Sleepies

We’re taking part in a big longitudinal adoption study, The Early Growth and Development study. It’s interesting for me from a geeky research perspective. This kind of social research is really hard and I get to watch the watchers and think about how valid I think the results will be. My orientation is anthropological, and I instinctively reject this sort of staged human research, but, at the same time, the amount of dollars and the invasiveness of doing participant-observation on this many adoptive families makes that option absurd. We have our first of three 2-hour home visits on the 16th—5 days before we move. Ha! Not the most representative time to observe Izzy in her natural environment.

To prepare for the visit both Pidi and I have to fill out some really long dot-questionnaires¹. I finally used yesterday afternoon’s naptime to plunge in. I hate multiple choice questions. I know, especially given the recent rash of pop-culture versions recently seen on FB, that lots of people enjoy multiple choice quizzes that tell you who you are, but I hate ’em. The instructions assure you that the questions can be answered “yes” or “no” or ranked by one of many scales, but my mental answers are never quite so tidy. Take this one:

I don’t care very much whether other people like me or the way I do things. True or False

Well, I do care whether people like me, but I often seem to do things that people think are strange or don’t like. And I keep doing them, even though it makes people cranky. Then there are the plain weird questions:

I am usually able to get other people to believe me, even when I know that what I am saying is exaggerated or untrue. True or False

Now, here, you have to wonder, if this is T for someone, wouldn’t they say F, just to fuck with the questioner? I mean, that seems to be the implication of the question, that you are the kind of person who has tested this proposition and therefore knows whether people believe you when you’re full of shit, right? I am generally able to get people to believe me, but I credit that to the fact that I am pretty much always saying something true, to the best of my knowledge.

You can see how this sort of thing can bog me down. This questionnaire has 51 pages, and a lot of different styles of question, most of them a bit blunt-instrument, in my estimation. In the Parenting section, there’s this gem:

When my child does something I don’t like, I insult my child, say mean things, or call my child names. The scale ranges from “never or rarely” to “Most of the time.”

Ok, so this question reminds me of applying for a job at McDonald’s when I was 16. My mom had decided that it was time I learned responsibility, and that I needed to get a job. I honestly have no idea why I decided to apply to McDonald’s, but that’s being a teenager for you². They had a little personality assessment included in the application, and one of the questions I remember was “If your manager asks you to sweep the lobby area, what would you say?” And it had some absurd choices, like “I’d tell him to go take a leap,” or “I’d discuss the merits of sweeping the lobby,” or “I’d say yes, sir, right away sir.” Now, c’mon. Who gets that kind of question wrong? Oh—and the Early Child Development Study questionnaire assures you constantly that there’s no wrong answer. I s’pose not, but jesus, if you are answering “Most of the time” to being verbally abusive to your newly adopted child, something’s wrong, and it predates which circle you’re filling in here. Sigh. I digress. But that’s why I have a blog.

I started this post thinking about Izzy’s sleep patterns, or lack thereof. I was reflecting that the questionnaire asks gazillions of questions, but only 14 of them have to do with sleep. But sleep is about the only area where I would say things are less than rosy with our dear one. And the questions don’t really reflect that. I mean, she’s not afraid of sleeping in the dark, falls asleep within twenty minutes, goes to bed at the same time each night, doesn’t resist going to bed at bedtime, doesn’t need a special object (um, unless you include mom or dad in this “object” category), etc.

The thing she doesn’t do, which seems to be something she’s supposed to be able to do, is to fall asleep on her own, after being put awake into her crib. Izzy falls asleep on me or poppa. Perhaps, though, I should back up a bit, in the interest of completism.

Izzy was entrusted to us by Leda when Izzy was three weeks old. Three weeks and three days, to be precise. I had read about swaddling, and knew about it from the general crunchy-mama lit. An internet papa-friend of Pidi’s had highly recommended Swaddle Designs swaddling blankets, and we’d bought a couple, for take 1. They make beautiful swaddling blankets that aim right at the hipster-consumerist targets on our chests. We got one in so-last-year-now, but very of-the-moment-then blue flannel with brown polka dots and stitching, as well as a plain mint green one.

The first night with Izzy, new parent-panic-101 night, I think we tried our first swaddle about midway through the night. I had the Happiest Baby on the Block book with us, which fortunately had a how-to illustration, and we managed a weak swaddle. Weak was enough for the little bean, though, and she settled happily in to it. It was great. She still woke up regularly for feedings, but she didn’t thrash herself into wakefulness in between feedings—and thrash she did, any time we tried going without the swaddle.

