Toddlers and Verbs

***this one gets an official 'long, go and get yourself a cup of tea' warning***

I've read a lot of parenting books in the last few years. Maybe you haven't - I guess you don't need to, since your kids are always perfect and all - but I'm unable to take any kind of decision or come to any kind of opinion without donating a large chunk of change to Amazon.  (And now I have a kindle. I can order books on the bus. This might get messy).  So yeah, I've read a lot of parenting books. I considered photographing our parenting bookshelf to illustrate, but which one to choose? There are three. Anyway. Here's the thing about parenting books. After buying about fifty, I've finally realised - I hate them. 

I didn't always hate them, and I don't hate every one. I'm just in a very specific hating-the-books point in my life because the thing I'm perpetually looking up is Toddlers, specifically behaviour, the management of, specifically tantrums, how to deal with, specifically how to stop the neighbours calling social services. 

Turns out there is a lot of really unhelpful stuff out there. For books that espouse such different stuff, they all feel weirdly the same.  They all seem to merge into one - let's call it The WonderMethod - written by a man called Dr Wonderful. So here's what I hate about that. 

I  hate the self-congratulatory stories about other people's kids . These go like this: A woman, let's call her Mrs A, came to me and she said 'oh, Dr Wonderful, my child is totally out of control. I'm at my wits' end! Whatever can I do?'  I observed the A family for ten minutes in my office and dispensed sage advice. Later that day Mrs A called me back and said 'Dr Wonderful, our problems are solved and it's all because of you! You really ARE wonderful!'. That was eighteen years ago. Baby A is now at Harvard.  

I also hate the stories where they use stories about their own kids to prove what mad discipline skilz they have. These are the ones that go Mrs Wonderful, the Wonderkids and I were at the beach. Wonderboy wanted to take his baby sister, Wondergirl, swimming. Mrs Wonderful said no and Wonderboy got upset. Gently and calmly, I told him that he had two choices. He could play on the sand with his baby sister or he could go swimming with me. Immediately, he dried his tears and said "Gee, WonderDad! Those two choices are BOTH wonderful. I'll go swimming with you now, then play with Wondergirl later'.  That was eighteen years ago. Wonderboy is now at Harvard. 

But maybe the stories that annoy me most are the ones about other people, you know, the ones who don't use the WonderMethod. These stories generally imply that parenting in any other way is some kind of Faustian pact, a foolish sacrifice of your child's lifelong happiness and security (and, if it's a Christian book, their entire spiritual life too).  These stories go like this: Some friends of mine, let's call them Mr and Mrs B, had a baby. They claimed to love and care for their child, but their words were proved false when they chose not to use the WonderMethod. That was eighteen years ago. Baby B is now in jail. 

Of course, if you're a Christian and / or an adoptive parent, there are two extra layers of that the books throw at you - and the worst part is that these two layers of advice often seem perpendicular to each other. 

The adoption books: A family, let's call them Mr and Mrs C, adopted a child.  They didn't understand that their child never actually did anything wrong, she was just processing her grief. Once they began to validate her emotions and only ever do time-ins, she blossomed and her behaviour was never an issue, ever again. That was eighteen years ago. Little C is now so emotionally healthy that she leads the student counselling team. At Harvard. 

The Christian books: Once there was a family, the D family, who did time-ins with their child. That was eighteen years ago. Baby D is now an atheist. 

Very helpful*.  

Another bugbear: most of these people have clearly forgotten what it is like to actually have children in the house. Even better - many of them seem to be men who have the gall to write books about how to do day-to-day discipline when they clearly spent their children's entire childhoods out of the house and at the office. Even if the office was a child psychologist's office, how is this not like taking parenting advice from Don Draper? 

I think she should go on the naughty step

 Someone who was always off being Dr Wonderful and never at home might know all there is to know about the amygdala but is very unlikely to really get what it is like to scrape jam off the cat for the third time in one day. I suspect there might be some kind of equation linking how smug authors are about parenting to the number of hours they actually spent parenting per week and how many years ago it occurred. But that's just a theory. 

