Beauty

The older I get the more convinced I am that every woman, every girl, is beautiful. And I'm not talking about that inner beauty nonsense, I mean good old-fashioned external beauty, the type you can see in the mirror. Most of us aren't a size four, many of us don't have perfect skin or an expensive haircut, but all of us look good when we make an effort, all of us have something about us that makes us beautiful. I am an average-looking woman, but that's okay because I'm coming to realise that average is quite beautiful enough.

I did not always know this. When I was growing up, I did not feel beautiful. My parents didn't say I was beautiful; I'm not sure they realised it was important. My mother knew enough from her own childhood not to actively criticise her daughters' features in the way her parents had done to her, and I'm grateful for that. I like to think we're improving with every generation; at this rate I expect Pink will be entering her daughter in pageants. But I think I needed more than just not being criticised. Like every teenager, I stared in the mirror and had no idea whether what I saw was beauty or horror. Some days I was convinced it was one, other days, the other. My face was never going to launch a thousand ships, but I had nice hair and I don't think it would have been too much of a stretch to find something to compliment. Occasionally my mother would look at my colouring and sigh and say ' I do so envy you that you can wear beige. I cannot wear beige at all'. And she was right - she couldn't - and it was the nineties so being able to look good in beige was no small advantage. But I craved more. Once, in desperation, I asked my mother whether I was pretty and she paused and said 'you are quite nice-looking. Now, your sister is very pretty' and you'd probably think that would leave a bigger scar than it does. Thing is - it was true. She got the blue eyes, you see.

But now I have a daughter of my own, and I realise just how fiercely I want her to know that she is beautiful, always, all her life. I have a degree and a PhD in engineering. I do not have a Disney Princess view of a woman's role. I support education for women, and equal pay for equal work, and the right for all of us to do whatever we want to with our lives without being held back by anybody's expectations of what a woman can or should do. I also support being a nice person, nurturing inner character, and not confusing a person's looks with a person's worth. But I think every woman does want to be beautiful, and I don't want her to grow up wondering.

When I was sixteen, for the first time a boy wrote me a letter and told me that he thought I was pretty. If I could go back in time, I would tell my former self not to take this too seriously, that it was not destiny, that sixteen year old boys are attracted to anything with a pulse. But at the time, I honestly thought that this meant we were going to be together forever. I began to make plans for our future married life. I really wish I was exaggerating, but I am not. For the first time in my life I felt beautiful, and that gave him far more power over me than it should have. Fortunately for me - although it did not feel fortunate at the time - he did not really want that power and he did not really want me. But I would have moved heaven and earth for this boy, if he had asked me to. And when it became clear that I expected more of this relationship than he did, it was all I could do not to shout at him but you told me I was pretty! Doesn't that mean anything? Because of course it doesn't. But I didn't know that at the time.

And so, my daughter. What is it going to mean for me, a white mother, to raise a black daughter to see herself as beautiful? Sometimes I wonder if the reason us white folk have been so eager to embrace Ethiopian adoption is because Habesha beauty is.... how can I say this? Maybe this is what I mean: typical Habesha beauty is easy for Europeans to relate to. High cheekbones, slim noses and oval faces? We get that. Loose, long curls? Ditto. It is not a big leap to look at Habesha women and see beauty that we recognise, beauty that reminds us of, well, us. A coffee-coloured, slimmer, taller, more elegant version of us. I'm not saying this preference for this type of Ethiopian beauty over other African beauty is a good thing, by the way, I'm just noticing that it's there.

My daughter does not fit this mould. She has a tiny little button nose, and chubby cheeks rather than sharp cheekbones. She has a high, prominent forehead. She has tightly spiralled curls. She looks nothing like Liya Kebede. And she is beautiful, so beautiful.

When I first met the babies, they seemed so unknown to me. They didn't have my hair or my eyes or my nose. I did not recognise them. Now I know every fold of their skin, every expression of their face, every curl of their hair. It's a strange thing, learning to love a beauty that is not your own, and a beauty that is, if I am honest, different from the beauty I expected. It's intoxicating, too. I know every mother thinks their child is the most beautiful creature the world has ever seen, but my daughter? Honestly, you should see my daughter.

It startles me when I remember that not everybody sees my girl this way. Everywhere we go, people compliment her little toddler curls. But several people have sighed and said 'oh, she's going to hate that hair when she's a teenager'. And I am reminded that not everyone sees her spirals and sees beauty. Cuteness, maybe, but not beauty. It takes my breath away that people say this out loud, in front of her. I usually snap something like 'I hope she always knows her hair is very beautiful' and think remind me to keep my daughter away from your son.

Right now, she's just a toddler and beauty usually means clean clothes and a mostly-clean face. I know I have a lot more work to do on how to nurture her awareness of herself as a black woman as she grows. I see the specialist hair relaxers for children on the shelf at the supermarket and swear never. But then I remember that I don't really know what it's like to have this hair on my own head. I see how beautiful her curls are, just the way they are, but one day she may well wish they were different. I was reading the comments on this totally fantastic post and realised that I shouldn't be tempted to use how she feels about her natural curls as a barometer of my own success as a transracial parent. They are her curls, after all, they are not about me. So I guess she gets to decide. Well, maybe when she's eighteen.

