Life More Bearable

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
--Kurt Vonnegut

It's important for me to be given the freedom to create something badly. I'm oh so good at that. Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Simon Rodia is the Italian immigrant who created Watts Towers, which I strongly encourage you to go visit in South Central Los Angeles.

I found the Vonnegut quote at The Jimson Weed Gazette. This man has a way of making Los Angeles, a city I typically think is pretty ugly, look beautiful. He often highlights the overlooked faces found wandering the streets and takes the time to tell their stories. This inspires me too.

Maybe making life more bearable is what these stencils are all about. This one I found in Jackson, Mississippi, in the parking lot of Basil's Cafe, which is in the old post office where Eudora Welty mailed her manuscripts and then went shopping next door at the Jitney Jungle.
Or I don't know, maybe they're gang symbols and I'm being had.

Happy Sunday

Thanks to the blog from a fellow soon-to-be adoptive mom, I found these two videos, which have made me laugh so hard my stomach hurts now. I may not have gotten a face work-out, but at least my abs got some work today...

Thank God for Thanksgiving

When I had my tonsils out at age three, the nurses (all friends of my mom, who is also a nurse) knew I liked to eat eggs, so they started feeding me some post-surgery. I don't know if they were scrambled, fried, boiled or what, but I ate them until they forced me to stop on number eight, thinking I might get sick.

My love-affair with all things eggy continues until today, so you can imagine my excitement upon walking into Alice's house and seeing a plate of heavy-on-the-mustard deviled eggs made by Christina and Lilly. Forget the moist turkey, rosemary laden stuffing, and sweet potato casserole, not that these things aren't delicious. I just want the deviled eggs.

I haven't spent Thanksgiving with my relatives in Mississippi since I was in graduate school back in 2000. Since then, I've made my own Thanksgiving meal with the help of friends in Slovakia on the Friday after the day (since I had to work on the actual holiday), and cooked for friends and family for two years in Los Angeles where it was always so warm we could eat outside.

Last year was the weirdest Thanksgiving ever, where I had a rueben and cole-slaw at my father-in-law's favorite New York-style deli in Palm Springs. It wasn't without its Thanksgiving cheer though. Upon arriving to Ed's condo and wishing him a "Happy Thanksgiving!" I get a surly "Don't you Happy god-damned Thanksgiving me!" Mr. Ed always makes the holidays cheery and bright.

So with all the years of Friday celebrations in another country, outside on the deck meals in hot L.A., and a Palm Springs Thanksgiving, it was really nice yesterday to be a part of a traditional meal with our family in Oregon. I felt very grateful to Edwin and Alice for hosting everyone and especially to Alice for doing the thankless job of eating the turkey neck and later picking all the meat off the bones.

It was a fun day, one in which we all got to meet a little fella named Peppercorn. He's a shy one who probably doesn't want his picture on this blog--and really, that's best for us all--so in place of Peppercorn, here's his new friends:We got up this morning and took part in "Black Friday" by getting to Fred Meyer's by 10:30 for their annual Sock-Sale, which had started at 5:00 am. There weren't too many people there, and Ted encouraged me to knock over this old lady's shopping cart. She eyed us for a while before realizing he was joking. The lady standing behind Ted then told us that there were whole bins of socks right around the corner, so Ted did his dramatic jump and scamper down the aisle and around the corner, making everyone in the aisle crack up.
Ted was picking out enough socks for the next few years while I was compromising my anti-corporation principles by taking a free white chocolate mocha offered to me by one of the Starbucks baristas as I was coming out of the restroom (he'd made it with caffeine instead of decaf as a customer had requested). I felt a little dirty walking around with that red cup, but I had to admit: it is such a cheery little thing.

And on a side-note (as if this post has a target-note), I don't get how people can drink these sweet coffee drinks every stinkin' day. Sure, it tasted good, but it was so syrupy and was a 16 ouncer too. I felt gross after going through half of it. And what's the appeal of white chocolate anyway? It tastes like nothing to me, just sweet. If any white-chocolate fans out there can explain this to me, I'd be grateful.

Hope your Thanksgiving was happy and that you avoided the mall today.

In Their Own Voices

So far in the reading I have done on adoption, the one book I would recommend most enthusiastically for other people interested in the subject is In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories. Actually, this book is so informative and helpful that I wonder why parents of children of a different race wouldn't take the time to hear what these people have to say. The book is not all touchy-feely, instant bonding, everyone lives happily ever after. These people tell the truth, both good and bad, and I am grateful to Rita Simon and Rhonda Roorda, the editors, for having the good sense to put this book together.