With some bumps and grinds along the way, that was the way we rode til Iz was around seven months old. For the most part she’d do 3–4 hour stretches, and Pidi and I would switch off, each getting up for every other one. As we passed the six month mark things started getting a little sketchier, since Iz was getting a lot more active, and starting to be less complacent about the swaddle. She’d go in happily at bed time, but middle of the night swaddles were becoming a little more aerobic for mama and poppa than you really want at 2.30a.m.

Finally, at around seven months she said “no more” pretty clearly one night. You could maybe get the swaddle on her, but in about 2 seconds flat she’d be out, blinking at you mildly, as if to say, “huh, that all you got?” So, then—now—we’ve all got to figure out what the heck one does to put a baby to sleep without a swaddle.

Bedtime itself is pretty no-hassle. We’ve got a good routine, and a regular bed time. After putting on her night dipe, snuggling with Good Night Moon, and having a bottle, she falls asleep in five or ten minutes. When I put her into her crib she rolls onto her belly, sticks her little butt in the air, drags her flannel blankie over her head and commences to snore.

But the pattern for the rest of the night is, for the most part, no pattern. Some nights it’s up every three hours, others it’s every hour to hour and a half. The really choppy nights started with the advent of teeth. It’s no fun. But it’s not every night. Last night went like this: she went down at 7, woke at 10, and I was up with her for about an hour; then she woke at 12.30 and I was up with her til 1.30³; then, wonder of wonders, she slept through til about 6.30! That’s the longest continuous stretch of sleep I’ve had in a very very long time. The thing is, of course, that even when the Pidi gets up, I notice her crying and him getting up and then coming back to bed. So it’s only when she doesn’t get up at all that I really sleep through. It was heaven. Truly.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I can compare to sleep deprivation of this sort. Nothing else in my experience has ever inspired in me crazier thoughts, more obsessive scheming, more insecurity about whether I’m doing it right. I was thinking about this last night while gingerly straightening from the 30 degree bend I had assumed to calm her thrashing body. This involved pushing up from the mattress, hoping the bed springs wouldn’t creak, and that I wouldn’t feel her leg thrust out in preparation for rolling onto her back. That she wouldn’t, one more time—as in the three previous attempts I’d made to put her down in the last hour—spring suddenly into full, waking action, flipping over, flapping her arms and legs and babbling sweetly and alertly. As I stood above her, thinking that maybe I had finally finally finally settled her, but waiting vigilantly for signs of explosion, I laughed to myself with the realization that if I had any doubts left that I don’t have a god, they are settled now, because if I was gonna pray, that is when I’d do it. I’d make a deal with just about anybody after an hour plus of trying to settle her, if they could actually get her to sleep. But there ain’t nobody but us, Izzy and me. Hangin’ with the glider and the crib, the street lights and the drunks walking to their cars at 2am.

Unfortunately, though—and this is what this post is really about—in my darkest moments, there are a bunch of others crammed in that room with us. All the voices of authority who state confidently the way babies should be sleeping at one age or another. And all the grandparents who tell you how they did it. And all the parents who ask how you’re sleeping, as if you might answer something other than “not enough.” In the wee, tiredest hours of the morning, they make me doubt what I do, and wonder whether if I was a better parent I’d be able to create the perfect environment for Izzy to be sleeping through the night already.

In my center, when I look at Izzy, I see all sorts of reasons that she would have some trouble sleeping solidly.

First and foremost, we’re primates. She’s a warmth-seeking, highly social being, who wants to touch and cuddle and hear the blood of another coursing through their heart by her ear. To feel the breathing in and out of her mother, and to know that she is safe and not-alone. When Izzy came to us, we started out with a family bed, and Izzy slept with us for the first couple months or so. I think this was a really important thing for all of us. Izzy had been wrenched from her birthmother, with whom she’d spent not only her time becoming in the womb, but her first three weeks out in this big overwhelming world. There is no way I’d have made her sleep alone, and that time helped us all bond with each other.

But after the first couple months, Pidi and I decided that we really needed our grown-up snuggle time at night to help nurture us, and keep our own relationship strong. Though we loved Izzy being in our bed, we knew that we were starting to suffer without our sleep time contact. So after talking to our pediatrician and our counselor and each other, Izzy went into her own cradle. Her cradle was at the foot of our bed at first, and then she went into her own room at around five and a half months.