Much, much more work to do. In the meantime, I'm going to tell her how lovely she is until she squirms with embarrassment. And make sure her father says it too, over and over again. I remember reading somewhere that daughters take a big chunk of their self-image from what their father says about them, and I can easily believe that it is true. My parents really did a great job, no complaints, but I don't remember my father ever even mentioning what I looked like. He could probably pick me out of a police line-up, but I think that's as much notice as he took. I just don't think it was important to him. But I want Pink to know that there are always at least two people in this world who look at her and see beauty. Not just because of who she is on the inside, but because of her unique combination of skin and bones and flesh and hair that make her beautiful to look at, too. When she is sixteen a boy tells her that she's pretty, I don't want her reacting like I did. I want her to say Thank you. But then I hope she opens her lovely eyes a little bit wider, looks at him again, grins and say I already knew.

Work / Life

On Friday, I had a really bad meeting at work. Well, bad for me. I'd done some work for a senior member of staff, and he loved it, which was great. Unfortunately, he loved it so much that he wants to roll it out further, which means it has to be handed over to someone else. Because I'm part time. And I felt really frustrated that I wouldn't get to complete the project I had spent so long working on.

Work is a funny old thing. I'm not one of these crazy lucky people who has a job they adore, a job they would do for free, but when I try to think of something I'd rather get paid for, I can't. (Except maybe hot air balloon attendant. And I'm not entirely sure that's really a job). And the less I'm there, the more I think about how getting good feedback for doing my job well is a fantastic feeling. Work, when it's all working, is an amazing adrenaline rush. Pouring myself into a project, thinking it's never going to get done, then finding a solution and suddenly seeing it all come together? Magic. Pure magic.

There are big downsides, of course. Those great days come along with a lot of bad days, a lot of frustration, a lot of, well, work. I'm not doing a grass-is-greener thing here about working full-time, I know how difficult it is to get up every morning and go to the office, again, then again, then again. But it turns out that not being there every day really does make a difference to how well I can do my job. I'm less committed; I have to be, unless I want to be working unpaid on my days off, a toddler under each arm, typing on our tiny netbook with my nose. So I can't promise to get something done by tomorrow, because I'm not going to be there tomorrow. It used to be the case that when something needed doing, if it was my kind of thing, people would come to me. But then I was off for a year, and now I'm hardly ever there, and instead I sit in the corner and most of the excitement passes me by.

Which means I'm not the go-to girl anymore. There's a new go-to girl now. This stings*.

A few people have told me that working part time is the perfect solution. These are not usually people who have done it. At the moment, I feel like working part time gives me an unparalleled opportunity to fail at two jobs simultaneously. Sure, I get to do two things, but it's not very satisfying to do two things badly.

I guess I could go back full time, but that's really not what I want. And yes, I know we can only make this choice because we are fortunate. (Although from another perspective you could replace 'fortunate' in that previous sentence with 'willing to stay in a small house'). It's not what I want because I really, really do value all the quantity time that I am able to spend with Pink and Blue.

Sometimes it's easy to talk about making sacrifices for our children but in the same breath we talk as if what we're missing out on isn't that important, actually. This is one of the reasons I'm not keen on talking about motherhood as The Most Important Job In The World®. This implies that sacrificing all that other stuff, like having a job where people take you seriously and you get to flex your brain and hey, they pay you, is just a nothing, a cipher. It's not important, so it's doesn't really matter if you make that sacrifice.

But the thing about making sacrifices is: you have to give something up. And that only matters if the thing matters. I'm really realising that making compromises at work for the sake of family life is no small deal. Accepting that I'm only going to be able to tread water in my job for the next few years is hard. J is having similar difficulties.

And then I went home after work and J was there, and the babies were freshly washed and had just eaten their dinner. We decided to go for an evening trip to the park, since it was still warm and sunny. I took off my work shoes and massaged my sore feet, while J put on some music and danced around the living room with Pink. Low evening sunlight streamed through the window, hitting her curls and lighting them up like a corona. Then we went to the park and Blue walked all the way home, even though it's a third of a mile. He's getting so big, and finally he's worked out how to use the momentum in his little-boy body so that his steps flow and he has lost the plodding gait of an early toddler. He was so pleased with himself. By the time we were at the end of our street, he was so tired that he was weaving like a drunk man. I picked him up and carried him the rest of the way, inhaling the smell of his sun-warmed skin. And I didn't wish that I had made my life's choices any differently.

But I still felt sad about work.

[Update, August : I've just linked this over at Tortoise Mum's 'Opportunity Cost' blog hop].

*Can I please say, for the record, that the new go-to girl happens to be one of my favourite people on the planet. Just in case you ever read this, H, you know I love you, right?

Monday Movies

The stupid no-real-blogging-before-finishing-chapters promise I made to J has officially come back to bite me in the butt. Since I'm still beating my head against a brick wall working on the same chapter I started about a fortnight ago, this blog is strictly a no-musing zone today. So less talking, more movies!

Welcome to my house, which my children seem to think is basically a theme park called ToddlerWorld. Star attraction? The world's most patient cat, guarded by an attendant who sounds reeeeeally grumpy. (Is it just me or do all of you find that listening to your own voice on video makes your spine want to dissolve with horror?) Like all theme parks, someone is wearing a silly hat that she will later regret.

Even the accommodation has entertainment. If you know this song, you know that the actions for the first half are supposed to be head in hands, quietly pretending to sleep. But our two little bunnies love this song SO MUCH that they just can't keep the hopping in until the second half starts.



While I was uploading these, I found that I never worked out how to got around to uploading videos during our first six months or so home. So there was a big backlog. These were the two that brought back the strongest memories.

Splashing the baby girl. This used to be her favourite, favourite thing.



(And just for comparison - here's seven seconds of one taken this week in the exact same spot. I find it hard to believe this is the same child, only a year later).



