Lettie wrote her letter to Santa last week. Her letters aren't at all like what I wrote at her age ("I want, I want, I want.") Two years ago, she asked for a pkg. of dental floss (and I don't mean a bikini!)- honestly, that is all that she asked for!
This year, she asked for the movie "UP" and some "fake jewelry" and then asked Santa to take any toys he was thinking about giving to her and giving them to children in Guatemala. She went on to tell him that she hopes to be a teacher in Guatemala when she is grown, teaching English to children there. Can she really be this emotionally mature at 8? Is this the same little girl who is (right now) wearing a sparkly ballerina skirt, pink striped shirt, and pink satin high heels (bought at a garage sale with great glee) and a crown and who was wildly dancing to the "Scottish Christmas" CD earlier this evening?
It is times like this that I think we must be doing something right, (but then she'll have a melt-down and I wonder what we're doing wrong.:)
Christmas is such a hard time for so many, especially this year, with money in such short supply. It is an opportunity to make gifts that have real meaning, though. Lettie likes nothing so much as having both parents at home, playing board games or gathered around the piano singing Christmas carols as she plays them. The gift of our time is something very precious to her, and I'm thinking some coupons for having us both at home together to spend an evening playing with her will be a nice gift. We wouldn't be buying the latest toy even if we could afford it, and what she really wants can't be bought with even the finest gold.
This year, talk to your kids about foregoing at least 1 toy, and giving that money to those less fortunate than you. In the U.S., even our poor have so much more than so many around the world.
There are many great charities- some we particularly like are kiva.org (microloans all over the world), mayanfamilies.org, hands-of-hope.com and the feeding centers in Chiquimula, Guatemala, for which we raised almost $2,000 this past month, http://www.guatemalamission.org/feedingcenters.htm
Instead of being upset that we can't get the latest "X", let's be thankful that we have so many blessings and have, in relation to so much of the world, have so much.
Instead of getting that sweater that your sister-in-law may hate, make a donation in her honor to a charity. None of us need more stuff, yet these groups I listed do work with people who are truly trying to find some bootstraps so that they can pull themselves up.
At the Austin table of the Pan American Round Table today, I led the "collect", which says in part "teach us that through knowledge, we gain understanding, and that understanding leads to friendship and through friendship comes peace." Maybe the knowledge that other parts of the world don't have nearly what all we have will help us to understand in some small way the needs in those countries, and we can help them in our own ways. I always love the quote from Mother Theresa that "we can't all do great things, but we CAN all do small things with great love."
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
"Unplugging the Christmas Machine"
OK, so I lifted the title- we've got a Sunday School Class for PWYC (Parents with Young Children) at church,and we're dicussiing this very thing these next few weeks. Our intrepid leader, Nikki, has a book by the title above. Sunday, we talked about what kids REALLY want for Christmas. (Hint- it isn't the latest expensive toy!) According to the author, what they want is a relaxing Christmas, time with family, traditions and I can't remember the other one. Nikki gave us "homework"- to talk to our chidlren and ask them what they like best about how we do Christmas in our home.
The previous week, we'd talked about what WE liked best about our Christmas, what we didn't like and what we positively HAD to change. For me, what I most like is our tradition of Christmas morning: Mark calls to us that Santa has come- (he has lit a fire in the fireplace by the time he announces Santa.) Then we rush into the living room. Our stockings are placed carefully around the room, with all the goodies that Santa brings. We "have" our stockings, then some friends come over for breakfast, followed by the annual watching of Chicken Run- really! I JUST love it- what a great movie to start out our Christmas day- it shows the building of character, sticking together in friendship and perserverence, and it is outrageously funny. After that, how can you be stressed? Of course, I do sometime worry that we're giving our Christmas International House students a bit of a warped outlook on American Christmas, but since everyone is happy, what the heck! I just hope they don't expect Chicken Run the next time they participate in CIH.:)
Anyway, Nikki said to ask our kids what they like best- we couldn't lead them on, just ask outright "what do you like best about our Christmas?" We did, and to our delight, she said "breakfast with our friends and watching Chicken Run." We've done this every year since we moved here in 2000, which is when Chicken Run came out.
It really isn't about toys or how much we spend, it is about spending time with friends and family, sitting, laughing, and relaxed. There aren't many times that I think I can pat myself on the back for parenting, but I think we're doing this one right.:)
The previous week, we'd talked about what WE liked best about our Christmas, what we didn't like and what we positively HAD to change. For me, what I most like is our tradition of Christmas morning: Mark calls to us that Santa has come- (he has lit a fire in the fireplace by the time he announces Santa.) Then we rush into the living room. Our stockings are placed carefully around the room, with all the goodies that Santa brings. We "have" our stockings, then some friends come over for breakfast, followed by the annual watching of Chicken Run- really! I JUST love it- what a great movie to start out our Christmas day- it shows the building of character, sticking together in friendship and perserverence, and it is outrageously funny. After that, how can you be stressed? Of course, I do sometime worry that we're giving our Christmas International House students a bit of a warped outlook on American Christmas, but since everyone is happy, what the heck! I just hope they don't expect Chicken Run the next time they participate in CIH.:)
Anyway, Nikki said to ask our kids what they like best- we couldn't lead them on, just ask outright "what do you like best about our Christmas?" We did, and to our delight, she said "breakfast with our friends and watching Chicken Run." We've done this every year since we moved here in 2000, which is when Chicken Run came out.
It really isn't about toys or how much we spend, it is about spending time with friends and family, sitting, laughing, and relaxed. There aren't many times that I think I can pat myself on the back for parenting, but I think we're doing this one right.:)
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thanksgiving Traditions
What are your Thanksgiving traditions? What did you do as a child that you wish you could do now?
