Two

A few days ago at the park, a little boy came up to Pink and started hitting her. She hadn't done anything to him, but he obviously wanted to hurt her. I was horrified.  It happened again the next day - same park, same boy - this time he was pulling her hair, yanking it by the roots and making her scream with pain. I was so angry that I could barely see. She was howling with anguish and tears were running down her little face. She lifted her arms to me and shouted cuddle! in a voice of pure panic, meaning save me, mama! And I did, of course. Before she had the word out of her mouth I had already swooped in and lifted her in my arms, shaking with rage at the kid who dared to maul my child.  How dare he hurt my precious baby? What is wrong with this boy? What kind of mother brings up a son like that? How can she live with herself?  What kind of person must she be? 

A person like me, of course. A person who is me, in fact, because the boy attacking Pink was her twin.  And so I don't know what to do with my rage, with my fury. What am I supposed to do when the person hurting my precious child is also my precious child? 

I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but it's not. At the moment, Blue has a terrible scratch down one side of his face. It was quite deep, and I worry it may scar. People ask me how he got it and I tell them it was Pink. They look shocked and start to feel sorry for him, but I shrug my shoulders and say 'no, he totally started it by biting her. It was just self defence'.  That shuts 'em up. 

One tends to be a little more aggressive than the other, but really they are pretty much equally to blame for these skirmishes. No matter what we - J and I - do, they are always at each other's throats. It's at its worst when they are a bit bored, and for this reason the supermarket has turned into a miniature warzone.  I have lost count of the number of times I have heard a blood-curdling scream from the stroller and looked down to see the screamer with a  bite mark on their plump little arm, the other sitting their nonchalantly as if butter wouldn't melt. Bad news - I'm beginning to worry that I'm raising vampires or werewolves. Good news - judging from the perfect half-moon indentations,  their teeth really are extraordinarily straight and I don't think we will need to budget for orthodontics. Heh. 

 Extreme irony alert - when we were deciding between a side-by-side twin stroller and a front-and-back, we ended up choosing the side-by-side because friends with twins told us that their children loved to ride along holding hands.  How could I deprive my little munchkins of that beautiful experience? I thought then. So we got the side-by-side and have spent the last two years barely fitting through doorways because I deliberately wanted them to be in close physical proximity. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! I think now, as I watch them hitting each other. Today I finally realised the real reason we are out of food - not just because I'm disorganised (although I am) - I just don't trust them not to get murderous during even a 15 minute shopping outing any more.   We are currently watching a few of these on ebay but until we find one at a good price, I'm so full of fear about what will happen, who will get badly injured this time that I have decided no more supermarket excursions! I just can't take it. I think we'll be spending the next little while living on dried pulses and frozen foods. 

I sound flippant about this, but I don't feel flippant. It's hard to know what to say about all this. Watching my children attack each other feels deeply, deeply not okay. People tell me 'oh, they fight now but they'll be such good friends when they are grown up!'  Honestly, right now I don't care . And anyway, who says that is necessarily true? I have one friend who barely speaks to her adult twin.  Right now I'm not even sure they are going to let each other live that long.   I know that most siblings experience some degree of rivalry but I am beginning to suspect that the animosity my children feel towards each other is on the extreme end of the spectrum.  

They seem to have been designed exactly to cause each other maximum irritation. Twins aren't supposed to start playing together when they are little, they are supposed to engage in what's called 'parallel play', where they basically ignore each other. Mine never, ever got to that stage. Instead, they only do what I call 'perpendicular play' - where they want to play independently but in a way that directly opposes what the other is doing. Poor Mr Potato Head, I should never have sent you into that mess, is all I can say about that. They do have moments of belly laughing with each other, of trying to high-five across their cots and giggling hysterically but that 1% does not even begin to touch the other 99. Blue loves rough and tumble, Pink hates it when he even touches her accidentally in passing (and no, I don't think it's opposite sensory processing disorders but thanks for asking).   They both love to sit on my lap, but they won't do it together. They have a strange, aggressive, abusive and co-dependent relationship that seems to have a life of its own; I know with absolute certainty that it's bigger than our parenting choices, that it's about them together rather than them in our family. They cause each other untold grief but they can't bear to be apart. In some ways they are two halves of the same whole but the whole seems to be chemically unstable, like a nuclear compound that has reached critical mass and is always about to explode in all of our faces. Their mutual antipathy feels almost pathological. 

Is there a conspiracy of silence about the realities of adopting siblings, or is our situation really unusual? I have no idea. I have no idea. I have nothing to judge it against. I don't really know how other siblings, other twins, relate to each other (apart from the deeply misleading stroller handholders, of course) because they don't live in my house. I do know that one of our two can't bear to have any part of the other's body touching them. I do know that I can't leave them alone together unless they are watching a DVD. I do know that Blue loves to hug Pink but it makes Pink wail as if she is a banshee, as if she is being flayed alive. J and I were discussing how that noise makes us feel and we agreed - it's like being attacked with a cattle prod, being electrocuted. It's absolutely unbearable, it's absolutely impossible to ignore. It happens about fifty times a day. I. Am. Losing. My. Mind. 

It's odd, how hard I find this. I won't lie - at the moment, having siblings feels like the hardest thing in my life.  There were so many things about adoption that I was unsure of, afraid of, and this was not one of them. This was something that I was sure would be hard but good. Instead, it feels impossible and poisonous. I find myself unhelpfully generalising from my own situation when I'm talking to people expecting their second child. I'm always consciously biting my lip, reining myself in, saying to myself do not make dire predictions of horror about having two children, Claudia! Because lots of people love having two children. In theory, I love it too. Individually, I'm extremely glad that I have the chance to mother both of them. It's just the two of them at once that I can't handle. 

