Things I can't let go of.

During my first year in Slovakia, a good friend told me that he learned pretty quickly the English phrase, "to hurt one's feelings" thanks to my having rather thin skin. He'd never heard this phrase before meeting me and quickly integrated into his English lexicon: Oh sorry, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings (in my defense, while this guy is a super-special wonderful life-long friend I can always count on, tact is just not his thing--he was always quick to tell me if I was eating too many jam-filled buchty, adding padding to my, erm, booty, and he just loved laughing at my frequent mistakes in Slovak, sometimes not telling me what I'd said that was so funny--all this from someone who would describe bryndza as "cheese made from ships" instead of sheeps' cheese and who left out that very-essential letter P when talking about our favorite rapper Coolio).

So while I appreciated all the nice responses to my post about "Choosing not to be offended," I felt sort of guilty reading them. I'm not so good at being able to let things go, like water off a duck's back, the way my mom always told me to do when I was the fifth grade nearsighted fat kid always picked last for games of kickball. I and my best friend Catherine, the other fat kid in my class, would let our teammates ahead of us in the line to kick so that we could exercise our intellect with invigorating discussions about who our favorite Goonie was or how we would have spent the money had we been Brewster in Brewster's Millions, at least until the teacher caught us not playing and made us take a turn.

Pathetic, I know.

So while I was able to see past the phrase "real mom" to the overall good intentions with the lady at the coffeeshop in Mississippi, I'm not always able to do so.

Case in point: This summer at a wedding, a close friend of one of our relatives whose house I'd been to about a year ago, approached us to chat and congratulate us on the adoption. This woman is very sweet and encouraging. During the conversation, she made the frequent (and oh, so annoying) comment, "Just you watch, as soon as you adopt, you guys are going to have your own baby. It always happens that way!"

I cringed. I tried to bite my tongue, I really did. I couldn't hold myself back though. As sweet as this lady is, fewer things get under my skin more than hearing someone tell me this. Before I knew what was happening, I was stammering something out about how this is actually a myth, that Barbara Katz Rothman in her book Weaving a Family actually cites several studies disproving this idea that there's a correlation between adoption and later pregnancy and that hearing this makes adoptive parents feel pressure to conceive and that the world thinks their child who was adopted is somehow less than their own or even a means to an end (a biological child).

I should have just smiled and said, "You never know what God has in store." But I didn't. I lashed out and immediately felt guilty, so guilty that I went back to her twice to apologize. She was very gracious and understanding and hadn't deserved to be given a barrage of facts about adoption research while at a wedding reception. I was wrong.

But really, so was she. Because many of us out there know someone who adopted and then conceived a child, this does not mean that this is the normal course of events for families. And pointing out to adoptive parents these cases where it has happened communicates the message that we're all just waiting for our biological child to come along for our families to be "complete." Though people who say this don't mean it to be, it is hurtful and I wish they would stop saying it.

I came across this blog this weekend and cheered loudly the post in which the author wrote:

Don't assume adoption is a second choice.
The reasons people choose to adopt are as varied and unique as the people themselves. While it is true that many choose adoption because of infertility, it is also true that many choose adoption for a myriad of other reasons as well. Many people choose to adopt not because they are out of other options, but rather because they believe that adoption is the best choice for them.
Don't tell us we're sure to have "our own" now.
She is our own. Those parents who choose adoption because of infertility do not secretly harbor lifelong yearnings for a biological child. Having "our own" is now irrelevant; the child we have is the one we want and it is inconceivable that we could love or want any child more. Like all parents, we have the best.

There were a lot of things this woman is so right on about, and I was really happy to have heard from someone else who has the same peeve. I strongly encourage you to read this entire post. She's much more articulate than I could ever be and doesn't even once rabbit-trail off to her memories of elementary school woes.

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Second thing I can't let go of: When people at my church use language publicly that excludes adoptees. Sunday morning before the baby dedications, one of the pastors of our church said something about how wonderful it is when "a woman gets pregnant and has as child," as if this is the only way a family is formed. I couldn't help thinking about any older children in the room who may have been adopted and for the parents of those children who probably had to have yet another conversation to clarify misuse of language on the way home.

