nat.

Sometimes, it seems strange that her birthday comes before the day we met her. I think a lot about her three days in the hospital nursery without a parent, and I've become certain she wouldn't have been released if she or Rose had had medical insurance. It's probably just as well that I didn't know it at the time, but Nat's weight was borderline for low birth weight (some books say it is, some say an ounce less is the line, but she was well below both by three days old). And judging by her first year of development, I think she was closer to five weeks than three weeks early as the doctors speculated. I think if she were my birth child, she'd have been watched a bit until her weight came up some.

But I didn't know anything about newborns except apgars then, and Nat didn't have any apgars, because she was born en route to the hospital.

Nat was born precipitously 20 minute's after Rose's water broke. She was born as Rose crossed her front porch to get to the car of a friend waiting outside at 3 am. So Nat went from 99-degree water to Chicago February with nothing but a pair of sweatpants between her and the icy blast of winter. Later that week, when she'd be asleep in my arms, clearly having tiny nightmares--squishing up her face and shaking her fists and murmuring discontentedly--Cole asked "what could she possibly be having nightmares about? And I said "getting born!"

Nat's first night home, she didn't sleep well. She didn't like the crib (we quickly obtained the Amby hammock and she was fine ever after) and I was up rocking her after her 3 am feeding--her birth hour--and I said, "you are four days old now. You seem to want me to hold you all night while you sleep. That's okay. When you're four days old, you can have anything you want" and I rocked her all night.

The next day someone asked if I thought I'd regret not giving birth myself. I looked at Nat and said "I dont' know how my body could possibly do a better job than that!" and it was true. I haven't given pregnancy or birth a thought since Nat arrived, though a mere week before, I'd turned 35 and heard a biological clock make the teeniest "tick" for the first time in my life. I had scrounged up a possible sperm donor just in case I changed my mind or somehow adoption didn't work out, but as it did, potential sperm donor became godfather and unlike a child born to me would have had, Nat has just his dark skin and dark eyes, as fate would have it.

Mama Rose has not been in our lives to the extent we had hoped. So far we're still waiting to hear from her. We haven't given up hope though--we've heard from all kinds of people who ought to know, that sometimes, first mothers take some time before leaping into regular contact. So we honor her photo, hanging over Nat's bed, we keep her in the bedtime prayers, write the updates we promised and save them for her.

I still get agitated when I read certain things about adoption and how it could be better for first mothers. I think I am starting to put my finger on it, having just finished the book I told you about the other day. it's a book about China adoption. But the analysis is about larger political concerns. And it helped me realize that it isn't that I'm against most of the adoption reforms I read about--longer revocation periods, legally binding openness agreements, first mother hospital rights/respect--it's that these all seem so individual and private when the issues that haunt (in Dorow's terms) our adoption are so much more systemic. Mama Rose didn't need a longer revocation period (in her particular crisis, she needed to be able to place her baby with a permanent family as soon as possible), Mama Rose didn't need a nicer hospital birth experience. She needed health insurance that would have given her access to the care that would have prevented a pregnancy she didn't want in the first place (much as she loves Nat--she told us so). Mama Rose personally doesn't need a legally binding openness agreement--we're willing to go well beyond the openness we agreed to extralegally. She needs to have heard of open adoption before she walked into the agency. She needed to have been able to tell her family that adoption didn't have to mean losing their sibling, grandchild, niece, that we could still be family.

Again, I'm completely in favor of all those reforms. I'd vote to make them global tomorrow if I could. but as with questions of adopters' culpability in the injustices that make some children commodities and their mothers expendable labor, I think the problems predate and go beyond adoption so far that these little reforms would just be a tiny drop in the sea of need for change. These reforms would help some of the more privileged first mothers out there have a better chance at making a choice they could live with. But so many mothers have no choices of any kind from beginning to end. So many women have no choice about whether to become mothers or under what circumstances. Many others have no choice to parent the children born to them, though with some support, they could do it. I told a friend yesterday, "we don't need 'adoption reform,' we need to take to the streets with pitchforks!"

The question is, how did I end up in a position to adopt and how did Rose and so many women like her, end up in a position not to be able to keep their babies (or to be able to prevent having them in the first place if they choose)? I do think that in a considerably more "perfect world" there might very well still sometimes be women who become pregnant and yet just simply don't want to be parents. There might be orphans whose parents have died. There might be women who want to parent with people not genetically kin to their children. So sure, there would be adoption in that world. But there would not be such disparity of privilege--race, class, cultural and national privilege--that render some women adopters and some women first mothers automatically, almost as if stamped on their heads at birth.

So although I'd vote for adoption reform, and I'll keep talking about that to people who ask us questions on the playground (etc.), I also need to feel that I am doing something to spit against the hurricane of political forces that keep moving us further and further in the direction of injustice, as the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. grows, as race not only doesn't become less of a problem but looks about the same rhetorically here in 2007 as it looked in 1850. And to be honest, I don't feel I am doing much in that department. I'll keep working on it though.

More about Race, Beauty and Transracial Parenting

Beate said:

I see a dilemma here: The need to counter society's negative messages with positive ones of your own conflicts, to my mind, with the risk that constant judgment of ANY kind will generate insecurities. I'm following the logic of Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Parenting" when I say that the constant affirmation of Nat's intelligence may some day raise the question (from her or others) of why you're not just taking for granted that she's smart. And yet I see why it's necessary to counter outsiders' negative input. Frankly, I have no idea how I would handle this dilemma. It's a tough one.

Sara said:

I think that the right amount of affirmation is hugely helpful, but too much praise reeks of insincerity.

Sadly, one's mother's view of one's beauty is probably the message least valued by just about any child over the age of 10 ... I think that making sure that the message is reinforced from other directions might be really helpful.

I appreciate Beate's recognition of the dilemma. It's definitely a dilemma, and as Nat has grown older and has started getting wiser to the world around her, our handling of that dilemma has shifted. No doubt it will keep shifting as the need arises.

The bottom line is, there's no right answer to the problem, because it's a problem rooted in and expressed through white supremacy and racism, plain and simple. There's no antidote to racism that any one parent or any one family can achieve on its own. When Sara suggests the need to reinforce family opinion with outside opinion, she couldn't have hit the target any squarer. The trouble is, where do we find that outside opinion? Look around. Where are girls and women who look like Nat represented as intelligent and beautiful? (For extra credit, compile a list of places where they're represented as inherently ugly, stupid, behavior problems, sexually loose and/or rapable, poor, drug-addicted, and otherwise undesirable and pathological.)

