Stapled

The last few weeks have been heavy weather around here. It's the stuff with our little girl, of course, but it's not just that. Those of you who are married, do you find yourself surprised by how hard it is to be married, sometimes? I do, and then I feel like I shouldn't admit it's hard, even though the idea of putting two different people in a house together with a big chunk of responsibility for each others' happiness is so MIND-BLOWINGLY CRAZY that surely everybody knows it's going to be hard, right? IT'S GOING TO BE HARD. But then it actually gets hard, and I'm shocked.

Over the last few weeks, my husband has: Failed to help me put a bookshelf together; not said thank you when I baked him his favourite cookies, generally been silent and moody, not said thank you when I made his favourite meal, not wanted to celebrate with me when I finally got my book off to the typesetter, and refused to open a bottle of wine on the basis that it was 'only Tuesday'. Seriously.

None of these are the end of the world, and I'm sure there's a list twice as long of things I do that annoy him. (She never gets up in the morning! Why does she always yell at the children? Is she seriously buying more stuff online?) But he always thinks everything between us is fine, whereas when I'm having trouble communicating with him, I start to panic and I'm all WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME ANY MORE? (Because I'm trying to eat my dinner and you keep asking me questions, Claudia, is the honest answer to that one, I think).

It's hard. I find it hard. I love him so much, and I know he loves me, but sometimes we're not in sync and it's hard.

Here's what I think: if you have a generally happy marriage, most of the hard stuff you face in life is faced together. For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. Etcetera. You're working hard but you're working together. But then when you have a hard time in your marriage, when you feel like you're 'working on it', it feels like you're doing that work alone. If you were working together on your marriage, it probably wouldn't feel like there was a problem, right? So you're working on your own on trying to improve a relationship, and thinking about your relationship when you feel lonely inside it just exacerbates those feelings of loneliness.

It's hard. It's normal. It's hard.

I don't know about you, but when this kind of thing happens I get involved in displacement activities. I develop short-term obsessions with things that really don't matter. I'm setting up a work space at home (FINALLY, and yes AFTER the book is basically finished, but obviously I'm very happy to have it - I'm calling it my Lady Room and I'll tell you more about it another day) and I need a few office supplies. I discovered poppin and was all set to order a matching set of desk accessories (in aqua, which would look bee-yoo-ti-full with my new dark veneered wood desk and white MDF drawers). And then I realised What the hey? These people don't make a hole punch! I can't buy a matching set of stuff and then have a non-matching hole punch! This set off a crazy need to find either a beautiful hole punch that would coordinate with the aqua set, or an entirely different set that included a hole punch and would fit within my approved palette.

This hole punch is beautiful, but it is also £130 and plated with gold. This hole punch did not solve my problems. 

And that's how I found myself creating a Pinterest board devoted entirely to office supplies, and how I spent hours googling combinations of exquisite + desk set + hole punch + stapler + happiness and how I found out that the world has waaaay more beautiful staplers than beautiful hole punches. I think I'll probably go with a boring (but acceptable) transparent acrylic hole punch, but now I'm stuck, totally unable to decide which of the beautiful stapling objects I've found will make me not just happy, but happiest. I want them all.

The clear acrylic casing? The gold underneath? COME TO MAMA.  

This stapler is in MOMA. Not buying this stapler would be like saying I'm too good for MOMA. That would be terribly arrogant, don't you think? 

What's not fun about this? 

It's a stapler, but it's made of wood. Do I really need to explain any further? 

This is the aqua stapler that started this whole debacle. I still love you, aqua stapler.  

And I found myself thinking: hey, why don't I just decide that now, I collect staplers? After all, if I just bought, say, three staplers, that would be buying too many staplers. But five or six staplers would be a hobby. Right? 

Want to know the stupidest thing? I barely even staple. If you asked me where my current stapler was, I would not be able to tell you. 

Something tells me it's not really about the stapler.

It's hard work, sometimes, this life. It's hard work, staying stapled together with another human being who is sometimes thinking about other things than what will make ME happy.

