Truth and Beauty

This post is about searching. This feels like an odd thing for me to be writing about, because you all know how strongly I feel about protecting the privacy of my children's story, but I'm going to keep all of this very general. Please forgive me if I occasionally veer into annoyingly vague. 

So okay, searching. I'm in favour. Some people who adopt are able to have meetings with known birth family through an independent translator and then uncensored ongoing contact - for everybody else, there's searching.  For families with relinquished children, searching provides the chance to make independent contact with birth family, verify (or otherwise) the information given at referral, provide mutual updates and somehow inch towards openness.  For families with abandoned children, searching provides the possibility of finding birth family, if they are able and willing to be found. If they are not, it provides the chance to make contact with other important people in the child's history, fill in gaps and, again, verify that the story the family was given is true.  Some people say the whole thing is very expensive, but if you don't want to spend a lot of money, don't use the overpriced American lawyers. There are other people out there. Honestly. 

Some people search while they are in country. In some ways I am glad that we know our children better at the point we are searching, that we have eighteen months of photos of them looking happy, but honestly it would have been better to do it sooner. I wish I could say we did, but I couldn't handle even thinking about it while we were in Ethiopia; I was too busy freaking out and vomiting.  After we got home,  we decided to wait until our UK process was complete and the children were citizens. And then after that, it took months and months of false starts and delays before things could actually get underway so we're only doing it now, after our children have been with us for about eighteen months. We never intended to wait this long; we were thinking more like six.  But this is how it's worked out, and so here we are. Now. Right now. 

A piece of advice from me to you - do not instigate a search during a month abroad visiting family. It's not smart and it's not fun. This is what has been taking up a large part of my headspace for the last few weeks, and I do not recommend it. I do not recommend that you spend hours hiding in the food court at a mall for privacy, typing out a list of questions for an investigator and trying not to cry. I do not recommend that you catch a late movie with siblings and then swing by the seven-eleven for a quick slurpee and oh, also to quietly transfer a bunch of money to Ethiopia on their moneygram machine.  And when I say 'you', of course, I mean 'me'. I'm not trying to be secretive about all this (obviously) but I don't really want to talk about it at family gatherings either, because it's impossible to talk properly without getting into specifics. Or breaking down.  

Oh yes, the breakdowns. Now that we're actually doing this, I'm realising how much I don't actually want to be here. There are lots of plausible reasons other people give for not searching but I'm going to be honest with you and say that  in reality, all my reasons for not-searching would be really bad reasons. In fact, they mostly boil down to one reason: there is a great big chunk of me that doesn't really want to know the answers to the questions we're asking. 

Honestly, I'm not particularly afraid that we will uncover anything unethical or corrupt.  I'm aware of the possibility, of course,  but I don't really think that's what's going to happen. We have no reason to suspect any of the details of our adoption; every reason to trust the people with whom we worked, so I'm not really expecting that kind of tragedy. What I am afraid of is any one of a number of less spectacular tragedies, the unspectacular sort of tragedies that it would be easier to know less about, easier not to talk to our children about. When I'm talking to my kids, it's much easier to deal in generalities about cultural attitudes to single motherhood, the prevalence of waterborne diseases and the realities of poverty. On the other hand, learning that something real happened to a real person, or (more difficult) that a real person made a real decision with real effects- this has the potential to be much less palatable.  I think what I'm saying is that the 'beautiful country beautiful people rich culture unavoidable decision' rhetoric can be a very effective way of blanking out that our children come to us from specific people, for very specific reasons, often unpleasant ones. 

But none of that is good enough, is it? My discomfort with finding out uncomfortable things is really pretty irrelevant. J and I aren't doing this for us (please, start the swelling orchestra music now), we're doing it because we owe it to our children to give them a history of themselves that we know to be true, that is as complete as possible, that leaves as few questions unanswered as we can, a history as complete as we would want for ourselves if it was us who had been adopted.  Doing this feels non-negotiable, to me. Morally compulsory. The more I read about open adoption, the more convinced I am that it what we should be working towards, no matter where we start. And we cannot leave this until our children are eighteen; the information won't be there.  I have the power to open up my children's history for them, or keep it closed. My conscience tells me that, for our kids, in our situation, only one of those options would be right. I could not look them in the eye, when they are old enough to ask the questions, and tell them that we never tried to get all the answers we could. 

Okay, end of stirring speech. Stop the orchestra. Because honestly, knowing this in theory is one thing; facing the reality is quite another. I am committed to this course of action but in some ways it feels like the hardest thing I have ever done. There are so many ways (it feels to me) like this could go so very badly wrong. I could easily find myself five miles out to ethical sea and many fathoms out of my depth. I could find out things that break my heart. I could find out things that will break my children's heart. I could be opening Pandora's box.  I'm terrified. It's so easy to mouth the platitudes about my child's best interest and pat myself on the back for my commitment to ethical parenting but in my heart of hearts I'm screaming out loud.  If anybody is in the mood to criticise me for finding it emotionally difficult to do this on my children's behalf - don't. At least not until you've done it yourself. Any adoptive parent who claims this isn't hard is lying. Or has absolutely no imagination. 

I have to remind myself - there are things that we might find out that I would rather not find out. But really, the problem is not with the finding out. The issue is that I do not want any of those things to be true. And not looking for them would not make them any less real, if they are real. And it's better to know than to wonder. I think. Keats said: 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

I think about this quote all the time at the moment, because I think he's flat wrong. There are a lot of true things that aren't beautiful, and a lot of beautiful things that are a long way from true.  Sometimes in adoption I think we have to pick one of those things: truth or beauty? Beauty or truth? Actually - no. That's not quite right. It's not either / or, because some things are both. But which do we choose for our starting point? Which one do we hold on to, if we can only hold on to one? It has to be truth, surely. It has to. We can spin beautiful stories for our children but surely, surely it is better to give them something real, even if it's hard. And so we search. And I don't know what we're going to find. I'll be keeping it private. I hope it will be true. 

But I would bet a lot of money that it's not going to be beautiful.  