Church, of all places, should be a place for the grace of inclusion. Because I'm not upset about it, now or even then when it happened, we want to mention it to this pastor, who is a really great guy and who I'm sure had just never thought of it before. I have to remember that adoption is not on everyone's radar as much as it is on ours. But if I can tweak their radars, with grace, I'm happy to do it, especially for the sake our child who I so want to grow up in an atmosphere of total acceptance from as many people as possible in our lives. I know this acceptance won't always happen on the playground, but I know for sure that it needs to at church.

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Third and final thing I find hard to let go of: Could the corporate big-whigs of Target please adjust the budget so that we have fewer segway-riding security guards and more signs pointing customers to the tiny, dimly lit corner where they've, to make room for all the holiday crap, shoved all the cleaning supplies (or as one worker called it, "uh, you mean, stuff with chemicals?")? Grrrr...

Sick

I think it may have been the several nights of bad sleep mixed with the abrupt change in weather, but I'm sick--so sick that I came home a day early from Jackson. The sleep deprivation and snotty nose turned me into a beast I didn't want to subject anyone else to those last 24 hours (well, besides Ted, of course). I came home and slept 10 hours and feel slightly better. All I have to offer blog-wise is this video, which isn't so bad really considering the state of things:



Thanks, cuteoverload.com for the gossipy cats. And thanks to the writers of last week's Office episode for making me cry today (anyone know what part I'm referring to?). And thanks, tivo for enabling me to watch all the shows I miss. I love you, technology. I'm off now to drink Nyquil.

Choosing Not to be Offended

In A Love Like No Other, there was one essay I particularly liked written by an adoptive mother who is hyper-sensitive about the language people use to talk about adoption. (I'm sorry I can't refer you to her name--my copy of the book is currently in Portland and I'm writing this from Granny's house). I laughed out loud throughout the whole thing at her unabashed chip-on-the-shoulder and her compulsion to educate the masses about proper adoption-related language. I feel the same way a lot of the time, cringing at terms like "own kids" for biological.

So this morning while picking up a cup of coffee, I was chatting away with the owner of the store and the subject of blogs came up and then the subject of our adoption. She was super sweet and interested, and I gave her the address of our blog. I'd been taking photos in the shop (with her permission) and while she was making a cafe au lait for me to take home to Granny, she was asking me questions about the adoption. When I told her I still haven't done much to get the baby's room ready, she laughed and said, "Oh well, you're just like a bunch of real mothers who wait until the last minute to get things ready."

She was so sweet and meant nothing by it at all. In other circumstances, I think I may have gotten my feelings hurt or cringed at the word 'real', but somehow I realized that it's just a case of a very sweet person saying something that she would never imagine being potentially hurtful. It's the classic case of her not having walked a mile in my shoes, so she doesn't know what's sensitive and what's not. She doesn't have the adoption-paperwork/waiting-made blisters on her feet. But I'm sure she has some other kinds of sensitive blisters, made from her own kind of hardship in her own life that I don't know about.

So I chose not to be offended. I chose to let it go because of the bigger picture. What's so funny to me though is that her coworker had been coming in and out of the room, listening and commenting here and there (she wouldn't let me take her picture, even though she's actually my favorite barista). When she overheard her coworker use the word, "real mom," she mumbled, "Real mom as opposed to what other kind of mom? So what is she going to be? Not a real mom?"

Can I hear an amen?

The whole thing was funny to me in the quiet way she mumbled it, most likely just for my benefit, not even looking at me when she said it. I appreciated her quiet support, and I found it almost ironic that one of the few times I actually wasn't overly-sensitive about the way people throw around willy-nilly the word "real," I got support from the sidelines.

It was a nice exchange all round. The first lady was so nice and supportive, and I know she meant nothing by her use of "real mom." Sometimes it's worth it not to be offended. It's easier to let it go with a smile, knowing the person meant no harm. The complicating factor will be when our child(ren) are old enough to hear and understand these terms, which I'm sure will cause some questions. And if I can hold on to this feeling of just shrugging it off, it'll be easier to gently explain the occasional misuse of language by well-meaning people. Grace, grace, grace: my goal is to offer grace.

Lord, help me.

Firing Dormant Neurons

I couldn't help it. On the plane ride out here, Johnny and June kept singing to me, "I'm going to Jackson..." It was an unexpected trip, to attend the "home-going" to heaven of a very good man who's most likely right now doing a two-step with his love Ruth and roaming flat fields that look a lot like Kansas.