It's hard work. It's worth it. It's hard.

Detachment Parenting

Why do you have to look after me some days? My daughter asks me. I want Daddy to look after me for ALL the days. I'm a little bit taken aback. Well, I say It's is Mummy's job AND Daddy's job to look after you. We are the grownups in the house and you and Blue are the children. And she says, all matter of fact,  But I don't want you to live in this house. I want to live with just Daddy and you and Blue can go and live in a different house. 

This is how being with daddy makes her feel.

Cue heartbreak. Not just because of the words, but because she is looking at me sideways to see how I'm taking it, like a tiny little three-year-old Mean Girl. I surprise myself by bursting into tears, suddenly and uncontrollably, noisily and messily, like a balloon bursting or  a dam bursting. Saltwater is gushing out of me and Jay comes home a few minutes later to find me howling on the sofa and Pink watching TV, unconcerned. 

You don't have to tell me I overreacted; I know I overreacted. It was just so... unexpected. I did not see it coming; not at all. Pink is crazy about her Daddy, but I would also say that Pink and I are pretty tight. I regain control and Jay tells Pink that Daddy loves Mummy, and Mummy and Daddy both love you, and you will not make yourself more popular with Daddy by being mean to Mummy. We put them to bed. 

What should I have said to her? Crying wasn't the right response, but what would have been? What would I say if it happened again? Twenty four hours later, I have the chance to find out when she has another go. She looks at me seriously and says But I really do want you to go and live in a different house, Mummy. Matter-of-fact, again. I'm prepared, this time, and I say I'm staying in this house with you, Pink, because I love you and it's my job to look after you. 

And score one to Mummy! I think. Calm, positive, affirming and yet firm. Who could not want to live in the same house as a mother like that? Nobody, that's who. And then: But I don't really LOVE you, Mummy, she says. I only love Daddy.  As if that settles it. 

 What am I supposed to do with this? I have no idea. Is there attachment stuff going on? I don't know. There could be. The way she has started to push me away verbally certainly sounds like it. And frankly, her behaviour lately has been a bit like something from the before section in The Connected Child. But... it just doesn't fit. It doesn't really fit with how she has always been. I don't think this is trauma, I think this is something else.  I'm not saying there isn't any stuff there for her - of course there is - but this feels different. It feels like fairly secure little girl trying to see what she can get away with. And it feels like she's been reading Freud, is what it feels like. I love that she loves her father, but could we please leave out the part where she resents her mother? 

I'm surprised by how hurt I am by all of this.  

I keep reminding myself: She is three. 

She is not my friend.

She is three. 

She is my daughter. 

She is three. 

I can't let myself get sucked into her crazy. I can't let her push my buttons. If I'm going to cry about this, it has to be after she has gone to bed. Which will be at seven o'clock, because: 

She is three. 

I walk her downstairs after helping her to get dressed. She reaches up and puts her smooth and tiny hand in mine. She grins at me and pads down the stairs and we do her favourite puzzle before bed. I want to say you do love me, Pink, I know you do but for once I'm smart enough to keep my mouth shut. 

Forget attachment parenting; I think I need to start practising detachment parenting with this girl. I need to remember this relationship is not reciprocal. I have let myself get into too much of an easy rhythm with her. Attachment-wise, she has always been my easy one. She is so precious to me, and she knows it. 

And it makes me think: what am I doing with my life? How can I give so much love to a person who will calmly look at me and tell me she doesn't want it? 

Some days I really hate parenthood. 

But I guess this is the way it has to be, this asymmetrical love. This is the only way that families can ever really work. It's my job to love her. It's not really her job to love me. 

I know this in my head, but sometimes my heart is slow to catch up. 

Notes From The Awkward Files: In Which I Ask For Your Money

Now, you know that I never ask you for money. But today that's going to change: I'm going to ask that you consider donating some of your precious pennies to my friend A in order to to help her family get their son home from Haiti.