The only place I've found reinforcement of positive images of dark-skinned, kinky-haired girls and women is in strong Black neighborhoods in major cities: On the street in DC or Chicago where Nat is set upon at every turn by gushing Black adults telling her she's gorgeous, at the Black feminist bookstore (alas the passing of Sister Space in DC when U Street gentrified and their rent got raised), in the natural hair salon like the one we visited with Uncle Wayne in Seattle, where I met a wonderful woman who works with One Church, One Child and talked with me about the value of homeschooling Black children. And so our goal is to live in a place like that sometime soon and be sure Nat is surrounded by a real community of real people who love her and value her.

Meanwhile, our little commnunity such as it is does its best. Much of our decision-making about taking Nat consciously to the mirror and pointing out her beauty in the specificity of her features comes through earnest conversations with Black parents who do this with their own children, and whose parents did it for them. "Direct socialization" as one mother of daughters put it for me, is almost the only tool we have to combat the negative messages that our children are bombarded with through indirect socialization. Telling my daughter her brown skin is beautiful does feel awkward to me. But that is the price of raising a Black daughter in the 21st century U.S. I don't have the luxury of following the no doubt good advice of child development experts that too much praise can be harmful. (I read that in Einstein Didn't Use Flashcards myself, and thought, "where the heck does that leave our family?" with our commensurate need to give Nat some kind of counter-message from a popular culture that tells her she can never be beautiful and she's unlikely to succeed educationally.

It leaves our family where Black families have always been in this country. It's another moment of realizing that we have lost some white privilege we didn't know we had.

The reason I'm writing this follow up is because I think many of my white readers have probably not thought of it that way. I know that before I was Nat's mother, the idea of making such a big deal out of a child's beauty and/or intelligence would have rung artifical to me too. But how do you think those little girls in that film came to see those white dolls as "nice" or "pretty" or otherwise desirable? And what can I, as a mere individual mother, do to combat that? This is one of the few tools I have with a child not yet 2 years old.

When Nat is older, we'll be able to let her pursue her heart's desires and give her all kinds of complex opportunities to learn to appreciate and love herself in complex ways. It's one reason I want to home school. I want to give her opportunities to have ideas, try them out, succeed and fail on her own terms and learn to try again without feeling defeated by classroom rules or grades.

I have read interviews with adult transracial adoptees who say they felt their parents didn't find them beautiful; that they had no memories of being told they were beautiful and how that messed with their sense of self-worth and how they interpreted it in racial terms. And if the worst thing Nat can tell her therapist about me someday is "my mother told me I was beautiful too much" well, I'll take it.

As Trey points out, there's too little praise and there's too much praise. It's a tough line to walk, but if I have to err, I'd rather err on the side of a child who bats her eyelashes at herself in the mirror and declares "pretty girl" any day of the week.

More on Education and Parenting Visions

Sometimes I worry that when I post stuff about what Nat’s doing along the lines of letters or numbers or more traditional “academic” things like that, people will get the impression that

A) I care that she learn her letters and numbers at one and a half

B) I’m spending an inordinate amount of energy drilling them into her

C) I think knowing letters and numbers at one and a half translates to anything about academic accomplishment in the long term (I am well aware that the research says not—and in fact early reading can create academic burnout in kids)

D) Academic accomplishment means anything to me as a parent anyway

A-D are all false. I spend the same amount of energy “teaching” Nat that I spend teaching any random toddler I come across, or specific toddlers I’ve cared for over the years. We read a lot of books because we all like books. And Nat turns out to love books and language much as we do and her mother does. Numbers and math seem to be another thing she loves—and believe me, she’s getting no particular reinforcement from me on that. I am seriously math phobic. If she turns out to love math, well, it’s a good thing Cole is good at it and that we have plenty of options in a university environment to find folks with whom she can study numbers to her heart’s content without me.

As for vision statements, it seems I need to clear that up a bit. I am not talking about a roadmap. “x years of ballet” aren’t in there anywhere. I am talking about broad values that can help us make decisions about little things like ballet when and if we ever get stuck trying to make those kinds of little decisions. I want something we can look at and ask: “how will this little decision contribute to hewing to our broader values?”

When we were in the home study phase of our adoption, people kept asking us to tell them what we wanted for our children or what we “dreamed of” for them. We were asked this by social workers and adoption agency questionnaires and interviews and it was pretty clear that “right” answer was “a good education.” In Liberal America it seems “a good education” is the ticket to a golden lifestyle (and a golden lifestyle is, of course, the goal). We kept saying “we want our children to know we love them unconditionally and to be happy people.” We just refused to say we wanted any particular kind of education for them. I mean, how could you say that about a child/ren you haven’t met yet? How do you know that digging in the garden isn’t going to make them the happiest people on earth?

So we didn’t say we wanted a great education for our kids. We simply said we would be able to provide as much education as our kids wanted. We also figured the fact that we were both college professors would be a pretty clear indication that we do in fact value and enjoy education ourselves.

But one of the reasons I wanted to adopt, rather than get pregnant, was to avoid the temptation to eugenics that choosing donor sperm would give me. Let me make it very clear here that I do not think all people choosing donor gametes for whatever reason are engaging in eugenics. What I am saying is that for me, going down that road, even in very preliminary ways, even in drawing up short-lists of possible known donors, pulled me in a direction I didn’t feel comfortable heading. Adoption forced me to let go and let God (if you’ll forgive the phrase) and just see what child the universe sent us. (This was my process, not Cole’s. She was very open to letting me decide whether to get pregnant or adopt.)

So when we decided to adopt, it was with no guarantees about our child’s intelligence or abilities. We wanted a basically healthy baby for our first child (but were far more flexible about what “healthy” means that lots of adopters), but we didn’t pin any particular expectations on this child. (And here I’ll add that we are expecting another child and have a similar hands-off, expectations-free attitude and even more wiggle-room as to health this time around).

Ironically, Nat seems to be more “genetically” intelligent than any baby I probably could have “manufactured” myself, no mater what sperm we’d used. Nat’s mother is, I do not hesitate to say, a genius. I truly believe that she is as smart as the smartest people I’ve met. (And I’ve met some really smart people, including, ahem, Nobel Prize winners, so take that “Nobel” sperm bank.) Once, while a lesbian couple was telling us about their anonymous donor’s SAT scores, it occurred to me that had Mama Rose the kinds of privilege their sperm donor had had, she probably would have blown his SATs out of the water. This is a woman who not only lacked privilege, but had every possible thing going against her in life and managed to achieve an education that could proudly stand beside that of plenty of well-to-do white kids I’ve taught over the years. She dragged herself up by bootstraps when she didn’t even have boots on her feet. I can’t imagine what she’d be doing if she had had the kinds of opportunities I’ve had in life. But it wouldn’t be blogging. She wouldn’t have time.