Now, most nights, she comes into our bed by morning. She usually wakes at around 5 and we bundle her up and snuggle her between us to sneak another couple of hours of sleep in. We all enjoy that time—especially the slow silly waking up. Izzy awakens first, and starts talking to herself quietly. Then she starts tapping us in the face to gently—and then less gently, depending on how hard asleep we are!—suggest we should wake up too, and play.

I know in my heart that Izzy would be absolutely happiest sleeping with us all night, if sleep were the only metric in her life (as it sometimes feels like it is becoming in ours!). But sleep isn’t the only thing, and Pidi and my overall relationship quality is a big factor in Izzy’s world. For the long-term, and for each day, it’s better for us to have a little just-us space and time.

Beyond whether she sleeps alone or with us, the rate at which she is growing and learning have to make for restless nights. Her sponge-brain and active little body soak up everything she can grasp and see and hear every waking moment of the day. She’s learned, in just the last month alone, to crawl and pull-up and, almost, to clap. And she can’t turn off so well, just because it’s nighttime. When I think of every time I’ve been in a situation with a steep learning curve—a challenging new job, a research project, a new love affair—I dream about what I’m learning, often waking in the midst of a dream of doing some task over and over again⁴. And it’s clear that Izzy is rehearsing during the night. Often I’ll walk in the room and she is doing her newest thing: waving, sitting up, or, lately, pulling herself to stand at the end of her crib, looking straight at me as I walk in the room.

She’s also still a skinny little stick, drinking two to three bottles over the course of the night, even though she’s been eating solids for months. It’s like her activity level keeps outpacing her eating. And now she’s getting teeth. She’s not a big complainer on the tooth front, but her most restless nights have preceded the grand entrance of each of her beautiful new teeth, now sharp and glinting in the middle of her formerly toothless, pink gums.

It’s a lot to make a girl restless all told.

There’s a story about me when I was a baby that my mom has told to me countless times for as long as I can remember. My mom actually told it again just the other day. It goes like this: I learned pretty early how to climb out of my crib, and would crawl down the stairs to go visit with my parents after bedtime. My mother would play with me for a while and then put me back to bed. When I couldn’t get out, I would cry, and my mom would go to me. At some point, my dad insisted that she not go to me, that I “cry it out” in today’s parlance. She did, though it tortured her, and after that night I stopped crying and just slept.

Now, as a parent, it is clear that there is some condensation of time and sequence here, but the gist is undoubtedly, knowing my parents, true. They were both raised with that great American tradition of protestant sternness, a tradition that seems to be the most powerful influence on childrearing instruction to this day, attachment parenting’s rise notwithstanding. And this story has been a constant refrain in my head as I wander the thicket of baby sleep literature and methodology. I wonder to myself whether I am spoiling her, whether she’ll ever learn to fall asleep on her own.

But I can’t do the cry it out thing. I have no doubt that it works. But I don’t see that it did me a lot of good on a character-structure level. The message I got from that experience, and from being raised with the underlying philosophy behind it, was that “you’re on your own, kid.” I want to make clear that I don’t think I was neglected or unloved, by any stretch. But what my parents knew to do—and what they knew from their own childhoods—was that kids needed to learn to stand on their own as soon as they possibly could. It would prepare them for the hard world ahead of them. And, too, it would take some of the burden of parenting off of the parents.

The result of this, for me, is that I am incredibly self-reliant. This has many advantages. But in the extreme form it took in me, it also becomes a liability. It makes it harder for me to ask for help (I don’t believe it will be forthcoming); to make connections with others (if you can’t depend on people what’s the point?); and, in general, to have trouble trusting. I have spent and will continue to spend a lot of energy unlearning those qualities. I’ve come a long way. If I hadn’t I never would have made the decision to have a child.

And when I hold Izzy in my arms, I know that I will never be able to let her cry it out. I am going to keep the burden of parenting to myself and to Pidi, and let her continue to trust that when she calls, mama or papa will come. Again, and again, and again. That’s the deal. That’s my commitment. Sleepless nights and all.

Footnotes

 ¹ To be filled out in ballpoint pen, of all things. Fortunately they send you a couple with the paperwork. At first I thought, “Gee, thanks, a crappy ballpoint pen,” but then noticed the instructions to use said pen to fill out the questionnaire.

 ² Yes, I got the job, and was a stellar Fry Girl for several months, rapidly moving up to Counter Girl. Though it seemed like forever, I think I lasted about six months.