Now, when I say my friend, I actually mean my friend. Not just someone I sort-of know on the internet - we met through blogging but now she's an actual, real-life friend (either that or I have mad photoshop skilz):

us in oxford, where we were pretending to be cultured but actually spent most of the day eating, hence the elasticated waistbands 

And not just any sort of friend, but A is someone that I trust. As in, really really trust.  She's been working in International Development for over a decade and knows more about international child welfare and in-country family preservation than anybody else I know of. Also: she was the one who showed me how to do a flat twist in Pink's hair, for which I owe her a debt of eternal gratitude.

And when I say 'bring their son home', I don't mean 'the boy who they are hoping to adopt'. I say 'their son' because his adoption in Haiti is already complete. He is their son. They have been moving his paperwork through the courts for well over a year (as is normal in Haitian adoptions). A few months ago, everything on the Haitian side was finally finished, and little Alex was theirs. All they need is for their final paperwork to move one more time, get Alex's passport and then a visa for him to come to the US.

But now their agency won't release their paperwork.

The thing is, while A and J were investigating their own adoption, they found out things about this agency - and the behaviour of the Americans working in-country - that were hugely concerning. They also found out things about the children's interim care that was hugely concerning.

They tried to talk to the agency about this, of course. They got shut down. (A and J, that is, not the agency. Unfortunately). And now the agency won't release their paperwork so that they can apply for their son's visa and bring him home.


They have been told they have two choices:


First choice: agree to signing a gag order so that the agency will (hopefully) give them their documents back. Second: re-create their adoption dossier from scratch, at a cost of about $8,500.

Their adoption has already been fully paid for. They paid for it themselves. But they do NOT have a spare $8,500 lying around to do a big chunk of it again (who does?) And their boy needs to come home.



Can I just reiterate - this is not a problem with the Haitian courts. It's not a problem with the US embassy. It's nothing to do with their own adoption - which has been investigated (more than once) and double checked  and triple checked and is absolutely above board. The only problem is with their agency, who are holding their documents hostage in the hope that A and her husband will agree to keep quiet about what they've seen. They have said that they will give back the documents if A and J sign a gag order.

Would you do that? Do you want them to do that? This is egregious behaviour on the part of the agency.  They want to speak out and let other prospective adoptive families know what this agency is doing in-country. They want to let people know how the children are being treated. They want to let people know what they have found out, during their investigations, about coercion and manipulation of Haitian families. This is exactly what APs should be doing when they see unethical behaviour going on. This is what we all say that we want them to be doing.

A and J are not panic-mongers. They are not trouble makers. They should not be gagged.

And yet they still need to get their son home.

These two things should not be mutually exclusive.

If I found myself in the situation that they are in, I hope I would have the courage to do what they are doing.

If you have a spare $10, click over here and make a donation via Project Hopeful. Most of us don't have very much money, but there are quite a lot of us hanging around the interwebs.

We can help. Please do.

Comments on this post are closed.

Sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel...

....is actually an oncoming train. And that's what returning home has felt like. We are back, and I'm extremely thankful for that. But re-entry has been brutal, mostly because we seem to have flown home on the Virus Plane. Three of us ended up sick - not just slightly sick but the kind of sick where I was too unwell to watch television. Too unwell to watch television, people, and yet the (also sick) children still needed looking after and on Wednesday I had to go back to work. I would happily have leapt off the top of a tall building during our first few days back.  It's just as well we live in a small town and there really aren't any.

Sidebar: while I think of it, I'm going to tell you my one secret of travel. I don't have any others - despite having been to quite a lot of places, I'm a pretty terrible traveller, and now that we have kids I'm even worse. I always pack too much, I'm terrible at going with the flow, and being out of my usual routine tends to make me very cranky. But this one thing I do know - if you have to go on a long flight (anything more than 12 hours) before you get on the plane, head to the duty free, find the Guerlain testers and cover your face with  this stuff: 

Guerlain's Issima Midnight Secret. I don't know what is in this stuff, but it is magic. It's supposed to make you look like you've had a full night's sleep, and it actually works. (I don't own any (the price, ouch) but if I was going back to those first days of new-baby-sleep-deprivation, I think I would consider shelling out for it because, like I said, magic). It is certainly the only way to get off a flight looking better than you did when you get on. Your hair will still be a mess, you will stink like a skunk, your clothes will still be covered in whatever your seat-mate spilled on you, but your face will be radiant. 

