Never What I'm Expecting

This story is in three parts.

***

Pink is devoted - devoted - to her baby dolls. She and Blue both got one for Christmas, and neither of them were interested. They sat on the toy shelf for about three months, ignored. "Do you want to play with your baby, Pink?" "No." "Do you want to play with your baby, Blue?" "Nope". And so it continued. Then one day, I picked up both dolls, handed them to Pink and said "Look, twins!" and a switch flipped in her little head - she had no idea what to do with one baby, but two babies? Now that's something she can get right behind. From that day, she has always referred to them as 'my twin babies'  and they go everywhere with her. "Where are my twin babies?" she asks, constantly, and I tell her: "In the pram / under the sofa / in the tree" or whatever the right answer is that day. Every evening, she forgets to take them upstairs at teeth-brushing-time and then, when she gets into bed, she yells "OH NO! MY TWIN BABIES!" and thunders down the stairs to get them.

(Did I mention that she calls them Pink and Blue? Well, not Pink and Blue, but Pink and Blue's real names? Unless she's having one of her girl power days, in which case she calls them Pink and Pink).

It's all pretty cute.

***

When I was in Australia, my sister and I were brainstorming ideas for my book cover.In the end, I've gone for this cover:

which - I'll be straight with you - I totally love, but getting there was no picnic. Laura was taking a ton of photos of me because hey, photos of me are free, and photos of other people have to be paid for. (The baby on the final cover is from a stock photography site, although Pink remains convinced that it is Blue). We were wanting to  find some way of getting across the concept of an anonymous baby - a hypothetical future baby - and were tossing all kinds of ideas around.
"How about a doll?" suggested one of us, and the other one thought that might be worth trying out, so we got the props ready. Then we suddenly stopped.
"Is this weird and skeevy?" I wondered. "White lady, brown doll? Like the child is some kind of accessory? Isn't that exactly what I don't want adoption to look like? A crowd of social workers might hunt me down and destroy me if I publish that."
"Hmmmmmm," she said. "Let's take the photo and see what it looks like.  Here, start with this white doll, maybe that won't look so weird - "
For the record, it did look pretty weird.
"Okay, maybe not that," she said. "Especially not the one where you are holding the baby by the foot as if it smells bad and you are about to drop it. Let me take a photo of you and Pink instead with all the dolls." And she did, and it was so horrifying that we immediately made an absolutely no dolls on the book at all decision.

See, there are lots of good things and lots of bad things about independent publishing. One of the good things is that you get to have total control over all of the fun bits. I've always loved book covers and I love that I got to design my own for this project. But then one of the bad things, of course, is that if you end up putting a weird, unflattering and borderline-offensive doll-photo on the front, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Also, obviously, it's a truckload of work. I really had no idea how much until I started doing it.Turning a book manuscript into a book object is actually insanely complicated. How can it be so hard to just insert page numbers logically? And how can Garamond italic be so offensive when standard Garamond is so beautiful? All this stuff is interesting and fun, but sometimes incredibly frustrating and astonishingly time consuming (hence my quietness around here lately).  I was reading a writing blog that made a great point: we are all so familiar with books, so used to handling them, that it's easy to underestimate how complex they are. So. Very. True. (And I thought - that reminds me of parenting. Because I saw other people's kids all around me all the time, because I was so familiar with their presence around me, I underestimated how complicated it would be to actually DO all that family stuff. But that's a different post).

***

On Tuesday, we were playing upstairs with the children's birthday toys - a train set and a play kitchen, since you asked. I was all for them sharing the two, but Jay thought they should start learning about having individual things, and I daresay he's right. On the morning of their birthday, when they unwrapped them (to squeals of delight), Pink's rapturous comment was "Oh hooray! Now Daddy and Blue can play with the trains and Mummy and Pink can do girls' things!"  Uh. "Girls can play with trains too, Pink," I said weakly, but my voice was drowned out by the sound of her offering everybody pieces of plastic chicken and slamming the oven door enthusiastically.

By Tuesday, the constant catering was beginning to pall and she flopped dramatically onto the bed and sighed deeply. "Mummy," she said, "when I see my new Mummy again?"

Uh, what? 'The new Mummy and Daddy' feature heavily in our adoption stories, but that's Jay and me - and then I realised she meant her first mother, and said "Do you mean your birthmummy?"
She nodded her head. "My birthmummy AND my birthdaddy" she said.
Woah, this is important. I thought.
"Does that make you feel sad?" I asked. "Would you like to see them?"
An emphatic yes.

I paused while I tried to think of something to say that would let her know she could share her feelings openly and freely; that this was an important but un-threatening topic; that she has the right to feel however she wants to feel about her own important and complex relationship with her other mother. Blue, of course, was still playing with his trains.

