The Adventures of Adoption and Parenthood

This is a post I've been thinking about for weeks and it will be haphazard and scattered, but I need to get it out there for me. If you read to the end, thank you. Food, I have discovered, is an emotionally charged topic. Until I was in my early 30's, I always found it easy to maintain my "ideal" weight. I could eat what I wanted, eschew exercise and look great doing it. In my 30's, I started gaining weight, but it was a slow process. I also started going to the gym. I still felt pretty okay and looked pretty okay. When we adopted Prima, I felt great and had a wonderful trip to China. When we adopted Segunda, I hurt everywhere and the trip to China was very very hard for me. In my mid-40's I have begun to deteriorate and I'm fat. Paradoxically, I'm also not into body shaming. There is nothing I want more than to give my children the idea that I have a healthy outlook on my body and I hope I'm faking it well enough to convince them. But my body ma...

The CCAI Adoption Reunion is coming up in June, and it got me thinking about our guides for our two adoption trips. Three of them will be at the reunion. They aren't going to remember us because they have helped over 11,000 children meet their forever families. But I'm so excited to see them again. This is a biased opinion because I haven't used any other agency but CCAI has the best guides in the adoption process. They shepherd worried parents through every step; they hand feed babies; they change diapers; they carry bags; they argue with the Chinese equivalent of TSA. In a word, they are AWESOME. And I mean that in the true definition of the word. Our first trip started in Hong Kong. We had Joann and Matthew. Joann picked us up from the airport with several other families, handed out water bottles, loaded us onto a bus, counted heads, made sure our bags were stowed on the bus, counted heads again, double checked water and we were off. She checked us all into our hotel r...

I haven't been blogging much lately. My kids are relatively stable emotionally. Segunda is doing unbelievably terrific with her current set of limitations. We have settled into a routine and all is calm ... for now. I have made some new Facebook friends. Their struggles with their kids are so much larger than mine. It feels petty to write blog posts about minor surgical procedures that scare the hell out of me, but are really just a tiny blip on the radar. My friends have kids who have had heart transplants, will have a hemispherectomy, spinal cord surgeries, have fought and concurred brain cancer, have multiple cleft lip/palate surgeries. My friends have kids who have ODD, ADD, ADHD, Sensory Processing Disorder, Auditory Processing Disorder, Autism. I don't have anything to add to that conversation. Of course, Segunda could get diagnosed with those things. Prima has not. Prima uses her words at level expert. She is just a dynamite kid. She enjoys karate and wants to learn ...

I am in awe of my 6-year old. Prima has always been a verbal child and able to express herself and ask questions about things she doesn't understand. At 2 1/2 we took her to Sea World. She spent the day in a state of silence just taking it all in. The next day, she couldn't stop talking about everything she saw the day before. Thus launched her interest in marine life. She learned everything she could about dolphins and could probably give a mini lecture to anyone who asked before the age of 3. This is just back drop to her history with the spoken word. Fast forward to today and she uses her verbal skills to tell us how she is feeling and what she needs. I often feel like she is parenting me. Segunda necessarily needs quite a bit of attention in the form of carrying and sometimes just plain cajoling to get her to do stuff like hold still for a diaper change. When this happens, Prima quietly says to me, "Mommy, I'm feeling jealous and I need some attention." Lite...

Today is my birthday. I'm 44. I have a very sick Segunda on my hands. The child can't stop coughing and she throws up and she chokes on her own snot ... you get the idea. My husband is starting to get sick too. Prima's birthday was Wednesday, but we didn't celebrate it until yesterday. Husband travels to Houston very early tomorrow morning. I took Prima to the birthday party of a classmate today. It wasn't much of a birthday. And as I wracked up the sympathy from the kind people who called to wish me a happy birthday, I realized that this is the best birthday ever. You see, I have a husband whom I have been married to for over 15 years. I have a lovely home. I have 2 children. What more does one need to have a great birthday? Every time Segunda sprayed her germs all over me when she coughed, I just held her tighter.  Every time Prima complained that she wasn't getting enough attention, I just smiled at her and reminded her about Chinese New Year on Friday, h...

It seems inevitable that I would write a post today. Things that shake me emotionally generate blog posts. I have a friend, who I only know through Facebook, who died this morning from brain cancer. She leaves behind a husband and daughter. Her daughter is adopted from China. This is hitting me particularly hard because I have been reading a book pointing out how very difficult the lives of adoptees really are. The book is called Primal Wound and anyone associated in any way with adoption really needs to read it. What I've learned is that adoptees never recover from being abandoned by their birth mother. Let me repeat that, they never recover. They may find ways to cope with it. They may not even be aware that it is impacting them. But every decision they make with their lives is impacted by this abandonment. And I got to thinking about my friend's daughter, who is in elementary school, who has lost not one but two mothers. I wish I could help them, but they live very far awa...

Lately Prima has been asking questions about where babies come from, which leads to questions about her birth mother. Tonight, I was watching Downton Abbey while the kids played and when Lady Edith lay in bed crying over the picture of her daughter, Prima wanted to know why she was crying. So I told her. Good or bad, I told her. To best describe the pain of an adoptee for the incredible loss of her birth mother, here is our conversation to the best of my recollection. P: Why is that lady crying? Me: Because she gave her baby to another family so that they could raise and love her. Prima looked at me with compressed lips and huge eyes. I stopped the world and focused on her. Me: Prima, are you okay? P: I don't want you to ever give me away. [and she began to cry] Me: Sweetie, adoption is forever. I'm your mommy forever and ever. Do you know what forever means? P: That you stay. Me: Yes, forever. So even when you are fifteen and tell me that you hate me and you wish I wa...