I've been storing up examples of Rory's need for control, in part to prove to myself that I'm not imagining things, and to gain, of course, additional verification that she is trying to drive me crazy:
1. In a restaurant, I ordered her chicken fingers, and she pitched a fit. "I not want you do that! What they got?" Um, chicken fried steak, meatloaf, smoked chicken and chicken fingers. That's it. That's the kind of restaurant it is (and one, I might add, she's been to BEFORE). Oh, the fury. Oh, the angst. Oh, the tiny, angry voice declaring "I want chicken fingers."
2. Same night, mad at me about something else, she refused to get out of the car on the side I'd opened for her, the side she was sitting on, but walked over and opened up the other car door.
3. Bathroom, airport. Upset that I washed Wyatt's hands first and not hers. (He'd just barfed.) Goes to first towel dispenser. It won't work for her. Second one is empty. Third, empty too. I wave my hand under the first one and get it to give up a towel--and she heads for the hated air dryers.
4. Same airport: walks in front, always, always, always. Can't wait to go through security. Can't wait to go down jetway. I finally had to physically put her behind me and say, in so many words, today you have to do it my way. Just today, just once, just now, with me and you and three other kids and no other adults, you have to do what I say the way I say to do it.
I could go on, I could list about ten other things from today alone. Do you want some water? No, MILK. You stand here. No, not there. HERE.
I have worked so, so hard to let go of this. To convince myself that some of the time I have to just let her cut off her nose to spite her face (like at the candy store, when she chose the smallest possible thing just to avoid choosing anything I suggested). I've worked to stop suggesting. I give her the range of drink choices every time, even when I know she wants Sprite. I wait, and wait, and wait for her to get the automatic towel dispenser to work, and I let her walk her requisite ten feet in front unless it's totally and completely unsafe to do it. I back off, I swear I do.
And as I back off, it's better. She'll wear what I suggest when it's important (which isn't often). Accept the Sprite when, for whatever reason, I really had to make the choice for her. I suspect she's worked hard, too, to understand that I'm not trying to mess with her sense of self. We get this delicate balance going.
But it still makes me crazy. I'm all tense and wrought up, just writing about it. I know I haven't really let it go, which makes me wonder: maybe my motives aren't so pure as I make out.
Oh, sure, when I'm trying to get her barfing little brother out of the airport, I think we can concede that I'm right to just make her USE THE PAPER TOWEL I HAVE. But I make a bigger deal of it that I need to, dwell on it more than I should. Look at me, my whole demeanor seems to cry at that moment, and when I relate the story afterwards, look what I have to put up with!
The fact is, I'm caught in a power struggle with a five-year-old, and it's one I need to let myself lose. Or maybe one I need to find a totally different way to win. Do I really care which side of the car she gets out on? What she orders to drink in a restaurant? Which paper towel dispenser she uses? No. But maybe I feel like her rejection of my choices for her is her rejection of me. Telling other people, worrying about it, arguing with myself—is this my way of saying no, wait, I'm right! She shouldn't push this, or me, aside!
But she's not rejecting me, not at all. In fact, I'd argue that these moments of control come when she's worried that I'm rejecting her, for the most part. When I've sat next to another kid, or am lavishing sudden attention on him at a moment when she'd accepted that no one was going to get much attention (that would be when you barf at the airport). What I want to control isn't what she drinks or who orders it (if that were the issue, we would not be talking Sprite!). It's how she feels about what she drinks or who orders it. I want her to roll with the punches, here, and she's not ready to do that. If there's a sudden change, an unexpected turn of events or a disappointment, she still needs to seize control any way she can. Trying to yank that control back out of her hands clearly isn't the answer. I'm not exactly sure what is. Maybe I'm the one who needs to roll with the punches until I figure it out.
Cross-posted on RaisingDevils.com
Showing posts with label KJ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KJ. Show all posts
February 18, 2011
January 17, 2011
How Old Are You Now?
When we set out to adopt, we initially thought of a baby. Not an infant--our thought was that there were many, many parents out there who wanted, even needed a baby. A baby, we figured, didn't need us. Plus, we'd had babies: three of them. We didn't need the neediness, the sleepless nights, the crying, the helplessness. Didn't want it. Anyone who's already been through this is already laughing
We thought we would adopt an older baby , a toddler or a preschooler, who could fit right in with what were, at the time, our 2, 4 and 7-year olds. They were 3, 5 and 8 when we adopted Rory, who was 3, nearly four. In calendar years, at least.
When we first got Rory's' referral, I struggled with her age. She was a little older--6 months--than our youngest, my baby. He was a little unhappy about that. And almost four seemed old. I knew she would remember her life in China. She would have more reason to hate of fear us. She might have gone longer without love, or medical help, or anything else she needed. I worried about it. A lot. I studied the pictures and records we'd been given. The pictures we were sent were of a much younger child. Was it possible there had been a mistake?
Nope. We were soon in contract with Rory's foster family (through one of those flukey things that are more common in adoption than I ever imagined) and were certain of her age. More than that, we had more recent pictures, of a confident preschooler marching happily through life, on a playground, at Easter, even at McDonald's.
So I talked myself, as one does, into this--adopting a three-and-three-quarters year old--being the best possible thing for all of us. I was ready.