Of course, as well as them pretty much hating each other, there's all of the normal difficulties that come from having two kids in the house - it really affects how much of myself I can give to each of them. I can't do long slow mornings reading Blue stories, because Pink won't join in (since that would mean touching him) and she still needs looking after too. I can't spend time drawing with Pink because Blue can't yet be trusted with crayons but wants to be part of the action if there is any going on. They both want to be picked up and carried, but I can't carry them both at once. Boo Hoo. I know this stuff is normal - anybody with more than one child finds out that they can't give 100% to two different people at once. And yet I feel so awful about not giving them 100% - I feel like they need and deserve all of me, at all times. I wonder if this is a sign of really messed-up thinking - who says that children should get 100%? Honestly, where does that idea come from? I really don't want my kids to grow up thinking that they are the centre of the universe; not even my universe. They are utterly loved, but they are not the axis around which the world spins. They need to grow up knowing that other people matter too; that they are not the only people who exist; that they have feelings and needs and they are important, but the rest of the world has feelings and needs too and sometimes those other needs are going to win out.  Theoretically, I think that having a sibling is really good for kids because they learn that they will not always come first, they will not always get what they want and yet the sun continues to rise. I also think that being annoyed by someone who mostly loves you takes some of the edge off learning to accommodate other people later. I think it knocks some of the rough edges off a person, and overall I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. I know all the theory about why siblings are so good. It's the practice I can't take. 

I'm also aware of just how much some of my friends would love to have my problems. One close friend in particular, at the moment, is filled with sadness about how long she has been waiting to become a mother for the second time. (No, it's not YOU, if this applies to you - she doesn't read my blog. I hope). Her first child  was long awaited and much loved, and number two is so far failing to make an appearance. She really wants another baby. Of course she does, and I sympathise deeply. But it feels odd how the very thing she is crying to have is the thing that most often makes me cry, too, because I have to work out how to deal with having it. It reminds me, yet again, of how it felt to be on the childless side of the fence while listening to my mother-friends complaining about how hard their perfect lives were. I button my lip and try not to complain to her about how hard I find the two-ness of my two because it probably just sounds like whining to her. 

And yet I am not imagining how hard this is, how much it grieves me that my children want to hurt each other and find so many ways to do it.  I want to justify to my friends who are parents of only children that two really is a whole different ball game. All that turning-up-late that I do? All that mess in my house? Not my fault. It's just that my life is really, really hard. MUCH HARDER THAN YOURS. The funny thing is, I felt the same way when I didn't have any kids. I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way if I one day have three. I'm beginning to suspect that the impulse to assume that my life has to be much harder than everybody else's just springs from fear. If my life is more difficult than yours, then it's okay that I'm not really coping. It's reasonable to be crying during naptime (and bedtime, and mealtimes) because my life is unusually, unreasonably hard and any sane person would be going crazy.  What I fear is this - if my life is really just averagely hard, then why am I coping so poorly? Why does my family have to live on lentils and frozen corn*? If my life is only averagely hard, and I'm coping really badly, then... what? I guess that would mean that the problem isn't my life, but me. I don't want to think about that. 

So I'm off to order some groceries online. Who cares if I never get to go to the supermarket again, huh? That's what the internet is for. Who cares if we can never again go to the park, never use the swings? That's why we have a DVD player. Who cares if cuddling one causes the other to break down and howl? That's why I have earplugs. I think I'm just going to give up on trying to lead a normal life until these two are in high school, at least. We'll hunker down. I'll pad the walls and turn this into a bunker.  It'll be fine. 

It'll be fine. Because apparently - they'll be really good friends when they are grown up.  So the horror now doesn't matter. I'll let you know how that works out. Stay tuned for the next update. 

In twenty years' time. 

*I'm kidding. We ran out of frozen corn WEEKS ago. 

My Life in 2011: A Summary

Life Lessons Learned

Recently, life has been teaching me some difficult but important lessons. Here are some of them.

Lesson 1: One of the biggest temptations that we, as wealthy westerners, face is the temptation to think 'just one more thing and then I'll be happy'. But we never are happy, are we? New car, new clothes, new house... they always disappoint. But do you know what NEVER disappoints?

New storage. New storage never disappoints. My living room is so tidy now; I just want to rub my face against this thing and nuzzle with it.

Lesson 2: Never buy shampoo at the dollar store.

Lesson 3: You should rarely (if EVER) write blog posts in the second person. You probably want to communicate something important but don't want to be direct about it. You may be taking out your frustration against a person who will never actually read what you are writing. You probably have the best of intentions. However, you might be interested to know that some people find it irritating. You run a big risk of becoming passive-aggressive. You don't want to be that person, do you? No, you don't. (Are you annoyed yet? See what I did there?)

Lesson 4: Life goes in cycles, and that's okay. About eight months ago, I was so ground down by this mothering thing that I wrote this post. I found it again about two months ago and thought 'whew! I'm so glad I'm not THERE any more! I'm glad I'll never have to be back in that place!'  And then suddenly, this month, I am again. I feel like a broken record, always saying "No hitting mama and no biiiiting mama. No hitting the cat. No biting your sister. No weapons, you two, NO WEAPONS!" I am worn out. A month ago, things felt really good. I wish that had been forever but it wasn't. This probably won't be forever either. It's a cycle. In the meantime I'm hiding the knives.