This holiday that is one of our most family centered one is coming up and the stress levels are building. How do you make it “perfect?” CAN you make it “perfect?” WHY try to make it “perfect?”
As a child, we’d get up, pile into the car and go to Grandma’s house over in Merryville, LA. It was about an 1 ½ drive, but we knew how much fun we’d have- cousins galore to play with, chickens to chase, and it was something we looked forward to.
Grandma’s house was the same house my Mom grew up in- 3 bedrooms- one was their parent’s, one was the boys’ rooms and one was the girls’ rooms (a total of 10 kids from 4 different “eras”- Grandpa Bean was married, had Uncle John Dee. His wife died, he married Grandma, and they had Momma and Uncle Jim. He died in 1919 of pneumonia, she married Grandpa Riggs. He’d been married before and had 3 kids, Uncle Tommy, Aunt Alice and Uncle Bob, and then Curry and Grandpa Riggs had Aunt Elaine, Aunt Atch, Aunt Penny, Uncle Charles & Aunt Linda, so the bedrooms looked more like dorms than our little bedrooms in our home in Woodville.:)
You can imagine, with so many kids, we had many cousins and we had a blast. We’d play, run, and I even learned to shoot from a second cousin there one year. After that, we’ll run off into the woods, set up tin cans, and shoot to our heart’s delight.
Food, as you might imagine, for that many people was pretty stupendous. We’d all bring food, and Grandma would have been cooking for days. The sideboard would groan under the weight of all the food. Desserts would cover the beds in one of the “children’s bedrooms”- sweet potato, pumpkin, apple, cherry, cakes, cookies- it was a veritable store of delights for us kids.
Being proper children of the 1950’s, we waited until the adults got their food, then it was our turn, and we loaded up. I loved Grandma’s cornbread dressing, so I’d load it up-not sure I got much of anything else from the “first serving”- maybe a little turkey, if any white meat was left from all the adults (Grandma would cook a HUGE turkey.) The adults would sit around the living room, talking about the “old days.” The kids got the porch, which we loved. We’d eat, play jacks and eavesdrop on the parents. That is how I learned that they couldn’t afford dolls, but Uncle Charlie had beautiful blonde curls as a little one, and they’d dress him up like a doll and play with him as if he was their baby doll. (Explains a lot!) I learned that Grandma always told Mom NOT to ride horses with her friends, but the ONE TIME she forgot to remind Mom about that, Mom rode. The horse bolted, run under a limb, Momma didn’t duck, got knocked off and out. Talk about instant Karma! (That is one of the things I seem to have inherited from her.) Everyone would eat, and then take a little nap, and then eat again. Then it was time to wash dishes- no dish washer in those days, and even so, it would have taken a dishwasher of momentous proportions for all those dishes. We’d routinely have 40-60 people at these holiday dinners. So, the kids were the dishwashers. I was one of the younger kids, we’d make ourselves scare when that time came! My oldest sister and cousins usually got that duty (and got mad at us for disappearing.)
From those experiences, I thought everyone had huge amounts of food- the sort that put Luby’s selection to shame” for holidays. The first time I shared a holiday with Mark’s family, I was shocked. It was an Easter. In the middle of the table was a small ham, looking like we MIGHT get a very small slice each, a bowl of English Peas and Broccoli/rice casseroles and a salad. That was IT- the counters weren’t groaning under the weight of hundreds of pounds of different types of food, just this little bit. Of course, his family was also in much better physical shape than much of mine- that could explain it! I sort of kept looking around for more selections, but there were none- to be polite, I had to eat English peas and broccoli casserole- two things that had not previously passed my lips. I managed to get them down (hunger had a lot to do with that, too,) and that was my first realization that my family might do things a bit differently.
Now days, Grandma and her wonderful old house are long gone, my parents have been gone more than 20 years, and Mark’s parents, too. We usually have a quiet Thanksgiving with just our immediate family, although we love to have company, especially international students. It is fun to explain the traditions of Thanksgiving, but this year I didn’t get involved with the new international students at UT, so no students at our table this time. Some neighbors may come, if they don’t go to see their family in another state.
I’m interested in what your traditions are? What do you serve? I usually cook the following: Turkey (roasted in a roaster like my Mom did), dressing that is as close to her (and Grandma’s) recipe as I can find, SW succotash (adapted from a recipe from Gourmet Magazine), sweet potatoes with jalapeno jelly, red Jell-O salad like Mom used to make (minus the marshmallows because neither Mark nor I like them) and pumpkin pie. I usually do the exact same recipes at Christmas, but am considering changing slightly this year-maybe my wild rice dressing rather than cornbread.
Will this be considered sacrilege, or will there be sighs of relief that we don’t have to eat cornbread dressing for several other meals after? (I can’t make a small dish of cornbread dressing.)
Please, share your menus and traditions. If you’ve got a recipe you want to share, feel free to post that, too.
This holiday that is one of our most family centered one is coming up and the stress levels are building. How do you make it “perfect?” CAN you make it “perfect?” WHY try to make it “perfect?”
As a child, we’d get up, pile into the car and go to Grandma’s house over in Merryville, LA. It was about an 1 ½ drive, but we knew how much fun we’d have- cousins galore to play with, chickens to chase, and it was something we looked forward to.
Grandma’s house was the same house my Mom grew up in- 3 bedrooms- one was their parent’s, one was the boys’ rooms and one was the girls’ rooms (a total of 10 kids from 4 different “eras”- Grandpa Bean was married, had Uncle John Dee. His wife died, he married Grandma, and they had Momma and Uncle Jim. He died in 1919 of pneumonia, she married Grandpa Riggs. He’d been married before and had 3 kids, Uncle Tommy, Aunt Alice and Uncle Bob, and then Curry and Grandpa Riggs had Aunt Elaine, Aunt Atch, Aunt Penny, Uncle Charles & Aunt Linda, so the bedrooms looked more like dorms than our little bedrooms in our home in Woodville.:)
You can imagine, with so many kids, we had many cousins and we had a blast. We’d play, run, and I even learned to shoot from a second cousin there one year. After that, we’ll run off into the woods, set up tin cans, and shoot to our heart’s delight.