And so Nat, it seems, “picks things up” not just easily, but enthusiastically. And I’m proud of her. She loves her letters and numbers. She launches into them on her own at every opportunity. And given that her half-siblings make straight A’s in some of the country’s worst schools, pick up musical instruments they’ve never seen and play by ear, and love to read when their peers are barely literate by high school graduation indicates to me that Nat will probably eat up any academic opportunity we strew in her path.

But part of my desire to home school is to maintain that hands off, let-go attitude. I want to give her the freedom to explore her own interests that school just doesn’t give. I don’t want her academically “pushed” because she’s talented. I also don’t want her bored.

Now who knows what needs, abilities or interests our next child will bring to the family? I want to make it clear that it doesn’t matter what they are. We will love and embrace that child for her/himself regardless. And that is just the way we embrace Nat.

Home Schooling It Is…

I haven’t given this too much specific thought lately, but when I do pause and focus, I realize that home schooling and school-schooling tend to lurk in my mind at the same time when I imagine Nat’s education.

I suppose I have a vague map in my head that we’ll home school for the early grades (K-3) or for as long as we live in this particular spot on the prairie and then perhaps send her to my fantasy private progressive school or fancy prep school when/if we move near such a thing and if we can afford it and if she wants to go.

“Why not public school?” you ask?

I confess that I am a product of Catholic parochial school and Catholic girls’ prep school having only attended public school for one year—Kindergarten—so I have a hard time envisioning my daughter in public school. (The reason for my schooling was that we lived in one of the worst school districts in the country—the public schools have been on notice and de-certified for years at a stretch.)

I have taught in a couple of different public high schools, one in a middle-class, white suburb of Princeton, NJ and the other, supposedly the best non-magnet school in Washington, DC. (There were school shootings among both student bodies [though not on school grounds], by the way, during my one-year tenure in each school.) The NJ school was freshly painted and brightly lit, had plenty of access to up-to-date technology, nice playing fields, good teachers, small(ish) class sizes and a golf team. The DC school was dim and falling down—paint peeling, ceilings dripping when it rained, rotten food in the cafeteria for the kids who qualified for free breakfast programs and I ran the computer center myself, which, I must tell you, was a joke. Separate and unequal, folks. Martin Luther King Jr. is turning over in his grave.

But it isn’t lack of resources or the existence thereof that really makes or breaks public school for me. I think I was in college when I went to pick up my brother from his shiny, well-funded, golf-team-having suburb (where my parents moved when they could no longer afford two kids in the Catholic schools)—located high school. That is when I decided that I could never send my kid to a public school.

It was the advertising. There were ads up and down the hallways for junk food, as I recall. Snicker Bars and Coca Cola. That sort of thing. I was horrified. Then I learned about Channel One, where, for selling the souls of their kids and curriculum to big corporations, poor schools could get “free” t.v.s and other a/v equipment. Then they started the charter schools and the magnet schools and later, in Washington, Newt Gingrich’s Congress forced vouchers on DC against the votes of the people—which they could do since they control the DC budget—and my tax money earmarked for public education started going to Sister Mary Joseph’s Academy for Tots or Brother Billy Bob’s Anti-Semitic Institute or where ever else and the kids in the public schools who still couldn’t afford those alternatives (even if they wanted them)—$3K voucher or not—got stuck in whatever gets left behind when you skim the cream off the top and rich people sending their kids to $20K/year prep schools got a little summer vacation bonus.

Then came No Child Left Behind which in fact, penalizes schools by taking away funding if their students don’t score well on standardized tests. Oh, THAT will help failing schools! Take away their funding! Now why didn’t I think of that? And the testing itself is something that few teachers I know agree with. Teachers complain about it all the time—how their curricular plans are hi-jacked by pressures to teach kids to perform a certain way on a test rather than teaching kids to learn and to love learning.

Okay. I will now pause while you yell at your computer screen because you disagree with some or much or all of what I said.

But I am not up for debating this. You can believe what you like and educate your kids accordingly. That is fine with me. Leave a comment about your perspective. I am not going to argue with you. This is a democracy and our kids can debate the relative merits of their respective educations in their first-year college English classes. This is just how I feel. I have a strong anti-capitalist bias, so I hate the corporate encroachment upon public education. I am a teacher whose philosophy is strongly anti-testing, so NCLB is the opposite of my idea of good pedagogy.

Now after the experience with the developmental specialist who seemed to look at Nat and see negative stereotypes and “risk” categories and statistics instead of…Nat, I am wary of subjecting her to any more institutional scrutiny than absolutely necessary. Knowing her as I do, I think the freedom to follow her incredible sense of curiosity and delight with the world will serve her better than the mental and bodily discipline that must be practiced in primary schools in order for learning to occur among larger groups of children. When she’s a solid reader and writer and add-er and subtract-er and multiplier and divider and creative thinker who knows and can stand up for herself, I will be willing to entertain her entering a school if she is passionately interested in trying it out.

And that is how I feel and what I think and why I want to home school her.

How do I plan to home school?

I’m not sure yet. It’s kind of hard to think of “school” as something separate from “life” since I am teaching her, literally, every minute I’m with her and she’s awake. I can’t imagine that changing for any reason, at any age. Teaching is just second nature to me. I don’t think of it as teaching until I watch other people interact with her and realize the slight differences. It isn’t that they aren’t teaching her in the sense that she is learning from them constantly (you can no more stop a kid from learning than stop a kid from growing) but that what I do is look for opportunities to show and tell and encourage her to practice stuff every second of the day. It’s just communication, really, because she is always “asking” in her 16 month-old way, for information and opportunities to experiment. (Cole does a lot of teaching with her too, it also being her second nature.)

So I guess my heart leans in an unschooling direction. Yet I also think that for myself, I’d need a little more planning, documentation and record keeping than unschooling seems to focus on. Nat may not need (in fact may very well resent) tests or assignments to check off in boxes with gold stars, but I am a teacher and trained as a teacher and also a bit of a control freak, so I will probably have my own secret curriculum somewhere in the back of a notebook, even if it’s just a big long list of things I want to accomplish every month. Or am I wrong? Do unschoolers do that anyway?

I sort of envision a few hours three days a week of sitting down and doing “school” work in a planned and scheduled way and then taking a couple of days a week to spend mostly in free-reading or field trips or lessons or sports or other hobbies Nat discovers and wants to pursue. I liked the Classical Home Schooling book, but it was overly rigid and moralistic for my tastes and I wouldn’t embrace it fully. I do want to do Latin, though, and I want to diagram sentences.

I also plan to enroll her in programs that do teach test-taking skills. I want her to be able to ace the SATs if she decides she needs to (and her Godfather Wayne wants her to go to Princeton, so if he convinces her, she’ll need to). I just want those skills placed in proper perspective—a dumb trick we have to learn in order to Get Over on the System.

