Four Gardners and Me

Squirrel Story

2011-06-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

For 10 years, I have been telling squirrel stories. They started as a way to put Trent and Michela to bed and were inspired by the squirrels that once scampered about in our attic at night. The stories always began the same way: "Once upon a time, there were two baby squirrels -- Trent and Michela. They lived in an attic. . . . "

Well, recently, a new baby squirrel name Maya appeared on the scene. This was the first story in which Maya appeared:

Once upon a time, there were three baby squirrels -- Trent, Michela, and Maya. They lived in an attic of a house on Main Street where an old lady lived. During the day, while the squirrels’ mother gathered acorns for the winter, the baby squirrels slept. At night, after their mother and the old lady went to sleep, they got up and played in the attic.

They were naughty squirrels. They got into everything. They knocked over boxes of Christmas ornaments and chased the glass balls around on the floor. They chewed into a box of the old lady’s love letters and made a mess of the envelopes that the old lady had neatly tied with ribbon.

The squirrels’ mother had scolded the naughty squirrels many times. She told them not to make so much noise. She was worried that if the old lady found out they lived in the attic, the lady might patch up the soft wood that their mother had gnawed through to make the door to their home. Their mother also told them that if they ever heard footsteps on the squeaky wooden stairs, they should immediately run and hide in their secret place in the corner under the eaves.

Still, night after night, the baby squirrels played and made noise.

One morning, after a long night of playing, the squirrels heard the old lady climbing the stairs to the attic. They were alone. Their mother had gone out to get acorns. They were frightened. But they remembered what their mother had told them and quickly scampered to the corner of the attic. They held their breath and waited.

The old lady opened the attic door, entered and looked around. She poked around in the cardboard boxes which held her letters and stacked them neatly against the wall. She picked up the Christmas balls and boxes from the floor, placed each ornament in its own compartment, and set the boxes on a wooden chair near the top of the stairs. Then she left.

The squirrels let out a breath of air filled with relief.

They had begun to play some more when the smallest squirrel, Maya, noticed that the old lady had left the attic door ajar. She was curious about what the rest of the house looked like and, swiftly, she scampered down to take a peek. Michela whispered loudly, telling Maya to come back up. Trent warned that the old lady might see her. Maya didn’t listen. She slipped out the opened door.

In an instant, Maya’s brother and sister knew what they had to do. They chased after Maya.

It took them a while to find her. They found her in the old lady’s bedroom curled up next to a soft velvet pillow on the big bed. Just as they shoved her to get moving, the three of them heard the attic door being closed. Michela whimpered. Now they might never get back to their home. Or their mother.

Trent told them not to worry. He had a plan. They would hide until they heard the front door open and then they would run out the front door to escape.

On the first floor, the old lady stirred oatmeal over the stove and listened to the news on the radio. The three squirrels tip-toed down the carpeted stairs and hid behind the long winter coats hanging on the coat rack. Hours passed until the old lady walked right to where they hid. She took down a coat to wear outside to check the mail. The three baby squirrels were so relieved that she didn’t see them that they almost forgot their plan.

And then they saw it! The old lady had left the door opened a crack. The squirrels escaped and hid under the holly bush outside the front door.

After the old lady went back inside, the three baby squirrels ran to the gutter at the corner of the house and scampered up to the hole that was the entrance to their home. They squeezed through the hole and found their mother waiting for them. Their mother was angry. The baby squirrels didn’t know whether to tell their mother what they did or not. They only knew that they were happy to be home. They snuggled up next to her and felt her sigh with relief.

That night, as the squirrels played in the attic, the old lady lay in her bed and listened. She heard sounds above her and wondered what those three naughty baby squirrels would get into next.

FOR NATIONAL DIABETES AWARENESS MONTH: A BARE BONES PRIMER ON TYPE 1 AND MONOGENIC DIABETES

2010-11-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

I’m a lawyer and should be drafting an appellate brief. But blogging about diabetes and my two wonderful children who have it is so much more fun.

My 14 year old son Trent was diagnosed a few days after his fourth birthday. Due to my husband’s vigilance, Trent was well cared for at home. We were lucky to find a no-nonsense babysitter who, after being told Trent had diabetes, said, “OK, so I prick his finger to get blood and then what?” She took on the challenges of diabetes with aplomb. Trent was asked to leave the daycare he was attending when he was diagnosed in June 2000. As a lawyer, I learned about Section 504 and the IDEA Statute and convinced the daycare (on the campus of a community college) that they had to take him back. I didn’t really want him to return, but I wanted to prove my point. I was subsequently able to use Section 504 to get him enrolled in a public pre-k program. With Trent on the pump in August of 2000, we faced another legal situation with the public school. However, with some ingenuity, and help from Crystal Jackson at the American Diabetes Association, we worked through that as well.

Now, ten years later, Trent is a freshman at a selective public high school. Here’s what I have learned in the ensuing 10 years since diagnosis:

1. ChildrenWithDiabetes.com is the best place for support and information on the internet or anywhere else. (See the parents’ list and message boards and chat rooms and conferences.) Someone at CWD has certainly experienced what you are going through with regard to your child’s diabetes and can point you in the right direction for help (including referring you to the right people as I was referred to Crystal Jackson).

2. You do not have to wait to have your child placed on a pump. 10 years ago, it was very rare to have a newly diagnosed 4 year-old on a pump. We were told by the endo that we had to wait until we learned how to use insulin. We told then endo we would find another endo who would prescribe a pump if she didn’t. She prescribed it. It is now routine to prescribe pumps for newly diagnosed children. This is a good thing. Contrary to the “old school,” it is just as easy to administer insulin through an insulin pump as through needles. It is just a different delivery mechanism. A mechanism which, by the way, makes it possible to administer the tiny doses of insulin that toddlers and babies require, and that allows for basal rate patterns to more closely match your child’s needs.

3. I had been very hesitant about pumping. I didn’t like the idea of seeing my beautiful baby hooked to machinery; it made diabetes so much more visible 24/7. My husband was insistent and I am glad he was. It means you don’t have to force a fussy toddler to eat when he doesn’t want to and allows him to eat whenever he wants. This has to be good in terms of avoiding “issues” with food. Moreover, when your toddler arrives at school with medical equipment that is more expensive than your car, the school takes notice and believes diabetes is as serious as it is.

4. You are lucky if a parent or a babysitter is able to help with diabetes care. My family was always uneasy with helping. I was lucky to find a babysitter. If you can’t find such a person on your own, go to ChildrenWithDiabetes.com and find someone in your area with a child with diabetes and give each other a break. You will need it. Don’t turn down help.

5. Learn your rights in school and learn about Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Amended Americans with Disabilities Act. You may need to become a legal expert to advocate for your child. I used Section 504 in a very unique way. Section 504 requires a public school to make reasonable accommodations for a disabled child. There is no description in the law that says what those accommodations are, except that they be reasonable. So, when Trent was diagnosed in the summer before pre-k and I had not had him tested the prior year for the gifted school, I asked that they test him for the school late as an accommodation. I wasn’t asking them to admit him if he didn’t meet the academic requirements; only that they test him out of sequence. They did. He was accepted to our gifted school and I didn’t have to send him back to where he was not wanted.

6. After diagnosis, take some time to grieve. Your child will be OK, but you will need to grieve the realization that you can’t protect your child from everything. Believe that with time, while it won’t get easier, it will become a new “normal.” Don’t forget to take time to care for your children without diabetes; the diagnoses will require sacrifices and grief on their part as well. They also need special attention.

You may find that diabetes actually brings good into your life. Don’t be surprised. For our family, we have learned to eat better and become experts on nutrition. We have made friends that are as close as family. We even adopted a baby daughter with diabetes.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY NEXT STORY:

My husband and I had two children by birth, Trent and Michela, but were never able to conceive more children. We loved our two, but always hoped perhaps to get pregnant again or adopt. When we heard about a baby through a contact at CWD who had diabetes and was in foster care in a neighboring state, we immediately called the social worker. Considering the state of the foster care system in this country, everything went relatively smoothly. We learned about Maya in August 2007, had supervised visitation with her, and were lucky to have her placed in our home within two months. Thus, she came to us when she was only 9 months old. (Being a lawyer helped again; I pushed through the legal requirements and even stretched a few to meet our needs.) My husband and I became foster parents. With our children, then ages 10 and 8, we were all thrilled to have Maya in our lives. In December 2008, we adopted her and officially became a family. We continue to have good relationships with her biological family through an “open adoption.” It is appropriate that November is both the official month for raising awareness of diabetes and adoption!

Maya was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of one month old. Her mother brought her to the emergency room in a state much like Type 1 ketoacidosis. She was life-flighted to a university hospital. When we brought Maya into our family, we believed she had Type 1 diabetes. She came to us wearing an insulin pump strapped to her back as she crawled. Being a part of the online diabetes community, we had learned that infants who were diagnosed with diabetes under six months of age might have a rare form called Monogenic Diabetes. It is a form of diabetes caused by a mutation in a single gene; an inherited gene or a gene that mutated in utero. Because none of Maya’s biological parents has diabetes, we know that her gene mutation (a mutation to the Kir6.2 subunit of the KCNJ11 gene) must have occurred in utero. (Thanks to Professor Hattersly in England for discovering monogenic diabetes.) We had her tested (a simple cheek swab) for the genetic form of diabetes and discovered that she had it. Over the course of a week in the hospital, we witnessed a miracle in the making. As the doctors decreased her insulin and increased doses of glyburide (an inexpensive type 2 medication), Maya became independent of exogenous insulin. (Thanks to Professor Philipson at the University of Chicago for guiding us through the transition.) Today, we only give pills to Maya to control her diabetes.

We feel as though we are the luckiest people on the planet to have adopted the daughter we always wanted and to find she has a form of diabetes that is easier to treat.

So, if you are newly diagnosed, be prepared for the unexpected. You may find joys you never imagined.

Open Adoption: Slicing Through the Concept of Family

2010-09-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about open adoption and what it is at its most basic element. It has been suggested that open adoption is about sharing of information at its core. I tend to agree that sharing of information is a significant part of open adoption. For instance, I love calling Maya’s mother (biological /first) and sharing information: telling her about all of the new events in Maya’s life -- that her teacher is crazy impressed with her ability to speak in front of the class and that the music teacher is floored with her singing abilities. I love sharing these events with Nikki because I know that she is as proud of her Maya as I am. I also love when Nikki’s grandmother shares with me the names of the Native Americans in the family going back many generations. I have gathered much ancestral information on Nikki and Maya’s genealogical tree from the information I have received. I don’t want Maya to lose that part of her history as a result of being adopted. I want her to be a proud Native, Japanese, Cuban, African, German American raised by her Catholic Italian mother and her Mayflower descended/Swiss Mennonite father. I know how crucial my ethnic and religious upbringing has been towards the making of my identity. I want Maya to have an understanding of her ethnic and racial background in order to develop a fully formed view of who she is.

Still, information sharing is, for me, not the most essential aspect of our open relationship. It’s nice to have access to all of Maya’s medical information and familial history. And to share her accomplishments. But more importantly, our open relationship has thrived as a result of us all – my family and Maya’s first family – opening our hearts to each other. We have used this wonderful tool of adoption to expand our family and to bring more people into our family that we might not previously have had. We have used the tool of open adoption so that Maya can have more people in her life that love her to the bone. Our belief has been that having more people love a child cannot possibly be bad. So, we open our hearts and homes to one another. My heart and home is open to Nikki and her family. They have opened their heart and homes to us.

It takes a certain capacity to love new family members unconditionally, merely because the circumstances dictate that such unconditional love is best for all. But, somehow, so far, we have managed this. If Nikki’s family wanted to look closely and find something we have done with Maya that they disapprove of, it wouldn’t be hard. Surely our methods of raising a child are different from their methods. Nikki’s family has not done this. They have been nothing but supportive of the way in which Maya is being raised. Likewise, when we go visit there, we are confronted with ways of handling children that we might consider less than ideal. Still, we respect the rights of Maya’s family to interact with her as they interact with others in their extended family.

Maybe that’s what is at the core of open adoption. It is not merely sharing information. It is not merely opening your heart and home. Open adoption requires people to open their minds and expand their understanding of what constitutes a family. It requires being open to a new kind of family and being open to seeing that family as valid as the traditional family. Open adoption requires people to slice open the entire concept of family, redefining it to include both a child’s birth family and a child’s adoptive family. Blasting open the concept of family mandates that people involved in open adoptions remain open to experiencing the uncharted adventures that lie ahead of them. Indeed, families in open adoptions need not only remain open to the adventures, they need to embrace them. And they need to shine their lights outward so as to open the minds of others who are not so lucky.

For other views on open adoption, see

http://www.adoption.com/uni/frame.php?url=http://www.productionnotreproduction.com/2010/09/open-adoption-roundtable-19.html

Moon Shadows

2010-07-28T22:28:00.001-07:00

I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know. But I can’t believe I let it happen. It just happened so slowly. Over time. It wasn’t one thing I did or didn’t do. Rather, it was like the tide eroding at the dune’s edge. Little by little, stealing away form and shape. Who would have ever thought it would come to this?

My husband has been encouraging me to exercise for years. For years I have had any number of excuses. I had to work. I wanted to join a gym to work out. I was healthy enough.

Until recently.

A few weeks ago was my 48th birthday. I had to face the truth. I have a three year old and I want to live a long healthy life so I can be there to watch her into her forties. To do that, I would need to be in good physical shape. I don’t need to win races anymore. It’s not like in the old days. I just need to be out there. So, for two weeks my husband and I have been going to the Roosevelt Highschool track to work out in the evenings. (Who am I kidding? What I have been doing looks nothing like a work out.)

It has been unbelievably hot this summer. I can’t remember summer heat that has affected me like the heat this summer. I haven’t been able to accomplish very much, including cleaning the house. It has been too damn hot. That’s my excuse anyway. So, instead of running during daylight hours, we have been going to the track after dark – when we hoped it would be cooler.

If I hadn’t been there and seen it for myself, I would never have believed it. We weren’t the only crazy ones running by the light of the moon. There is a veritable cadre of people who clandestinely appear at the track after dark at 9:00 p.m. The young black sprinter with his long tight sinewy legs, practicing his sprints and stretching. The dark-skinned hurdler, gliding over hurdles like a gazelle. The thin white woman with her long blonde hair and skinny legs, ipod connected to her ear, running up and down the stadium stairs. And the father, maybe a decade younger than Tim and me, yelling to his boys interchangeably in English and Arabic. Or was it Hebrew? It was hard to tell. The actual words just disintegrated in the air before they reached me across the field. (Seeing his children play in the dark at the edge of the track brought to mind children I had once read about who had some condition where their skin couldn’t be in sunlight; their mother took them behind their house to play at night. Under the moon.) The father had good form and was covering his miles at a fast clip, checking in on his children with each quarter mile.

Then there were Tim and I. Tim had been running one mile three times a week for years. Last year, he stepped it up to three miles and began to swim on the off days. Many a night he could be seen running around our block which makes a circle – six laps to a mile. With Trent and Michela, when they were young, and lately with Maya, we often waited for him to round the bend and yelled “Go Daddy Go!” from the front lawn.

I hated running around the block. The street banked from the high center of the street to the lower side by the curb. It always hurt my knees to try to run there – on the few other occasions that I tried to exercise. So it was I who told Tim that if he would run with me at the track, I would exercise with him. He agreed and has come to enjoy the track as much as I once did. His form is not the best; he lopes and his arms swing from side to side somewhat, instead of efficiently going back and forth. But he makes pretty good time around the track. Three laps for every two that I run. And two laps for each one that I walk.