Food, as you might imagine, for that many people was pretty stupendous. We’d all bring food, and Grandma would have been cooking for days. The sideboard would groan under the weight of all the food. Desserts would cover the beds in one of the “children’s bedrooms”- sweet potato, pumpkin, apple, cherry, cakes, cookies- it was a veritable store of delights for us kids.
Being proper children of the 1950’s, we waited until the adults got their food, then it was our turn, and we loaded up. I loved Grandma’s cornbread dressing, so I’d load it up-not sure I got much of anything else from the “first serving”- maybe a little turkey, if any white meat was left from all the adults (Grandma would cook a HUGE turkey.) The adults would sit around the living room, talking about the “old days.” The kids got the porch, which we loved. We’d eat, play jacks and eavesdrop on the parents. That is how I learned that they couldn’t afford dolls, but Uncle Charlie had beautiful blonde curls as a little one, and they’d dress him up like a doll and play with him as if he was their baby doll. (Explains a lot!) I learned that Grandma always told Mom NOT to ride horses with her friends, but the ONE TIME she forgot to remind Mom about that, Mom rode. The horse bolted, run under a limb, Momma didn’t duck, got knocked off and out. Talk about instant Karma! (That is one of the things I seem to have inherited from her.) Everyone would eat, and then take a little nap, and then eat again. Then it was time to wash dishes- no dish washer in those days, and even so, it would have taken a dishwasher of momentous proportions for all those dishes. We’d routinely have 40-60 people at these holiday dinners. So, the kids were the dishwashers. I was one of the younger kids, we’d make ourselves scare when that time came! My oldest sister and cousins usually got that duty (and got mad at us for disappearing.)
From those experiences, I thought everyone had huge amounts of food- the sort that put Luby’s selection to shame” for holidays. The first time I shared a holiday with Mark’s family, I was shocked. It was an Easter. In the middle of the table was a small ham, looking like we MIGHT get a very small slice each, a bowl of English Peas and Broccoli/rice casseroles and a salad. That was IT- the counters weren’t groaning under the weight of hundreds of pounds of different types of food, just this little bit. Of course, his family was also in much better physical shape than much of mine- that could explain it! I sort of kept looking around for more selections, but there were none- to be polite, I had to eat English peas and broccoli casserole- two things that had not previously passed my lips. I managed to get them down (hunger had a lot to do with that, too,) and that was my first realization that my family might do things a bit differently.
Now days, Grandma and her wonderful old house are long gone, my parents have been gone more than 20 years, and Mark’s parents, too. We usually have a quiet Thanksgiving with just our immediate family, although we love to have company, especially international students. It is fun to explain the traditions of Thanksgiving, but this year I didn’t get involved with the new international students at UT, so no students at our table this time. Some neighbors may come, if they don’t go to see their family in another state.
I’m interested in what your traditions are? What do you serve? I usually cook the following: Turkey (roasted in a roaster like my Mom did), dressing that is as close to her (and Grandma’s) recipe as I can find, SW succotash (adapted from a recipe from Gourmet Magazine), sweet potatoes with jalapeno jelly, red Jell-O salad like Mom used to make (minus the marshmallows because neither Mark nor I like them) and pumpkin pie. I usually do the exact same recipes at Christmas, but am considering changing slightly this year-maybe my wild rice dressing rather than cornbread.
Will this be considered sacrilege, or will there be sighs of relief that we don’t have to eat cornbread dressing for several other meals after? (I can’t make a small dish of cornbread dressing.)
Please, share your menus and traditions. If you’ve got a recipe you want to share, feel free to post that, too.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
While I don't intend to write exclusively about adoption issues, this IS National Adoption Month, so........ This is a time to focus on building families through adoption. Our family is one made whole by adoption. Recently, there has been much controversy about international adoption, which is how our family came together. Our daughter is from Guatemala.
UNICEF, believe it or not, is one of the strongest voices in getting international adoption closed down in many countries. Their mantra “a child should grow up in his or her birth family and birth culture” is one that, in a perfect world, would make a lot of sense. In fact, I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but only when there is a just world, and, as you know, we’re FAR from a just world at this point.
Adoption plans are made for many reasons. When I was in high school (way back in another century,) if an unmarried girl or woman got pregnant, and the pregnancy was carried to term, an adoption took place. Unmarried moms didn’t raise children. That was due not only to the toughness of raising a child on one’s own, but also due to the social stigma of having a child out of wedlock. That stricture still applies in a great many other countries (I saw a stat that said something like 90% of the adoptions from Korea came from unmarried moms there.) Divorce was rare 30 years ago, so two parent families were the rule, and few people could imagine intentionally raising a child on one’s own. Things have certainly changed in the US- 50% of marriages end in divorce, many times people who thought they’d be raising a child with a spouse or significant other find themselves abandoned and raising children alone, so here, raising a child unmarried no longer carries the social stigma it once did, but it IS still very hard. Single parents who don’t have extended family to help often really struggle to raise their children. Domestic adoption from those who made an adoption plan during pregnancy is way down.
