I dug a pair of heels out of the pre-child archives to wear to work, and the child was so overcome with delight that she ran away with them while I was in the shower.
What happened to my shoes? I wondered as I got dressed.
They aren’t even Manolo Blahniks, poor child, not even close. Just a pair of loafers with a 2.5-inch heel. Sarah Jessica Parker wouldn’t approve.
The child got stuck with Grumpy Working-Runner when what she REALLY wanted was Barbie Mom.
I just read that Peggy Orenstein is publishing a book this fall called Cinderella Ate My Daughter, and all I can say is, I’m glad to hear this happens with biological parents, too, who can’t blame the baffling girly-ness on some mysterious genetic destiny.
Which doesn’t stop me from wondering all the time about the child’s mysterious genetic destiny. (As I’m sure the child will, too, once she’s old enough to understand.)
She came home last week from her first day at Farm Camp, where they had made peach jam, and said, “Well, THIS was the best day of camp EVER.” The next day, they made pickles, and we ate the whole jar that night (well, they were good). She told me all about “egg duty,” where she goes in the coop with a partner and carefully takes the egg out of the nest and puts in a basket. (Or at least, I think that’s what she said. Details are hard to come by, even from kindergarten graduates.)
Now, I know she loves to cook and bake and be involved with meal preparation (and eat; mostly eat), and also that she likes to sew (really! They sewed patchwork “quilts” in preschool!), and I suspected she’d like Farm Camp, but still, even I was surprised by the force of her enthusiasm.
Where did this come from in the rural Hunan Province of China? A farming family that cooked lots of great food while wearing princess gowns and high heels?
It’s too bad that my own grandmother (1900-1999) isn’t around—a farmer’s wife who cooked, sewed, and wove fabric on hand-made looms--because she was good at all the things the child is interested in and would’ve approved wholeheartedly. My grandmother could’ve passed on knowledge I just don’t have.
I zipped up my dress and went to the family room. The child was watching WonderPets with the shoes beside her.
“I found your shoes!” she said, beaming. “You’re wearing HEELS!”
She practically shone with joy and approval.
P.S. The shoes chewed up my feet so that the next day I had to wrap two blistered toes—in waterproof Princess Band-aids, of course!
Summer Camp Blues
7/22/10
School’s out! Too bad work isn’t.
Summer may be the most wrenching time of year for the working parent of the school-age child. Or it is for me anyway.
This never occurred to me when the child was in the year-round on-site environmentally correct, organic-food-serving preschool at the organic-farming company where I work. Fall, winter, spring AND summer she was cared for in a fantastic setting by warm loving staff with the same group of kids she’d been with since 10 weeks after her arrival in the United States.
We sent her to local kindergarten because it was time she got to know some local kids and we got to know some local parents. (The organic farming company is a LONG way from home, alas.) And it was great! She loved her teacher! She was friendly with every kid in the class! She learned the names of most of the kids in the six other kindergarten classes! Even her reticent mom had real live conversations with real live local moms.
To our credit, we saw summer coming as early as January and began discussing options. In-home babysitter to take her to pool and library every day? Country-club daycamp with daily swim and horseback riding lessons at exclusive private school that provides door-to-door service? (Oh, sure, that sounded great, and then I saw the price tag.)
For many good reasons, we landed at the local YMCA, which is indeed wonderful. Much of the staff also works at the before-care/after-care service the Y provides onsite at our elementary school and which our child attended two days per week (though not without complaint). Many of the kids at before-care/after-care attend the Y camp. Continuity! Every day they swim in the indoor pool. Swimming! Plus, listen to these options: Adventure camp, gymnastics, cheerleading, tennis, sports fusion, performing arts, farm camp, science explorers!
“I love gymnastics!” my child said after the first day of gymnastics camp.
On the second morning: “I wish gymnastics were over.”
And now, two weeks in, I hear this every day: “It’s a really long day. I want to stay home. I wish you’d stay home with me.”