To prove my point: the day after we got home, my ears and throat were unbearably swollen and sore and my whole body felt like it was being attacked by a cattle prod. I was sick and miserable, but unable to get any sympathy from the friend I was talking to. I feel really rotten! I kept on saying. You don't look rotten! sez she. You look great! I can't believe you've just got off a plane; you look so... fresh! And that's when I realised just how good this stuff really is. That freshness isn't really me! I wailed. It's that dang Midnight Secret! but she wouldn't believe me. I guess it serves me right for using so much out of those tester pots without any intention of ever actually buying it. Sigh. /End sidebar.

Anyway. We are here now. The sickness is mostly gone. It's good to be getting back to real life. All the things I was looking forward to doing when we got back (you know, in APRIL) can finally begin. Top of my list - finding a really really good home made barbecue sauce recipe. Is there anything more delicious than barbecue sauce?  No, and I want to be able to make my own. I tried Jamie Oliver's recipe but he was trying to be clever and it was waaaaay too full of orange rind. Why, Jamie, why? I used it to make slow cooker bourbon baked beans but the citrus overdose just made the whole thing taste like Christmas. Not recommended. Once I crack this, I'm going to start with the dry rubs and learn to make proper ribs. On a related note: I have decided that I need to stop trying to get away with skinny jeans.

One more thing. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me how lucky we were that Jay didn't get appendicitis while we were on the plane. I am, of course, extremely glad that this didn't happen. It would have been awful. But lucky? I just can't help thinking that it would have been luckier not to get appendicitis at all. 

After his operation, Jay was unexpectedly kept in hospital for four days so that they could pump him full of high-dose antibiotics. The kids didn't cope very well (that's a euphemism, people, make of it what you will), and I found the whole situation really hard (so is that). One day, I went up to visit him and we went down to the hospital cafe together. I was so tired that I fell asleep sitting on a hard plastic chair, my head on the cafeteria table. Apparently I stayed out cold for 45 minutes while Jay read Australian Handyman magazine. I didn't feel lucky then. I didn't feel lucky when I had to miss some really crucial stuff at work because of our delay. I didn't feel lucky when we ended up on the plane o' death because of our changed plans.

I don't mean to sound churlish. I don't mean my whole life is a vale of tears (far from it). But it's a funny thing, this word, lucky. I think I'm hypersensitive to it because I really don't like it being used when people talk about adoption. To mean, the word lucky implies that you ended up with something better than you could reasonably have expected.  Winning the lottery, say. Becoming America's Next Top Model. Only bothering to study one topic for an exam and having that be the only one that comes up.

So I think that deciding that someone is lucky only works if you have decided what their reasonable expectations should have been.

This is why it bugs me when people say that my kids are lucky to be adopted. I feel like the background is that they should have expected to have no parents at all, and now they are lucky to have me. Whereas - why should they have expected to have no parents? My children didn't come from the cabbage patch; they had other parents before they had us and they lost those parents and that sucks. A few times I have said to people that if their child was to lose them, and then be moved to a new country, they might not feel particularly lucky about it. From a few people this gets that's not the same! (whereas actually, it is) but other times I think it has helped make some sense of why the 'lucky' comment can be the wrong thing to say, no matter how well meant. Or maybe it didn't make any sense at all, and they just wanted me to stop criticising their attempts to be nice to me.


I had a conversation online with a few friends recently about this after one had dozens of people tell her your little girl is so lucky! when they got a referral.  She feels like I do about the lucky thing, but I was interested to see that a few other mothers weren't bothered by it at all. One (who always challenges me to think differently) said 'I tell people that their bio kids will be lucky to have them; why shouldn't people say the same about our adopted kids?' She's probably right. I like her attitude. And yet.