Can't really think of any way to explain this one. Taken during our first two weeks or so home. We were encouraged to help them move their limbs. It was winter. I was inside the house a lot, and we had banned visitors for the first month.

I think what I'm maybe trying to say is that I was just the teeeeeensiest bit bored.

Oh, and their father got them dressed that day.



And I have clearly not got a shimmering career in front of me as a choreographer.

Why Motherhood Is Like A Diet

I love to cook and I love to bake and I love to buy cookbooks and most of all I love to eat. Unfortunately, this has consequences. In 2008 I had to admit that my weight was creeping up and I decided to diet. It worked, I forgot about it, all was good. Until recently, when my jeans started getting tight again and I thought how can this be happening to me? I honestly had no idea. And then one day I was feeding the children their lunch and I realised that I had eaten all of their crusts. And they have a lot of crusts. And then I realised that the night before, I ate a good few mouthfuls of their dinner to check it had cooled down enough for them. And the night before, the same thing. And again the night before that. What's going on? I asked myself. How did I become this person? How did I become the woman who thinks that second-hand bread is a good snack? Do I really have that little self-respect?

Apparently so. For while I was standing there asking myself this question, I grabbed a half-eaten slice of Blue's discarded pear and unconsciously ate that, too, because it was easier than walking across the room and putting it in the bin.

I guess that explains the squeezy jeans, then. And I'm horrified at myself. It's one thing to get overly Rubenesque on loving good food too much, but quite another to do so on table scraps, on fruit that has already been chewed once and is now covered in breadcrumbs from the highchair tray. And so I've begun to think about dieting again. And thinking about this has made me realise how similar it is to what I've been doing for the last year and a half. These are the ways that I think motherhood is like going on a diet:

It's all about saying no

When I was dieting, I felt like I spent my life saying no. Bad: no to cake. Worse: no to chocolate. Unbearable: no to chips. Unimaginable: no to wine. They became occasional treats, and I think that was probably the time in my life when I developed my extreme aversion to the word 'treat'. It's so mealy-mouthed. I hate the way it suggests pleasure carefully meted out. I hate the way it suggests that I should be pathetically grateful for whatever the 'treat' is, like a peasant being granted a favour by a king. I don't want to see wine as a treat. I want it to flow through my life like a rich ruby river, flowing over the chocolate and the cake and the chips that surround me in abundance. But that way lies heart disease, so I learned to say 'no'. I learned to count and ration and measure and weigh and it wasn't the end of the world.

What does sometimes feel like the end of the world, to me, is all the times I have to say no because I am the mother. No to them: no hitting, no scratching, no biting, no tantrums, no standing up on the sofa, no touching the diaper genie. No to other people: no, we can't come over because it's nap time. No, I can't take on another commitment because right now I'm barely keeping my head above water and my children clean. No, we can't travel that far in a day because the children are awful at being in the car. No, we can't come over for dinner because we have nobody to watch them unless we call in a huge favour. No, no, no. No to being the cool and competent mother I always hoped to be: No time to do all that I want to. No chance to recover from one tiny crisis before the next one hits. No way to keep one child happy for any length of time without upsetting the other. And of course: no to myself. Every day, trying to mother them well calls for a thousand tiny sacrifices, of which my three most painful are always no to sleeping, no to reading, no to writing. I feel like my life is spent saying no. That is:

Except when it's more important to say yes

I found that the hardest times, dieting, are when the food is out of my control. I might know that I have seven points left for the day, but if I am eating at someone else's house, they don't know that, and they also don't care. I had times when I was almost weeping because I had been so good - so good - and then I felt like all my efforts for the day (or in extreme cases, the week) were derailed by someone else's menu. Sometimes, the buttery creamy delicousness tasted like ashes in my mouth because I was only thinking oh nooooo, the caaaaaaloriiiiiiies! And yet, at those times, I ended up deciding that it was absolutely worth it to eat up, be happy, say thank you and ask for seconds. Food is how we show love, so it stands to reason it's how we receive love, too, and refusing to receive the buttery creamy love is a stunningly effective way to passive-aggressively hurt the hostess' feelings. If I go to someone's house and make a face like I'm sucking a lemon when they bring out dessert, then diet or no diet I'm not being a very good friend.

If it's not possible to diet and be polite at the same time, if it's not possible to diet and be a good friend at the same time, then the diet is going to have to take a hit. Manners are more important than my jeans size. Friendships are more important than getting thin as quickly as possible. And as long as I'm not using the friendships as an excuse (meeting someone for coffee doesn't mean I have to order a venti gingerbread latte with whipped cream, much as I wish it did, Starbucks does have other options) I need to prioritise people over food control.

I think the same principle applies to parenting, to baby control. Mothering is stonkingly hard work, and requires so much of me that it's easy for me to forget that I have other responsibilities too, as a friend, as a wife, as a human being. I remember very well how it felt to be on the receiving end of maternal de-prioritisation, when my friends had kids before me. I know I don't get the balance anywhere near right, but I'm trying to remember that sometimes other people's needs have to come before my children's immediate needs, or their routine. Sometimes a friend needs me more than my children do, and I need to get in the car even though it isn't the best thing for them. I don't do this enough. I'm working on it. The world does not revolve around my children, no matter how much I love them. They need to know that they are unutterably precious to me, but they are not the centre of the universe. I struggle and fail to get this balance right. My brain hurts. My body is tired. And so:

Some days, I don't really feel like doing it

No, really. Too much effort. For both categories. And yet:

It's such a good problem to have

When the babies were tiny, we were once stuck for an hour or so without formula. I can't remember why it happened, but I will never ever forget what it felt like to look at my babies and know that I couldn't give them the food they were screaming for. I knew it was temporary, but it tore my heart in half. For too many mothers and fathers across the world, this is not a temporary problem. Too many mothers and fathers know this reality daily. For them, I suspect give us this day our daily bread is prayed with more fervour than I can muster. I know this, I've seen this sort of suffering with my own eyes, and yet I feel sorry for myself because I have too much food to feed myself and my children? I feel sorry for myself because I get too many calories in a day? I feel sorry for myself because oh, it's so hard to say no to the butter and the cream and the delicious delicious pistachio macarons? Bored, with three hours until dinner, it is hard to say no. But honestly, this is such a good problem to have.

