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. 

********

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.

It Doesn't Seem To Matter How Many Times I Explain It...

They just keep letting the pigeon drive the bus.


 
This is probably their favourite book at the moment. Actually, okay, it's mine, but since they can't read yet it amounts to the same thing.

New bedroom, by the way - Jay has FINALLY finished his 18-month-long attic renovation project. We spent all of last week making an entire new bed in our kitchen (what can I say - it seemed like a good idea at the time) and we've moved in even though the room has no bedside lights, no wardrobes, no side tables, actually no other furniture at all - just a bed and some carpet. The whole thing was such an ordeal (Jay did 95% of the renovation himself, and we had a fixed deadline of ten people sleeping in our tiny house last weekend) that all we've done since it finished is sit under the duvet and read stories. And watch youtube. There are worse ways to live, though, right?

To Three or Not To Three: I Like Doing Other Things, Too

What kind of person does it make me if I would rather shut myself away and write a book than raise another child?

Because sometimes I would rather do that. Hey, sometimes I would rather do that than raise the children I already have. They wear me out. They have hit the Whys, and they have hit them hard. I really thought that people complained too much about the whole why thing: after all, what could be more of a privilege than explaining the world to my two little treasures, thought 2011-me? HA HA HA, says 2013-me.

I thought the whys  would be along the lines of 'Mummy, why do I need to hold your hand when I cross the road?' And of course, the answer would be both honest and loving: So you don't get squished, my little angel.

I didn't realise the questions would be not just incessant but unanswerable:Mummy, WHY can't you find my gloves?' /Because I'm a terrible housekeeper, my sweetheart. 'Mummy, WHY do we only have red jam?' / Because Daddy did the shopping and Daddy has no culinary imagination, precious darling  'Mummy, WHY you wearing those clothes?' / Because I like them... I think... hey, what's wrong with these clothes? You're too young to be criticising my clothes!   Mummy, WHY does Nathaniel have a big house but we only have a small house? / Errrrrrrrr.....)

Today, it was even stupider. One of my children requires constant verbal interaction: 'Mummy, look at my feet! Can you see my feet!' (yes I can). 'Oh look, Mummy, THE QUEEN' (that's right, honey, that's a statue of Queen Victoria I think'') and then "Mummy! We are climbing the stairs!" and while I'm trying to think of the appropriate response to that, the other one chimes in with "Mummy, why are we climbing the stairs?"

Why... hang on... what? I have no answer for that, except because we have to. So many of their questions have no response except that's just the way things are, honey; I don't know, I guess that's culturally determined; I have no idea, why DO we bother with cleaning?I'm pretty sure it's all just a chasing after the wind. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. There really is no meaning to so much of what we do, it turns out, when every single thing is interrogated. Mummy is officially weary of it all. It's like living in the book of Ecclesiastes over here.

They are delightful, but they are tiring. And they use me up. I want to do other things too but they need me all the time. For the times I am home with them, they are my job. And when they are asleep I have to do all the things I didn't get a chance to do when they were awake. It's a never ending treadmill. (See here. None of this has changed).

I know that if we added another child to our family, the tiny bit of time that I have left in my life to do things that I actually - gasp - want to do would shrink to be even tinier than it already is. The tiny portion of my brain that remains to me as mine alone feels so small already. I hate that I have so little time to do things that fill me up, as a person - the things that recharge me. I want more time to be creative, in ways both big and mundane. I that this is no less selfish for being an educated sort of selfishness. I know how privileged it is to be yearning for things that are right at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but that's what I'm yearning for.

I mean, some of the time that's what I'm yearning for. Because other days, I ask myself: What kind of person does it make me if I would rather watch TV than raise another child?

Because really, that's no less true than the other stuff. I just want a break, sometimes. Why would I make things harder, faster, busier?

The best description of parenthood I've ever heard is: Lots of joy; not a lot of fun. That's the tradeoff. That's the opportunity cost. We trade one sort of pleasure for another. To be a parent, to do parenting, means sacrificing time that could otherwise be used for other things. I won't get my thirties twice. And I love being a mother, but this really is a real sacrifice. If the joy / fun thing looks like an easy win to you, looks like an equation with a payoff that tends to infinity, I think that you are really underrating how awesome fun can be.

I haven't read a novel all month. I would never, ever have believed that could be true of me.

The other day, I lay on the floor with them and we built roads out of their blocks. I built some tunnels for Blue's trains and he started using them as bridges for a family of imaginary snails, imaginary snails that I hadn't met before and haven't met since. As it was happening, I realised that he would never remember this. He will never remember the day we spend building a block bridge to take his snails to safety.

And I grumpily thought what's the point and then I realised that I will remember this. Days like this are much more a gift to me than to them. When this has all faded into a subconscious childhood blur for them, I will be the one who remembers him, his small pudgy hands, his tiny body, the look of intense concentration on his face, the way he compliments me without quite knowing how to do it: "Oh wow, Mummy, I love your hairs! They look really... similar!" 

I treasure these days. There is so much joy. Why would I not do all this again?

I love them so much. I love being with them.

But I like doing other things, too.