Cheerleader

May I talk about something awkward? (What? You can't stop me. Great! Thanks!)

Our kids bathe together. No, this is not about touching and poking and asking and discussing and giggling, although, believe me, all of that goes on and we have discussed, in great, exhaustive detail, which parts of our bodies are just for us to touch and not our sister or our brother, right now, let go, thank you very much. I think they are still young enough to bathe together and I'm going with that although I'm happy to discuss the age of bathroom separation and the wherefores and whys.

This is about taking it one step further, introducing the subject of who (NO ONE) and when (NEVER) it is appropriate for someone outside of our family to touch.

Our kids bathe together and I hate bath days. (So much so that I would be absolutely humiliated to confess how infrequently they occur. Suffice to say that dunking in a chlorinated swimming pool and rinsing in a public shower totally counts as a bath in my world). But, I figured, they're all trapped in there, naked and captive, and so, what the hell, let's start talking about inappropriate se.xual touching. With my suddenly very small looking, innocent, open, babies.

Gulp.

More and more, I've been feeling the need to do it. Full day kindergarten stares me in the face, just four months away. Just four months until two of my children spend six hours, a large portion of their day, in an environment, which, while safe, has some unknowns. I can't know every teacher, every staff member, every janitor, every parent, every visitor, at such a big school.

I have no concerns about the school or anyone else in our lives, but there in a nutshell, is the problem. When children are se.xu.ally mol.ested, it is usually, often, a HUGE percentage of the time, by someone unexpected. Someone trusted. Someone they trust and their parent trusts.

So. Momma. Head. Sand. Out.

I took a big breath as I sat on the tiny, uncomfortable, hexagon tiles of our bathroom floor beside our eighty-year-old white porcelain tub with baby Nate clutching the ledge and babbling excitedly at his slippery, soapy siblings. Their three innocent faces looked back at me over the edge.

"Where are your private parts?" I asked.

They identified. We discussed. This is old news in our world. I'll assume you don't need a refresher.

"Who can touch your pen.is or va.gina?"

"Me!! Me!! Me!!" So far so good, we've covered all of this before.

"Anyone else?" New territory.

"Momma?" Gee asked.

"Only if she's helping you wash or wipe." (And for the love of all that is holy, ANY TIME you want to take these tasks on yourselves, PLEASE DO. I would gladly relinquish my quintuple ass wiping duties ((I count the dog because picking up poop is worse than ass wiping.)) at any time. Unfortunately, currently, the amount of ass grunge residue (AGR) left when I allow solo wiping without backup is lamentable and also, pungent.)

"Any one else?"

Blank looks.

"Can anyone else touch your private parts, your pe.nis or your va.gina?" I shook my head side to side as I asked, by way of clue.

"No."

"Right! No one! Only you. What about Miss E?" I ask. Miss E is one of my closest friends. Tricky.

"No?"

"Right!"

"What about Coach S?"

"No!!" They all screamed. The laughter started too. This was fun.

"Teacher Glinda?"

"NOOOO!!!!" They were beside themselves with glee at this new interactive game.

"What about Grandma?"

"NOOOOO!!!!" Uproarious laughter ensued. They took over, thinking up people on their own and yelling no! no! no! across the bathtub at each other.

I brought it back to me. Surprisingly, I'm not all that worried about Clifford the Big Red Dog molesting my children. Nor Dora. Nor the Kratt Brothers.

We practiced what to yell if someone tried to touch, or asked to touch, or talked about touching.

NO! THANKYOU!! I WANT MY MOMMA!!

And just like that it was a cheer. A hilariously funny cheer.

Ess: What about Haley's Poppa?
Cue and Gee: NO!
Ess: What do we say?
Cue and Gee: NOTHANKYOUIWANTMYMOMMA!!!!

Their favorite part of bath time for weeks now, bar none.

Suddenly, weeks into this, I'm unsure. It's not supposed to be funny, right? Dammit, Stacey, it's not funny; it's not a game. I can't even get my anti-sex.ual mo.les.tation cheer right.