Lesson 5:  On a related note: when infant teething seems like a distant, long-ago memory, along come the two-year-old molars. Beware.

Lesson 6: Don't leave it four months in between uploading photos. It makes the task of posting them seem increasingly impossible with each passing week.

Lesson 7: When in doubt, probably a few randomly chosen photos are better than no photos at all. Even if they are absolutely out of order, span four months and two continents. Which leads me to:

me and my boy. 

Me and my boy. And my girl. And my other boy. 

The boy and the girl and the other boy and the other girl. Okay, this is getting old already. 

Sometimes life really IS about running through a field of daisies

This picture is from when,  APRIL??? Pink and Blue with Holli K's gorgeous kids, S&S. 

cousins = best thing ever

This picture has everything required to make Pink and Blue happy. 1) Miffy the Rabbit (who they call Baby, for reasons that are not clear to me) 2) Miffy ON TELEVISION - first time I played that DVD they went absolutely spiral - they couldn't believe that baby had come to life 3) a tutu 4) another tutu - Blue's love for tulle will not be denied 5) actually, that's it.  Mostly they act like their existence is nothing but a vale of tears, but in this photo, their life was perfect.

This is what I see ALL THE TIME. Just imagine he's saying 'Wattss bee-bee? Wattss bee-bee?' and you are LIVING MY LIFE.  (Wattss bee-bee = Watch baby, ie Miffy)

she LOVES to hide

Have I mentioned these two love Shades of People? They really, really REALLY love Shades of People. 

Wonky parts and all; I was ridiculously proud of this hairstyle. (If you look closely, there's a little crown of joined twists). It lasted approximately seventeen minutes. 

yeah, this was clearly going to end in tears. This was just after the cornrows came out. 

after a bath

the ballet love continues

How grown up! He's riding a scooter! (Except he's not, he's just standing on a scooter and
leaning a bit.  But wow, he looks grown up in this picture). 

And she's on a bike! This is what J thought fatherhood was going to be like EVERY day.
Boy was he wrong. 

hiding-behind-a-tree-while-C-takes-a-photo-of-the-kids-FAIL

This pony is not fast enough. I want another. 

Hey, cat... how's that diet coming?

Family photo session in Australia... My sister and her crew

Technically, the best of our family shots 

My bro and his little boy. Of course, 'bro' is what I call him in real life. All the time. 

making a break for freedom. I was feeling a bit the same by this point, little guy. 

upside down is still where it's at for my two

Be still my beating heart. 

Recreation of a family portrait taken in 1987. Outfits? Not planned.  What can I say?
My whole family just really, REALLY likes blue. EXACTLY THE SAME SHADE OF BLUE.

cousins! Still the best thing ever. Even when they are different cousins. The cuteness does not discriminate by continent. 

This magic mirror turned me into a girl.

It's never too early to think about your long-term mobility needs

I loved this shot. Until I noticed my nose. 

I'm never touching that blue thing again

But you said you LOVED me

Not posed. 

Lesson 9: When it's really late at night, the pictures are only halfway done and the blogger picture uploader has creaked and groaned stopped working, there is only one obvious path:  save to draft, shut down computer, try again, fail, finally get around to installing windows live writer, realise I don't know how to use windows live writer, consider whether it is worth upgrading the computer's operating system, do some research on amazon about prices, dither, eventually fall asleep in this chair. The wiser path, which I plan to take (for once in my life) is: click publish on the pictures that are there already and and then GO TO BED.  I'll post the others another day. Probably. But for now: goodnight to all, and to all a good night.
.

DNA

I'm not really back, but this stuff is eating me up from the inside so I had to get it out. Nothing to do with adoption. This one doesn't get a tea alert, it gets a serious TMI alert instead. Oh, and if you want to be my friend for-evah? Help me figure out the chords to this thematically-appropriate song. It's been stuck in my head for days. 

A few years ago, we went to the big hospital in Oxford for a series of genetic tests. Well, I say we went but J was just there to hold my hand- it was my arm that they took all the blood from.  We got the results we knew we would, but that didn't make receiving them any easier. Seeing it all in black and white was what pushed us, eventually, after a lot of grieving,  towards adoption. What I feel like I should  say here is that I am grateful for what we went through, then, because it led us to our wonderful children.  And our children are wonderful, of course, but I still can't feel grateful for those months, for that entire year. I don't know what to say about that time of my life except that I can't remember a single good thing about it. It was a season of grey despair. 

And now I have to go back to the same hospital for a new round of tests. I don't want to go. 

It's nothing to do with babies, this time. On this occasion I'm trying to avoid dying young of a gene-linked cancer. I don't even know if I've got the gene yet - hence the tests. My grandmother had it. She got it from her mother and passed it to my mother. I don't yet know if she passed it to me. This is the kind of gene where 'breast cancer runs in the family' becomes a hilariously colossal understatement.  This is the kind of gene where if you've got the gene, you'll almost certainly get the cancer - breast or ovarian, or maybe melanoma. "Don't forget to check your freckles!" one of my aunts told me on our recent trip back to Australia. "People always check their moles but freckles can kill you, too. Don't forget to check your freckles". So I've started checking my freckles, but it's not really possible to keep an eye on my ovaries, seeing as how I don't have X-ray vision. Mammograms, for women who carry this mutation, are scheduled regularly and frequently but lots of doctors recommend managing the risk by just getting everything removed. Hysterectomy including ovaries. Total mastectomy, with optional replacement breasts in the cup size of your choice. 