Advice in Unexpected Places

I was going to upload a video of my children eating sand for your delectation, but I don't have the right cable and I'm too tired to hunt for it. Everything feels a bit much at the moment, even stupid things like looking for a cable. I wanted to post the video because trying to write anything also feels like too much - way too much. There's a lot of stuff that I need to process but I can't because there is no time to do it. My head is in a terrible mess at the moment, about fourteen different difficult things all churning away in there together, making me feel like my skull has turned into some kind of industrial grinder of confusion.

In other news, my brother has been teaching me how to play his ukelele. Do you have any idea how much fun that is? Tons of fun, that's how much fun. There's nothing that's not fun about the ukelele. It's even fun to type the word 'ukelele' - try it. He's really good. I'm absolutely not, but happily I'm starting to form a callous on my left index finger and I'm hoping that I will improve once my fingers numb up a bit and I stop getting such burning pain every time I try to play E minor.

These two things, the angst and the ukelele, do relate, because the best advice I got for dealing with the angst was during a ukelele session with my brother, when he introduced me to the song in the video below. To set the scene: this is the crazy genius who did the music for the movie of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Wonderfully uncomfortable interview first up, but to hear the music, forward to 1:55. (And if you want to learn how to play this, here's a tutorial, although obviously you would have to buy a ukelele first. Obviously). 

Good advice, no? Harsh but brilliant. I wish I'd heard it years ago. Now, if only I had the self-control to put it into practice...

Subtropical Hometown Blues*

Returning to my hometown always feels strange. Not because I've changed, but because I haven't. Since I've been away a decade and had a long journey, it always seems like I should be coming back wiser, transformed, but I am not that guy from The Odyssey and real-life journeys don't usually do that, they just give me jetlag. Sometimes when I come home, people are disproportionately nice to me because I've been away so long and I feel like I have to justify their expectations by pretending to be more interesting than I really am. But living abroad hasn't made me an interesting person, which isn't really surprising because all I do when I'm there is go to the supermarket, moan about my life and search on youtube for videos of cats. In other words, I am exactly the same person I always was.

And that person finds it really exhausting to spend lots of time around people. Without my customary seven  hours per day of time alone, I start to seize up and quiver and become prone to unexpected fits of weeping. The dilemma when I am here is that there are so many people I want to see, so many people I want to spend time with, so many people I really love, that I end up vastly overcommitting myself. I don't want to do it, I always swear I won't do it this time, I come up with strategies to mitigate it, but when it comes to the crunch I do it anyway. I have a big extended family – to give you an idea of scale, I have twenty cousins – and they are all great people who I love spending time with, who I can't imagine not spending time with. But when I divide the amount of time I have by the number of people I want to see the answer to the sum is always FAR, FAR TOO BUSY. This trip, with the babies, everything feels multiplied by ten. It seems ten times as important to see people, to introduce them to their large and enthusiastic fan club who have been loving them from afar since before we even knew who they were. These people are so important to us as a family; seeing them is not negotiable. And yet.

And yet. It seems I am not the only person in our family who finds day after day after day of seeing people to be utterly draining. They are totally over it, ten times more over it than me. We've been here about ten days now and the babies have officially had enough. Every day they have been meeting new people, going new places or waking up in new rooms and it's too much for them. This feels like one of those times when I need to say a whole lot of Yeses, even when the babies' immediate needs would be better met by Nos. The big picture tells me we are doing the right thing by being here – I am sure of it – but the small picture we are living in feels really difficult. They are overstimulated. They are perpetually tired. After a week and a half of the 'Turns Out My Family Is Twenty Times Bigger Than I Thought' show, Pink is constantly crying and clinging and Blue is ricocheting from person to person, charming all the ladies and striking fear into my attachment-paranoid heart.

And so we are perpetually tired too. Looking after them is five times as hard as it usually is, and it is usually pretty hard. My parents in particular are being great at supporting us and helping with the childcare but I feel like someone has held me down and beaten me with a plank, and I know J feels the same. We're at the beach at the moment on week away with my parents, siblings and all of our kids which is amazing in lots of ways but it's more change and ….. well, see above. Also it turns out that Pink is sort of scared of sand, which makes beach fun more challenging than expected. I know how lucky we are to be having this long, long holiday and taken as a unit, a month in Australia sounds like a lot of fun. But each one of the thirty days feels tough at the moment. 

J and I had been planning on taking two nights and going off on a mini-holiday on our own. I cannot tell you how much I was looking forward to this, but what with the clinging girl and the sudden reappearance of ping-pong boy, we're no longer sure this is quite such a good idea. Yeah, cue the violins, I know. First world problem, definitely. But man oh man, I have been looking forward to that break for I don't know how long. I wonder if I could just make a singing hologram of myself, if that would fool them into thinking that their mother hadn't prioritised sitting next to a pool somewhere drinking a cocktail rather than staying by their sides working on remedial attachment parenting. So I don't know what we're going to do about that. I know that we need to put their needs first, but I don't honestly know what their needs are in this case, and I also know that cocktails are delicious. D'oh. 

But it's all about the memories, right? In ten years time, I probably won't remember that Pink refused to eat yesterday and Blue had four tantrums in the space of an hour. Well, I wouldn't if I hadn't just written it down. But I will be glad that Blue loved the beach so much he got a head full of sand. I will be glad that I bought Pink a swimsuit with a built-in tutu, even if she only wants to wear it in the house. And I will certainly be glad that I got to watch Pink reading Shades of People with her uncle. Here are the obligatory heartwarming photos: 

Hard bits and good bits aside, there's always a lot of stuff about coming home that's always just plain weird. Like the fact that in a city of well over a million people, I just happen to run into an ex-boyfriend's sister. Or the fact that a disturbing number of people always feel the need to analyse my accent, with conversations that go like this: “Oh, you totally have a British accent now! Oh hang on, you just said 'chips' and that sounded Australian. So I guess you don't have a British accent at all. Oh but then you said 'dancing' and you sounded British again. So you do have a British accent. And then when you told me you were going to punch me in the face if I didn't stop assessing your accent you sounded sort of a bit of both. Hang on, now your fist is connecting with my nose! That's not very Australian!'  

Anyway. It's late, and I'm rambling. I should really go to sleep and recharge for the day ahead. I keep thinking - tomorrow, we'll just have a quiet day. But then tomorrow comes and somehow it never is. But what can we do, huh? I've got no idea. 