What exactly we end up doing will depend on how long we home school and that will depend on money, location, and of course, Nat herself. I can imagine her loving school and I can imagine her hating school. So it could go either way. But I feel pretty certain that we will start her out at home.

Post your judgments below if you must. I am ducking.

Literary Mama Shannon

Recently, there's been a bit of chatter around the internet about gender and babies and gender and babies' goods. I have been biting my tongue, waiting for this to come out.

What do you think?

ETA:

Several folks have written to point out the article in the most recent issue of Brain, Child magazine, called "Beautiful" by a mom who let her little boy wear "girls'" clothes throughout preschool. I wanted to add that yes indeed, cross-dressing a boy has different cultural and social ramifications than cross-dressing a girl.

Our position before Nat arrived in girl form was that we'd let a boy wear a dress if he wanted to--but only at home. After reading the Brain, Child piece, I have reconsidered. Notwithstanding the writer's lefty, Quaker school , heterosexuality and supportive husband, I think if we ever have a boy who wants to wear girl clothes, we'll just plain let him. It matters, however, that both of us are able to fully, legally adopt our children so that our family is not threatened by homophobic neighbors, social workers or what-have-you. For some gay families, gender-bending could carry risks that outweigh even the happiness of a child.

On Potential Birth Mothers and Prospective Adopters

Poor Julie's post on her anxieties about adoption got quite a bit of flack in the blogosphere, as did the comments of several of her readers.

First off, I want to make it clear, that I understand where Julie is coming from and I was not a bit offended by her funny Ward and June comparison chart. Every domestic adopter I've talked to has felt the same way about doubting they could ever be picked by a pregnant woman looking to place her baby for adoption. Before Nat came, I wondered the same thing. I spent a lot of time calculating what kind of woman would ever want to choose Cole and me.

But since Nat came home, I don't worry about that at all any more. What I worry about now is making sure a potential birthmother doesn't pick us if we're the wrong family for her.

I have been working on profile number two for this next adoption and rather than fretting about presenting ourselves well so as to impress and attract any birthmother, as I probably--if somewhat unwittingly--did with our first profile, I fret about making sure the letter is as clear and informative as possible about who we truly are. I think about what I'd need to know about the strangers I would give Nat to, and I try to make sure it's in this letter.

I feel very differently about this letter than I did the last. I am not, for instance, going to give you all a pdf link to it like I did the first time around, because now that feels sort of like a betrayal of a potential birth mother's privacy. If this is really a letter to her, then it shouldn't be public like that. I read our old letter and wince at how shallow it sounds.

I didn't intend to be shallow the first time around, I just didn't know any birth mothers back then, and now that I know Mama Rose and have read some birth mother blogs, a "PR"-type "Dear Birthmother" letter just feels disrespectful of the profundity of the decision process a woman in a crisis pregnancy is going through.

Like a lot of agencies and programs, ours offers guidelines for these profiles that, when followed, seem to produce such formulaic results that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart. With so little to go on, it's no wonder adoption workers often tell anecdotes about birth mothers choosing families based on the dress someone is wearing in a picture, or the fact that the family vacationed in a place she always wanted to go or that they had a white cat or a two-story house or various other seemingly trivial details. There's not that much of substance to go on. Browse the profiles on the internet, imagine choosing one to give your baby to and you'll see what I mean. If you did give your baby to one of them, you have my deepest admiration. I can't imagine how you could even decide who to meet and interview based on those two- or three-page sales pitches.

So if you are "thinking about adoption" and worried about the process of putting yourself on the line to "get picked" just remember that birth mothers have the even harder job of picking. And it isn't a contest, it's a match. Be yourself and you will attract the right birth mother. Hire a consultant and your karma will get you in the end.

After all, we are a geeky-freaky, socialist, butch-femme lesbian couple (one atheist, one liturgical junky) who live in the middle of nowhere and we got Nat.

The Upside

Being an "older parent" gets a lot of negative press. It's one of those subjects that people seem to feel has an obvious moral value based on "common sense." I'm sure there are indeed some down sides to being over 35 (or even over 45) when your first baby arrives, but you have heard them all repeatedly in mainstream media from the New York Times to letters to the editor of People magazine, right?

I want to extoll the benefits of being an older parent.

1. Having children for me, was an afterthought. I had decided first in my babylusty 20's and then in my coming-out early 30's to have and then to not have them. I had settled quite happily on not having them and changing my mind was a matter of happy surprise. The effect of this approach to children, for me, has been an attitude most often of gratitude and enjoyment rather than resentment of how hard parenting is. I didn't "have to" do it. No one particularly expected me to, including me. I did it for fun and it has been 99% fun.

2. Cole is at a very high and stable point in her career. Becoming a mother at her age will not take the kind of toll on her career or lifetime earning potential that it typically takes on of a professional woman in the U.S.

3. Cole's career position also frees us financially so that we can have me at home, making up a new freelance career as I go along, with little profits for a while. If I wanted to, I could get a full-time OTH job with pay that just breaks even with high quality childcare expenses, but I don't want to, right now anyway. Cole's age makes this an option for us. If we were both just out of grad school struggling to make ends meet, get jobs and then tenure somewhere? Life would be far less relaxed.

4. We have both been through enough major life changes at this point that we know who we are and have stable identities that are not easily threatened by the role shift of becoming parents. The change in role, lifestyle and identity is more of an adventure for our core selves than a scary upheaval of who we thought we were.

5. We have wiped enough snotty noses, bandaged enough skinned knees and rolled our eyes at enough tantrums of other people's children by now that we aren't all that freaked out as these things happen to Nat for the first time. We have enough confidence in our wisdom about life that we feel comfortably competent as parents most of the time.

6. Two or three years of sleeplessness and even 18-21 years of whatever daily energy and stress kids will require just doesn't seem like a very long time anymore. It seems like a fair investment for the possible (though not guaranteed) return of a good relationship with adult children and maybe even their children, etc. Having this longer view of things takes day-to-day anxiety out of parenting in many ways.

Now I realize that plenty of older parents are totally immature and incompetent and plenty of 21 year-old moms of three are brilliant and easy-going, happy, healthy moms. But these are some of the beneifts we associate generally, with our age. So if you too qualify as "older" (I believe the OB's these days consider anything over 35 to be "advanced maternal age") take pride!

Waiting for...?

When we got home from our long, long, long road trip last Friday night around 11:45 pm, Cole checked the answering machine. There was a message from our home study agency (a different one from our adoption agency) saying only "we may have a possible placement for you, please call us back." The message had been left the same day, at about 2 pm.

The thing is, we sort of forgot that we are a foster family.