I think that I'm getting a little better about giving people the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, but I can't help myself, I still don't like people saying my kids are lucky. (Lucky to have a cat, yes, lucky I don't make them bathe every day, yes, lucky to have a twin, yes, lucky to be adopted, no).  Would it be different if people were specific that they meant lucky to be adopted into THIS family? I don't know.

What's your take on the lucky thing?

For / Against

So there's another book about adoption doing the rounds.  I haven't read it yet, but I probably will, armed with a stack of those little post-it flags to write notes on the bits that annoy me. (What can I say? I'm easily annoyed - you should see all the flags sticking out of my copy of 'Adopted for Life'. Actually, I think I might keep these two books next to each other on my adoption shelf and see if the friction between them causes some kind of a nuclear explosion).

All the blog comment about this new book made me think about something.

There's some really great, complex comment out there but why do some people feel the need to be 'pro' adoption or 'anti' adoption?

I can't help thinking that being 'for' or 'against' adoption is about as meaningful as being 'for' or 'against' sex. Sometimes it's a great thing, sometimes it's a terrible thing - it's all about the context.

I'm afraid that when someone tells me that they 'love adoption' or 'despise adoption', all I hear is 'I am incapable of nuanced thought!' Dude. Sometimes it's a great thing, but sometimes it's a terrible thing. How can you be for or against it?

Is the desire to be 'for' or 'against' something partly appealing because it gives us a chance to be on a team, to be on the winning side? After all, I can't win an argument if I'm not having one, and dangit, I love winning arguments.

Back to the book: I know enough about publishing to know that non-fiction books need to have a 'big idea'. They have to have an angle. More Christians should adopt, for example, or Too many Christians are heedlessly adopting for another. That's something that the public can agree or disagree with; that's the kind of thing that will get you on to NPR. Books like this have to validate us or annoy us or we won't buy them - there's very little market for books that say meh, here are a few different angles, now make up your own mind'.

But our minds are not books. They are not for sale. We don't have to have an angle; we don't have to be for or against anything, except maybe genocide, or bananas (I'm against both, just for the record). We can leave room for nuance, if our own drama addiction will let us.

So I'm not For or Against adoption, and I don't think you should be either. Sometimes it's a great thing. Sometimes it's a terrible thing.

It's all about the context.

********

Speaking of context, here's a reminder that I have a hundred or so of my favourite links about all kinds of adoption stuff here, under Adoption 101. 

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And a bit of personal context: having said all that, I'm going to add that I should be on a plane right now, rather than sitting here in my PJs blogging.  Long story short: yesterday, Jay had to have surgery! For appendicitis! Do I sound a little hysterical? I am. 

Yesterday, Jay woke up with severe abdominal pain. Two doctors, three phone calls to our travel insurers and an ultrasound later we were sitting in a hospital ward, waiting for a doctor to cut him open and snip him up. I'm super, super grateful for good healthcare here, for travel insurance, for the fact that this didn't happen while we were on the plane, for the fact that my parents are continuing to be so gracious and hospitable and also the fact that I got to eat barbeque chicken pizza tonight instead of disgusting plane food. 

However. 

On Saturday, it was my cousin's wedding, and we all had a really great time. Think barefoot beach wedding on an island in perfect sunshine. Think happy bride and besotted groom. Think great food and fun people. Think cake. As the night was winding down, though, I was talking to one of my aunts about our plans to go home and I realised that I was so homesick I was about to start crying. It's okay, I told myself, home soon. Little did I know. I've been pacing myself, and now I find out that my pacing was wrong. Abdominal surgery is a big deal, obviously, and it's likely to be at least a week before we can return. And then when we do, everything is going to be totally upside down because we will be even further behind with work and we'll have a hundred things to do to catch up. 

I've hardly told anybody that we are still here. I can't bear to do all the goodbyes again. 

First world problems. I know. In other places on earth, if he had got appendicitis yesterday morning he would probably be dead by now. Instead, he was out of surgery by midnight, groggy and in pain but on the way back to his usual self. When he woke up, he thought he was Daniel Craig, which was almost funny enough to make the whole thing worth it. 