*With apologies to Bob Dylan

No Such Thing As A Vacation

So a few people have told me that there is no such thing as a vacation with small children. 

These people are telling the truth. This post will be scattered, because I am scattered. We've been here nearly 72 hours but I'm still not quite sure which way is up.  One thing I am sure about- you know that place where you live? Take it from me, the place where you live is fantastic. It's great. You love it. You never want to leave. There is no need for you to go on a long plane journey with your kids, ever. The rest of the world isn't worth it. Trust me. (Joking- sorta).

If you don't trust me - here's reason #1 why you should stay home: Fake Aeroplane Night.   What is WITH this? I'd forgotten that airlines seem to think that once you're in the sky, it's night time. Every long haul flight, no matter what time of day it happens, no matter which timezones it crosses, seems to begin with lunch and then immediately segue into this odd, pitch-black affair where all the cabin lights are turned off, the shades on the windows are compulsorily down and the stewardesses only talk in whispers. FYI: this is not ideal when travelling with bored toddlers. We got on a plane at 11.30am, and within two hours it was too dark for our children to play with any of the myriad toys that I had lovingly packed (in identical pairs) into ziploc bags.  Unfortunately, it was not too dark for them to kick and scream, or jump on things, or try to destroy the aircraft.  Also - the A380 is weirdly quiet. I was counting on engine noise to drown out their yelling but it didn't work and  - this may be the only time anybody has ever used this sentence - I really wish our plane had been louder. We did have a laptop for videos and two old mobile phones (these were GREAT in the dark - wonderful, wonderful idea, thanks Shonda!!!) but I don't think they have ever behaved with quite the level of naughtiness that we saw on our first flight. I know it was hard for them, etc etc etc, but it started in the car on the way to the airport (seriously, Pink and Blue?) and  by the time we were flying over Turkmenistan I was filled with a hollow, aching rage and inches away from storming the cockpit and demanding that the pilot turn the plane around or at least give me access to an ejector seat.  We were stuck in oppressive, whirring darkness with two children we were utterly unable to control, fielding angry glares from the other passengers and trying not to shake them and say 'if you think you can do better you are welcome to do a few hours of mid-air babysitting, pal'.  There was a moment of relief when they finally, finally, FINALLY both went to sleep, but within sixty seconds - sixty seconds - the seatbelt light came on and we had to remove them from their bassinets to comply with safety regulations. Something to do with the oxygen masks. Because obviously, by the time the oxygen masks are dropping from the ceiling, everything is going to be fine, and we are totally not going to die at all, and it's really really really going to matter that my kid is in a bassinet.  (If you are an airline safety engineer and know a good reason for this rule, I'm afraid I don't want to hear it - I'd rather stay mad about this). I told the stewardess - if you make me wake this boy up I guarantee he will scream at you for every remaining minute of this flight - but she did make me get him up and the whole experience went from tortuous to apocalyptic as I held him, screaming, through the rest of that too-dark imaginary night. Next to me, Pink slumbered peacefully on J's lap and he kept making a face at me, the one that says 'can't you keep your kid quiet? I've got a child here who's trying to sleep, you inconsiderate woman'.  It's a good thing it's not possible to file for divorce in mid-air, is all I will say about that particular experience.  

After a few not-too-bad hours in Singapore, we got on our next flight and had - you guessed it - lunch, and were then plunged back into night again, although it was 10am in the country we were leaving and midday where we were going. Fortunately all the yelling on leg one had so tired the children out that they fell asleep as soon as the bassinets were fixed to the wall. I got out my phone to take pictures of them - finally, finally, finally sleeping - and before I had put the phone away the seatbelt light came on again. Horrified, we decided to see if we could get away with sitting there quietly and not doing anything. Ummmm.... 'no' is the answer to this, for those of you ever planning to fly Singapore Airlines. The stewardesses began to mass behind us in battle formation and I'm afraid I started to ugly-cry.  "They haven't slept for about 23 hours" I wept "and I just cannot doooooooo it. I cannot wake them up. I can't beeeeear it" and then I put my head in my hands and sobbed, because nothing says 'mature, successful, in-control woman' like boo-hooing at the top of my voice in front of a few hundred airline passengers.  Anyway, they clearly cover this kind of emergency in stewardess school because five minutes later they had found us enough spare seats for both children to stretch out and stay asleep, where they then slumbered peacefully for the next five hours while my blood pressure returned to normal. They also obviously designated us as 'high risk for crazy' because they then kept on offering me extra drinks,  snacks, blankets and crayons for the kids and nobody even batted an eyelid when Blue threw his brand new Dora the Explorer toy watch at one of them during landing. 

Oooh, sorry, that was only supposed to be a few sentences but once I started it seems I just couldn't stop. Anyway, I'm glad that's out of my system now. And of course, now that the flight is finally over it is so good to be here. So good. Watching my kids play with their cousins is just the most fantastic feeling. Blue is particularly crazy about his oldest cousin and is having the time of his life with her as his new tickle-partner. He loves to roughhouse, and Pink hates it, so for once he is getting enough rough and tumble and she is getting enough personal space.  They remember their grandparents, which I wasn't really expecting and is both really nice and a little scary. Whose says tinies don't remember stuff, huh? 

Anyway. Scattered. We still are. J and I seem to be taking it in turns to not be able to sleep, which is making it hard for us to do ordinary things like finish sentences, or drive. I've already broken one of my mother's plates; fortunately not an expensive one.  The babies are sleeping strangely well, or perhaps we're just so deeply asleep when we are asleep that we don't hear them when they wake up. 