The very first day I approached the track I was excited. I had run many a race in high school on various tracks. I had made good friends and learned many life’s lessons from my coach on the track. Just walking on, I thought about striding around and feeling good, like I always had. (Some dust-covered trophies in the attic and newspaper clippings would testify to my former ability to run a 2:18 half mile and a 5:15 mile at my best. I had been our high school’s scholar athlete the year I graduated. Previously this had been awarded to the best football player who could maintain a C average. I was the first girl to receive it and the only graduate to attend Harvard.)

That first day is when I realized what had happened to me. I may have felt like I could just hop on the track and run a mile. But my 48 year old body would protest otherwise. With each slow small step that I took, portions of my body began to hurt. My upper thighs. My calves. And my knees. Oh, my knees! All the extra weight I have carried for 30 years have taken a toll on my knees. I was reminded of Coach, who used to faithfully run, if a bit wobbly, around the track and on the streets with ace bandages or braces around his knees. I had reached *that* age.

The first night, after jogging/walking a mile and a half, my aching legs wouldn’t let me sleep. I had to take Ibuprofen to ease the pain. A couple of nights I jogged/walked two miles. So far, that is the farthest I have made it. All the while, I am reminded of the days in high school that we ran twice a day to train. Early in the morning, my friend Eileen would come knock on my bedroom window to wake me so that we could go run around a field 20 times or the equivalent of five miles. In the evening, we would have practice around a track at a neighboring school, where we had to jump the fence, because our school was too poor to have a track. Or during cross country, we would run out in small packs, grouped according to how fast we could run, and run for 7 miles or more.

I still need someone like Eileen and am grateful to have Tim, who nudges me each evening to come with him to the track, even when I have excuses: “I have to cook. I want to go to Shanikqua’s house and watch my new favorite TV show.” Tim is gently persistent.

So many memories flood back into my mind and keep me going on the track. My coach would say that every mile is like putting money in the bank. Each one makes you stronger, no matter how slow you go. So I push on. In two weeks, I think I have saved about 12 dollars! Me, with my wobbly knees and ace bandage.

And I am reminded of a wonderfully inspirational speech I recently heard by Jay Hewitt about his iron man competitions. In his speech, he describes pain and depletion of a magnitude that I can only imagine. He describes thinking that he can’t make it any further. And then asking himself, “How bad do you want it?” He concludes by advising children with diabetes (he, himself, has Type 1 diabetes), “You may not win, but you will do better than those who never tried.”

As I run around the track, I think of my children, and my coach, and Jay Hewitt. And I hear the melody of my earrings. “Clink clink, clink clink!" The harmony with each step I take. “Shuffle, shuffle." And my breaths keeping time. “Huufff, huufff, huufff.” The sprinter runs by. “Pitter patter pitter patter!” The hurdler glides. “Whoosh!” The young girl runs up and down the steps. "Tap tap tap tap.” The father passes me on the outer lane and my husband laps me again. My knees go “clickety clack.” Under the dark sky, as I chase my moon shadow around the track, I am determined. I may never win anything again, but I will do better than if I had never tried.

Wish me luck.

Some Random Musings on My 48th Birthday

2010-06-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

1. I’m not baking my own birthday cake. Instead, I am doing what our foster child, Livie (wonder how she is), suggested last year: I took one of those shrunken half gallons of ice cream (mint chocolate chip because you can’t get peppermint in the summer) and let it melt a little. (Not difficult in today’s heat and humidity.) Then I spooned it into a store-bought oreo cookie crust and placed the plastic cover of the crust on top upside down. Put the whole thing in the freezer to re-freeze for dinner. Better than Carvel at a fraction of the price.

2. I am also not cooking my birthday dinner. Trent has promised to cook. I know he makes a mean tilapia, so that will be good. I only hope he cleans up after himself because I’m not cleaning either.

3. Last year at this time, we had a foster daughter Livie because her biological mother wouldn’t let her travel to Canada with her foster family for vacation. She had type 1 diabetes. Each night I got up and went from her bedroom to Trent’s to test blood sugars in the middle of the night. It was tiring for eight days. I can’t imagine how people with two kids with Type 1 do it. (Maya doesn’t need testing in the middle of the night. She has a rare kind of diabetes and is very unlikely to go low – and never seriously low.) I wonder how Livie is doing. Last time I heard, her foster parents decided it was too much work and wanted to give her back to the state. (Pisses me off. Don’t we all want to do that with our kids? But we don’t!) Mental note to check up on her.

I think I’ll keep my three kids this week. Trent is starting to be very useful at 14. He’s strong and can carry heavy loads. And he’s interested in cooking. Michela is always funny. Just as her friend Angela once commented, “This family is no fun without Michela.” And Maya is funny and endearing. Besides, she has actually slept in her own bed for three nights in a row. That’s almost a pattern.

I think I’ll keep Tim too. He’s good for a lot of things. But that’s fodder for another time.

4. It's been a good day. A man in the supermarket gave me a coupon for paper towels on sale because I helped him locate the right size. Don’t you hate when you get to the counter and the check out lady says, “That’s not the size that’s on sale!.” Almost as bad as when she yells out, “I need a key. Food stamps!.” That’s never happened to me, but I’ve seen it. My pharmacist did yell out once, “Ms. Rago? Ms. Rago? I’m sorry we don’t have any more of your ______ medicine in stock.” Um, what? Why don’t you tell all of CVS what meds I am taking?

5. Another reason why it's been a good day is that it started with a telephone conversation with one of my dearest friends. (Even if the conversation was about bacteria she picked up from eating chicken in Paris last week.) I also received a phone call from an old flame. Not bad after more than 25 years, I figure. And no client has called to yell at me and demand that I be more accountable. That, in itself, makes for a good day.

6. I’m 48. Almost half way through with my life. I hope I can make the second half better than the first. And I hope I can get in better shape. The supermarket tabloid declared that Zack Ephron, at age 50, has an amazing body. Well, no one’s gonna declare my body good enough for The Star. But I hope it’s good enough to pass a stress test by the time I turn 50. Mental note to start exercising.

After the ice cream cake tonight. . . .

(P.S. The cake above is the one I baked for Trent last week.)

Maya-isms

2010-06-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

Maya always says things that make us take a deep breath and look at each other in shock. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we are amazed. Like when she hid under the dining room table and announced, "Oh, no! Daddy is coming. He's going to recognize me." She is three years old. Going on forty. "Recognize?" Really? And then there was the time she told me, "I absolutely do want to go to Starbucks, once I finish what I am doing." You "absolutely do want to go?"

Of course, those times were better than when she turned to me and told me she was going to "kick my ass." I pretended I didn't hear her because I didn't want her to think I was as shocked as I was! She has never said that again.

Well, this week, we have had a few more amazing statements by Maya:

As she was putting on her sandals, to wear under her princess costume, she announced, "I have to put my sandals on so that I can look FABULOUS." Fabulous? Um, OK.

Then, today, she saw my brother Tony, her Uncle Tony, for the first time in a long time. He picked her up and kissed and hugged her. She said, "I remember you. You weren't nice the last time I saw you. But now you are nice." My brother Tony can be gruff, so we all laughed.

Lastly, our house is under a bit of construction. With a new roof and gutters being put on. And walls ripped out to put in french doors to the deck and to build new closets. So, when we went to my sister Marissa's house today, and Maya saw Marissa's kitchen ceiling ripped out, she looked at it carefully. (Marissa's air conditioner had leaked so she was none too happy about the gash in the ceiling.) Maya turned to Marissa and said, "Oh! I didn't know your house was banged up like ours is!" Banged up? That's actually very close to how I feel about how the house looks.

We continue to be amazed by Maya's skilled grasp of the English language and her use of intonation to get across her meaning. When she starts counting spoons in Spanish, we are blown away. But that's a whole 'nuther story. . . .

When Maya Looks Back

2010-05-31T22:24:00.000-07:00

In the shower today alone (without Maya) for the first time in a long time, I enjoyed having the entire showerhead to myself. I imagined a day when I would be able to take a shower without Maya asking to get in with me. Then I thought, “Don’t hurry up these years by wishing them away. Savor the moments. Most people don’t get to do babyhood and toddler-hood a second time with the benefit of hindsight and having experienced it once before. You know how fast the years go.” And I thought about all the things I will miss when Maya gets older. I will miss how she plays at my feet and chatters to herself, singing songs she has recently heard and, sometimes, even practicing curse words she has heard. (Ooops!) I will miss how I hear her feet paddling along the wooden floors coming to my bed in the middle of the night and how, when she arrives eye level at my bedside she quietly, and in her best voice, asks if she can sleep next to me, “for just a little while.” I may even miss how she wears my Tupperware on her feet and skates around the kitchen floor or spreads every block and toy on the living room carpet.

Sometimes I am saddened for the mother who gave her life, her Mommy Nikki, because she misses a lot of these little milestones: Being able to open the refrigerator all by herself. Being able to identify all the vegetables on her plate – and liking them! Being able to pour a cup of juice. Being able to climb up onto the toilet to reach the sink and brush her teeth. Being able to take off her own clothes or put on her own seatbelt. Every day, Maya learns something new. I try to keep Nikki apprised and to let her enjoy in the small miracles of our life when she is here or when we go visit her. I have her brush Maya’s hair (Nikki is much better at that than I am). Or test her blood sugar or choose her clothes or read Maya’s favorite books or snuggle in bed with Maya during the night.

People ask if this isn’t confusing to Maya. I don’t think it is. It’s her normal. She will happily announce to people, “I have two mommies!” Most of the people we are with understand what she means. Sometimes people look at me wondering if I am a lesbian. I laugh and let them wonder. Lately Maya has been re-telling the story of her birth and that of her siblings, Trent and Michela., checking with me in a questioning tone to see if she has it right ‘”Mommy, Trent and Michela were taken from your stomach by the doctors and then brought to you to take care of them?” I answer, “Yes, Maya.” “I was taken by the doctors from my Mommy Nikki’s stomach and then brought to you?” Even though this is a pretty shorthand version of the truth, I agree with her because this is how she seems happy envisioning things at the moment. Little by little she will understand the full details.

How will she come to view the circumstances of her life when she is older? I don’t think we can really know. Open adoption is still very much an “experiment” in some sense. (Although in another sense, it is a very tried and true tradition for family to raise another family member’s child, when the biological mother is unable. In our case, the only difference is that we became family with Nikki through Maya; we weren’t family prior to Maya’s birth.) Indeed, raising children in and of itself is as much an experiment. Before becoming a parent, no one has had experience in raising their children. And no one knows what the outcome of his or her efforts will be. That is the definition of what an experiment is, in my book. Trying something you’ve never done before and having faith that it will work out for the best.

Towards the middle or end of this "experiment" we call our lives, when Maya looks back, I hope that she sees that her mother and I worked at making the best choices for her life that we could. I hope she remembers the fondness that Nikki and I share for one another. I hope that Maya does not view my role as a person who has taken away another person's baby, but rather loved her enough to want to bring her and her family into my life. I hope that she sees that Nikki had little choice once the state got involved, but made the best choice for her under the circumstances. I hope that she sees how both her families worked hard to become one family for her sake -- because we all love her. And that both families compromised in order to make the situation work.

I hope that Maya will look back fondly on the times we took her to visit her brother and cousin and aunts and uncles and grandparents and mother and sisters -- on holidays, on their birthdays. I hope she sees how I always thoughtfully pick presents for her family and make sure that I don't forget them. And that I share the best photographs, pieces of artwork, and life stories with them, so they can be as proud of her as I am. I hope she will look fondly on the times her mother and other family members came to see her in her home, with her adopted family. That she enjoyed showing them her latest milestone: riding her tricycle; moving into a big girl bed; painting pictures and hanging them on "her" door in the kitchen.

I hope that she is proud of her birth family as much as her adoptive family. I hope she gains a skill for dealing with people from all walks of life, having walked between the two worlds of her two families. I hope she views the situation as lucky: to have two families even before she marries, when she will have three. (Unless by crazy coincidence, she marries a man from an open adoption who will also have two families! In which case she will have four families in her life!) Not to mention the family that she may one day create. I pray in my heart that she will not find any of us a burden. And that she will know that I did not find the openness of her adoption a burden. I hope she knows I enjoyed it -- I get to brag about her to the only other people in the world who love her as much as I do. I hope she knows that the openness was as much for me, as for her and her mother. I couldn't live with her adoption any other way. Maybe under some other circumstances, I would not have chosen this. But in this instance, for our entire extended family, the openness of the adoption is ideal.

***For other thoughts on how parents hope their children will view their open adoption, see here:

http://www.productionnotreproduction.com/2010/02/open-adoption-roundtable-16.html

The Fake Birth Certificate

2010-05-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

When a child is adopted, the local government issues a new birth certificate to the family. The new birth certificate essentially obliterates evidence of the child’s past, as though it never happened. Instead of showing that a child was born to the parents who actually gave birth to her -- and then indicating that the child is adopted into her new family and has a new name – the new birth certificate is issued as though the adoptive parents gave birth to the child on her birthday. In our case, Maya’s newly issued birth certificate asserts to the world that Tim and I gave birth to her in Pennsylvania in the exact hospital and at the exact moment that she actually was born. Her mother’s name – the person that actually did give birth to her – is nowhere to be seen on the newly issued birth certificate. Nor is her biological father’s name there. Instantly wiped out and erased by the government. Kind of like being in the witness protection program. The government creates a new identity for an adopted child and issues official government documents to perpetuate the lie. The only difference? Adopted children generally don’t need protection from anyone, particularly not from their original families. In the instances where children might need protection from abusive original families, perhaps this fiction is warranted. But, for the most part, adopted people WANT their original birth certificates and the only people they need protection from are the government bureaucrats that continue to deny them this fundamentally important information.

We have what is known in adoption circles as an “open” adoption. We have essentially extended our family to include Maya’s family, so that hopefully Maya will feel that she has not been ripped from her roots, but merely replanted in another part of her family garden. So, for Maya, she will always have access to her original birth certificate. She can ask her mother to see it when she is with her because we have a very good relationship with Maya's original family. But the original birth certificate no longer has any legal effect. It is null and void, essentially. As though her birth to her mother never really occurred the way that it did. It is as though the original birth certificate created a marriage and the second birth certificate represents a divorce decree. But instead of creating a new type of paperwork to represent reality – that Maya was born to a first set of parents and adopted to a second set – the government has taken the documentation that already exists and tries to make it seem as though the reality were different. The government tries to make it look as though Maya were born to Tim and me. Like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

I am completely comfortable with the fact that I am Maya’s mother. I don’t need her birth certificate to erase the existence of her original mother in order to make me feel like I am her mother. I know I am her mother. I feel like the birth certificate I have is a total fake. I would prefer if it said that Nevaeh Nikol, born to Nikki and Y.A. on her birth date at the hospital in Pennsylvania, will now be known as Maya Nevaeh Nikol, with her new parents Tim and Michelle, of New York. Why can’t the government create some new documentation to evidence the reality that we know to be true instead of insisting that it’s version of reality is the only one that it will document? Tim and I had never even heard of the town where Maya was born until we got involved with adopting her. We had surely never set foot there. It feels like such a sham to have government issued documents, with raised seal and all, claiming that we gave birth to her in a town we had never set foot in. I can’t begin to imagine what that feels like to a child or even grown adopted person. I imagine it gives one an instinctive sense of the irony of life and government authority.