I take her in as late as I can and sneak out of work as early as possible, but still, there are some days she spends almost 9 hours at camp. And she isn’t even 6 yet.
“I wish I could stay home with you, Mom.”
When I was growing up, my own mom worked, in the South in the 60s and 70s, which meant we had “help” (see Kathryn Stockett) and I had siblings: a big sister 13 years my senior who took me to her thrilling performing arts troupe (see 1960s) and a big brother 8 years my senior (see not happy brother looking after little sister).
After one particularly guilt-inducing dropoff and subsequent long day, I was stewing over all this, when my husband came home.
“Oh, eh,” he said and shrugged. “Summer’s almost over. It’s good for her!”
And you know, of course, he’s right.
Independence Day!
7/12/10
Can I get up now, Mom? Mom? Mom! I want to get up. Let’s get up.
How will I know when it’s 6:00? How long is 15 minutes?
Will you play with me? If you’re not going to play with me, then WHY did you get up?
I’m hungry, Mom. Corn cake AND cereal AND a bagel AND yogurt AND milk. Have you got any bacon?
I really could use some more milk.
No, I don’t want my toenails painted. No, no, no, no, no. Can I watch you paint your toenails? I wish you’d paint my toenails.
Watch this, Mom! Watch this! Watch!
Can we bake? Can I have sugar? Can I have butter? Can I taste salt? Can I taste baking soda? Can I lick the spoon? Can I lick the spatula? Can I lick the paddle? Can I lick the bowl?
I can do it! I can do it! I can do it! Will you do it, Mom?
Can we paint? I’ll draw a line and you can paint on one half and I’ll paint on the other. What should I paint, Mom? Do you like it? Is it pretty? What else should I paint? What should I paint now, Mom? I really wish I had yellow. How do you make brown?
Lookit, Mom! Lookit! Lookit! Mom, Mom! Lookit, lookit!
This pack of gum is my most favorite ever. Can I buy a pack of my favorite gum ever in the grocery store? Can I buy two? Can I have the olives with pits? Can I have a mozzarella ball? Can I have another mozzarella ball? Can I meet you in the toy aisle? Can I have Lucky Charms? Can I have yogurt-covered raisins? I don’t like these yogurt-covered raisins. Look, Mom! Colored straws! We need them! Can I have them? Can I meet you in the toy aisle? Can I have a big bouncy ball? Can I just play with the big bouncy ball until we get to the toy aisle? Lookit, Mom, lookit! NOW can I meet you in the toy aisle?
I don’t know which to get. Polly Pocket or Dora and the Pony. Can I have them both, Mom? Please? Please? Pllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?
I have to go to the bathroom. Is there a bathroom here?
When you’re done putting away the groceries, unloading the dishwasher, and making lunch, THEN will you play with me?
Pick a card, Mom. Any card, any card. Look at it. Show it to me. Put it back. Was THIS your card?
WHEN is lunch going to be ready?
Can I have some cereal? Is there any more?
I’m going to do a bridge-up. Watch this, Mom. Watch. I’m going to do a bridge-up. Watch, Mom, watch.
Where’s Dad? What’s he doing? I wish Dad were home.
Moooooooawhoahwhaoahhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmm! I went pooooooooop!
Will you wipe me?
Will you come in the pool with me? Come in the pool with me, Mom. Mom! Watch this! Watch! Watch!
Are we going out to dinner? Is it time for dinner? When are we going out to dinner? Are we going out to dinner now?
Do you have any more rice?
Guess whether I have an ice cube in my mouth or not. Guess. Guess.
SOMEbody has to play with me. Not a toy. Somebody real.
Mom! Can I watch TV?
Mom! Can I have a treat?
Do I have to brush my teeth? Do I have to use the potty? Do I have to wash my hands?
Will you read another book? Will you tell me a story? Will you stay here with me until I fall asleep?
Good night, Mom.
I love you too, Mom.
Pink Shoes! Pink Shoes!