I've known about this family risk for years and years, since it was my mother and her sister and brothers getting the tests (because yes, men can get breast cancer too and how annoying would that be?) But I've always thought it was something to think about later, in the future. I thought the risk really kicked in after menopause. Occasionally when family would ask me whether I was going to get tested I would say that I was limiting my gene mutation diagnoses to one per decade and this next one wasn't due until 2017. 

But then I was talking to my cousin Beth a few weeks ago and she has just had tests done. She came back positive - unfortunately -  and told me that her doctor was horrified that she had never had a mammogram. She was pretty much marched straight from the diagnosis chair into the medical imaging suite, where they gave her an MRI rather than a standard mammogram because of her age and risk.  She's not yet thirty five. 

Forgive me if my medical information is not as good as it should be, but I'm getting it all second hand through Beth, seeing as how I'm too chicken to get the tests myself. I couldn't believe all this when she told me, and we had the conversation about how we thought the risk started at menopause but no, apparently, if you're going get your bits removed it's sensible to do it when you are five years younger than the youngest age you have had a relative die. "Weren't all Grandma's sisters in their fifties when they died?" I said to Beth.  And she said no - Grandma's mother died aged forty three. Breast cancer. Her oldest sister: ovarian cancer. Forty three. The next: breast cancer. Also forty three. And another. You can probably guess what age she died, too. 

My grandmother and her baby sister Isobel were the only two girls who lived. Grandma got breast cancer too - at forty three- but survived, maybe because she was the youngest of the ones who got it, because treatments were more advanced than they were for her mother and sisters. I wanted to mention her other sisters by name, but I can't remember all of them.   I don't know their names, because I didn't know them. Because I never met them. Because they all died at forty thiree. This is the kind of suckage that words really don't begin to touch. 

I talked to my other cousin, Anna, about it. She is in the middle of the tests, and she is hugely upbeat about the whole thing. She's upbeat about most things; I thought this might finally push her over the line into pessimism but apparently not. She doesn't see it as a big deal, and she admitted that there. is a tiny part of her that will be disappointed if her tests come back negative. "I am totally looking forward to my new boobs!" she told me. "I'm going to go up a few cup sizes and then watch out, boys, because I am going to be flashing them all the time". And I had to laugh because I have no doubt that she will.  

Talking to her helped, but I keep lapsing into flat despair about the whole thing. Why can't I have her attitude? Partly it's just personality, I guess. Never mind genetic mutations; I tip over into pessimism when I run out of breakfast cereal.  Partly - if I'm honest - it might be because I don't actually want new boobs. I don't mean to seem boastful, but I am perfectly happy with the ones I have currently. Seriously - of all my body parts, why remove these? They give me zero psychological trauma. (If we were talking about cancer of the buttocks, I might be singing a different tune). I'm not Anna Nicole Smith, but I'm not an ironing board either. I have no problems in that department. If I do so say myself. I don't want new boobs.

A bigger part, though, is about the operations. I'm a total coward about physical pain, and I'm terrified of those procedures. Terrified.  I had my tonsils out when I was twenty five and it hurt so much; I know it sounds trivial but believe me, it wasn't. I would wake up in the night weeping with pain. I don't want to go through that kind of thing again.  I got my appendix out when I was eight, too - also horrible- and I really thought I was done with the elective removal of internal organs. If I ditch the uterus and the ovaries and the boobs? Soon I'll just be a brain in a jar, typing on my keyboard with electronic thought pulses. 

I've seen women in recovery from these operations. It's not pretty.  It takes weeks and weeks and weeks. My brain skitters to all sorts of horrible places when I think about it. Who would look after my kids?  What if i don't get a good endocrinologist and the HRT isn't managed well? I'll get terribly depressed and my hair will fall out. And I keep remembering a description I heard of a mastectomy and how they first have to peel all the skin off your chest. Are you dry heaving yet? I know I am.  The one thing that scares me more than these operations? Not having the operations and then dying, aged 43, leaving my children and husband alone with nobody to cook for them.

Of course, thinking about preventive surgery for reproductive cancers has a few extra layers for a woman who has never been pregnant. I can't decide whether it's terribly efficient - sure, take my uterus and ovaries, I wasn't using them anyway! or absolutely heartbreaking. My uterus and ovaries? But I never even got to use them. Okay, who am I kidding, yeah, it's the second one. Some days it makes me feel so sad that I just want to howl at the moon.  

That's why I haven't had the tests yet, I suppose.  Once I get them done, if I'm positive, I have to start making decisions. And I am not ready. I don't want to end up in a situation where I am pressed into making irrevocable decisions about our next child or children, yet. I feel less and less like I want to try the fancy IVF, but I still don't feel ready to close that door forever, either. I'd rather have the luxury of the time I thought I had. I'd rather let my uterus shrivel up on its own, when it's ready.  I'd rather not have to deal with any of that. And then I get a flash of a vision of my husband hunting through the cupboards for a tin of baked beans, of my children motherless - again - as they go to secondary school and I know I have to face up to my responsibilities. 

