Cheerful Abundance

I thought we were done with the drama of the kindergarten registration process, but apparently, we are not, because yesterday we got a call from the school district, informing us that the kids are missing 3 DTaP vaccinations on the medical forms we turned in. Forms that our doctor signed, stating that the kids were up-to-date. Because they are. Because we are the anti-granola family, all vaxx’ed up and stuff.But the district is adamant that we are wrong, and our doctor is wrong, and why doesn’t the paperwork for my kids match those of kids born in an industrialized nation, and also, maybe we could just get them three quick TDaPs before mid-October, when all this is due, and did I mention that I turned this paperwork in two months ago, and if there was a problem, maybe the woman who checked it and said it was complete should bear the brunt of the blame here?

courtesy, mtv.tumblr.com

It never ends, adoption paperwork, and every milestone brings more with it. In this case,  my kids spent the first 7 months of their life in Africa, and since TDaPs are given at 1, 3, and 6 months, we had to do titre testing. Medicine that ends up in Africa is often expired, often watered down, often is mislabeled, and even if your records look good, the only way to know for sure what inoculations were given is to check for the presence of them in the blood, which is called titring, or titration testing. Which we did, which demonstrated that the kids had in fact lucked out and had their three TDaPs, and that the dosage levels were appropriate and good, and so they only needed 2 more, at 15 months and 4 years, which they got.

So our doctor’s office faxed over the titre results, and an explanation of them, and I thought we were done, until the phone rang again today, and it was the school district, telling me now that the forms were incomplete because the kids didn’t have a Varicella vax listed. Which they don’t, because they had Chicken Pox as infants, another titre test we had done. Chicken Pox swept through their orphanage like a brush fire, 250 infants and toddlers burning up with it, including my own. Immunity through disease.

So here is where I was a tiny bit not so nice, because, as I tried to explain, wouldn’t it have been better if they had told me on the first call *everything* that was inconsistent in their records, so I did not have to keep bothering their doctor to write and fax letters for each individual issue, day after day? Now I have to chase down their doctor (again). And I get it, I really do. I have had Whooping Cough, and I wouldn’t wish it on a kid. It went through our PreK school, and was awful. I don’t want my kids to have the measles, and I don’t want anyone else’s too,either. I believe in herd immunity, and Doing Our Part in that. But it is also awfully tiring to always have to explain away the inconsistencies, the differentness of our records. I just, for once, want one thing to be straightforward and easy.

The best part of the conversation happened as I was trying to get off the phone, when the district caseworker said to me, “Oh, and make a note: the kids also need HepA,” and so I told her no, the kids had their HepA shots already, broken into the 2 dose schedule, but she interrupted me to interject that she meant they needed another dose by Grade 5, and I said, jokingly, well, we have five years to figure that one out, and she replied that she just thought she would tell me, because it seemed like maybe we didn’t really understand the importance of these vaccinations. And then I did this.

via http://realitytvgifs.tumblr.com/

Because I have seen, with my own eyes, people with Polio, and beggars with Leprosy, and children blinded by Measles and Rubella, begging and starving at the side of the road. I am fully aware of what these vaccinations mean to my children, and what can happen in places where vaccinations are not available. We aren’t non-compliant with the vaccination schedule at all: our records just look a little different. We look a little different. So if you need me, I will by lying on the floor next to my chair, the back of one hand pressed firmly against my forehead, moaning quietly to myself.

Yesterday was an anniversary for us today, five years. Five years ago, today, we got the call that changed everything.

A common misconception in adoption is that parents somehow pick out the child they adopt, but in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. There is no catalog, no way to choose. Instead, countries ask potential adoptive parents to give them some parameters to work with – an infant as young as possible, a child between the ages of 3 and 7, an older child, maybe a gender preference – but everyone knows that what drives the process is as simple as this: who needs a family the day your dossier is being read? We gave very, very general parameters on age, and none at all on gender, because we trusted in our hearts that the child who needed parents was the child we wanted to parent, and the details didn’t really matter. But sometimes, even with no expectations at all, you can still be stunned by the result.