It's always such a lovely thing to come here and soak up my uncle's story-telling; the conceptual, often absurdist humor of my friends; the velveeta-laden casseroles and butterbeans. Today for lunch, I had a pimento-cheese sandwich and "Tipah-County Caviar" a.k.a. black-eyed pea salad. I bought my own copy of The White Trash Cookbook and Deep South Staples: How to surivive in a southern kitchen without a can of cream of mushroom soup written by Robert St. John, chef of my favorite Hattiesburg restaurant, Crescent City. If you come to my house, I'll made you some buttermilk chicken and hoppin' john.

Here's what my lunch looked like today: Last night, my sister, neices and I drove to rent a movie and to two grocery stores where we kept running into people we knew, including my sister's high school boyfriend (who is now married with kids) who talked to me in the greeting card aisle about his love for Slavic culture (they lived in Russia for years). Then we ran into my sister's neighbor's brother who had two big dogs in the back of his pick-up and told me in the seafood aisle all about how much better key west shrimp is to "that stuff they import from China with all them chemicals and sh*t."

And I've heard the best maceroni-n-cheese recipes and tried to keep my manners and talked one at a time at the dinner-table and sat in Krispy Kreme donuts with one of my oldest friends wearing the paper hats and singing "Digging up Bones" by Randy Travis as we talked so long about years past that he said, "It's like all these dormant neurons in my brain are being fired off!"

I've remembered how much it means to have people in the church bring by food made in their own kitchens with their own loving hands brought over after a funeral for the family to eat on. This stuff you can never get as good in a restaurant. There were home-grown butterbeans and home-grown corn, home-made rolls, and all kinds of casseroles. And I also made sure not to eat that last piece of ham on the pretty glass tray, no matter how good it looked: in the South, you don't eat the last of anything. You leave it in case somebody else wants it. So usually it gets discreetly eaten by the person doing the dishes a couple of hours later.

This is what it looked like as we were getting ready to eat (and don't think it's just that everybody was full--these ham rolls were an apetizer and most of us were really hungry):

Sometimes it's good to have some dormant neurons fired off, to remember our manners, to take things slow, to shut up and listen to each other, to sing some Randy Travis, to practice saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, you go on ahead," to tell stories, to save that last piece of ham for somebody else, and to hug each other and gently say goodbye when a loved one goes on Home.

Tagged Again

Jana, one of my favorite bloggers, tagged me a few days ago. Without further ado:

Jobs I've had:
*Preschool assistant director (less than a year)
*ESOL teacher (six years)
*Coffee-server at Jody's in Hattiesburg, MS (one year)

Places I've lived:
*Jackson, Pearl, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi
*Euless, Texas
*Los Angeles, California
*Kosice, Slovakia

Places I'd rather be right now:
*Having Ted show me his stomping grounds in New York, and then meeting this guy and following him around for a day while he takes pictures in the subway.
*Having a ruby and tots at Kennedy School
*Talking to my sister while sitting in her driveway, drinking in the humidity
*Smelling the lavender in Hvar, Croatia, minus all the rich tourists that have taken over the place in the last few years.
*Sitting in a dark movie theater watching The Bourne Supremacy or Feast of Love.
(These were actually sort of hard for me to think of--I am kind of sick of travel and am really digging fall in Portland)

Food I love:
*The mix of these flavors: cilantro, coconut, peanut, red pepper
*Fresh pasta swimming in olive oil and basil with pecorino and pine nuts
*Cajun/Creole--gumbo, crawfish bisque, beignets, etc.
*Grits--salt, pepper, butter, egg, maybe cheese
*Key lime pie
*Bryndzove pirohy so slaninou
*Tater tots and Ruby ale from Kennedy School
*Ice cream with crunchy bits
*Home-grown beefsteak tomatoes with salt, pepper, and fresh mozzarella
*Fried okra
*Sweet potato casserole
*Granny's beef brisket and cofffeecake
*Guiness beef stew from McDermott's Pub
I must now stop thinking about food...