 ³ Me going to her two times in a row was accidental—it was Pidi’s turn, but sometimes one of us hears her in our sleep, gets up, and goes to her room pretty much on automatic. Several times I have gotten up, put my robe on, walked to her room, opened the door and almost had a heart attack because someone was standing over her crib—Pidi. I hadn’t even have noticed he wasn’t lying next to me when I got up.

 ⁴ In another journey through Pottergrrl’s spotted work-history, my most vivid example of this phenomena is when I had dropped out of college, kicked myself out of my mom’s house, and gotten my first real job. Real in the sense that it had to pay my rent and bills. The job I found was as a clerk in the lingerie department of a local department store chain. I got promoted to department coordinator, and was responsible for taking inventory. This was before barcodes and scanners, and involved putting every single item in order by color and size, and then counting them. Next time you are in a lingerie department, really take in how many individual panties, half slips, full-slips, camisoles, bras, girdles, garter belts, bustiers, tap pants, and various other minor items there are, in how many different colors and styles. A single color of a single style of bra in the full size range is 27 pieces of merchandise. There are generally two or three in each size package, meaning up to 81 on the floor. Sale tables were the worst, as customers would come to a neatly-ordered table and assume, apparently, that the best method for finding their size was not to read the tags, figure out the order, and go to their size. No, what most did was, more or less, to pick up as many as they could grasp, toss them into the air, and then hope their size landed on top. Seriously. During my first inventory, I spent many nights sizing rack after rack of bras in my sleep…

bookmarks

We’re moving to our new place soon. Found it a few weekends ago, after much craigslist time and a few long days of viewing places. The range of rentals in this town always blows my mind. The neighborhood we live in now has a ton of hipster cachet, and that, combined with the fact that tons of people bought here during the bubble and have big mortgages to cover, means that people are offering very little house for a whole lot of rent. We were hoping to stay in this neighborhood, but we need more house than we could get. Turns out, though, that just a couple miles away, in a much fancier neighborhood, but an older one, there are a lot of really nice old duplexes.

So, now we’re in  moving frenzy, juggling work, baby, and getting two households moved by late April. To make things more exciting, Izzy has decided to start popping teeth out, and to refuse swaddling, meaning that we’re in major sleep transition time. “Transition” translates, of course, in to very little sleep, at least for the big people.

I’m getting rid of a lot of stuff. I’m a saver, and have been carrying around huge chunks of my history in generations of corrugated boxes, from Michigan to Washington to California to Oregon. From moving van to moving van, basement to basement. I’ve whittled away a little here and there, but also added. I’m one of those people with boxes labeled “memorabilia,” since there’s no other coherent category for the content. This natural tendency of mine was only exacerbated by my sister’s death, when she was 21 and I was 23. I started saving her stuff and my stuff. I also have always saved school stuff. Until pretty recently, I think I probably had every paper I’ve ever written, and given that I’ve always been humanities-oriented, and have three post-high school degrees, that’s a whole lot of papers. I mean, I had all my high-school papers, even. Seriously.

I’ve been itching under the weight of all of this stuff lately, though. Izzy is a part of this, I believe. I am not completely clear on how or why. I think a part of it, though, is a shift in my vision from backward to forward.

There is a bookshelf on the landing of our stairway leading from the first to second floor. It has two short shelves, and it was the last bastion of my academic books. It was the ones that meant the most to me. I’d long since culled the boxes of IMPORTANT BOOKS that I never read, or merely skimmed. Those are the ones Powells will actually give you money for: they’re clean, spines unbroken, not super common. The ones I still had were in two categories. Ones that were seminal to me in my intellectual development, and ones that I always planned to read and never managed to get to.

Last week Izzy and I sat on the landing and went through them. I looked at each one, really looked, for the first time in, oh, about nine or ten years, since I finished my exams and decided not to write my dissertation. I had so many emotions run through me. Memories of the fresh excitement I felt when I discovered theory, when my mind was blown by feminist theory, when I grappled with Marxism and class. I felt a longing and grief for being a student. I love being a student. I’m a great student. I love the beginning of classes, the smell of classrooms, a crisp syllabus, heated discussions, research, writing papers. Love it. (If you could see my student debt level, you’d really know how much I love it.)