This afternoon, Jay and I got half an hour alone and I'm afraid to say that I sat down in the hard hospital chair beside him and cried all over his shins. I have found the last few days really really hard - especially coping with the children - I would totally suck in any kind of a real crisis. The children and I went to visit him this morning and it wasn't great. The children's dysregulation has not been helped by a busy wedding weekend and then having their father hospitalised. Also, they have discovered convenience food and boy, isn't that the gift that keeps on giving at a time when they are already climbing the walls. On ferries, in cars, in hospitals it seems that cheesesticks and chips go down a whole lot better than sliced-up apple and raisins. On the way back from the hospital today, Pink was whining about being hungry. (And yes, I do mean whining. When she's really hungry, it sounds totally different).  I called her bluff by saying that she didn't need to worry, we'd be having lunch soon. She was not impressed, and started yelling. I told her it was nearly time for sandwiches. 

No! She roared. I don't want sandwiches! I want something in a PACKET! 

Ahhhh. Of course, I was horrified. And of course, I immediately felt like a hypocrite because hey, I ate three packets of Twisties while I was waiting for Jay's surgery yesterday. We got home and she howled and he howled and then they started hitting each other and I have no idea when we are going home and it all feels like a hot mess. 

When I left Jay at the hospital this afternoon, he grinnned at me and said This place is great! It's so peaceful here! I guess that could have been the Oxycodone talking, but it was a cheap shot and that's why I'm posting this picture of him, pre-surgery, on the internet: 

The lilac surgical gown suits you, sweetie. Very manly. 

Anyway. I think I've found something else to add to my genocide-banana axis. Appendicitis. If today and yesterday are anything to go by, I am Definitely. Against. Appendicitis.

Nine Seconds

So we are still here.

It feels pretty complicated. On the one hand, I need to - and I want to - maintain all the family relationships we have over here. I'm being a bridesmaid for my cousin on Saturday and I wouldn't miss it for the world. Four of us have all been each other's bridesmaids - the first wedding was in 1998, and fifteen years later this completes the set.

On the other hand: my children. Oy. The next generation of cousins is having a great time together, but the levels of dysregulation from the lack of routine and all the new people? Epic. EPIC.

(And that's just me. Ha).

The choice I have right now is: write a post about the complexities of trying to balance important long-term family connections with the short-term needs of my children and my own inability to handle chaos, or throw up my hands, admit I have no idea and post a video instead.

We are closing in on four weeks here. Home in another week.  How about I show you nine seconds of the boy having fun, and you tell me how to manage this family stuff?

Reasons To Be Three

You're small enough for a piggyback... from an eight-year-old cousin. 

Playing with fountains is genuinely thrilling

And even if there are two of you, you only need to bring one towel. 

 If people annoy you, you can just turn around and run away.

And if you get bored, you just flip yourself upside down and wait for the moment to pass

 You still think that Hello Kitty make a sweet pair of shades

You can take an excursion on a rocking horse very very seriously. 

And yet 'kiss the horsey, sweetheart, kiss the horsey!' seems like a perfectly rational modelling direction.

Most importantly, though, you can see cousins who you don't remember at all and go from almost-strangers ....

...through curiosity....

 ... to friendship....

...to co-conspirators, all in less than a minute.

Long may Three continue. 

Jetlag

This is the only part of jetlag I like:It's 5am and I'm sitting by myself, drinking a coffee and waiting for the sun to rise. We're in Australia right now - did I mention this plan? Actually, I didn't, and I know I didn't, and I'll tell you why.   Last time we came out here, I tried the approach of Massive Overpreparation - I treated the whole plane-with-twins thing like a military campaign and it was a DISASTER. This time, I tried Deep Denial, where I pretended that we weren't coming until about five days before the trip, then shoved a bunch of stuff into bags and hoped for the best. That worked a lot better, judging by the fact that I wasn't crying or quivering or phoning divorce lawyers when we left the airport. Could be the change of approach (maybe), could be the fact that the children are now old enough to watch the Disney Jr channel on the plane for hours at a time (yes, probably that too) but maybe also that I had to compensate for the time difference by taking a whole extra dose of brain medicine while we were in the air (ding ding ding I think we have a winner).