Which means it was a terrible shock to me when we adopted a baby.
Oh, not really. We adopted Rory, all right. But there's this thing called "family age," which I'd read about but not put much credence in, a theory that kids will regress in so many ways that it's almost good to think of them as being only the age they are in your family. One month old, two months, one year: Rory would be 19 months old now in that light.
I discounted this because I was thinking of it as all encompassing. I wrote it off as applying to kids from institutional settings, and deprived ones at that. Rory, I knew, knew how to live in a family. She had been a beloved family member (of a constantly changing family,something I failed to spot at the time) since she was two months old. She might regress a little, but it wasn't something I thought much about.
So many of my adoption stories include the phrase "boy, was I wrong." This is one of them.
Rory wasn't really a baby. She knew how to talk, walk, use the potty (we did have to introduce the toilet paper concept), feed herself. She knew how to act with other kids, and she knew, because her foster family had told her so, that we were Mommy and Daddy now. But oh, did she need to be babied. She'd been through hell. Her foster parents left her a week before. Foster nannies, other caregivers had put her in one van and told her to wave good-bye to foster sisters and brothers she'd known all of her life. Kids she'd shared a crib with. People she loved and counted on. And then they put her in a van, and handed her over to strangers in another van who brought her to us. By all accounts she kicked and bit the whole way. (I'm perversely proud of that.)
And now she was with us. She knew who we were. We had skyped and sent a video. She'd been told to come love us, and we would take care of her. And here we were. Never, ever has a kid been more in need of the kind of all-consuming love and attention you would lavish on a new-born.
She didn't get it. I'd sold myself on a preschooler, and I wanted a preschooler. Our trip thus far had been no picnic. We'd been detained, then split up and quarantined. I'd spent a week in an un-air-conditioned hotel on the outskirts of Beijing in a heatwave, husband locked in a hospital, mother and kids with me and no idea what I'd do if the authorities tried to remove my mother or one of the kids. When I excuse how little I had left fornRory at that moment, I tell myself I had post quarantine distress syndrome. I should have stepped up. I know I didn't.
When Rory needed babying, too often I stepped back, expecting, demanding that she be the big girl in the picture. I didn't want a baby. When I gave up on the younger kid idea, I focused on all the pluses: that she wouldn't have to be carried. That she wouldn't have needs that effectively put all of the attention on her. That she would't crawl, or scream inconsolably. I saw it as a trade off, and of course it wasn't a trade off at all. I didn't "sign on" to parent some ideal of a preschooler. I signed on to parent Rory, whoever she was. No one, Rory least of all, had made me some commitment that she would behave in some particular way. I'd made it to myself, more fool me, and it locked me into ridiculous expectations and even worse behavior. When a better person would have knelt down, snuggled up, lifted, carried, I stood tall, stiff, removed and Rory walked.
It took months for me to open up to the baby needs Rory still carried in her heart. She had been a baby, but she had never been my baby. She needed me to show her how I could love and care for the baby in her. She needed me to give that baby the sense of me rocking, tickling, singing. But somehow I fought that. I thought she was asking for spoiling. I thought she was trying to manipulate me away from the other kids. I thought if I gave her an inch, she'd take a mile. I thought it was wrong to treat the big girl I'd adopted like the baby I'd first imagined, that she'd think I didn't expect her to act like the other kids. And I just couldn't bring myself to do it. As stiff as her body was when I did take her into my arms, as much as she refused to melt into my lap--I didn't melt, either. We were at cross purposes. She needed a parent I wasn't being, and I wanted to parent a kid she wasn't anymore.
If I had believed, if I had gone into this, or been able to go into this, expecting to put my heart and soul into a baby in the body of a three year old girl, our transition might have gone easier. (if I hadn't been burdened with the week of fears of what I, in planning this adoption, had unwittingly risked for my mother and three other young children, that would have helped, too--but while that offers a small explanation, I don't think it excuses my failure to step up). It's only now that I see that everyone of us parents adopts not just the three, four, eight, twelve-year-old in front of us, but every child she or he has been up to that moment. And we need to parent all of those kids, sometimes all at once. Maybe that's why sometimes it feels so hard.
Not tonight, though. Tonight I held my baby Rory tight and sang her a lullaby while she rocked and sucked her thumb. I tickled toddler Rory's back I rhythm with another tune, and I read a big 5-year-old girl a chapter of a new book along with her sister and ine if her brothers, and I shared a dream with that girl about an even bigger, older Rory, six, seven, fourteen, forty-two--still snuggled safely in my arms.
Cross-posted on Raising Devils.
We thought we would adopt an older baby , a toddler or a preschooler, who could fit right in with what were, at the time, our 2, 4 and 7-year olds. They were 3, 5 and 8 when we adopted Rory, who was 3, nearly four. In calendar years, at least.
When we first got Rory's' referral, I struggled with her age. She was a little older--6 months--than our youngest, my baby. He was a little unhappy about that. And almost four seemed old. I knew she would remember her life in China. She would have more reason to hate of fear us. She might have gone longer without love, or medical help, or anything else she needed. I worried about it. A lot. I studied the pictures and records we'd been given. The pictures we were sent were of a much younger child. Was it possible there had been a mistake?