I sat there piling books into three stacks: one to recycle (most the books were so written and cracked wide that nobody would buy them); one to add to our next Powells trip; and one to keep. There were about 4 in the keep pile. And I really knew that it was time to let them go, but god, it hurt. I mean seriously hurt. I was crying and crying while Izzy chewed on a few and looked up at me in puzzlement. So I tried to figure out what was so hard about it. And I realized that the books, like so many of the boxes I’ve carried with me on my back, are evidence. Evidence of that life I used to lead, that I went to all those classes, got those degrees, was well-regarded by my peers and professors. That I did good.

At core they are evidence that I exist. And as I sat there with Izzy, I thought again about the ways that children can help us heal. That pile of evidence will never be important to Izzy. What is important to her is how I am with her today, and tomorrow, and the next day. What is important to her is our relationship, our human interaction. And when I think of that, I can recognize that I am carrying this stuff around for an old me, a me that shouldn’t be making policy anymore. And some of the tears, I know, were for her.

Better off

I’ve been struggling to figure something out for a couple of weeks. It’s one of those language things, where someone says something, and you feel like it’s not quite right, but it’s not immediately evident to you how to explain why. I find this happens a lot with me around adoption language. And language is important. It has the power to shape things.

When my mother talks about Izzy’s adoption into our family, she has a tendency to say that Izzy will be “better off” than she would have been if Leda had chosen to parent. She says things like “she’ll have a much better chance”—though a chance at what, she usually doesn’t specify. So I assume she means “life” in all its grand possibilities. (This is a in a similar class of speech to something Heather at PNR talked about after adopting her daughter—talking about adoptive parents as if they “deserve” their child.)

There are a lot of levels on which this statement of “being better off” operates. I am all too capable of getting cultural-studies about the whole thing. But this feels more visceral to me. My gut response is to tell my mother, “I’m better off.” Which is true, but also still leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Like I said, this has been causing me trouble.

I think the core issue is that I reject the equation of the statement. I do not think that our relationships are like mathematics, and to say that Izzy is “better off” with us than she would have been if Leda had chosen to parent is like making a formula of us:

Leda + Izzy < Pottergrrl + Pidi + Izzy

Interesting—when I do that, I see something more clearly (math is good for something!). If you take that equation and subtract the same “amount”—Izzy—from both sides, you get:

Leda < Pottergrrl + Pidi

This is not accurate. This can never be accurate, no matter who is on each side of the < sign.

Leda < Mother Theresa

Not true either.

You can maybe make those equations work with a ≠ symbol. We are all different. And I can agree with the statement that Izzy is going to have a different life with us than she would have if Leda had chosen to parent.

I’d like to add that I do believe there are certain women who have babies and should not parent. Sometimes it’s that they don’t have the resources because of the particular place and time in their life, sometimes they are not mentally healthy, sometimes they cannot or do not control their substance use. Some women—gasp—are fundamentally not maternal. But, you know, these are the exceptions, especially in adoptions that don’t involve the state. In the grand lottery of life, many of the women who choose to place their children would have their struggles, but if for whatever reason they chose to parent, they could and would.

And every person who adopts is not going to be the best parent in the history of the world. Sometimes they will be bad parents. Life will also happen to adoptive families. People divorce, tragedies befall people. I know a woman who was adopted as an infant in a private adoption. Her adoptive mother became addicted to prescription meds, left the family while she was quite young, showed back up briefly when she was around ten, and then died. Her adoptive father remarried, and her step-mother had biological children who became the focus of the family, eclipsing her and her adopted brother. Not a magical childhood.

But again, though it’s almost reflexive to go there, I don’t think this is about greater than or less than. It’s not about being better off. I don’t ever ever want my mother or anyone else to say to Izzy, “You’re much better off with your parents than with Leda.” Izzy is not a charity case, she is not a project, or an outcome. She is a person. We are blessed that, after making her own decision about her capacity to parent at this time, Leda made another choice to entrust Izzy into our family.

And, though this is another “not equal to,” Izzy is not “with” us and “without” Leda. Leda will always be in her life. As her birthmother. As a star in the constellation of her universe.

Sharing stories

Heather, at Production, Not Reproduction, blogs about life in an open adoption. She recently made a great thing happen—a blogroll of open adoption blogs. In her inaugural post she says:

In the very beginning, it was stories that demystified open adoption for me and made it something I not only agreed with in principle, but really wanted for our family. Stories turned unknowns like “contact” and “visitation” into regular people sharing phone calls and meals.