The majority of domestic adoptions now are from foster care, where children have been removed from their homes for a variety of reasons. It could be as simple as neglect, or as awful as sexual abuse. I’ve had friends adopt through Child Protective Services (CPS), which is free, by the way, and I’ve got a friend who is currently trying to adopt through CPS. Here’s the problem I have with that- CPS seems hell-bent on reuniting families, which, while noble, is just not always the best for the children. CPS sees children as something that “belongs” to a biological family. I see children as a gift from God, to be protected and loved. IF that can be in the biological family, that is great, but if not, there are literally thousands of people in the world who want to raise a child, who will love and nurture that child, who won’t neglect or abuse the child. NO child deserves to be treated like a commodity and ping ponged back and forth between foster home and bio home. I’ve got a very hard stance here- if I was empress of the world, when someone abused a child (and I don’t mean just a spanking, but true harmful abuse), there would be no second chance. Children deserve to be loved and nurtured, period! I salute those of you who are foster parents to these children, but the craziness of taking children out of bad situations, spending a few months in foster care, then thinking the parents have “changed” and putting them back and then yanking them out again a few months later. Children should not be yo-yoed, but they’re still treated like a commodity that belongs to those who produced them, and that is not always in their best interests. There is a significant number of youths who are homeless who were foster kids, bounced around and having no permanent home. Where do they go when they age out of the foster care system? The streets are often one of their alternatives.
Now, to international adoption, which, just as in domestic infant adoption, has had some fraud, and even one fraudlent adoption is too many, but to shut down this avenue of hope for so many because of a guilty few is just wrong, INHO. We lost our first referred child when it turned out that the woman who presented her as the biological mother was actually no biological kin at all. The US has long required DNA tests of the child and mother, and this one proved that they were not biologically related. The Department of Minors in Guatemala took little Flor de Maria, and told us that we had “no legal right” to know anything about where she was taken. The woman was taken into custody, but nothing happened to the attorney or to the agency and that is where the problem is. I have long maintained that if agencies were told that if they worked with an unethical attorney, both the attorney and agency would lose the ability to process adoptions that that country for one year the first time, and, if there was a second time, it would be a lifelong ban by the US Embassy (which processes most of the adoptions in the world) to the agency, any of the principles in the agency (meaning they couldn’t simply change their name and keep working) and for any attorneys in the firm. That threat to their livelihood would have stopped fraud, but the Embassy wasn’t willing to do that. They’d give a little 2 or 3 month ban to an attorney, but the other attorneys in the office could continue processing. It is really so frustrating, knowing there are thousands of children who need a family, but whose biological family no longer as the right to make an adoption plan so that their children have a chance at not growing up, for example in Guatemala, in a country with one of the highest under 5 mortality rates in the world, and where on any given year 50% of the children suffer from severe malnutrition, which starves not only their bodies, stunting their physical growth, but also starves their brains, making them mentally disabled. UNICEF says that poverty shouldn't be a reason for adoption, and again, if it was a perfect world, I'd agree. However, the US helped to facilitate a vicious 36 year civil war in Guatemala, which didn't end til 1998. The country is still struggling, and now is in the grips of drug lords. There is also a very bad drought going on, and subsistence farmers are not being able to grow enough to feed their families. Children are the ones suffering the most.
I’ve got friends in Guatemala with a medical clinic; they say that women frequently come to them with their babies and small children, asking them if they can get them adopted into the US, although he has never been involved in adoptions. They’re seeing their children starve before their eyes, and they want something better for them, but that “better” is no longer available to them. There is much racism in Guatemala towards “browner” people, and I have to wonder how much that plays into this. In India, there was a woman working very hard to stop adoptions there, who was quoted as saying something to the effect of “what right do these lower caste children have to a better life?” Hard to believe, isn’t it?
When we met our daughter’s biological mothers, she thanked us over and over for adopting our daughter. She talked about how her daughters still in Guatemala could never even dream of the life that this daughter had. Her older daughters had been born at home, and she couldn’t afford the few dollars it took to register them, so according to the law, they didn’t exist, which meant they couldn’t even go to school (if they could find the clothes and shoes for it.) We gave them the money to register the girls and told her we hoped she got them into school, but we don’t know for sure if that happened. When you’re struggling to survive every moment, it is hard to plan for the difference having an education will make in the future.
I was reading on an anti-adoption site the other day and it just makes me so sad. A comment was made about “the big lie” that adoptions are happy occasions, but it isn’t a big lie- it is a part of the truth- it is a happy occasion when a child comes to parents who are prepared to parent and to love, and also sad for the mother who may never see that child again, but who has chosen adoption for a “better life” for the child. Too many parents are not willing to be open and honest about their adoption. Our daughter met her birth family when she was 4 years old. We’ve always had a photo of her and her bio mom in her room; along with one of her and her foster mom and sister (they raised her from 2 days old to 8 mo.) I’ve had people ask me if we’re going to tell her she is adopted. HELLO! It is pretty darn apparent she isn’t our bio child, and I’m always stunned when I’m asked, not only for that obvious reason, but because I can’t imagine not telling her, even if she looked like us. We include her birth family in our prayers every night, and she will sometimes talk about her birth family, and how she wants to study hard in Spanish class so that she can talk to her sisters directly when we get to see them the next time. Another friend of mine who adopted from Columbia and Guatemala put it best when talking about whether to meet the birth family or not. Leceta said “you can’t have too much love” and I can’t agree more.