I watch them laugh and laugh. Uncle J? NO! Aunt D? NO! Rachel's Daddy? NO! What do we say? NO THANK YOU, I WANT MY MOMMA!

And then I think, why not? Maybe it should be funny. I want them to laugh in the face of any asshole adult who ever suggests that they be touched and keep quiet or feel ashamed. Shame is a powerful emotion and it is a mol.ester's strongest ally. Why not banish it with laughter? I hope my bold, brave children will laugh at the very idea that they would need to do such a thing because an adult asked them to do it. I hope they're learning that the only person who should feel ashamed is the adult that suggests such a thing. Any adult, any person, no matter how well they know them. I hope they yell NO THANK YOU I WANT MY MOMMA at the top of their lungs over and over while the criminal slinks away. Quickly. To keep me from killing them.

So yeah. We're learning an anti se.x.ual mol.esta.tion cheer. This is all new to me. It's a tough subject. How did you introduce it? How do you talk to your young kids about their bodies and who can touch them? How do you convey to them that their bodies are theirs to control no matter who asked them or suggests otherwise? Do you think it's a mistake to let them find this funny? Why? It takes a village. I'd love your thoughts.

Practice makes perfect

The first thing is the wind. The lake is choppy and white capped. The pines sway in a menacing dance. The elegant row of flowering trees along the north side of the parking lot contort painfully, a row of brides with their veils blown over their heads.

The second thing is the sun. Light so intense and rich and bright that the world is a slide under a microscope. I can see each petal on the flowering trees twenty feet away. Each blade of grass has its own shadow. There are a million greens. Too many shades for Ralph Lauren to name. Evergreen. Nantucket green. Hillside. Sun dappled pine. Shadow green. Grass green. New bud green. The sun emits energy with little warmth unless you can hide from the answering wind.

I do. I hide in the van and watch Matt disappear up the hill and into the trees, the baby on his back. Three kids stretch out behind him and in front of him. The dog, on a red leash, lopes along at his feet. I can't hear them now, over the wind, but I squint into the glare and imagine.

"A rock!" That is Quinn, our little collector, bent over in raptures of discovery.

"This is where we saw a snake when I was three." Garrett, one finger raised, as careful and precise as four-year-olds come.

"I'm the leader! Can't catch me." Saige, looser, fiercer, always a competitor, always in a race of her own making.

I don't feel well. My throat hurts and my head pounds and my nose drips and so I have stolen this moment. I helped with preparations and packing and I rode out here, across the border into tall pine country, nursing a chai and doling out snacks, on the promise that I could stay in the van, sheltered and warm, and try to bake the nastiness from my head. Inside the van, it is sleepy-warm and muffled-wind quiet. I revel in the chance to watch my husband and my children hike up the side of the hump of land jutting out into Lake Coeur D'Alene and disappear into the tall wind blown pines while I practice.

I practice the capture of a moment in time on paper. I practice letting them walk away. I practice who I am, settle my heart against what is difficult in my life and resolve to do better. I practice acknowledging that every day I do some things really well.

I practice caring and not caring in equal measure. I care and I want no one to be hurt because I am careless. I don't care in that I won't take another's perceptions or misconceptions onto me and make them who I am.

I practice free flow writing. Can you tell? I long for and dread both that moment when they burst from the trees. First tiny under the needled giants, than larger. Running. Their voices emerging from the wind.

"I'm hungry! I'm thirsty! I fell. We saw a hawk. We hunted bears. Hampton ate a dead frog."

Beautiful. Difficult. Time-consuming. Joyful. Loved. Loving. Energetic. Needy. Children.

"How do they have the time?" Matt asked me in the parking lot of Starbucks this morning before we merge onto the highway. "Look at them all." The coffee shop was full. Jammed to the gills with people sipping, talking , reading, thinking.

"How do they have a whole Saturday morning? Where are their four kids and a dog?"

We lived like that once upon a time. On the ocean in a humid apartment, we sipped coffee and wasted five years worth of Saturday mornings. We had no idea what we had, except in retrospect. Lucky people.