This is nearly the last, I promise - It also drives me crazy how these books assume that you only have one child to take care of. This is almost universal. Oh, yeah, and you certainly don't have to ever do the dishes or make dinner. The assumption is that you can always focus on whatever your child needs to help them be the emotionally healthy well behaved toddler that they really are on the inside. Sibling rivalry usually gets a short chapter towards the end and other than that it's assumed there is nothing - nothing - in your life that you might have to do other than plan and execute fun-filled activities to do with your munchkin. Which is fine, because that is totally my life. Yeah. 

Oh yeah! (This really is the last one, I promise) -  I also hate it when books give the impression that there is some magical way of disciplining children that they are actually going to enjoy. I'm particularly bitter about this one because I keep falling for it, even though I should know better. I keep kidding myself that if I just try hard enough, if I just read the right book, I will find a way to make my children like being disciplined. I want my story to go like this: A woman, let's call her Claudia, because it's me, parented her children with such love and grace that they never questioned her authority or threw pasta at her. If it ever happened that they were naughty made poor choices, they would come and ask that she guide them back onto the way of happiness. That was eighteen years ago. Pink and Blue are now at Harvard.  Whereas of course the child is not really supposed to like whatever the sanction is. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that this is kind of the whole point. I don't think there's really any such thing as toddler parenting by mutual consent because toddlers have pretty much no idea from one minute to the next what they need or what is good for them. But sometimes I forget this and I want it to be easy. I want to find the magic button, even though I know full well there is no magic button. 

I know the mentally healthy thing to do is to ignore all of the advice. I shouldn't let it bother me. But I can't ignore the issue altogether either -  parenting is incredibly important, and it behooves us to take it seriously. We are our children's most important influences, we have no excuse for not doing our best. As my children get older and more wilful, this becomes increasingly clear to me. So my new philosophy is this: I am trying to focus on doing this well rather than find the one way of doing it right. Isn't that a great philosophy? You can borrow it if you like. You're welcome. But take it from me- it is of absolutely zero practical use. 

This conviction to do it well, don't worry about doing it right doesn't help me when I'm facing off two screaming toddlers and trying to decide what to actually do with them. Let's say one of them has just hit the other one. Okay, so I'm not going to spank (and I'm not philosophically anti-spanking, by the way - there's a huge difference between spanking calmly (!) and hitting in anger and if you've only ever seen hitting then of course I understand why you would be totally anti-spanking but you might find yourself surprised by some of the evidence in the chapter on spanking in the ever-thought-provoking-book Nurtureshock, which surely you've already read because of the awesome chapter about why white parents don't talk to their children about race? Yes? But anyway spanking is a moot point in our house because UK adoption regulations determine that all adoptive parents need to agree to a no-smacking policy so we never had to make a decision about this. Okay, where was I?) Right. One of them has hit the other. I'm not going to spank. Most of the adoption books rain down dire warnings about the evils of time-out.  So what am I supposed to actually do, I mean actually physically do with the hitter at this point? 

It's really hard getting straight answers from people on this one. Even the books - the ones that don't fall into the you must use the WonderMethod or your children are forever doooooomed - are short on actual, well, verbs. You know - 'doing words', like send to their room or carry them to time out or talk to them or sit with them. There are an awful lot of adverbs about how to discipline- words like gently and calmly and consistently and lovingly and don't get me wrong they are fan-spanking-tabulous adverbs, every one, but I never know what verb the author is imagining these lovely adverbs are modifying. I've been reading a lot about writing recently and one of the pieces of advice I keep on reading is to ditch the adverbs because your verbs should be specific enough to not need them. And these books (and bloggers, and people, when I talk to them) seem reluctant to commit to specific verbs. If we shave out our discipline adverbs when we talk about how we parent (especially in adoptive parenting) we seem to be left with very little. Really, the adverbs are philosophy, not practicalities. It's great that an author is counselling me to be gentle and consistent but gentle and consistent in doing WHAT? 

