Peter's Cross Station

The People You Meet Online

Why are people afraid of the Internet?  As far as I can tell, the Internet is a place where, if you can read and if you can write, you can vet people pre-meeting and know how cool they are going to be in advance.  Or at least get a good clue in the right direction (I, for example, am cooler in real life, which I'm sure my virtual-turned-literal friends can vouch for).

Anyway, all this is just to say that my latest Internet meet-up has been a stunning success.  Some of you might remember Sster, who hasn't blogged in a while.  Well, I'm here to report that she's fandabulous, just like you suspected she was.  Her kid is cute, her husband is sweet and her kitchen is a den of delights.

All this could just be a ploy to gain our trust before the axe comes out, but I'm doubting it.

No Place Like Home

I bought these shoes in Kansas City:

  
 

(Technically, they came from the Missouri side, but just barely, and I wore them in Kansas.)

Nat was extremely upset that I left town with Selina but not her.  I suppose that's to be expected, but she had a heck of a grand time in my absence.  She had her end-of-year school picnic to which both Josiah and Whitney took her.  (Always keep the private school crowd guessing, is my new motto!)  When Cole arrived, she took her to see Diana Ross in concert.  Cole explained to Nat, when picking her up from school, that they would be staying up past bedtime, having popcorn for supper and seeing a very special show.  At this, (so I'm told) Nat's eyes got very big and she asked, "Does Mama Shannon know?"  Nat thinks even Cole needs the Mama Shannon Clearance for Fun.  Then, it seems they had a picnic again on Sunday, featuring smoked salmon and cheese, both of which Nat loves.  Then, Cole took her bike riding.

Then I came home and you would have thought she was locked in a closet for the past four days.

Sigh.

I will probably be going again soon, and I don't think either kid will be coming next time.  A big part of Nat's distress was missing Selina.  And while Selina had a grand time being an only child for a few days, she missed Nat a lot too.  They both spent a lot of time talking and asking about each other.

It's going to be a weird summer, with lots of visits to Kansas City, as my father is going to be doing chemo for pretty much all of it.  It would appear that he has cancer of an especially nasty type.

Other than that, gee, things are rosy.  Selina will be three on Sunday.  Can you believe that?  (No, I know, you cannot.  Me neither.)  We're doing a low-key birthday zoo trip with a couple of friends and cake.  Selina keeps changing her mind about what she wants on the cake, but it's always an animal.  A sheep, a dog, a giraffe, an alligator, a lion, yadda yadda.  I will probably either do a lion or a zebra.

I will show you the finished product.  Selina is very excited about the whole thing and looking forward with great enthusiasm to the Dora underwear I promised her she would get to wear when she...you know the rest.  I am unveiling said underwear at the birthday party for extra effect.  I don't even like Dora, but Selina does and WHATEVER WORKS, right?  Here's to a diaper-free family!  Coming soon to a blog near you...

P.S. Yes indeed, your prayers, thoughts, candles, meditations on the void on behalf of my family would be awesome.

Correction

 Josiah would like you to know that his feet are actually only a size 13.

Kids these Days

The boundaries of our family have shifted again and I thought that if I am to keep telling you about our family, some introductions were in order.

You may remember Babysitter J, who appeared here about 18 months ago.  Well, without further ado, that would be Josiah.  Josiah was a waiter at our favorite local restaurant and the first moment I laid eyes on him, I knew he'd make a great babysitter.  So when I overheard him tell a coworker that he needed another job, I handed him my card and said, "wanna be my nanny?"  He was on, and the rest is history.

But there's more to the history than I've let you in on, so here's a little update.  Last summer, Josiah told us he was going to move to Ireland in January (that's January just past).  So we mourned the eventual loss of him and helped him plan and prepare for his trip.  About 3 weeks before his flight, we were all eating at his former place of employment, waited on by a friend of his, one Miss Whitney, who said "heck yeah," when asked if she'd like to fill in for some of Josiah's hours with Nat and Selina after Josiah left the country.

Whitney, to briefly introduce her, rocks our world.  She also just plain rocks, on an electric bass, for this band.  She is a graduate of an elite art school and is a multi-media artist.  She is beautiful, smart, incredibly self-possessed and unpretentious (in spite of all that artiness!) and a marvelous art tutor for the girls on top of being an all-around sweet caregiver.

So there's that.