6/22/10
“Well, I couldn’t find the shoes you asked for, but I did find these,” said the (hapless) salesman at our local shoe store. “They’re pretty.”
In the early pictures of our child, when she is 13, 14, 15 months old, and unable yet to express her decided opinions in English, she wears cool, gender-neutral, trendy, eco-hip sweaters, tops and jeans. A beige L.L. Bean sweater with stripes in blue, red, yellow and green. And she looks miserable.
Was it because she’d spent her first 11 months in an SWI (Social Welfare Institute, the Chinese euphemism for orphanage)? Because she’d been moved 7,800 miles to join her new family? Who looked, smelled, sounded, tasted, felt strange? No, no, and no! (Well, okay, yes, yes, and yes, but that’s too heart-breaking, and it’s more fun to be funny, to paraphrase the Cat in the Hat.)
One night when she was just 2, and she and I were almost done with the drama of bed, bath, and beyond - that is, bathing, drying, diapering, clothing, tooth-brushing, rocking, reading, singing, turning on music, dimming lights, sitting nearby until she fell asleep in the crib in our room - I tiptoed out of the room, and immediately she popped up like a jack-in-the-box.
“You’re okay, I’m here,” I must’ve said. “What’s wrong?”
“Pink shoes!” she replied.
Only she was just 2 and not entirely articulate, and I didn’t quite catch her drift. (Nor did I yet quite understand the force of willful nature I was living with.) Would you have?
“Sh-sh. Go to sleep.”
“Pink shoes! Pink shoes!” Stubborn mom, stubborn child.
This went on for a while until I understood that she wanted her pink shoes in the crib. And then for another long while until I understood that she wanted to SLEEP in the pink shoes.
Pink is not my favorite color, and I didn’t intend to fall into any stereotypical gender traps -I’d read (and agreed with) Peggy Orenstein’s diatribe about the evil Princess empire’s hold on very young girls - but I had recently caved and bought a pair of pink Maryjane sneakers from Target because daycare wanted the kids in sneakers and these were so easy to put on! And, well, they were cute. And see how happy she looks in the picture above?
You know where this is going: The 2-year-old slept that night and many others wearing her pink shoes, and Mom scurried off to Target to buy the exact same shoes in every half-size up for the next two years.
Friends, I’ve got a girly-girl on my hands, and I’m here to tell you that it’s nature, not nurture. I’m vaguely athletic, and have been accused in the past of dressing like a pre-teen boy.
You think you are influencing your child, and then one day you wake up and you go to your closet to get dressed and you realize that not only does she insist on wearing dresses and skirts every single day of her life, rain or sun or sleet or snow, but you can’t remember the last time you wore pants, and your shelves are stacked with your very own colorful (!) T-shirts adorned with beads and birds and flowers, and you’re starting to think all your (hip) black-clad New York colleagues DO look sort of scary or sickly or at least unimaginative.
And so it was a couple weeks ago that we were attempting to give our local shoe store our business, and had picked out several pairs of pink shoes to try on, but the (hapless) salesman hadn’t found any in stock and came out with two pair - one navy with an embroidered white flower, one black patent leather.
“These are pretty,” he said.
Oh, kind sir, with all due respect, you could not be more wrong.
We did not burst out laughing, but we did have to leave, right away, and go home and order online - pink shoes.
You Never Know What You'll Get
6/04/10
About this time five years ago, we received an email from our adoption agency with two photos of a round-faced baby, then 7 months old, with bow-shaped lips and a thin patch of dark hair, stuffed into seemingly many layers of thick clothing, standing in a yellow exer-saucer in front of a plastic play house dotted with purple hearts.
That’s our baby!
When I told my older sister, who has two now-grown children, that we were adopting, she said, “Oh! I guess I’d be worried about what you’d get. I mean, you can’t know about the family background.” We were out running at the time, plodding along side by side, which, much like driving in a car, is a good way to have difficult conversations, because you can say things without seeing the other person’s horrified reaction. Then my sister said, “Of course, you don’t know with biological kids either, do you? I mean, there are all those alcoholics in our family tree.”