Laurie Goff's story has so far been the most inspiring to me. She has a bitingly sarcastic sense of humor and tells such funny stories about encounters she's had with people around the world who see her outside-the-box family. This woman was raised to be resilient. I think she gets it from her mother:

"People were afraid of my mother. If they messed with me once, she'd come to school. For three months my school didn't have a world culture teacher or a French teacher. My mother called the principal's office, but he did nothing. Then she wrote letters to the school board and two teachers were hired--two of the best teachers in the school.

In history I ended up getting a grade point average of 5.8 out of 4.0--my teacher let us do extra credit. I did mine on Apartheid. In a school of 400 students, with only ten of them white, no one knew what Apartheid was. No one.

How did you explain the meaning of Apartheid?

I explained that it was like slavery, that for decades white people came into the country and took it over, that they didn't allow blacks to gather or to keep their family unts together. It was legalized slavery. These students didn't know this was going on. I did an assembly for the whole school to clue them in. People told me I was smart. I said that I read.

My father came to school to give a talk on AIDS since he's a medical doctor. Kids were impressed with my dad. Some people asked me if I ever wanted to meet my real parents. My philosophy has always been that a parent is someone who loves you, who takes care of you, who is there for you when you are sick, when you do fabulous things, and when you do stupid things. They'll even bail you out of jail. I told these kids that I didn't really want to meet them. Some of them didn't understand. They wondered if I felt weird because my parents were white and I was black. I said, "No. The people who feel weird are people like you."

Ms. Goff did go on to try to meet her biological parents and in the process connected with many of her biological relatives, which she said was both a good and bad thing. An example of her sense of humor: When she found out that her biological father was in prison for murder, she said, "Well, isn't that just precious."

As a future adoptive parent, I so appreciated hearing her words about what a real parent is, and she gave such excellent advice throughout her whole interview about how to raise well-adjusted and confident children in the complicated world of transracial adoption. While the sad stories of heart-ache and confusion are helpful and necessary to read and study for knowing what not to do as parents, these success stories are truly so inspiring.

I also really liked her response to people telling her that she was smart. That's so true! It makes me want to toss our television (not that we watch it all that much anyway--I'd say it's on maybe five hours per week).

I'm going to get back to the book now. I hope you all go track it down and read it too.

Marok

When I moved to Slovakia for the first time in 1998, one of the first friends I made was Joko, one of the computer teachers at the school where I was teaching. Early in the schoolyear, I noticed in the zborovna (staff room) that someone had just logged out of "pine," the very old-school (yet efficient) email software on the computer as "Agent Cooper." Being a Twin Peaks fan, I immediately wrote Joko to ask him who this account belonged to because I said that I knew I'd have an instant bond with a fellow Dale Cooper fan. He wrote back saying he was Agent Cooper and thus cemented our friendship. David Lynch brings all sorts of people together.

Nearly ten years later, Joko and I are still friends, despite living thousands of miles away from each other. He's one of the truest, bluest friends I've ever had, completely and utterly dependable. That first year, I could always count on him to show up at my office a couple of times a week after classes were finished with an invitation to go downtown for zmrzlina (ice cream). And he'd occasionally humor me by going with me to Aj Vega, the local vegetarian place where he'd only order the oh-so-healthy vyprazany syr (fried cheese) with potatoes and tartar sauce. To this day, he avoids vegetables whenever possible.

We also discovered that we were both fans of the 80's, German pop band Alphaville, so when they came to Kosice, we went to the concert. And yes, we sang along to "Forever Young," which became "our" song, as cheesebally as it is, and which Joko would always request to have played at any school ples (dance) we went to. Here we are at Imatrikulacny ples back in 2002, I think.

I could write a book of funny stories about Joko, including interesting tidbits like a four-hour cab ride to Budapest, camping out on the Great Wall of China, my first time officially "tipsy" thanks to someone sneakily refilling my cup with becherovka while I wasn't watching, a couple of surprise parties, a frigid tour of Prague with the flu, and an interesting translation of the ice-show Mrazik in Spisska Nova Ves ("Are you cold?"--"What, are you asking me now or translating again?").

Suffice it to say, good people like Joko are the reason I love Slovakia as much as I do. My years there would have been completely different and much less interesting without his friendship and helpfulness to me the foreigner in his country.

Eventually we grew up and the carefree time of our '20s left us. Joko met a beautiful dentist named Silvia, and I met Ted. Joko and Silvia had a baby, and when Joko wrote me to ask if I'd be Marok's krstna mama (godmother), I cried, so beyond honored.