When they called us with the good news, we weren’t home, so our agency called my husband’s cell, to ask him a few questions, and then coincidentally, while he was sitting in his car, trying to process what had just happened, I called him, and after he let me blather on a bit, he told me that our agency had called him, and this is what he said.

“It isn’t an official referral,” he told me. “Ethiopia wanted to run something by us, first.”

Our agency coordinator called my husband because Ethiopia had had asked them too. Not how adoption usually works. Ethiopia thought they had a potential referral for us, but it was so surprising, so completely out of the blue that they wanted our agency to check with us, to make sure that, if we were given this referral, we would accept it. And then Brian told me the little information that our agency was able to give him. It was a pair of newborn twins, girls, and they were impossibly tiny and there was no solid medical information and no photos and they were sick, and our agency didn’t know if other families were also being asked what we were being asked.

Two little girls. But NOT a referral. We couldn’t tell anyone, there was no guarantee that we would get this referral for these children, and nobody knew what might happen next. Its unexpected, this ‘call before the call’. But there was only one answer we could give, and we gave it, and we waited. We couldn’t tell anyone, we didn’t know how long we would have to wait until an official referral happened, or if other families were on the same pins-and-needles we were about these girls. We didn’t know if both girls would live to see a referral, or how we would swing the adoption costs for two children, or how you fly two infants on a 36 hour trip, or if they were healthy.

They made us wait. And wait, and wait, and wait, and we didn’t sleep, and we barely ate, and we each had one word running through our heads, day and night. Twins. That wait was torture, and when people brush it off to me know, tell me they knew it was all going to work out, I think of all the waiting we did in which it didn’t work out, and I stay silent. I am well aware of how often it doesn’t work out, and so it is hard to trust even the smallest bit of good news.

I like to tell people that I became a mother in the back-to-school aisle at Target. I was there yesterday, with two big girls, girls who had to pick out their school supplies because they start kindergarten next month. Five years! I can hardly believe it. It was all I could do to keep from crying while they picked out new school jeans, cool (everything has to be ‘cool’ now. Or cute) stripped tops, and fancy notebooks. Five years. The best five years.

Gentle reader, are you tired of my ranting about kindergarten registration yet? I promise, I am almost done. The whole process started with a district-wide meeting for all parents, and then individual evening presentations at each of the three selective public schools in our small town, along with an evening tour and presentation of our neighbourhood school.

At each of these meetings, they kept going over the process, and the thing they kept stressing is, even though you fill out an online registration form, on a specific date set by your neighbourhood school, you need to ‘swing by‘ – that is how they kept wording it, ‘swing by‘ the school board offices to drop off proof of residency and the kids’ birth certificates. I made a plan to ‘swing by‘  after work on our appointed day, planning on getting there about 2PM. No problem – they are open until 7PM, and hey, it’s just swinging by, right? I mean, my own kids don’t get out of school until 3:30PM, so I had so much time.

The first sign that maybe it was going to be a rougher day than expected was when I walked out of my office at about 1:30, and saw people staggering in through the building’s front doors, encrusted head to toe from ice, looking shell-shocked. Bad weather, you say? An ice storm? Was I going to let that stop me? No I was not. I am not some delicate flower. I grew up in a snowbound country. I scoff at ice.

Well, I scoffed until I walked out into it. Then, gentle reader, I admit that I might have, for a brief moment, considered sinking delicately to my knees and giving up, letting the wind whip the snow up around my prone body, to be found by Streets and Sanitation workers in the spring. It was rough out there. But, I reasoned, bad weather would make dropping all the kindergarten documentation off even easier, because so many people would likely stay home, so I hitched up the team and off I went.

ed note: not really me. I wish I had horses, given the sad little non-snow-friendly sedan I actually drive.