TV Shows I Love:
*Little House on the Prairie
*Seinfeld
*Friends
*The Office (both UK and American)
*Lost (first two seasons)
*Twin Peaks
*The Comeback (so sad it ended)

Movies I Love:
*Magnolia
*The Royal Tenenbaums
*Lost in Translation
*Office Space
*Les Miserables
*Fiddler on the Roof
*Waking Ned Devine
*The Jungle Book
*In America
*Breakfast at Tiffany's

Books I Have Loved in the last Year:
*She Got Up Off the Couch (Haven Kimmel)
*All Over But the Shoutin' (Rick Bragg)
*Searching for God Knows What (Donald Miller)
*The Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
*Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)

Who I'm Tagging:
Susan, Carey (cause really, you have nothing better to do, right?), Erin

The Halloween House

We live around the corner from these people in Portland who decorate for most holidays. And when I say decorate, I don't mean in the way that common mortals put a few pumpkins on their porches or string lights at Christmas. These Super-heroes of the Holiday World must have a storage unit somewhere with their stash of goods for Halloween, Christmas, the Fourth of July, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day. They go so far out at Halloween that The Oregonian did a story on them last year and hundreds (probably thousands) of kids make their way by the house this time of year.

Since we live so close by, friends and relatives will sometimes stop by our place at night to go to the Halloween House all lit up and spooky. It's fun to walk over and then come home for hot chocolate. Kids love this place. The house features: a Bates Motel sign, ring of ghosts in the front yard with a pot of dry ice in the center (every night, not just Halloween night), various skeletons and skulls placed about, horror movie cardboard characters looking out from the front windows, hands reaching up out of the ground, big plastic candycorns, a bloody head in shackles, etc. It's hard to remember what all is there off the top of my head. Just believe me: it's over the top and wonderful.

Yesterday while babysitting a friend's two kids for a couple of hours, we walked over to the Halloween House so they could have a look. As we walked up, this fancy Lincoln Continental pulled up and parked next to the house and four kids poured out. All four kids proceeded to admire the decorations by running through the yard, even amidst all the goodies including the ring of ghosts (my favorite part). I was shocked.

Now granted, these were grandparents taking their kids there, so maybe it was just an issue of grandparents spoiling grandkids and not that these four kids were disrespectful brats. Of course, the three-year-old in my charge saw the goings-on and wanted to run around with them. I explained, loudly enough for the clueless grandparents to hear, that the decorations are for admiring from the sidewalk and that we were not going to trespass.

I know I probably sounded bitchy. I'm sorry. But not really.

After a few moments, the grandmother mosied over towards me and actually said, "Oh, I know I shouldn't let them run in the yard, but...oh well...it's there." Huh?! It's there? What kind of logic is that? What is wrong with people today? How is it okay for these four kids to be allowed to run around touching and stepping all over the hard work of the owners of this house? I had no idea how to respond to this woman, so I just walked away saying nothing.

In retrospect (because isn't that always how these things work?), I thought about how I wished I had told her, as nicely as possible, that I'm a neighbor and appreciate what these people do every year and that I want them to continue doing it and that if people driving by don't respect that, then the happy Halloween-lovers might get pissed and get tired of the bother.

Sigh. Am I crazy for getting so mad? Maybe it's the old-fart in me, thinking about how this kind of thing is exactly what's wrong with people today: a sloppy lack of respect of both self and others. It's easier to just let kids run wild. Actually making the effort to teach them that dignity and respect are values that honor oneself and others takes some work. It doesn't come naturally to most of us. I know it didn't for me, which is why my Momma could make me straighten up the slouch (usually during a long church service) by just pursing her lips into a tight line from the choir loft. I was not a perfect child by any means, but one thing for sure is that Momma taught us to respect other people's things (which is why I had to save up my allowance to buy my sister a new rubik's cube when I "solved" hers by taking all the stickers off and putting them in the "right" place--and they still somehow let me into the gifted program a couple of years later).

So that is my daily rant. I'm curious what else I could have said, how else I could have responded in this situation. Maybe I did the right thing by just walking off, but probably not. I could have at least rolled my eyes at her before I turned around, right?

Now this is in no way connected to the above rant, but I found it interesting anyway. These spiders look a lot like the thousands we have in our backyard now and maybe is the same kind that bit my face last weekend. If you like spiders like I do, enjoy (oh, and possibly a PG-rating as well):

Star Wars!

I can't help myself. I hope not to overload you with videos (though I did warn the blog is currently my distraction from Waiting), but really...I've been laughing at this all day. This is the most awesome thing I've seen since Chocolate Rain. Bless her heart: