I have started this post three times now! Once towards the end of the summer, once right after school started, and once now. Now we are approaching a year and a half with Daniel rather than just starting our second year. And this second year has gone in a totally different direction than what I predicted when I first started this post. It almost seems pointless to finish it...but I want to remember how the summer felt, and this will remind me.
So here is where we were at the end of the summer:
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Life has been quite the ride lately. I started out our second year with Daniel rejoicing in how much progress we've made. There was the visit to the dentist where he had to wait for nearly an hour, but didn't do anything more disruptive that unplugging and replugging the waiting room lamp several times. He even refrained from playing with the elevator chair when I asked him! Then there was the comment from an adult he is close to in China that he is like a whole different person this year compared to last year. Apparently, some of my efforts at teaching him to speak positively and respectfully to others have been successful! And he did so much better with being out of routine on our long summer trip than we had feared. We had some "moments," of course, but on the whole he was cheerful and adaptable, and had a good time. Even the unstructured time of summer has been going reasonably well, with the kids less rowdy and more capable of (occasionally) entertaining themselves or each other.
However, this summer was intense. I don't think it was as stressful as the first summer we were together. Daniel has calmed way down, and only rarely gets into the "lets have a blast being wild and crazy!" moods that left me feeling last summer like I was just hanging on by my teeth and toenails. And he has learned a few more things he can do to entertain himself, so I had a little more breathing room. So the norm this summer was relatively calm, but the outlying incidents! Well, let's just say that this summer featured both the lowest low points and the highest high points of our relationship thus far. And I am ready to get off the roller coaster and enjoy a little monotony!
I won't invade Daniel's privacy by sharing the low points, but I have wondered about the timing. It seems like the trigger is usually if I do something that makes him feel rejected. I don't know if our relationship has become important to him to the point that the stakes are higher than they were before, or if he has now made enough of an adjustment to his new life that he is ready to deal with deeper-level challenges. Or maybe the summer was just too stressful, what with unstructured time to fill and my demands on him to study with me for an hour a day. But whatever is going on, a trip to "that place" is hard on everyone involved. Hard, because when Daniel is in that mode he can't be reasoned with, can't be touched, but often won't let me disengage. Hard, because he only ever goes there when I'm alone with both kids, so I also have to worry about keeping Esther out of the interaction without scaring her or making her feel responsible. (She has a very unhelpful tendency to inflame the situation by adding her two cents about what Daniel should or shouldn't be doing.) Most of all, hard because I know "that place" owes its existence to hurts that I don't want my child to live with, and that I can't fix. Thankfully, he doesn't go to "that place" often and doesn't stay there very long (although it feels very long indeed). We (me and our social worker, me and Tim, and me and Daniel) have talked about counseling, and all feel that it will be a very good thing for him once his English is enough to communicate. He is very articulate and insightful, and willing to do the hard work of healing. But that still leaves us at a loss as to what to do right now. We've considered medication for anxiety (and are still considering it), but whether it was catharsis from the last incident, the start of school, or just a natural cycle, Daniel seems to be in a better place right now.
Meanwhile, we are still rejoicing in this summer's high points. We got to travel for three weeks to the west coast and see both of our extended families. Both kids did great on the trip, and Daniel told me afterwards, "Now I know who everyone in my family is." We planted tomato and pepper seeds, watched them grow into plants, and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. One day after not having been in the garden for a few days, Daniel went out and saw ripe tomatoes on our plants for the first time. I got the biggest kick out of him jumping up and down and yelling, "Mommy, come quickly! Come look!" :-) Daniel was able to use his English well enough to talk to friends on the phone, and he made great strides in learning to read. He is starting to believe that he could be good at learning. Daniel added his birthday money to money that he has been saving in the bank for months, and bought himself an iPod touch. And occasionally I will find him and Esther curled up on the couch together looking at something on the iPod. :-) We figured out a way for everyone to enjoy the Olympics together: Tim and I and Esther sat in the living room and watched the sports, while Daniel (who is not much for TV) sat on the couch and had me rub his feet.