It's another long, odd, funny story for the book about Joko that I may eventually write, but the short end is that the Catholic Church in Slovakia wouldn't let me be official krstna mama. That summer, Ted and I were visiting Kosice, so we had a couple of meetings with Joko and a young priest
who Joko somehow hoped would overlook the fact that he wasn't Catholic, I wasn't Catholic, I wasn't Slovak, and that he didn't plan on raising Marok to be Catholic. It was fun to watch the varied expressions of bafflement on the priest's face as each of these facts came to light through the meeting.

So we ended that visit to Slovakia with my promise to be Unofficial American Krstna Mama to Marok, that when he grows up, he can come visit us and spend as much time with us as he wants. I hope he does.

Joko sent me this video this week of Marok taking his first steps, and it made me cry as I had all those thoughts about how fast time passes, growing up and becoming adults, and how it feels like yesterday that I was 23 and gallivanting around in what to me felt like an 'exotic' country with quirky locals. It was definitely weird to see Joko as a dad, but he's a proud, doting one, as you can see from the video.

Joko and I have tried to translate all the lyrics to this song, but it's too hard. The song is on the surface about learning to walk but speaks metaphorically (hence the difficulty to translate by us nonprofessionals) about how we are searching for our own personal ideals and Edens but get scraped knees in the process of learning to stand on our own feet and need the help of others. We'll be unaveny a sam (tired and alone) as we search to live to the fullest, trying to stand on our own legs and picking out the best bits from life's bonboniera (box of chocolates).

It's a lovely song with lovely ideas introduced by a lovely friend. Hope you enjoy:

Awash in a Sea of Books

It's starting to sink in that I may never read all of the books that have found their way to our house in the last couple of months. I've had a hard time knowing where to start, which ones are most important and which ones I'll actually like. If the tone or style of the author rubs me the wrong way, I'll usually set it down, never getting back to it. I'm not sure how bad of a habit this is. When this happens, I usually feel guilty a little. So more for my own sake than anything, I'm going to compile a list of the new books in our house, just in the last couple of months.

Feel free to chime in with what you think I should go for (though some of these on the list I've already read).

Books not about parenting or adoption:

1. Deep South Staples (Robert St. John). I've written about this book already. I love it and want his new one.

2. White Trash Cooking (Ernest Mathew Mickler). My dad has had this book for ages, and I'd always loved thumbing through it when I was at his house. When I bought my own copy last month, my grandmother was offended. She thinks I and the book make fun of the South. Is she not aware of how I glorify the South on this blog? Sheesh. And besides that, I have family--albeit not on her side--whose cooking resembles pretty closely what one finds in this book. And I love it!

3. Revolution (George Barna). Some Christian friends in Southern California gave us this book. It explains why they stopped going to church. I've only read bits and pieces, but so far, it makes a lot of sense.

4. The Complete Peanuts Collection 1959-1960 (Charles M. Schultz). After watching the American Masters documentary, I had to go back and read these. I poured over them throughout my childhood, so it's wonderful to go back now and read them as an adult. This is what I'm up reading before I fall asleep most nights these days.

5. She Got Up Off the Couch (Haven Kimmel). My favorite "memoirist."

6. Too Much Coffee Man: How to be Happy (Shannon Wheeler). I met him Sunday right before meeting Melissa Faye Greene. He is a very sweet guy and his comics are hilarious. Go read them.

7. The Happiest Days (Cressida Connolly). I picked this up at the free table this weekend at Wordstock. I see you can buy it used on Amazon for one cent. I got a deal.

8. The Heights, the Depths, and Everything in Between (Sally Nemeth). She is a friend of Ted's who hosts the most kick-ass New Year's Day party every year with black-eyed peas, cornbread and a bookswap. We stole her bookswap idea the next year but had ours as a Christmas party, and I think she got miffed. I still feel bad about that. We got to see her Sunday at Wordstock too, where she signed her new book for us. We like Sally.

9. Children of Zion (Henryk Grynberg and Jacqueline Mitchell). I got this at the free table too. It's about Polish Jewish children during the Holocaust. I don't plan on reading this before bedtime.

10. Sunset Song (Lewis Grassic Gibbon). We just got this in the mail this week as a thank-you gift from John, the crazy Scottish cyclist.

11. In the Forest (Edna O'Brien). This book came for free in the Saturday edition of The Irish Times that I bought before flying out of the Shannon airport. I read her Country Girls trilogy when I lived in Slovakia, which I liked a lot, so I was excited about a free book by her. I still haven't read it though.

