Sick Day Reflections

Here are a few moments of gratitude resulting from my child's recent (minor) illness.

1) Thank goodness for my husband

My dear husband fetched Gatorade.  He got me two hours to myself outside the house when my cabin fever set in.  He got up at 2 am to dose the child.  He got me naps.  He entertained Mr. Cranky McFeverpants.  MVP right here.

2) Thank goodness for the DVR and YouTube and smartphones

Those screentime limits go out the window when the thermometer hits 103.  Yay for having hours of cartoons stored away and/or available on the internet.  Chromecast for the win.

3) Thank goodness for pharmaceuticals

Motrin and Tylenol: two great tastes that taste great together.

4) Thank goodness for plumbing and running water

Stomach bug.  Enough said.

5) Thank goodness for the Target dollar section

That last day, when they're mostly better but can't go to school yet, those cheap art projects and activity books are lifesavers.  Yay for stickers and coloring and card games.

6) Thank goodness for snuggles

Snuggles are the best medicine, for caregiver and sick one alike.

Of course, all of these things I'm grateful for have something in common: they rely on my husband's employment.  He has the kind of job that allows him to run by Rite Aid during lunch or go into work a little late without getting in trouble.  He has the kind of job where he makes enough money that I can run to get him from school the moment a virus rears its ugly head, stay home and snuggle with him as much as he wants, and keep him home as many days as necessary.  My husband makes enough money that I can grab some fun stuff from the store just because and not worry.  He has the kind of job that has good family health insurance.  And I am beyond grateful.

I am acutely aware of the fact that this is not most people's reality.  That's why we need things like paid sick days (shout out to my cousin at PathwaysPA), the Affordable Care Act, and a decent minimum wage.  Being able to care for your sick children shouldn't be a luxury of the few.

Baltimore Uprising: True and False Conclusions Drawn from this Week

People are drawing a lot of conclusions from recent events in Baltimore.  Let's examine a few, shall we?

True Conclusions

Decriminalize drug possession already

A huge amount of police harassment occurs over checking people for drugs.  The drug war destroys lives and does nothing to actually help people not do drugs.  It makes money for police departments and private prisons and serves no other useful purpose.  It gives police a reason to harass people who live in low income neighborhoods.  And I'm pretty sure being a police officer would be safer and more rewarding if we ended the war on drugs and they could spend their time helping people instead of effing people up over an ounce of weed.

Our justice system is fucked up beyond belief

Literally.  White people and people with money don't believe how fucked up it is.  Police and prosecutors are incentivised to make as many arrests and get as many convictions as possible no matter how penny ante they are, no matter whether or not it makes people safer.  Private prisons make a mint off of small time drug offenders.  Black people are more likely to be charged with resisting arrest for the same behavior as white people who aren't charged, more likely to be prosecuted for the same crimes than white people. Cities balance their budgets with exorbitant fines extracted from the poor rather than raising taxes on people who can afford it.  Protesters are held for two days without charge, in crowded cells, with no access to food or water or lawyers.  It is a right mess, and police and local governments need some real oversight.

The people of Baltimore care about their city

They care enough to protest, and they care enough to clean up the mess when it gets out of hand.  They care enough to try to find ways to feed and care for their children when the city cancels school for a bunch of kids on free breakfast and lunch.  They care enough to speak truth to power when the cable news tried to peddle bullshit.  They care enough to try to prevent violence between police and protesters.  

The people who run Baltimore are bad decision makers

I know, let's shut down public transit right when kids get out of school and meet a bunch of teenagers with cops in riot gear.  That can only end well.  Oooh, and let's let drunken sports fans mix with protesters.  Sounds fun.  And I sure am glad we didn't buy body cameras for our police a while back.  Jesus Christ.

Half the people (at least) on Facebook are hypocrites

Why don't the looters take personal responsibility for their own neighborhoods?  Well, why don't the cops take personal responsibility for killing someone for the crime of pissing them off?  Why don't they take responsibility for breaking someone's neck and failing to call the paramedics?  