Here they are, the little parade that is my life. Saige runs under the bride trees, still, always, in the lead. Garrett, skinny and vulnerable, his black hood up around his round, open face. Quinn, bare-headed, bold, he is not one troubled by the elements. Nate rides on Matt's back, the most content baby, a slight pucker on his forehead the only indication of worry, his cheeks chapped red by the wind. The black and white dog stays by Matt's side, a hopeful eye on his pocket.

They reach the side of the van and I open the door to a rush of wind and voices. Ruffling my hair, ruffling my heart.

Every day is the real thing. There isn't any practice.

Conclusions to things I've mentioned and I'm sure you're not up nights worrying about

I can't keep up. I keep trying to write nice, tidy, essayish blog posts that circle back to a larger theme or examine an interesting truth about motherhood, or life, or existence on this ball of happenstance in space, or just have a freaking point already.

Nada.

Today, I thought, huh, maybe I could just tell you how a few issues have resolved lately. All chatty like. Hi. Hey. How's it going? This is hard because you can't chatty back to me. Until the comments, we can chatty there.

I loved your comments on that last post. April's comment said it all:
"I am more than a stereotypical, harried mother of four barking at a Great Dane puppy in a parking lot." ...we all are.

So true. Maybe we can't shout it out in parking lots, but we are all more than we seem.

The great kindergarten/preschool/stick a fork in me I'm done thinking about school next year dilemma. Thank you for talking me through that one. Whew! Earths spinning off of axis. Planets crashing together. What oh what on earth to do about school for almost five-year-olds?!

They are going to all-day, five-day-a-week Kindergarten at a private school run by a large, local Presbyterian church. Not the one paving our back yard. They are Lutheran. Not that it matters except that clearly the Lutherans in border of Idaho, Washington have been infiltrated by demons. Demons with special zoning privileges and large paving machines. Watch out. They are coming to your neighborhood next.

((I have nothing against Lutherans, truly, so long as they are not paving my back yard and ruining my life because OHMIGOD, my HOUSE, my first baby, that we restored and put all our money into and loved and nursed and coddled back to health and code and stability and stuff. Leave it alone!! Take your property-value-degrading parking lot elsewhere. Seriously. What would Jesus do? Would he do this?? WOULD HE??? I'm pretty sure Jesus would not drive a car, hence, eliminating the need for parking lots of any sort.))

Kindergarten. I have all kinds of issues that I'm still sweating about in the middle of the night. Like, holy shit, (hahaha) I'm not Christian and I'm not on board with that whole "accept Jesus or go to hell" thing and so, nail biting, angst, conundrum.

Matt: It is ONE year. I'm am supremely confident in your abilities to corrupt them and keep them on the straight and narrow path to hell despite the best efforts of the lovely Kindergarten teachers to try and show them a better way.

Also, all day? Really? My BABIEEEEESSSSSS. Gnash teeth. Hair pulling, etc., etc. Shouldn't I want to spend more time with them? They are so whiny. But, school is for the rest of their lives, they spend less and less time with me from here. They are so whiny. They like to paint. It's endless, my ability to create and perpetuate worry.

Matt: It's six hours a day. I'm supremely confident in your abilities to spend time yelling at them and wishing it were ten hours a day for the other eighteen hours a day.

They are registered. I'm mostly okay with it. I'm thrilled, actually, but get this one thing that still cracks me up. I had to go and stand in line at 5:00 a.m. in the morning to get my kids into Kindergarten. You just can't make this shit up, can you? It was absolutely ridiculous, and kind of fun because there were twenty or thirty other parents there too, standing in line, feeling ridiculous and sheepish and like FOR THE LOVE OF AN ACCEPTING AND NON PICKY GOD WHO DOES NOT GET UPTIGHT AND ANGSTY ABOUT WHETHER YOU ARE ON BOARD WITH THE JESUS THING OR NOT, it took forever to decide about this friggin program and I am sure as hell not going to have to pick another one over whether we got here at 5:00 or 8:00 a.m.