Some of Anna's words come back to me - "Of course I'd rather not deal with this, but we are so lucky. If we were two generations ago, we would only have ten years left and then we would die and have no warning. And one generation ago, HRT was not well developed and fake boobs looked really fake. Now we really have nothing to worry about!" I know she's right, even if I can't make myself feel that positive. And believe me, I see the irony of dealing with too much genetic knowledge when my children have so little. Some days I want to push their stroller into the genetics clinic, roll up their sleeves and ask the nurse to run every test in existence, just in case. Maybe they will decide to do that when they are older, but for now I am holding off. I don't want to make this decision on their behalf. I know from personal experience that these diagnoses are not like diagnosing a virus. It's deeply, psychically, unsettling to find out this kind of bad news, if there is bad news to be had. It's already happened to me once. There's a fifty-fifty chance it's about to happen again. I know I need to make the appointment, but I can't make my fingers dial the number on the telephone. 

And of course - of course - I might come back negative. This one may have passed me by. I can't imagine the relief if that turns out to be the case. If so, I promised my sister I would get tested for celiac disease. Because guess what? It turns out that runs in the family, too, and if ignored can result in bowel cancer. "You've probably got it" my sister told me, shortly after the freckle conversation with my aunt. "You'd probably feel much better if you went gluten-free. I did."    "But I feel fine" I said, frustrated, and then she mouthed 'bowel cancer' and I went into my room and cried. I know she wants to keep me around so that we can squabble into our old age together, and I love her for it, but seriously, a third thing? Shallow end of the gene pool, that's our family, for sure. 

I can't even think about testing for that one yet, although occasionally when I'm eating a particularly delicious slice of toast I feel a stab of fear that our wheaty, crunchy days together might be numbered. What would I miss more, I wonder - bread or my real boobs? Boobs or bread? If I'm honest, the answer is probably bread. Fake boobs look more real than fake bread tastes. I don't know why I have these thoughts - It's not like I get a choice. I might lose both. I might lose neither. 

In the meantime, I know I should make that appointment. But I can't. I can't. I'm not ready to get on the healthcare treadmill if we get bad news.  I'm not ready for that next phase of life to start. I don't want to deal with it. All these molecules don't make me who I am. 

Turns out that being a grownup is seriously, seriously overrated. 

Not A Blog Post

No! Definitely not a post. Just eight seconds of a happy little boy. (I said there might be photos, and this is close enough, right? I'm only half-way through downloading the photos).




Oh, and in case you couldn't quite tell, the song he is singing is 'Dance of the sugar-plum fairy'. Of course.

I Need

To take another month off blogging. 

Lately things have felt a bit too busy and a bit too tough. Nothing awful is happening, I just feel like I'm still (still!) trying to catch up from the time we had in Australia in June. I want to write, but the house is cluttered (and I hate, hate clutter) I never have any idea what we're eating from one day to the next, I'm dragging my feet at work and all I want to do in my downtime is watch DVDs, read blogs and trawl ebay for fabulous handbags. 

You may think I'm joking about the handbags. Unfortunately, I'm not. One day I'll write more about my bag-shopping-stress-transference-thing, but not today. Let's just say it was a Mistake installing the ebay app on my phone. I hasten to add that I've been wasting time rather than money, but still. Still. I've been avoiding working on my book since we've been home, which is crazy, because I love working on my book. I told myself that the ebay searching was actually to help my book, because I thoughtlessly sold the only bag I had that was both big enough to take my laptop and beautiful enough to carry proudly and after all I cannot possibly write this book until I have the appropriate laptop bag to take to the library! And by appropriate laptop bag, of course, I do not mean a nylon zippy thing. Unfortunately. And of course a plastic carrier bag wouldn't work. Oh no. Because so many of the old men at the library really care what bag I have with me. And so do the people who frequent my upstairs hallway, which is where I actually do most of my typing, since I have small children and rarely get to leave the house on my own. Hmmmmm. I've been transferring my stress about all manner of things into this ridiculous quest and today I said ENOUGH!  No more. I marched into a department store and bought a perfectly nice, inexpensive bag that is more than adequate (and I could have bought it ooooh, about four weeks ago when I first saw it but I'm trying not to think about that). Then I swore to myself that I would not waste ANY more time bidding on vintage satchels. Honestly, woman. Get a grip. 

So that is ebay sorted. This week, I've also done a big clear-out in our bedroom, which makes things feel a bit more under control. We also did our first family trip to IKEA on Saturday (milestone!) and bought some decent toy storage for our downstairs. So I feel like the haze is lifting a bit and last night I actually gritted my teeth and re-read some draft  book chapters I wrote earlier in the year and they are not quite as bad as I remember. We're not talking taut, supple prose, people, but it's not quite as much of a seething morass of ME ME ME EXCLAMATION POINT ME ME ME ITALICS ME ME ME EMOTION as I feared, which frankly is a huge relief. 

Obviously, the sentences are all too long. And some of it I have no recollection of writing, at all, which is a little weird. But I think what I'm trying to say is that (now I have an appropriate laptop bag) I need to spend the next month having some quality time with Scrivener and some hot beverages and finding out if I can bully my lazy muse into coming out of hibernation. I'm ready to go again.  I also need to sort out our holiday photos (again, from JUNE!) so there may be a photo or two. But apart from that, I've promised myself not to post. If you see me here, slap my wrist. (Oh, and if anybody can tell me how to remove the ebay app from my phone, I would really appreciate it). 

Wish me luck, people. See you at the end of September.