And then - last night we had our first ever allergic episode. After dinner I looked over at Blue and he had a fat lip. I looked again and saw that it was a really really fat lip and getting fatter, and that his face was covered in hives. Within seconds his eyes started to swell and suddenly I'm thinking about anaphylactic shock and asphyxiation and I start to totally. freak. out.  Fortunately my Dad is a doctor and realised it wasn't serious or life-threatening so we didn't have to take him to the hospital. Unfortunately my Dad is a doctor and realised it wasn't serious or life threatening so didn't quite realise how dramatic it seemed to me. For while I was standing there thinking my son's face is swelling up WHY IS NOBODY PANICKING??? I guess they thought I was doing enough to cover everyone else. It was utterly terrifying and although it didn't take long to find out that his breathing was fine and he wasn't in any real danger, it's one of the scariest parenting experiences I've had so far and triggered ugly-cry #2 for this trip.  And of course, we had no antihistamines with us after what happened last week gave us The Fear. He was so uncomfortable and itchy that we decided to risk the crazy and bought him some more - a different chemical, and fortunately it worked fine and didn't send him off the edge. I'm not sure we would have noticed if it had, though, because later the same evening my tiniest niece took a dive off the sofa and opened up her forehead on my parents' coffee table.  She's just come out of general anaesthetic to be stitched up, and my sister's two eldest are staying with us at my parents' while my sister and brother-in-law stay up at the hospital with her. That certainly put our not-actually-anaphylactic-shock episode in perspective. We're all incredibly glad she's doing well, but it's been an extremely rough 24 hours for her and my sister and her husband. 

There's other stuff going on too, which I'll write more about when I'm in the mood to make jokes about gene-linked cancers.  Nobody is sick, there's just a lot of stuff I need to think about, and it's already been the cause of ugly-cry #3, although I suspect that was partly due to jetlag. Did I say it was really good to be here? It is, but it's been a bit draining too. 

I think I'd better go and make another coffee. Or look at hotels online. 

I need a vacation. 

This Is For Everyone Who Told Me

to test the Benadryl.

THANK YOU. 

From the bottom of my heart.  The only good thing about this afternoon is that it's not happening on a plane.

Unreasonable

This is how my children were unreasonable today:

They got angry and frustrated at me for cleaning cat vomit off the floor.  They didn't want me to get out the cleaning kit; they wanted food and they wanted it right then. My selfish insistence on getting the puke cleaned up rather than putting their highchairs in the middle of the goopy brown puddle was impinging on their Cheerio time and they did not like it, no they did not like it one bit.  I cannot say just how crazy this drives me. If they were getting antsy because I was reading a book, or learning to make cake pops, or doing one of the twelve hundred other things I want to be doing and don't have time for then okay, fair enough. Yell your little hearts out, kiddos. Mummy is being selfish; shout until she remembers her responsibilities. But seriously, children. Cat vomit? I can't find any way to make them understand that I do not want to be cleaning up vomit. Do they really think I am choosing to do this because I don't love them? Do they really think I would be on my hands and knees getting a face full of this particular substance if it wasn't absolutely necessary?  Apparently so. They howled and howled and I got madder and madder as I scrubbed it up and wondered how did this happen, that I even get an earful of mother-guilt when I'm doing stuff that I don't want to do? 

This happens all the time. Later they were at it again. Blue had filled his nappy in impressive style and based on the smell, it needed changing pronto if we didn't want to throw out all of our soft furnishings.  This led to a four-legged, four-handed cyclone because Blue didn't want to have his nappy changed and Pink didn't want me to put her down so I could do it. Blue writhed on the changing mat, kicking and screaming, angry and frustrated because he wanted to be running-running-running, not staying still and attending to personal hygiene. Pink wailed down below, clutching my knee and throwing her little body to the ground, angry and frustrated because I wasn't quick enough to get Blue off the mat, pick her up again and cuggen, mama, cuggen.  None of my entreaties to look at Mummy's face look at mummy's face LOOKATMUMMY'SFAAAAAACE had any effect on either of them. Again, I was facing serious toddler-wrath even though I didn't even want to be doing the thing that was making them mad. And that made me really mad.  

So I guess this is how I was unreasonable today:  I got angry and frustrated at my children because they were acting like (almost) two-year-olds.

I try to remind myself that actually, it's reasonable that they don't have any concept of time. It's reasonable that they can't see even thirty seconds into the future and understand that what is happening RIGHT NOW will not always be happening. It's reasonable for them not to realise that the cat-vomit-cleaning, the nappy change will end and the cheerios or cuddles will start again. It's reasonable that they don't understand any of this. 

But I guess it's also reasonable that I don't like being kicked in the windpipe by a raging child. It's reasonable that I don't like being bitten so hard that it draws blood. And you know what? I really don't like it. And so their reasonable plus my reasonable equals one great big fat maelstrom of unreasonable.  This is where I get angry at them for being angry. I yell at them for yelling. Sometimes, as the words stop shouting! come roaring out of my mouth I hear myself and think Okay, which one of us in this room is acting  most like a toddler right now? Oh right, it's me.

When I think about how frustrated and angry I get with them, I swing wildly between self-loathing and self-justification. On one side, I say to myself 'You've had a long day, they're being utterly unreasonable, it's no surprise that you snapped'.  The other side says 'How could you have yelled so angrily at your precious baaaaaybeeeees! You are not worthy of them! They deserve better than you!' 

I suppose both sides are right, and both sides are wrong.  When they are being little horrors, losing my temper with them is understandable, but it's not okay.  Just like their kicking and biting is understandable, but ultimately not okay. We are the same as each other, them and me. The problem isn't really the frustration, it's what we do with the frustration.  I need to train them to learn self-control in difficult situations, but sometimes I feel like such a hypocrite. 

I never thought I had difficulties with my temper until I had toddlers, but r

ight now I struggle more than I could ever have imagined.

Christians often say that having children opens surprising new windows into what the Father-love of God is like.  I was sceptical about this while we waited for ours. I knew I would love my children a lot, I knew God loved me a lot. No surprises lurking there, surely? In a way, I was right. The love I feel for them is deep and true and wonderful, but it hasn't been a surprise. I longed for that sort of love and now it's here, hooray. No, what has surprised me is that sometimes my utterly beloved children are so awful I don't even want to be in the same room as them. And yet I still love them. 

At the moment, as I see my toddlers spin around, confused an unaware and totally unable to control their impulses I keep being hit by the fact that God must see me in just the same way. They want everything right now. They have no patience. They have no self control. They destroy things. They are always complaining. And every time I put this into words - to complain about them- I am forced to admit that the person I am really describing is me.  