One special highlight for me has been Daniel's growing relationship with God. We had a conversation mid-summer where Daniel explored all the different reasons he had for not wanting to follow God. He came out with a lot of ideas, but basically it boiled down to him not wanting anyone to tell him what to do. I left the conversation feeling a little down, although I firmly believe that thinking through all your alternatives is a necessary part of the process of owning one's own faith. But then, the funniest thing happened. Daniel started to become more enthusiastic about all things God-related. And one day, a few days after the most memorable of our "low points," we were having testimonies in church. Daniel asked why people were standing up and talking, and I explained that they were telling us how God had been good to them. Daniel said, "I want to say something too!" So I helped him get the pastor's attention (having no idea what he had in mind to say!), and Daniel told the whole congregation (in English): "When I tired, angry, Jesus help me. Jesus tell me peace in heart. Everybody peace." Not only was it a very appropriately communicated testimony, but I think it was good for our congregation to hear someone testifying about God working on their character, not just healing an illness or removing a difficult external circumstance. On another Sunday recently, Daniel decided to sit by the pastor in the very front pew. He knew and especially loves one of the songs that morning (I think it was You Are My All In All), so he was singing his heart out. Later in the service our pastor got a little choked up about a story he was telling, and Daniel grabbed a tissue out of the box in the front pew and darted up to give it to him. Later the pastor pulled me aside to tell me how much Daniel ministers to him. And it's true, Daniel has been a blessing to a lot of people.
Adopting (or being adopted) is, I think, a lot like culture shock. The "classic" progression of adjustment includes the honeymoon phase (everything is new and wonderful!), the disillusionment phase (everything is weird and dumb and bad and uncomfortable and you just want to get back to the place that feels right to you), and the realism phase (like any other place/person, this one has its good and bad points; you know how to handle the bad and you can enjoy the good without reservations). But real life rarely follows a classic progression, so the first year with a new child can be suspenseful. ("They" say that an adoption honeymoon typically lasts several months, though some kids cut right to the disillusionment phase and others, especially older ones, can honeymoon for a year.) I don't know about other adoptive families, but I periodically found myself wondering: Is this just a honeymoon? Are things going to get worse, and if so, how soon and how bad and for how long? Does XYZ incident mean that the honeymoon is about to end? At the same time, I have been going back and forth between countries for most of my life, and while I have had culture shock on a couple of occasions, I've also had plenty of transitions that went smoothly, with bits of extra stress (and extra excitement) spread out over a long period of time rather than all bunched together. And to me, it looked like Daniel was transitioning much like that: noticing things that bugged him, that he missed, or that he was no longer competent at, and processing them as they came up rather than stuffing them all in until the wheels fell off the bus.
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So, as we got several months into our second year, I was feeling pretty sure that we weren't going to have a wheels-falling-off-the-bus experience. We had worked through a lot of challenging behaviors and were steadily having "Wow, we could never have done that last year!" moments. But I was wondering if the second year wasn't going to be harder emotionally than the first, finding us periodically falling into a morass of old hurts and having to work our way out. In the event, those fearful expectations didn't materialize. (Not that I fear dealing with old hurts, it's work that needs to be done sometime...but the way they were surfacing this summer was a little scary, for us and I think for Daniel as well.) Instead, we are having a year of realizing how far we've come together. And we are so very grateful we didn't miss out on this journey!
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
threads of adoption
Most days, being an interracial family formed by adoption doesn't play much into our lives. Parenting, after all, is parenting, no matter who is involved or how you get into it. [Yes, kids with difficult histories can come with extra parenting challenges, but I attribute that to their experience rather than to the plain fact of being adopted.] But it does seem like the last week or so has held more than the usual adoption- and race-related business.
Last weekend, Tim and Esther were playing. She suggested that she be the mommy and he be the daddy and her doll be the baby. He agreed. She announced it was time to go to the store. He asked if they should take the baby and Esther said, "No! We don't have her yet. We have to adopt her!" So they went "shopping" sans baby, and Esther picked out lots of things, commenting on how cute they would look on the baby or how much the baby would like them. (We think the plot of the story owed a lot to a favorite book, Over the Moon by Karen Katz, although we also talk from time to time about our excitement in getting ready for baby Esther.)
Another time over snack, I was talking about how I had gradually come to like a food after trying it multiple times. Esther asked, "And when you first met me you didn't like me, but now you do?" I assured her that we liked her from the very beginning, but then, recollecting that not all loving relationships start out that well and that I don't know what our future may hold with other foster or adopted children, I went on to tell her a story about a college friend who I did not like at all at first, but came to appreciate after we were thrown together on a common project.