When an adoption takes place, there is much sorrow as well as joy, but I can’t help but think of the baby in the Bible when King Solomon discerned who was the actual mother of a child by telling his soldier to cut the baby in half to give each mother claiming it some. The mother who had borne the child said to give the whole baby to the other mother, rather than to harm him. Adoption is like that- whether it is because the bio family can’t nurture the child because of poverty or other reasons (sometimes a new man in the house and he doesn’t want his money to feed some other man’s children), they are giving the whole child to another so that, not only will the child not be harmed, but that the child will have a chance at a better life. It isn’t that they don’t love their child; it is often that they love them so much they’re willing to sacrifice having them in their arms to give them a shot at a life where their talents can be nurtured. That is love greater than most of us have. When we contacted our daughter’s bio mom and sent her photos of our family, she said she was so excited- she’d never expected to hear from us, and although she prayed every day that this daughter would be safe and loved, she just didn’t know. She kept thanking God for allowing her to see our (and in her and us) child again and in getting to see how healthy and loved she is. It was a tough meeting, lots of tears, (from her and me,) but it was a good kind of tears. She knows first hand how much we love our daughter, and our daughter knows first hand she was relinquished out of love, not because she wasn’t wanted. That’s important.
Sometimes children are cruel- saying things like "you're adopted because your "REAL" parents didn't want you!" First of all, please teach your children that we are the REAL parents- there is nothing artificial about me- I hold her when she cries, we snuggle when we watch movies, we celebrate good things and commiserate about bad ones. She has a first family, who lives in Guatemala. Some folks call them "birth families" or "biological families" or "first families"- all are correct. "Real" however, is not! Also teach your children that adoption is a gift, as surely as their birth to you was. It isn't about "not wanting", but, rather, about wanting "better" for their children. Whether it is the teen who isn't prepared to be a parent now, or the family in China who isn't allowed to have that second child, or the family in an AIDs-sticken country in Africa who wants their young relative to be raised in a family rather than an orphanage, or the mother who simply can't afford to feed another child, and sees better opportunities for that child elsewhere, as painful as it will be to the first mother, it is about making a better life for the children. Some people do that by immigrating to a country with more opportunities (legally or not.) Sadly, as adoption closes is so much of the world, immigration to other countries may become the only way for that better life. Teach your children that adoption is about love- the love of the first family to provide a more stable home for their child, and the love of the forever family, who brings this child into our homes, born not of our bodies, but of our hearts.
People often say "bless you for adopting", but, believe me (most days, anyway) she is a much bigger blessing to us that we could ever be for her!
As we celebrate National Adoption Month, I hope that you will read some of the wonderful adoption books to your children. They help to explain that it is just another way to build a family, one that gets to have more people who love that child. While adoption is about loss, it is also about growth and gaining a whole new family to love the child. When we're honest with our children, we can help them navigate the loss pathway, and hopefully help them come out stronger and more sure of the love they hold from both their first family and their forever family.
UNICEF, believe it or not, is one of the strongest voices in getting international adoption closed down in many countries. Their mantra “a child should grow up in his or her birth family and birth culture” is one that, in a perfect world, would make a lot of sense. In fact, I can wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but only when there is a just world, and, as you know, we’re FAR from a just world at this point.
Adoption plans are made for many reasons. When I was in high school (way back in another century,) if an unmarried girl or woman got pregnant, and the pregnancy was carried to term, an adoption took place. Unmarried moms didn’t raise children. That was due not only to the toughness of raising a child on one’s own, but also due to the social stigma of having a child out of wedlock. That stricture still applies in a great many other countries (I saw a stat that said something like 90% of the adoptions from Korea came from unmarried moms there.) Divorce was rare 30 years ago, so two parent families were the rule, and few people could imagine intentionally raising a child on one’s own. Things have certainly changed in the US- 50% of marriages end in divorce, many times people who thought they’d be raising a child with a spouse or significant other find themselves abandoned and raising children alone, so here, raising a child unmarried no longer carries the social stigma it once did, but it IS still very hard. Single parents who don’t have extended family to help often really struggle to raise their children. Domestic adoption from those who made an adoption plan during pregnancy is way down.
The majority of domestic adoptions now are from foster care, where children have been removed from their homes for a variety of reasons. It could be as simple as neglect, or as awful as sexual abuse. I’ve had friends adopt through Child Protective Services (CPS), which is free, by the way, and I’ve got a friend who is currently trying to adopt through CPS. Here’s the problem I have with that- CPS seems hell-bent on reuniting families, which, while noble, is just not always the best for the children. CPS sees children as something that “belongs” to a biological family. I see children as a gift from God, to be protected and loved. IF that can be in the biological family, that is great, but if not, there are literally thousands of people in the world who want to raise a child, who will love and nurture that child, who won’t neglect or abuse the child. NO child deserves to be treated like a commodity and ping ponged back and forth between foster home and bio home. I’ve got a very hard stance here- if I was empress of the world, when someone abused a child (and I don’t mean just a spanking, but true harmful abuse), there would be no second chance. Children deserve to be loved and nurtured, period! I salute those of you who are foster parents to these children, but the craziness of taking children out of bad situations, spending a few months in foster care, then thinking the parents have “changed” and putting them back and then yanking them out again a few months later. Children should not be yo-yoed, but they’re still treated like a commodity that belongs to those who produced them, and that is not always in their best interests. There is a significant number of youths who are homeless who were foster kids, bounced around and having no permanent home. Where do they go when they age out of the foster care system? The streets are often one of their alternatives.