I was pretty excited when I got to the board of education – a table set up in the lobby, and only one person in line. This was going to be so easy, this swinging by thing. Until they handed me a numbered ticket, deli-style, and pointed me to a large room full of angry people, just to my left. “Wait in there,” they said, “until your number is called.” I was number 97. They opened at noon, and it was 2:30PM, and in the two and a half hours that people had been swinging by, they had only processed 52 files. I sat down next to a woman who had been there when they opened, and was still 10 numbers away from being called. I sat there, and I seethed. There are ten hours of meetings before this point: why on earth did nobody ever say, oh, by the way, you aren’t swinging by. Book your schedule for 3 hours. It will take at least 3 hours.

Three hours is NOT ‘swinging by‘. Three hours is ‘getting a babysitter and making a dinner plan that includes take out’. Three hours is, ‘thank god my husband could pick up the kids.’ Three hours is, ‘I can’t pretend this is just a lunchtime errand’.

I settled in, and waited, impatiently, but grateful that, unlike many other parents, I didn’t have my pre-kindergarteners with me, because those people, who waited three hours with their kids? Those people are saints. I had my laptop, luckily, although no internet connection, and I had my iPhone when my laptop battery died, so I made it through. But when they called the number of the woman next to me, who had been waiting since noon, I may have leapt up, Academy awards style, and given her a standing ovation, and she may have laughed until she snorted. That may have happened. Allegedly. People, you have to make your own fun.

Once my number was finally called, and I was at least 3 years older than when I entered the room when that event occurred, then it got … fun. Here is what I know as an adoptive parent: carry way, way more documentation than you think you will need. In my case, their birth certificates were rejected, due to being foreign, so luckily I had their certificates of foreign birth, which is what dirty foreigners like us get when we live in the US, become citizens, but sadly had the bad taste to be born abroad. So, we had a fight about that counting as a birth certificate. Then we had another fight, and I say fight, but really, a kind of quiet-voiced, tight-lipped Politeness-Battle because, even though my name, and my husband’s name, are listed on both their foreign birth certificates and their certificates of foreign birth, they would not process the paperwork without a certified adoption decree from the state. Which I happen to carry in my car, because seriously, you cannot even believe how handy that is.And thank God it was there and I grabbed it on the way in,  because there was no way I was going to start this process all over and get back in line.

After three or so, maybe a hundred rounds of, “Oh, I see you made a mistake here on your form. You checked that your kids are AFRICAN-AMERICAN HAHAHAHAHA” and me answering nope, not a mistake, and then the look askance because truly, I am so white it hurts to look directly at me, and then a few rounds of ‘that writing on their birth certificate looks like chicken scratches‘ [ed note: Amarhic, a written and spoken language. Written and spoken by humans, not chickens], and then a few exclamations of “Oh, TWINS” and several “Those Girls are So Lucky” and “You Saved Their Lives” and finally I was out of there.If you have never seen the video @#$% people say to transracial families, made by these lovely women, I highly recommend it. Sometimes, after crappy interactions like this, I like to go home and watch it to calm myself down.

Some days I really regret quitting smoking.

So steps one through three, done. All that was left was the final application process online. Which turned out to be typing the kids names into text boxes, filling out my name and address, and hitting enter. Pretty anti-climactic.

And now, we wait. We find out in May, and we pray that both girls are in at the same school, and if they aren’t, we start some kind of byzantine waiting list process that makes no logical sense, that no administer can adequately explain to me, and that, when asked, most tend to answer with the non sequitur, “don’t worry, it all tends to work out in the end.” What end, exactly? The end of the process, the end of my patience, or the end of my sanity? Nobody seems to know.

It is Catholic Schools Week, which means every single day my kids have to bring something in, and I have to keep track of the schedule. Boxtops one day, canned goods the next, and I think pennies might be on Friday. I don’t know for sure, because I am currently using the flyer as a coaster. But it was today’s request that gave me pause, and that ended up in a 3 hour discussion between the mister and myself, scheduled for Saturday night between 11PM and 2AM, as all discussions fraught with overthinking are.