Thirty Three Short Thoughts About Being Conspicuous

This is my contribution to the topic of CONSPICUOUS. Have you linked to yours yet? LINK! And okay, this one doesn't get a cup-of-tea warning, it gets an entire kettle-of-tea warning. This topic was more complicated than I expected. Sorry. 

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I never used to be conspicuous

My appearance is almost aggressively average. White skin, mid-length brown hair, brown eyes, medium build. No piercings. When I'm on my own, people's eyes always slide right over me, and that's absolutely fine. That's the way I like it. And until I was thirty, I lived my life in a pleasant, safe bubble of anonymity. Being anonymous meant I could go back to the same shop twelve times in a week to stroke their handbags or try on clothes I couldn't afford or order complicated coffees and nobody would care because nobody would remember me. It was awesome. It was easy. And then we adopted Pink and Blue.

Suddenly I became very conspicuous

For realz. 

What I mean, of course, is that we all became conspicuous

But I can only talk with any authority about what it means for me. I have all kinds of theories about what it might mean for my children as they grow up, and of course this is issue that cramps up my heart the most. But this is pretty much all going to be about me because that's what I'm qualified to talk about. 

I probably don't need to say

That your mileage may vary. You don't live where I live (otherwise, I wouldn't be so conspicuous. Ha). You're not introverted me. You may not have two kids. You may have some white kids, too. Thousands of things will different about your life and mine. But this is the way it is for me.

It's not about them, it's about us

We do not live in Whitesville, and I'm really glad of it. In our town, we have a lot of Black British and African immigrant families. If my kids had black parents, people would still gasp at their beauty (she said modestly) but I don't think they would remember  them the way they do now. My children are not the only dark-skinned, curly-haired twins in town. But they are the only dark-skinned, curly-haired twins with a white mother and that means we get a lot of attention. This is especially true because we walk everywhere, so we are exposed. I rarely drive because our house is so central, so we don't have a car-bubble to keep the adoring public away.

However

The attention we face is because people wonder how we got together; they don't wonder why my dark-skinned children are here at all.  This distinction feels important to me. 

It's not all in my head

I'm definitely not imagining the attention. I know that people love to talk to women with children, and I can't calibrate my current experience against any other version of motherhood. But I go out with friends - white mothers with white babies - and strangers approach us and only talk to me and my kids, blanking everyone else in a way that defies all the normal rules of politeness. There's one coffee shop I go to regularly with my friend H and her little boy and the waitress always, always tells us how much she loves my twins and how BIG they are getting. I'm glad she loves them, and yes they are getting big, but little Oswald (not his real name! Fortunately!) is sitting right there and she just ignores him. Every time. It makes me squirm with embarrassment.   And that kind of differentiated attention is the rule, not the exception.

It seems to me that

Being conspicuous turns any town into a small town. I have never wanted to live in a small town.

Overall, I find it draining

For me, the hardest thing about being conspicuous is that I can't switch it off. There are no days off from being That Family. Every time I am out with my children, we are noticeable. Not just when I'm in a good mood and the sun is shining and they are happily waving Hurrow! and Buh-bye! to everyone they meet, but also when we're running late and one of them is screaming and I want to sink into a deep, dark hole and never resurface.  On those days, I do not want to have to interact with strangers who think that they know me because they have seen me around. Some days, being conspicuous is exhausting.

Sometimes when I'm out on my own without the children, I get an unexpected rush when the blood flows away from my muscles and I suddenly, unconsciously relax because I realise that nobody is looking at me.  Most of the time I don't think about being on show, but my subconscious is aware of it even when it's not really on my mind.

Yes, I realise

That my children are going to have the same experience. One day they are going to wake up and realise that they will have an easier day if they go out without their white parents.

Sometimes nice things happen

The only person we have ever had come up to us out of the blue and speak Amharic to the children was a white guy.  He politely greeted them in Amharic, told us that he used to live in Ethiopia , and then he was gone.   The whole interaction was very quick, and absolutely pitch-perfect on his part. Not a word about adoption or luck or famine or families or anything. It was one of my two favourite stranger experiences.

My other favourite was just as quick. I was pushing the too-heavy stroller up the small hill to the park in the middle of town, feeling cranky and tired and muddled and worn out. In the opposite direction came a black guy in about his mid-twenties, carrying a briefcase and wearing a pin-striped suit and looking sharp and professional and together and everything that  I wasn't.  Suddenly he flashed me a grin and said you have got two VERY good-looking children and before I could think I grinned back and said I know. And suddenly,  I did know. I knew it because he said it and it made my day. And he never would have said it if he hadn't noticed us, if we weren't so blindingly conspicuous.

And sometimes weird things happen

Like the time a very loud (probably deaf) woman approached me in the library and shouted SO! ARE YOU MARRIED TO A BLACK MAN? in the middle of all the quiet. She wasn't having a go at me, she was just curious, and maybe a tiny bit insane. So I shouted back NO! MY HUSBAND IS WHITE! And then felt compelled to add BUT IT WOULD TOTALLY BE FINE IF HE WAS NOT! and then yes, I pretty much wanted the ground to swallow me up. Good work, mama.

Yeah, or the woman who thought that the child in the ergo (I had one in the stroller, too) was actually a doll. A life-sized doll. That I was carrying in an ergo. She didn't want to accept that it was a real child. Extremely freaky.