And so it is with motherhood. I know that there are so many women who are still waiting for this to become a reality, whether they are waiting for their first child to come home, or their second, or their seventh. Right now, I'm particularly thinking of those of you who are waiting for court or embassy or travel - those of you who are in that almost-but-not-yet stage of motherhood which is more painful than I can describe, which felt, when it was happening to me, more painful than I could bear. And I am painfully aware of the other mothers, too, the women who have had a child, but said goodbye. And I am reminded of how much I have been given. I longed for these children for so long, and here they are, safe and well and happy and in my arms. Right now, they are sleeping in their cots upstairs, with their heads buried in their blankets and their bottoms pointing heavenward and I could not be more thankful that they are there, that they are mine.

This job - some days it feels like too much. But I stroke their curly heads and snuggle their warm little bodies and watch them learn to say duck and car and cat and I know with all my heart that this too-much-ness is such a good problem to have. Of all the problems in the world, I am grateful to have this one.

Here Comes The Sun

On behalf of SAD suffers all over the Northern Hemisphere. And I don't care if you are at work, you've really got to play the music.


Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun,


and I say it's all right

Little darling

it's been a long cold lonely winter

Little darling

it feels like years since it's been here

Here comes the sun

here comes the sun

and I say it's all right


Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces


Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here


Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

and I say it's all right

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...


Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting

Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say, it's alright


here comes the sun, here comes the sun,

and I say it's all right

It's all right

In Which I Ask You All A Question

I always expected to have at least three kids. So did J. (He always said four, minimum). And then we actually acquired some children, and suddenly two began to feel like a WHOLE LOT OF KID. For a year or so, the idea of having any more never really crossed my mind. But suddenly, it is starting to. When people ask the question any more planned? I've stopped laughing in their faces and started saying hmmmmm, we don't quite know.

Because honestly, we don't. We don't feel like this is the right time for #3 (or, who knows, #3 and #4) but it is starting to feel like the right time to start thinking about it. Know what I mean? And we really haven't thought about it yet. We've talked about it for probably less than ten minutes, all together, over the course of about three short conversations. So right now, I have no opinions and no prejudices and that's why I'm asking for your opinions.

Because we have one important complicating factor. Four years ago, we decided that because of my messed-up DNA, pregnancy wasn't the right choice for us. But in the meantime, IVF techniques have been developed that could be game-changers. (we have ethical reservations about some of the IVF techniques that could have helped in the past - these newer techniques address those concerns. Not going to say any more about that because my total ignorance of all matters reproductive would VERY quickly become apparent).

The weird thing (for me) is just how totally neutral I feel about pregnancy at the moment. While we were waiting to adopt Pink and Blue, I grieved and grieved and grieved about all that I felt like we were missing out on. I grieved the specific losses we faced, but I also grieved the lost opportunity to be normal, to have a family that nobody would feel the need to comment on. And I guess that is one of the big differences from this perspective - no matter how we form our family from here on in, we're already on an unusual path. No number of pregnancies would ever get us our Normal back. Another big difference, of course, is that I'm pretty dang pleased with how our first go at being not-normal has worked out.

And that brings me to my biggest fear about pregnancy, if IVF was successful. It's not the thoroughly unpleasant side effects (the women in my family tend to have horrible pregnancies) and it's not the bit at the end, with all the screaming. No, what I fear most is that if we announced a pregnancy people would burst into tears and hug me tightly and say 'oh, I'm just so, so, so happy for you!' and tell me that they have been praying that this would happen.

This might sound stupid (what? You'd be annoyed because people would be happy for you?) if you haven't become a parent for the first time by adoption. But those of us who have probably all have our own stories about the people who take us aside and tell us their stories about how you never know what will happen! and how they knew someone who adopted, and then after they adopted, they finally had one of their own! I've had one person tell me, with a straight face, that this is definitely going to happen to me, because that is what always happens. I came within a micron of saying to that woman wow, even though I'm on the Pill? That really WOULD be a miracle!

Even J, who turns not-taking-things-personally into an Olympic sport, has noticed this attitude and finds it utterly creepy. There's a thinly veiled not even slightly veiled message from some people that a bio baby would be the right and proper happy ending to our story. Nevermind that they really have no clue what the start of our story was. If we said guess what, we're adopting again! to people, many would be pleased, but I fear that for some, a pregnancy would be the reason to get out the champagne. If people said oh, how INCREDIBLE! I think I would hear finally, the real thing! and its corollory, those twins of yours were just practice babies, a means to an end.

(You are not a means to an end for me, babies).

And then I fear that I would punch one of those people in the mouth and get arrested and then I would have to spend my entire pregnancy in jail. So yeah, that is my biggest pregnancy fear.

Okay, srsly. I guess I had thought that if we had any more kids, it would be via adoption. But suddenly I'm starting to think hmmmmm, it doesn't HAVE to be, necessarily. I absolutely know that IVF doesn't guarantee pregnancy, but it's an option that was never on the table before.