I have asked my girlfriend who is adopted how she felt. She is an adopted person who has no interest in the mother who gave birth to her. She says she would just tell her "Thanks for doing the right thing. I have had a great life." I find this to be a little bit of denial. But what do I know? I am not an adopted person. I just can’t imagine not wanting to know my biological and personal history. I am like that. To her, her history is that of her adoptive parents, period. The history with her biological parents is irrelevant. Anyway, she doesn't feel the birth certificate is fake and says she sees it as necessary to show that she is the legal child of her parents.

I feel as though there must be another way -- particularly in an open adoption. In the days of closed adoptions, when parents tried to hide that their children were adopted, I can see the necessity of the fake birth certificate. It looks just like a real one. Unless one conducted a C.S.I.-like fiber test to determine whether the fibers are consistent with documents on the date of birth, it would be impossible for anyone to tell that the fake birth certificate is a government-issued forgery. I guess if you want your child to live a lie, the fake birth certificate serves you well. But when a child is always told that they are adopted and there are no secrets, I would think that the government could create a new kind of document to commemorate the new family relationships. I’ve heard of “born again” but even when one is “born again,” a new birth certificate is not issued. I don’t think a new birth certificate is appropriate for adoptions either.

I am fully behind the movement to open all original birth certificates to adopted people. I believe that the government has no right to be in collusion with the original parents in denying a person access to their original history. I don't understand why the parents’ rights are given more weight than the child's rights. Why does a parent have a greater right to erase history with the government’s blessing and complicity (and perhaps live in denial of ever having given birth)? What about a child’s right to know his or her own personal history? Who decided that the parents' wishes were more valuable than the child's right? The child had no say in the entire situation. The parents had some control over their choices. It is a screwed up system where the government surreptitiously works with parents to erase the evidence of having given birth to a child, in total defiance of what the child’s wishes might be.

With my daughter, when she gets old enough to understand, she will be able to see her original birth certificate at her mother’s house. Even if it is null and void. I may just explain to her that “your mother has your original birth certificate. I have the fake one they created because the government is too stupid to understand that I don't need to have my name on your birth certificate to know that I am your mother."

I guess that's part of what pisses me off. Why does the government think that I have to be on her birth certificate to be considered her mother? There are mothers that give birth and mothers that don't. Why does the government continue to insist that there is only one type of mother? Why does the government only recognize one type of mother? If they recognized adoptive mothers as legitimate mothers, they would give us an amended birth certificate or some document that represented our reality. Instead, if you're not the parent that gave birth, they will create a whole new fiction to make it look like you did. As though I need their documentation to tell me that I am my daughter’s mother. As though I need for them to obliterate Maya’s mother who gave birth to her and who loves her, for me to be a mother to Maya. Typical government: if the reality doesn't fit their story, they make the paperwork thick enough to cover the reality and make it look like the story they want to present.

Maya is lucky. In some ways. She will always have access to her personal history and original birth certificate. But she still must grow up knowing that the government sought to obliterate all evidence of her relationship with the mother that gave her life. Others are not so lucky. And they won’t know their history until we stop allowing the government to perpetuate the fiction that a child can only have one type of mother: the mother that gives birth. We must stop allowing the government to force our reality to fit their fiction.

Stepping down from my soapbox.

Tearing Down the House

2010-05-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

We are in the midst of renovations. Anyone who has been through renovations will understand how this all unfolded after losing several shingles in a storm. Anyone who has been through renovations with a spouse will also understand how renovations bring to the forefront marital and familial conflicts -- and accords -- over what a home should look like.

Tim and I bought our house 17 years ago – at which time the home inspector told us we had 10 more years left on the roof. So we knew we were on borrowed time. Then, a few shingles began to break away with each storm. They were brittle to the touch and broke easily when retrieved from the front lawn, or worse, the neighbor’s front lawn. Our roof problem was becoming hard to hide or ignore.

Then came the severe spring storms that struck hard in Westchester County generally – and on our roof in particular -- recently. We could no longer delay getting a new roof. Why had we waited so long? There are several answers. Fear may have been one of the main reasons. Fear of the mess and upheaval that a new roof would entail. Fear of how much it would cost. Fear that there would be conflict over how best to do it. (Tim and I both have very strong design opinions.) There were other related reasons: the house had three layers of roof: the first cedar shake roof from 1921 (the underside of which one could see in the un-insulated attic), the second dark green asphalt roof; and the last speckled green and gray asphalt roof, probably dating from the late 60s. This meant that we had to shovel off all three layers and start over again according to the City Building Code. (Indeed, I believe the new code only allows two layers of roofing before it has to be ripped off – good for roofers; not so good for homeowners.) Tim has always wanted a very light colored roof – like those seen in Florida – to deflect the heat. I always thought they were inappropriate in the Northeast. I have always wanted a slate roof -- but I knew that would be out of our budget.

Another reason we waited so long is that we had always hoped to raise the dormer to the attic, along with insulating, so that we might use all of that untapped real estate – used now only for storing projects we had hoped to complete but long since abandoned; college and high school memorabilia; and “valuable” things set aside for prosperity. (Having spent time up there recently, I realize that my idea of “value” has changed over the years. I also realize that I don’t have as much time for “projects” as I once thought I did.) So, re-roofing meant not only putting on a new roof, but making other improvements at the same time.

And, once we have the carpenters coming. . . .

Closets are so scarce in our home. People just didn’t own many things, it seems, in the 1920s. As a family in the third millennium A.D., we have always needed more closet space. Or, at least I have. My clothes have been spread throughout all three bedrooms in the house: dresses in Trent's room; suits in Michela's room; and casual clothes in our room. I dreamed of a large walk-in closet where I could keep all my clothes together. I thought one would fit nicely where our upstairs terrace stood. I rationalized: we rarely use the terrace. (The terrace is accessed from Michela and Maya’s room and Michela has never been keen on my plan to “steal” her terrace.) We had also talked about taking Trent’s closet, which backed our room, in order to have another large closet along one wall of the master bedroom. (We are equal opportunity thiefs; Trent is equally unhappy about our stealing his closet and making his room smaller by building one in the corner.)

And, we need to knock a hole in the wall and put in French doors to the deck that Tim has been building for years now. Why not do that at the same time we put on the new roof as well?

And so, here we are. Thick in the middle of renovations. No room has been spared. To start, we had to go all through the house and take down the paintings so that plaster and saw dust didn’t wind up coating the surfaces. In our house, that was a day’s work in and of itself. Maybe because my mother didn’t like us to hang things on her walls because she wanted to keep the plaster intact. Or maybe because I can’t stand the idea of empty space. Or maybe we just enjoy a lot of artwork on our walls. For whatever the reason, in our house, we have numerous paintings on every horizontal surface. Bedrooms, hallways, living room, dining room, office, bathrooms, staircases. They all had paintings that had to be removed and bagged for protection during renovations. Then they all had to be placed somewhere where the contractors wouldn’t put a hammer through the canvasses and where Maya wouldn’t ride her toy train. After that, contractors’ paper had to be taped down on the floors to protect the wooden floors from damage. (The guys Tim works with are VERY careful. But still, damage to floors is hard to avoid during construction.) Lastly, plastic had to be draped over everything to protect it from plaster and saw dust. In fact, we never did put plastic over our bed and I swear that I have woken with plaster dust between my teeth and on my tongue many mornings now.

Choosing and purchasing materials is one aspect of renovations that I hope not to go through again for a long time. Tim and I finally did settle on a 50 year architectural roofing tile that reflects the sun to keep heating costs down. (I didn’t know why we chose 50 year shingles when we will be dead by then. Maybe Tim is optimistic about our longevity? I figured we could get the 30 year shingles and leave the kids with the problem.) I chose the color from among the colors that Tim approved: a light gray with green specks. It has turned out very nicely, even if some portions remain to be completed.

There were architectural materials we did agree needed to date to the 1920s in order to be in keeping with the rest of the house. We had purchased vintage French exterior doors at auction many years ago to put in the dining room, so they waited in the garage to be installed. We agreed that the walk-in closet needed a vintage French door to allow the light to come into the bedroom from the closet. Accordingly, I drove to Harlem to Demolition Depot and paid $325 (bargained down) for a used French door from the 1920s to fit the space. (I’m sure I had seen many on street corners being thrown out in the past years that I never picked up because I never knew I would need one.) We used the tall, vintage, double cabinet doors that I had scavenged from my friend’s apartment renovations for Trent’s closet doors. And we took the windows from the dining room to put in the raised dormer. We would use the vintage outdoor light fixtures from Fort Dix that we purchased at a tag sale to light the terrace and the deck. The terrace would get terra cotta tiles, like my grandmother’s terrace in Italy. And the old copper gutters would be replaced with new copper ones, which would age to a nice green patina over time. We agreed to hire a man to skim plaster over the sheetrock inside so that the new walls would match the old plaster ones and wouldn’t look so straight and naked. And we would have men skim stucco on the new outside walls to match the original tudor stucco.

Suffice to say, we have survived most of the decisions and much of the destruction. I now know more about construction and renovating than any woman should. (I won’t even get into the finer details of insulation: fiber glass versus shredded jeans?) I will just be glad when this is all over.

And we finally have the new roof that we have needed for so long. . . .

The Substitute Teacher

2010-05-14T16:53:00.001-07:00

Trent came home from school recently. Said he had a frustrating day. When I asked why, he said, “I had that substitute teacher that thinks I can’t eat candy.” I already knew what this meant. Ever since Trent was 4 years old and in pre-k, there has been one substitute that gives candy to the entire class at the end of class. The entire class except Trent. Because he has diabetes and she doesn’t think he should have candy. Many times over the 10 years he has been in the school, he has tried to explain to her that he can have candy and that he merely needs to give himself insulin to “cover” the carbohydrates in the candy. She hasn’t budged over the years. Instead, she brings him a pencil. (He has a sizable collection of the pencils she has given him.)

Every year when Trent was younger, we went into school and had a little Diabetes 101 session with the class. We explained what diabetes is. We explained that Trent did not do anything wrong to get it. We explained that it was not contagious. We explained that he could eat anything as long as he had insulin to convert the glucose to energy. We answered questions. (“No, it is not at all related to AIDS.”) We talked about how Trent might look if his blood sugar was too low or too high. (“When little, the kids were always very protective of Trent and would inform the teacher if he looked funny.) And sometimes we had a little demonstration of how he checked his blood sugar by pricking his finger for blood and putting the blood on a strip in a glucose meter. (“If you think it’s gross, you don’t have to look. But Trent has to do this many times each day just to stay healthy and alive.”) Mostly, the kids were in awe that he was so brave and could check his own blood. They also thought his pump was “way cool.” The teachers were sometimes nervous and never real happy to see a needle or lancet in their classroom. But they were always impressed that Trent could calculate insulin doses for his H-tron or D-tron pump (pumps that Trent had before the new technology that calculates doses for the person with diabetes).

Sometimes teachers would make comments or do things that weren’t in keeping with our philosophy of diabetes. Our philosophy is that it is better to allow sweets and dose insulin than to deny them and risk Trent sneaking sweets without insulin. (Indeed, I once told Trent that if he asked I would give him ice cream for breakfast – and the insulin to cover – so that he needn’t ever sneak sweets. Would I really have done that? He never put me to the test. But he also never snuck sweets without bolusing insulin.) We tried to explain to the teachers that if cake and ice cream were healthy for the other children, it was also healthy for Trent. And that only foods that were unhealthy for other children were unhealthy for Trent. Too often, they didn’t get it. They often couldn’t get past the fact that they knew that their aunt Frannie or grandfather had diabetes and couldn’t eat sweets. Instead, they just assumed we were too permissive as parents. No matter how hard we tried to distinguish Type 1 from Type 2 diabetes, in some minds, it would not stick. Amazingly, even one of the school nurses didn’t get it and would give sugar free candy to Trent, assuming that he did not need insulin because it was “sugar-free." She did not understand that the sugar was not what we counted; that it was the carbohydrates that mattered.

We tried to talk to the teacher or the principal or someone at school whenever these misunderstandings arose and made Trent feel left out or segregated. But no matter who we spoke with, there remained the one substitute teacher that refused to believe that Trent could eat candy. She thought she was being protective and nice by bringing in pencils for him. But she didn’t seem to understand the issue from the kid’s point of view. A kid wants to be treated, usually, like the other kids in class. Especially when they are getting candy. So, when Trent came home again announcing that The Substitute With the Special Pencil for him had been at school, I sighed and asked to see his pencil. Instead of showing me, he went on to describe how he finally convinced her to give him candy, by showing his pump and how it connected to his stomach. Success! I thought. Finally, after 10 years. Given that Trent is leaving this school at the end of the year, to go on to high school, I thought this was a fitting end to his time at the school. Trent wasn’t so sure. It had been frustrating for him to endure yet another time. And, in the end, she would only give him one piece of candy. Even though she gave the other kids more than one piece. However, he didn’t miss the pencil.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

2010-04-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

This week, open adoption bloggers are blogging about how money plays a role in their open adoption. For families who have adopted through foster care, money is an added element that colors the relationships. Here are the dirty financial details behind our open adoption from foster care:

Money is a topic rarely discussed when it comes to adoption. It feels too crass to even mention. But, the raw fact is that children are often moved from home to home like commodities traded on an exchange. There are websites with pictures of beautiful children available, providing an experience akin to purchasing books on Amazon.com (albeit with a lot more red tape and bureaucracy). It was this aspect of “shopping” for a child that led my husband to feel that he did not want to try to expand our family through adoption. When I pushed him, however, he always agreed that if we heard of a child in need, he would be happy to adopt a child.

It was in that context that we found Maya. Whenever I heard of an unwanted pregnancy, I offered our family as a resource to raise that child. Nothing ever came through. Until one day, a colleague and friend mentioned the beautiful baby in foster care that she had come across in her work as a diabetes educator. Apparently, even families waiting to adopt infants felt unable to adopt a baby with Type 1 diabetes. Catholic Charities was having a hard time placing the baby with an adoptive family. I immediately moved on the chance to adopt a baby. The diabetes did not scare us. We have a son with Type 1 diabetes. Indeed, because we had become old hands at managing “the beast” of Type 1 diabetes by then, we felt that we would be an ideal set of parents for this baby. We informed the social worker at Catholic Charities that we would love to adopt the baby in their care. No photo listing in hand. Sight unseen, we committed. That decision has proven to be one of the greatest leaps of faith we ever made. Maya has been a joyous addition to our family.

It seemed that we had found the perfect chance to adopt a baby and escape the commercial aspects of adoption that Tim (and I, if the truth be told) were uncomfortable with. Alas, we came to learn that even adoptions from foster care sometimes involve an exchange of money. Apparently, in an effort to get children from foster care into permanent homes, the federal government has made available financial subsidies to cover the care of raising these children. Harder to place children – racial minorities and children with medical conditions – actually “command” a higher price than white, healthy children. This means that families receive monthly checks for adopting children from foster care.

My husband was immediately opposed to the idea of accepting any subsidy to adopt a baby we wanted and had come to love. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t see it as money for us as much as money Maya was entitled to. A government benefit. Like unemployment benefits. Who would turn those checks down when they lost a job? My reasoning was that we could put the check away for her every month and have a sizable nest egg for her college fund. My husband felt that Maya would share in our family wealth (or poverty) in the same way as our other two children did. She would be treated the same and wouldn’t have monies set aside that they didn’t have. “Fine,” I responded, “We can divide the monthly check in three” and make college funds for the three of them. The fact that this would be a significant amount of money – some parents in New York receive more than $1,000 per month per child – did not change his mind.