A conversation with Daniel started over math, of all things. I was trying to explain the concept of percent. As an example, I said that in our family we have four people, and 50% of us are Chinese. The other 50% are...and here I got stuck, as it's not accurate in our case to contrast American (which is not an ethnicity) with Chinese. My kids proudly identify as Chinese, but I don't want them to feel that that makes them any less fully American. So I hunted up my dictionary and figured out how to say that 50% of us are European (ethnically but not culturally...man, these things are hard to talk about coherently!). Daniel of course asked why, so I explained that my ancestors (or "grandpa's grandpa's grandpa) came from Europe. He wanted to know how I knew, which led into a great long discussion of the relatives who compiled our family genealogy and of the process of hunting down court records of marriages and births in order to trace one's family history back. So then Daniel wanted to know if he could find his own birth family information by looking at court records. I had to tell him that without a specific name to search for, that would be well nigh impossible. I then thought of hospital records, and how there were probably not too many baby boys born with albinism during the same time period as Daniel. He asked how we would know which hospital. I said that we wouldn't; we would have to ask every hospital in the city (which is a lot), and some might let us see their records, but others would refuse and ask why we cared about knowing, anyway. He agreed that that was likely how it would be, adding, "Some people are just that way: annoying to death!" (And then there is the possibility that he wasn't born in a hospital, or was born in a different city, or the hospital is now defunct, or the records were destroyed, or....) So if Daniel ever wants to search for his birth parents, it will be daunting. I don't know if he will choose to or not, but I'm pleased that he feels comfortable discussing the possibility with me. We try to let both our children know that if there comes a point in their life where having more of a connection with their birth parents is important to them, they can search or do whatever they need to without being disloyal or hurting our feelings.
Meanwhile Esther has been telling me lots of stories lately about things that "really happened" when she was a baby in her orphanage. For example, she had her own bottle and another baby chewed it up and it had to be thrown away. All the stories have to do with something the valued being destroyed and taken away from her. I don't think she is really remembering these things (for example, she held up a teething toy that she had as a baby with us and insisted that she had one just like it in the orphanage until another baby chewed it up), but they represent very real losses nonetheless. This past weekend she was saying some hurtful things to Daniel, so I took her into her room to have a private talk. I had intended to talk about how she was treating her brother, but instead we ended up talking about loss. She told me another orphanage story, this time that she had had a blankie that she loved, but a bad guy came and took it away and tore it up, and she cried. She told me that she still misses that blankie. (Given how fast and thoroughly she attached to the green blankie that we brought to her in China, I have often wondered if she was attached to something before we met her. If she was, it didn't come with her.) I asked her if she might be missing the blankie because she was thinking about her birth family and was missing them. She looked at me strangely and said no, then told me again how much she missed the blankie. I stated that babies don't get to take anything with them when they go to a new family. She started crying hard, grabbed me tight, and said, "YES!" Then she added, "When babies have to go to a new family that they don't know, they feel so scared." My poor baby! So she cried about that for a while, and then was ready to move on with life (including the delayed talk about how to treat one's brother). My understanding is that a lot of kids start to understand and grieve the losses of adoption at about age five, so we seem to be right on target.
Then there was the evening that Daniel was hanging out with me in the kitchen and, a propos of nothing, asked, "Mommy, can I go back to China? I mean, I know I can go back to visit, but I still won't be an orphan, right?" I assured him that we will still be family even when he is in China. "Can you send me back to the orphanage?" "We don't want to send you back to the orphanage!...but no, even if we wanted to we couldn't. One a child is adopted in China, their family is responsible for them for the rest of their lives. Occasionally if a child is really not getting on well with their family, their new family might find a different family for them. But it is still that family's responsibility to make sure the child is taken care of." Apparently, that answer was satisfactory, and we moved on to other things.
And finally, Esther's school's open house last week gave me the chance to address an issue that has been nagging at me for a while: the Boy on the Bus. Esther doesn't know his name. But one day near the beginning of school they were sitting near each other on the bus and he informed her that she is Mexican. [As a side note, I wonder how many other people locally have thought that? I have more than once had a stranger tell me that she looks like Dora the Explorer, which she does with her big eyes and her haircut. But it hadn't occurred to me before now that they might actually have thought she is Hispanic.] Esther corrected the boy that she is Chinese, and he (according to her retelling) said, "Chinese?!?" in that over-the-top dramatic way that kindergarteners have. Esther seemed mildly upset, but not to the point where we needed to call the bus driver. Over the next few days I checked in with her to see if anything more had happened, and she said she wasn't sitting near him anymore. But then one day she told me that he had said to her, "Chinese, Japanese, look at these!" And another day she told me, as if it were a good joke, that when they line up for the bus she and her bus buddy say "Chinese" to the boy and he shrieks and runs on the bus and they laugh at him. She seemed to find it entertaining, but I was not thrilled with the ongoing drama. I can't really blame the kid for not knowing the difference between Mexican, Chinese and Japanese; he's only in kindergarten and we live in a very non-diverse community. But it's not fair to Esther to have to spend her life explaining herself to people. So before the open house I spent an hour or two hunting up the names of children's books and websites that might help children learn how to talk about their differences in positive ways rather than teasing and being dramatic about them. I told Esther before we left that I was going to give her teacher and this other child's teacher (Esther was able to tell me what class he was in) some ideas about how to help kids talk respectfully about having different skin and hair. I had a nice chat with Esther's teacher, part of which Esther was present for and part of which she wasn't. Then as we were getting ready to leave Esther reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was going to speak with the other teacher, and took my hand and towed me over to that classroom. The other teacher was very receptive as well. I have no idea if anything has come of my talking with the teachers, but Esther's reaction to my doing so showed me that the situation really did bother her, even though she was treating it as a joke. And I'm glad that I sent the message--to her if to no-one else--that she has the right to be treated respectfully and it's okay to stand up for herself if someone is hurting her feelings in ignorance. I'll also be thinking carefully about what books I pick out when I go read to her class (which I do once a week).
So, lots going on internally in the last nine days or so. Phew!
Last weekend, Tim and Esther were playing. She suggested that she be the mommy and he be the daddy and her doll be the baby. He agreed. She announced it was time to go to the store. He asked if they should take the baby and Esther said, "No! We don't have her yet. We have to adopt her!" So they went "shopping" sans baby, and Esther picked out lots of things, commenting on how cute they would look on the baby or how much the baby would like them. (We think the plot of the story owed a lot to a favorite book, Over the Moon by Karen Katz, although we also talk from time to time about our excitement in getting ready for baby Esther.)
Another time over snack, I was talking about how I had gradually come to like a food after trying it multiple times. Esther asked, "And when you first met me you didn't like me, but now you do?" I assured her that we liked her from the very beginning, but then, recollecting that not all loving relationships start out that well and that I don't know what our future may hold with other foster or adopted children, I went on to tell her a story about a college friend who I did not like at all at first, but came to appreciate after we were thrown together on a common project.
A conversation with Daniel started over math, of all things. I was trying to explain the concept of percent. As an example, I said that in our family we have four people, and 50% of us are Chinese. The other 50% are...and here I got stuck, as it's not accurate in our case to contrast American (which is not an ethnicity) with Chinese. My kids proudly identify as Chinese, but I don't want them to feel that that makes them any less fully American. So I hunted up my dictionary and figured out how to say that 50% of us are European (ethnically but not culturally...man, these things are hard to talk about coherently!). Daniel of course asked why, so I explained that my ancestors (or "grandpa's grandpa's grandpa) came from Europe. He wanted to know how I knew, which led into a great long discussion of the relatives who compiled our family genealogy and of the process of hunting down court records of marriages and births in order to trace one's family history back. So then Daniel wanted to know if he could find his own birth family information by looking at court records. I had to tell him that without a specific name to search for, that would be well nigh impossible. I then thought of hospital records, and how there were probably not too many baby boys born with albinism during the same time period as Daniel. He asked how we would know which hospital. I said that we wouldn't; we would have to ask every hospital in the city (which is a lot), and some might let us see their records, but others would refuse and ask why we cared about knowing, anyway. He agreed that that was likely how it would be, adding, "Some people are just that way: annoying to death!" (And then there is the possibility that he wasn't born in a hospital, or was born in a different city, or the hospital is now defunct, or the records were destroyed, or....) So if Daniel ever wants to search for his birth parents, it will be daunting. I don't know if he will choose to or not, but I'm pleased that he feels comfortable discussing the possibility with me. We try to let both our children know that if there comes a point in their life where having more of a connection with their birth parents is important to them, they can search or do whatever they need to without being disloyal or hurting our feelings.