Now, to international adoption, which, just as in domestic infant adoption, has had some fraud, and even one fraudlent adoption is too many, but to shut down this avenue of hope for so many because of a guilty few is just wrong, INHO. We lost our first referred child when it turned out that the woman who presented her as the biological mother was actually no biological kin at all. The US has long required DNA tests of the child and mother, and this one proved that they were not biologically related. The Department of Minors in Guatemala took little Flor de Maria, and told us that we had “no legal right” to know anything about where she was taken. The woman was taken into custody, but nothing happened to the attorney or to the agency and that is where the problem is. I have long maintained that if agencies were told that if they worked with an unethical attorney, both the attorney and agency would lose the ability to process adoptions that that country for one year the first time, and, if there was a second time, it would be a lifelong ban by the US Embassy (which processes most of the adoptions in the world) to the agency, any of the principles in the agency (meaning they couldn’t simply change their name and keep working) and for any attorneys in the firm. That threat to their livelihood would have stopped fraud, but the Embassy wasn’t willing to do that. They’d give a little 2 or 3 month ban to an attorney, but the other attorneys in the office could continue processing. It is really so frustrating, knowing there are thousands of children who need a family, but whose biological family no longer as the right to make an adoption plan so that their children have a chance at not growing up, for example in Guatemala, in a country with one of the highest under 5 mortality rates in the world, and where on any given year 50% of the children suffer from severe malnutrition, which starves not only their bodies, stunting their physical growth, but also starves their brains, making them mentally disabled. UNICEF says that poverty shouldn't be a reason for adoption, and again, if it was a perfect world, I'd agree. However, the US helped to facilitate a vicious 36 year civil war in Guatemala, which didn't end til 1998. The country is still struggling, and now is in the grips of drug lords. There is also a very bad drought going on, and subsistence farmers are not being able to grow enough to feed their families. Children are the ones suffering the most.
I’ve got friends in Guatemala with a medical clinic; they say that women frequently come to them with their babies and small children, asking them if they can get them adopted into the US, although he has never been involved in adoptions. They’re seeing their children starve before their eyes, and they want something better for them, but that “better” is no longer available to them. There is much racism in Guatemala towards “browner” people, and I have to wonder how much that plays into this. In India, there was a woman working very hard to stop adoptions there, who was quoted as saying something to the effect of “what right do these lower caste children have to a better life?” Hard to believe, isn’t it?
When we met our daughter’s biological mothers, she thanked us over and over for adopting our daughter. She talked about how her daughters still in Guatemala could never even dream of the life that this daughter had. Her older daughters had been born at home, and she couldn’t afford the few dollars it took to register them, so according to the law, they didn’t exist, which meant they couldn’t even go to school (if they could find the clothes and shoes for it.) We gave them the money to register the girls and told her we hoped she got them into school, but we don’t know for sure if that happened. When you’re struggling to survive every moment, it is hard to plan for the difference having an education will make in the future.
I was reading on an anti-adoption site the other day and it just makes me so sad. A comment was made about “the big lie” that adoptions are happy occasions, but it isn’t a big lie- it is a part of the truth- it is a happy occasion when a child comes to parents who are prepared to parent and to love, and also sad for the mother who may never see that child again, but who has chosen adoption for a “better life” for the child. Too many parents are not willing to be open and honest about their adoption. Our daughter met her birth family when she was 4 years old. We’ve always had a photo of her and her bio mom in her room; along with one of her and her foster mom and sister (they raised her from 2 days old to 8 mo.) I’ve had people ask me if we’re going to tell her she is adopted. HELLO! It is pretty darn apparent she isn’t our bio child, and I’m always stunned when I’m asked, not only for that obvious reason, but because I can’t imagine not telling her, even if she looked like us. We include her birth family in our prayers every night, and she will sometimes talk about her birth family, and how she wants to study hard in Spanish class so that she can talk to her sisters directly when we get to see them the next time. Another friend of mine who adopted from Columbia and Guatemala put it best when talking about whether to meet the birth family or not. Leceta said “you can’t have too much love” and I can’t agree more.
When an adoption takes place, there is much sorrow as well as joy, but I can’t help but think of the baby in the Bible when King Solomon discerned who was the actual mother of a child by telling his soldier to cut the baby in half to give each mother claiming it some. The mother who had borne the child said to give the whole baby to the other mother, rather than to harm him. Adoption is like that- whether it is because the bio family can’t nurture the child because of poverty or other reasons (sometimes a new man in the house and he doesn’t want his money to feed some other man’s children), they are giving the whole child to another so that, not only will the child not be harmed, but that the child will have a chance at a better life. It isn’t that they don’t love their child; it is often that they love them so much they’re willing to sacrifice having them in their arms to give them a shot at a life where their talents can be nurtured. That is love greater than most of us have. When we contacted our daughter’s bio mom and sent her photos of our family, she said she was so excited- she’d never expected to hear from us, and although she prayed every day that this daughter would be safe and loved, she just didn’t know. She kept thanking God for allowing her to see our (and in her and us) child again and in getting to see how healthy and loved she is. It was a tough meeting, lots of tears, (from her and me,) but it was a good kind of tears. She knows first hand how much we love our daughter, and our daughter knows first hand she was relinquished out of love, not because she wasn’t wanted. That’s important.
Sometimes children are cruel- saying things like "you're adopted because your "REAL" parents didn't want you!" First of all, please teach your children that we are the REAL parents- there is nothing artificial about me- I hold her when she cries, we snuggle when we watch movies, we celebrate good things and commiserate about bad ones. She has a first family, who lives in Guatemala. Some folks call them "birth families" or "biological families" or "first families"- all are correct. "Real" however, is not! Also teach your children that adoption is a gift, as surely as their birth to you was. It isn't about "not wanting", but, rather, about wanting "better" for their children. Whether it is the teen who isn't prepared to be a parent now, or the family in China who isn't allowed to have that second child, or the family in an AIDs-sticken country in Africa who wants their young relative to be raised in a family rather than an orphanage, or the mother who simply can't afford to feed another child, and sees better opportunities for that child elsewhere, as painful as it will be to the first mother, it is about making a better life for the children. Some people do that by immigrating to a country with more opportunities (legally or not.) Sadly, as adoption closes is so much of the world, immigration to other countries may become the only way for that better life. Teach your children that adoption is about love- the love of the first family to provide a more stable home for their child, and the love of the forever family, who brings this child into our homes, born not of our bodies, but of our hearts.