Yet God as my Father continues to love me like his own precious toddler. For me, this has been my new window. Not the depth of God's love, but it's strength - that it must be strong enough to keep going even when I'm really, really annoying. 

So that's a reason to be thankful, and I am. But what am I going to do about the fact that my own behaviour is toddlerrific? After one of my children has a tantrum, the way our house works is that they need to look at my face and say sorry.  Then I tell them I forgive them, give them a cuddle and it's over, forever, forgotten (if it was an infraction against the other twin they have to apologise to them, too).  I don't want them pretending that they didn't do anything wrong, but I don't want them to keep thinking about it, either. I don't want them to sit there feeling guilty for what's already happened, I want them to leave that behind and do better next time. 

I think this is what I should be applying to myself as well. When I lose control and get angry with my children, I need to stop making excuses about why I couldn't help it and man up and admit I was wrong - to God, to myself, to the children. Whatever the provocation, I should not have done it. I need to ask for their forgiveness, and then I need to get over it and do better when the next pressure point comes.  Which will probably be in about ten minutes' time.  Sometimes I wallow around feeling guilty about my parenting because it's easier than actually making changes. Guilt sort of feels good because it makes me feel like whoever did that yelling and screaming wasn't the real me. Guilt is cheap. And ultimately, it's a bit of a cop-out.  Believe me, I speak from experience. 

So what can I say? It's easy for me to make grand resolutions right now; my children are napping. I was a great mother before I met them, and I suspect I'll be really great again once they've left home. But in the days and weeks and months (and aeroplane flights) ahead, I need to practice modelling the kind of self-control that I would like them to be learning.  Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Failing and falling and trying again. And again. And again. 

Hmmmmm. Nothing about this mothering thing is easy, is it? 

Like You've Just Stepped Out Of A Salon

I owe you all a salon story. Remember this ad?

Well, that is not how our trip to the salon made us feel, not at all. To start with, they were rude. I mean really, extraordinarily rude. We arrived on time, and I went to the woman at the reception desk and said I had a 10am appointment for my daughter. 

"We don't have any record of that appointment" she said, not even looking at the appointment book. 

"Are you sure?"I asked. "I phoned yesterday". 

She stared at me. "No, nothing". 

I was about a millimetre from saying kthxbai! and beating a hasty retreat when an older woman walked over to us. She looked at the appointment book, pointed, and said to the younger woman

"Look, the appointment is right here. It's in your handwriting". The first woman shrugged. 

"I guess it's my handwriting, but I didn't make that appointment". The older woman spoke sharply to her and told her- you made the appointment, now do the braids. The first woman shrugged again. She looked at Pink's hair. 

"It's too short to braid, anyway. I can't braid her hair". 

"It's not too short" said the older woman. 

"Well, I can't braid it". 

Impasse. 

The older woman called to a third woman. 

"Can you do these braids?" she asked.  "I would do them myself, but I have an appointment in half an hour"

"No, I can't" she replied, regretful. "I have an appointment in a few minutes too".  The older woman raised her eyebrows. 

"You don't," she said. "I have the book in front of me and you don't have anybody coming for two hours".  Then all three of them glared at each other for a little while and I wished I were anywhere, anywhere but there. Eventually the older woman said:

"Fine. I'll do it. My next appointment can wait" and she led us over to a chair. 

This is probably a good moment to explain a little bit more about why I chose to take Pink to a salon rather than try her first braids at home. I'm pretty confident about the technicalities of braiding; the problem is that she hates having my fingers anywhere near her head. Not while eating, not while on my lap, not while watching a DVD and absolutely no way  in the bath. Both Pink and Blue are extreeeeeemely tender-headed. I have no idea how much of it is physical - I'm sure having their hair detangled does hurt - and how much is psychological - they often start to yell well before I actually start detangling.  When I tried to put puffs in Pink's hair, she struggled and kicked and yelled and screamed. I've given them medicine and put them struggling into prams and changed their nappies when they were angry about it and had 101 other standard annoyed-kid experiences with them - trust me, their reaction to hair stuff is absolutely and utterly beyond. We do detangle regularly, because that's pretty much compulsory, but trying braids at home was always going to be a disaster. Getting someone else to do it seemed like a good idea - if part of her aversion was psychological, where pain from detangling causes fear of detangling and then fear of detangling causes extreme paranoia about letting mama into the space-helmet-sized-curl-zone-of-personal-space, then getting a new person to do it seemed like a smart way to try to break the cycle.  

Well, I can now exclusively reveal that this did not work at all. It went wrong right at the start, as soon as we sat down. The stylist wanted to blow her hair 'out' so she could work with the maximum length. I'm not sure if I've said this before about Pink - she is scared of a lot of stuff. Two things she is particularly scared of: hairdryers and combs. So when she saw a hairdryer coming at her with a comb attached to it she nearly lost her tiny little mind. Before it came anywhere near her head she was climbing up my chest and wailing and trying to escape.

This was the point at which I began to think - okay, this was a REALLY bad idea, and not just because I feel like the white invader in a minority safe space where I'm obviously not welcome. But the stylist had gone out of her way to do this when nobody else would, and I didn't feel like I could just walk out. She blew out her hair. Pink screamed. She did the first parting. The screaming went up ten notches. She started to braid it into cornrows, and the screaming went through the roof. I was clutching Pink and stroking her back. 99% of my brain was taken up with trying to comfort my beloved child, but I will admit the other 1% was thinking Hey! I asked for box braids!   

The stylist got down one row, and started the second.  Pink was shuddering and wailing and I had no idea what to do. Do I sound unsympathetic? I was not unsympathetic, I was on the edge of tears myself. Her face was covered in snot from crying and suddenly she flipped her whole body across to the other side of my lap. At this, the stylist threw her hands up in the air and said "I can't do this!" She put down her comb. Air rushed back into my lungs. Mentally, I already had Pink back in the pram and we were out the door together. I decided that I would worry about taking out her single cornrow at a later point, like next year. But before I could get up, the first woman - the one who I spoke to at the desk - came over to our chair and said "Okay, I will do it."

She elbowed the older woman out of the way and made a start on the second cornrow. Pink, who had briefly stopped crying, started up again. It's hard to know what to say about cornrows two through eight except that I'm not sure whether holding Pink on my lap through that experience means I should get a medal or get fired completely as a mother. At one point I asked if I could sing to her, because singing has always been how I have calmed her, since she was a tiny tiny thing. The new stylist said okay, and that is how I found myself belting out 'The Lord's My Shepherd' (her favourite) at the top of my lungs in front of all the staff and customers. It calmed her for about a minute, until she realised that singing or not, her head was still being attacked and I gave up. By this point there were a few other customers in the salon. One was not very pleased at my choice of song, saying "I feel like I am back at Sunday School!" But the others were smiling at each other and making nostalgic, sympathetic noises at me, the sort of noises that older mothers make to younger mothers while they wait in fear for their children to get vaccinated. This helped my state of mind- it helped a lot, in fact. 

Once she had decided to help us, the young woman was actually pretty good about putting braids onto a writhing, screaming toddler. (I found out why later, when she rang up the price and I saw she had given herself a 50% tip). She took up the singing when I stopped, asking me for Pink's name and then singing 'Piiiiiink, she is a veerrrrryyy nice giiiiiiiirl' over and over again in a voice being both remarkably tuneless and remarkably loud. Eventually - after the longest hour of my my life - she finished. I put my girl - exhausted from screaming, eyes puffy and red - back in her pram. I paid, and didn't quibble about being gouged over price.  I stumbled out, legs quivering, as quickly as I could. 

And truth be told? I don't even really like the style. I don't think it suits her. I really wanted box braids. But I think it's going to be a long, long, loooooong time before we get to find out whether they suit her any better. 

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

[Part 2, which you can skip if you want to]

And okay, because I can't tell a story without picking away at what everything meant, I have to add that the whole experience was pretty confronting for me on quite a few levels. So many things to think about concerning race and hair and mothering and what's good for kids versus what they want, and then wondering whether some of those good things are really as good as I am assuming. Much of this was not really a big surprise, if difficult to live at the time. But one that was a surprise: after this happened, I had a long conversation with some really good friends at work about what the experience had been like. (They heard the original phone conversation, so they wanted to know how it would all end up). I told them what I've told you, and each person who joined the conversation said 'do you think they were rude to you because you were white?'  And I said I didn't know. Then I said that was what made it particularly hard - I had no idea whether the whole thing was about the colour of my skin or whether I had done or said something wrong, or whether the particularly rude woman just had a terrible hangover and didn't want to be at work at all that day.  Then a I said how difficult I find it that my children are going to face this situation much more often than me, where they have no idea whether a difficult situation has happened because of their colour. Nothing too monumental there. For a moment I felt like I had been through an experience that would really help me to understand what my children's life would be like.  

And then an explosion happened in my brain and I realised - every single person who has asked me about this experience has at least considered that the tension I experienced could be attributed to race. Nobody dismissed me when I wondered about it, I didn't feel like I had to apologise for suggesting it, and most people brought it up on their own.  If our Zimbabwean colleague had walked in with a different story about how rude people had been at a different place of business, I doubt that any of us would have been very quick to say 'do you think they were rude to you because you are black?'  It wouldn't have been our first thought, if the conversation that he reported hadn't been explicitly about race. And if he had suggested it himself (which he definitely would not have, based on my knowledge of how he operates) we would have considered it but I suspect that at least one of us would have said 'hey, it was probably nothing to do with that, she was probably just tired!'  I know that's happened to me a few times when I've wondered out loud about whether my children have been treated a particular way because of their colour.  But that didn't happen when the person who might have been treated rudely due to race was me . I shared my brain explosion with my colleagues and we all said 'oooooh' and sat there silently for a little while, pondering.  It's taken me until now to sort it out enough in my head to write about it, and I'm sure I still haven't explained it very well. 

I know white privilege is real, but it freaked me out a little - okay a lot- to feel that I even get to have white privilege when I'm talking about the fact that I may have experienced racial prejudice. There's something mighty messed up about that. 

Twins On A Plane

That's the film they really should have made. 

We are due to fly to Australia in about two weeks. Fifteen-ish days. 360 hours, not that I'm counting, not that I'm absolutely horrified by the prospect.  I'm looking forward to being there, of course, I'm just really, really dreading going. At the moment I'm spending all my non-existent spare time running around in ever-decreasing circles, trying to work out how we will manage two large, not-really-verbal lap children for twenty four hours. I'm sort of wishing we had shelled out the additional thousand or so pounds to get seats for them, which shows just how irrational I am becoming about the whole thing. 

We have pre-booked bassinet seats, although the bassinets won't really be large enough for our almost-two-year-olds to sleep in them. We have got a prescription for the UK equivalent of Benadryl, so that should help when we just can't stand it anymore if they are having difficulty sleeping draped over our shoulders. (Yes, I am an unapologetic fan of drugging children when appropriate, although this is the first time we will have actually tried sedating them. On really bad days, if I want myself to feel a bit better when they are sick and super-cranky, I close my eyes and imagine that I'm living in ye olden times,  before magical pink syrup was invented.  Then I open my eyes and say to myself Surprise! It's 2011! and go to the medicine cabinet and nothing seems quite so bad). 

But even I do not plan on drugging them for the entire trip. So, this is my plea for travelling tips.Our two are exceptionally adorable, but frankly not especially advanced for their age, so they aren't really at the sedentary-focused-imaginative-play stage yet. Colouring holds no interest for them.  They are at an age where they want to be doing. Their favourite toys right now are miniature strollers - they love to tear around the house pushing their animals and dolls. It's very cute, but it's not going to be an option on an aircraft. We know about buying lots of cheap small toys and pulling them out of my bag every hour or so. Well, in theory. In practice, we're not quite sure exactly what sort of toys to buy, since most small toys look like have been specifically designed to fit exactly into a toddler's windpipe. 

Ideas?  Seriously, we are going to need all the help we can get. 

May 11: Day In Photos

In case you couldn't tell from the header, this is my (freakishly long) post for Evelyn's Day In Photos linkup. (Thanks, E!)

On Thursday morning, I woke up in the spare bed. I've been unwell and my cold had turned into a cough. Now, J and I hardly fight but one thing that brings out the worst in both of us is me being sick. I want him to cosset me, and he wants me to shut up and stop whining. The less sympathetic he is, the more I whine, the more I whine, the more he wants me to shut up and the less sympathetic he is. It's not pretty. It's worst of all at night time because he takes each cough as a personal insult, specifically planned by me to keep him from sleeping. And I take each martyr-like sigh (from him, when I cough) as a message that he doesn't love me at all. Lose-lose. 

So on Wednesday night I decided to spare both of us this trauma and slept in the spare room. It was the perfect solution. I didn't stay awake suppressing coughs; he didn't stay awake grinding his teeth at me. We both slept well; he brought me coffee in the morning to wake me up. Win-win. Because sometimes marriage means loving each other enough  not to share a bed.  

All that to say: I don't have a picture of the coffee. You know what coffee looks like. He goes to work. I drink my coffee in bed. 

The babies gave their unwell mother the best present ever and slept in - their latest ever, I think. Don't hate me when I say that they woke up at eight o'clock. It's not normal, I promise. First thing, milk at 8:01: 

Followed by second thing, at about 8:11 - ummmm.... leopard management classes, Pink?  (There's that stocking hat I promised you).

Does anybody else take an INSANELY long time to get their children ready in the mornings? I swear it took us the first hour of the day just to get downstairs. I whipped out the video camera, just in case anybody wanted to see Blue go NUTS about his current favourite song  (he can do the actions properly, by the way, he just gets so excited sometimes that he forgets):



(It's been bugging me for weeks - what does he look like in that outfit? I finally remembered as I was typing this - a vintage penguin book. See what I mean?

(Bad choice of title, incidentally - their room has a view of a carpark). Also very exciting: Pink is very excited about having discovered a new body part, her 'bettabutta':  (Personally,  I am less excited about the fact that I keep on forgetting our video camera cuts off the last two seconds or so of each video we take)



We go downstairs, eat breakfast and then it's time for a morning dance before going out.





Morning dance time is my cynical daily attempt to keep them in a good mood. Our best morning (or indeed anytime) dance CD is unquestionably Sharon, Bram and Lois' Great Big Hits vol 1. It was a present from my sister. She has a degree in music and one in early childhood education so I take her kids' music suggestions very seriously. So should you.

Right. So they woke up at 8, and all we have done is get them dressed, had a dance or two and eaten breakfast, it must be what, 8.30?  Nope. Time to leave the house: it's 10:00.

Every Thursday we go to singing time at the library. I love it. They love it. We love it. It's at 10:30 and we walk there - we are nearly always late. Not this week! This week we were on time because I was meeting a new friend there - she's only around town for 2 weeks and we met in the park on Tuesday. She is stuck in a hotel room with her baby while her husband works here for two weeks (they're from Australia) and she seemed nice so... I invited her to come singing with us. This is fairly out of character for me. Usually I try to avoid eye contact with strangers. Who knows what happened? Anyway, she is nice so that's a relief.

11am: Singing has just finished. Here is the usual post-singing scene of library carnage:

After the library, three of us (including my new friend) went to Starbucks for coffee / babies' lunch. This is a standard part of my Thursday routine and I really really like it - we go to Starbucks because they are the only cafe that tends to have enough highchairs for three or four children (This drives me CRAZY, by the way. Lots of places only have one or two, which means they are off-limits if I want to meet a friend who also has a kid. I couldn't understand why local businesses would shoot themselves in the foot like this until I realised that hey, they don't actually want my custom until my kids are older, less messy and eat food bought on the premises rather than the endless parade of jam sandwiches that is all my children will allow to pass their lips at the moment. Okay, digression over). I catch up with my friend H, usually, and we try to entice our children to eat by getting the other mother to offer them the food. It doesn't really work. It worked even less well than usual this week because Blue decided that what he really wanted to be doing was running around, pulling packs of coffee off the shelf.  I didn't get any pictures. Here we all are afterwards:

Believe me, crying on the inside. And in case anybody isn't sure, the well-groomed, made-up person on the left is not me.

Then we went on to Marks and Spencer to buy a few groceries. M&S is popular with the over-sixties crowd, and it's more expensive, but usually quieter than the other central option so that's where I chose to get the bread and milk we needed. But in one of those strange statistical flukes, it was heaving - heaving - with people. (I bet the place next door was empty). This fact is relevant only because Blue was pushing all of my buttons in there and we ended up having a big time face-off in front of pretty much every senior citizen in town.   I nearly cried.  I'm chalking it up to the continued efforts to teach just-because-we-are-not-in-our-house-that-doesn't-mean-you-can-be-naughty. We have a way to go.

It was mortifying. But I won.

Back home, time for naps. You can't tell here, but this travel cot is in our spare room. It's a tiiiiiny room, so the only place for the cot to go is on top of the double bed in there. So, when I slept in there on Wednesday night I first had to manoeuvre the cot over so it was sort of leaning against the wall and there was enough room for me to cram my body alongside. I hauled it back to the middle of the bed and put Blue inside. We separate them for naps because they don't always need the same amount of sleep.

Oh yeah, Mummy, I am TOTALLY ready for my nap.

Then I cleaned up a bit, then 2pm: Lunchtime for me! I ate it in the pocket-handkerchief-sized-garden that is attached to our pocket-sized-house, and if we didn't have so much washing up you could see that the clematises were blooming. But I guess if you cared about clematises, you'd be reading a different sort of blog.

The worst thing about sharing childcare with J is the fact that we often sniff the children, look at each other and say: "I thought YOU were bathing them!" The problem is that they are both big-time bathtime poopers, so bathing them is not for the faint of heart. Straight after their nap seems to be their best chance for a bath with no untoward incidents. Recently they have both been doing a bit of bathtime-refusenik-ing, and this day I had so much trouble getting Blue in that I decided to stick with just one. Once he'd been in for about 5 minutes, he was having a great time. Obviously.

Actually, they were both in really unusually good moods all day. When they are happy and clean we sometimes go and mess around on our bed after bathtime. When they are UNhappy, it's pointless because they spend the whole time whining to be up when they are down and down when they are up. But this was the sort of day for which feather duvets and bouncy mattresses are intended (4pm):

(For anybody looking closely - that is WATER on her clothes. She slipped over on the bathroom floor and fell on her butt into one of his many splashing puddles).