Meanwhile Esther has been telling me lots of stories lately about things that "really happened" when she was a baby in her orphanage. For example, she had her own bottle and another baby chewed it up and it had to be thrown away. All the stories have to do with something the valued being destroyed and taken away from her. I don't think she is really remembering these things (for example, she held up a teething toy that she had as a baby with us and insisted that she had one just like it in the orphanage until another baby chewed it up), but they represent very real losses nonetheless. This past weekend she was saying some hurtful things to Daniel, so I took her into her room to have a private talk. I had intended to talk about how she was treating her brother, but instead we ended up talking about loss. She told me another orphanage story, this time that she had had a blankie that she loved, but a bad guy came and took it away and tore it up, and she cried. She told me that she still misses that blankie. (Given how fast and thoroughly she attached to the green blankie that we brought to her in China, I have often wondered if she was attached to something before we met her. If she was, it didn't come with her.) I asked her if she might be missing the blankie because she was thinking about her birth family and was missing them. She looked at me strangely and said no, then told me again how much she missed the blankie. I stated that babies don't get to take anything with them when they go to a new family. She started crying hard, grabbed me tight, and said, "YES!" Then she added, "When babies have to go to a new family that they don't know, they feel so scared." My poor baby! So she cried about that for a while, and then was ready to move on with life (including the delayed talk about how to treat one's brother). My understanding is that a lot of kids start to understand and grieve the losses of adoption at about age five, so we seem to be right on target.
Then there was the evening that Daniel was hanging out with me in the kitchen and, a propos of nothing, asked, "Mommy, can I go back to China? I mean, I know I can go back to visit, but I still won't be an orphan, right?" I assured him that we will still be family even when he is in China. "Can you send me back to the orphanage?" "We don't want to send you back to the orphanage!...but no, even if we wanted to we couldn't. One a child is adopted in China, their family is responsible for them for the rest of their lives. Occasionally if a child is really not getting on well with their family, their new family might find a different family for them. But it is still that family's responsibility to make sure the child is taken care of." Apparently, that answer was satisfactory, and we moved on to other things.
And finally, Esther's school's open house last week gave me the chance to address an issue that has been nagging at me for a while: the Boy on the Bus. Esther doesn't know his name. But one day near the beginning of school they were sitting near each other on the bus and he informed her that she is Mexican. [As a side note, I wonder how many other people locally have thought that? I have more than once had a stranger tell me that she looks like Dora the Explorer, which she does with her big eyes and her haircut. But it hadn't occurred to me before now that they might actually have thought she is Hispanic.] Esther corrected the boy that she is Chinese, and he (according to her retelling) said, "Chinese?!?" in that over-the-top dramatic way that kindergarteners have. Esther seemed mildly upset, but not to the point where we needed to call the bus driver. Over the next few days I checked in with her to see if anything more had happened, and she said she wasn't sitting near him anymore. But then one day she told me that he had said to her, "Chinese, Japanese, look at these!" And another day she told me, as if it were a good joke, that when they line up for the bus she and her bus buddy say "Chinese" to the boy and he shrieks and runs on the bus and they laugh at him. She seemed to find it entertaining, but I was not thrilled with the ongoing drama. I can't really blame the kid for not knowing the difference between Mexican, Chinese and Japanese; he's only in kindergarten and we live in a very non-diverse community. But it's not fair to Esther to have to spend her life explaining herself to people. So before the open house I spent an hour or two hunting up the names of children's books and websites that might help children learn how to talk about their differences in positive ways rather than teasing and being dramatic about them. I told Esther before we left that I was going to give her teacher and this other child's teacher (Esther was able to tell me what class he was in) some ideas about how to help kids talk respectfully about having different skin and hair. I had a nice chat with Esther's teacher, part of which Esther was present for and part of which she wasn't. Then as we were getting ready to leave Esther reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was going to speak with the other teacher, and took my hand and towed me over to that classroom. The other teacher was very receptive as well. I have no idea if anything has come of my talking with the teachers, but Esther's reaction to my doing so showed me that the situation really did bother her, even though she was treating it as a joke. And I'm glad that I sent the message--to her if to no-one else--that she has the right to be treated respectfully and it's okay to stand up for herself if someone is hurting her feelings in ignorance. I'll also be thinking carefully about what books I pick out when I go read to her class (which I do once a week).
So, lots going on internally in the last nine days or so. Phew!