Yes. Yes. Yes. One of the many blessings the struggle to become a mother has given me has been learning the truth and necessity of shared stories to teach us, nurture us, lift us up, and connect us. And the web becomes a better tool for this all of the time. So if you’re looking for company on this journey, some crumbs to follow if you’re just starting out, or some insight into a world you’ve found some connection to, check it out.

Thanks for making this happen Heather.

D-E-N-I-A-L

We cloth diaper. Mostly. Except at night. Two disposables a night. I’ve had the (sweet, pricey) little wool soakers for night diapering since loooong before Izzy came along. But no doublers, so no cloth dipes at nite. And it’s been easy to rationalize that it’s just two a day. And we’re using Seventh Generation disposables—they’re chlorine free. Yea, Seventh Gen!

ok. Seriously, Seventh Gen makes good products. They have a good ethic. We use their laundry soap—even on Izzy’s diapers, it works great—and their toilet paper. We used their disposable wipes, until I got my act together and ripped up some receiving blankets for reusable wipes. (Still use ‘em when we’re out of the house, though I have much less occasion to change diapers out of the house than I expected, unless we’re traveling.) And recently, I got that little frisson of public validation, because the NYT had this story on what an immense sacrifice it is, according to toilet paper manufacturers, for Americans to wipe with recycled fibers. Apparently fresh kill is needed in the wood pulp department to make that super-fluffy toilet paper that I haven’t used in so long it makes my ass feel weird when I come across it…well, technically it comes across me, but that’s probably enough detail there. To protest the loss of old-growth forests in the service of ass-wiping, Greenpeace is rating TP, and the companies that make it, to help people make better choices. Ok. I hate greenwashing, but still, I went to look at the Greenpeace site, and yes, I got a smug little smile on my face, seeing that Seventh Gen rates so highly.

But then. Yes, they really mean it when they say pride goeth before a fall. Looking at the page, with the link to the Seventh Generation web site, I felt myself wilt a little. I had to click through, and look at the diapering info. I had been meaning to for, well, a little over six months, now, since we bought our first package of Seventh Gen diapers. They always assert that they tell you all the ingredients in their products. And the package of diapers said quite clearly that they were produced without chlorine—which is good, and important in all paper production. However, they say nothing on the diaper package about whether they use sodium polyacrylate.

Sodium polyacrylate is the stuff used to make the crystals in disposable diapers that make them “super-absorbent.” It can absorb 100 times its weight in liquid, which is why disposables can hold so so much pee without it pouring out all over your lap. (It’s also what makes a joke of trying to rinse out poopy disposable diapers—which you are supposed to do. It’s illegal to put human excrement in the garbage. But if you put a disposable with sodium polyacrylate in a toilet bowl of water it’ll suck up all the water in the city system. Seriously.) The gel crystals have been implicated in bad things for babies, including potential impact on girls’ reproductive systems. They are banned in tampons because of links to toxic shock. They are a prime example of the better-living-through-chemistry philosophy that ruled the last half century. Let’s face it, chemical company executives have realized better living through chemistry. The rest of us are slowly waking up to a world swimming in bizarre combinations of toxins, in our water, our meat, our soil, our fatty tissue.

So, I click through to the Seventh Gen web site, and go to the diaper page. True to their word, they tell you what’s in &rsquo;em—. Dammit. Off to the diaper store this weekend. Gonna buy those doublers. Gonna live with changing her sheets more often. Thanks Greenpeace.

Do you like piña coladas?

There’s a lot to adoption culture and language that I am not exactly sure how I picked up, because there’s no manual that lays this sort of thing out (er, or if there is, no one told me about it!). But as with all things cultural, you just do. Things like being “in the pool.” After you do all of the rigamarole required to adopt—from picking your adoption method to excavating your entire life onto paper and into interviews to homestudies to criminal background checks—you are suddenly, abruptly just . . . waiting. At our agency, and I imagine others, this waiting is described by participants as “being in the pool,” the pool in question being a pool of applicants. Though “applicants” is probably not the term I’m supposed to use. Supplicants? Parents-in-waiting? “Prospective adoptive parents” is probably the most politically correct term.

Anyway,  a little phrase to summarize where you are in the process is helpful. Unfortunately only folks who are also in the pool understand what the heck you’re talking about if you use the term. Meaning that with all the other people in your life, when they ask “how’s it going?”, you are stuck with saying, “Um, we’re waiting.” Which sounds pretty inactive, really. Maybe that’s where the whole being-in-the-pool metaphor comes from—sounds more like you’re doing something besides waiting.