In spite of the wonders of Whitney, it was with a heavy heart that I drove Josiah to the airport in early January and put him on a plane to Ireland with three stringed instruments and a tent on his back.  I had filled his pockets and bags with my card, and exhorted him that he must not hesitate a moment to call if he needed anything--including a ticket home.

Well don't you know he hit a perfect storm of rotten luck and in about two weeks, I was picking him up again and bringing him home?  It was a bummer, but I can't say we weren't glad to have him back.

We moved Nat into Selina's room (which is actually all good, because I had wanted the girls to share a room anyway but had copped out on getting through the very rough patch of them adjusting to sleeping together) and have ordered a new bed.  Josiah is going to live with us and go to nursing school.

Meanwhile, Whitney is still the babysitter from Nirvana.  (Well, maybe from Bikini Kill.)

Nat says Josiah is her brother.  I told her that's fine as long as he agrees.  He agreed.  So Cole and I are now the proud lesbian moms of a 24-year old with size 14 feet.

On the Fallout from the Sandra Bullock Adoption

Been here.  Done this.  But it is unending work.  This morning, I got an email from an acquaintance (who is African American) asking me to talk a bit about how I feel about the doubts of Black people about Black-white transracial adoption.  The usual questions: should white people adopt Black children?  Can white people adequately address race in America as they raise children of color?  What should white people have to do (if anything) before being allowed to parent Black children?  --are suddenly in play again.

I am bizybizybizy, so I am going to post my response to my friend here, for you to read over my shoulder, complete with links to some of my past writing on the issue.

But if you read no further, take this away: Everyone is asking the WRONG questions.  The question we should be asking is:  How did so many children of color come to be in the child welfare system in the first place?

We need to tackle that before we get sidetracked worrying about the still tiny minority of adoptions that are white-parents/Black children.  Because in spite of media attention, they are still the tiny minority.

Without further ado, my response to my friend:

Hi M,

This is a question that comes up frequently. (And I am totally not offended or uncomfortable or whatever. Ask away.) I can definitely point you at some scholarship that has been of great import to me in thinking through the question. But meanwhile, I'll summarize it by saying that Black/white adoptions are still QUITE rare in the U.S., in spite of media attention that over represents them and makes them seem like a "trend" or a "fad."

In fact, Black children--even healthy newborns (like my children)--are still at the very bottom of the adoption hierarchy (healthy, white, newborn girls being at the top, African American boys of any age or health status being at the bottom).

That doesn't mean that when Black/white transracial adoption happens, issues of race aren't important, and I for one think the "training" sometimes given to prospective white parents of Black children is not just woefully inadequate, but sometimes even counter-productive. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I have a post at my blog that lays out what I'd like to see prospective white parents read and learn about African American history before adopting Black children. And dare I say, the same goes for parents adopting children from Africa, who will grow up to be African American, after all.

But anyway, I like both Dorothy Roberts (esp. "Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare") and Randall Kennedy, "Interracial Intimacies" (which is a different angle from Roberts but also excellent) as introductions to the real meat of this issue.

The question is not "Should white people raise Black children?" (frankly Black and white people have been family for...ever) but "why are Black children over represented in child welfare systems in the first place?" (Short answer: white supremacy, duh.)

And finally, yes, the media is HORRIBLE on this issue. White people heroically saving children from their blackness, yadda yadda. It's just appalling. The flipside of the all-loving mammy who sacrifices herself inscrutably for white people.

I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the Blindside, much as I know it's my responsibility as an anti-ractist white intellectual to do so and tear it to shreds as publicly as possible. Will get to that as soon as I can stomach it.

And you are tripping my guilt at abandoning a plan I had to implement a reading group for the white parents of Black children this year. I got side tracked writing my novels. But I will have to get back to it, because I do feel it's something I am uniquely equipped to offer.

Here's some of my past writing on the topic:

http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2008/05/transracial-ado.html

http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2008/07/if-i-was-in-cha.html

http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2008/07/more-on-reading.html

http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2007/11/wendy-asks-me-1.html

http://lilysea.blogs.com/peterscrossstation/2007/11/more-on-money-a.html

Feel free to continue the discussion. I'm super glad you asked. Because keeping it all hush-hush is not good for my family.

Welcome to Peter's Cross Station

I don't update this blog as often as I used to.  I try to write something new on a weekly basis, but since becoming more and more involved in work (mostly writing and editing) for pay, I've had less and less time to write here.  I don't want to stop altogether though, because there are still things that I only want to put here, or that need more detail than a tweet or a facebook update.

I also know that some of you come here for specific information in my archives.  To help you out, here's a handy index:

For posts on ADOPTION click here.

For posts on RACE click here.

For posts of queer/gay/lesbian/GLBT FAMILY click here.

You can also browse through the categories list on your right.  Meanwhile, my latest post is just below this one.

Ejuhmacashun

Nothing on the teasing/race issue below.  We are going to ask about it during parent-teacher conferences which is yet a couple weeks away.

Meanwhile, we are finding that even after nearly an entire school year, Nat is still...spacey? Distractable?  It's hard to put a finger on, really.  Here's an example.

Everyday, the kids have to hang up their coats, put away their book bags, change from boots to shoes, etc. before they can enter the classroom.  It regularly takes Nat 20 minutes to get through all this, for the sole reason that the minute she sees another child--in her class or another--she is completely disinterested in the coat task and watches the other people.  So as soon as her classmates arrive and start in with their coats, she's busy watching them.  If we show up early, so that she's the first, she invariably sees other kids in the hall, etc. and it still takes her for-ev-er to get the coat task done.

BUT.  If she has some motivating factor she is perfectly capable of getting the coat hung up as fast as I could do it myself.  In short she CAN do it, but usually won't.  Apparently she has similar behavior in the classroom.

When I've observed her, she's been distracted by the other children while she's working on something simple like spooning rocks from one bowl to another.  It'll take her 30 minutes to move the rocks, because she's stopping every kid who walks by to interact with her.  But then I watched her concentrate perfectly and engage in a perfectly typical way with a box of cards with story problems on them, which she had to read, then formulate equations and solve them using the Montessori beads with which, I know, many of you are familiar.  For 20 or 30 minutes she worked on these story problems without interruption, even though her best friend was working on something else right beside her.

My diagnosis is that certain things bore her and she doesn't care to make herself do them when there is an alternative (like social engagement, which is usually her favorite thing).  But given something with just the right amount of challenge (the math/reading activity was just a bit over her head, but not so much that she didn't feel competent to work at it).

I am convinced, though, that if she were in a more average type of school, she'd be labeled a problem child.  The teacher says she's never seen a kid so "spacey" as Nat who didn't have some kind of cognitive issue like ADD or sequence processing issues or a spectrum diagnosis.  Nat has no other "red flags" for these kinds of issues.  So the teacher--with all her years of experience attending closely to a zillion individual children is stumped.

Me, I think it's just a very pronounced personality quirk.  And I am grateful that A) there is a school where her quirks aren't overly problematized and B) that Cole and I are able to stay on top of what's going on at school and protect her right to be quirky.

I realize that she will have to be capable of moving according to a clock and to someone else's timetable at some point in her life, but I also think that learning that is far less important than doing whatever it is she's doing in her head now, instead of moving to that clock.  I also think it's of virtually no importance at all for a five-year old.  Again, I'm glad she's in a school where it's less important than it would be at most schools.

But this is just the sort of thing that makes me interested in homeschooling.  Yes, it's annoying when Nat won't put her coat away in a timely manner (we struggle with it at home too), but it is so very unimportant to me, really, that she do.  Of much more importance is that her right to be quirky and grow into whoever that quirk indicates she is, be protected.

Help Me Out, Ya'll

The Problem:

Nat is one of three African-American kids in her class of 19 at school.  There are also two Asian kids, a brother and a sister (5 and 3).  Their parents are first-generation Korean immigrants.  When I was visiting Nat's classroom recently, I overheard a couple of the white boys teasing the 5 yo Asian boy by saying "you're Chinese!  You have a Chinese shirt!  You ride a Chinese bike!" then much laughter.  The kid being teased did a noble job of absolutely ignoring them.  You'd have thought he was deaf to their words.

I was really bothered.  The teachers in the room were far away and had not heard the exchange, but I am certain it wasn't the first time, right?  Surely they have heard it before.  So I began thinking about what to do.  I ought, I think, to have intervened with the kids right then and there, but of course, I was slow on the uptake in the moment.  And even pondering it later, I thought about a dozen ways to intervene and couldn't really decide what would have been best.  So I thought I should either email or meet face to face with the teacher to share the story and find out if she has a classroom game plan for intervening in that sort of thing already and what it might be.  And on the chance she doesn't have such a plan, sharing my concern that she develop one.  Somehow.