Later, in our journey of adoption, we had occasion to meet Maya’s biological mother and, if we wished, develop a relationship with her. Again I pushed my husband to accept the subsidy once we completed all of our foster care requirements and adopted Maya. He was adamant. Even for the time that she was in foster care and not “legally” ours, he would not accept foster care payments. I argued that we could use the money to help Maya’s mother and her mother’s other son. Tim told me we could do that with our own money, if I wanted, but that we were not taking money for the privilege of adopting Maya. For families that need the extra income to adopt a child, he didn’t have a large problem with the subsidies. But he felt that we were not in that situation. He did agree to accept the medical insurance that is provided for foster children who are adopted. There were a few reasons for this: she had a medical condition and might need expensive care in the future; her insurance was better than the insurance that we purchase as self-employed individuals for the rest of our family; and the state insurance coverage would guarantee that she got the medical care she needed even if we became unable to provide for it. My financially savvy side vehemently disagreed with Tim. I could come up with a number of valid reasons to accept the subsidy. But somewhere in my heart, on another side, I knew that taking the subsidy wasn’t right for us. We weren’t providing a service to the state by raising Maya. We wanted to expand our family. We had come to love her.

Our decision not to accept any subsidy to adopt Maya is one that I am glad we made. We have developed a fully open adoption. Maya’s mother Nikki has turned out to be an extended member of our family, as has the rest of Nikki’s large and extended family. Our family has grown exponentially with the adoption of Maya. And I feel good about that. I feel good about having been able to tell Nikki and her family that, while we could have received a subsidy to adopt Maya, we turned it down. (They must think we are crazy or secretly wealthy.) We adopted her because we love her as much as they do. Had we accepted the subsidy, I would have felt guilty in Nikki’s presence. It would have weighed upon me that I was receiving money that Nikki so desperately needed to raise the daughter that the government callously took away from her. I am glad for my husband’s insistence. And I know that I want as little government involvement in our lives as necessary. We have no ties to the government. In that way, our adoption now feels like a private open adoption, with no government involvement.

Still, as I imagine exists in private open adoptions, money – or the disparity of financial resources between our family and Nikki’s – is something that makes its presence felt at times. In little ways. Like the fact that I know that I will pay for Nikki’s entrance fee to a museum or skating rink. Or that I will pay for her meal at a diner or McDonald’s too. And, at holidays, I give her the standard Italian-American “envelope” with cash in it for her gift. I try to encourage her to save her money and not buy me or Tim anything for holidays. Sometimes she still does. And I always appreciate the effort. I also appreciate that her family doesn’t forget my children at holidays. So, to the extent that money plays a role in our lives these days, it is much like how money plays a role in the lives of me and my brothers and sisters. Because my brothers and sisters have greater financial resources than Tim and I, they will often pay for our meals at a restaurant or not ask us to chip in for a gift to our parents, but still say the gift is from us, too. In the end, in our open adoption, money plays a role in the same way it does in any family.

Introducing Thorn

2010-03-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

"Production, Not Reproduction" is a blog written by Heather about her life as a mother of two children through domestic, open adoptions. Heather also organized a group of Open Adoption Bloggers, of which I am a member. In order to commemorate the first anniversary of the Open Adoption Bloggers, members were voluntarily paired with others and asked to interview their partner. (To read those interviews and Heathr's blog, go to http://www.productionnotreproduction.com.) I had the pleasure of being paired with Thorn who, with her partner Lee, has been a foster parent to children in respite care. They have also hoped to become adoptive parents of a child in foster care, as Tim and I are.

Thorn writes her blog "Mother Issues" at http://motherissues.wordpress.com. Her blog is very well written and evidences the thought processes of a contemplative person. In it, we read about the frustrations of wanting to be a parent to a child in need and being pressed upon by the very bureaucracy that is supposed to find adoptive homes for children. We are introduced to Thorn's partner, Lee, who also wants very much to have a child but feels beaten down by the system. Thorn tells their compelling story, including tales about the trials of an inter-racial lesbian couple. But Thorn doesn't complain about their life. Instead, she ponders and tries to think her way out of the problems they face. Her thinking is so clearly set forth that the reader can relate. Thorn is full of thoughts and thoughtful about everyone: Lee, the children they have cared for, and even me. (She interviewed me, showing effort with her questions and genuine caring. The interview is posted on her blog.) So, without further adieu, below is the interview between Thorn and me:

> 1. Tell me about your family growing up. What were their attitudes on
> race, religion, adoption?

My parents are politically conservative Catholics, but they've always
had friends of many different races and backgrounds. While there's no
adoption in my immediate family, my parents and especially my mother
are strongly pro-adoption as part of their anti-abortion views. Only
the youngest of their children has remained Catholic (and he's only
18) but they seem to be okay with that and just hope that like them we
eventually come back to the fold, which I don't see happening. As I
get older, we get along better.

> 2. Are there some aspects of your family of origin that you would like to
> continue with a child? Are there some that you would like to leave
> behind?

We always had family dinners and a lot of lively conversation, which I
think is an important way for kids to learn. We didn't have a tv while
I was growing up and while that won't be an option in our house (Lee
would DIE!) I hope we'll be able to foster an interest in books and
the outdoors and other things besides being passive consumers.

I don't think my parents did a good job handling the mental health
problems one brother and I had, though they eventually got better
about it. My mother has a lot of behaviors and attitudes that I really
don't want to perpetuate, because I know how they've messed me up and
left me feeling insufficient. I hope to be more open and less rigid
than my parents were, but I do appreciate a lot of what they did.

> 3. How do you think your (you and Lee) being gay will affect your roles
> as parents, if at all?

I worry about this more than Lee does, I think, and I'm very
conflicted about how I'll play a lot of the more stereotypically "mom"
roles, cleaning and having the emotional conversations and checking
homework and so on, while she's the one who's into sports and joking
around and grilling and watching tv. I hate that it breaks down that
way (though there are other ways to read the relationship that aren't
so gendered and I just get hung up on this because it's a hangup of
mine!) and yet it's important for us both to play to our strengths
while simultaneously learning to stretch. I'm sure we'll be able to
find a good balance.

I do think that our being gay and an interracial couple affects how
self-conscious or self-aware we are when we're out in the community as
a family. When we've had respite teens staying with us for the
weekend, that's been something I've noticed, that I'm very carefully
gauging their reactions to make sure they're comfortable with how we
present as a group. It's really hard to guess ahead of time how this
will work out.

> 4. What would you say to people who might say to you that you shouldn't
> raise children in a same sex couple? Or that a child should have a
> father?

The good thing about the kind of adoption we're trying to do is that
it's very hard for people to say, "You know, I don't think gays should
be parents. I think kids should have to wait longer in foster care so
that they don't have to have gay parents." That's just not an argument
most people make. The one child we got close to adopting (Rowan) is
probably gay himself and is not comfortable having a father figure
because at this point that's a role that causes him too much stress.
So I think we have specific benefits we can give as a family without a
father, though we do have many men in our lives who will be actively
involved if we parent.

> 5. What would you say to people who might say to you that you shouldn't
> have an open adoption?

A lot of people do have a preconception that open adoption isn't
healthy, especially in the situation of a child who's been in the
foster care system. I think, though, that children who have actually
known and lived with their first families may have more need to
maintain contact. That might not be contact with parents (though it
might!) but certainly could involve siblings, grandparents, and so
on. These kids have lost a lot in their lives and I hope even people
who are skeptical about open adoption can see that any healthy and
supportive connections can be a major plus.

Because Lee was adopted by her biological grandparents, her adoption
was always open and she knew who her biological parents were and was
involved in their lives although they didn't raise her. Even though
her biodad went through some rough times, seeing his experiences and
recognizing his addiction (for instance) as what it was let her deal
with that in a healthy way as a child, while some of his other
children have had to deal with it as adults after growing up with a
fantasy of what their dad must have been like.

> 6. What if your child doesn't want to see their biological/first parent(s)?

That's fine! There are many factors at play in adoption from foster
care. Especially in the case of a child who's been neglected or
abused, contact may not be welcome or healthy. I think openness is to
some degree the job of the parents. I'd want to make sure we knew
where first family was so that if the child was interested in contact
we could facilitate that in a safe manner, but I certainly wouldn't
want to push a child to spend time with his abuser or anything like
that. And yet we're always going to be open in the sense of
acknowledging that a child has other families (by birth and perhaps
through foster care or as in Rowan's case a previous adoption) and
that those are part of the story of who this child is. We can and
should keep that story alive (in therapeutic contexts for the
bad/hard/sad parts and in positive ways for the good stuff) as part
of creating our own story and life as a family.

> 7. What would a child of your dreams be like?

Ooh, this is a tough one! I do sometimes dream of babies, little
girls. And yet it's very unlikely that we'll end up in a situation
where I'll actually parent a young child. I think going through the
process of being trained and then looking at hundreds (thousands?) of
child profiles has pretty much robbed me of any dreams I might have,
but I also think that's a good thing. I hope that I'll have a spark
with a child, that I'll get to see a personality grow and flourish.
I'm really excited about what the reality of a child would be, but not
so invested in dreams.

> 8. Anything else that you want to tell people?

It was actually very hard for me to answer a lot of these questions
because Lee and I have been having a lot of difficult conversations
and I'm starting to have less faith that we will in fact end up
parenting. It's hard to talk about what I'd like us to do when I'm no
longer all that sure we'll actually get to do it, so I think you'd
have gotten a more lively interview if we'd done this a month ago. I
love my partner and I love the life we have. I think we'd make great
parents and I hope we'll get to find that out, but even if it doesn't
work out I'm glad we're trying to adopt (and now, I guess, become a
foster home). This process has been harder -- mostly bureaucratically
and emotionally, but also in other ways -- than I had expected, but
the real reason I'm sad and frustrated and annoyed by that is not that
we can't get a kid but that there are so many kids who need homes and
permanency and stability and aren't finding them. I hope we'll be able
to push hard enough to end up being one of those homes, but I also
know that's not enough.

Even though it may sound weird given that we've had so much
frustration Lee is ready to quit, I would really recommend this
process to others who are hoping to build families. My life has been
enriched by what I've learned and from the children I've met and I
absolutely think it's been worthwhile. Lee and I are a stronger couple
now and I hope we'll be able to be good parents. I'm glad we've been
able to have some impact, but I'll go ahead and acknowledge the cliché
that the biggest positive changes have probably been in us. I'm so
grateful for that.

And thanks, Michelle, for these great questions!

Two Heads of Cabbage

2010-01-11T17:10:00.000-08:00

Two heads of cabbage. That was all it took for me to start feeling better today. I had spent the morning in the middle school discussing issues with the principal, vice principal, guidance counselor, and psychologist relating to my children. This made me feel helpless and hopeless. I try so hard with my children and, still, I can’t seem to produce the respectful, confident, hardworking, happy kids that I strive for.

So it was no surprise that I was feeling blue this morning. I always feel down when I am called into school about my children. I feel like a bad parent. And I wish that I had those perfect children that I see all around me in the school: children that are involved in all the right school activities; children that are always on the honor roll; children that are happy to be at school and enjoy the privilege of their education. (Well, OK. Maybe I imagine the other children to be more than they really are. But who doesn’t want their fantasies to be possible?)

I left the school and went home to pick up the baby to bring her to my friend and babysitter, Shanikqua. (Maya is already 3 years old and no longer a baby. But in my heart and mind, she will be my baby for a long time to come.) At home, it took forever to get Maya to cooperate long enough to get her dressed. This is one of the most frustrating things about having a 3 year old. I can’t control her the way I would like to. She actually has a mind and will of her own! When I want to get her dressed, she would rather jump on my bed and sing about the three little monkeys jumping on the bed. “Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, ‘NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED.’” And when I go around my bed to the other side to get her, she slips from my grip, jumps down off the bed and runs away calling out, “Naked baby on the run!” Or “naked booty!” It’s all very cute and she is having a wonderful time of it. But when I want to pick up and go, I don’t want to play. Sometimes I am not in the mood for her ever-present smile and playfulness. Sometimes I just want her to come to me, stand still, let me dress her and go downstairs so I can brush her hair, test her blood sugar, and put her shoes, coat and hat on. But Maya? Maya always has a different plan about how things should occur.

After finally getting Maya’s coat and hat and shoes on, I strapped her in the car seat and left for Shanikqua’s house. -- That’s the other disadvantage of a three year old: you can’t just tell her to hop in the car so we can go. You have to coax her into the car when she would rather inspect the snow and touch and taste and smell it. (Maya is all about how things smell.) Then you have to strap her in before walking around to the driver’s side door. I had forgotten all those things in the years since Michela has grown up.

Once in the car, Maya still has opinions about what she wants to do and where she wants to go. Immediately, she tells me that she wants me to put music on. And she’s not polite. Rather, she says, “I want music!” For the umpteenth time I respond, “How do you ask nicely for Mommy to put music on?” Sometimes she just says, “Nicely!” And I think she really just does not understand. Other times, right on cue, she says, “May you please play some music?” Then, if I don’t put in the CD that she wants to hear, she cries out, “NO! I want the pink one!” Or, “I want reggae!” Again, I ask, “How do you ask nicely for Mommy to change the CD?”

Once we got the music resolved, I turned the car to the left at the stoplight and headed for Shanikqua’s house. Maya knew exactly where we were going when I made that left turn. (How does a three year old know directions to all of the places that we go?) Again, her plan was different from mine. “I want to go to Starbucks!” she yelled. Thinking that I could use a cup of coffee, I agreed. “We’ll go to the Starbucks near Auntie Shanikqua’s house.” At Starbucks, she wanted to hold my credit card, which I often let her do. This time, she dropped it in the grate on the refrigerated display case. I was in no mood to fish out my credit card from the depths of the cold metal. Still, once the kind barista helped me get it with tongs and long fingers, I asked Maya if she would like juice. “No,” she told me. Turning to the barista, she said, “I would like a cup of water with ice in it please.” “A child who would prefer ice water to juice; that’s a different one,” the barista responded. I shrugged my shoulders.

Needless to say, by the time I got through Shanikqua’s front door, I was ready to pull my hair out. I took off Maya’s coat and told her to go play with her friend. After a little small talk, I asked Shanikqua not to forget to test Maya’s blood sugar and handed her the envelopes she had asked me to bring for her. I was on my way out the door when Shanikqua pointed to a grocery bag tied in a knot sitting near the door. “Take that,” she told me. “What is it?” I asked. “Two heads of cabbage,” she told me. I must have looked a little confused. “I was in The Bronx and I saw a good deal on cabbage,” she explained. “So I bought four. Two for you and two for me. Take them.” I took the cabbage and left.

I was walking along the sidewalk to my car, carrying the cabbage when a nice warm feeling came over me. I was reminded of the many times I saw the old Italian aunts or my mother come into my grandmother’s kitchen through the back door carrying a paper sack with something in it. “Peppers were on sale at the A&P,” they would tell her in Italian as they placed the bag on the kitchen table. Or, “my cousin was in Patterson and bought bushels of tomatoes. You’ll need to cook these right away because they are ripe, but I thought you’d like some for gravy.” Or, “I baked five loaves of bread, so I brought you one.” Shanikqua is not even Italian, I thought with a chuckle.