True enough. Picture your biological offspring, and you imagine all your best traits weaving together in a magically perfect DNA combination. When Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley had children (I’m dating myself), you hoped they got his musical talents and her looks, not the other way around--kids who looked like frogs and croaked like them too.
Our biological kids would have my husband’s height, full head of hair, good cheer, and patience, and my love of words and unerring sense of a good deal. What they would not get is diabetes, high-blood pressure, heart disease, male-pattern baldness, eczema, paunchy guts, saddlebags, impatience, a hot temper, a tendency toward depression, obesity, or indebtedness, never mind the aforementioned alcoholism.
The degree of information you receive from birth parents varies from copious to nada depending on the circumstances, and ours was of the latter. Since the heart-stopping day five years ago when we first saw our baby’s picture, we have watched her big personality unfurl, with no frame of reference. She isn’t like my mom, or his aunt, or someone’s cousin once removed. She is who she is.
When the child was about 2, she pitched an intense and blood-curdling fit over something extremely important that escapes me now, like the color of her sippy cup, and my mother watched in bemused amazement and said with a laugh and a harrumph, “Willful. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was exactly like you.”
I was thinking about all this on Memorial Day as the child, now age 5.75, played at the town pool with a changing assortment of friends over the course of an afternoon. She is very democratic about whom she’ll befriend, which is utterly charming, as she plays so nicely with a chubby boy a year younger (“Mom! Mom! I remember him from last year!”) who is far less confident in the water than she. But she’s aggressive, too, literally getting in other kids’ faces, which is a little worrying and heartbreaking as she tries to assert herself with a particular pair of Mean Girls from kindergarten who whisper “Let’s not let her play with us,” and run away from her - with her in hot pursuit.
Is her intense interest in other kids just her nature? Is it “normal” kid behavior? Is it because she’s an only child? Is it survival skills ingrained from her early years in group care? Something she picked up from my husband and me? All I can do is shrug, and like any parent, try to guide her the best I can.
If you are pregnant, or thinking about it, or you have a small baby at home, or are waiting with a dossier logged into China’s slow-moving adoption bureaucracy, you can’t know what will happen. You don’t get a postcard from the future saying, "Everything turns out fine, she goes to Princeton and secures a seat on the Supreme Court."
You never know.
You know what the kindergarten teacher would say: "You get what you get, and you don’t get upset."
Ha!
Hair Today
5/26/10
Let’s put your hair up.
No!
Will you please put your hair up?
No!
It’ll feel good.
No!
You’ll be so much cooler.
No!
It’s hanging in your face.
No!
It’s getting in your food.
No!
You used to wear your hair up.
No!
Please?
No!
Why not?
Because it isn’t pretty.
I can do pretty!
No!
I can do a braid.
No!
Or a ponytail.
No!
Or two ponytails on the side.
No!
Remember when you wore your hair up in two buns for Chinese New Year? I could do that!
No!
It was so cute.
No!
If you don’t put your hair up, I’m going to cut it all off!
[Howling] Nooooo!
[Note to self: bad idea.] If you put your hair up, I’ll give you a dollar.
Can I have a dollar?
If you put your hair up.
No!
Please put your hair up.
No!
Your Auntie Yishane says your hair would drive her crazy.
Well, Auntie Yishane isn’t here now, is she?
Um. No!
Toy Story
5/10/10
Last week when I was out for the night, my husband — home alone with the child — sent me a panicked text message: Do you have some kind of paperclip thingy? An airplane???
What’s your child’s favorite toy? What does she most like to play with? Is that an easy question for you to answer? Not me.
Of course it changes through the years, and sometimes very quickly. When we first got back from China, I rushed around like a madwoman trying to find a colorful set of stacking cups, the single most important developmental toy, I was told by someone who knew, for just-arrived-from-orphanage children. Once I obtained them, everything would click into place, like magic! (You may roll your eyes now.)