Our home study agency really specializes in foster and foster-adopt, and when we hired them to do our home study they didn't really know how to do one for an agency that exclusively does infant adoptions. So they made us do all the prep they would have their foster-adopt candidates do, including getting a foster license. We were all fine with that, because we are interested in being a foster family someday and interested in how the system works and enjoyed meeting the folks who took the foster classes with us. But we filed our official foster license when it came in the mail and forgot about it.

We had specified (for purposes of adoption) that we wanted a healthy newborn infant. They don't get so many of those and we only filled out the form for protocol reasons, since what we really planned to do was list ourselves with our infant adoption agency and get a baby there.

And we did get a baby there. We got Nat.

But when we got that message Friday, we wondered what kind of placement? Foster or adoption? Was it an emergency, temporary or long-term thing? A baby? An older child? Siblings? What? But they weren't there all weekend, so we spun scenarios and said "yes, no, maybe" to them without knowing. We were leaning from "maybe" to "no" in general, but curious, anyway.

Cole finally reached them on Monday and found out that they had needed an emergency foster placement for a newborn that looked like it would probably turn into a permanent placement and an adoption. They found someone else after failing to reach us on Friday.

Our "maybe" turned to "yesyesyes!" And we found ourselves unexpectedly disappointed that we had missed the call.

Meanwhile, Saturday, I woke up groggy (post long, long, long road trip) and checked my 850+ emails. Most were offering me inexpensive generic drugs but one was from a friend asking if Cole and I would be her children's guardians in the unlikely, but always possible event that she and her partner went down together in a firey plane crash.

"Yesyesyes," we said. Of course.

Then on Tuesday, another friend called about another child-related issue that I won't go into here, but "yesyesyes" I said, and Cole agreed.

So it seems that the universe has been slapping us around a bit trying to get our attention about this family expansion thing.

Today, we called the adoption agency (from whence, Nat) and asked what we need to do to get back on the list. Home study update, new birth mother letter and on we go back to the bottom of page three (or however many pages there are).

We think we are going to call it "Ben" (which is short for Nat's Godfather's surname) if it's a boy and "Azusa" if it's a girl. But "Waiting for Ben or Azusa" isn't a very catchy title, so we'll just stay here at Peter's Cross Station, lean against the info kiosk, stick our hands in our pockets and whistle to pass the time.

Join us, won't you?

Howdy from Afar

Hello from DC, where we will spend a fun-packed couple of days before heading back to the wind-bitten plains until Spring break.

Nat had a nice, modest first Christmas. I have to admit that I have "issues" with Christmas; not so much religious/theological ones as pop-cultural/meteorological ones. Not my favorite holiday, not my favorite season. But I also realize that one must put on one's merry face for one's ten-month old child who knows naught of the season's downsides. So Nat got a little red wagon from Grammie and Granddaddy, a scooter/car from Uncle David, a dump truck from Uncle Bobby, a lovely music box from Grandmom, a handy dandy check from Granddad towards our savings for next year's big-girl bed (which I have already picked out), a baby doll that giggles (which makes Nat giggle and whom she kissed upon first seeing) and other sundry items of fun and practicality, all under the warm glow of a small twinkly tree.

Nat has recently exapanded her repetoire of baby tricks to include waving when waved to (she did this for the first time to a perfect stranger in the Kenneth Cole outlet during our post-xmas shopping frenzy), and touching her head when you say "where is Nat's head?" or whenever she wants you to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" though, shoulders, knees and toes remain a mystery as far as we can tell. I have been giving her a very small number of "baby signs" (of my own invention mostly) for a few months, but she has yet to show much interest in any of them. That is, she knows what they all mean ("All Finished" "Bottle" "Up" "More") and grins when I make them, but doesn't make them back. However, she patted Cole's bagel, patted her mouth and said "uh-uh!" one morning, so Cole gave her a nibble. Similarly, when I am putting her down for sleep and we are running through our brief pre-sleep rituals, she rushes me to the lullabye step by throwing her head back expectantly (to watch my face), grabbing my mouth and humming. I swear, in my mind I hear her saying "Sing, Mama Shannon! Sing NOW." If I stop singing too soon, or change from words to humming before it pleases her, or dare to sing a different song from our usual "Amazing Grace," she repeats the command.

As for spoken language, we spend the usual amount of pointless time going "mamamamama" and "cococococo" or "dadadadada" (long "A": for "David") or whatever, and she watches us very intently before proudly declaring "k!" So she's got that first sound in "Cole" but that's IT. And she thinks this sound will do as a proper response to any attempt we make to encourage her to speak English. If we were teaching her Zulu, she'd be more prepared, as Helen, her South African auntie from church has taught her all the clicks required for that language and she clucks and clicks proudly back when Helen does it first.

On the motion front, Nat refuses to even try crawling. She has always despised tummy time. I think it's because of all the wrap/sling carrying. She really wants to be on a level with the grown up people. She HATES being down on the floor by herself and she especially hates facing the floor for tummy time. She just won't listen to me when I explain that the control over the world she so longs for is merely a tiny effort at crawling away. She doesn't believe me and instead, insists I move her from where she sits to where she wants to be. If I sit her down and put a toy six inches out of reaches, she reaches once or twice, then looks at me, hits me (if I'm in hitting range), points to the toy and demands "uh!" Spoiled rotten, anyone? And of course, she pretty much only does this to me. Cole says I'm wrapped around her finger. If I say, "you can get it, go ahead" she gets ticked off. She tries harder for other people. I think she will skip crawling and head straight to bipedalism. The little red wagon from Grammy and Granddaddy is Radio Flyer's walker-wagon and she loves, loves, loves to stand up unassisted by adults. The stepping part is still a bit clumsy, but standing is her pride and joy.

************

Now for your questions, most of which, I am not going to answer. For this, I apologize in advance.

What does the name of your blog refer to? Does it have a religious connotation?

Robin

It's a secret. Sorry. A few people know, because there was a contest at the outset of this blog to locate my bread machine paddle and two people located it for me and thus won an explanation. Someday, I may very well tell you all the story behind the title, but not today!

You mention that Nat's stroller will last for more than one child. Are you considering users afield, or closer to home?

Jody

A few posts ago (it's not easy for me to link here, but hitting "adoption" under the catagories list will get you there) I mentioned we were thinking of several scenarios for second children. One was African adoption (probably Liberia, for its historical U.S. connections) of an HIV+ infant. Well, I did a bit of research on that particular option and discovered that it would be all but impossible to do since we'd have to closet ourselves (which we are ambivalent about) to even try and then would probably not succeed anyway, as many African nations are closing adoptions to single women, having decided that the risks of giving a baby to a lesbian couple are not worth sending a sick kid to the U.S. to live a long, healthy life. Okay. Whatever. I (not necessarily Cole, who has not given up on African adoption, since South Africa is doing same-sex marriage now) have revised that idea to thinking about giving a regularly pledged amount of support to an orphanage in Africa for HIV+ children or AIDS orphans who aren't eligible for adoption anyway, as most aren't. I actually think that in terms of helping manage the crisis of world AIDS, this is the most efficient possibility since a tiny fraction of what it would cost us to raise one child in the U.S could buy medicine for a group of children and feed and clothe them in their own country and culture.