The request was simple: have the kids bring in 3-5 photos of themselves, and their family (culture). I know what that means for at least half this class: a picture of the child with her parents, a picture of the child with her grandparents, and a formal studio photo of the child in her $1000 Irish Step Dancing dress and fake curls. Culture – for some people, it is easy.

For us, not so much. First up, my husband I share nothing in common. We are from different countries, different religions, different cultures, different races, different ethnicities, different Socio-economic Status backgrounds. It is entirely possible that only our shared love of chocolate and Godzilla movies, coupled with the fact that we are both too lazy to do the kind of paperwork a divorce would require, keep us together. So that is us, complete opposites in every cultural way. Then you add in the kids, who share none of those traits with either of us, and …. you tell me. What is our culture, as a family?

And I can’t just cheat and say it is Ethiopia, for the kids, because truly, it is more complicated than that. I work to connect my kids to where they were born, as do most international adoptive parents. Ethiopian restaurants, celebrating the holidays, reading books based in Ethiopia. We do it. But we don’t live it. We can’t. It isn’t our cultural heritage. The best I can do – the best any adoptive mom can do – is show it to my kids in as many different ways as possible, find ways to let them have a piece of that culture, maybe internalize it just a little bit. But we don’t have a way to get so immersed in it that it becomes second nature, and that is just one of the many little bittersweet moments of adoption, that severing of the luxury of cultural immersion.

I also can’t just cheat and say, “Ethiopia”, because truly, my kids do not yet understand adoption, or that they are adopted. They know their ‘story’, but they don’t really understand the big picture, or that families are made in different ways. They don’t get it, at all. And because they don’t get it, they are not ready yet to participate in a public conversation with people about the formation of their family, and their cultural heritage, and what it means to be part of the adoption diaspora. I don’t want that ‘aha moment’ to happen in public, with strangers.

So how to depict our family (culture)? These instructions are so vague. I had no idea. Also, two kids means two sets of photos, all different. Finally, I printed up pictures of  them together, the girls with each parent, and the girls playing with their grandparents. On the photo of just the two of them, I added our flags – just the country each of us was born in. Not our heritage countries, not how we might answer the question, ‘where is your family from’? Just – where we were all born.  Because maybe we don’t have a cultural background. Maybe we are such a crazy mixed bag of cultures that we can no more tease out a heritage from it than I can turn all the mud-brown playdoh in my house back to the blue, yellow, and green it started out life as. Maybe our crazy little family is its own distinct cultural island.

Maybe the unbearable cuteness of these two will mitigate any of the wrongs I have committed by not being able to follow the extremely vague instructions of this assignment in the impossibly short amount of time I had to complete it. Maybe I am overthinking this. Maybe I am a little jealous of the moms who don’t have to think about this kind of thing, to be on guard for it. I wish I had some tidy way to end this entry, some bigger lesson learned, some silver lining. But I don’t. What I do have is a mountain of laundry, a dinner that has to get made, pennies that need to be unearthed from couch cushions and the backseat of my car for the penny drive, and two ‘What I Want To Be When I Grow Up’ costumes to make for Friday’s Catholic Schools Week Career Day. No wonder there are so many SAHMs in the ‘burbs – it is a full time job, here.

Two years ago today, we were on a plane, flying North from Africa, across Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, the pole, Canada, and down the coast to New York, the longest part of our journey from Ethio to home. Our world travelers spent most of the flight in car seats, sleeping, watching Bollywood movies and Finding Nemo, and rejecting most forms of food and drink. You can practically see the raging ear infections they had in this photo, but they were troopers, sailing through 36 hours of travel, hopping from continent to continent, airport to aiport, from Addis to Dubai, then New York to Chicago with only a few meltdowns. We brought our own travel blankets, and wrapped them around the kids, and the flight attendants brought us more and wrapped us all up.