People often say "bless you for adopting", but, believe me (most days, anyway) she is a much bigger blessing to us that we could ever be for her!
As we celebrate National Adoption Month, I hope that you will read some of the wonderful adoption books to your children. They help to explain that it is just another way to build a family, one that gets to have more people who love that child. While adoption is about loss, it is also about growth and gaining a whole new family to love the child. When we're honest with our children, we can help them navigate the loss pathway, and hopefully help them come out stronger and more sure of the love they hold from both their first family and their forever family.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Potpourring our cultures
I’m sometimes asked: “What is it like to have an adopted child?” That is a hard question for me, this is the only child we have-she is, simply, OUR child. She came into our family through adoption, but she is our child. There are times I had a hard time remembering a life without her.
We adopted from Guatemala, and people often want to know what it is like to adopt transnationally. It is hell, to be honest, going through all that we went through, but I think that many people experience hellish problems bringing children into their families, where that is by adoption (domestic private, domestic foster or international) or by birth (vaginal, Caesaria, surrogate, etc.)
Once a child is in your home, he or she is your child. There are times in our lives when I think we all think we’ve “ruined our lives” by adding children into the dynamics, and then others, when we know heaven couldn’t be any better than having this child in our family.
A gift of adoption is that there are really no expectations in terms of intelligence, talent or looks. It is like unwrapping a new gift just about every day. It makes one wonder if “nature” or “nurture” is the key to a child’s gifts. Our daughter went to weekly live music concerts with me every week from the time she was 9 months old. It only stopped the semester she went to public school, and now that she is in a small private school. Was it all that exposure to music that makes her such a good musician, and gives her such a love of music and dance, or is that something innate? When we met her birth family, because of their poverty, her sisters have never had music or dance lessons. It is something completely unknown to them. As her birthmother told us, our daughter has opportunities that her daughters still in Guatemala don’t even know to dream of. She’s smart, too, and really good in math (CLEARLY not my biological child, although my parents were both very good in math.:)
What international adoption does that some people don’t understand is make our children’s birth country a part of our family heritage. We’re no longer a Scottish/Cherokee/German family; we’re a Scottish, Cherokee, Guatemalan, German family. As such, we celebrate that heritage. Lettie and I have kilt skirts that we love to wear, and we’ve got Guatemalan clothing as well. Lettie loves playing Scottish music on the piano, but is learning a Guatemalan ballad as well.
When I was growing up, we spent a lot of time in Mexico and South America, and I grew up with artwork and furniture Latin countries, as well as with brown skinned people. We had relatives who lived in Mexico City, and spent a few weeks there just about every summer as a young child. Adopting from Guatemala just felt right, and it was.
However, as a Scottish, Guatemalan, Cherokee, German, US family, we also acknowledge the intervention that our home country made in Guatemala, and the dire consequences it has had on the country and her people. Do we pretend it never happened? Some parents refuse to acknowledge it, in fact. Do we attempt to take some responsibility for the starving children there and some of the inequities of the system? That has been our response. No matter how one tries to hide it, sooner or later our children WILL read about the US intervention in Guatemala, how we caused their 36 year civil war that decimated so many of the native peoples there, and how we’ve not been really good neighbors to most of Latin America. We figure that even if we didn’t want to, for that reason alone, we need to do what we can to help there.
Yes, there are starving children all over the world, and anytime you do something to save a child, you’re doing a good thing, but THESE children could be our child. What if Dona R. had not decided to relinquish this child? Our child might be suffering from severe malnutrition, along with over 50% of the children in Guatemala. The words from the Bible- “what you do to the least of these, you do to me” is truly brought home in this case, but instead of Jesus’ face, I see our Lettie’s face there.
Land distribution is so inequitable in Guatemala. The rich have thousands of acres, much of it totally unused, and the poor people have so little. They don’t have reliable water to water their subsistence farms, they don’t have medical care, they don’t have accessible schools, and they don’t have all the things that we take for granted in this country.
There are, however, incredible people like our friends Anita & Gregory (www.hands-of-hope.com) and our new friend, Marla Johnson. Anita & Gregory run a medical clinic for the very poor in Guatemala out in the hills outside of Antigua. Marla and her husband run feeding centers in the department of Chiquimula, Guatemala, where they feed well over 600 children a day. I spoke with Marla by phone- she didn’t set out to start feeding centers, but she said the first year they were there, she saw the starving children, and over 100 children died (these were just the reported deaths) from lack of food. She had no clue how to do a feeding center, but she just did. People like these folks make a huge difference. They set out to do something, and sometimes find that there are different needs and they just do it. I admire them for leaving their lives of comfort in the US to move there and work to help people. They are truly following a higher power that leads them into the service of others. As a Christian, I see a BIG difference between those who worship Christ and those who actually follow Him. These are folks who follow and I admire them so.
Since Guatemala is a part of our family, we do what we can from here. Right now we’re working on a fundraising concert that will be held in Austin at Central Presbyterian Church (www.cpcaustin.org) on Sunday, Nov. 22, from 1:30-3:00 PM. Joe McDermott http://www.joemcdermottmusic.com will be our featured artist. His “openers” are April Rain (Chinese dancers), a martial arts demo (with a Guatemalan born child as one of the performers, and our Lettie, playing piano with a friend playing violin, performing “Luna de Xelaju” a popular Guatemalan song. We’re raising money now with sponsorships (from $50-1,000.) and then for the concert, rather than selling tickets, we’re asking for donations for the children. Donations are tax deductible (make checks to Generations Church, the sponsoring church of Marla’s feeding centers) and you may donate any amount. We’re hopeful that we can raise a few thousand for this.
In the spring, we’re working on premiering “Looking for Palladin” (http://www.palladinmovie.com) a movie made in Antigua, Guatemala, in Austin as a fundraiser. The director and distributor are on-board with this, just need to get a theater to donate their services now. If anyone has any “ins” with a theater here, please let me know.