Nope. We were soon in contract with Rory's foster family (through one of those flukey things that are more common in adoption than I ever imagined) and were certain of her age. More than that, we had more recent pictures, of a confident preschooler marching happily through life, on a playground, at Easter, even at McDonald's.
So I talked myself, as one does, into this--adopting a three-and-three-quarters year old--being the best possible thing for all of us. I was ready.
Which means it was a terrible shock to me when we adopted a baby.
Oh, not really. We adopted Rory, all right. But there's this thing called "family age," which I'd read about but not put much credence in, a theory that kids will regress in so many ways that it's almost good to think of them as being only the age they are in your family. One month old, two months, one year: Rory would be 19 months old now in that light.
I discounted this because I was thinking of it as all encompassing. I wrote it off as applying to kids from institutional settings, and deprived ones at that. Rory, I knew, knew how to live in a family. She had been a beloved family member (of a constantly changing family,something I failed to spot at the time) since she was two months old. She might regress a little, but it wasn't something I thought much about.
So many of my adoption stories include the phrase "boy, was I wrong." This is one of them.
Rory wasn't really a baby. She knew how to talk, walk, use the potty (we did have to introduce the toilet paper concept), feed herself. She knew how to act with other kids, and she knew, because her foster family had told her so, that we were Mommy and Daddy now. But oh, did she need to be babied. She'd been through hell. Her foster parents left her a week before. Foster nannies, other caregivers had put her in one van and told her to wave good-bye to foster sisters and brothers she'd known all of her life. Kids she'd shared a crib with. People she loved and counted on. And then they put her in a van, and handed her over to strangers in another van who brought her to us. By all accounts she kicked and bit the whole way. (I'm perversely proud of that.)
And now she was with us. She knew who we were. We had skyped and sent a video. She'd been told to come love us, and we would take care of her. And here we were. Never, ever has a kid been more in need of the kind of all-consuming love and attention you would lavish on a new-born.
She didn't get it. I'd sold myself on a preschooler, and I wanted a preschooler. Our trip thus far had been no picnic. We'd been detained, then split up and quarantined. I'd spent a week in an un-air-conditioned hotel on the outskirts of Beijing in a heatwave, husband locked in a hospital, mother and kids with me and no idea what I'd do if the authorities tried to remove my mother or one of the kids. When I excuse how little I had left fornRory at that moment, I tell myself I had post quarantine distress syndrome. I should have stepped up. I know I didn't.
When Rory needed babying, too often I stepped back, expecting, demanding that she be the big girl in the picture. I didn't want a baby. When I gave up on the younger kid idea, I focused on all the pluses: that she wouldn't have to be carried. That she wouldn't have needs that effectively put all of the attention on her. That she would't crawl, or scream inconsolably. I saw it as a trade off, and of course it wasn't a trade off at all. I didn't "sign on" to parent some ideal of a preschooler. I signed on to parent Rory, whoever she was. No one, Rory least of all, had made me some commitment that she would behave in some particular way. I'd made it to myself, more fool me, and it locked me into ridiculous expectations and even worse behavior. When a better person would have knelt down, snuggled up, lifted, carried, I stood tall, stiff, removed and Rory walked.
It took months for me to open up to the baby needs Rory still carried in her heart. She had been a baby, but she had never been my baby. She needed me to show her how I could love and care for the baby in her. She needed me to give that baby the sense of me rocking, tickling, singing. But somehow I fought that. I thought she was asking for spoiling. I thought she was trying to manipulate me away from the other kids. I thought if I gave her an inch, she'd take a mile. I thought it was wrong to treat the big girl I'd adopted like the baby I'd first imagined, that she'd think I didn't expect her to act like the other kids. And I just couldn't bring myself to do it. As stiff as her body was when I did take her into my arms, as much as she refused to melt into my lap--I didn't melt, either. We were at cross purposes. She needed a parent I wasn't being, and I wanted to parent a kid she wasn't anymore.
If I had believed, if I had gone into this, or been able to go into this, expecting to put my heart and soul into a baby in the body of a three year old girl, our transition might have gone easier. (if I hadn't been burdened with the week of fears of what I, in planning this adoption, had unwittingly risked for my mother and three other young children, that would have helped, too--but while that offers a small explanation, I don't think it excuses my failure to step up). It's only now that I see that everyone of us parents adopts not just the three, four, eight, twelve-year-old in front of us, but every child she or he has been up to that moment. And we need to parent all of those kids, sometimes all at once. Maybe that's why sometimes it feels so hard.
Not tonight, though. Tonight I held my baby Rory tight and sang her a lullaby while she rocked and sucked her thumb. I tickled toddler Rory's back I rhythm with another tune, and I read a big 5-year-old girl a chapter of a new book along with her sister and ine if her brothers, and I shared a dream with that girl about an even bigger, older Rory, six, seven, fourteen, forty-two--still snuggled safely in my arms.
Cross-posted on Raising Devils.
October 17, 2010
No Messing With Heaven
First, let me say that I know from tough questions bubbling up from the back seat. I have already handled, on previous occasions, the question of what war is, an explanation of gay marriage and, regarding racial discrimination, "but that was all a long time ago, right?" And I have fielded, also while driving, a lengthy discussion among all four kids regarding why and how my youngest son, then three, could indeed "get a baby" if he chose to marry his best friend Trevor. I've always known the big conversations take place in the car. I hadn't realized it started this young, but I'm always happy to talk.