But, looting isn't the right way to protest!  Oh, did you miss the week of peaceful protests before the riots started? Of course you did. Before they started breaking stuff, you didn't even know who Freddie Gray was because the media figured they couldn't make enough money off of telling you about it until there were sirens and fires and ghettos to make fun of.  I'm not pro destruction.  I'm not pro lost jobs and pro grandma not getting her pills because the CVS burned down.  I don't like it, but I sure as hell can understand it.  If you don't understand it, it's because you don't want to.

A person is smart.  A person is moral and kind.  Mobs are destructive.  They have been ever since there were enough people on the planet to make one.  Take a group of people with nothing to lose and do something that fills them with anger, and had things happen.  That isn't due to race.  That's just human nature.  Maybe our society should make sure even the poorest of us have something to lose and something to live for.

But white people don't do this kind of thing.  The Black community needs to condemn the violence.  Oh, like the white community condemns the violence when white kids riot after they lose and/or win a basketball and/or football and/or baseball game?  Or when one of us shoots up a school or movie theater?   Oh, I forgot, only Black people represent the entirety of their race when they break the law.  Our criminals are crazy, and theirs are symptoms of social pathology.  And the French and Russian revolutions don't count.

Some police need to learn better coping skills

We cannot continue to give police a pass on brutality, a pass on killing unarmed people who pose no threat to them.  I realize being a cop is dangerous and difficult, but they need to be held to a higher standard.  There are a lot of jobs more dangerous than being a policeman, and we don't give the people who do them a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Donny killed somebody?  Oh, but he's a crab fisherman, so it's cool. Mark ran a guy over with his garbage truck in a fit of road rage?  Well, shit happens.  That guy should have stayed on the sidewalk.

You know who manages to deal with mouthy, uncooperative young people in large groups all day long without laying a finger on them?  Teachers.  Somehow we manage without a gun or a taser.  Some of those kids even smell like weed and swear at us and have criminal records, but by some miracle, we all get through the day alive.  And we get paid a hell of a lot less than cops.

  

If you can't deal with assholes all day without losing your temper, don't become a cop.  That's the job.  

False Conclusions

Protesters are anti-police and want cops to get hurt

Most proteseors don't want police to get hurt on the job.  Most people know there are good police and appreciate what they do for society.  What people are against is a culture in many police departments of dehumanizing the very people they are supposed to protect and serve.  What people are against is the refusal to address the biases that permeate our society, implicit racism that teaches all of us, cops included, to be terrified of young Black men to the point of killing them even when they don't pose an actual threat.  Being anti police brutality doesn't make you anti police officer.

Black moms need to beat their kids more

Oh, yeah, if those looters had been smacked around some more, there wouldn't have been any riots.  Riiight.  More violence, that's the ticket.  You know what else would prevent riots?  The police not killing people for no reason and then doing their best to evade responsibility for it.  

And all those people in prison? It's totes because their moms only gave them timeouts or took away their toys or their allowance when they acted up.  If only they had beaten their children.  Oh, my bad, almost everyone in prison received corporal punishment as kids.

And let's not even bring up how much slavery and Jim Crow play into corporal punishment in the Black community.

If you don't run and don't fight, you'll be fine.

Running from the cops is not a capital offense.  Neither is resisting arrest.  Neither is mouthing off to the cops.  It's foolish, sure.  You know who tends to make foolish decisions?  Young people and frightened people.  People with mental health issues and people in altered states.  You know who should have better judgment?  Adult, professional police officers trained to deal with stressful situations.

Also, there are plenty of dead people who neither ran nor resisted arrest and were killed by police anyway.  I love how we're apparently supposed to treat the police with the level of caution usually reserved for wild dogs, but it's the protestors who are called animals.