People on the listserv for our agency talk about being the pool as if we are all in a swimming pool, complete with “dive on in,” and “toss the beach ball,” and “have a piña colada” cuteness. It’s sweet in its way; successfully, for the most part, fostering a sense of shared comradery that helps to mitigate the discomfort and potential sense of competitiveness inherent in the fact that we are all in the same pool waiting for the same pregnant women to look at our profiles and pick one of us. And there are always more waiting families than women considering placing their infants for adoption. And some people will be chosen before others. At our agency, an open adoption agency where birthmothers, not counselors or social workers, choose the families with whom they want to plan an adoption, the amount of time you’ve been in the pool has no bearing on when you’ll get picked.

I don’t think most agencies have the level of community that ours does. The listserv, for example, is not run by the agency, but by prospective and adoptive parents who work with the agency. At this point, I’m not even sure the agency has access to it. There’s a lot of in-person community as well, which is an amazing resource for this really really challenging experience. For example, the day that we got in the pool, we went to a NAFA baby care class, and then to a naming ceremony for the child of the couple who first told us about our agency. At that ceremony we met a whole bunch of other adoptive families from our area who knew the couple through the agency.

This knowingness is amazing and supportive, and it’s also sometimes bittersweet. If you’re on the listserv, you know that some people have been waiting for long time. What’s a long time? Two years, occasionally three years. And that’s just among the folks you know—if only virtually. Some families watch the agency web site, tracking the photos of prospective parents closely enough to know when people come off and on, and how long they’ve been there (the agency website does not even necessarily show all the people with the agency, since some choose not to have their photo on the site for one reason or another). I didn’t track the site that  carefully, but I’d go and see where we were in the queue, and check out new faces. And, boy, did I empathize with the impulse to set up a spreadsheet. If nothing else, it’s something to do!

It is impossible to describe to someone who hasn’t been through it, but the waiting part of the pre-adoption process has got to be one of the hardest—much harder than the dread homestudy, or birthparent letter, or ten page bio. In my experience, folks who make it to adoption in their quest to have a child are do-ers. It’s almost definitional. Successfully adopting is not passive. There are too many hurdles. Our agency probably has more than most, as they are intent on reality testing people about their true commitment to open and ethical adoption. I think hurdles are important and good, but like I said, it means the people who end up on that web site are not so much people who wait around for life to show up at their doors. But, once your packet is complete, and you’re approved by both agency and state, well, you’re kind of stuck doing exactly that—strangely, in fact, you’re waiting for a life to show up at your door.

For this reason, prospective adoptive parents spend a lot of time eliciting successful adoption stories from anyone they meet who has adopted, and from the internet, and from books. And one of the key facts they wanna know is how-long-was-your-wait? As I noted, with our agency, how long someone else waits has pretty much zero bearing on how long you’ll wait. Our agency is one of the few that will accept gay prospective parents, prospective parents over forty, parents of any or no religious affiliation, single parents. Their conviction is that the woman (sometimes the couple, but not usually) placing her child with a family is the best judge of what that family’s characteristics should be. And though they note in their lit that certain groups take on average longer to be chosen, you can still find examples of, for example, gay male couples who are chosen very quickly, and straight, white-bread, relatively young (ain’t none of us young), married couples taking eighteen months, then two years…

So when you splash down in the pool, after whatever long-ass journey was involved in getting to that great day, you have one hope—ok, a baby is your real hope, but you’ve convinced yourself, and everyone you know has convinced you that this is gonna work. Whatever their or your doubts, you get in that pool sure that you’re going to emerge, dripping, to walk away with a babe-in-arms. So the thing you hope for is a short wait. Though you tell everyone you’re settling in for the long haul.

Another important bit of adoption terminology—“The Call.” That’s the phone call that you get, telling you that you’ve been chosen. We got The Call the Monday morning after our paperwork was completed. Our picture wasn’t even up on the website.

Melancholy momma

We currently live with my mother. She moved out here from the midwest about a year and a half ago, now. She, like, I, was born and raised in a rust belt city that is in such rough shape that it makes me sad to think about. Unlike myself, however, she never left, til an August day in 2007, when she was 65 years old. Pidi, my husband, and I asked her to come live with us, after a series of calamities had struck her life. It’s safe to say now, after many moons of co-habitation, reflection, therapy, and pain, that asking her was not a wise decision. I think the most concise explanation is that a very old reflex was triggered in me, one that I developed way too early in life, that says “Take care of your mother. She needs help.” That was—and is—an accurate statement. But really, little girls are not supposed to be the ones to provide it, or hopefully, even be aware of the need. But this little girl, back in the day, was aware, and since my mother decided to divorce my father when I was but five years old, the only other adult left the building.