Well-meaning friends who came to meet the child brought stuffed animals and wooden blocks (thank you, friends!), and pack-rat family members who’d saved toys from their college-kids’ youth sent two boxes of stuffed animals, a case of dress-up clothes, a K’nex set circa 1980 and a string bag stuffed with whirring plastic figurines, which you can bet are not ANSI or TIA certified.
Soon it seemed every room was overrun with toys, toys, toys!
A parenting book recommended sorting through the toys and putting “like” things together — for example, all the princess teacups and saucers in the giant princess teakettle — and getting rid of stuff that no longer had mates. Ha! I can say now, with authority.
In a Time magazine story on overparenting, I read that the average child has 150 toys. I looked around our house: Does my child have 150 toys? How do you count? Does a princess tea set count as one toy or as 16, since she never plays with it as a “set” anyway? Does any child ever play with matching sets the way they’re “supposed” to be played with? And where’s the fun in that?
Before dear friends arrived for a visit this weekend, my daughter carefully set up a tea-party with four chairs: a pink rocking horse (vintage husband), a stack of couch pillows, a grown-up rocking chair and one kid-size chair (vintage mom). Each place setting got a plate — not matching! — and a “cup,” a couple of which were the must-have stacking cups (whose mates are long lost). She sets up “houses” made of parasols and scarves, and uses mini Christmas trays for “TV.”
Her dad (a neatnik of German descent, he can’t help it) comes home at night and sweeps it all back into bins, and the next morning she begins again.
Back to the urgent text message. It was a paperclip into which my child had wedged a piece of wax paper — an airplane she’d flown to the end of the driveway that morning to meet the bus. She’d given me strict instructions to make sure her dad had the airplane when she got off the bus, which I’d promptly forgotten after I waved goodbye.
Luckily, I remembered: in the top left pocket of my black jacket hanging on the hook by the back door.
Husband’s next text: WHEW.
Will You Play With Me?
4/22/10
Does a high-pitched plea to play from your small child make your heart sing or sink?
“You’re the king and I’m the princess and we’re in a castle and a witch comes and she steals my jewels and she wants to use magic but she is evil and the magic only works with good and not with evil and she gets mad and she flies to the castle and she has the jewel and I want the jewel but she won’t give it to me and she wants to kill me and I lie down and you take the jewel and you fight the witch and I wake up and I take the jewel and I use the magic and I kill her!”
Got all that?
Maybe it’s because I’m the youngest, third child — my siblings are eight and thirteen years older than me — but I promise you, my mother never sat in a pink princess tent with me and eight of my closest “friends” (Dog, George, Bunny, Little Bunny, Brother Bunny, Big George, Halloween Barbie and Queen Clarion). I am pretty sure she never played board games, either.
“Will you play with me?”
When your small child asks you that at 6 a.m., do you grin or growl? What if it’s 4:30 a.m.? (It happens.) How about at the end of a 12-hour at-home day of solo parenting?
Sometimes I think it’s because we only have one child that I spend more time “playing” than other parents. But when my friend N’s husband was away on a rainy Sunday, she sat on the floor in her apartment with her two kids and played Trouble — with its PopoMatic die-rolling bubble — 14 times. Straight. Thump, thump, thump.
Recently the
New York Times reported a study that shows — surprisingly — that parents spend more time with their kids than parents of previous generations. Which is good news for guilt-ridden working parents who worry that they’re not giving enough of themselves to their children.
In the piece, Tara Parker-Pope writes: “Notably, the data ... do not count the hours mothers and fathers spend ‘around’ their children — at the dinner table, for example, or in solitary play. Instead, the survey tracks specific activities in which the parent is directly involved in the child’s care. ‘It’s taking them to school, helping with homework, bathing them, playing catch with them in the back yard,’ said ... Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. ‘Those are the activities that have increased over the last 15 to 20 years.’ ”
What? Time “around” the child doesn’t count? But that’s my favorite kind of time! When I am at the counter chopping the chicken into bite-size pieces and she is at the table telling me about what she’s drawing or (better yet) in “her” kitchen (which I can see from mine) assembling dinner for Dog, George, Bunny, et al. (They get bananas, carrots, cupcakes and ice cream for dinner, if you’re wondering. Sometimes a fried egg.) I love just being “around.” And honestly, I think it’s better for all of us when she figures out how to entertain herself without our constant involvement or (worse) the TV on.