This will never happen to your Black son, because you are raising him right (unlike all those Black parents)

I am raising him right.  He's smiling and friendly and kind.  He yes sirs and no sirs and pleases and thank yous with the best of them.  He never gets in trouble at school.  He already has a college fund.  He already knows not to take his hands off the wheel.  He knows to wear his hood down.  He knows not to run from the police.  He knows not to break the law.  He is 5 years old, and everyone loves him.  Am I reducing the odds something bad will happen to him?  I certainly hope so.  Is it foolproof?  Hell no.

When he gets old enough to go somewhere by himself, my white privilege isn't going to cover him anymore.  And when he's a teenager, he may go through a rebellious stage, like a lot of kids.  He may go through times of looking like an angry black kid instead of a happy one.  White kids get to go through phases like that.  They get to make mistakes of youth.  They get to swear and smoke weed and dress poorly and put stupid pictures on Facebook and act generally like idiots and still be "good kids with a bright future ahead of them."  Black kids should be able to do the same without having to worry about getting shot for it.

And the implication that I am necessarily a better parent because I'm white and married someone with earning power is racist and classist, and I don't want to hear it.

Marathons

I go to church in Oakland, and yesterday, the Oakland Marathon ran right past our side lawn.  The pastor made good use of this fact in her sermon.  Marathons make good metaphors.  One thing she mentioned is that long-distance runners hate when spectators tells them that they're "almost there" when there are still miles to go.  Those final miles, in fact, are the hardest and most painful, and the runners are not "almost there."

Right now, this feels like the story of my life.  I feel like I'm on so many long-distance journeys, and I'm starting to feel it,  I'm trying to finish my first novel and get it epublished before summer, and I have so few hours in the week to devote to it that it seems like it will never get done,  And then I get to thinking about the sequel and when I'm going to find time for that, and I'm overwhelmed.  Then there's the Lupus, which is a journey that will probably never be over, and right now, I'm in the hills, hoping for some flat stretches around the corner.  Then there's our effort to adopt a second child, a process that began over two and a half years ago.  Even when we do match with an expectant mom, those last days of waiting and hoping and not knowing are brutally long, and you don't feel "almost there" until you're sitting in a hotel room looking at a baby with a dumbfounded look on your face.

So when I limp by and you give me some water, please don't tell me that I'm "almost there."  Just remind me that I'm looking good and that I can do it.  I'll do the same for you.  ;-)

Arkansas Re-homing Atrocity

This story has pretty much all the triggers, fyi.

Sometimes adoptions get "disrupted" after finalization.  There are cases when it is in a child's best interest that he or she join another family because their current one cannot meet their needs.  This tends to happen to older children with extremely difficult-to-handle emotional and behavioral problems.  Sometimes the family wasn't honestly informed about the child's issues pre-adoption, and the child poses a significant physical danger to to others in the household.  Sometimes disruption is done with the supervision of professionals, and the child goes to a family with a valid home study where the parents have been trained to help a child with severe issues, or they go to a residential treatment program for those with mental illnesses.  It is always a tragedy, but sometimes is a tragedy with the transition conducted in a responsible, loving manner.  This post is not about one of those times.

"Re-homing" is a term used in the adoption community when parents simply give their adopted child or children to another family, often with minimal vetting and no supervision by any sort of adoption professionals or governmental agency.  They just sign over guardianship and wash their hands of a child they no longer want in their house.  It's a horrible practice that leads to lots of abuse and trauma for the kids, as you might imagine.  It's something most people never would consider doing if they had a bio kid with difficulties rather than an adopted one.

In Arkansas, a state legislator (R-Crazytown) named Justin Harris adopted two little girls, age 2 and 4 at the time. The elder one had been sexually abused in the family of origin.  Mr. Harris and his wife were allegedly informed of the child's emotional issues.  They were, in fact, strongly discouraged from adopting the children by the girls' foster family and by various social workers who felt that the couple were not equipped to handle their needs.  They ignored this advice, because Jesus, or something?  Anyhow, they adopted the girls against advice, allegedly by exerting pressure on the head of DHS, whose budget Mr. Harris just happens to oversee on his legislative committee.