Then I thought more about it. “That’s what good friends and family do,” I thought. When they see a good deal on cabbage, they pick you up a few. The sharing of bounty – and good deals on produce -- transcends race and ethnicity. Family and friends show their love and support for one another through the small gestures in life. I thought about how lucky I was to have a friend give me cabbage. And I hoped that my children, however they turned out, would be lucky enough to have a friend give them two heads of cabbage one day.

I tossed the plastic bag with the cabbage in it on the front passenger seat and turned the key in the ignition. With that cabbage, my worries melted away.

Boxing Maya

2009-11-06T19:19:00.001-08:00

I knew this day would come. One day. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced with Trent and Michela. It was simple with them. With Maya, there are more choices. That’s what makes it harder. I knew one day I would have to put her in a box. It’s bad enough that she is being raised by parents who are, arguably, incapable of raising her properly. But to have to box her in. When we are trying to live up to her rich history. To be forced to box her in. I hated it.

Today I registered Maya for school in Yonkers. She will turn 3 soon and will be eligible to go to pre-k next year. But to send her, I had to fill out the paperwork and register her by going downtown. I had made my appointment weeks ago. But I was running late because Maya had colored herself with orange Crayola marker and I had to take time to scrub her hands and face and toes before leaving. Finally, with Maya in tow, I entered the Board of Education building armed. I had all of my paperwork: I had her official birth certificate stating that Maya Nevaeh Nikol Gardner was born to Tim Gardner and Michelle Rago in Northhampton County PA. (Never mind that the birth certificate is a total fake. And that Tim and I had never set foot in Northampton County until months after she was born. That is a bitch session for another day.) I brought in my Verizon cellphone bill, my internet provider bill, and my ConEdison gas and electric bill (which I NEVER knew was so expensive since Tim pays all the bills). I proved that we were residents of Yonkers. I also brought in Maya’s immunization records and proved that she has been appropriately immunized.

After waiting only a short while (they are pretty organized for such a large city with 30,000 students in the school district), I sat down with a Board of Ed employee, filled out the last paperwork, and was interviewed. “Whoa, Ms. Rago.” The words stretched out slowly before me. “Help me here with this question. What are we putting down for your daughter’s ethnicity?” With a sigh, I began. “I filled it in. I want to put ‘Multi-ethnic.’” Maya has a history that pre-dates Tim and I. I have always wanted to be forthright about that. With her. And with other people. That means, first and foremost, we acknowledge the diverse family background that Maya has inherited. The woman interrupted my thoughts. “I see that you have written here – African American, Asian, Hispanic, Caucasian, and Native American.” I responded, “Yes, she is all of those. She has a Japanese grandmother, a Native American grandmother, and an African American father with Cuban ancestry. So I didn’t know what to write. How do I choose?” The woman responded. “I can’t choose for you. You have to choose.” I thought. “Well I can’t choose. I want to put multi-ethnic. I don’t want to deny any of her heritage by choosing one over another. The U.S. census has finally changed this year. In 2010, people will be able to choose multiple ethnicities as they identify themselves. That’s what I want to do for my daughter.” I could see my interviewer was slightly exasperated. “I understand your frustration. The U.S. census has changed. But this is the Yonkers school district. I have to check one box.” I patiently tried to explain my position, as I knew I would have to do many times in the future in order to advocate for my daughter. “Well, if I had to choose, she has more African ancestry than any other. But I really don’t want to choose. What does a child do when he has a Caucasian parent and an African American parent? Deny that he is as much Caucasian as African American just because there aren’t sufficient boxes?” My interviewer finally came clean. “Look. I have sympathy for your position. When you came in here with Maya, I had to do a double take. She looks exactly like my niece, Brittany, who is half black and half Irish. My sister married an Irish man and feels the same way you do.” She pulled out a photo of her niece who had the same complexion and curly hair as Maya. “I have written letters to the Superintendent. I have tried to explain,” she went on. “But, this is Yonkers. This is not the federal government. Yonkers doesn’t understand that none of us are pure blood. We are all mutts. And it shouldn’t matter.”

I knew that she understood that it did matter. I protested. “It shouldn’t matter. But it does matter. My daughter is being raised by white people. But she has an identity. She is not all white or all black. How do I raise a child with a healthy sense of herself if I have to categorize her as something she isn’t? It shouldn’t matter, but it does.” My new friend was very sympathetic. “Let’s hope that when Maya grows up, it doesn’t matter. But right now, it does. If I were you, I would put Caucasian because that’s what her brother and sister are listed as being here. Then, when she grows up, she can be anything she wants to be. She can just be American.” I thought about it and I chose Caucasian as recommended.

She is an American baby, I thought. Just like my husband. When people ask him where his family is from, he usually answers, “America. Here. And Switzerland.” My husband’s father’s family has been here from the time of the Mayflower. They are descended from Priscilla and John Alden. They are Dutch and English. But, after so many generations, what does it matter? No one speaks Dutch anymore. No one cooks Dutch. The farm that old Abraham Van Nest owned in Greenwich Village has long since been divided up and sold, (in part to New York University). His mother’s family fled Switzerland to avoid religious persecution as Mennonites. But, even that flight was so many years ago that no ties to Switzerland remain -- save a few of Grandma Liechty’s recipes.

I thought about how my life differed from my husband’s life growing up, and what that would mean for our children. I was “pure” Italian, as far as I knew. My father’s mother was from Muro Lucano, Italy, in the region of Basilicata, “provincia di Potenza.” (I had been to my grandmother’s house several times, even bringing my husband and children to meet my remaining relatives there several years ago.) Grandpa Rago was from Salerno, the launching point for the Almalfi coast. My mother’s parents were from Benevento, Italy, which was further north and east – a town famed for its witchcraft. Everyone I knew growing up was Italian. No one came into our home that wasn’t Italian. They sat around at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, and speaking Italian. My father was a shoemaker, working at a shop with his father. Everyone we knew were carpenters, plumbers, tradesmen or employees in the government. It was very insular and we knew our place in society. We were told about when the neighbors came to the door and tried to get my mother to join a group to keep Italians out of the neighborhood. We knew when we brought in eggplant sandwiches that other kids didn’t eat the same. And when we confused English words for Italian words on homework, we knew we were not like most of the kids in class. I never felt American as much as I felt Italian.

Trent and Michela have some sense of being Italian. They eat my food and I only know how to cook as I was taught by my mother and grandmother – start everything with olive oil and garlic and it will turn out. They have been to Italy and have heard Italian spoken. They want to learn Italian. They are also very proud of their father’s heritage. They know that his father is descended from people who came over on the Mayflower. And that his mother has Swiss Mennonite ancestry. They are true American children, but to outsiders, they are Caucasian.

Maya will have a more difficult road to understand her identity. Being raised by me and Tim, she will inevitably feel some kinship to Italian people and Swiss Mennonites and Mayflower descendants. That will be the environment in which she grows up. Still, she has a relationship with the mother who gave birth to her. Her mother Nikki is one quarter black, one quarter Native American, one quarter Caucasian, and one quarter Japanese. She lives amidst people from many different cultures in her town. Unlike the home I grew up in, the home in which Nikki lives frequently has Polish, Puerto Rican, African American, and Cuban visitors. However, while we live in a completely white neighborhood of European descent (overwhelmingly Italian American), our children go to Yonkers public school, which is truly as diverse as the United Nations.

Maya is a smart cookie. She will have no problem understanding the heritage into which she was born and the heritage into which she was adopted. But that is an intellectual undertaking. My job as a parent is also to raise an emotionally healthy and happy child. I believe that, in order to do so, Maya needs to feel proud of who she is: she is a multi-ethnic child being raised by European descended parents, amidst their families, and amidst her Mama Nikki’s diverse family. I have a hard time teaching her to be proud if the Yonkers public school district makes me box her into one category.

I think it is time to write my own letter to the superintendent of schools.

Flying Too Close to the Flame

2009-10-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

We had just sat down to a late dinner in early August when we heard the lightening and the thunder strike. Suddenly the lights went out and it was dark. Each of us immediately had a private thought. Trent wondered if the computers were zapped. I wondered if we’d have no power for a week, like two summers ago. Michela said she wondered if there was anything on her fork. She said she couldn’t see it; that she had tried to spear some salad just as the power went out. She said that she didn’t hear any crunch that would tell her that she had caught something. She explained how hungry she was and how she hoped, as she brought her fork to her mouth in the dark, that there would be lettuce or tomato on it. (There wasn’t.)

We had become old hands at what to do when we lost power. Trent opened his cellphone for light to guide me to the candle drawer in the kitchen. Tim felt his way to the cupboard where the matches were kept. As soon as we had enough candles lit, I suggested that someone should call Tim’s aunt Fran down the block while I went to check in on our elderly neighbor Theresa.

Later in the evening, as we finished our meal, a moth flew too close to the candle flame and burned a wing, falling to the top of the china closet where the candle was situated. Michela pointed it out and Trent went to verify that, indeed, a moth had fallen dead on the oak cabinet. “The plight of many moths throughout history,” said my father-in-law Merritt to everyone and no one in particular. “Flying too close to the hot flame.”

Maya was very upset. “The moth flew too close to the fire and burned himself Mommy?” “Yes, Maya,” I replied. “Why?” she asked in her two year old way of dissecting all events. “It was an accident,” I told her. “Just like when you accidentally got too close to the pot on the stove this evening and burned your pinkie finger.” “Where did he go Mommy?” she asked. I wasn’t prepared for this. I decided I didn’t need to tell her that the bug had died. “He flew home crying to his Mommy so she would make it better,” I told her. I told myself that this wasn’t exactly lying. That maybe bug heaven was like going home to your Mommy.

“He flew home to his Mommy?” she repeated. “Yes,” I responded. “Wouldn’t you come crying to your Mommy if you were burned?” I asked her. “I would go crying to my Real Mommy,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears. Her Real Mommy? Where did she hear that phrase? I ventured another question. “Who is that?” Hoping the answer wasn’t what I thought it might be. It was. “My Mama Nikki,” she said. I thought I heard my mother-in-law Ruth Ann audibly gasp. “Michelle is a good Mommy,” she blurted. She was trying to fix things, as she always did. But since when did we refer to me as Michelle in front of my daughter? I’m Mommy.

“Did someone say to you that I’m not your Real Mommy?” I asked. “No,” she answered. “Well, where did you hear that Mama Nikki was your Real Mommy?” I continued. She shrugged, “I don’t know.” I thought about how to approach the subject. “Mama Nikki is just a different kind of Mommy,” I told her. “She carried you in her belly and gave birth to you,” I explained, as I had on other occasions. “But I take care of you. I’m a Real Mommy, too.” I was rambling. “Do I look like a pretend Mommy to you? Do I look pretend? I look real to me. I’m real.” I turned towards my husband, “Daddy, do I look pretend to you?” He assuaged me, “You look real to me.” Merritt and Ruth Ann were on the front porch now, talking in low voices. Maya ran off to go play.

I asked Tim where he thought she learned that. I told him that I never use that language. He suggested that she learned it at our friend’s house. Our friend has had two foster children for three years and it is possible that one of the children there told Maya that I am not her real mother. Tim suggested that I drop the matter and not give electricity to the word and it would pass.

Later that night in bed, I asked Tim how I can make it clear to Maya that we don’t use that language. Just as we teach our children that there are certain other offensive terms that we don’t use. He said he expected that if we never used that terminology, she wouldn’t use it anymore either. “But then how do we teach that certain words hurt? That certain words are offensive?” I asked him. “It’s offensive to me. I mean, I know I’m her mother, but still. . . .” I protested. It did hurt a little. He reiterated that if we didn’t use that term, she wouldn’t either. And that she would understand that it was inappropriate. He said if I made a big deal out of it, she would use those words to push my buttons. “I still think there must be a way to gently, casually mention it, but not make a big deal out of it,” I told him. He said that the best way to teach was by example and that I should drop it.

My husband’s approach was always to avoid and deny, in my view. That was so not my approach. I am more in your face. An emotional, screaming Italian mess. With gestures to accompany the words. And, yet, I knew that Tim was right on so many things I didn’t know how to approach. I hoped he was right this time. . . . .

My Little Girl Is Growing Up

2009-06-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Our little girl is growing up. Shortly after her adoption was finalized, we removed the crib in our room, and the crib in the room she shares with Michela. She never slept in those anyway. We just needed to have them to show to the social workers when they came for home visits. Instead, she slept with us. Right between Tim and me. We found on Freecycle some happy young couples that were happy to take the cribs away for us.

For Maya, we bought a tiny pink sleigh bed at the Salvation Army, using our own mattress of course, and gluing brightly colored wooded letters spelling MAYA on the headboard. She has been very excited about her Big Girl Bed since the day we moved it in. To anyone who came into the house, she would ask, “Do you want to see my big girl bed?” Or she would ask Tim or myself, “That’s my Big Girl Bed? Not anyone else’s?” We assured her it was. And we made it very comfortable by putting in the Elmo doll that she has had since she was born, and the Madam Alexander baby doll that her Aunt Marissa bought her, and the American Girl baby doll that I bought her, along with the teddy bear that her Ima bought her from Ten Thousand Villages, and the monkey given to her by her brother Dylan, and the blanket that was sent to her from her Nanny, Mima, and Mommy Nikki. She still is not sure she likes sleeping there. If we move her there after falling asleep in our bed, she will usually stay there all night now. But it takes more effort to have her start the night in her bed. We usually have to sit in the rocker and sing or lay down next to her for a time.

We have also thrown out all pacifiers in the house recently. I thought maybe her front teeth were sticking out a bit due to the “Nook” -- which is what we call them after the brand named “Nuk.” I told her she was too big for a Nuk, now that she was a big girl and slept in her Big Girl Bed. “Then I’ll sleep in your bed,” she reasoned. No need to be so hasty. “But Mommy’s afraid your teeth are crooked,” I told her. She looked in the mirror and agreed they might be. When I asked her whether she thought she could throw her pacifier in the garbage in the bathroom, she said she could. And ran off to do it. I heard the lid to the can close as she came out. It wasn’t until going to bed later that night when she couldn’t sleep and was truly suffering that I began to think I might have to give in. I told her I thought she could do it. I held her and tickled her feet and her back, like she likes. She cried for her Nuk and, like an addict, jumped out of bed and began rummaging through the bathroom garbage pail. I got there just in time to grab it from her hand and wash it with soap and water before she put it in her mouth. And then, after having it for awhile, she said, “I can’t have this. My teeth are crooked.” And she went and put it in the bedroom garbage pail.

There have been two other funny instances of Maya struggling with giving up her Nuk addiction. My friend Shanikqua tells me that, at her house, after Maya had given up Nuks, she found one in Shanikqua’s bedroom. Quietly, she placed it in her mouth and placed her hand over her mouth so as to cover up the Nuk. She walked around the apartment with her hand over her mouth, believing that she was getting away with sucking on the illegal contraband. That is, she thought so until Shanikqua asked her what was behind her hand in her mouth. She tried to respond, “Nothing” through her hand. Shanikqua says she fell out laughing.

The other instance of Maya facing her addition head on occurred today. From across the room, she turned towards the couch and her eye caught upon something. I heard her squeal “OOOOHH!” And then saw her dive under the couch. Like a fisherman who had reached into a hollowed log and pulled out a catfish, she raised her prize in the air and smiled with a grin that was somewhere between delusional and playful. “A Nuk!” she laughed in a jittery voice. “What ya gonna do with it?” I asked. “Maybe you should go downstairs and ask Daddy what you should do with it.” She fled from the room.