Generally, though, I would say 99% of our interactions with strangers are netural-to-positive

I don't find it easy being the centre of attention but I need to make it clear that at least 99% of our interactions are positive. People smile when they see us. They say kind things to us. They regularly tell me how beautiful my children are. I was really prepared for some overt hostility, for the need to justify who we are, but it just hasn't come. I suspect this may largely be a function of where we live. I am beginning to realise that I can acknowledge being conspicuous is difficult without having to think that these interactions are sinister. It truly is exhausting to be the celebrities around town, but that doesn't mean the people who are noticing us are doing anything wrong.

Despite all the positivity, or perhaps because of it:

Sometimes, after the fiftieth white person has told me 'your kids are so beautiful!' I get a bit prickly and think 'I wish people would stop objectifying my children and treating them like exotic pets!' But then someone who shares their brown skin and spirally hair tells me exactly the same thing - 'your kids are so beautiful!' and I think 'what a nice lady!' Which is incredibly inconsistent of me. I've also realised that I cut black strangers a LOT of slack for saying crazy adoption-related stuff that would offend me hugely if it came from a white stranger. I assume the best. Which is good, but I need to extend that benefit of the doubt to the crazy white people too, surely? Why the distinction? Sometimes I suspect that I feel a need to be finding covert racism in every interaction – or at least a fair number of them – in order to be approve of myself as a good transracial mother. This is a terrible attitude and I need to sort myself out about it.

(On the other hand

I have come to realise that there is no relationship – none at all – between how much people adore my children's 'beautiful brown skin' and how willing they are to really grapple with issues of race in society. This shouldn't surprise me, but it does. Some of the people who are most enamoured of my children's beautiful skin – and they aren't faking it, I'm certain – are the least willing to examine what it will mean for these kids to go through life wearing it).

Surprisingly

Hardly any strangers have tried to touch my children's hair.

Not surprisingly

We are much more conspicuous if our whole family goes out together. When only one parent is there, there are lots of reasons why one of us might have brown kids. When we are both there, people are much more confused. I'd say we get more attention, but fewer people approach us.

Interestingly

As I write this paragraph, I'm in a coffee shop on my own. Sitting in the bay window on a pair of coffee sacks are a mother and teenage daughter (I think) who are brown and white, like my daughter and me. I keep sneaking glances at them while they read their books, but I'm trying to stop myself because I don't want to become the story that they go home and tell, you know? The crazy racist staring lady. It makes me wonder how many people who look at me have a reason for doing it. Maybe they are looking into their own future like I am right now; maybe they are looking at their past.

My favourite part about being conspicuous

I love being acknowledged by older black women around town. I have lost count of the number of times an older woman, passing us, has given me the eye-contact-head-dip-slight-smile that feels like it's saying keep up the good work. The presence of these older women around me is my main motivator for paying attention to my children's hair.

The attention is definitely tapering

Lately I've noticed that people look at us a lot less than they did when the twins were tiny. There's some strange magnetic force that babies exert over people's attention that is dwindling a little as they become toddlers. People still tell us how utterly adorable they are, all the time. But when they were really little, people would actually stop and stare. Once I went through the train station with J, and he went on ahead to the platform while I stopped to buy tickets from the machine. This meant I was about 50 metres behind him, and as I walked towards him I heard the people he had passed all saying to each other 'did you see those twins?' I was half-horrified, half-proud. It was intense. Things are definitely less intense now. For which I am extremely grateful. I'm glad Pink and Blue won't remember being the object of that much attention.

But there's still quite a lot of it

Even though people are mostly well meaning and positive, we do get asked a lot of questions, and sometimes this wears me down. I get frustrated that I've gently educated on the same topic again and again and again and that makes me impatient with the next person who asks. But this new person hasn't actually asked me before, and there's very little transracial adoption in this country so it's likely we're the first transracial adoptive family they've met. And why should people know about adoption stuff, why should they be educated about a topic that they haven't had any prior exposure to? Nothing is really a dumb question if you're starting from zero. Even when the question itself isn't appropriate, I've been really impressed by how graciously individuals tend to back off when I've explained this. Being aggressive about it, or getting offended doesn't really do anybody any good. Not me, not the stranger, not my kids. Once upon a time, I didn't know those questions were intrusive, and people took the trouble to educate me. I'm sure I wasn't the first person they educated; I'm sure I wasn't the last. And now it's my turn.

After all, there is no such person as The Public. Telling one person doesn't make a blind bit of difference to the next. The public only find things out one person at a time. That's slow and frustrating for me, but that's just the way it works. Expecting the guy I meet today to know something because I talked to someone else about it yesterday? Unreasonable. I might have been educating people for two years, but this particular guy has been learning for about ten seconds.  

That doesn't mean that I don't think some people are crazy

They are; there's no getting around it. And conspicuous people attract a lot more crazy because we attract a lot more of everything. Working out who is okay-crazy and who is run-away-quickly crazy can be a finely balanced thing. There should be some kind of warning device you can buy, but there's not.

Probably a lot of this seems obvious

But if I've learned one thing out of my experience of being conspicuous, it's that people feel a compulsion to comment on the very, very obvious - telling my six foot four husband that he's tall, as if he hadn't noticed - and people forget that the most obvious thing about the person they are talking to, whatever it is that they noticed first about that person, is also the most obvious thing to everyone else that person has ever met. That person has undoubtedly talked ad nauseam about whatever that is and probably doesn't need someone else to say Sooooo..... you're very tall / I see that you're wearing a pirate hat / I can't help noticing that you have a birthmark on your arm in the exact shape of a llama.   Although if it is the one about the pirate hat, I suppose the person brought it upon themselves.