So okay then, I'll be specific. We have been doing a whole lot of emotional validation and 'time-ins'. I love the idea of a time-in. The child knows they are being sanctioned, but they also that Mummy loves them and isn't going anywhere. Awesome! It sounds like a great big circle of win-win-winningness. Okay. So, I love the idea of a time-in, but have you ever tried to actually do one? I can see how they might work for older kids - maybe - but it's just a disaster with my toddlers. I try to hold their hand and do all the talking about how I understand how frustrating it is that they can't do whatever it is that they want to - validating their emotions, etc etc, but honestly? I just turn into a wall of words. I lecture. I don't intend to do it but before I know it I'm talking, talking, talking, telling Pink or Blue or whoever just how important it is that they obey Mummy, that they don't hit don't whine don't pull hair don't bite don't stand on your brother's head I know how frustrated you are but mummy needs you to LISTEN  and I'm telling them a whole lot of stuff that is both true and important but I know all that they are hearing is BLAH BLAH BLAH and honestly? That's not doing either of us any good. They get bored and I get frustrated and it doesn't take long for the circle of win to turn vicious. Also, while I'm quietly showering child #1 with focused time-in goodness, let's be honest: child #2 is either gawping and making faces (if we've stayed in the same room) or taking the opportunity to attack the cat (if we haven't). See above about how the books assume you've only got one kid to take care of.  Maybe there are families for whom time-ins are constructive and helpful but for us they are ten different flavours of wrong. Time-ins do nothing to change their behaviour and they also do nothing to help our relationship. It makes me feel angry, much angrier than it should and then sometimes I yell. (Oh right, this is why nobody wants to talk specifics). So. I don't think this is  popular position for adopters, but I am officially done with time-ins. 

We tried doing the choices thing too, really we did. Here's how that story goes: Blue was thrashing and flailing on the floor. I offered him two fun, constructive re-direction choices. Blue continued to have a tantrum. That was two minutes ago. Blue is now in time out. 

So yes! Time outs are now The Thing in our house. We're sort of 1-2-3 magick-ing the twins now - the general idea is three counts and then once they reach three they are silently and unemotionally taken to a time-out space. (I was inspired to read this book by Marcia and she has lots more about this on her blog). The book does have a few of the features I mocked earlier in this post but the general method is a winner for me because it stops me spewing forth words upon words. We modify it because I'm big into them saying 'sorry' and me saying 'I forgive you' after being disciplined, whatever form the discipline takes. (Once it's over, I want it to be over. I don't want them wondering whether I'm still mad). We've only been doing this for about two weeks but so far it's been much, much better. Who would have thunk it? Me, a time-out parent. As a Christian, it seems too wooly and thoughtless and only focused on externals. As an adopter, it seems to harsh. Maybe ignoring both of my instincts that means everything is okay. Yeah, that's a good parenting philosophy. 

Every stage of parenting I hit seems to knock me much harder than I expected it to. I really thought that I knew what I wanted to do about sleep. And I didn't. And then about eating. And I didn't. (I haven't blogged about it much, but basically my children only eat grated cheese). Now discipline is joining the list. What's going to be next, I wonder? I can't even begin to imagine. 

*And of course, adoption and theology both have a huge impact on how I think about parenting my child. As adopted kids, I know my children have a whole lot of stuff to deal with that most kids can't even imagine. But sometimes they are also really, really naughty. Adoption is a layer in my children's behaviour, but it's not the only layer. Adopted kids are naughty too. Adopted children have grief and attachment considerations to take into account and this makes my job as a parent more complex but not totally different from if they had been born to me.  Sometimes when we theorise and categorise and psychologise about adoption in general and our children in particular I think it's easy to forget that children are not rational creatures. Sometimes they act out because of grief. But sometimes (often!) they act out because they are in a bad mood and determined to make everyone in the house suffer, just like every other kid on this planet.  And as for theology - hmmmm., actually, maybe that belongs in a different post. 