After about a year of doing things like locking the older girl in an empty room for hours at a time and conducting exorcisms failed to heal her trauma (shocker, I know), they turned the girls over to some guy who used to work for them-- at their government funded super-Christian preschool, natch.  New dad promptly began raping the older girl, and he is now in prison.  The girls are now apparently doing okay in yet another new family.  Mr. Harris, of course, blames everyone but himself and his wife for this horror show.

Adoptions that go terribly awry tend to do so because best practices are ignored by agencies and hopeful adoptive parents.  For some reason, this seems to happen more frequently in a certain part of the Evangelical community that is really into promoting adoption and large families.  Most of these situations could be prevented if people would simply do proper research, listen to people who know what they are talking about, think things through, and not take parenting advice from wingnuts,  I don't just blame the adoptive parents in these situations.  Many of them have the best of intentions when they decide to adopt.  Agencies and DHS need to do more to stop bad placements.

Reasons I think you should not adopt an older child with a history of trauma or other special needs

1)You think love is enough.

Everyone wants to believe that love is enough to heal a broken heart.  It isn't.  Love is necessary but not sufficient.  You also need knowledge and professional help to assist a traumatized child in recovering, attaching, and learning to thrive.

2)  You think you can pray it away.

I go to church every week.  I pray every day.  But God gave us brains so we can use them.  We have psychologists.  Go to one who specializes in adoption and trauma.  You can pray all you want in the car on the way there.

3)  You already have a boatload of small children

High needs kids need lots of attention in order to recover.  That is kind of their whole bag.  There are only 24 hours in the day.  You think God will make a way?  Maybe his way is another family with fewer demands on the primary caregiver's time and energy.

People act like there is no way to foresee that a mom home-schooling five other kids under the age of 12 can't handle a 4-year-old with an emotional problem or a health issue that requires four doctors' appointments a week.  Anyone who has a grip on reality can see that train wreck coming.  It isn't fair to the new child nor to the ones you already have.  Why do agencies let people do this?

4)  You're adopting out of birth order

Do not adopt a special needs 3-year-old when you have or are expecting a new baby.  That high-needs kid needs to be the center of attention for at least a couple of years.

5) You have an authoritarian parenting style

I'm not saying you can't have rules and structure in your home.  I'm saying if unquestioning obedience and submission to authority is what you require of your children, a child with a trauma history is not a good idea for you.  Quite frankly, I think it's a terrible idea with any kid, but with a traumatized kid, it is a disaster.

You can't punish kids into forming healthy attachments.  You can't use the rod to make them trust you.  You certainly can't regularly lock them in a room all alone with no toys or books for hours on end because you think they are possessed by demons and expect that they will get better.  That makes you a child abuser, not a parent, and they shouldn't let you adopt a hamster much less a child.

6) You're going to treat your adopted kids like second class citizens in their own home

Your new kids will be able to tell if you treat your bio kids' health, safety, and happiness as more important than your adopted kids' health, safety, and happiness.  Kids aren't stupid.  How good do you think that is for attachment?

7) You have a savior complex.

It is noble to want to help a child who needs a family.  It is horrible to place obligations on a child to be grateful to you for "saving" them, or to teach a kid that their home country is a horrible place you saved them from, or that their family of origin was terrible.  It's wrong to adopt because your church is putting pressure on you to do so or because you want to look like a saint or a martyr.  It's gross and harms the kids.


Families in crisis need more resources.  Particularly in international adoption, once that adoption is finalized, sometimes parents have nowhere to turn for help.  Mr. Harris claims DHS threatened them and refused to help them when they asked for assistance, and that the head of DHS knew about the rehoming,  If true, that is a real problem.  But in in addition to providing resources for these families, more care needs to be taken pre-placement to ensure that the fit for the child is a good one.

The Harrisses abused these girls and then turned them over to a monster.  They should experience consequences for that.  But they also should never have been allowed to take those girls home in the first place.

This SAE thing . . . I can't even

I'm sure all of you, rock-dwellers aside, have heard about the SAE racism scandal at the University of Oklahoma.  The school seems to be taking things seriously, expelling both the fraternity and some of the ringleaders.  Now one of the kids' parents have issued a statement which reads like one part apology, one part denial, and forty-six parts white privilege.

Now, I can kind of understand where these parents are coming from.  They don't want everyone to think their kid is a monster. They probably think they didn't raise their kid to be racist.  White people seem to think that unless you're a card carrying Klan member, you can't be a racist.  We think that if we don't consciously think or say, "I think white people are better than everyone else, and I hate Black people super much," then we're not racist.  We don't acknowledge that racism is instead a system of oppression that affects all of us.

I don't think this young man's parents sat him down when he was a kid and said, "Son, I want you to hate Black people."  That isn't how you wind up with kids who would sing that song, not most of the time.  Hey, maybe they never even used the n-word at the dinner table.  But there are plenty of ways white parents pass down racism to their kids without even noticing.  I'm going to focus on anti-Black racism for the moment, since that is the case with the SAE issue.

A (very) partial list of ways you can teach your kids to think of Black people as "less than"

1) When an unarmed Black kid gets shot by the cops, calling him a "thug" who had it coming instead of acknowledging that Black kids are more likely than white kids to get shot for the same behavior.
2) When an unarmed Black kid gets shot by the cops, posting "police lives matter" memes, as if cop killers routinely walk free in our country and we really need to be reminded that their lives matter.
3) Bringing up "Black-on-Black crime" every time someone tries to talk about police brutality, as if the one cancels out the other, or as it Black people don't care about that, too.
4) Using the terms "race baiter" or "playing the race card" when a person of color tries to talk about their lived experience.
5) Laughing at cartoons of the President picking cotton and eating watermelon.

"But Anne Margaret," you say, "I would never say any or do any of those things!  Surely my child cannot grow up to think singing a song about lynching is funny."  Well, buckle in for some "racism lite."

Some more ways you can leave your kids racially ignorant in ways that will eventually cause them to hurt other people

1) Refusing to talk about race with your kids because you think that somehow this will cause your kids to grow up to be "colorblind" or simply because you don't ever think about it much, because, hey, you don't have to think about race.  After all, you're white.  Newsflash: we all see color, assuming our eyes work correctly.
2) Not acknowledging that racism still exists and discussing it with your kids (in age appropriate fashion) when examples arise.
3) Whispering about race like it's dirty: "You, know, Kenny, in accounting . . . [whispers] he's Black."
4) Refusing to talk about the ugly parts of American History that have shaped our country into what it is today. (I'm looking at you, Oklahoma.)
5) Pretending we live in a "post-racial America" when our culture sends constant messages that white is better.
6) Not ever interacting with people who are different from you.


I  know it is hard to talk about racism.  Do you think I enjoy explaining to my Black child that people who looked like me used to own people who looked like him and do horrible things to them?  Do you think I like teaching my kid to never wear his hood up and to always keep his hands where the police can see them?  Do you think I like talking about Black people being denied the right to vote?  Do you think I want to talk to him about what to do when someone does or says something racist to him?  I do it because I have to in order to try to keep him safe, mostly from white people whose parents couldn't be bothered to teach them properly.

Black people have to do this shit with their kids every day since forever.  It's time for white people to step up with theirs. Read a damn book, broaden your horizons, face reality, and talk to your kids on a regular basis about these things. 

Those SAE parents wanted to tell everyone that in spite of his mistakes, their son has a good heart.  You know who else always says that?  The mothers of those unarmed Black boys shot dead in the street by the police.  Then tons of people make fun of them for being "ghetto" and call their dead babies "thugs." 

And that is how you get college kids who think singing a song about murdering a Black man to prevent him from joining a club is funny.