Okay, that's two things I like about jetlag.

I'm not a morning person, at all, so this 5am quiet and wakefulness is a strange and beautiful thing to me. I'm pretty sure that 5am only exists in Australia, and then only for two or three days after we've landed. The light is beginning to leak out from behind the clouds - yes, it's cloudy here too, as cloudy as England, which does feel like some kind of monumental injustice. When one has to pay thousands of pounds to visit family in the southern hemisphere, one at least expects that the weather is going to be nice.

Things I always forget about this place, though: how much it does rain, actually, how fast the sun rises, how noisy the birds are, how quickly I become an unbearable version of myself when I'm staying with my parents. They've moved house since we were last here, and it feels strange. This place is approximately one hundred times nicer than their old house (for a start, I am no longer younger than the carpet) and it's hard to get used to. They designed and built this new house and it's lovely - lots of white, lots of high breezy ceilings, lots of shiny surfaces, lots of wooden floor. Turns out my mother really does have a talent for minimalist design, like she's been claiming all these years. It makes me wonder where my maximalism came from. I don't like clutter and I don't like disorder but I could never pull this kind of sleekness off. Where is the velvet? Why aren't any of the walls painted charcoal grey? The leopard-print ponyskin brogues I wore on the plane are still lying on the floor and they do look a little sad and out of place.

I have no idea why I just told you that. It's probably time to get another coffee.

While we're here, J and I are probably going to have a drive around and look at the areas of Brisbane where the Ethiopian / Eritrean community tends to cluster. We don't have any plans to move, but the perpetual possibility is always in the back of our minds - Jay's more strongly than mine, which surprises me. I wonder what it would really mean to bring up two Ethiopian children here. There certainly are a lot of white people here, that's for sure.  Would living in a different suburb make a difference? I don't know. Yesterday we took two very cranky jetlagged twins down to the park and spoke to precisely one person who immediately asked where they were from. My synapses were firing at very low speed by that time so I hadn't anywhere near formed my mouth to say Ethiopia before my mother said, firmly, England. Technically true, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't what he was asking. Once upon a time I wrote about being a conspicuous family in a big multicultural town. I suspect that being here would take it to a whole different level.

Yet there are things about being here that we love, that the children would love. I think they would happily never go home if it meant that they could spend every afternoon in their grandparents' pool. And I almost hate seeing family when I visit, because it reminds me how much I miss them, and I want to be part of their everyday lives and I'm not. But of course we would feel the other way if we didn't live near Jay's family in the UK. This three-continent-family thing is no joke.

The noisy birds are up. I quite like the straightforwardness of the way they are pretty much just yelling at each other. Here I am, other birds, I'm awake! Oh good, me too! And me! Let's wake up the humans by screeching as loud as we can! Okay!

I think I hear stirring downstairs. Yesterday, I got up at five and crept upstairs to be on my own like this but they were awake. Honestly, I nearly left them to fend for themselves - these first days are filled with people and an hour or so on my own makes all the difference - but my better self won out and instead we met the morning together, munching our bran flakes and waiting for the rest of the world to catch us up. They had lots of things to tell me - Hactually, mummy, hactually - and by the end I only resented a little bit the loss of this morning solace.

I'm glad they slept for longer today, though.

Maybe tomorrow I will do the same.

I Have Some Big News!

You guys? I've finished my book!

It still needs copyediting, layout, checking, footnoting, ISBN-ing, and all that extra stuff, but after seven drafts it's pretty much done. (About time, right?) Here's a mockup of the cover(this is only a rough layout - it will change) :

And there's the title. I could say more, but I'm a little bit out of words right now.

Umbilical

He wishes he had been born from my tummy - it's as simple as that.

I think he would get under my skin if he could. He tries to crawl under my shirt. He looks up at me and says Look, mummy, I in your tummy! 

 It makes me think of Nicodemus.