So when the highest-pitched voice in the back seat demanded to know where we go when we die as we cruised down Route 10, about 15 minutes from home, I was ready to answer. I'm always ready. It was the anniversary of 9/11, and I was already in the middle of a tough conversation with her oldest brother, so 5-year-old Rory's query actually came as a relief. I may not have a great answer to that one, but at least I've answered it before.
But then her four-year-old brother Wyatt responded, quite cheerfully and confidently. "To Heaven."
I know that's the standard line re: the afterlife. "To heaven" is actually, in its own way, the perfect answer/non-answer for young kids, because after all, heaven—what's heaven? It can mean that you sit at the right hand of God, or that your soul is granted or otherwise experiences eternal rest, or peace. It can mean fluffy clouds or virgins and cheeseburgers. It can mean "I know, absolutely," or it can mean "I really don't know, but whatever it is, I'm confident that it's a good thing." It's nicely definitive without really defining anything, and the child can, one supposes, take it from there.
But that's not really what we do in our family. (Well, it's not really what I do. My husband turns up the radio.) No, with the exception of Santa Claus, I go in for the absolute truth, even if the absolute truth is really nothing more than an absolute uncertainty. If I don't know, I say I don't know. And I don't know about "heaven." I only wish I did. (I know that in this, or at least in my rejection of the word, I differ from most of my fellow NHBO bloggers. I can only say I hope you'll accept my extremely respectful struggle with what it means to believe, and in what. I have faith, and although I tend to express it differently I've found that there are fewer fundamental differences than first appear from either side.)
According to the experts consulted by Bruce Feiler for his column in the New York Times this past weekend, I'm exactly right. "If you want to share with your kids your deepest beliefs," Rabbi David Wolfe, author of "Teaching Your Children About God," told Feiler. "your deepest beliefs are not about shopping. They're about what happens after you die, or what life is about." Feiler's daughter asked "if I speak to God, will he listen?" Felier doesn't say, but I imagine him thinking, well, define God. Define speak. Define listen. After all, an honest answer to that question would require an agreement on those things, just as an honest answer to question of an afterlife can't turn on a pleasantly hazy "heaven."
I reject the literal "heaven," the one with the the clouds (and the virgins and the cheeseburgers). I don't doubt that something happens to you when you die, but the literal vision that the word "heaven" conjures up for me isn't one I want my kids to think I endorse. I still remember a character in a book I read as a child, who'd been told by the preacher that heaven was "up there" at a wake and subsequently believed it to be located in "Simon Fletcher's garret." I shy away from the word heaven because others have invested it with characteristics I don't accept, and because when one of my kids drops it into conversation, I know it hasn't come from me—so I don't know what it means. My response has always been something along the lines of "I'm not sure, but even when your body dies, the part of you that's important stays with the people you love somehow." I've modified that for the occasion, even to being very specific in promising the child whose grandfather's funeral left him with a fear of being left "down in the dirt" that no matter what happens, I will never, ever leave him—but I've never pretended to believe that death offers some sort of actual destination. Therefore, no "heaven."
I had not, however, reckoned with Rory. We adopted Rory at almost four, and she had a life and a family before she shared ours. When I contradicted Wyatt, however mildly, (I said something like "I don't really believe that. I don't think there's really a place you 'go.' I think your body is gone, and the part of you that thinks and loves and is you kind of stays in the memories of the people you love") Rory became hysterical. She started to cry. "But where you GO?" she demanded, and I kind of repeated that I didn't think you really "go" anywhere, and she said I didn't understand, didn't understand what she was saying, wasn't listening, because "WHERE YOU GO?"
By the time we got home she was screaming and sobbing, deeply embroiled her own unique version of a grief-stricken temper tantrum. It took me at least half an hour to calm her down. But—stupidly— less than a week later I did it again. She brought it up this time, asking about a dog we had before she arrived, a dog she knew had died. "But where she go?" Rory demanded. I coughed up the same idea, about how even though her body was gone, she was still here, because we remembered her...and it started again. Rory was hysterical within seconds. "But where she GO? You not listening me. Where she GO?" It didn't matter what I said by then. Rory, at least, was gone already.
It was like a return to the first days after Rory came home with us from China, when Rory fought a hundred screaming battles with me and with herself from that car seat. Her grief and misery was beyond her ability to control it. This wasn't petty, and it wasn't one of Rory's convenient ploys for attention (when another child has my focus, Rory's been known to tap me on the arm and announce "I want go back China.") Whatever was happening to Rory was coming from somewhere inside her we hadn't been, and it wasn't about whether I was listening to her. Or maybe it was.
I know Rory's foster family, and I know something of the history of the three-plus years she spent with them. They are American evangelical Christians with a fundamental belief in God and in Christ that obviously goes far beyond lip service. They act on their faith every day. They work with the orphanages in their region and take in kids who aren't thriving, which sometimes means kids like my daughter, who need their help to heal, but also means kids whom no love can heal. I know children died in her foster home while Rory was there. I don't know where those children went when they died, any more than I know what happened to the souls or spirits of the victims of 9/11. But I begin to suspect that Rory thinks she knows, and that whatever she knows, or believes, is far, far more important to her than the truth of ambiguity is to me.