"And what would you say to her, sweetie, if you could talk to her now?" I asked, as gently and neutrally as I could.
"I would say 'YOU HAVE TO HAVE ANOTHER BABY!' " Pink said. "And then she would have another baby and we could take it home".
"Uhhhhhhhhh...." I said [and yeah, what would YOU have said????] and then - (when in doubt, ask another question) - "Why would you say that?"
"Because I want MORE BABIES!"
"Uhhhhhh.... okay." Clearly she's not having issues deciding whether this family should stop with two children. I envy her certainty. "I don't really think that's how it works, though, sweetheart." Does it? "If she had another baby, Pink, that would be her baby. It wouldn't be our baby".
"I want to go to my Ethiopia and get another baby!" she wailed. She then told me what she would name the babies (turns out that actually, it's twins again! What kind of luck is that?) and in the end the conversation - which really did start off being about her other mother, I think - was totally about wanting to be a big sister and control the lives of two babies who are - coincidentally - also called Pink and Blue. Just like the real children. And the twin baby dolls.
"Well, when you're a grownup, Pink, you can have as many babies as you like," I said.
She scowled at me.

No matter how much I've read, no matter how much I've thought, these conversations are never, ever, ever, ever what I'm expecting.

"I want another baby NOW!" she said, and I, lost for words, just had to say "I'm sorry Pink, but for now I think you're just going to have to be happy...

look away!!!!

...with the dolls."

The Evening After The Morning Before

Is it normal to have actual chest pains at the thought of a fourth birthday party? This morning, as I was icing a cake and preparing the house for an influx of miniature people, I could actually feel something like a band squeezing my heart. It was pretty painful, but there was a silver lining - at least if I have to go to hospital, I thought, I won't have to supervise ten children in a small space who are all hopped up on way too much refined sugar. 

I do know, by the way, that it is theoretically possible to do a party without a huge amount of sugar, but frankly I'm not sure what the point of that would be. They can have carrot sticks any day, and if their birthday party isn't fun and different then why would I do it? I'm not putting myself through this pain for my own edification. Also - let's be honest - things like healthy snacks require both preparation and planning, and neither of those are my special gifts. Neither is any other kind of party planning. In fact, I'd say that insofar as this birthday party had a theme, it could best be summed up as  Denial. I recommend it, I think. The way it works is that you pretend your children aren't actually having a birthday, and refuse to discuss or think about any details of a party until about four days beforehand when you pick a time at random and then send frantic invitational texts to their friends' parents.

The advantages of this approach are obvious - the late notice means fewer children can come; you can honestly answer all those what are we doing for my birthday questions with a legitimate I don't know; and no paper invitations means that you make significant savings on postage. However, the downside is - well, the chest pains, as you frantically try to do about three weeks' worth of organising in a few hours.

"What are we going to actually do with these children?" I said to Jay, during the ten-minute planning session we had on Thursday.
Jay suggested that he take the children down to feed the ducks. We live about twenty metres away from the river and the Thames Path goes practically right by our house. Just in case you think that makes us fancy - our tiny house was originally built to house abbatoir workers, since the river was the most convenient site for that kind of activity (don't think about that too hard. I try not to).
"Okay, ducks," I said.
"Musical statues?" he suggested. "Or maybe What's the Time, Mister Wolf?"
"We don't have a big enough yard for that" I said (because it's true).
"I know," he said. "We can just play it on the path beside the river."
"Problem with that," I said, "is that ten kids will kind of block the path, and then half of them will get run over by cyclists."
"Well okay then," he said. "Not the actual path, in that case. Just the bit before you get to the actual path."
"You mean the street?" I asked.
"Yeah, I guess" he said. "We won't play there for very long".
"The way things are going," I said, "I think people are just going to remember this party as the one where Jay and Claudia encouraged everybody to play on the road. What else are we going to do with them?"
A long pause.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe television?"

I really wish that at least one of us had some kind of aptitude for this sort of thing. I begged my friends at work for help, and one of them suggested - brilliantly - the idea of sitting all the children down at a table, giving them some plain biscuits (you know that means cookies, right?), a few bowls of icing and some sparkly sprinkles and standing back while they 'decorate'. I told Jay about this, and then we had an argument about party bags. He's anti. I'm not really pro, but I don't really see how they can be avoided when you have ten little faces looking at you expectantly.

"Party bags always seem to have: something sticky, something to choke on, and something that will stain. Surely we can manage that? " I said.
"It's the principle" he said. "It's just plastic junk. Children need to accept that not every party has party bags."
This didn't sit right with me, and a day or so later it hit me why: any sentence that starts with Children need to accept.... is going to end in floods of tears. I can't be doing with that. In the end, I won, and we prepared to send the children home with their dubiously iced biscuits and tiny toy cars that were absolutely exactly windpipe-sized.