Tim reports that she came downstairs and showed him the Nuk and said, “Maybe I should put it in my Big Girl Bed.” Tim suggested, “Or you could throw it out.” Maya offered, “Or put it in your pocket for when I need it.” They looked at one another for a time that seemed interminable until Maya, in a voice more mature for her age, suggested, “I have crooked teeth. Maybe I should throw it out.” And she hopped up the steps to the kitchen. Tim didn’t know what happened to the Nuk after that, but Livie, our foster child for the week, told me Maya was very brave and threw out her Nuk.

It was so sad to see her come across an object that brought her such simple pure joy and to see that joy in her face again, only to be crestfallen to realize that she doesn’t do Nuks anymore. It was sad to see her then be brave and throw away the one thing that never failed her in her short life. This is growing up way too fast. I just wonder if there is a way to slow things down and ease the pain. My poor baby girl.

And poor me. Growing up so fast. Pretty soon she'll want to drive the car. . . .

What If She Wants To Go Live With Her Mother?

2009-06-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

I never refer to Maya's mother as her birthmother or biological mother or first mother. In my eyes, Nikki is Maya's mother. Not exactly in the same way that I am Maya's mother. But her mother nonetheless. "Maya's other mother," I sometimes say. I worry that people will think I don't think of myself as Maya's mother. Which is far from true. I KNOW I am Maya's mother. And Maya knows that. And Nikki knows that. But I can't refer to Nikki as a "birthmother" because I don't refer to myself as an "adoptive mother." And I can't refer to her as a "first mother" because I don't refer to myself as Maya's second or third mother. (Maya had a foster mother before she came to me. One who loved Maya so dearly that she was able to move easily to our home and love us completely because she had known so much love in her life.) I know that this is unusual even in open adoptions. But I have nothing but great respect and awe for Maya's other mother. And I can't take away from her the title and honor of being Maya's mother. She has been through enough hurt in her life. I don't feel right stripping her of one of her greatest accomplishments. So, often, I will tell Maya to run and give her mother a big hug and a kiss when we arrive at her home. Or I ask Maya if she wants to talk to her Mommy on the phone. Maya always knows who I am talking about. She is not confused. I will sometimes refer to Nikki as "Mommy Nikki" or "Mama Nikki." Even though I don't refer to myself as "Mommy Michelle." Being one of two mothers does sometimes require clarification.

Nikki is very good about recognizing me as Maya's mother. When I once went to a family birthday party and an in-law introduced me to a distant relative as Maya's step mother, I told Nikki about it after the party. She was adamant that I should have put the woman straight right there and then and told her I am not a step mother, that I am Maya's mother. She also tells Maya that she has to go ask her mother if she wants to eat a treat. Nikki and I also laugh about when we are out in public and people see us together and try to figure out the relationships. We are hesitant to say we are both Maya's mother because we don't want to lead people to believe that we are a lesbian couple. Usually, we let them assume what they want to. Once, when we were at my green grocer, the checker (who knew me) asked, in reference to Maya, "She's your daughter, right?" I nodded proudly. Maya was in Nikki's arms. I set more fruit and vegetables on the counter. The checker rang them up and bagged them. Then she looked at Nikki quizzically, obviously recognizing that Maya looked very much like her. Raising her chin towards Nikki, she asked, "She's your daughter too?" I thought and quickly said yes, that Nikki was my daughter. It was much easier to make her believe that I was Nikki's mother than to explain everything as I unloaded my bananas and tomatoes on the counter. Nikki and I had a good laugh in the car.

People are very curious about Maya because she is a little darker than me. Her biological father is black and his family is from Cuba. Nikki is one quarter Japanese, one quarter white, one quarter black and one quarter Native American. Maya is absolutely gorgeous with ringlets of curls on her head and bright dark eyes that sparkle and a smile that steals your heart. The supermarket is a place where women chat and ask questions indiscriminately. "She has such curly hair. And yours is so straight. Does her father have curly hair?" "Yes, he has lots of curls," I respond. I know that the woman is really asking if my husband is black or if the baby is adopted. But since that is not what she asked, I answered truthfully. My husband, Maya's only father, does in fact have very curly hair. Curls so beautiful that when he was a child people would say, "What gorgeous curls and what a shame on a boy." Another woman had the nerve to ask if Maya was my grand daughter. When I said she was my daughter, she dug her hole even deeper. "How wonderful that God made it possible for you to have a child so late in life." Admittedly I was 47 and Maya was only 2. But I had often been told I looked much younger than my years because I never wore make-up. And there is nothing in my relationship with Maya that says grandmother. She calls me Mommy. And I reprimand her for touching the candy in the check-out lane. It is true that I am a couple of years older than Maya's biological grandmother. But still.

My own mother does not think it is the best idea for me to continue a relationship with Nikki and her family. But Tim and I knew they loved her dearly when Maya's great grandmother and grandmother gave me a photo album of all of Maya's ancestors and living relatives on her mother's side -- with name and address and relationship written on the back of each one of them. They made the album with the belief that they would never see Maya again. If I had taken Maya from them, this would have enabled her to find them one day. I also knew how much they loved her when her great grandmother gave me a gold locket that was hers to give Maya when she got older. They asked if they could send her cards and presents from time to time. They were honest with themselves in what must have been one of the most difficult decisions of their lives: They admitted that they felt incapable of raising a child with diabetes who would require insulin injections for the rest of her life. Tim and I realized we could not remove a baby from a family that loved her so much. So, after one of our initial meetings and discussing how we could go forward, I hugged Maya's grandmother -- her Mima -- and asked, "We can make this work, right? We can have Maya feel that we are one big family who love her, right?" And through her tears and tight hug, Mima agreed. My commitment to Nikki's family was that I would not take Maya from them. They trusted me. Almost two years later, we are one large family created through adoption.

So, despite my mother's concerns, I continue to maintain a relationship with Maya's family. My mother asks me, "What if she runs away to go live with her mother?" Given the economic disparities of our families, I tell my mother that I think Maya might like the comforts of our life better than the harshness of her mother's life. But it is my husband who has more thoughtful answer to that question. "What better place to run away than to her mother, where she is loved as much as she is here?" (He always has such a sensible approach to problems.) Still concerned, my mother wonders. "What if Maya rejects you and doesn't want any part of you when she grows up?" My only response to that, perhaps naively, is: "If that happens, then I haven't done too good a job, have I?" Lastly, my mother (and others) ask, "Aren't you afraid her mother will come and take Maya or try to kidnap her?" I think my best approach to prevent that is to give her as much contact with her daughter as she wants, I tell them. And to be as good to her as I am to my other family members. So that she has a relationship with me and will not want to hurt me. I know that it feels odd and discomforting to others in the abstract. One relative said that it crossed her mind, when she first met Nikki at Maya's second birthday party, that Nikki could just grab her and run. (She added that she quickly realized how silly that was when she got to know Nikki.)

Nikki and I have become close. I am not her mother. But I am, in some way, like an elder aunt or sister that she can talk to. She confides in me about her boyfriends. And I chide her when I think she needs to do something differently. And I press a $20 bill into her hand when she has no money on her, much as my elder brothers press money into my hand when they know things are tight in my family. I want her to know that Maya is in a family that cares for her well, so I keep her apprised of Maya's progress. And I send her photos, and paintings by Maya, and curls from her first haircut. But I don't mince words when Maya misbehaves or wears me out, pretending that it is all milk and honey. And I admit to my shortcomings readily. I hope that through being real with Nikki, with my faults and strengths, that she can see her way to having a good relationship with a man and raising children herself one day. And I hope that she knows she can come to me for help when she needs it; and that I will help if I am able to.

If Maya wants to go live with her mother some day, as long as it is not in anger towards me, I will have fostered the relationship between them that I hope for.

Dinnertime at the Rago-Gardners

2009-06-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

“That’s a soaker.” That’s what Tim or I used to declare, early in our marriage, when we faced a frying pan or baking dish with a cooked-on mess. Especially when we were too tired from work to exert the elbow grease required to clean it. After having cleared the table and washed all the dishes by hand in the narrow kitchen in our apartment, one of us would look at that last pot on the stove, sigh, and say, “That’s a soaker.” The other spouse inevitably would respond, “A soaker, for sure.” Once declared a soaker, a pan didn’t have to be washed that night. Rather, we would cover the bottom with hot water and dish soap, and place it on the back burner of the stove to soak overnight -- thereby making the grease and cooked-on blackness easier to remove the following day.

I remember dinnertime fondly in the early days of our marriage. We both would come home relatively late from work. Neither of us were 9 to 5 kind of people. I worked in New York City as a lawyer and Tim worked at Nyack High School as a math teacher. I would work late so as to impress the bosses, put in face time, and bill an exorbitant amount of hours in a day. Tim would work late to create a special program that he would use to teach his math students. Tim worked harder than most teachers and I worked harder than many lawyers.

Still, we believed in having dinner together. Cooking at home, setting the table, and sharing a meal together. Unless it was too late in the night to eat when we finally got home. I took pride in cooking for Tim. He delighted in my meals, claiming that he was so happy he married an Italian who knew how to cook. He would refer to himself as IBM, Italian By Marriage, when he finally knew enough about Italian food to be comfortable with labeling all the different cuts of macaroni. In the early days, my repertoire of meals was new to him and he enjoyed each meal. He even learned to make a few as well as many Italian mothers I know. For instance, his homemade pizza and his spaghetti with clam sauce rival the best.

I developed a rotation of good, healthy, quick meals when we were first married. Getting home late in the evening meant that I couldn’t spend too much time in the kitchen because we would be hungry and needed to eat sooner than later. Often I would start each meal with olive oil and garlic in the frying pan. To this day, I joke that even before I know what I am cooking, I can be sure that olive oil and chopped garlic in the frying pan will turn into something good. Some days I sautéed spinach and collard greens and just served canned salmon and leftover potato salad for dinner. Other days, I used the olive oil and garlic to sauté canned octopus, scallops, and clams with sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts to pour over angel hair spaghetti. Or I fried Italian sausage (when we still ate red meat) and peppers and onions and leftover boiled potatoes. Naturally, these meals would leave behind many “soakers.” Whoever got home earliest would tend to washing the soaker.

Things were easy in those early days in many ways. There were just the two of us. And even though we didn’t have a dishwasher, there weren’t that many dishes to wash. We usually divided the work by having me cook and Tim doing most of the clean up. On days when he cooked, I cleaned up. “I cooked, you clean,” was an oft-heard refrain in our home.

Life got more complicated as Tim worked on developing his own business out of the house and I took on more complex cases as a lawyer. While I still enjoyed cooking as much as before, it became harder as my workload got heavier and I gained more responsibility. After the two children came, Tim would cook almost as much as I did. I would tease him that he didn’t consider color in his cooking. He would serve white fish, white rice and white corn on the same night. “Is that your all-white meal?” I’d ask. I had always taken color into consideration when cooking, so that it looked appealing on the plate. Yellow rice, a bright salad and chicken cutlets made for an appealing plate. (I was interested to read in a health magazine that colorful foods have varied beneficial vitamins and anti-oxidants that are good for you.) And I almost always served a green vegetable with a meal. Dinner was not complete unless it had a starch, a protein, and a green vegetable as far as I was concerned.

Cleaning became an issue and, when Michela was two years old, we hired a fulltime housekeeper/nanny. She watched the children after they came home from daycare or school and completed the routine chores around the house, including cleaning the kitchen. I still cooked almost every night, with Tim filling in. But, after clearing the table, we left the rinsed dishes and dirty pots on the kitchen counter and stove. (We now had a dishwasher which meant there was no washing of dishes required, but the dishwasher still had to be loaded and unloaded and we left that to Barbara.)

For more than eight years, we lived a charmed life. We could work as hard as we liked to and still enjoy dinner together and a clean house. We pushed dinnertime back to eight o’clock because that is when I returned home from work and was able to cook. Barbara left each evening at eight o’clock, just as we sat down to eat. We had no opportunity to label a pot or pan “a soaker” because, in effect, they were all soakers – left for Barbara.

Recently, due to the downturn of the economy, we were forced to let Barbara go. Trent is now 12 and getting out in the world on his own more; Barbara’s leaving didn’t affect him much. Her leaving affected Michela, but at age 10, even she didn’t need Barbara as much as she used to. Still, Michela was heartbroken not to come home to Barbara everyday. Barbara had potty trained her and shared in all her secrets for more than eight years. Michela was Barbara’s baby girl, since Barbara only had a son. For Maya, being new to the family and only a baby, Barbara’s leaving had no effect at all. Indeed, she has never mentioned Barbara’s name since she left. For Tim, Barbara’s leaving means that he does the laundry down in the basement while he works.

Barbara’s leaving affected me in several ways. I am now the person who takes care of Maya all day long and cleans the house. I am also the person who does most of the cleaning in the kitchen: floor, dishes, and washing the pots and pans. My cooking hasn’t been affected much. I still start many meals with olive oil and garlic in the frying pan. Tonight, for instance, I started the meal with olive oil and onions and red peppers in two large frying pans. I sautéed the vegetables and placed pork chops over them. While they browned and as I turned them over and over, I made a green salad with Romaine lettuce, plum tomatoes, pitted black olives, dried cranberries, pignoli nuts and, of course, extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Leftover potato salad served as the starch. After we finished eating, Tim cleared the table and unloaded the dishwasher, loading it again with the evening dishes. For me to wash, he left behind the salad bowl (I don’t like to put my vintage yellow ware bowl in the dishwasher and he knows that) and the two frying pans. I washed and dried the salad bowl, wiped up the kitchen counters, and the stovetop, and faced the frying pans. Tired from a day in which Maya never napped, I looked at the them wearily. “Soakers, for sure,” I declared.

Aunt Ruthie Passed Away

2009-03-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

Maya's great great Aunt Ruthie passed away last night at 11 p.m. after a battle with cancer. Aunt Ruthie was my daughter's great grandmother's sister. She was a thin woman with long black hair. She was Native American, of the Lenni Lenape tribe that lived along the Delaware River crossing from New Jersey into Pennsylvania. I only met Aunt Ruthie a year ago. I tried a few times to get a good photo of her alone and one of her with Maya. But I wasn't able to. I didn't want to be intrusive and force her to pose, as I was only just getting to know Maya's biological family. I assumed I could get another picture of Maya with Aunt Ruthie at a later time. That time never came.

The last time we saw Aunt Ruthie, her long black hair was gone. It had been sheared off after falling out from chemo-therapy. She was more thin than ever, though still looking like royalty with her head held high and her smooth tanned skin. She slowly moved in soft slippers across the sidewalk from the car. She was just coming home from the hospital, presumably to spend her last days at home. But she managed a smile and a hug for me and Maya. Maya kissed and hugged her as only Maya can do. I worried we would hurt her frail body by hugging too hard and told her she looked beautiful. We left her Valentine's Day card and gift in the house. The card had a photo of Maya kissing the mirror. The gift was a small wall hanging that declared Love Endures All Things; Love Never Ends. From Corinthians. I hope that she understood that our love for her will never end.

I owe a lot to Aunt Ruthie. Aunt Ruthie and her sister Virginia, Maya's Nanny, are the matriarchs of Nikki's family. Virginia was always very supportive of my adopting Maya and, I believe, helped Maya's Mama Nikki come to the acceptance that Maya would do well in my family. But still, for me, was the question of whether I would be accepted into Nikki's family. Would the family not resent me? After all, I ended up with the beautiful baby. Their beautiful baby. Would they think I was a snooty lawyer from New York with whom they could have nothing in common? Would they accept my presence coldly, merely to visit with their daughter, granddaughter, great granddaughter and niece? Or is it possible that they might accept me as the person I am, even under these awkward circumstances?