I Have An Announcement To Make

It's a big one, folks. I would like to officially announce that yesterday, the 28th of July 2011, my two children sat down and spontaneously played together. Happily. For five full minutes. Without biting or hitting or screeching or weapons of any kind. Here's the photographic evidence:

(Yes, he's wearing a bear hat in the middle of summer. No, I don't know why either). 

For once, watching these two together wasn't like watching Fight Club.  I thought this day would never, ever come. Forget first words and first steps and first teeth - this is a moment I need to mark for posterity.


 I just don't have the words for how happy it made me. 

Playing Favourites

Sometimes, when people are talking to me and they have have run out of things to say, they ask so, which twin is your favourite? 

That question always makes me do my "seriously?" face. My seriously face involves eyes squinched, eyebrows raised and head on the side, which is not a very attractive look so I do it as little as possible - but sometimes there's just no other option. Asking which twin is my favourite is sort of like asking which foot is my favourite - they both have their good points, but I wouldn't really want to be without either.  Once I've got my twitching under control, my answer is usually an eye roll and whichever one isn't screaming which seems to be a pretty standard response among twin-mums to that surprisingly common (if astonishingly dumb) question.

Because who would have favourites, right? They are both my favourite. Now that I have kids, I love watching just how transparent parents are about their favouritism for their children. And that's a really big reason why, except in the most exceptional of circumstances, I will always favour families for children over any kind of group home situation, no matter how wonderful. Everyone should be someone's favourite. Everyone should have someone in the audience who thinks that they are the smartest, the prettiest, the best company, who secretly feels sorry for all the other parents because their child is not cut from the same magical cloth as my fabulous child, or children. Because the strange thing is just how true it is that I really do have two children who really are my favourite. I never understood how that could be true, but it really is.  In a family, who would have favourites?

Ahem. Here's the embarrassing thing. Two people in our house do have favourites, it turns out. But it's not us, it's the kids.  I'm not sure whether they discussed it between themselves and decided okay, you get Mum but Dad is mine but there is some serious parental preference happening. Pink has decided that her heart belongs to her father. And Blue, it seems, is mine.

All day when I'm at home alone with them, Pink turns her soulful little eyes on me and says Diddy? Diddy?  I don't think she's asking after Sean Combs so I sigh and say he's at work, honeybun. Won't it be lovely when he gets home? and she's happy for about five minutes until she comes up to me again, forehead creased in concern and asking Diddy? Diddy? She loves me, but she really wants to know where he is at all times.  I've turned the front of our refrigerator into a family photo album and when she gets really worried I walk her in there and point at him: There's your lovely Daddy, Pink, he loves you so much! And she relaxes and points and says, joyously, Diddy!  Since he is usually home from work after she goes to bed, I think she's decided that he spends Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays actually living in the fridge. But hey, she seems happy about it so I'm not concerned.

Blue's preference takes a more - um - assertive turn. Remember all that attachment work I was doing with him so diligently? Well, it worked. Oh boy did it work. He's not worryingly clingy - he can play without me and occasionally he still likes to hug strangers - but if he's hurt or worried or hungry or tired or cranky (or, frankly, breathing) and he wants someone it's got to be Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama.  When he's with J, if he can see me, he roars for me.   I wanted this for so long, from him, and it seems so strange now that it is finally happening. Now I have a knee-high boy wrapping his arms around my legs and saying Cugga! Cugga! Cugga! because he wants a hug from me, only me. If I don't do it immediately, he cries. It's been happening for months now but it still feels a little strange, like he has decided after close to two years that he hasn't been making the most of having a mother and suddenly wants his money's worth out of this tall woman who lives in his house. Sometimes I think I was here the whole time, sweetheart. 

I'll be honest, part of me loves it.

