Part One-And-A-Half: Disclaimers

Before I posted Part One of my map of adoption ethics, I thought: 'hmmmm, I should probably include a few disclaimers on this thing'. And then I my husband hollered 'It's midnight! Switch the light out so I can sleep!' so I said 'Okay, Okay' and clicked 'publish' instead.


Turns out I should have taken the time to write the disclaimers. So here they are now:


Firstly: I'm looking at international adoption. I should have specified. One thing I was going to say in part 2 that I'll say now instead - yes, I think that the wall in US domestic adoption is pretty much non-existent, and I can't imagine that is a good thing. It seems to me that coercion in domestic adoption is a HUGE issue, at least potentially. I recoil from the idea of an international PAP showing off their perfect life with the intention of persuading a mother to relinquish her child. I think that's unspeakably unethical. But it seems that similar things happen every day with domestic adoption. I have to admit, the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable this makes me. But I don't live in the US, and we have zero non-foster-care domestic adoption here so I am a long, long way from being an expert on that scene. Hence, it wasn't what I was writing about. That doesn't mean I don't think it's important (see below....!) it just means that it wasn't what I was addressing.


Secondly: I know it's possible to take the polarised positions of 'Adoption is inherently good; everybody should adopt!' or 'Adoption is inherently bad; it should never happen at all' but I don't take either of these positions. (Disclaimer-within-a-disclaimer: of course I think that we should be trying to do away with the reasons that so many adoptions happen. But thinking that we need to fix the problems that lead to adoption is a very different thing from saying that adoption itself - as a response - should never happen. More on this in part two. Honestly). If you do take either of these positions, that's fine, but it's probably going to help to be clear from the outset that we are coming at this discussion from very, very different places.

As soon as we remove those polarised extremes, and say that adoption is neither always good nor always bad, what is it? I think the answer is this: adoption is complicated. I mean complicated. I mean really really complicated. To really get into all these complexities, to really grind out the details of what ethical adoption means, it would take at least a whole book. And believe me, I would love to read that book. But I am not trying to write that book in two blog posts. What I'm trying to talk about is the basics. The bare minimum. The bird's eye view. The broad brush-strokes. The bits of adoption ethics that are not complicated. The bits of adoption ethics that should be absolutely non-negotiable.


There are two reasons I'm not writing about the complexities. Firstly: I have twin toddlers. I have limited time. As they nap, I'm typing this with one hand while I eat my lunch with the other. (Slow-cooker corn soup. Delicious. Want the recipe? Put 2 pounds of frozen corn into your slow cooker with a chopped onion and a chopped potato and about two pints of vegetable stock. Cook. Blend. Serve with chipotle hot sauce, if you've got it. Freezes well. Doubles easily. You're welcome). But the more fundamental reason is that when we start talking complexities, there are lots of legitimate disagreements.  I think that a lot of the time, conversations about adoption ethics get derailed because we start talking about the complexities before we have agreed on the fundamentals.  I'm not saying the complexities aren't important - I think they are extremely important - but the complexities are not what I'm trying to write about here. I'm trying to write about the fundamentals.  Like I said - the bare minima. Again with the birds eye view. Again with the point about the broad brush-strokes. And for me, the number one fundamental in ethical adoption should be that (all together now....) the people who benefit from adoption should not get a say in deciding who gets adopted. 


So - I'm not trying to be complex. There are about a million things I haven't addressed. A few were raised in the comments on the last post, and a few have been addressed to me privately or mentioned in other fora*. Mostly the discussion has been polite and thoughtful and I really (really) appreciate that. But  I do feel the need to say - the fact that I haven't written about a particular thing  in one half of a broad overview doesn't mean that I don't think it is important. If you think it is important, it doesn't mean that I disagree with you. It doesn't mean I don't care about that thing.  Please believe me - I am not trying to say that this map of a wall** is all there is to say on ethical adoption. Per-leeze. I'm not that stupid. It's just some stuff that I think is important. In fact, I think it's foundational. That doesn't mean that I think it's the floors and doors and windows as well. Would you mind giving me the benefit of the doubt on that one? Thanks. (I know that 99% of you already do that, and I'm really grateful). 