Right now, it is looking like any second children will come from the same agency that placed Nat with us. We are very, very pleased with our agency's ethics regarding birth parents and babies (our first concern) and efficiency, fairness and economy towards adoptive families (far secondary concerns). We did promise Nat's birth mother that we would adopt any children she might be forced to carry in the future, and given her lack of access to decent health care (which pains us terribly, not to mention her but there are boundaries both legal and ethical on what we can do to help) and her age and pregnancy history, this is a distinct possibility. So in some ways, I'd rather just see what happens than jump on the waiting list again. But on the other hand, no one in our family is getting any younger and if we're going to do it, we kinda need to do it.

Sometimes I think one is good and we should stay here (barring unexpected events) but other times, little things happen (little unpleasant things related to being an interracial or queer family) and we feel strongly that Nat needs an ally in life who shares her exact family experience.

And sometimes I look at all those tiny preemie clothes she's outgrown (not really--we donated them after Katrina--but figuratively in baby stores) and sigh and want another baby.

And sometimes I wake up after Nat has slept 11 hours and think "thank god she's not waking every 2 hours anymore!" and I don't want another baby.

So who the heck knows?

Here's my burning question, which you are free to ignore if it's *too* burning: How are things going with contact with Nat's birth mom, Rose? She sounded amazing, when you wrote about her.

mopsa

That is something I've decided not to blog about beyond what I've already written. Nat's birth mother kept her birth and adoption a secret and though she let us put her picture and first name in our snail-mail birth announcements, I don't feel comfortable blogging her all over the internet in any more detail than I already have. This is sometimes hard, because in lots of ways, Rose's story really needs to be out there. It's a minority story that gets twisted and skewed by CNN and Oprah and the like on a daily basis and needs to be told loudly, from her perspective. But I'm not her. And while I'd tell her story sympathetically, I'm...still not her. So I'm just not going to tell it too much here, now.

I will say that we have less contact than we'd like in our ideal open adoption (which is admittedly a LOT of contact), but we have left this to Rose's discretion, which we feel is fair. And we still think she's a beautiful, smart, brave woman and great mother and we're very proud to have her in our family. Her picture hangs over Nat's bed, along with one of each of her other moms and we talk about and pray for Rose and her family every night in our bedtime prayers.

*******

I could write another tome on my experience of spending the night away from Nat for the first time (I came to DC early to get in a little more time with friends, while Nat and Cole stayed with my in-laws) but I fear this is getting long and I need to get out there and get started on my to-do list before we have to leave town.

So TTFN and feel free to leave more questions if you are so inclined. I'll do my best to answer them!

Hope everyone survived or perhaps even enjoyed their sundry holidays.

In Which I Confess We Let Her CIO (sort of)

So, I mentioned that Nat was sleeping through the night.

Well. Until last Sunday night, she was not. She was waking, like perfect clockwork, every four hours and taking somewhere between 2 and 3 oz of formula, then promptly going back to sleep.

When she first came home, she took 2 oz. of formula every two hours. Then it was 2.5, every 2.5 hours. Then it was 3 oz every 3 hours. (I remember that first 3-hour night. I was so thrilled! I could go to bed at 2 and expect her to sleep at least until Cole's shift began at 4.) When she hit 4 oz every 4 hours I thought soon she'd be onto 5 oz and finally 6 and then we'd all get a decent night's sleep. I thought this would certainly happen by 6 months old, since we hit that 4 oz. mark around 4 months.

I was WRONG.

Nat settled into a schedule of eating at 6 am, 10 am, 2 pm, 6 pm, 10 pm and 2 am without fail. And she stayed there. She didn't eat more. She wouldn't take more than 4.5 oz in any given feeding no matter how I begged her to do so at 10 pm.

"Feed her solids before bed" my mother, my mother-in-law, Uncle David, Aunt Nancy, the doctor and my Indie Mom bulletin board moms all said.

But no matter how big or hearty her evening meal, no matter how close to bedtime she ate it, she wanted her bottle not just at 6 (right before her 6:15 bedtime) but again at 10. And again at 2.

Then two things happened.

1. I got sick. I tried to get better but I simply could not get over it. Even though Cole gave me four days of complete bedrest and took over baby care 24 hours a day, I couldn't get better. Even thoguh I took antibiotics which technically whipped my infection, I couldn't get better. Even though I took narcotic cough syrup and took afternoon naps while Nat slept and let the house go all to hell and made Cole order in pizza, I could not get better.

2. I started to notice that at 10 and especially at 2, Nat wasn't really taking much formula. I could barely coax her to finish 2.5 oz. I thought, "this child is not going to die for want of 2 oz of formula for the next four hours."

So I decided to try and send 2 am bottle the way of the binky using a similar technique. That is, I would get up at 2 when she cried, hold her and rock her and sing to her but not feed her.

I did that on the first night and after listening to Nat cry (albeit in my loving arms) for about 30 minutes over the baby monitor back in our bedroom, Cole got up, came into Nat's room, took her from me and gave her a bottle.

The next night, I turned off the monitor before going in.

She cried much worse with me in her room than she did before I went in. It was like she accelerated her pleading since I was right there to bargain with. But I didn't feed her. I rocked her and sang (which completely quieted her until I stopped). After about an hour, (or something--who really knows) she was calm, I put her back to bed and tip-toed out the door. I reached my own bed again, and she let out a wail.

I let her cry.

I sat and bit my nails and stared at the lights on the silenced baby monitor jump all over the place, but I didn't go back into her room for the next 30 minutes.

And she went to sleep.

The next night (we'll call it night #2, since Cole forced me to abort my plan on the original first night), Nat shockingly slept until 1 am. She voluntarily slept through the 10 o'clock bottle. I got up and went in and held her and sang and when she was quiet, I put her down and once I got back to bed, she was crying again, but this time, it was over within ten minutes.

On night #3 she slept until 6 am. She then woke up, talked and laughed in her crib until 6:30 and then cried for Cole to come get her up for the day.

That's pretty much what she's been doing since. She goes to bed between 6:15 and 6:45 (depending on our schedule and whether we went out for supper) and she wakes up around 6, but plays to herself happily for at least 30 minutes (this morning it was more like an hour) before really demanding to get up for the day. We listen to her babble and chit chat and make motor boat noises over the monitor and we laugh. So we're not sleeping, but we're not rushing around just yet, either.

And I finally feel like I'm recovering from my sickness. I'm sure the iron and vitamin c supplements are helping too, but a decent night of uninterrupted sleep can't be hurting.