Of course, with the exception of that 4:30 a.m. request, which I turned down, and none too politely, I regret to say — I always agree to play. Even if I can’t remember the instructions.
Travels With Child
4/08/10
“Where she from?”
The question is not always intrusive. The man asking this time was Chinese, in his late 50s, and our busboy (although what a ludicrous thing to call a man in his late 50s) in the Westin San Francisco Airport Hotel’s dining room. It was the last night of our very first spring break.
“You a good girl,” the busboy told our daughter, circling back to our table for the fifth time. “You eat all your dinner and I give you ice cream.”
Well, she is a good traveler.
Five years ago, at the end of the two howling weeks we spent in China picking up our daughter, I was in dread of the 13-hour flight back to the States. Adoptive parents who’d gone before us had warned me that dealing with a baby on the trans-Pacific flight was our payback for not experiencing labor.
Mercifully, our daughter delighted in the barf bag and the aircraft safety card and slept for eight straight hours — the last time, in fact, she would sleep that long and peacefully for the next four years.
When she was 3, we spent a week at the beach with my glamorous sister-in-law — bleached blond hair, full figure and big jewels — and her college-age children and their friends, who existed on doughnuts, Diet Coke and beer, and watched Scarface during dinner. Within a day, my daughter was swatting me away and weeping that she wanted to go live with her Auntie.
When she was 4, we went to Disneyworld — mostly for the lunch with the princesses. “It’s like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer,” said my husband.
So when it came time to plan our kindergartner’s first spring break, I landed on San Francisco for this family’s vacation trifecta: a wealth of fun kid things-to-do that wouldn’t hammer her parents in the head (cable cars, the Exploratorium, Coit Tower); a short, easy side trip to my father-in-law in Napa (red wine, hammered parents!); and San Francisco’s Chinatown, the largest and oldest in North America.
Mindful of reports from adult Korean adoptees that it’s uncomfortable growing up as the only Asians in predominantly white communities, I try to put my daughter in situations where she’s not the only Asian, at school, on vacation, at the playground. And I do it without comment.
It’s not going to make up for growing up in our predominantly white community, where the handful of Asians in her kindergarten year are carefully distributed so each room has a little “diversity,” but it’s my quiet way of trying.
What this means in reality is that, on our way to a commanded repeat visit to Coit Tower, we stopped for an hour or so at a playground in San Francisco’s Chinatown — because our daughter wanted to practice her newly acquired skill of swinging across the monkey bars.
We were surrounded by a gold-toothed Grandma commenting about us loudly (we knew, even though we couldn’t understand) and children who eyed each other warily.
And our only actual conversation with a person of Chinese descent was with the busboy in the Westin. As he hovered by our table, telling us that he knew our daughter was Chinese and not Korean because of her light skin and about his two children in their late 20s and his three grandchildren, I began to want to finish my sesame-crusted salmon and spinach salad. And I wasn’t sorry when dinner was over, and a dish of strawberry Häagen-Dazs landed in front of my daughter, as promised.
On our way back up to our room, she asked, “Why’d he give me ice cream, Mom?”
Food Issues
3/17/10
Thwok! The child, age 5.5, wields a knife the length of her head. She places the blade across a flat circle of sweet potato, presses down on the top of the knife with her right hand and chops the circle into halves, then quarters, then eighths. Thwok! Thwok! Thwok!
Before we flew to the Hunan Province to pick up the baby who would become our child, we were counseled by friends who’d recently been down a similar path about how to coax a baby who’d spent her first 11 months on formula in an orphanage into eating solid food. “You’ll have to be patient,” said C. “Sometimes I have to sit with S. at the table for an hour just to get her to eat something.”