And I don't think I need to mess with that.
So when this comes up again—and it will—I'll put a whole lot less emphasis on sharing my own doubts and beliefs, and try to give Rory room to share hers. "Where do you think they go?" I'll ask, and if she can't answer, I'll meet her more than half way. Does she think they go to heaven? Does she believe they're happy there? Are they with God? Whatever she says, I'm there with it. I may mentally cross my fingers, or place my own meaning on the words, but I won't insist that she understand my doubt. Whatever she believes, I plan to embrace.
Another expert Feiler consulted rejects that course. "You're lying to your children," John Patrick Shanley, Pulitzer-prize winning author of the play "Doubt" says of professing a definitive belief you don't share, "and one day they're going to realize that you were a hypocrite." Until now, I've shared that view. I don't want my kids to wake up at ten, or fifteen, or fifty, and realize that I lied to them! That would be awful! What would they think of me? I can't help but notice, as I think that through, that there's an awful lot of "I" and "me" in those worries, and not a whole lot of anyone else.
If I accept Rory's view of the afterlife, will she wake up one day and realize that I was a hypocrite? I hope so. I hope, of course, that she'll forgive me for it—that she, or one of her brothers or her sister, will remember how much it meant to her as a child that whatever she'd already learned about death not be torn away from her along with everything else. I hope she'll understand. But if all I get out of abandoning principle is is an eventual quiet ride home, I can live with that. It turns out that my deepest beliefs aren't about what happens when we die, or even what life is all about. My deepest belief is in my love for Rory (and all of my children). If that means I let a couple of other beliefs lie, so be it. I will set aside ambiguity, I will embrace the appearance of certainty, and I will even—so help me, I'm only going to do this once—I will even stop the car.
KJ Dell'Antonia, aka Lola Granola, blogs about bonds, balance and blend at RaisingDevils.com. You'll also find her column in Kiwi magazine, and her views on the intersection of women, parenting and culture at Slate's XXFactor blog.
So when the highest-pitched voice in the back seat demanded to know where we go when we die as we cruised down Route 10, about 15 minutes from home, I was ready to answer. I'm always ready. It was the anniversary of 9/11, and I was already in the middle of a tough conversation with her oldest brother, so 5-year-old Rory's query actually came as a relief. I may not have a great answer to that one, but at least I've answered it before.
But then her four-year-old brother Wyatt responded, quite cheerfully and confidently. "To Heaven."
I know that's the standard line re: the afterlife. "To heaven" is actually, in its own way, the perfect answer/non-answer for young kids, because after all, heaven—what's heaven? It can mean that you sit at the right hand of God, or that your soul is granted or otherwise experiences eternal rest, or peace. It can mean fluffy clouds or virgins and cheeseburgers. It can mean "I know, absolutely," or it can mean "I really don't know, but whatever it is, I'm confident that it's a good thing." It's nicely definitive without really defining anything, and the child can, one supposes, take it from there.
But that's not really what we do in our family. (Well, it's not really what I do. My husband turns up the radio.) No, with the exception of Santa Claus, I go in for the absolute truth, even if the absolute truth is really nothing more than an absolute uncertainty. If I don't know, I say I don't know. And I don't know about "heaven." I only wish I did. (I know that in this, or at least in my rejection of the word, I differ from most of my fellow NHBO bloggers. I can only say I hope you'll accept my extremely respectful struggle with what it means to believe, and in what. I have faith, and although I tend to express it differently I've found that there are fewer fundamental differences than first appear from either side.)
According to the experts consulted by Bruce Feiler for his column in the New York Times this past weekend, I'm exactly right. "If you want to share with your kids your deepest beliefs," Rabbi David Wolfe, author of "Teaching Your Children About God," told Feiler. "your deepest beliefs are not about shopping. They're about what happens after you die, or what life is about." Feiler's daughter asked "if I speak to God, will he listen?" Felier doesn't say, but I imagine him thinking, well, define God. Define speak. Define listen. After all, an honest answer to that question would require an agreement on those things, just as an honest answer to question of an afterlife can't turn on a pleasantly hazy "heaven."
I reject the literal "heaven," the one with the the clouds (and the virgins and the cheeseburgers). I don't doubt that something happens to you when you die, but the literal vision that the word "heaven" conjures up for me isn't one I want my kids to think I endorse. I still remember a character in a book I read as a child, who'd been told by the preacher that heaven was "up there" at a wake and subsequently believed it to be located in "Simon Fletcher's garret." I shy away from the word heaven because others have invested it with characteristics I don't accept, and because when one of my kids drops it into conversation, I know it hasn't come from me—so I don't know what it means. My response has always been something along the lines of "I'm not sure, but even when your body dies, the part of you that's important stays with the people you love somehow." I've modified that for the occasion, even to being very specific in promising the child whose grandfather's funeral left him with a fear of being left "down in the dirt" that no matter what happens, I will never, ever leave him—but I've never pretended to believe that death offers some sort of actual destination. Therefore, no "heaven."