And it seems to me that people treat transracial adoption somewhere in between a pirate hat and a visible disability. Everyone notices it, most people want to talk about it, but people don't want to be the one to bring it up; they aren't quite sure if the topic is taboo.  I've had very few strangers launch straight in with the so... where are they from? that I hear other adopters complaining about. Maybe it's a British thing, maybe we're all repressed.  Here, in my experience, I have a lot of people asking me tangential questions that I think are aimed at leading me towards talking about adoption, towards sharing our story, but don't ask the question directly.

And of course I realise

That during all of these conversations, my children are sitting, watching, listening. That's what makes it so hard, of course. I tell myself that's why it makes me feel uncomfortable. It's not much fun thinking about how this kind of thing is going to affect our children, but I know that I have to be honest with myself and admit that when the weird things happen, not all my discomfort is because of the children. Its hard, but important, I think, to be excruciatingly honest here (as everywhere) and separate out what really is mama-bear defensiveness of my cubs, and what is pain that comes from my own past, my own stuff, my own junk. Being constantly reminded how different my family is has the tendency to stir up a mixture of feelings that isn't always easy. To be blunt - prospective adoptive parents -  I think that if you would not be comfortable walking around with a placard that says 'please make assumptions about my fertility', you will probably personally struggle with the conspicuousness that comes from being a transracial family, and it's tempting to project all of that onto your kids. Even if you feel like that page has been turned, and you aren't struggling with significant grief about fertility stuff any more, that doesn't mean it's easy to talk about. When you're mother to kids who don't 'match', all the painful things that you never wanted to talk about are suddenly on show to the entire world, all the time.

(Oh, and that reminds me:

Those of you who did NOT have any struggles with fertility need to think very hard about how you will respond when people assume that you did. Please do it graciously and I beg you, don't be smug about your awesome lady parts. For the rest of us. Okay?)

I think where I'm going with that earlier point is here:

Honestly - I think a lot of the ire that comes out when people complain about the crazy things that people say  to their families is really about us as parents, not our kids. If I feel insecure or have unresolved grief about not having biological kids, when people notice us and say crazy stuff to us it can sound like people are telling me that after everything we've been through, all the years of difficulty, I'm still not really a mother. And if that's what I'm hearing, then yeah, that's painful. For me. But it's not really about my kids, although making it sound like it's about my kids gives me a great excuse to get angry about it.  You know that old saw about how adoption does not cure infertility? True dat. And when adoption makes your infertility conspicuous, it can sort of do the reverse. It's personally humiliating for me when people I've never met before want to tell me how I'll get pregnant next time, or say other things that stir up difficult and painful parts of my own life when all I wanted to do was take my kids for a walk. I think it can make us angry when people notice us, not because it's necessarily doing any actual harm to our kids, but because it's hard for us to be reminded that we are different. It's all jumbled up together, of course, but I think this is a risk worth being aware of. If I'm going to teach my kids anything about how to be comfortable with conspicuousness, I need to be honest enough to work through my own feelings about how it affects me.

Because after all

Who should we really be angry at, if we are angry? Who put our kids in this situation? We did. Let me say it again: WE DID. We chose this life for them. They didn't choose it, of course, but neither did the people at the supermarket. We chose this life for them, and then people notice us. Why shouldn't they? After all:

People are not stupid. People know how babies are made.

People know how babies are made. And when they look at two white parents with a brown baby, of course they know we didn't make that baby. I think that as adopters it's very easy to normalise adoption, to forget that it's actually a very strange thing that we're doing. It is not the norm for a child to have skin that is a different colour from both his parents, and no amount of positive adoption language will make that fact disappear.  I don't think we do our kids any favours when we pretend that our unusual family structures is not unusual, or that people who notice it are necessarily ignorant or mean. Normal isn't the same as real. Seeing that we're not normal doesn't mean my family isn't real. And we are not normal. And I need to come to terms with that before I can help my children to do so.

(Unusual isn't the same as bad

Obviously. Normal would be nice, certainly, but I remain convinced that our family was the best of the available options for my kids).

But while I'm saying uncomfortable things, I might as well lob this one in:

I found that, especially when our children were newly home, I didn't want to go to very many mother-and-baby groups, or very much of anywhere. This was partly sleep deprivation and partly twin-shock, but it was at least slightly because it's exhausting meeting a group of strangers when you know everyone is going to be interested in your story. One of the ironies here is that the more uncomfortable you feel being conspicuous, the more likely you are to stay entrenched in a small circle of old friends who already know you and your kids and your story; where you won't have to explain yourself. If you're like me, this is probably a small circle of white friends.  In this way, being a transracial, conspicuous family can actually make it less likely that you will get out there and make diverse group of new friends after your child is home, no matter what you told the social worker during the homestudy. Another risk that I hadn't thought about. I would encourage my fellow white mamas to be aware of it.

Speaking of fellow white mamas

It has crossed my mind that one day, Blue might marry someone with skin like mine. If that happens, and they have kids, I will have a daughter-in-law who has to do her own coming to terms with changing from an anonymous white girl to a conspicuous mother of a brown baby. That is a weird thought. If that happens, I hope that many fewer heads will turn than is the case today.

But when all is said and done

I may not ever like being conspicuous but I've got to be at peace with it if I'm going to be any kind of a good mother to these kids.

And a thousand times over

I would rather be conspicuous with my children than anonymous without them.