Does that last paragraph make me sound a little bit peevish? Sorry, I guess I am. It does grate my cheese a little when people read 'I think Thing X is important' and respond with 'I can't believe you didn't mention Y!' when actually, I love Y, I think Y is hotter than Justin Beiber***, it's just not what I was trying to say when I was talking about X. Seriously - if you want to know my opinion on Y, all you have to do is ask. Preferably politely. And we can discuss! Discussion is great. I love respectful discussion. I have no issues with honest, thoughtful, polite disagreement either. But I have less patience for when people make assumptions or talk unkindly or rudely on the internet in a way that they would never do in real life . It makes me feel like this. 


Thirdly. One thing that a few people have asked - and most very politely - is why children aren't on the map. That's a very fair question, and one that I wondered about as I was drawing it. Initially I felt like of course, children should be there somewhere because adoption should put the interests of children first. However, in the end I didn't include them on this particular schema because generally, children aren't making any of the decisions in adoption. The map is really a map of decision-making, of action, of who-is-doing-what. And when 'adopt' is used as a verb, children are always the object, not the subject, of the sentence. They aren't making any choices. So that's why they're not on the map - because they are not making choices about adoption, not because I don't think they are important in how those choices should be made. In, fact, their powerlessness is the main reason we should be working hard for an ethical process. I should have been explicit about this.


I think that's it with the disclaimers. I hope so, because I can hear thumps - I think naptime is over.




*possibly my favourite plural of all time
**and there's another structure coming in the next post, can you bear the suspense?
***Joke. I think Justin Beiber is creepy. Obviously. I was in Claire's earlier today buying earmuffs for my kids and was utterly weirded out by just HOW MUCH STUFF you can buy with JB's face on it, mostly for under a pound. Ewww. 

The Wall: A Map Of Adoption Ethics According to Me (Part One)

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This was going to be one post but it got too long. Yes, even for me. Today, part one. 

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There's always lots of talk about ethics in international adoption, and that's great because there always should be. But what does that word mean: ethics? I'm pretty sure that people use it to mean many different things. So, this is my attempt to answer the question: What am I talking about when I talk about an ethical adoption? 

To me, an ethical adoption starts with one simple thing: A wall. 

A great big, unclimbable, immovable, unbreachable wall. This wall needs to divide two groups of people: The people who benefit from adoption and the people who make decisions about who will be adopted. Those two groups of people have to stay on different sides of the wall. 

That's what an ethical adoption is, to me. An ethical adoption is not about how many social outreach programmes an agency has. An ethical adoption is not about how wonderful and kind the agency staff are. An ethical adoption is not about how great the kids are, or how well they fit their new families. An ethical adoption is not (necessarily) about waiting the longest for a referral. An ethical adoption is certainly not the very best possible thing that could happen to child. An ethical adoption is about the people who benefit from adoption staying on their own side of the wall. 

So, who are these people? I think there are two main players on one side of the wall. I'd say that prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) and adoption agencies are the key beneficiaries of international adoption. PAPs have an obvious emotional investment in the process, adoption agencies have a financial interest. 

I know, I know, nobody is allowed to 'profit' from adoption, but there are a lot of people who make a living from it without, strictly, turning a 'profit'. This is totally legal, and I'd say that mostly it's totally fine. Homestudies need to be done, and someone has to do them. Dossiers need to be collated, and someone has to collate them.  Later, children need to be cared for, and someone has to do that caring. Even the nannies in the baby homes are, in some small way, benefiting from adoption as agency employees. There's nothing immoral about making a modest living from doing honest work involved in the adoption process, as long as those people who benefit stay on their own side of the wall.  

  

On the other side of the wall sit the people who are making the decision: is this child an adoptable child? 

I've put two sets of people there: parents and social services, but in international adoption, usually, the decision should rest with the child's parents. (Here, I'm using 'parents' and 'mothers' interchangeably to avoid getting overly specific about the myriad family dynamics that can contribute to adoption decisions. I'm sure you'll figure it out). 

On top of the wall sits another group of people - those who are responsible for overseeing adoptions. These people (judges, local social workers and so on) should be able to see both sides of the wall and make objective decisions when necessary. They should also stop people straying onto the wrong side of the wall. They are like the wall police.  