I had not, however, reckoned with Rory. We adopted Rory at almost four, and she had a life and a family before she shared ours. When I contradicted Wyatt, however mildly, (I said something like "I don't really believe that. I don't think there's really a place you 'go.' I think your body is gone, and the part of you that thinks and loves and is you kind of stays in the memories of the people you love") Rory became hysterical. She started to cry. "But where you GO?" she demanded, and I kind of repeated that I didn't think you really "go" anywhere, and she said I didn't understand, didn't understand what she was saying, wasn't listening, because "WHERE YOU GO?"
By the time we got home she was screaming and sobbing, deeply embroiled her own unique version of a grief-stricken temper tantrum. It took me at least half an hour to calm her down. But—stupidly— less than a week later I did it again. She brought it up this time, asking about a dog we had before she arrived, a dog she knew had died. "But where she go?" Rory demanded. I coughed up the same idea, about how even though her body was gone, she was still here, because we remembered her...and it started again. Rory was hysterical within seconds. "But where she GO? You not listening me. Where she GO?" It didn't matter what I said by then. Rory, at least, was gone already.
It was like a return to the first days after Rory came home with us from China, when Rory fought a hundred screaming battles with me and with herself from that car seat. Her grief and misery was beyond her ability to control it. This wasn't petty, and it wasn't one of Rory's convenient ploys for attention (when another child has my focus, Rory's been known to tap me on the arm and announce "I want go back China.") Whatever was happening to Rory was coming from somewhere inside her we hadn't been, and it wasn't about whether I was listening to her. Or maybe it was.
I know Rory's foster family, and I know something of the history of the three-plus years she spent with them. They are American evangelical Christians with a fundamental belief in God and in Christ that obviously goes far beyond lip service. They act on their faith every day. They work with the orphanages in their region and take in kids who aren't thriving, which sometimes means kids like my daughter, who need their help to heal, but also means kids whom no love can heal. I know children died in her foster home while Rory was there. I don't know where those children went when they died, any more than I know what happened to the souls or spirits of the victims of 9/11. But I begin to suspect that Rory thinks she knows, and that whatever she knows, or believes, is far, far more important to her than the truth of ambiguity is to me.
And I don't think I need to mess with that.
So when this comes up again—and it will—I'll put a whole lot less emphasis on sharing my own doubts and beliefs, and try to give Rory room to share hers. "Where do you think they go?" I'll ask, and if she can't answer, I'll meet her more than half way. Does she think they go to heaven? Does she believe they're happy there? Are they with God? Whatever she says, I'm there with it. I may mentally cross my fingers, or place my own meaning on the words, but I won't insist that she understand my doubt. Whatever she believes, I plan to embrace.
Another expert Feiler consulted rejects that course. "You're lying to your children," John Patrick Shanley, Pulitzer-prize winning author of the play "Doubt" says of professing a definitive belief you don't share, "and one day they're going to realize that you were a hypocrite." Until now, I've shared that view. I don't want my kids to wake up at ten, or fifteen, or fifty, and realize that I lied to them! That would be awful! What would they think of me? I can't help but notice, as I think that through, that there's an awful lot of "I" and "me" in those worries, and not a whole lot of anyone else.
If I accept Rory's view of the afterlife, will she wake up one day and realize that I was a hypocrite? I hope so. I hope, of course, that she'll forgive me for it—that she, or one of her brothers or her sister, will remember how much it meant to her as a child that whatever she'd already learned about death not be torn away from her along with everything else. I hope she'll understand. But if all I get out of abandoning principle is is an eventual quiet ride home, I can live with that. It turns out that my deepest beliefs aren't about what happens when we die, or even what life is all about. My deepest belief is in my love for Rory (and all of my children). If that means I let a couple of other beliefs lie, so be it. I will set aside ambiguity, I will embrace the appearance of certainty, and I will even—so help me, I'm only going to do this once—I will even stop the car.
KJ Dell'Antonia, aka Lola Granola, blogs about bonds, balance and blend at RaisingDevils.com. You'll also find her column in Kiwi magazine, and her views on the intersection of women, parenting and culture at Slate's XXFactor blog.
June 17, 2010
That Gon' Make Me ANNOYING!
Well, yes, yes it is. In fact (and this is awful, and I know it), you were already annoying. Far more annoying than your brothers and sisters. and I'm trying to figure out why. (Of course, when you're pouting, as here, you really ARE annoying. Nothing tough to get about that one.)
Rory doesn't mean she's annoying, of course. She means she's annoyed (by Lily's singing in the car, and in this case, she's absolutely right). But it's something she says often, and oh, it rings so true for me. Why is Rory (4, and home for very almost close to a year now) so much more annoying to me than the other three kids? I actually have a couple of ideas about why--but first, just for my own venting purposes, do let me catalogue the ways in which I get annoyed. (Note my phrasing? I GET that it's not that Rory is annoying--not really. She doesn't annoy others. It's that I am annoyed by Rory's behavior, which is a whole different question. And I mostly, nearly almost always at least kinda really try hard not to take that out on her. And I often succeed.)