When our baby was placed in my arms and began her prolonged campaign of howling protest, we discovered only two things that would reliably calm her down. One was walking around, carrying her in a hip sling, pushing her in the stroller, so she could stretch out her arms to the smiling, friendly, clucking Chinese waitresses and hotel floor attendants. Now, I don’t speak Mandarin, but she was starting to babble, and I’m pretty sure she was saying, “Help! Help! I’ve been abducted by giant blonds!”
The other thing that calmed her down was food.
Thwok! The child tosses the sweet potato bits into a pot on the stove with the onions, garlic, red pepper and celery she’s already chopped.
Like an ’80s Pac-Man, she plowed through anything put in front of her: rice, eggs, melon, berries, peas, cooked carrot bits, stir-fried celery, chicken, Cheerios, Goldfish, noodles (especially noodles). We have a picture of her in the Hua-Tian hotel, eyes wide with delight as she sucks in a noodle. Later (but not much), she added pita chips, hummus, pickles, black olives, gazpacho, balsamic vinegar. We were at a friend’s house back in the U.S. when she discovered an apple in my backpack and set about eating it — the whole thing, with just her four teeth. “Babies don’t usually do that,” said my astonished friend, whom, because she is a mother of twins, I consider a professional authority.
When the child was 18 months old, I turned my back so I could eat a square of dark chocolate without her seeing. Smelling it on my breath, she literally pried my mouth open to get at it.
We began baking before she was 3. She scooped flour into a cup, dug out a tablespoon of baking soda, softened butter in the microwave, poured in sugar, measured chocolate chips. When she started kindergarten this past fall, I succumbed to parental peer pressure and began to harass her about what extracurricular activities she wanted to enroll in. Do you want to do soccer? No! Taekwando? No! Ballet? Swim? Gymnastics? No, no, no! Well, what do you want to do? Baking class!
She’s food-obsessed, and who can blame her? For her first 11 months, she got little attention and nothing but formula, then along come the abducting blond giants with this incredible nectar. Talk about your comfort food!
If I lived in New York or a highly educated suburb like Princeton, enrolling the child in baking class would be, well, a piece of cake (sorry!). In our far western suburb, however, the best I could do was a not-so-local cooking class for 5- to 7-year-olds, offered approximately once a month. We’ve been three times. Which is how she knows how to wield a kitchen knife like no other kindergartener in a 50-mile radius, and why we’re making black-bean stew on a Sunday morning.
I stand within arm’s length, eyes fixed on the blade, wondering how I’d explain the situation to the attending physician in the emergency room or the social worker from the Division of Youth and Family Services.
“Your parents in China must’ve been really good cooks,” I say. “Because you’re really good at this.”
Thwok!
Whose Daughter?
2/26/10
“Who? Who? Who?”
A turbaned, bearded man rested his forearms on my passenger-side window rim and gestured to the backseat, where my daughter sat strapped into her floral pink-and-green high-back booster seat.
“Whose? Whose?”
It is one of the many peculiarities of living in New Jersey that the law mandates that only gas station attendants may pump gas. Another peculiarity is that many gas stations in the suburban rings seem to employ men from South Asia.
“Not same, not same,” said the gas-station attendant, motioning to his eyes, his hair, pointing to me, then her. “Not same, not same.”
Americans have been adopting children from China since 1992. In 2005, the year we flew to Chang-sha to pick up our baby, Americans adopted 7,906 children (mostly girls). Adoption from Korea began in 1953, and adoptive families have a strong presence in the Northeast (and California).
So we have mostly been spared what the adoption community calls “grocery store moments” — the frank stares, awkward encounters and intrusive questions of people surprised to see Caucasian parents with Asian children.
He pointed at me, then her, circled his eyes, his hair. “Father? Father? Same? Same?”