Okay. Now adding a little more detail:  

I've called the area in which the relinquishing parents find themselves the 'swamp of adversity'. (Did I spend too much time reading Pilgrim's Progress as a kid? Um, possibly).  The swamp of adversity is fed by three rivers: the river of poverty, the river of illness and the river of social expectations. Of course there are other factors, but I chose those three because I think they are behind a lot of decisions to abandon children, or formally relinquish them to international adoption.  Any of these three can lead a woman to decide she is unable to parent.  A single, HIV+ woman with no income faces all three. 

One of the main reasons that I think there needs to be a wall between the beneficiaries and the decision-makers in adoption is that people living in the swamp of adversity are incredibly vulnerable.  They are socially vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable and financially vulnerable. And not only are they vulnerable, they are parenting vulnerable children and I am sure that they know it. None of the three rivers lead to my door and yet parenting often seems to me to be nearly impossible. I often feel like my children deserve more than me. If I couldn't feed them, or care for their health, or my parenting attracted social stigma, I am certain I would feel that even more strongly. So people with an interest in seeing me decide not to parent would have a moral obligation not to exploit that, by staying a long way away. Preferably behind a wall. 

Of course, vulnerable is not the same as stupid. And yet being vulnerable and facing adversity can lead a person to make poor decisions. Here's where I want to tread carefully. Because: adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I am sure that there are cases where a mother is not coerced in any way and yet regrets her decision intensely for the rest of her life. I am equally sure there are cases where a mother is not coerced and yet her child regrets that decision intensely for the rest of her life. I am not trying to make light of that. Ideally, in a better-than-merely-ethical situation, all mothers (and fathers) considering placement would receive free, neutral counselling about the implications of the decision they are about to make. And in the best of all possible worlds, these people would get more than counselling, they would get help and support and  financial assistance and encouragement to parent. That is what we want. That is what we should be striving for. That would make these families' life better, and obviously helping children to remain in their families of origin is better than international adoption with all its losses. But I think the baseline, the very minimum for an ethical adoption, should be that it does not make anything worse. I think that a lot of confusion comes into discussions about adoption ethics because we conflate two things - an ethical adoption, and the very best possible outcome for a child. These two things are not the same. More on this later. [in part 2]. 

And speaking of regret - I do think that sometimes, ethical adoptions involve some very bad decisions. One thing I find odd about having been immersed in thinking about adoption for several years is that I am now pretty aware (at least theoretically) of the realities of adoption for children. I know that relinquishing a child for adoption is a lifelong decision with lifelong ramifications for both parent and child. I am also aware that these decisions are being taken, daily, by disenfranchised women who have never had the opportunity to learn to read at all, let alone the opportunity to read birthmother blogs or longitudinal studies on transracial identity formation.  From my position of privilege, I certainly hear some adoption stories where I think 'oh no, I wish that mother had decided to parent'. But here's the thing: It's not my decision.  I'm not on that side of the wall. What makes an ethical adoption, in my opinion, is that mothers make their own decisions about placing their own children with no coercion and no manipulation from people who are getting something out of that decision. 

Those decisions may not always be good decisions. But in each case, for each mother, it must be her decision, and hers alone. The prospective adoptive parents must not emotionally blackmail a mother into relinquishing her child with promises of 'a better life'. Adoption agencies (or their representatives) must not offer money or other incentives to encourage relinquishments. I'm not just talking about outright harvesting (although that is obviously wrong). I'm also including 'strings-attached' maternal care, outreach / sponsorship programmes that are only available to families with relinquished children, religious pressure and and all other slightly more subtle ways of making people think that relinquishing their children would be the right thing to do. Because - I'm going to say it again - An ethical adoption is about the people who benefit from adoption not getting involved in deciding who will be adopted. 

Ethical doesn't mean good. Ethical doesn't mean wise. Ethical doesn't mean that adoption is win-win. It doesn't mean that  everybody is always happy with what happened. But I'd say the minimum is that an ethical adoption picks up the pieces of a tragedy that has already happened  to a child - the loss of his or her parents. An ethical adoption is never an active part of making that loss happen. An ethical adoption takes a bad situation (kid with no family) and makes it - hopefully - better (new family). Ethical adoption is not the reason the bad situation happens in the first place.  

Moving on. All I want to say about social services is that they had better be living in the hills of neutrality. 

  And so now, some more detail on the other side of the fence. Prospective adoptive parents. 

PAPs tend to inhabit two very different types of terrain. Lots of people come to adoption because all their other attempts to make a family have failed, and I've labelled this zone the Valley of Despair. Here's why people who live in that place need to be totally uninvolved in the process of relinquishment: People who are desperate for a baby are not in a good position to make wise decisions.  I'm not saying this to judge people who are desperate for a baby. I've been there. Who knows, one day I may be back in that place again.   I know that people who have never felt that way can get very judge-y about it, but in my opinion it is absolutely normal for a woman facing fertility problems to feel a desperate, overwhelming desire to be a mother. Some women don't feel this way (and I bet they work out five times a week and like quinoa, too) but most of us who have been in that situation know that knot in the stomach of painful, hopeless desire for something we can't have.  I think that biology programmes us to be desperate for a baby and feeling that way is normal, it's natural, it's nothing to be ashamed of. I think that pretending that desire isn't there or wishing it away by saying it shouldn't be there is counter-productive. Emotions are neutral. You feel what you feel. There's nothing wrong with emotions on their own.  It's what you do with emotions that lends them power.

So: there is nothing wrong with being desperate for a baby. But it can make a person very selfish. It can make us forget that the potential birthmother we are looking at is a real person, not an incubator for our child. It can make a person want a baby at any cost. And conversely, PAPs in this position are also extremely vulnerable. They are vulnerable to making extremely poor choices, of displaying extremely poor judgement, of deciding that the means justify the end. They are vulnerable to believing things that no sensible person would believe, because they so desperately want them to be true. These things include  if you sign up with OUR agency you can ethically have a baby home by Christmas and we are the victims of a smear campaign; we can explain all of the ethical issues that former clients have raised. Not all PAPs believe these things, but this crazy desperate belief and trust is a risk. A huge risk, actually. Power corrupts, and so does grief and desperation.  Putting power into the hands of desperate people seems, to me, to be an extremely bad idea.

The other place PAPs can often be found is the moral high ground. These PAPs aren't adopting because they want a child, they are adopting because they want to help a child find a family. People can say sarcastic things about saviour complexes at this point, but wanting to help a child find a family is a great reason to start thinking about adoption. (Unless the only child you are willing to help is a healthy infant. But that's another post). 

The problem that can come from inhabiting the moral high ground is that it can lead to tunnel vision.  People who decided on adopting from Ethiopia years ago are often unwilling to see that the situation there is no longer what it was. Some of the needs that formerly existed no longer exist. I think that sometimes, people are adopting in order to fulfil a desire they have had for more than, say, ten years, so it's a desire sparked by a situation that is now ten years out of date. But having started on a path, they stop looking around, stop considering the context. All they can see is the light at the end of the tunnel: their future child. Again, this is absolutely understandable. Making adoption decisions is agonising.  It's unlikely that people are going to put themselves through that same agony once a week for ten years. The human brain just doesn't work that way. But I do think that it's an extremely rare person who is detached enough to pull back before completing the process and say 'actually, I don't think our family is needed any more'.  Even if the situation has changed drastically, it's much more normal to stay fixed on the original plan. The main risk with adoption tunnel vision, I think, is that it can lead people to think that their adoption will definitely be ethical because they are in it with good intentions. "I adopted in order to help, therefore my adoption is a good thing". This is more palatable than baby hunger, perhaps, but no more rational and ultimately not very much less risky. 