And bringing this option to the table makes me ask all kinds of questions. I always assumed that all of our kids would be adopted, and that they would probably all be brown. What would it mean to Pink and Blue if we gave them a white, non-adopted brother or sister? Ummmm, adopted adults, what do you think? Opinions, parents with mixed families? I've really got no clue because I always assumed all of that stuff would never apply to our family. Adoption is what I'm used to. It feels normal to me, and I don't like change. Adopting again would in some ways be our easiest plan. But adoption is such a complicated issue - three separate people have flagged up this report over the last few days and what can I say? It's eye-watering stuff. (Start at p41 - thanks to Tafel for that pointer). I'm much, much more aware than I was a few years ago of the risks in international adoption, and I'm not talking about developmental delays from institutional care. I don't think it's a cut-and-dried 'no, we shouldn't', but I certainly don't think it's a cut-and-dried 'yes' either. There are no easy answers here. It's not simple.

If we do adopt from Ethiopia again, there's the question of infant or slightly older child. If we did want to adopt, say, a preschooler, we would probably have to get cracking because we would need to start again with being assessed, which would probably take about a year, and I wouldn't want too small an age gap between that child and Pink and Blue. (2009 is already quite crowded enough as a birth year in our family). And if we adopted another infant, I wouldn't want the gap to get too big. Would I? I don't know, that's why I'm asking. What should I be thinking about? School me.

And how about foster-adopt? I found out from our social services department that they ask people to promise that if they start a family by adoption, they won't have any birth children. What's THAT all about? It sounded to me (because the conversation was a bit longer than the one line I've given) like they are saying that it's not possible to love an adopted child as much a a birth child, so you can't have a bio kid after an adopted kid because you'll reject the adopted kid once you find out what REAL love feels like. Ummmmm... do I want to get involved with a social services department who think like that?

IVF (one or two rounds) would be cheaper than adoption.
J thinks that pregnancy is a bit gross.
I feel like some kind of traitor for even thinking about the possibility of pregnancy.
I know that's ridiculous.
I'm confused.

And so I ask this question to all of you - what would YOU do, if you were in our shoes? What should we be thinking about, rather than worrying about prison uniforms? As you can tell, I've got no idea. You won't offend me by blowing my favourite idea out of the water, because I don't have a favourite idea. You can go anonymous on this one if you have strong opinions and don't want me getting cranky at you. If you've decided to adopt after bio kids, or had bio kids after adopting, or just had more than one kid - how did YOU decide? On the other hand, how did you decide not to have any more? Extreeeeeemely curious, here.

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Just one more tiny thing - I've had a new rule imposed (by J) that I'm only allowed to blog (or comment) after I've written drafts of new chapters for this supposed book. I have agreed to this. I have not told him how short the chapters are. But it will definitely slow me down - I'm expecting my blogging speed to go from 'tortoise' to 'sloth'.
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Bite Sized

I have about ten minutes to write this. Let's see how fast I can type, shall we?

• Does anybody else think that teething is like PMS for toddlers? It's totally unprovable, some people suffer much more from it than others, and it's a fabulous catch-all for all kinds of unbearable behaviour. I notice this today because three people in my family are currently suffering from one of those ailments. You can probably guess who has got what. All I want to do is go back to bed with a hot water bottle and a bag of M&Ms. I have no idea what they want; if I did I guess this whole thing would be a lot easier.
  

• For a balanced and very thoughtful response to the recent changes in Ethiopian adoption, I recommend that you read this post. For what it's worth, here's my solution: Not a slowdown - fines. Money is the problem, right? So let's make the solution about the money. If agencies faced fines, I think they would waste a lot less of MOWA's time with poorly prepared applications, and (much more importantly) be much more intimidated about misrepresenting (okay lying) about children's circumstances. If an agency sends incomplete paperwork to court: they get a fine. If they send incorrect paperwork to court: they get a great big fine. If they send falsified paperwork to court, they get a HUGE, ENORMOUS, totally financially crushing, see-you-later-don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out-sized fine. And the person who tips off the authorities that agencies are falsifying information should get to keep half the money. I'm not kidding. I think this would work.

• In other Ethiopian news: There has recently been an outbreak of violence against Christians near Jimma. One of our friends is from Jimma. Those of you who pray, please pray that peace will be restored, neighbours will be able to live together without tension, and that this will not be the start of wider sectarian violence in that region or the country.

• I don't know what to say about the incredible series of posts that you have all written about attachment. For once in my life, I have nothing to say. Words fail me. It's been amazing. The best I can do is: Thank you. And you, and and you, and you.
  

Attachment Triage

In trauma response, Triage (pronounced /ˈtriːɑːʒ/) is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition. This rations patient treatment efficiently when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately.The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning to separate, sort, sift or select. (Thank you Wikipedia)

I think I mentioned once that my children used to slow-crawl-chase each other around the house. It was adorable. I loved it; I thought they were learning to play together. But now I know what was really going on: Pink was trying to hunt Blue down and kill him.

If Pink could be granted one wish, I think that it would be this: to be an only child. She sits on my lap and when Blue comes close, she uses her new, shiny boots to aim a kick at his head. He tries to join in reading with her and she bites him on the hand, hard. He sits next to her on the floor and she scratches his face. He makes any kind of move into her personal space and she sets up such a shrieking that I start to worry about what the neighbours must think. (She does get into trouble about this, by the way, but this is about attachment rather than discipline so I'm going to leave that topic alone).