Truthfully, I enjoyed it. I enjoy anything that I can do by myself and that involves a big chai tea latte. There is a sad, sad comment on my life in there somewhere, but I don't care because I got to stand in line and talk to other adults for THREE hours while I sipped chai. HA!

My uterus/period issues. I'm just crazy. My thyroid is fine. My hormones are fine (aka, it's not menopause, you nut). I am now relaxed on this issue. Zen even. Temporarily.

The Walk to 160 pounds. I absolutely suck at series. Hampton Noodle has grown just a tad in the last few weeks. He weighs 36 pounds. That's a 25 lb weight gain in seven weeks. Yikes. At this rate, I estimate that he will be able to reach my counters and tabletops with his nose in about seven more weeks.



Busted.

And finally, for our last trick. Mobility with a huge side of into everything. Can I sign him up for all day kindergarten?

A revelation of sorts

Something occurred to me today, around 3:55 p.m.

This is Matt's week "on," which means that he works seven days in a row, ten hour shifts, and so I was alone with all four kids in the parking lot unloading for Gee's baseball class. Cue screamed hysterically, the catastrophe du minute being a dropped rock. A rock. That he dropped and could not reach. I'm surprised it didn't make the evening news.

OHNO. Ohno. OHNO!!! MY ROCK!!! MY ROoooooOOOOOOCK!!!

Just a...

MYROCKMYROOOOOOOOOCK!!! CAN'TREACHIT!!!! MYROOOOOCKMYROOOOOCKMYROCKMY...

Just a...Cue can you give me a minute. Okay. All right. We'll get it.

Oh hell. As I spoke words of soothing rock comfort, I body blocked the fourteen-week-old Great Dane puppy that was trying to evade my brilliant dodge and feint moves to leap from the minivan and cavort, idiotically, about the parking lot, while unbuckling Babynater with one hand and pulling him onto my hip from his car seat.

My other hand held a full, steaming chai tea latte. The chai hand yields to no baby extraction, puppy escape or rock dropping crisis.

Unless Brad Pitt wants a handshake or someone is mortally injured, that hand is busy.

I finally extracted the baby, settled him on my hip and was directing Ess and Gee around the van from the other side when Hampton lunged for a crack between my other hip and the van door frame. I checked him against the frame because I am wicked smooth and have lightening fast reflexes. Ahem. When I checked him, while holding the baby and not spilling my tea, he crouched down and then lunged up, barking loudly in my face.

That's right, a teenage GREAT DANE PUPPY gave me lip about when he could, or could not, exit the car. So, I did what any good Great Dane mother would do. I barked back in his face, only LOUDER.

(Stay tuned with the anyfamily into the teen years. I guarantee my fantastically mature, rational parenting skills will continue.)

Hampton Noodle scampered to the rear seat of the minivan and cowered there, which I considered a stunning victory over...something. Cue emerged from the minivan, clutching his beloved, irreplaceable rock and I shut the door and turned around to find more than a few people scattered about the parking lot watching me and that was when it hit me.

My life is absolutely ridiculous.

For a moment, I wanted to shout at no one in particular: I HAVE A LAW DEGREE. I'VE ARGUED BEFORE A FEDERAL CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS. I'VE BEEN TO HAITI AS A VOLUNTEER. I WISH I'D GONE INTO PSYCHOLOGY AND I COULD HELP ADOPTIVE FAMILIES WITH ATTACHMENT ISSUES. I LOVE TO READ. I JUST FINISHED Let the Great World Spin. IT'S EXCELLENT. I THINK REALLY HARD ABOUT THINGS. I TRY TO BE COMPASSIONATE. I WROTE A ROMANCE NOVEL. A WHOLE DANG NOVEL AND I'M TRYING TO WRITE A SECOND DRAFT, THREE PAINFUL PAGES AT A TIME, AT NIGHT, IN THE HOUR A DAY THAT I HAVE TO MYSELF.