The chest pains continued as I iced an octo-alert onto a bought cake, introducing the party's sub-theme: copyright violations. Half an hour before it started, I realised I'd left an important part of the snack menu in a friend's car.

Then the children came, and it was awful. The whole thing was awful. One little boy licked all of the doritos and Blue got in massive trouble from Jay for some unsanctioned sampling of the cake.

Do you know what though?

In a horrible way, it was also kind of fun. I'm sitting here, about ten hours after the party ended, still wearing my paper octonauts hat and remembering that Blue walked into the kitchen then and said OH WOW, LOOK AT MY CAKE! He wasn't judging my skilz at all. The whole thing was an MSG and sugar-fuelled disaster, but they loved it.

They loved it.

Roll on next year.

I think.

War Stories

So a friend of mine recently had a baby. (Shocking, I know). She had difficulty conceiving this time around, and during that time I was the person she turned to.

I was happy to be there for her (obviously; she's my friend). But then she got ready to actually have the baby and suddenly I was surplus to requirements. I have exactly zero useful advice about what to pack for that particular journey. And then it all happened and the baby (lovely, of course) was born and I remembered how weird things always get after that.

There's this ... ritual that groups of mothers always go through when someone comes back to the group after giving birth. You know the one I mean, right? I mean the so, what was your labour and birth like? ritual. It's like the so, show us your ring! engagement ritual, but with way more mucous and placentas.

It's always a strange word salad of body parts and intimacies. It always sounds sort of like:
"Well I was only four centimetres, but then I remembered that when I was at four centimetres with Rose, Dave had gone to get coffee and ..." and then someone breaks in with "... I was being pushed down the corridor in a wheelchair, screaming and begging for an epidural..."and then suddenly everyone is talking and it's all "Honestly, I had no idea meconium was going to be that colour" "and he's yelling 'Push!' and I'm saying 'I am pushing!'" and then someone always says something like "Well when I had Charlie, of course, I thought I was never going to be able to poop again" and then everyone goes mmmmm-hmmmmmm, mmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmm because they have heard this story so often that it's practically like they were there when Charlie's shiny wet head started crowning. Suddenly I know all about all of their lady parts and they're sharing all this incredible detail but I never volunteer any information about my lady parts, ever. After all, they aren't doing anything interesting.

It's a strange and one-sided intimacy, and I've realised that I'm tired of not knowing what to say when other women swap these labor-and-birth war stories. More than that - I don't even know what to do with my face. Am I supposed to look interested? Curious? Sympathetic? Repulsed? I know what all the words mean, obviously, but I don't have any first hand experience. I don't have these war stories. I'm not ever going to have these stories.

I do get it. get it. I get that it's a big thing (fwoaaahh, I think a person just came out of me!) and I get that there is a lot to process. And I know that it's an important bonding experience for women, to swap The head was HOW big? And it came out of WHERE? stuff, but it makes me feel distinctly un-bonded and lonely. This is the weird side of adoption - the bits of the fallout that have nothing to do with how I relate to my children, and everything to do with how I relate to my friends.

After all, I don't think there's anything more isolating than a universal experience that you're not a part of, is there?

Four years into adoptive parenting, and sometimes these feelings still take me by surprise.

Twenty-Five Things I've Learned From Five Years Of Blogging

So Saturday was my blogoversary. Five years. Five years! It's been so much fun. Thanks so much for being here with me; it means more than I can say. Here's to the next five, right? (What a thought).

Anyway. I could reflect on the last five years, but I've already done that - see a) the archives and b) the book. And I generally try my hardest not to blog about blogging (see #8 below) but after five years of reading and writing blogs, I think I've earned this. So here goes, internet - here are my top 25 rules of blogging for fun and profit.

Look What The Postman Brought Me!

this is my happy face, believe it or not.

Paperbacks for checking. This is starting to get real, people!

By the way, I'm planning to have a launch party on facebook when it's time to go, a bit later in the summer. You'll have to photograph your own beverages and show me pictures. Please come. It'll be fun.

There will also be a giveaway of some of my favourite adoption books. I'm trying to narrow down my selection - there are so many good ones that I'm having a tough time choosing. Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child is looking good, though. And Red Dust Road. And My Fathers' Daughter. And ... yeah. It's a tough job making these decisions, but someone's gotta do it.

So. Don't make me sit on facebook taking photos of my own champagne and winning books I already own all night, okay? Come. Promise? That means YOU.

But now - I'd better go - I have some shiny shiny covers to stroke.

Acceptance

So the other day, a friend was visiting and we were talking about our kids, of course, because we had already talked about television and we are too washed up and tired to talk about anything else. Our children are the same age and after we'd discussed all the boring stuff that people do in these situations, she said conversationally, "Do you know what, Claudia? I know they are the same age, but I really think my girl seems like she is a whole year older than your two." Then, on seeing my face, she added "I just mean developmentally."

my genius children

I was shocked into silence. My mouth was saying nothing, but my mind was working at warp speed.