And I think - Pink, what's going on? You shared a womb with this boy. I look back at the time when we got our referral, and almost want to laugh. Oh babies, my babies I would say to their photo. You have already lost a mother, and now are going to be torn away from everything you have ever known. I can't imagine the pain you will feel. Then I would weep a little bit and, choked with emotion, say but babies! You will always have each other. And I would stroke their pixellated little faces and smile a teary smile.

For children who had lost so much, it seemed like such an astonishing blessing for them to have not just a sibling, but a womb-mate. Their other half, their other self, the other one who was right there at their own beginning. I assumed that being twins would mean they would have a head-start, attachment-wise. I thought that even if they didn't like us, they would have solace in the deep familiarity of a twin. I always assumed that their two-ness would be a source of instinctive comfort to them, but right now, it seems that the reverse is true.

Because it's not just Pink's dislike of Blue that makes things complicated. When two become three, it's possible that uneven attachment within the family unit will result in triangulation. But what about when two become four? There are so many new dyads going on when two children are adopted at once, and it all begins to feel not just difficult but frankly, pretty mathematically complex. So what's the word for what happens at our house? Square-ation? Diagonalisation? I think the technical term is probably hot mess.

I drew an attachment-o-gram for the people in our house, sometime in December. This is what it looked like:

Mummy loves everybody. Daddy loves everybody. Pink loves everybody except for Blue. Blue loves everybody except for Mummy.

Yeah, Blue loves everybody except Mummy. I am not saying that lightly. I wanted, more than anything, to be able to feel like everything was either fine or travelling towards fine. But as time went on and Pink became more and more secure (clingy, at times, but a normal kind of clingy, not an 'I'm terrified you're going to leave me' kind of clingy), I could see an increasing contrast between the two of them and by the time I sat down to draw this diagram, I knew that the arrow between the two of us mostly only went in one direction.

I don't think I appreciated, before we adopted, just what a spectrum there is in attachment. I knew about RAD, but I guess I thought that if we didn't face RAD then everything would be pretty much fine. And our babies were so young when we adopted them. Three months! And some children suffer much more neglect than they did, for much longer, and form new attachments easily. But because Blue was only three months old when he came to us, because he was held to be fed, because his sister seemed to attach so well, it can be very easy to minimise just how awful his early experiences were. It can be very easy to forget how totally logical, how totally understandable it would be if they continue to affect him. And I was aware that all children are different - some cling, some run. I didn't want to turn into the sort of mother who would drag my toddler off to the psychotherapist or the hypnotherapist or the aromatherapist for imaginary emotional problems, problems created in my own fevered imagination, problems invented to feed my own need for drama.

And for a while I hoped that this was only one of those imaginary problems. It never used to seem like a pattern, just an agglomeration of bad luck. He's sick. He's tired. He doesn't dislike me, he just prefers his Daddy. When he wasn't very cuddly, or didn't want me if he hurt himself then okay, that might just be personality. But when he rejected me and snuggled deeply into the lap of a stranger one week at the library - and then someone else, the next week, and then another again, and started doing the same at church - then, I was worried. Not calling-the-adoption-agency-for-emergency-suport worried, but worried enough. He would show a lot of signs of security - checking in, chatting, really good eye contact - and then lots of signs of insecurity - inappropriate stranger behaviour, ignoring me, a rigid body when he was being held by me - all in the same day. I watched him, and I found out some things that I wish I had never needed to know.

I found out that it is easy to project feelings of love onto any reasonably contented infant, but that a child who can move suddenly shows where their heart really lies. I found out that I really had expected my children would prefer mother over father, even if I had never said it out loud.I found out that keeping a child mostly at home might be wise for a hundred different reasons, but that it can give a false sense of security that comes crashing down once the child actually spends time in a situation where stranger interaction is inevitable. I found out that when Blue picks strangers to snuggle up to, he prefers brunettes. I found out that nothing throws insecure attachment into sharp relief like a sibling whose attachment seems to be fine. I found out that a child can show a lot of signs of secure attachment and then a lot of signs of horrifyingly insecure attachment within the same day, the same hour. I found out that nobody in my 'real life' has any idea what this means. I found out that attachment issues aren't necessarily two-sided. In fact, I felt like a teenager again as I remembered just how painful it was to fiercely love someone who didn't seem to love me back.

And I found out that each time I tried to draw him in, to get closer, I had Pink screeching and pushing him away.

I cannot possibly explain just how big an issue this was. Because of course - she needs me too. If she wants to cling, I want to let her cling. And which child do you think is more likely to be picked up - the child who is grabbing my legs, saying 'mu-mmy! mu-mmy!' (yes, that's FINALLY happening) or the child who is running as fast as he can in the opposite direction, covered in his sister's bite marks? Yeah, you guessed right.

I wasn't deciding to prioritise her over him, it was just sort of happening. Hour by hour, day by day, she was getting the lion's share of the attention. The number one Big Thing I have learned, parenting two children, is this: It's not possible to put two people's needs first at the same time. Not possible. Sometimes their needs coincide, but often they don't and that means that a lot of my day is spent making split second decisions that essentially reduce to: right, which one of you is going to lose this time? This is fairly trivial when they are both thirsty and want a drink, or hot and need their jackets taking off. But when they both need therapeutic parenting my brain feels like it is going to just give in and finally explode.