12. The Pirate Queen (Morgan Llywelyn). I'm fascinated by the Irish Queen Granuaile whose fortress we happened upon on Achil Island, so I got this book to find out more about her. I haven't read it either.

13. A Star Called Henry (Roddy Doyle). I found this at Goodwill and got it because I tend to like Irish writers. Still unread too.

14. Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (Andrew Ferguson). Ted's dad gave us this. He said it's about all the people who make their livings off Abraham Lincoln. Whatever.

15. The Chinook Book of Coupons. Does anyone truly remember to use enough of the discounts to cover the cost of the book? That's our goal.

Books about parenting, Africa, and adoption:

1. Parenting with Love and Logic (Foster Cline and Jim Fay). Apparently, this book is a big deal these days. It was on PBS and everything, though I've heard it doesn't teach you how to keep your kid from running into traffic--how to obey in those urgent moments of danger.

2. Shepherding a Child's Heart (Ted Tripp). The friend who loaned this to me got it as a gift and hates it.

3. Secrets of the Baby Whisperer (Tracy Hogg and Melinda Blau). I found this at Goodwill too and got it never having heard of it. I have several friends who love it and swear by it.

4. The Myth of the Perfect Mother (Carla Barnhill). Picked this one up for free too at the free table. I liked the title a lot and got all jazzed up by reading the introduction. I like that it's written by a Christian. I am not Betty Crocker.

5. Both Supernanny books (Jo Frost). I adore Jo Frost. And how sexy is she on the front of her first book? Go check it out.

6. Discovery of a Continent: Foods, Flavors, and Inspirations from Africa (Marcus Saumuelsson). Our friends with the three kids from Ethiopia gave us this book this week. I love it. And she made this from it: This stuff was better than anything we've ordered in Ethiopian restaurants, as you can see by Ted's eagerness to dig in.

7. Black Baby, White Hands (Jaiya John). I got this from the library. I've heard great things about this memoir written by a black man who was raised in a white family.

8. In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories. I just got this in the mail this week and have read one story so far. I think I'm most excited about this book.

9. Spirit of the Nursery (Jane Alexander). Another from the free table. I've read it already and can tell you all you might need to know about how to spiritually cleanse your baby's room with various crystals and energy fields. Trippy.

10. The Bradt Ethiopia Guidebook.

Books I Want:

1. The Daring book for Girls (Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz).
2. The Dangerous book for Boys (Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden). I've been intrigued by these for ages now and fell flat in love with the one for girls this weekend at Wordstock. Then Erin wrote about these over at Holding Still. The Universe is telling me to get my hands on these books.

3. Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (Florence King). Hell, with a title like that, what Southern girl wouldn't want to read it? Plus, I have a friend who loves it, and she is so beyond rad that I want to read it too.

4. Fifty Acres and a Poodle. (Jeane Marie Laskas). This is another friend recommendation, one that she says this about: "it makes me laugh, and cry and it is one of those rare books where I feel like this person is describing some of my own thoughts better than I am capable of. It makes me think I may not be as abnormal as I sometimes feel." There's my friend "doing her thing" in Jamaica (serving the poor). If we were all as abnormal as her, the world would be a better place. I just like the photo and I like what she said about the book. Makes me want to read it.

5. Deep South Parties: How to Survive the Southern Cocktail Hour Without a Box of French Onion Soup Mix, a Block of Processed Cheese, or a Cocktail Weenie (Robert St. John).

6. First Meals (Annabel Karmel): I've always liked the idea of making my own babyfood and of raising a kid who is not a picky eater (one of my biggest pet peeves is a kid who won't try new things and even worse, parents who say, "Oh, my kid doesn't eat fill-in-the-blank."), so I was excited when a friend showed me this book that she used with all her kids.

7. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Maggie O'Farrell). Just read about this in the NYTimes, am fascinated.

8. Blankets (Craig Thompson). I've been wanting to dip my toe in the world of graphic novels, minus the ninjas and vampires, and this one appealed to me when I found it in a bookstore this weekend. I have it on hold at the library, which is probably a bad idea considering the list I have just shown you...

Respect

There's something so comforting about being understood. This is something I love most about Ted--I feel that he gets me, not judging me during my daily rant about something stupid like the misbehavior of our neighbor's cat or of members of the cast of Friends. And he'll stand there and laugh just as hard as I did when we notice that our leaf-blowing neighbor's yard is now even more full of leaves after last night's windstorm since he hadn't bagged the leaves he blew to the curb.