Herewith, a short list:
- She ALWAYS has to go to the bathroom. Still. There is nothing wrong with her, her system--in every way--just moves faster than my other kids, and she goes more frequently, and that is just the way it is. At home, it's--well, it's still an annoyance, because she feels that she can't wipe on her own--but never tells me she's going to need me, and if I'm out in the yard, the yelling and hollering and level of outrage that I did not appear immediately when called is high. But when we are not home, every entree gets cold, and I miss part of every party, every meal, every anything you could name, because I am in the potty. Plus, it's Port-a-Potty season. Plus, she finds bathrooms--all elements of them--a source of never ending delight. The toilets! So many! The soap! The paper towel dispensers! The tiny little trash can things on the walls! And if I am in there, of course, she gets my attention, my undivided attention, which can be used to discuss such things as: The toilets! So many! The soap! The paper towel dispensers! The tiny little trash can things on the walls! You get the idea.
- She loves to talk, but has few subjects for conversation, so she likes to really get the most out of the ones she's got. This means that every day, we discuss, ad nauseum, whether it is a school day, whether she can have candy, whether she can play Wii, whether it's day, whether it's night, where we are going, when we will next visit Grandma and Grandpa, whether we can visit Grandma and Grandpa right now...She knows the answer to all of these questions--or at least, she does after the first time she asks. But she likes to keep asking, just to chat. Especially in the car.
- She likes to fall asleep in the car at night--but not really. She likes to pretend to be asleep, get carried upstairs, have a pull up put on, get tucked in and then...get up, having peed in the pulll-up, get another one, and do it all over again for bedtime.
- She likes the dogs. Too much. The dogs need, at all times, to be doing what she wants them to do. She's finally agreed to leave the old dog mostly alone, but she drags the young dog everywhere by his hair, or his collar if she can get it. If you have the copy of the Olivia book where Olivia is carrying the cat in and out of every room, you'll get the idea. It isn't that she wants the dog to go somewhere, it's that she ones someone--anyone--to do what she wants. So she drags him into my room and shuts the door. She lets him out and drags him into the playroom. She tries to box him in by moving things around in the playroom. Whatever room he's in, she drags him out; whatever room he's out of, she drags him in. I don't want to forbid her from touching the dog entirely. She loves him, and he loves her. But she really hasn't been able to grasp any limits on this.
- She doesn't distinguish between a tiny offense-bumping her accidentally with your coat sleeve as you walk by, say--and something more like having her arm ripped off. The noise she makes (and it's a horrible screely combination of a scream and a cry and a whine) is EXACTLY THE SAME. Which means it's impossible to tell if someone should be punished or if I should rush to the rescue, or if I should sigh and turn a page. ANd I always, always get it wrong.
What I think is that every stage has its annoying moments, and Rory is going through a whole passel of stages at once. Every one of my kids, at about two and a half, had to turn every bathroom visit into an odyssey. Every one talked and talked and talked when they first got to a point when they could really communicate. And they're all, still, prone to hanging on to the things I do for them that I do for only them, and "wiping" certainly qualifies. So there's that.
And then there's leftover stuff, huge foster family stuff, like the screely noise (which MUST have garnered her plenty of attention). And the dog thing. No one, ever, does what Rory wants to do just because Rory wants to do it. They might agree to play, or work out a deal, or choose something together--but there is no one that she can just tell to do something, who does it. The dog qualifies. She's manipulative, too--I didn't mention that. If everyone is cleaning, she'll poke at one item until everyone else has done all the work. She asks for candy after crying--as in, she had a big boo boo or whatever, and there was a big fuss, and it's over and...now can I have the candy you said no to half an hour ago? I chalk that up to foster homes and foster nurses, too. If I were a nanny in a foster home, I'd stuff the kids with cheap candy constantly. Why not?
And then there's stuff that's just Rory. She has to pee, she really does. And she has a voice that's best described as piercing, which means she gets "shhh'd" when no one else does, just because her tones carry. Eventually she'll deal on her own.
So, there it is, my annoying rant about my sometimes annoying kid. I could have posted all the ways in which she is extremely cute--like when she lays on the same dog, thumb in her mouth. Or her new words, which include "awesome" and "cool." Or her delighted affection for her ice cream shaped silly band. There's an even longer list of all of that. But right now, I'm on the question of annoyance, and it's time to look at how the blame should fall on me.
Rory annoys me because I try to do too much at once--typing on the computer, for example, at a time when I know they're needy. She annoys me in the car because I get tired, and I just don't want to talk--but if I changed my attitude, it wouldn't be a big deal. She annoys me when she asks for food right after a picnic because I don't make her sit down and eat--and I should know by now that she won't eat if there's anything better to do, a quality that will stand her will in life. She annoys me because I often don't want to focus on the kids, and nobody's more gifted at making a person focus on her than she is. All those things aren't even a little bit about Rory. They're about me. Knowing that doesn't change much (although I have designated big chunks of time as kid time now, instead of trying to multitask constantly, and it's much better). But it tempers my reaction. It's pretty easy for me not to react, knowing that I'm only reacting to my own responses. I save the reactions to respond to their actions, now. When I yell because I'm annoyed, I really just ought to go in the bathroom and yell at myself.
Cross posted, and elaborated on pretty much endlessly, at Raising Devils.