Call me stupid, but I did not realise how difficult this would be when we decided to adopt two at once. Overall, I think we had excellent adoption preparation. Our homestudy involved months and months of weekly visits from the social worker, so you'd hope so, right? We covered the usual adoption topics in considerable depth, and I feel like we went into this as well prepared as was possible. We discussed attachment. We discussed race. We discussed discipline. We discussed food. We discussed our own childhoods. We discussed pretty much everything, I thought - but we never discussed the realities of adopting two un-attached children at the same time. We were asked one question about multiples during our assessment, and I improvised wildly and said something like we would treat twins like any other siblings, siblings who happen to be the same age. And our social worker said Yes! Absolutely! and ticked a box, and that was that. I think that they were just wanting to check I didn't want twins to be a pair of dolls to dress up in matching outfits, and my answer reassured them. (As if I would do that!

What do they think I am?Some kind of monster?) And so we were approved for twins. But we were never asked the question how are you going to do all the one-on-one attachment activites you've waxed lyrical about if you get more than one? Where do you plan to put baby #2 when you are babywearing #1? How do you propose to do all of those slow sweet silly games with your child that rely on focused, individualised attention if your other child is clinging to your leg and biting her brother's foot? Do you plan to keep one of your children in a stasis booth for part of the day while you do attachment stuff with the other one, and then swap? Because frankly, lady, that's the only way your plans are going to work.

The truth is, I had no idea at all just what it would mean to be working on attachment with two kids at the same time. I'm going to insert all the usual disclaimers about our twin referral here - very lucky, extremely grateful, yes indeed, no question. But seriously, no idea.

With twin-life in general, when people say 'oh, twins, how DO you cope?' my most frequent answer is: Triage. And I say it like I'm joking, but I'm sort of not. Sound extreme? You're welcome around here on a rainy afternoon, just after naps, anytime. The irony is, I make jokes about how having twins is all about triage, but I never noticed how I was utterly failing to properly triage the attachment situation that was staring me right in the face. The whole idea of triage is that you don't just care for the patient who is screaming the loudest, you care for the patient who needs intervention the most. On a battlefield, the person shouting the loudest is probably going to be okay, and I think that it's probably the same with children. The child who is wrapped around my knees, showing me she wants me and needs me, isn't going to get forgotten. The child who is quietly ignoring me probably needs connection much, much more. I was being an idiot, and letting the important get crowded out by the urgent.

And I'm pretty slow about these things, but eventually something clicked and I got it. I started to shove Pink off my lap and plonk Blue down there instead. Actually, I was pretty mean about it, sometimes. I would read Shades of People with him, and she adores Shades of People. So if she wanted to read along so that she could point at the giant infant on p14 and say 'bay-bee', she was going to have to suck it up and get deal with being close to him. And if she didn't want to, that was fine, but she was not going to shove him off my lap and sit there herself because Mummy has two babies, Pink-my-sweetie, Mummy has two babies, and Mummy loves you like crazy but Mummy loves Blue, too, because Blue is Mummy's baby just like YOU are my baby! And Mummy is having a cuddle with Blue right now, and it would be lovely if Pink wanted a cuddle too - we can all cudddle together! - but if she doesn't want to cuddle with Blue then she needs to play with a toy because Mummy is cuddling with Blue now, sweetie. And some of you are thinking no wonder your children are having trouble with speech and language if you use sentences that long to talk to them! but mostly I was just talking and talking to cover the sound of her screaming at me in protest.

But she got used to it. And more importantly, so did he. He started to relax with me much more. I spent a lot of time on the floor with him, crawling around, and letting him feed me stale cheerios that he found under the high chairs. And for a while, whenever someone asked me 'what do you do?' I would tell them about my job, but I would silently think I'm working on attachment with my son, that's what I do. I've always worked hard on attachment with them - always. But it's always been with them. It's only recently that I realised just how much he needed it to be with him.

And now suddenly, the last four weeks or so - it's like a switch has been flipped. He's always known I was The Mummy, but it seems that pretty much overnight he finally decided to stop shopping for a replacement. He will still go to other people for cuddles, but after a while he wants to crawl out of their laps and into mine. And then last week, he climbed out of his father's lap and into mine, and wouldn't budge. We went to the library again today and he snuggled with me all through the song time. He cast flirtatious glances over my shoulder at the other ladies, of course - otherwise he wouldn't be my Blue - but he wanted to stay with me. And when I come home from work he runs up to me and squeaks and wants a hug, most days, which sounds like a small thing but feels far from small to me.

And so here we are, for now. We haven't got there yet, wherever 'there' is, but I feel like the spiderweb of connections that we have is getting more and more tangled and dense and holding us together more tightly every day. I feel like I have learned a lot about attachment over the last few months, but the biggest thing has been - we couldn't have addressed this unless we had admitted it. Critically considering our attachment has not been easy, but I am profoundly thankful that I knew enough to realise that needing to work on our attachment did not mean that our family was failing. I'm convinced that we are more likely to fail our kids when can't imagine that attachment might ever be an issue for us, when we try to sweep these issues under the carpet. I try not to be strident (no, honestly, I do) but the more I see, the more I read, the more I learn, the more strongly I feel about this. Without turning into aromatherapy-panic-mothers, I think we owe it to our kids to be real about this when it's real in our lives, even if it does make us feel uncomfortable, even if it does remind us that our families are different when we would rather forget. I know that a lot of you feel the same - and if I had ever doubted that, this week would have shown me how wrong I was.

I'm sorry to report that we have seen less progress on the Blue-Pink dyad. They are starting to enjoy tickling each other, but unfortunately when Pink hits Blue, Blue has now started to hit back. So things aren't static there either - but that's probably a story for another day.