Five Life Lessons From Disneyland, In No Particular Order

We recently made our first family trip to Disneyland. It was, in the words of our five-year-old, "totally epic." I had a lot of time to mull things over while standing in line for tickets, standing in line for rides, standing in line to meet characters, standing in line to avoid standing in later lines, standing in line to eat, standing in line to pee, standing in lines for a bus to another line, etc. Here is a summary of my musings, and I won't even make you stand in line to read them.

1) Don't force your kids to do things they aren't ready for.

This applies to many areas of life, but Disneyland makes it uncomfortably obvious in the weeping, screaming faces of children mid-meltdown. There is no point in bringing a kid younger than five to Disneyland. You will pay a lot of money, and everyone will suffer. Between the skeletons freaking everywhere and the overpriced toys around every corner, you are well and truly screwed if your kid is not old enough to have some degree of control over his feelings.

This lesson applies to many areas of life. Perhaps a 3-year-old doesn't need tutoring or to be playing three sports, for example. Perhaps it's okay that my kid needs a nightlight, hasn't yet read War and Peace, and still wakes up with a wet pull-up in the morning. I'm pretty sure that by the time he leaves for college, he will possess both literacy and bladder control.

2) Churros are yummy.

Enough said.

3) A place that is fun can still be casually racist.

Tiana. Iridessa. The Black baby dolls singing "It's a Small World." There, I've listed all the Black characters I saw at Disneyland who aren't shooting poison arrows or wearing hats made of bananas -- and only the singing babies had curly hair.

Does this statement mean that I think everyone who works at Disney is a racist, and you can't go there ever again, and if you have fun there you're a terrible human being, and I don't want to be your friend anymore, and we should feel guilty for being born white? No.

Does this mean that I think white supremacy and white privilege are pervasive in our culture and I saw that in stark relief at Disneyland? Yes. Does it mean that it makes me sad that my Black/Indian kid sees very few people there who look like him? Yes. Do I think white people need to be more aware of and self-aware about these kinds of issues and be a part of fighting the good fight? Yes. 

4) Personal interaction makes a bigger impression than dazzling technology.

You know what my kid loved best at Disneyland? It wasn't the amazing rides, though Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters was a big hit. It was meeting and conversing with Captain America and getting to fight Darth Vader in the Jedi Training Academy. He loved interacting with the characters and staff and playing pretend with the other kids on Pirate Island and in Toon Town. He loved telling his tales of adventure to anyone in earshot back at the hotel. He loved spending time with his parents and his birthmother and sharing his excitement with us. The joy was in the interaction and the relationships.

Kids don't need an expensive trip or pricey gadgets to make happy memories. They just need us and an adventure of their own making.

5) Good things come to those who wait.

We did a lot of waiting in line, as I may have mentioned earlier. My kiddo was a trooper. After every ride, I asked him if the wait was worth it. Every time, he said that it was. We never knew for sure while we were doing the waiting of course. We had our moments of doubt. Maybe Nemo will stay lost, we thought. Maybe all the animatronic children singing "It's a Small World" will come to life and kill us all in their first step to world domination. Maybe I'll barf on Star Tours. Okay, that last one is a bad example since it almost actually happened. The point is that in the end, generally, our perseverance was rewarded.

Good things come after a time of waiting. Good things can even come during a time of waiting.

This is a lesson we hear often in the church: look at Advent and Lent. But sometimes in our daily lives, we want everything to come so quickly.

This is a lesson I often struggle to remember as we wait (over 2 years so far this time around) to see if anyone out there will choose us to raise her child. It is a lesson I have to repeat to myself as I struggle to make progress writing my stories and getting them published in my very limited free time. It is a lesson I often forget when I get impatient with my health, when Lupus seems to be winning and my treatments seem to struggle to make any headway.

When I get impatient, I need to remember that when I look back at periods of my life spent waiting, those aren't bad memories. The journey still contained joy and growth and fun. I also need to remember that every time I've been seemingly stuck in an endless line, that every time the days have crawled by with little to show for them, when I got to the front of the line, the ride was still worth it: better, even, than Astro Blasters.