For those families like ours created through international adoption, our lives have been enriched by the addition of another culture. As we “acculturate” our families, we hope that we can enrich our communities with the beauty of these other cultures, while still remembering that we’re raising American children, too.
We adopted from Guatemala, and people often want to know what it is like to adopt transnationally. It is hell, to be honest, going through all that we went through, but I think that many people experience hellish problems bringing children into their families, where that is by adoption (domestic private, domestic foster or international) or by birth (vaginal, Caesaria, surrogate, etc.)
Once a child is in your home, he or she is your child. There are times in our lives when I think we all think we’ve “ruined our lives” by adding children into the dynamics, and then others, when we know heaven couldn’t be any better than having this child in our family.
A gift of adoption is that there are really no expectations in terms of intelligence, talent or looks. It is like unwrapping a new gift just about every day. It makes one wonder if “nature” or “nurture” is the key to a child’s gifts. Our daughter went to weekly live music concerts with me every week from the time she was 9 months old. It only stopped the semester she went to public school, and now that she is in a small private school. Was it all that exposure to music that makes her such a good musician, and gives her such a love of music and dance, or is that something innate? When we met her birth family, because of their poverty, her sisters have never had music or dance lessons. It is something completely unknown to them. As her birthmother told us, our daughter has opportunities that her daughters still in Guatemala don’t even know to dream of. She’s smart, too, and really good in math (CLEARLY not my biological child, although my parents were both very good in math.:)
What international adoption does that some people don’t understand is make our children’s birth country a part of our family heritage. We’re no longer a Scottish/Cherokee/German family; we’re a Scottish, Cherokee, Guatemalan, German family. As such, we celebrate that heritage. Lettie and I have kilt skirts that we love to wear, and we’ve got Guatemalan clothing as well. Lettie loves playing Scottish music on the piano, but is learning a Guatemalan ballad as well.
When I was growing up, we spent a lot of time in Mexico and South America, and I grew up with artwork and furniture Latin countries, as well as with brown skinned people. We had relatives who lived in Mexico City, and spent a few weeks there just about every summer as a young child. Adopting from Guatemala just felt right, and it was.
However, as a Scottish, Guatemalan, Cherokee, German, US family, we also acknowledge the intervention that our home country made in Guatemala, and the dire consequences it has had on the country and her people. Do we pretend it never happened? Some parents refuse to acknowledge it, in fact. Do we attempt to take some responsibility for the starving children there and some of the inequities of the system? That has been our response. No matter how one tries to hide it, sooner or later our children WILL read about the US intervention in Guatemala, how we caused their 36 year civil war that decimated so many of the native peoples there, and how we’ve not been really good neighbors to most of Latin America. We figure that even if we didn’t want to, for that reason alone, we need to do what we can to help there.
Yes, there are starving children all over the world, and anytime you do something to save a child, you’re doing a good thing, but THESE children could be our child. What if Dona R. had not decided to relinquish this child? Our child might be suffering from severe malnutrition, along with over 50% of the children in Guatemala. The words from the Bible- “what you do to the least of these, you do to me” is truly brought home in this case, but instead of Jesus’ face, I see our Lettie’s face there.
Land distribution is so inequitable in Guatemala. The rich have thousands of acres, much of it totally unused, and the poor people have so little. They don’t have reliable water to water their subsistence farms, they don’t have medical care, they don’t have accessible schools, and they don’t have all the things that we take for granted in this country.
There are, however, incredible people like our friends Anita & Gregory (www.hands-of-hope.com) and our new friend, Marla Johnson. Anita & Gregory run a medical clinic for the very poor in Guatemala out in the hills outside of Antigua. Marla and her husband run feeding centers in the department of Chiquimula, Guatemala, where they feed well over 600 children a day. I spoke with Marla by phone- she didn’t set out to start feeding centers, but she said the first year they were there, she saw the starving children, and over 100 children died (these were just the reported deaths) from lack of food. She had no clue how to do a feeding center, but she just did. People like these folks make a huge difference. They set out to do something, and sometimes find that there are different needs and they just do it. I admire them for leaving their lives of comfort in the US to move there and work to help people. They are truly following a higher power that leads them into the service of others. As a Christian, I see a BIG difference between those who worship Christ and those who actually follow Him. These are folks who follow and I admire them so.
Since Guatemala is a part of our family, we do what we can from here. Right now we’re working on a fundraising concert that will be held in Austin at Central Presbyterian Church (www.cpcaustin.org) on Sunday, Nov. 22, from 1:30-3:00 PM. Joe McDermott http://www.joemcdermottmusic.com will be our featured artist. His “openers” are April Rain (Chinese dancers), a martial arts demo (with a Guatemalan born child as one of the performers, and our Lettie, playing piano with a friend playing violin, performing “Luna de Xelaju” a popular Guatemalan song. We’re raising money now with sponsorships (from $50-1,000.) and then for the concert, rather than selling tickets, we’re asking for donations for the children. Donations are tax deductible (make checks to Generations Church, the sponsoring church of Marla’s feeding centers) and you may donate any amount. We’re hopeful that we can raise a few thousand for this.
In the spring, we’re working on premiering “Looking for Palladin” (http://www.palladinmovie.com) a movie made in Antigua, Guatemala, in Austin as a fundraiser. The director and distributor are on-board with this, just need to get a theater to donate their services now. If anyone has any “ins” with a theater here, please let me know.
For those families like ours created through international adoption, our lives have been enriched by the addition of another culture. As we “acculturate” our families, we hope that we can enrich our communities with the beauty of these other cultures, while still remembering that we’re raising American children, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)