But the other part of me is driven crazy by it. One of the good things for us about adopting two kids at once (and there were plenty of horrifying things) was that we never got confused about who was on whose side in our family.  J and I have always been a team. Our first loyalty is to each other, and we've always been united in how we manage the kids - and maybe there's the occasional high five when Team Parent wins a major victory.  Does that sound terrible? I don't mean we're against the kids, obviously,  just that there hasn't really been any triangulation. Even when I was really struggling with Blue's attachment (classic triangulation risk right there), J was nothing but supportive.  I've observed lots of families where the arrival of a child means a solid Husband+Wife team quickly becomes Team Wife+Baby and poor old Team Dad is the competition.  Whereas with two kids coming at once, there was no exclusive mother-baby bond because you just can't do that with two kids simultaneously. Dad was definitely not on the sidelines, he was up to his ears in wee and poop and sleeplessness, just like me. I don't think this is particularly an adoption thing - lots of people with twins say that an unexpected benefit is just how much more involved the Dad becomes than when there is only one baby.  I'm sure it's possible to share a baby when there's only one, but I'm also sure it would be harder.

So Team Parent has always remained strong in our house. But now, I feel like the preferences that the children are showing are beginning to divide us into Team Blue and Team Pink, and that's what's driving me crazy. We don't like each other any less than we did, but since Blue wants to be with me, and Pink wants to be with Diddy, and Pink and Blue can barely stand to be in the same room with each other... we end up taking the easy way out and gravitating to the child who wants us.  We know that we should be making an effort to spend one-on-one time with the child who prefers the other parent (ouch) but that isn't really happening. We're all so exhausted at the moment - I haven't been well since we got home, and J is picking up a lot of slack - that being deliberate about this kind of thing just feels too hard.  And shutting the door on a child who is yelling for me, while holding  a child who is yelling for their other parent... also too hard.

I feel a bit lost, people. Has anyone else dealt with child-induced favouritism? I worked so hard to show Blue that it was safe to form secure attachment to me, but I didn't want it to be at the expense of his relationship with his father. Or at the expense of Team Parent. How do I keep his attachment to me secure while nurturing the other ones, too? Maybe the real problem is that I worked so hard to get here, I'm a bit frightened of losing what I've got now.  Maybe I should just take a Valium and not think about all this so much.

Like I said to someone else earlier today, life never gets easy, does it? It just gets different.

Stretch Marks

Want to know a secret just between you, me and the entire interwebz? I've never had a baby. I've never been pregnant. But I have stretch marks.

I looked at myself in the mirror one day and thought 'huh. I was sure my appendectomy scar never used to be on my thigh' and then looked a little bit closer and saw that my scar hadn't migrated after all. I had a stretch mark. It was sort of like a small ghostly caterpillar, and when I looked again I saw that actually my skin was now host to a whole family of ghost caterpillars. What on earth? And the more time passes, the more there are.

I always thought stretch marks were what happened when you had a baby. In fact, every time I hear 'stretch marks' it's someone talking about them as badges of honour, a sign of the exchange that women have made for generations, the one that goes: Dear Universe, I would like to trade this perfect youthful body for a baby, please. And it's not just the stretch marks either, is it? It's drooping breasts and weight gain and a hundred other thing and the usual narrative goes this is the price I have paid to become a mother and look at this picture of my adorable child on my iPhone! See? It was all totally worth it.

So how am I, never-pregnant Claudia, supposed to think about how my body is changing, now that I'm in my thirties? I have stretch marks too and I can't tell anybody they were worth it because they got me nothing. They don't remind me of nine months of protecting a child. If they remind me of anything at all, it's that I don't exercise enough, or maybe they remind me of the six months during 2008 when I was really stressed at work and ate way too many oreos. And they remind me that I'm getting older. But none of that is anything to do with maternity, the one acceptable reason for getting round and eventually soft. And so I feel ashamed of the way my body is changing, of the way my body is ageing. Society doesn't have a body-change narrative for just getting old. It's all about bearing children. So if most women bear their stretch marks as battle scars, mine feel like something I got from stupidly riding my horse into a tree. Something to hide.