May 2, 2010
Explaining "I Did Not Love My Adopted Child" to My Very Real, Very Loved Daughter
A final guest post, contributed by KJ Dell'Antonia (aka Lola Granola). KJ is now a regular contributor at NHBO, so you'll hear from her monthly beginning this month.
KJ is a writer and mother to four children. Her youngest, Rory, was adopted from China in July 2009. She blogs about real life at Raising Devils.
KJ is a writer and mother to four children. Her youngest, Rory, was adopted from China in July 2009. She blogs about real life at Raising Devils.
In the the wake of the Torry Hanson case, I wrote a piece for Slate Magazine (where I’m a regular contributor to the DoubleX section) that my editors there titled “I Did Not Love My Adopted Child,” or, if you came to it from the first page, “I Didn’t Love My Foreign Adopted Kid at First, Either.” I liked the second title better – and actually proposed changing the first; I wanted to call it “Adoption Sucks – But that’s No Reason Not to Do It.” But the title held, and it worked – I don’t have any way of knowing exactly how many people read that piece, but certainly “a lot” is probably an understatement. And that’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted what I wrote to be as helpful to people as Melissa Fay Greene’s essay “Post-Adoption Panic” in the book A Love Like No Other was to me. I came back to her words so often in the difficult months after we brought Rory home that the book falls open to her pages. I treasure her description of her son: “a fit-throwing, non-English-speaking, snarling Bulgarian four-year-old,” and I recited, like a mantra, the advice she attributed to a friend “You can just pretend to love him... Just fake it.” That’s what I hoped for, and I think I succeeded – at the very least, I encouraged people to believe that it’s ok to work hard for the happy ending – but, of course, I have to live with my words, and their title, forever. And the big question, asked by everyone from commenters to friends to a caller on Talk of the Nation, is – how are you going to explain this to Rory?
I’m not sure I’ll have to – at least, not in the sense of her suddenly being confronted with this from out of the blue. Because the thing is, like Greene, I was faking it, and – because unlike Greene’s son Jesse, Rory had had a mother, a loving, devoted foster mother who I hope will always be a part of her life – I firmly believe that, at least on some level, Rory knew it. That’s what I think of, when I picture Rory reading my words. She knew I didn’t love her. And she knows I love her now. And I’m even more determined that by then she’ll know I’ll love her now forever.
She was there, after all. The awful truth is that, although she was every bit as miserable and anguished and angry as I described her, she was ready to love me, or at least to need me. She had just been torn away from everything she ever knew, and her foster mother told her to love me – to love us, to go to us, to adopt us as her own – and she was willing, probably because it was her only hope. I was the one who didn’t meet her halfway. She knows that there were moments when, as she sobbed hysterically (actually, with her, it was usually firetruck screams of rage) over something – no, she can’t play with my phone, no, she can’t drink all my coffee, no, she can’t stand on the trash can, no, she can’t flush the toilet over and over and over and over, no, Wyatt shouldn’t hit her but she hit him first, I saw her, no, she can’t just take Lily’s doll, no, that’s not her cookie, she already ate her cookie – and I knew, because I’m not stupid, because I DID read the books and I DID think about what we were doing and I DID think I was prepared – that she was really screaming about being taken away from everything she’d ever known and loved – she knows, in short, that there were moments when all she needed was comfort and I put her down and I walked away. Those were most emphatically not some loving moments.
And she knows that I don’t do that any more.
So what I think is that that’s part of our story. I’ll have to be sure to put words to what might have otherwise gone unspoken, and that forever, when we talk about that summer, it will be the summer when we were learning to love one another. That I will have to, when I talk about our becoming a family, use love the way I used it in the article – to mean our secure and ongoing connection. I will tell her that I was always committed to her, and that even in the hardest moments, I would never have sent her away, never have hurt her, never have let her have her world torn apart again, and I will tell her that I never meant to fail her, but I know that I sometimes did, and that the fact that we learned to love each other anyway will always be one of the abiding miracles of my life. I think our love will be even stronger for having all that out where we can see it and own it.
And it will also be the summer when she fell asleep on the tag-a-long and fell off the bike, and ate Doritos at the pool, and learned to swim and jumped off the diving board for the first time. Because, you know, I write about this a lot, and I think about this a lot, but mostly, we just live our lives. I didn’t love Sam the day he came home from the hospital nearly the way I love him now; I hated Lily for coming between me and Sam, and for all the fierce love I feel for Wyatt now, when he was a newborn I’d have left him by the side of the road if I’d had to do it to save Sam and Lily, who I’d known and loved for so much longer–and I write those words, and I don’t worry about them reading them someday. Love grows. That’s what it’s meant to do. And then it never, ever goes away.
A different family could tell a different story – I loved you before I met you; I loved you before you were born, I have always loved you. For me, that would mean that I loved the idea of my children as much as my children themselves. That’s not us, that’s not me, that’s not our story. That’s not what I mean when I use the word love. I did not love “my adopted child.” But oh, I love my daughter now.
So, thanks to everyone who cared enough about us, and our progress, to ask. I could say a lot more about this. I could write a whole book about it. Stay, I guess, tuned – but know that Rory went to bed tonight with a bunch of kisses, an extra hug and a smile on her face. Of course, when I said “I love you, good night,” she said “Meow,” but I didn’t take it personally. Everybody knows cats can’t talk.
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