Aunt Ruthie helped pave the way for my acceptance. I had tried to impress upon her how important family was to Tim and me. I tried to show her that it was important for Tim and me to make our relationship with them a good one. And to let her know that I had no intention of taking their baby from them. I told Aunt Ruthie that I believed we could make our unique family situation work because we all loved Maya. I gave out my cell phone number freely and sent photos and small gifts for holidays and birthdays as often as I could. She must have believed me. I was thrilled to hear from Virginia that Ruthie liked me and said, "She's just like one of us!"

I'll never know what she meant by claiming I was "just like one of" her family. I'll never get the chance to ask. Nor will I ever get the chance to ask her about her history --about my daughter's history -- of being Lenni Lenape. Nor will I ever get to take that photo of her smiling at me and Maya. But I will forever hold Aunt Ruthie dear to my heart. I promise to teach Maya to honor her legacy. And I pray that, in her passing, she has found peace.

Adirondack Camping With Maya

2009-03-06T23:35:00.000-08:00

Adirondacks August 2008

This was Maya’s first year camping with us. She seemed not to understand why we loaded up the back of the station wagon with canoe paddles and orange life jackets. Nothing seemed unusual to her about the cooler in the back of the car – we had often filled up the cooler for the two and a half hour drives to our farm house. Perhaps she didn’t see the trailer riding along behind the car either.

Maya is a good traveler in the car. Many times she withstood the more than two hour drive to Allentown, PA (where Catholic Charities and her foster mother are located). She had even made the five hour car ride to Washington D.C. with us recently in her usual go-with-the-flow attitude. So, the six hour drive up to Brown Tract Pond near Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks passed uneventfully for everyone. Certainly Maya had no cause to believe that this trip would end much differently than the others had.

Maybe it was when we parked the car and trailer in a remote wooded location that she began to suspect that this trip was different than the rest. By the time the tent was set up and she wandered inside, she knew something unusual was afoot. She began to exclaim “Wowee!” and “Oh!” as she saw new things – her cot and sleeping bag in the tent, the campfire, the canoe in the water.

It will be several years until Maya understands the Gardner family tradition of tent camping that she has inherited. One day she will come to learn how her grandfather painstakingly built our trailer from the front end of a ’48 Dodge he salvaged from the junk yard. (And how her Ima waited several days past the time they were supposed to depart for him to finish it.) She will learn how the tent is the same one that her Daddy camped in when he was a little boy – with his two brothers and two sisters and parents. (I hope that, like me, she will be delighted that we are not so tight in the tent as to require bunk cots or – heaven forbid – a triple bunk cot!) In fact, Trent has begun to strike out on his own this year now that he is 12. He pitches his own sleek single-man tent he bought for Boy Scouts next to our Victorian canvas family tent. In the large tent, we have the girls – Maya, Michela and myself – and their father and my husband, Tim.

I think the family Maya was born into would be proud of Maya’s camping activities with us. Her great grandmother is a native American from the Delaware or Lenni Lenape tribe (later subsumed into the Cherokee Nation). In fact, Maya’s biological mother Nikki chose a natural outdoor park setting along a canal for one of our early visits together. She told us it was one of her favorite places that her parents used to take her when she was little.

If Maya has the great outdoors in her blood, she didn’t let on that first night in the tent. She cried much of the night, frightened by the loons calling out on the lake and the sound of her sleeping bag rustling in the quiet night air.

Having tended to Maya all night, I slept through her first canoe trip in the morning. Tim, Trent and Michela all reported that she didn’t fight having to wear the life jacket – not too much anyway. Michela paddled in the front of our Grumman Aircraft aluminum canoe. Tim steered and paddled from the back while Trent held one of the straps on Maya’s life vest, keeping her from diving over the edge of the canoe while allowing her to walk around a bit. Maya thoroughly enjoyed dragging her hands through the water and splashing as my family made its way around Brown Tract Pond.

Since that first trip, Tim has taken Maya out paddling alone early in the morning or at sunset. She has enjoyed these trips with her Daddy. She even convinced him to let her paddle – showing her resolve about having had enough by throwing the paddle overboard. Tim describes watching the paddle drift first five, ten and fifteen feet away in the current before deciding to lay his body over the front of the canoe and doggy paddling with his hands to chase after the floating canoe paddle. Truly experiencing the adage “up a creek without a paddle,” he managed to reach out and grasp the paddle, pulling it back into the boat. I noted without saying a word that he took two paddles with him on each of his subsequent canoe trips with Maya.

As active as she was in those trips with her Daddy, we were all thankful that it was Maya’s naptime when we decided on a whim to paddle the “Crick” between Brown Tract Pond and Raquette Lake just as the storm hit. Our neighbor at the camp, an avid camper whose license plates on his truck declared ADK CMPR, had told us that the small “crick” near where we were camped would take us to the larger Raquette Lake. On a morning when the clouds threatened, we decided to venture up the creek. We figured that we would turn around if it began to rain. Trent took the front seat, paddling, while Tim steered and paddled from the back. Michela sat second position and I sat third, with Maya on my lap. I decided to leave my running shoes on the bank of the pond near the camp to keep them dry in case we tipped. Michela had her flip flops on. The boys had on socks and shoes. Only Michela and I had sweatshirts, which we quickly put in the clear “dry bag” when the drizzle started. Because it was only a light drizzle, we decided to keep going and try to make it to Raquette Lake as it seemed we must be surely half way. The drizzle stopped for awhile, but continued to threaten in the distance. Maya fell asleep in my arms just before the downpour. I kept my arms wrapped around her, her soft, curly hair just below my chin. Michela kept my feet warm by sitting on them and tucked her arms in her shirt. We decided that Tim could walk the two miles back to the campsite for dry clothing and our car while we waited at the General Store on Raquette Lake. When we got there. . . .

We were very discouraged when we saw no sign of the lake around every corner. Two roads required us to portage the canoe and re-launch on the other side. One fallen log forced us to climb out and stand on the log, pulling the canoe over it by hand. Several times we had to duck down or lay very low in the boat in order to pass under fallen trees or branches. As Maya slept, the four of us talked about how families had to pull together to make it through hard times. So, Michela and I encouraged Tim and Trent in their paddling and told them how thankful we were to have such strong men in our family. Though we were shivering, we determined not to complain but to dream about what it would be like to be warm. Neither Tim nor Trent complained about the hard work of paddling fast to get us their, either. We all determined we could withstand another hour if that is what it took. (We had already been out on the creek over an hour and a half.)

Seeing several Great Heron up close in the tall grasses and among the beautiful lillypads made the trip special. Finally, seeing a kayak coming towards us gave us hope. At least we knew there was a way out. The kayakers told us that it would be about another hour until we hit the Lake. We soon saw two more canoes and our spirits were lifted. (We were envious that they had ponchos and we had forgotten to take ours. That is all it would have taken to make the trip so much more enjoyable.) Michela wanted a second opinion. She asked them how much longer until we hit the Lake. They said a half hour to forty five minutes. As the rain lightened up (and Maya remained asleep and warm in my arms), we knew we would make it.

Under the bridge in just over forty minutes, we paddled into the sun – now shining – triumphantly onto Raquette Lake. Our success was made all the sweeter when the owner of the General Store graciously offered to drive Tim back to the camp to get our car. That meant that Trent, Michela, Maya and I would not have to wait too long until Tim returned with warm, dry clothes and money to buy hot cocoa and treats for having endured the trip. We jokingly decided we would question Mr. Adirondack Camper on his definition of a “crick” upon our return to camp.

That canoe trip baptized Maya into the Gardner camping rituals. Thereafter, she became a veteran camper, crying out “ga-noo!” whenever she wanted her Daddy to take her paddling. She also learned the joys of Graham crackers (“crackey”), marshmallows (“mashalow”), and chocolate (“chockey”). She learned to chew on tooth picks, call to passing ducks, and admire the sunset. Maya delighted in picking raspberries (only the red ones) and blackberries (only the black ones). After a couple of nights, she insisted on sleeping in “Maya’s cot” during the night, scooching far down into her sleeping bag to stay warm. She learned to paddle, well almost. And even attempted to light the Coleman lantern and stove. (We think we will hold off on teaching her that until she is 5.)

Next year we hope that Maya learns to pull her weight hiking. (Daddy wasn’t feeling up to hiking with her in the back pack this year.) We also hope that she’s out of diapers and not as messy when she eats next year. We hope she will abandon her habit of pulling on the tent stakes and tossing the paddles overboard. But this year, despite her novice status – or maybe because of it – we thoroughly enjoyed camping with her. Maya reminded each of us of the first time we watched the pink sunset over a lake. Goodnight Sun!

FindingMaya

2009-03-02T10:46:00.001-08:00

When I first heard from a friend, who was a diabetes educator, that there was a baby in foster care that had Type 1 diabetes and needed a home, all I could think was that the baby could be mine. My friend merely made the statement in passing: that she had just brought diabetes supplies to a beautiful mixed-race baby in foster care. She wasn’t looking for a response. Just making small talk. She couldn’t have known that my heart raced and that I began plotting at that moment how to approach my husband. She told our group of friends that the baby was diagnosed at one month old and would require insulin injections for the rest of her life. That was fine with me. I knew a lot about Type 1 diabetes. Diabetes had come to live at our home eight years earlier when my then-four-year-old son was diagnosed.

I couldn’t believe that I might be so lucky as to be able to adopt a baby. My husband came from a Midwestern Mennonite family with five children. I came from an Italian Catholic family with six children. We always agreed that having a good number of siblings was a fun way to have been raised. Unfortunately, having married at 30 and having faced some fertility issues, we had a difficult time having biological children. Then, when Trent came, we felt very lucky. We tacitly agreed to accept whatever children God had in store for us. To much joy and surprise, Michela came two and a half years later.

For the following eight years, I wasn’t exactly disappointed every month to find that I wasn’t pregnant. I got used to it. But silently, I did hope. I was not about to complain. We had one boy and one girl. They were healthy, beautiful and intelligent. Life had been good to us. Still, sometimes, I found myself looking on the internet at children waiting to be adopted. But when I broached the subject of adoption with my husband, he was not keen on the idea. He didn’t like the idea of “shopping” for a baby. When pressed, he agreed that if a baby was born that we heard about that needed a home, he would be open to adoption. With that in mind, I kept my ear open.

When I first talked to my husband about the baby with diabetes at Catholic Charities, I was surprised to hear that he was immediately receptive to the idea. He knew that strong families could be formed through adoption. He has three siblings who were adopted. They are half-Jewish and half-black by birth and were adopted during the late 60s and early 70s when placing children of color into white families was unusual. We have a close relationship with all of them, especially his sisters who now live close by in New York. He agreed that we would be good parents to a child with diabetes with our experience. A mixed race child would be especially welcome in our family.

The striking thing was that he confessed that it was difficult to voluntarily bring diabetes into our home. For the first time in eight years, he told me, “I hate diabetes.” I had never heard him say that before. I always thought that he saw diabetes as just another problem to be solved, like a math problem. (He comes from a long line of mathematicians; math and problem solving are hard wired into his brain.) I never knew he had strong emotions about diabetes. Wasn’t it he who taught me not to feel guilty about giving our son shots and to be thankful for every shot we had to give? To be greatful we live in these times because before the discovery of insulin in 1921 our son would be dead? Wasn’t it he who for years meticulously calculated insulin doses and charted carbohydrates? Did he really hate diabetes? Would he choose not to adopt a child who had diabetes because he hated it? He said he hated diabetes for all the times it took our son from us: when he had high blood sugars and couldn’t concentrate or when he had low blood sugars and was too weak to participate in family activities.

Nonetheless, he agreed it would be nice to have another child. He agreed we would make good parents to a child with diabetes since we had become good at managing “the beast” over the years. He thought that it would be nice for our children to have another sibling; for Michela to have a sister to look up to her and with whom she could share secrets. For Trent to have another child with diabetes in the family. This child would be good for our entire family. Even if that meant inviting diabetes into our home once again. My husband told me to follow up and inquire about the baby.

I emailed my friend, “I have been speaking with Tim about the baby . . . . We might be interested in adopting her or even taking her for foster care if that were the only option. Is there a way you could put us in touch with her caseworker? We have always wanted more children. . . .” After a week, which seemed like an eternity, I finally connected with the social worker. I was encouraged when she said she didn’t believe the biological mother or any family members would be able to care for the baby. It was bittersweet to hear that families waiting to adopt infants had been approached but didn’t want a baby requiring a lifetime of insulin injections. Bittersweet because I knew that could be my son who was rejected merely for having diabetes. Bittersweet because I knew my son likely had been rejected in his life for having diabetes. Bittersweet because I knew more than ever that this baby was meant to be mine.

After a few phone calls back and forth, the social worker and I agreed that Tim and I would drive out on Friday to meet the baby. And to talk with all involved about how they envisioned the case proceeding. The caseworker told me the baby was gorgeous. She offered to email a picture of her. I was hesitant. I didn’t want to jinx anything. Oddly, she insisted on emailing me a picture. (She later told me that she had not sent pictures to the families who said they couldn’t handle a baby with diabetes because she didn’t want them to take on a baby they didn’t want just because it was good looking. By comparison, she wanted me to fall in love with the baby because I had already agreed to take her, insulin dependent and all, sight unseen.) From the moment I saw Maya's picture, I was in love.

I drove the one-hour trip from my father’s shoe and leather repair business in New Jersey, where I had been helping out, to my New York home. I was a swirl of emotions. I wrote down the following when I got home:

"I noticed it was a full moon this evening on the drive home from New Jersey. I noticed the most minute detail of everything around me as though the details were all so important that I had to commit them to memory. The smallest details kept jumping out at me and making me take notice: the fact that it was 7:26 on the clock on my dashboard when I left work; the spices in the chicken sandwich on my tongue included taragon; the fullness of the moon seemed to swell. I thought the moon was appropriate. My heart swelled like that moon.

All day I have felt like I am an eagle at the edge of a high cliff about to soar out over the horizon and feel the breeze in my face as I stretch my wings.

And yet, I am afraid to move even a muscle or to exhale because I fear losing the perfection of the moment. As though, if I move, I might set events on a course that might take Maya away from me. From the moment I saw her face in the photo on my computer screen today, I have also had a heavy feeling in my stomach. If I hadn’t seen her face, I might have been able to handle it if the adoption doesn’t work out. But now that I have seen her, it seems like it will be a cruel twist of fate if anything goes wrong. She seems so perfect and meant to be mine.

Too bad we just threw out all of those sippy cups."

I called everyone I knew to tell them that Tim and I might adopt a baby girl with diabetes. Tim’s parents were thrilled; they wanted to be kept abreast of every event that occurred. Tim’s siblings were happy; they would have a little one to guide through her adventure of being adopted into a white family. My father said adopting another child was something he had always wanted to do. My niece wanted to be the Godmother when we baptized the baby. My friends thought I was crazy but wished me luck. The daughters of one of my friends, Monica and Sarah, were overjoyed about hearing about the prospect of my raising a baby with diabetes. And, another friend, a devout Muslim, treasured the idea of having a baby around.