I can't end this section without mentioning the fact that a lot of Christians are keen to adopt for religious reasons. I'm a Christian myself, so I love seeing children growing up in homes where they will learn about Jesus. No matter what your worldview, I'm sure you feel the same - we all like seeing children growing up with parents who will teach children values that we, ourselves, respect. For me, and lots of other Christians, we rejoice to see kids learning to pray. If you are an atheist who values secular humanism, you will be glad when a fellow secular humanist brings their child up to quote Dawkins from an early age. My point here is that there is nothing wrong - for all of us-  with wanting to see children adopted into homes where we agree with the values that will be learnt. However - I do think that we Christians have a bad track record with assuming that the ends - a Christian home - justifies the means, any means, of an adoption. This is the worst kind of tunnel vision. Because God is not honoured when we pressure or coerce mothers into relinquishing children that God has given to them, not to us. James 1:27 is often quoted to imply that God is always in support of adoption but I think we also need to have a sober look at Job 24:9 and Mark 12:40 before ever, ever thinking that we should look for a way to get around the wall. 

Of course, there are some PAPs (a very, very small number) who don't live on either the moral high ground or the valley of despair. But even where this is the case, if I'm honest, I'm yet to meet a PAP who does not suffer (to some degree) from adoption induced psychosis. Waiting to adopt makes a person crazy, especially towards the end. There is nothing normal or natural about waiting to be meet a total stranger who will one day call you mama. The feelings that this state induces are understandable, but they are not rational and they are not conducive to good decision making. 

I think what I am saying is this: PAPs, on average, are vulnerable, tunnel visioned and / or psychotic. I'm joking. Except no, actually, I'm not.  For these reasons, they - we - are not the right people to be making decisions about whether a child should be adoptable. Having been one myself, I would barely trust a PAP to make a good decision about choosing a breakfast cereal. 

This is why I think that PAPs should not be involved in any of decision making about which children really, truly need new homes. They profit from adoption - not financially, but emotionally, so they are generally unable to be truly neutral about what should happen to a child. Perhaps a good way to illustrate how judgement can be compromised while waiting to adopt is to ask: have you noticed how common it is for people to suddenly become much more vigilant about ethics after returning home with their oh-so-perfect-obviously-meant-for-our-family child? I think this is partly benign - after becoming a parent, I think it's pretty normal to have more of an understanding of what it would mean to lose a child. However, I think part of it is simply that, once we are no longer invested in the system, we are able to look at it more objectively. This is what I call 'Oh, I wouldn't adopt from there now' syndrome, or, more bluntly, post-adoption-hypocrisy.  Symptoms include discussions about how different things used to be in country X, when actually, nope, things were pretty much always like they are now. I'm going to put my hand up to this one and say that there was a lot of stuff I did not want to think about before we brought our children home, stuff that seems obvious to me now. People who adopted about the same time as me sometimes mention that now there are concerns about ethics in Ethiopia but hmmmmm, I'm pretty sure there were some concerns about ethics when we were adopting, too. My own experience of observing my own changing perception is enough to tell me - I was too invested in the process, as a PAP, to be able to make any objective judgements. I am so grateful - unspeakably so - that I was never put in a position where I had the opportunity to choose an ethical shortcut for a quicker adoption. (We adopted in the UK - so we made pretty much no choices at all in our adoption. But that's also a different post). I would like to say I never would have done it, never taken that unethical choice, but honestly, with such clouded judgement it's hard to be sure. One of the biggest reasons that the adoption system needs a wall is that PAPs need to be shielded from the consequences of their own poor judgement. And I'm speaking for myself first.  

What is the point of writing all that? Maybe all of that only applies to those who adopt independently. Surely, one good thing about an agency system is that PAPs do not generally get involved, cannot stomp into a country and demand babies, healthy girl babies, now now NOW! This is true, to an extent. It means that  the way PAPs are able to do most damage, in an agency system, is by choosing an agency poorly. The agency a PAP chooses will act on their behalf. (That's what the word 'agent' means, after all). This means that PAPs need to be aware of their own limitations and get educated. And going to an agency  and demanding babies, healthy girl babies, now now NOW! risks having exactly the same effect as getting on a plane in order to do it. 

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TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW SOON: Where do agencies fit in? What about non-adoption outcomes? Is hiding behind a wall enough to guarantee an ethical adoption? With MORE RIDICULOUS PLACE NAMES and LOTS MORE RANTING. (I just hope I don't change my mind about anything in this first section while I write section two). 

Part Two is now up HERE. 

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Edited to say: I've added some disclaimers in a new post.   If anything in this post makes you feel cranky, please read the disclaimers before getting annoyed at me. Thanks!

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.