We have mostly been spared the questions, but I knew from my reading that how I handled this situation would be important to my child. She was watching. If I were angry, or embarrassed, or rude, that would send her a message. My actions would show her how to deal with her own questions when she gets them, as she surely will.
“Mine,” I said, and beamed at her. “She’s my daughter.”
“Where from?” he wanted to know.
“China,” I said. “And where are you from?”
“India,” he said, and waved his hand dismissively. “Yours? Yours? Yours?” he said again, pointing to the back seat.
People who do approach me usually want to tell me about their daughter, cousin, co-worker, friend or dental hygienist’s daughter-in-law who has adopted or is in the process of adopting from China, Russia, Ethiopia.
When my daughter was about 3, we stopped at a playground after one such encounter and she marched up to a curly-haired toddler and announced in a loud voice, “I’m from China!” Understandably, the poor child looked bewildered.
“Yes,” I said, and looked at my daughter and laughed. See how light-hearted I could be? “Mine.”
Peggy Orenstein, who wrote movingly about her own quest for motherhood in Waiting for Daisy, has a biological daughter with her Japanese husband. She has written that people often ask where her daughter is from, assuming the child is adopted, and her (impatient? angry?) response is, “From my uterus.”
“You can’t? You can’t? You can’t?” the man asked, and did his hands in a patty-cake motion, first one hand on top, then the other. What? Was he seriously inquiring about my reproductive functioning? I looked at him with what I hoped were wide, horror-filled eyes. “Is OK. Is OK. Is OK,” he said. “I know, I know.”
I would surely have fled, but the car was tethered to the pump and the man was leaning in the window.
At last I paid and rolled up the window. The car was filled with a loud — dare I say pregnant? — silence. “Man, that guy really kept talking, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” said my daughter, quietly, and promptly fell asleep.
Will You Sleep Tonight?
1/6/10
“Where are you planning to sleep tonight?”
My 5-year-old and I are strolling down the hallway to the bedroom. She looks at me sideways. Am I joking? “In your room!”
Sleep has been difficult for my daughter – hence for me and my husband – since the day she was put in my arms four years ago in the official orphanage office in Chang-sha, in the Hunan province of China. She howled. Who could blame her? We looked weird, smelled weird, sounded weird, felt weird, no doubt tasted weird. The other five babies adopted by Americans in our travel group that day howled too, only they stopped soon enough.
We had this piece of paper from her orphanage that laid out her sleep schedule: wake at 7 a.m., nap from 9 to 11, nap from 1 to 3, down for the night at 7 p.m., sleep through the night without waking.
Too bad she couldn’t read.
When we got back to the States, there were two weeks of jet lag. Howling. We put her in a crib in her own room. “This is a nice room,” we said. Howling. We brought her crib to the side of our bed (adoption social worker’s advice). She’d sleep for about an hour and a half at a time, and wake up, howling. At least I could stick my hand through the slats and pat her back to sleep. I would’ve brought her into our bed, but at the time we had two 100-pound Great Danes who liked to sleep under the covers. (They’re in dog heaven now. Old age.)
One night my husband and I tried Ferber’s let-’em-cry approach, and we sat clutching each other’s hands trying to laugh at Curb Your Enthusiasm while the child howled.
At age 3, she finally decided she wanted to go to her own “big girl bed” in her own room. For about six months.
And yes, we do the whole routine: bath, books, story, hug, kiss, lights out, black-out curtains on the windows, a 15-watt princess night-light, soothing Beatles Muzak on repeat, sit for just a few minutes while she drifts off. Sneak out. MOM! DAD! MOM! DAD!
Changes disrupt her. For four years she’d been in a wonderful and loving day-care/preschool on-site at the organic farming company where I work. Last month she started the well-respected but crowded local kindergarten in the suburbs where we live. Two days in, she got pneumonia and missed a week of school. So she came back to the “big bed” (our room) until who knows when?
“Are you ever planning on sleeping in your own bed again?” I ask her.
“No,” she says. “You might as well just throw it away.”