Ready When You Are

Mr Linky is now live! So If you're participating in 'Let's Talk About Attachment', here's how to do it:

• Write your post (that's the hard part).
• Publish it on your blog
  
• Go back to the original post and look for the new widget at the bottom
• Type in your name
• Paste in the link to your post (not the link to your whole blog, ie we want to see www.bunnies.blogspot.com/iluvbunnies rather than just www.bunnies.blogspot.com)
• That's it!
  

A few extra points:

• Post any time until Monday 7 March.
  
• If you don't have time write something new, but you'd like to participate... pick your favourite previously-written attachment post and link to that.
• If you don't want to post on your own blog, either comment in the original post or email me and I'll post it separately.
• Do I need to say this? Everybody loves comments, so let's start some conversations. But remember to be nice. Obviously.

Thanks for joining in. I know I'm not the only one looking forward to reading these!

Let's Talk About Attachment

Here's an idea I'm kicking around:

I've been thinking a lot about attachment lately - my perspective on attachment has been changing since our babies came home, and has changed even since I wrote this. I want to write about some of the recent attachment issues we've been thinking about, but I'm not finding it easy. It's not all easy stuff, and in some ways I don't really like thinking about it. My kids were three months old when we adopted them, they must be totally fine, right? I don't need to think about it. We are just an ordinary family. They'll be fine.

And then things happen that let me know that actually, I do need to think about it. As my children have hit new developmental milestones, new attachment issues have popped up. A few weeks ago, I tentatively mentioned on an Ethiopian adoption forum that I didn't think we had 100% secure attachment going on in our house. I then said that I no longer saw that as a huge admission of parenting failure, and wondered whether actually it might not be fairly normal. I had hoped that others would say 'yeah, me too' but all I got was crickets. Of course, then I started to panic. Maybe everyone else really has made it. (And I bet they're all doing Ethiopia-themed craft during naptime, too, bah!) And then I remembered: Attachment theory wasn't developed to describe adopted kids, it was developed to describe relationships between members of ordinary bio families. (I know that classical attachment theory isn't the last word in how to talk about relationships between parents and children. Personally, I like Patty Cogan's term 'connections', partly because of the way it implies something that grows, rather than a place you get to and then stop. But when I find myself talking about this stuff, I end up using the word 'attachment', and all the other words that go along with that. Feel free to butt in and suggest better words and definitions if you have them!) It's more complicated with adopted kids, but not all bio kids are securely connected to their parents - it would be a bit freaky if all the adopted Ethiopian kids were magically doing A-OK.

So why is it so hard to talk about it? I think that the China adoptive community is better at talking about attachment than the Ethiopian adoptive community. This might be because there are just so many more complete adoptions from China - it makes sense that there is more dialogue about pretty much everything. It might also be because the program has been going for much longer - a lot of the adorable babies / toddlers are now at school, and behaviour that can be dismissed in a tiny kid suddenly pulls into sharp focus and parents are forced to start thinking hard. It might be because babies from China are often older than many of the infants adopted from Ethiopia, and attachment problems really are more widespread. But it might also be because there is a persistent view in Ethiopian adoptive circles that says attachment isn't as much of an issue for our families. When we were thinking about where to adopt from, we got lots of positive information about just how well Ethiopian kids attach. Ethiopian people love children! They are so well cared for! and so on. And this may well be true - the people who worked in the children's home where my babies lived were extremely kind. But they were also utterly overworked, and it was work to them - they weren't mothers to these children. My children spent three months flat on their backs on a mattress staring at a ceiling, and I'm not sure how much difference it made that the mattress where this took place was in a country where children are loved and valued.

And of course I'm not saying that nobody is talking about it. The other people on this forum may not be avoiding the issue - they may well have been busy making dinner, or washing, or you know, actually DOING attachment stuff with their kids rather than talking about it. Some people do blog about it. But if race is the elephant in the room in our adoptions, then I think that attachment is the horse. Or at least the medium-sized dog.

Many of us don't have any other kids. My adopted kids are our first try at parenting, and so how would I know what 'normal' attachment behaviour is like, outside of a book? How do we deal with having no clue about whether what is going on in our house is normal? (Or is that just me?) So. Who wants to talk about it? The idea I'm kicking around is that I beg you suggest that people (anyone who wants to) writes something on their blog about their experiences of attachment in their family and I'll link to all of them here*. Not just Ethiopia families - anyone.

You could write about the hardest thing you've faced with attachment. You could write about something you thought would be hard, but that turned out to be really easy. It can be happy or sad, long or short, whatever is happening or has happened in your house. Here are some starter suggestions:

For PAPs:
How are you planning to decide who gets to hold the baby (or teenager!) when you get home (and how are you going to tell the people who don't make the list?) Have you read a book that really shaped the way you think about attachment? If you have kids already, how does this affect your plans to work on attachment and connection with your new child? Do you think 'attachment' is just a big hoo-ha [again with the technical terms] over nothing?

For APs:
How has attachment with your adopted child been different to what you expected? How has it been exactly the same? Has it been a really big deal in your house, or not at all? What have you found easier - personally bonding to your kid, or helping your kid to bond to you? If you have an other half, does your child have a favourite parent? If it's not you, what do you do about it? How have siblings affected your family attachment dynamics?

Or, of course, something TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

Post anytime between now and Monday 7 March. I'll sort out a Mr Linky before that date, and I'm going to write something so it won't be completely empty. So, who's in?

*If your mother reads your blog and you would rather not use this opportunity for her to find out that you're not going to let her hold her new grandchild, (or you have some other reason for wanting to write, but not on your own blog) just let me know and I'll post what you write anonymously here. Or you can leave it as a comment if you'd rather!