What a ridiculous thing to say, I thought first. My kids are fine. FINE I TELL YOU! 

And then - How dare you, anyway! How dare you say that about my children! How could you be so ill-mannered? I have a good mind to pour my coffee all over you. 

Then I thought about all the stuff my children can do, and my mind continued with anyway, my children are doing all kinds of hard emotional work that your precious princess will never have to do. They are learning about families and complications and dealing with talking about how many parents they have, and why they never see two of them. They are facing the fallout of huge, grown-up decisions they had no hand in making, and they are doing it with such grace and good humour for such tiny people - I am so proud of them, every day. They are doing amazing things. EXCUSE ME if we haven't got around to spelling yet. 

But this was quickly followed by Oh no, when ARE we going to get around to spelling? Sometimes I don't think they'll ever be ready. They'll be behind before they go to school, and then they'll never catch up and they'll never be able to get a job and I'll have to keep working forever to support their cheerios habit and oh no, she's right, they are a year behind, she's right.... 

In other words, I cycled through the first four stages of grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression - in under thirty seconds.

I quickly changed the subject, but I've continued to think about it, obviously. I  have been thinking how this conversation was actually pretty different from the ones that people normally have about kids' development. Those usually go Oh, your child isn't SPELLING yet? Really? Oh. Okay. Oh well, I'm sure they'll catch up. 

I know this stuff is well meant, but it always makes me think Oh yeah? And if not, then what? 

Because this is a weird thing about having three-year-olds. People are still talking as if they are all going to achieve equally. Uh, yeah, not so much, I don't think. We don't really know who will do what at this point but I do know some children will be capable of more than others. And if my child is at the bottom of the bell curve, if my child doesn't 'catch up', what happens then? There must come a point where people stop telling mothers that their child is going to catch up, a point where everyone realises yeah, that kid is really not ever going to be like the other kids. Or even if the child doesn't have obvious problems, there must come a point where the teacher realises that this child isn't going to set the world on fire, academically. This child is never going to catch up to Princess Perfect and her gang.

Maybe I should thank Princess Perfect's mother for her refreshing honesty. Or maybe I should just start criticising her kid's development, and see how she likes that. "Oh, Princess Perfect can't sing arpeggios yet? I guess it's like my children are a whole year older. I just mean musically." 

But what would be the point of that? Because a) it's rude, b) who cares what her child is doing, c) no, really, who cares, d) honestly? Who cares and also e) it's still as rude as it was at a).

But people talk as if this stuff matters. People tend to say that each child will 'catch up' with whatever imaginary milestone is being discussed, apparently, but if not then what? All this oh, they'll catch up makes me think the speaker feels like the alternative is too awful to even contemplate. If they don't catch up, does that render them unloveable?

Colour me obvious, but achievements and milestones are not what makes kids - mine or anyone else's - precious. I know we don't really think this is true, but if that's the case why do we talk like we do, about catching up, with all this boring competitiveness? Why did Princess Perfect's mother feel like she could be somehow proud of her child's superior development (whether imaginary or not)? I don't want my kids thinking that way about themselves, as if this is what makes them worthwhile. I don't want my kids thinking that way about other people, either. And by the way, I think this goes for the Oh, she may not be very clever but she's very kind stuff too. What happens when our children also have below average kindness? Because even that stuff isn't dished out evenly, is it? Not in my house, anyway.

My point is this - it's not a game. It's not a race. It's not a competition.

My children are unutterably precious to me for one reason, and only one - they are my children. They do not have to be better or faster or stronger or cleverer or taller than anybody else's to earn their place in my heart.

After all, isn't this why kids need families? The strongest, the fastest, the cleverest, the prettiest - they are the kids who would probably survive wherever and however they grow up. Families are what the rest of us need. Families are the places where we clutch our average children close to our average chests and run our fingers through their average hair and whisper in their average ears that nobody, nobody is more precious to us than them, and we say this because it's absolutely, totally true.

You know what? Maybe my children really are developmentally behind Princess Perfect. Maybe they always will be. And I would spare them hardship, if I could. I would like them to be clever and tall and beautiful and a dozen other things that would grease life's wheels for them. But I can't, and I wouldn't love them any more if I could.

I do think that my two are largely fine, developmentally, but that's not the point. And Princess Perfect's mother really was rude, but that's not the point either. And it's also not the point that my two are scaling emotional mountains no three year old should have to climb, or that actually, they may never 'catch up' academically, or that I may need to pay for their breakfast cereal until they leave home at forty-five.

The point is that we're a family, and I love them, and they're precious, and they're mine. And really, that makes the rest of it seem kind of irrelevant.

Public Service Announcement

Because sometimes I think we all need a bit of this.

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.

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