Sleeping on the plane, somewhere over Scandinavia/Russia 2009

Mostly, what we remember about this trip is the incredible kindness of complete strangers:

• The airline representative who got us, literally, on the last 2 seats of the last plane (from another airline) cleared to leave O’Hare in the surprise blizzard that hit the city the day we left, in business class, and who we suspect had something to do with our first class upgrade in Dubai.
• The flight attendant who made the people around me behave during the first 4.5 hour leg of the trip home, while M made it abundantly clear that she was NOT HAPPY WITH AIR TRAVEL.
• The woman sitting across from me who made faces at M to make her laugh while I rocked her, and the flight attendants on the long-haul flight from Dubai to NY, who raced to get us hot water for formula, kits of washcloths and baby wipes, and offered to walk the kids on the plane to let us sleep, if we wanted.
• The counter person at the Starbucks in the New York airport who filled our bottles with hot water so that we could mix formula while waiting for our next flight, expertly testing the temperature against her wrist to make sure it wasn’t too hot.
• The business traveler who saw us struggle with 2 babies, 2 car seats, and a walk across the freezing, open tarmac without winter coats on us or the kids, and who grabbed a car seat to get us out of the cold as fast as possible.
• All the flight attendants who helped us install and uninstall the car seats on plane after plane, the security people who waved us through at Dubai so we could catch our flight.
• The man who knelt down and helped me get my shoes back on so I could sprint to the next gate with a baby strapped to me, towing a car seat behind me.
• The security checkpoint at the NY airport, who let us take our time (we were so, so tired), and admired our girls, and let us go through without any fuss, even though the car seats couldn’t be x-rayed.
• The Homeland Security officer at NY Immigration, who let us line jump ahead of at least 200+ waiting people, to a line of just 6 VIPs, and then waved over a security agent to open a special gate for us and sent us directly through so that we could finish our immigration paperwork and sit down.
• The agent who processed our paperwork, who was kind, and efficient, and made us feel welcomed back to the US.
• The second set of immigration officers, who line-jumped us again, taking our casework as soon as we walked through the door.
• The airline rep who carried our bags from the pickup area and got it sent directly to our next flight so that we didn’t have to carry our checked baggage with us to our next check-in.

Sitting at the gate for our three hour layover for our next flight, in New York. 2009

I am sure it was a stressful trip, but all I remember with any clarity is how willing all of these people were to take a moment out of their day to offer some kindness to strangers. And how much I threw up! I definitely remember perfecting the technique of throwing up while wearing a baby, because I did it in 4 different airports, and a few times on the plane, each time with M strapped to me in her Bjorn.

The courtesy shuttle from our car dealership just arrived, to whisk Brian off to pick up his car. On Monday, we took M to the doctor, worried that she was getting sicker and in need of antibiotics. I stayed home with G, who apparently was just fine having Mummy to herself. We ate a cookie, watched TV, and then she had a nap, alone, and was fine with that, too, which was surprising. Good, but surprising. When Brian got back to his car after the doctor, he and M found the steering column locked up, which makes it undrivable. You know what is super-fun on a freezing cold midwestern winter day? Holding a sick baby, standing on the exposed roof of a parking garage in high winds, and finding your car can’t be started. But our guy at the dealership came through – sent a tow truck, brought it to the ‘burbs where our dealership is, fixed it, got GM to cover the fix and the tow, changed the oil, and sent a shuttle to get Brian today. Good service!

Today Brian is mailing off our annual adoption report – four copies, to four separate sets of interested agencies and parties, both in the US and in Ethio. We will do this every year, on the anniversary of bringing the kids home, until they are grown up.

When we first started down the road to adoption, a very big flamewar broke out on a large International Adoption listserv, with large numbers of parents home already with their kids getting all bent out of shape and taking the stance that the country in question couldn’t make them do these reports once they were home with their kids, so why bother. And people starting the process answered them, begging please, please, please don’t back out of what you agreed to, because it’s us – the ones still waiting – that will pay for your choice. It is amazing how easy it is to forget on this side of things how hard life is for those who still wait. And adoption from Ethio is becoming increasingly complicated, and wait times are getting longer and longer. So we sent off our reports, because it is the right thing to do, both to honour our original agreement, and also to help those who come behind us on the adoption path.

But also because we want to show all those officials – who took a chance on us and in a giant leap of faith, entrusted us to parent these children -  that they made a good choice, that these children are loved, and cherished, and treasured, that they are healthy, and happy, and have parents, a loving extended family, a home, a joyous life.

Two years ago this week we were in Ethiopia, getting to know our children, and spending time every day at the orphanage in which they lived.Our afternoons looked like this:

Same handsome man, same beautiful children, two years later, at home:

This is the 100th post on our blog, and it seems appropriate to celebrate, because today is the anniversary of the day we met our Sparrows for the first time. Two years ago today we landed in Addis after a 36 hour trip, met our lawyer, dropped our bags off at the house we stayed at, and headed off to officially double the size of our family and start the most fun adventure of our lives. We celebrated this milestone today, as we often do, by all of us having colds. The kids haven’t been out of their jammies in 3 days, and the whole house smells like Vicks Vapo-rub. But a few days ago, before the ick set in, we got a nice set of the kids just hanging out and doing their thing, and we thought you might like to see what they are up to these days. Here is a hint: it’s SHENANIGANS!

“Hey… I have a GREAT IDEA! Let’s throw ourselves backward onto the couch from the window ledge!”

“Yes…. that could work. THAT COULD WORK!”

“So far, so good”

“Don’t mind me up here, lurking ominously. Because I am TOTALLY NOT going to jump right on top of you”

“Oh, wait … YES I AM! HA!”

“Are you squished yet? Because I could totally do that again, if you want”

“Not quite squished, you say? Let me roll around on you for a bit”

“Hey Mummy. Your delicate little flowers want a cookie now, thanks.”

Two years ago today, Ethiopia called. Newborn twins. Impossibly tiny, no medical information, no photos. All that would come later, if we were actually given the referral. Today, it was just a question. Would we? Could we? We would, we could, we did!

Today we took them back to Target, because that is where I was when I got the call and found out that we were on our way from being a family of 2 to being a family of 4. So, if you were shopping in Target two years ago today, and came across a crazy woman crying into her Blackberry near the 24 cent crayon display, that was me. And two years later, we strolled through Target, buying diapers, while M. graciously waved and said “HI!” to everyone we passed, because she is the Mayor of Target.

The 24 cent crayons are now 25 cents a box. And nobody cried into their Blackberry, although I kind of wanted to, after finding out the government wants a thousand dollars from us to print up the forms that prove that they are US citizens.

A year ago today, at about 3 in the afternoon, in an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we sat waiting, and waiting, and waiting, until finally, two nannies walked through the door of the visiting room holding M. and G. and we saw our daughters for the very first time.

So much of their story we will never tell, both from before we met them, and after, because it’s really their story to tell, should they ever decide to tell it, and not ours. But we are so, so grateful to have a place in it, and to be able to spend an afternoon with them like today, listening to music, dancing, eating cheese, drumming, and throwing things at each other. And kissing – there is so much kissing going on over here these days. Its bliss. Exhausting, yes, but bliss.

One year later, at about 3 in the afternoon, after a long nap and a plate of cheese, we saw our daughters playing in the living room, just like they do every day, giggling and being ridiculous.

Rolling around the floor, belly-laughing so hard they cannot get up, wearing the softest  sweaters you could possibly imagine,  knit for them by their Really Great Aunt D.

If that isn’t the very definition of magic, I don’t know what is.