I let him do it - there must be some reason he keeps doing this -  but I make sure I talk a lot about pretending. Are you pretending to be in my tummy, Blue? 

He nods. He curls himself tightly up on my lap and says Look, Mummy, I have a 'tend umbilical cord! Now that's not a sentence you hear every day.

definitely too big for my tummy. 

Although, we do talk about umbilical cords a lot in this house. It came about because of Pink - she is crazy about her belly button. She gazes at it lovingly and pats it gently, like a kitten. Often, she sidles up to me, dips her head and looks up at me coyly through her giraffe-lashes.  Mummy, can you talk about my belly button again? 



We have a whole established patter about this. Here's how it goes:

When you were a baby, before you were born, you grew in your birthmummy's tummy and was it just you?(Noooooooo!)

That's right, it was Pink AND Blue growing in there together, because you are . ..(Twins!) 

And what happened when you were in her tummy? Did you get hungry? (No!)

Well what did you eat? Could you drink milk when you were in her tummy? (Nooooooo! I had a Bilical Cord!)

That's right! You got your food through a special tube called an umbilical cord, and when your birthmummy ate food, some of it turned into food for you. And  you got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and then you got SO big that you wouldn't fit inside any more and you had to be born. 
And when you were born, the doctor said: these babies don't need an umbilical cord any more, they are born babies! They can drink milk now!  So he went  (SNIP!)(Dramatic scissor actions at this point, of course)

And then in a little while the rest of your umbilical cord fell off and what was left behind? (MY BELLY BUTTON!)

That's right! That's how you got your belly button! So when you see your belly button, you can remember about how your birthmummy kept you safe and gave you all the food you needed when you were in her tummy. (Teachable moment or what? High five, Mummy, I've been telling myself. My children are going to be so well adjusted about their adoption).

She loves, loves hearing about herself as a baby, and this is her favourite story. But these days, she barely lets me get to the end before telling me and then Mummy and Daddy came and got me and we went home on a Neroplane and now we are a FAMILY! 

Ummmmm, yeah, I guess we did, but that is totally not the point here, Pink.  This is supposed to be a story about the umbilical cord, not the Neroplane. Did you not get the memo about the teachable moment? But at the moment, she wants to get to the Neroplane as quickly as possible.

I don't want her to skip forward quickly. I don't want him hiding under my shirt. This is slightly surprising to me. I thought maybe I would.

I always thought that it would be me who had to remember not to pretend that they came from my body. I always thought it would be that way. But no, it's them who want to gloss over what came before and pretend there was never anything except for this, the four of us.

Pink doesn't seem particularly sad about what came first, just not that interested. But Blue hurts.

Maybe one day that hurt will become I wish I had stayed with her. But right now it manifests itself as I wish I had always been with you. I'm astonished to find that this is as painful to witness as the other one would be. My boy wishes that I had been there with him, and I wasn't. Never mind the physical impossibility of what he wants - he wishes I had been there, and I wasn't.

I believe wholeheartedly that an attitude of openness in adoption is always better than the alternative. But I didn't realise this openness would be so painful for them - and especially for him - at this developmental stage. Right now, I think he would honestly prefer not to know that he is adopted. He would prefer that we were all complicit in his fantasies. Why am I surprised by this? As a adult, I have had to work and work at having an attitude of openheartedness towards my children's other family, their early history, their other selves. I don't think that children are naturally open-hearted; I think children crave exclusivity. He has no desire to be part of two families, and why should he? I wonder if sometimes we adults superimpose our own understanding of what they should want onto how they actually feel. After all, they are only three. How can they possibly understand any of this? I am eleven times that and sometimes I don't.

He knows that he came from anther woman's body, but he doesn't want it to be true. He wants to make it go away. I think he's waiting for the day when I will cave in and say only joking, Blue! You weren't adopted You were always mine! 

He wishes that we had been joined by a real umbilical cord. Do I wish that? Not really, but I wish I could take away this layer of sadness from my sunshiny boy.

He wishes he had been born from my tummy - it's as simple as that.