See what I mean by happy? I would thank morning dance time, but we do that every day and it doesn't usually work. Usually this kind of approach from him would send her into a frenzy of screaming and fingernails. But they are actually kissing.  These two fight so much - so much - I'd say it's by far the hardest thing about parenting them. This gives me some hope that one day they will be glad to have each other around.

Now here they are, practising for bedtime. This is the 'you can't brush my teeth if you can't get at my head' position.

Downstairs, dressed. Blue is turning his headstands into some form of upside down ballet while I make their pasta.

Here are my two geniuses eating. They love cutlery. They wouldn't be without it. They like to hold it in one hand, while they shovel food into their mouths with the other. And by food, I guess I mean 'pasta' since that is the only thing they really like to eat.

After dinner they get to watch an episode of Playschool, the only Nanna-approved television programme for under-4s. Fortunately, they love it. LOVE it. They watch while I comment on blogs clean the kitchen from their dinner.

I could be anywhere during this 25 minutes and they wouldn't know or care. This would bother me, except by this point of the day I would usually RATHER be anywhere else. So win-win, again. And did I mention it's Nanna-approved? (Speaking of Nanna - ball is still in their court re: the fabulous guest post they have the option of writing for all of us. I'll let you know when I hear more. Also - salon stories later).

Seriously, Mummy, why are you still here? I'm watching my stories.

It's nearly time for bed. This isn't on the hour, but had to share with you what happens when I ask Blue to show Mummy dancing. 

7pm: bedtime. Here's Pink, back in her pyjamas, still entranced by her bettabutta.

I clean up and fritter away time commenting on more blogs until 8pm: J gets home from work. That's pretty much his normal time, which I reallyreallyreallyreally hate. Dinner ready to go straight away - carnitas from this fabulous recipe, black beans from this wonderful book, both made in mega-bulk in the slow cooker and frozen, ready to be defrosted at a moment's notice and crammed into tortillas with whatever else we have lying around that feels vaguely Mexican. And cheese.  (In case you're wondering, yes those are monkey legs you can see on the worktop).

We're both exhausted. We watch some episodes of the office and go to bed. Before that we check on the kidlets :

Flash doesn't wake them up, fortunately! Both asleep. And a few minutes later, so were we. 

Hi There, Mum And Dad

No, that's not a typo. Because it turns out that my parents read my blog. Hi Guys. 

Mum told me that she can't remember exactly when she found it, but it was probably more than a year ago. And they've been reading it ever since. And have read nearly all the archives. I love my parents dearly and we are very close but  when they told me a few days ago I was freaked out cranky surprised, to say the least. This space to write freely about our unusual parenting journey has been really important to me. I was very weirded out to find out that it was not as private as I thought. 

Mum told me that it had actually been very, very easy to find me. (Just for the record? If you're ever having this conversation with someone? That did not make me feel better). 

After the conversation (by email, and on the phone) I asked myself: Why am I so upset? I don't want to be a hypocrite. I don't want to be the kind of person who shows one face to one group of people, and another face to everyone else.  If I'm ashamed of what I write here, I shouldn't be writing it at all.  (Although if I'd known my parents were reading, I might have at least changed the title of this post to mythical-crack-ladies-of-the-night). 

A blog is not a diary. It doesn't have a lock. I know that. And yet. Having found this lock-less space, here are some Clues that your child is trying to keep their blog under the real-life radar: 

• There's the fact that I blog under a fake name. Of all people, the people who chose my real name should notice the difference, yes?  Mater and Pater, were you sitting there saying to each other "Hang on, I forget. Did we call our second daughter Claudia? I thought we called her something else. Can you remember, honey?' Were you having this conversation, dear parents? Hmmmm? HMMMMMMMM? 
• There are the paranoid posts, like this this and this, where I talk about how awful it would be if people I knew in real life were reading my blog. 
• There's the fact that I blog under a fake name. 
• There's the fact that I maintain an entirely separate family blog. 
• There's the fact that I have never, ever mentioned this blog to them despite having been writing it for three years
• Did I mention that I blog under a fake name? 

Which leads me on to Clues that they knew perfectly well I was trying to keep my blog under the radar: 

• There's the fact that they never mentioned they had found it at the time when they first found it
• There's the fact that they have been saying 'oh really?' when I tell them things I have already mentioned here, rather than 'Duh! We know! We totally found your blog!'    
• There's the fact that the above two things have been happening for around a YEAR

Which leads me onto Oh boy do I feel stupid now and its close friends They really should have told me and What shall I do next? 

• There's the option of no longer blogging at all. That's not what I want. 
• There's the option of making this blog private. I don't like that option either. The whole point of blogging, in my opinion, is pooling wisdom with a whole bunch of people I don't know. (And posting videos of my cat). I like the collaborative nature of public blogging, and I want to be part of that.
• There's the option of asking my parents not to read any more. 
• Or, if they want to keep reading there is the option of making them pinky-swear not to mention it to anyone else, ever and devising a suitable forfeit.

And so I asked myself: What would Gilbert and Sullivan do? There's a famous line from The Mikado that my Father likes to quote - it's from this song -that goes: Let the Punishment Fit The Crime.  

So. I need your help to make that happen. Since they've been reading, my best idea is that they should have to do some writing, yes?  If they want to keep reading, I think they should have to write a guest post. (Each?)  Since they have read the entire archives of this blog, and are now experts on adoption from the APs point of view, I wondered whether we should demand a grandparent's guide: How to Support Your Child While They Adopt Your Grandchild. 

But that's just one idea. I'm totally open to suggestions. What do YOU want to hear from FascinatingNanna and FascinatingGrandpa? (Stories about me are not an option. If they want to tell embarrassing stories about their children, they can get their own blog). Or should the forfeit be something else entirely? Or should I just say please stop? (Does your family read your blog?)

These are not rhetorical questions, people. There will be no stories about our (horrific) trip to the salon, or photos of Pink in braids, or photos of Pink looking like the world's tiniest bank robber in her new stocking cap, until y'all help me out with this.