I was thinking today about how understanding between people is the highest goal, but that in the many cases where this can't be reached, respect should be given. While this feels basic, I was pretty disappointed this weekend by the conversations going on at one of the adoption message boards I'm a member of about the varying degrees to which adoptive parents engage emotionally in the process. Some of the posters on both sides showed a fair amount of close-mindedness and disrespect (I'm more of a lurker than anything, which you may understand if you could read how the occasional voice of dissent is treated).

Providing here the whole backstory that resulted in the message-board nastiness isn't necessary. I couldn't help feeling frustrated by posters who chose to use disrespectful and alienating wording, many times while prefacing their comments with a phrase supposedly giving credit to their openness like, "Everyone is entitled to their opinion" or "This may work for you, but for me..." or "We're all different, but..." and so on. What would sometimes come after one of these prefaces was an expression of an opinion that sounded judgmental and inflammatory.

As one great twentieth century philosopher said, "Can't we all just get along?" We're all people who are interested in adoption; shouldn't we of all people be models of inclusion to other ways of thinking and doing?

Her honesty is the thing I admire most about Melissa Faye Greene (author of There Is No Me Without You). There were so many moments during her reading Sunday that I laughed out loud, felt my heart break, and shoved down the compulsion to stand on my chair and shout hallelujah. She is a pioneer in this world of Ethiopian adoption and such a God-sent impassioned voice to the orphan crisis in Africa.

But what means the most to me as a future-mom is the way she lets us off the hook, so to speak, outright telling us that it's okay not to always believe what a lot of adoption literature says. She lets me know that it's normal if we all don't experience that "love at first sight" when we meet our children. In fact, she even said in her talk Sunday that, not only was she panicked and terrified when meeting all her adoptive children but that she even nearly threw up once or twice. That's not a picture you're likely to see on the front of an agency's brochure.

Since we haven't received our referral yet, I really have no idea how we will respond when seeing that face for the first time. It's a big unknown. As excited as I am as the weeks creep by on the Waitlist, I am growing more familiar with that sense of panic as I drift to sleep, thinking, "Oh my god, this is for real. Our lives are going to change forever. This is a small, fragile little person we're going to be responsible for..." It's always nice when friends of mine who are mothers already tell me that they had the exact same thoughts during their pregnancies or Waiting periods. Whew.

What really struck me Sunday is what a good mother Melissa Faye Greene is, how this is a role she embraces and is honest about. Someone in the audience asked her if any of her kids have had ongoing emotional or psychological issues (he kept using the word "damage") the way that some children whose mothers were drug-users during pregnancy sometimes do. I thought it was a terribly personal question and sort of cringed when he asked it, but she answered with such grace and honesty.

She answered by telling us about one of her sons that very morning refusing to go to Hebrew school, even running away to parts unknown as his siblings were getting in the car. Later that day, the family found him asleep in the treehouse with his bag of Halloween candy tucked under his arm. She said she didn't know where this behavior was coming from, whether it's "damage" or not. She just shrugged and said that sometimes a boy just needs to nap in his treehouse with his Halloween candy.

I loved her honesty and her understanding of her boy. I love that she takes these things in stride. As much of a role model as she is for a lot of us, her family is not perfect and she doesn't claim to be a perfect mother. She didn't feel the love at first sight. The bonding she experienced with her children was sometimes a slow process.

And this is okay because in the end, her kids know they belong and are loved. Shouldn't that be the goal, no matter how we get to that point? If we celebrate the milestones along this long path to adoption, have our showers before we've met our children, and introduce with joyous fanfare to the world the children referred to us, this should all be okay and good and I cheer loudly right alongside anyone who chooses to do this.

But the same should be true if we choose not to do these things. If we choose to be more guarded and private in our experience, that should be okay as well. Our children will not suffer for it. This I strongly believe, and I was saddened this weekend on the message board by being made to feel like a bad mother for not doing things the other way.

We have some close friends who adopted a daughter domestically and were involved pretty close with the birth mother throughout the whole pregnancy. They were there for the birth and got to hold her immediately. But because it was a few days before things were officially finalized, our friends stayed guarded with their emotions. Even while holding the baby, the mom told me that she felt very little. It was only after things were finalized that they truly celebrated and opened wide their hearts.

And I can tell you: their daughter is nothing but well-adjusted, completely confident, and a true charmer who knows that she is loved with ever fiber of her parents' beings. She has suffered no damage because her parents tried to guard their emotions through the process. Her parents lavish attention and love on both her and her sister.

I just hope that we can be, if not understanding, at least respectful of each other. We all know our emotional limits. And we all love our children. I hope that is enough for us to cheer each other on, no matter what path we take.

The Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.