I have been an insomniac as long as I can remember. When I was three years old, I would lay in bed at night, listening to my parents watch t.v., then go to bed, then talk to each other in bed before they went to sleep and then I'd lay awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking about whatever three year-olds think about until I fell asleep.

I don't know why, but I just don't have that thing other people seem to have that says "time to sleep now" in my brain. If it is nature, well, I guess that's dumb luck. But if it is nurture, I am committed to helping Nat develop it at any cost. Because sleeplessness is a terrible curse. So far, she seems like an awfully talented sleeper. Even the 4 hour bottle schedule was perfectly timed and she'd go right back to sleep right after eating. And she never woke between bottles.

Now she can go down into her crib awake and play for a few minutes before going to sleep for two naps a day and bedtime. I have high hopes that she is going to be good at sleeping in the future.

And now for the ironic catch:

When I put her down at night, I feel real sorrow that I won't see her again until morning. It's a long time--more than 12 hours before Cole will bring her to me in bed with a cup of tea and we will have our little family hour before Cole goes off to work.

I miss her!

I Might Have Mono

So says the PA who works under my doctor (who was full-up today and couldn't squeeze me in when Cole called to make an appointment).

Cole makes me go to the doctor whenever I'm ill. I never want to go. I spent years underinsured and learned that most of the time the doctor will just say, "yeah, you're ill, go to bed and drink lots of fluids." And I can cut out the middle man and go to bed myself. But now I have insurance via Cole and I can get antibiotics and codiene and blood work all for the low-low copay of $15.

So today I went in due to swollen, painful tonsils and tiredness that just hasn't subsided since my sinus infection of weeks ago. I had mono in college like everybody else, but the PA agreed with Cole and speculated that I might have had it largely in one gland only and now it's in the other (Brits: "Mono"=Glandular Fever, if you haven't caught on at this point).

So here I sit while my blood spins in a lab somewhere. They said tomorrow or the next day they'd call with the results. And you know what? I hope it is mono. Because at least then I'd know that "go to bed and drink lots of fluids" is the best and only thing I can do and I could just do it and stop trying to get up and be my normal super mom self while functioning at only aout 75% capacity of energy and enthusiasm. Otherwise I don't know what it is and I'll feel like I have no excuse to slack off.

Having a baby means not having time to recuperate and not having energy to spare on functioning while ill. Talk about a Catch 22.

So cross your fingers for mono, everybody.

Whither my Professional Ambition? Part II: Channeled into my Blog, Obviously!

I'm not sure that last post came out quite right.

I am not happy that I was forced to make a choice between the thing I was (highly) trained (at great expense) to do and having what is for me, an acceptable personal life.

The fact is, I chose the career I did because teaching was the way I planned to contribute to the next generation, rather than parenting. I LOVE teaching. Teaching is absolutely my calling--it is why God put me on the planet. I have no doubts about that. I will definitely find ways to teach in this new configuration of family and life that I have made since Nat's arrival. The online thing is my first attempt at finding new, workable ways to teach. But parenting is now in the mix too, and if I am forced to cut back on one or the other, it's not going to be Nat.

I am angry at the academy I was trained to enter (the high-stakes Research I part of the academy, which offers the most stress, but the greatest rewards in terms of financial success, benefits, and professional respect) for disallowing women from its highest ranks unless they successfully pretend they either don't have personal lives, or don't value those aspects of life as highly as their careers.

I know that men get the same treatment, but it's women who really pay the price for this attitude, given a society that still assumes that mothers are the 75-90% parents and fathers are evening and weekend hobbyists. this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education showed that when women have babies before achieving tenure, their chances for ever achieving it go down, while men with babies pre-tenure actually have better chances. Clearly, wives and mothers are picking up more than their fair share of family slack.

My decision not to leap onto the gerbil wheel of a tenure-track job was, in some ways, a forced one. I know there are women willing, able and doing the incredibly hard work of both a pre-tenure academic career and parenthood, but given a choice, I was just not willing to try it. And like I said, finding a job in the first place would have been a challenge for me, given my geographical limitations at the moment.

In her book, Crittenden calls for part-time work that is paid in fair proportion to the percentage of time worked. This is not even close to what I will get in my new permanent-adjunct existence. In D.C., my university paid me $200 less per semester to teach a class than they charged me to stay enrolled as an ABD. So I worked another job half-time, in addition to teaching (which I did out of love, more than anything) to keep a roof over my head (that's a big reason it took me about 1.5 years longer to finish the degree than the average for my field). If a full-time, tenure-track faculty member makes $60K and benefits, I'd like one-third of that (including one-third of the benefits) to do one-third of the same job (for example, teaching three classes a year with no committee or research requirements). To do that work in my field, anyway, I would be getting more like one-fifth of the pay and no benefits and no job security (adjuncting is a semester-to-semester contract job). I'd also be knocking myself out to teach even that much with a baby at home and the pay would not cover/barely cover the childcare we'd need if I worked that much.

So I made the choice to skip it for now, find work from home and do it somewhat minimally until Nat is older.

But it's an incredibly loaded choice. One cannot really drop out of the high-stakes academy and return later. That's an even more uphill battle than getting tenure with a baby. Once someone has dropped out, slowed down, taken a break (especially a break for a baby), professional respect goes out the window. Hence the sudden crazy looks when I bring up my family in a conversation about where my career is going next.

When I say Nat is the most fun, fulfilling thing I've ever done, I don't mean women in general ought to run home and get pregnant and knit booties under their framed PhDs. I just mean that if I'm going to have to choose (and clearly, I am), I pick Nat.

My partner had a colleague who told her that after his young son was almost killed in a car accident he realized (yes, "he!") that on his death bed, he wouldn't be wishing he'd written that one more journal article. He'd be wishing he spent more time with his kids. So he had chosen to work at a small college without the Research I pressures (or rewards) to focus his priorities on his family. A few years later, his son died of cancer. I think the moral of the story is not "get back to home and hearth, women!" To me, the moral of the story is "get real, academia!" People have full lives. Demanding fewer articles and allowing more flexibility and pay equity for those who choose it would be a nice start.

And, as I said below, the government respecting and paying for the time people do put into the labor involved in family life would be another nice start.

And in our case, treating me like the spouse I am would be another very helpful change, but there's yet another long post.

Whither my Professional Ambition? or: How to Waste 10 years and $100K on Your Rapidly Atrophying Brain

I've been reading The Price of Motherhood, by Ann Crittenden. I have thought for pretty much, ever, that women who mother 24/7 at home with little or no income-producing other work ought to get paid for it by someone, preferably the government. Failing that, it would be nice to at least accrue some Social Security credit for the labor. Other countries do this. Not all of them, of course, but a handful. And the ones that do have very low rates of child poverty. The book goes into this in detail and it's terribly interesting.