But I had done none of this as yet, when Cole came home from dropping Nat at school yesterday and told me that Nat had announced that 3 yo sister of the boy I saw teased "lives in China!" then fell out laughing.  Which is probably my number one biggest concern about the whole thing--that Nat not pick up the idea that it's funny or cool to tease an Asian kid for...being Asian.

Cole's response to Nat was based on one of the ideas I had tossed out to her about addressing what I had seen at the school, which was to lay down the facts.  She told Cole, "no, 3 yo sister lives in ChicagoSuburb."  She then coached Nat in this and role-played with her what she should say if anyone said her friend lived anywhere other than ChicagoSuburb.

I gave her a refresher at the door to school, since 3 yo sister and her mom were the first people we saw today at drop off.  "Where does 3 yo sister and her 5 yo brother live?" I asked Nat.  "ChicagoSuburb," nat said.  "And if someone says they live somewhere else, what will you say?" I asked.  "I will say, 'No! They live in ChicagoSuburb!'" she answered.

But that's all I've got at the moment.  We will need to do a larger talk about racial differences in people's bodies--which we've done since Day One, with regard to the racial and phenotypical differences in our own family.  But as for what to do/say to the white teasing boys and/or the Asian kids and/or the whole class, and/or the teacher?  I'm swimming with feelings and thoughts, but would really appreciate feedback from those of you with more experience with these things a la school and multiple racial differences.  Obviously the school's "multicultural potluck" is hardly a way to address such issues.  But the school does care about getting it right.  Help me help them do that.

Advise!

A Family is...Raceless

I am never going to find the time to write that polished, brilliant critique of the Rosie Family is a Family is a Family movie.  So I'll just keep it short and sweet.

Problem One:  Unless I missed it, the film contained not ONE single mention of race.  There were loads of colorful examples of interracial families both by marriage and birth and by adoption, but not one single mention of this or why it might require discussion.  It was the typical White Liberal colorblind approach to the topic of race which--have we not learned by now--is the wrong approach.

When a film sets itself up as an unwincing account of the beauty of family difference and variety, not mentioning that families can contain people of different races--and discussing that--is a glaring oversight.  The film discusses single-parent, same-sex parent, ART, internationally and domestically adoptive families but not one word is spoken about race.  This is just more confirmation of my theory that absolutely no topic makes Americans more uncomfortable.

If you can ask a little girl to talk about her abandonment, institutionalization and adoption, it seems you can broach the topic of how it feels to be the black child of two white men, right?

Guess not.

Problem Two:  The "science experiment" animation of IVF was...unspeakably awful?  Children born of ART aren't "science experiments" any more than children born to women who took prenatal multivitamins are.  I can't imagine how I would feel about that segment if I had A) used IVF to conceive my children or B) was conceived that way, myself.  I thought it was flat-out offensive.  Not to mention the brief gloss of fertility challenges at the beginning in which the miserable infertile couple are sitting woefully on opposite ends of a couch as if they might as well just kill themselves as live without children.  Ugh.

Problem Three:  I found the parroting by children of grownup explanations of various family forms really annoying.  It reminds me of the times I hear other same-sex parents, or adoptive parents talk about how their kids have "no problem at all!" with their family differences; how they willingly volunteer the story of their family to strangers with pride, etc.  Sure, your kid under five is going to repeat whatever you've told her about the family and its meaning.  But much older than that (or even younger than that, but repressed), and these children will have their own complicated feelings which I can't help but worry will be shut down by all this "a family is love!" platitudinizing (yes, that's a word, I just invented it).

Sure, a family is love.  But kids still live in a world in which there's a lot more than love--and more than family, for that matter--influencing their daily experiences of life.  A loving family will be a place where it is safe to air the difficulties that arise from being different without fear of upsetting your parents who have been declaring those differences don't matter in a way that begs the question "don't they protest a bit too much?"

The only thing that salvaged the film for me were the musical performances by kids and their families.  Nat loved that bit and it was cute and well done.  But our kids need meat and potatoes, not cotton candy fluff when it comes to negotiating their differences from the mainstream culture, if they are to learn real pride and real spokesmanship for what matters in a family.

Watch This Space

I have some things to say about the Rosie movie about families.  But I can't find the time to say them.  While I sort out the other things I've got going on, tell me, what did YOU think of it?

My short answer is 2/5 stars.