I have long known that my parent’s divorce was not a net gain for me, though it may have improved their lives (emphasis on the “may”). But I have lately come to think that it was a lot worse for me that I had really comprehended. I love my mother. Please hold that truth throughout what follows here, and in future posts that unravel these issues. But my mother is also a really damaged person. I have dealt with that reality in a lot of different ways over time. Probably one of the better ones was when I finally left my home state, at thirty, and moved across the country to live with Pidi.  But then ten years passed. I grew a lot, and only seeing my mother once a year made things seem a lot easier between us. And she’s aging. And then she lost her job. And then she lost her house. And had to declare bankruptcy. And she had helped Pidi and I out during some rough times, with some good advice and some needed cash.

So at a certain point as my mother’s not-so-terrific-to-start-with life was getting a lot worse, my grown-up, self-preserving self took a breather, and a scared little girl took a deep breath, straightened her little spine, and went in to try to clean up the mess, again.

Pidi will insist here, as he should, that we made the decision together. And that’s true, and I am grateful—more than I will ever be able to express—that he has shouldered this burden with me. I believe that having him in the yoke next to me is the thing that has given me the strength to find my way out of this mess. But I have come to have a new, wary respect for the strength of will of that little girl. And she was a big part of making this happen.

This is one of the many wrong moves that I am grateful for, however. I feel sorrow, and some real concern for the toll living with my mother has taken on my and Pidi’s relationship, and on Izzy. My mom is great with Izzy, but we’re not great with my mom, and I know that Iz can feel the tension, the anger, the hurt. But I also know that I am a better mother today than I would have been if I had not had this experience. This time living with her has forced me to see things about my mother and about myself that I did not want to see, or to say out loud, but that would have continued to fester inside. I’ve been working with a skilled and gentle therapist who has helped me find my way through the labyrinth of emotion evoked by becoming a mother while living with my mother. Has helped me start to see the places where her rigidity and severity want to come out in me, and helped me soften instead of snapping.

We’ve known for some time that we had to break up the household, have my mom find her own place, find ourselves a smaller, less expensive place. I found the courage to tell her last month. She has taken it better than I had believed she would, and we are all moving forward. I went to look at a place with her yesterday. Pidi and I are looking at craigslist daily. But some days it just breaks my heart.

Mom babysat Izzy the other night, and we had friends over, while she took care of the babe upstairs. When I went up to get Izzy and put her to bed, mom gave her usual glowing report about all of Izzy’s accomplishments. As I took a groggy Izzy from her arms and turned away I noticed a tear streak on my mother’s cheek. I didn’t say anything about it, and continued out of her room and down the hall to Izzy’s room. But I felt like my heart was being squeezed. I could think of a million things that she could have been crying about. And I wished for the millionth time that her life could be better.

Six months in

Yesterday we received a package from our lawyer with our daughter’s revised birth certificate. The one that has my name as her mother, and my husband’s as her father. That has the name we chose for her on it. Six months ago, yesterday, she was placed in our care, in an entrustment ceremony with her birthmother. Izzy, our daughter, was three weeks old that day. We’d met her four days before, heard of her existence five days before.

There is a lot about the process of becoming a parent through adoption that is a little surreal, but that birth certificate may take the cake. We have her original birth certificate, which is unusual, according to our lawyer. It lists her birthmother’s name as mother, “none named” as father. The new birth certificate changes that history, and there is nothing about it that indicates that anything was changed. There’s no “revised,” no “adoptive” modifying “mother,” the date of filing is the same, the record number is the same. (There’s a change in the fee number—trust that money will be tracked accurately in America, even if nothing else is.) And from what our lawyer says, until Izzy is eighteen, there is no way she’d ever be able to get to that original record, except that we have a copy. Except for the fact that we have an open adoption, and she will know that she is adopted. She will continue to know her birthmother. She may even, someday, meet the man who would have filled the “none named” box on the original certificate.

I’m starting this blog because I find I have a lot on my mind these days about all of this. How we finally came to want to be parents. The long and winding road we travelled until Izzy came to us. And how this life as a family rolls out beneath our feet. I expect this to range from the high to the low, the sublime to the ridiculous.  I’m looking forward to it.