But in spite of my interest in this topic, I never thought it would have any direct personal ramifications for me.

One of the biggest expenses in raising children is the loss of wages to a woman who slows down or breaks entirely from her career while her kids are little. I have thought a lot about this, believe me. Without that Social Security credit and without a job that would allow me to save for retirement, I am entirely at the mercy of my partner's longevity and/or will. And of course, lesbian families and inheritance taxes and the government taking back their share of her retirement contributions and blah blah blah...Shannon retires in poverty and becomes a greeter at Walmart.

(Nothing puts me in a worse mood than being greeted at Walmart (and like places) by an elderly person who ought to be playing golf in Arizona somewhere, but instead is stuck on his or her feet in a stupid red apron pointing at a shopping cart I can find perfectly well on my own, thank you! Why is our society so woefully crappy at taking care of our elders that they are reduced to this in their "golden" years?)

Anyway, reading the book has inspired me to tell you what I was going to be when I grew up and how that changed and what I hope to be now.

When I was in college, I was going to get a BA in English, then maybe an MA, or maybe just a teacher's certificate and become a high school English teacher. Once in college, I found myself in what I realize, with hindsight, was a pre-graduate-degree-in-the-humanities honors program in which a mentor convinced me, during my senior year, that I ought to go on and get a PhD and plan to teach college. He assured me that his generation (the oldest of the baby boomers) would be retiring just as I finished this degree and there would be jobs by the gadzillions opening up everywhere.

(pause for laughter/tears from my academic readers)

My then-boyfriend, soon-to-be-fiance (now ex) told me he had decided either to be an advertising executive or an Episcopal priest (he is neither, now) and I voted priest. So off we went to seminary. I figured, as long as I was there, I'd get a degree too. So I got a Master's in Religious Education and did some student teaching and got my certification, shelved it and applied to PhD programs in English. At that point, I figured I'd go ahead and get the PhD for fun (do I need to pause again?) and then teach high school anyhow. But somewhere along the grad school way, I decided to go for the tenure-track university job after all.

Ten years in the PhD program, $100K in student loans, coming out, divorce, remarriage, yadda-yadda, stay-at-home mom.

Okay, here's what's under the yadda-yadda:

Last summer there was a BIG conference in our town and Famous Academics from the World Over descended upon us. Some of them descended into my very home for a big sloppy party with way, way too many interesting people per square foot. One in particular descended on my couch and started chatting with me. She asked about my dissertation and my teaching interests. I told her about those things and then I told her that we were also waiting for a baby through adoption. "But what if you get a job in another state?" she asked. She had a genuinely clueless look on her face. "I won't" I assured her. "But how can you possibly control that?" she asked again, with real confusion. Suddenly, I had an epiphany.

"Because I will prioritize my family" I explained. And she looked at me as if my head had suddenly become a wheel of swiss cheese.

And I realized all at once that the people I've been surrounded with for the past decade place no value whatever on things like marriages and babies. At least, if they do, they have learned to bury and hide it very carefully because the institutions they work for have no sympathy or interest. As another academic friend said recently, "we all feel our children are more important than our research, but no one dares admit it." One of my dissertation committee members has a very healthy, happy family with two kids, but she didn't even wear her wedding ring to her job interviews, let alone tell them she was newly pregnant.

So there I was, on the brink of finishing this big project that had consumed my blood, sweat and tears for over ten years, and I realized that it had to be set aside, given the other things I wanted in life at this point. My partner has a very solid career and has been promoted as far as you can be promoted and still be teaching. She certainly can't pick up and move to follow me to a mere assistant professorship in a new place. We can't have a commuting relationship with a new baby. And I have glimpsed the storied Partner Hire of Academia via others' experiences and it is not for me. There aren't all that many interesting non-academic career paths for PhDs to choose from in this itsy-bitsy town and the money I'd make might cover daycare. Or it might not. But it would not get me the retirement account of my dreams, that's for certain.

I was in academic limbo with a shiny new degree, and a choice: jump into the uncertain waters of the tenure-track job market or do something completely different.

In some ways, it's the perfect place for a career hiatus. I finished the degree but I have not invested anything in the (exceptionally stressful) tenure path. In some ways, waiting until one is 35 to finish school and enter the job market (retirement again) is pretty foolish to begin with. Not to go ahead and start working my butt off now that I can is financial suicide.

So I am dependent on my partner not just for the present but for the long-term futue as well. And unlike the women Crittenden discusses in her book, I'm not even a wife who is legally entitled to anything at all accrued by my family in the comng years. And while I have 150% faith that my partner and I will not split up (been there, done that, not again, thanks), I don't necessarily have faith in our government or court system to regard me as her dependent in the event of disaster. Just look at the situation post-Katrina. Once again, as after 9-11, same-sex partner survivors are getting stiffed on federal assistance and rights that married surviving spouses get automatically.

So why in heaven's name am I a stay-at-home-mom? Because I'm a fool for love. Parenting Nat is the most fun, most fulfilling thing I've ever done in my life. And there are lots of close seconds. I have had a fun, fulfilling life so far. But in spite of the fact that my head now indeed feels like that wheel of swiss cheese ("mom brain" is not hormonal gals, I'm an adoptive mom, and I have it too), this beats all my grad seminars and all my conference papers and all my lectures, hands down.

I have restyled myself a freelance writer. This is not a lucrative career (unless you are Stephen King). It is not a career at all, as of this moment, because, well, I haven't sold a single piece of writing to anyone, anywhere, yet. I'm also going to try this online teaching. I am hoping I love it because it's a nice portable job, if benefits-less. (That's what became of the gadzillion open slots left by the retirees predicted by my college mentor, by the way, they went adjunct and benefits-less.)

I do want to have a writing and teaching career, if not one that demands a pint of blood per week like a Research I tenure-track gig would do. For one thing, I will miss those things if I don't do them at least a little. For another, though, I think it will make me a better mother to have a professional identity. I don't want Nat thinking that girlie mamas like myself are all chief cooks and bottle-washers (not that there would be anything wrong with that if they got the respect they deserved).

But since Nat got here, the glamorous life of an academic rock star I once thought I wanted has all but lost its lustre. It's strange. I never would have predicted it. I don't think day-in, day-out baby care to the exclusion of most else is for everyone. It's good I have a professional option that doesn't require me to clock in on anyone else's schedule. Not everyone has that. I also have the option of forgoing decent pay while my partner supports the family finacially. I also have a partner who recognizes the labor I do as a valuable contribution to the family budget and well-being. Not everyone has those things either.

So I am lucky and I know it. Still, that Social Security credit would really help me sleep at night for whatever few hours Nat allows.