And then there's body shape. I have heard a lot of people talk about the way their metabolisms have slowed down after they have children and I haven't been there so I'm in no position to argue. But I can't help wondering how many changes women talk about are hormones and how many would have happened anyway, but I don't feel like I'm even allowed to raise the question. Would an endrocrinologist know the answer? I'm so far from being an endocrinologist that I don't even know if he would be the guy who would know those things. Here's what I do know: I've never had a baby, but now that I'm in my thirties my body is slowing down too. It's heading towards a sluggish metabolism and a thickening middle and a control bra but I don't feel like I'm allowed to be this way. I didn't make the trade. I didn't make the baby so I should still have the body. Right? I should still be lean and lithe and unstretched. But I'm not. Really, really not.

Maybe I'm the only one who feels this pressure.

Sometimes I feel like society misses something important when we talk about the way women's bodies change throughout our lives. As a woman who has never had a baby, I guess I'm saying that sometimes I feel like my body is not allowed to get old. Physically, I'm 'pre-baby'. But that doesn't mean I'm twenty. I'm not disputing that pregnancy accelerates physical changes, slams many of them together into nine efficient, terrible months. But in the end, I think they happen to us all. Having an unused uterus does not get me out of ageing. And I look around me at the women I know and I see that there is no difference in body shape between the older women who have borne children and those who have not. I know thin women in both camps and fat women too. I could not tell by looking who has been pregnant and who has not. People say that feeding a baby destroys the shape of a woman's breasts but it seems that so does turning fifty. Or forty. Or, okay, if i'm honest, thirty is already seeming like a good start.

I don't know what my body would be like if I'd had a baby. But society doesn't really know what women's bodies would be like if they didnt' have babies. My guess is much the same. Maybe it doesn't happen as quickly, but baby or no baby I think everything droops in the end.

But this isn't the way the story usually goes. I don't get to be proud of my stretch marks. They aren't a badge of honour. I didn't earn them through making new life. The only thing I did to earn them was manage to cling tightly to this planet while it hurtled round the sun some thirty-odd times, and probably eat too much cake. The only life they signify is my own. That should be enough, but when groups of women gather and talk it never feels like it is.

But this is the reality: I'm getting older, and my skin is getting thinner, and I've got stretch marks.

And that's just the way it is.

We Are Home

and I'm glad.  The journey back was much better than the journey out - merely a giant, annoying drag, rather than a major trauma that will require years of counselling.  Now we're facing the jetlag and the unpacking. J is a very enthusiastic unpacker but I am realising that he really does not know where a lot of stuff goes in this house. 

I owe about a hundred emails, a thousand comments and a million phone calls. If that's you, I'm really sorry. I'm not ignoring you, I promise. I'm getting there.

And then there's all the stuff still swilling around in my head. I'm struggling with what to write here next, and I can't just blame the jetlag. Amanda recently summed up the feeling well, although some of her reasons are different from mine. If you're in the mood, help me decide what I should squeeze out of my cranium first. Here are your choices of post titles: 

1) I bought my genes at TK Maxx  

2) My life as a celebrity (I was going to write this ages ago, but never got around to it)

3) Maybe it doesn't all even out

I was going to subtitle them with what the posts would actually be about, but if I had that figured out, there'd be no need to write the post, right? 

It's strangely hard to type while jetlagged. I have to keep on backspacing, because all my fine motor skills seem to have deserted me. I think I'd better stop. More later, when my brain is functioning again. For now, here's a photo of me and my boy. 

(And this photo reminds me: GUESS WHAT? All three of us (me and the babies) are getting ukes for our birthdays. I'm tomorrow, they are Saturday. One week, one house, three ukeleles. Bring it on. Now is a good time to be very glad you're not our neighbours). 

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.