My enthusiasm was like the enthusiasm of the children I spoke with: bright and naïve. I had worked while Tim raised Trent and Michela and I had no idea of the demands a baby could make on a parent. I was therefore taken aback at the reaction of my own mother. Only she reacted negatively. Her first reaction was that we had financial difficulties raising the two we already had with all the medical bills. I responded that we could work it out. Her next words were that I was no “spring chicken” to be running around after a baby. I was 45 at the time. My eldest sister MaryLynn was with me when I called my mother. She suggested to my mother that I wasn’t calling for advice but for blessings. “In that case,” my mother responded, “God bless you.” The call ended hastily.

My mother had always made it clear how difficult it had been for her to raise 6 kids; how much she sacrificed; and how sometimes she wished she had fewer children. She always emphasized that nonetheless she loved us all deeply. Later that week, she proved her ability to love her 16th grandchild as she loves her own children and all the other grandchildren. Knowing that Tim and I were determined to adopt the baby, she gave me a bit of advice before we went on our first visit that Friday: “Michelle, if that baby is teething, you need to bring those Zweibac teething biscuits with you. That will soothe her gums. Or maybe one of those rattles filled with water that go in the freezer for her to chew on.” My mother had fallen in love too.

[The photo above is the first photo I took of Maya on Tim's lap the following Friday.]

The Tent and the Steak

2009-02-27T08:16:00.001-08:00

Happy Campers

2009-02-25T20:56:00.000-08:00

I wrote this a couple of years ago. I post it below for my friend Pam. May she continue to enjoy her RV, free of bugs and water. And pray that my tent holds up, J.I.C. (just in case):

As the rain crackled on the roof of the tent, sounding like fireworks off in the distance, we questioned our sanity. Why was sleeping in a tent in the mountains, with a 300 pound bear on the prowl, considered vacation? I asked my husband.

“Do you hear any cars?” my husband retorted.
“No,” I answered.
“Any trucks?”
“No,” I conceded.
“See any streetlights?” he asked. Of course I saw none.

It wasn’t just the absence of these things that made it vacation, we concluded. It was the feeling of communing with nature, really experiencing it, that we enjoyed. We told ourselves that the people who merely drove through the Smoky Mountains missed all that we saw. Likely they didn’t see the bear family crunching on apples in the apple tree, the wild turkey or fox. For sure they never got to see Abram’s Falls or to swim in the icy pool at the base of the falls unless they got out of their cars and hiked the steep and rocky 2.5 mile trail along the creek and up into the mountains. We got to feel what a bear must as he accidentally walks through a spider web or comes upon a juicy patch of blackberries.

We told ourselves that the people sleeping nearby in RVs and trailers didn’t get the full experience of nature like we did. Even after the first drop of rain that leaked through the tent, we told ourselves that. A little water wasn’t going to spoil our commune with nature. In fact, it wasn’t until we were wading in puddles in the tent, sleeping in soaked sleeping bags, that we began to appreciate the beauty of those RVs. It was not until I realized that my sneakers, which I had set neat and dry beside my sleeping bag the night before, were drenched that I began to question my sanity anew.

“Refresh me. Why is this relaxing?” I asked my husband as the early morning sun peered into the tent.

He was silent for a moment. “Well, just thank Got there aren’t any mosquitoes,” he replied. “If there were mosquitoes or bugs, then I would know for sure that we were crazy.”

I slapped at my thigh where I was sure something just bit me. “Might as well get up and make coffee,” I said to him. “Big day ahead.”

* * *

Who could explain how the canvas tent, after serving my husband’s family well for more than 35 years, decided that night that it would no longer protect its occupants against the storm? As a child, he had camped with his two brothers, two sisters, and parents every summer in that tent. He and his siblings shared a triple-decker and double-decker set of bunk cots, while his parents had their own cots on the other side of a blanket which was draped to divide the tent into two rooms. He had fond memories of those early camping trips.

As an adult, he “inherited” the tent, along with the trailer that his father had painstakingly built from the front end of a ’48 Dodge truck salvaged from the junk yard. With only me, Tim, and the two children inside, the tent was more than spacious. It stood like an aged Victorian home – proud, if somewhat old fashioned, among the aerodynamically designed tents and RVs of the campground. In theory, the threads of the canvas roof swelled up with the rain and formed an impervious shelter. In fact, it worked that way for every single rain storm that my husband could remember. Even during the hurricane on Assateague Island, it was not the roof that let in the rain, forcing us to leave. Rather, the poles blew over and the walls fell in on us as the windows let in the storm. During the hailstorm on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at Pictured Rocks National Seashore on Lake Superior, the tent had held fast for us.

We will never know for sure why then the tent suddenly failed that rainy night -- serving not as shelter but as a colander filtering the rain through the canvas on our family. One thing we did know: just as the locals had told us it would, the weather changed after we waited long enough. So, the next day we went about the business of survival, feeling much sympathy for the early settlers of Cades Cove and other parts of the Smokies who had, no doubt, suffered far worse leaking problems of their own. Unlike the early settlers, we were able to resolve our weather issues fairly readily. At a laundromat, all the soaked sleeping bags and clothing were washed and dried. At a Walmart, we purchased a blue plastic tarp which would cover the tent and, staked down, protect us from any further storms. Indeed, we even purchased new weatherproof carpeting for the floor of the tent to cover the threadbare material through which water had leaked.

Prepared for any further weather, we went about our days as happy campers. (Silently, I told myself that it would never storm again now that we were prepared.) Michela and Trent whittled toothpicks and chop sticks from twigs they found on the ground. Tim cooked pancakes on the griddle for breakfast. And I built a campfire in the fire ring (cheating just a little by using lighter fluid instead of blowing endlessly on newspaper). Later, we drove to watch the elk (reintroduced only recently to the Park) nibbling on greens in the meadows. We explored the historic homes of early settlers, and were reminded of our own farmhouse in upstate NY that stood desperately in need of restoration. We visited the nearby reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and learned about the Trail of Tears. And we spent long, silent moments watching a bear family high up in an apple tree feasting on apples in preparation for the long winter ahead.

The next evening we devoured steaks marinated in balsamic vinegar and flame-broiled over the open fire with garlic, salt and pepper. We relished the local, crunchy produce in our cucumber and tomato salad and savored the local sweet corn, roasted in the husks on the fire. Food had never tasted so good. Tim and I washed down our supper with cheap, red Italian wine. We smiled through the smoky haze of the campfire as Michela and Trent roasted marshmallows on sticks which they had whittled to a perfect point. Looking at each other, we raised our Tupperware tumblers and celebrated. “Salute!” We had made it through the storm.

My Daughter's Other Mother

2009-02-24T21:09:00.000-08:00

Many people, family and friends included, don’t understand the nature of the relationship we have chosen to enter into with the woman who brought our daughter into this world. And how could they? There aren’t words to describe it. The English language doesn’t quite have a word for the relationship between a biological mother and an adoptive parent. If the language doesn’t exist, how can others understand? And yet, just because the words don’t exist doesn’t mean the relationship doesn’t exist. Just because the words don’t exist doesn’t mean the relationship is not real.

Nikki gave birth to Maya. She cared for herself, her body and her baby for nine months during the pregnancy. She rushed Maya to the emergency room days before Christmas when Maya was just barely one month old, only to be told that her baby had a flu. She rushed her again to the ER the day before Christmas and, after being transported in a helicopter to the nearest large hospital, was made to understand that her baby would require multiple injections of insulin daily for the rest of her life. Maya was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was just a month old and Nikki was 19.

I know Type 1 diabetes. My son Trent was diagnosed when he was barely four years old and I was in my late thirties. I was dumbfounded. I had never heard of Type 1 diabetes; only the kind that my grandmother had: Type 2. She used to sneak sweets all the time and died of bone cancer in the end anyway. At first I assumed that Trent’s life would be like that: sneaking sweets that weren’t good for him. I didn’t understand that with Type 1 diabetes, because his pancreas produced no insulin at all to convert those candies into energy, he would have to inject insulin for the rest of his life. I didn’t understand at first that it wasn’t a mere misdemeanor to sneak sweets, but in fact could be a death sentence if the sugar in his blood remained above a certain level and damaged his organs. I was an “educated” lawyer and had never heard of Type 1 diabetes before Trent’s diagnosis. I was too numbed by the vast quantities of information I had to absorb to have any feelings at first. When I finally thawed out, I couldn’t believe that my beautiful, happy, innocent first-born would have to be injected by syringes with stinging insulin each and every day to stay alive.

I can’t imagine what Nikki must have thought or felt when her newborn baby girl was diagnosed with Type 1. We, in middle class society, have a tendency to think poorer people don’t have strong minds or capacity to feel subtle emotions, as though they are less than fully human. Like hapless, long-eared puppies. If I had not known Nikki so well, I might have thought she didn’t understand what was happening or that she didn’t feel the appropriate fear and sadness. But I know Nikki. She is very smart. And she loves her daughter keenly. She surely understood the severity of the diagnosis. And, from what I read in the disclosure files provided to me before the adoption (the social workers’ judgments aside), Nikki took on her new role as pancreas with aplomb. She pricked her infant daughter’s pudgy toes to draw blood sometimes more than six times a day to obtain a glucose reading. And she stuck the baby several times a day with a syringe to inject insulin and adjust the glucose levels. Moreover, she stuck the baby two more times each day with a whopping needle full of Luvenox to break down the blood clot that had swelled around where they inserted an IV into the baby’s leg in the helicopter. I have no doubt that, had diabetes not struck, Nikki would have been a loving and competent mother to her daughter, given a little support.

The visiting nurse assigned to Maya’s case did not understand how difficult diabetes is to manage. She mistook Nikki’s insecurity for bad attitude. And, as she hopped into her car driving from one home visit to another, she did not appreciate how much effort and precious money it took a 19 year old girl to bundle a baby and take several buses across town to get to doctor’s appointments. The only thing she understood was that, without proper care, Maya could die. She certainly didn’t want any baby dying on her watch. So she blamed Nikki for every mistake and for every high blood sugar number. Nikki never had a chance. She was reported to CPS for medical neglect and her daughter was taken from her.

I only had the verbal reports from the social workers at first: that Maya was near death and in a dangerous diabetic condition when they took her; that the mother did not understand how to care for her and was not competent. I would only really know the truth when I got to know Nikki and when, just prior to adoption, I read the files. When Maya was taken from her mother, her blood sugar was 232. Normal blood sugars are between 70 and 120, but a person with Type 1 diabetes sees 232 on the glucometer often. No matter how hard a person may try, he is never as good as a working pancreas. The social workers didn’t know that. I know that. My son has had Type 1 diabetes for more than 8 years. If they took him away from me every time his blood sugar was over 232, I would have lost him hundreds of times in the last 8 years.

Still, I can’t just give Maya back. I love her. So what do I do?

To start, I don’t deny that Nikki will always be Maya’s mother. She carried her in her womb. She gave birth to her. Most importantly, she loves her. Isn’t that the essence of what motherhood is? She is not merely a “birth” mother as the adoption industry would have you believe. She didn’t just give birth and then toss away all interest and concern like an old winter coat. She’s not just a “biological” mother, passing on pertinent biological traits and nothing more. Maya inherits not just her beauty from her mother. She has also inherited that hearty laugh and coy smile from Nikki. She has inherited her mother’s intelligence and her love of music, giving her the ability to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and her ABCs from start to finish in perfect pitch. Nor is Nikki merely Maya’s “first mother” as politically correct liberals would have it. She was not only Maya’s first mother; she remains her mother.

This is not to denigrate my role and relationship with Maya. I, too, am Maya’s mother. I am the Mommy she runs to when I walk in the front door. I am the Mommy she emulates when she types on the V-tech computer Nikki bought her for her second birthday. I am the Mommy she refers to when she says “Mommy hold Maya” as she cuddles alongside me in bed. And I am the Mommy she cries for when she is hurt. I am not just an “adoptive” mother like some wet nurse in an old fable. I can’t just give Maya back like an attitude I’ve chosen to try on for a while, as experimental teens are want to do. I am her mother. Maya recognizes that. And Nikki recognizes that. I have no need to prove it to anyone else.

The truth is this: Maya has two mothers. It would be easier if she didn’t. Certainly it would have been easier for Nikki not to ever have me enter her life. Still, I think she recognizes that I am better equipped at this time in our lives to parent Maya. Certainly it would be easier for me not to have to deal with Nikki. That is the most typical scenario for mothers (setting aside lesbian couples raising children and step-mothers). Certainly it would be easier for Maya not to have such a complex family life. But I hope it will make her more complete, more rich, more full. To Maya, I am her Mommy. Nikki is her Mama Nikki, her other mom. We as parents can love more than one child. I believe that Maya can also love two mothers.

So what is the difference between Nikki and me? What has Nikki lost? What do I gain? I am Maya’s parent. I get the privilege of parenting her on a daily basis. I get the privilege of watching her master her world daily. I get to watch her wander the living room singing in her high pitched voice. I get to see her try on her Mommy’s high heels and fall over laughing. I get to see her pick up the cell phone, flip it open and say “Hello? Can you hear me?” I get to hear her insist, “Maya do it!” as she takes away the glucometer and tries to place in it the tiny rectangular strip. I get the privilege of watching her in wonder as she remains perfectly still while I prick her finger with the lancet, squeeze it, and drip blood onto the testing strip.

It is only my relationship with Nikki that has no words to describe it. I have come to calling her and her family my “baby in-laws.” My relationship with Nikki was born of a legal event: my adoption of her daughter. Our families are forever tied to each other through Maya. I am committed to making our relationship work for the sake of our family in the same way that I am committed to making the relationship with my husband’s family work. Others may not understand it. It is hard to describe to someone not in a similar position. I have come to accept that outsiders cannot understand. And they have no incentive to understand. Nikki and I have come to terms with our relationship. Of course, we have an incentive to make things work. We are Maya’s mothers.

Getting My E-Life in Order

2009-02-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

Well. . . .

I have had e-mail accounts for a long time. Outlook. Hotmail. Yahoo. One at my husband's company (codeHorse.com) and my own ragolaw.com e-mail address as well. (Not to mention a Google account that I never use.) And I have been an avid purchaser on e-bay forever. I have joined lists online and some of my best friends were made online. So I am no online newbie. I even joined Flickr recently to showcase some of my photos. But it wasn't until today that I finally joined Facebook. My husband had been prodding me to join for some time. So had my friends. Apparently I have been missing all the little smileys and cups of coffee people have been sending one another for so long. And no one has ever read 25 Things About Me by me.

So, I figured, now that I have joined Facebook, I might as well go headstrong into the wind (as is like me) and start the blog I have always wanted to write. I majored in sociology in college. And I had a fondness for oral histories. Blogging seems like a natural outgrowth of that. (Can you imagine a good sociological study about blogging?) I have fantasized about blog names. Schlag.com is unfortunately already taken by a German who is not using it to its fullest potential. MamaLaw? (I think Lawyer Mama is taken.) Italian Mama? I have also fantasized about blog subjects I might write about. Parenting two children with diabetes. Being the daughter of a shoemaker. An Italian American in WASP America. Legal subjects like securities litigation. Or the Americans with Disabilities Act. Parenting an adopted child from the foster care system. Creating a multi-racial family through adoption. Extending my family through open adoption. There are so many blogs I enjoy reading and would like to emulate in some way. (Most recently the ones relating to adoption.)

But, my blog? I think I will just stick with what I know best: my family, my life. Four Gardners and Me. Here goes. . . .

Michelle