I am more than a stereotypical, harried mother of four barking at a Great Dane puppy in a parking lot.

Driving home, on the first warm evening of the year, with our windows down and the soft light of dusk sitting gently on our faces, the dog sat between the front seats with his head in my lap and the kids belted "Joy to the World," to anyone who would listen at every stoplight. We looked ridiculous and I turned it up and sang with them.

I'll take ridiculous. I've been other things. I've been too stressed about a legal argument to notice the soft light of dusk. I've been so overwhelmed, so mired in pain and confusion and fear as a mother that it snuffed out all the laughter and silliness. That there was no room for singing.

Thank god for ridiculous. Give me average, silly, mundane, ridiculous days, one after another in endless succession until I croak at ninety-three in some ridiculous, painless way. I'll make an ass of myself a thousand times and bark at impossible dogs and be mocked by endless numbers of observers if we can just stay here. Right here. In this soft light on the first warm day of the year, singing Jeremiah was a bullfrog at the top of our lungs.

Ridiculously happy.


((The amazing Countess Mo sent me that t-shirt. It's my new favorite. The package also contained a perfect sign for our mud room from Andrea of The Sweet Life, picture in a few months when I actually procure a hammer and nails. Thank you!! You made my month.))

Voices of the Year

BlogHer. Maybe you've heard of it? Little event in NYC in August?

I'm going again this year and I'm just as excited and nervous as I was last year.

Are you going? Because I'd love to add you to my nifty sidebar list of people who are going and I know and so I promise you, self, you do not have to hyperventilate walking into various events alone.

Or with Nate. He's coming too this year. Not so much on the whole party girl thing for me.

I also want to point out a "little" thing at BlogHer called Voices of the Year. At the closing keynote of the first night of the conference, the BlogHer organizers have 20 or so selected bloggers read one of their posts. It is an absolutely astonishing and moving experience to hear these authors read their own words.

The nominations for posts come from the BlogHer community and if you are going you probably know all of this, but I'm going to tell you one more time anyway. Nominate someone. Close your eyes and think about a post that sticks out in your mind from the last year, that moved you or made you laugh or taught you something, and then go here and nominate it for Voices of the Year. (You have to be logged in to the blogHer website.)

Not only do you get to tell someone that their writing rocked your world, you also might just be instrumental in torturing them with heart palpitations of terror for the entire first day of the conference before they have to stand in front of 1000 or so people and read their work. It's fun. I did it to Issa last year, so you can ask her ;-)

If you're going (which you should absolutely be commenting to tell me because I like lists and because the whole weekend flies by and I need to know so that I can focus on spotting you), do you have a post that you wrote in the last year that you love? That stands out in your mind? Email it to me. It's hard to remember everything that I read and all that I loved over a year's time. I might have missed it. You are not too small. New voices are the whole point.

The deadline for submissions is April 15. One more day. Don't miss it!

Tight Huggins

Some days, I worry that I haven't hugged my children enough. Or listened to them enough. Or maybe even looked at them enough. I'm just managing the chaos, keeping things moving. In the midst of the organizing, herding and directing, I forget to enjoy. To stop. To notice all that is around me now.

At 2:00 a.m., when quiet and peace settle, I realize how the day passed me by, how I spent so many hours swimming my hardest that I forgot that if you float on your back, the water carries you. I worry that they'll remember a mom who barked orders, not a mom who gave hugs.

The day started with menopause. Invented, hysterical menopause, but still.

I had an appointment scheduled to see my midwife and Matt wanted to take Ess and Gee and Cue swimming. That combination of goals befuddled the entire morning and let me spare you the packing and the potty breaks and the reorganizing and the moving of car seats and the doling out of kids and redoling and checking and switching of keys.

I made the appointment because I haven't gotten my period back after weaning Nate. It's now been eight weeks. And yes, that's probably fine and no, I'm not pregnant, and I know, it can take time, but in case you haven't noticed I have a raging, undiagnosed case of OCD and also I like things to happen when I expect them to happen. I like schedules. I like predictability. My period returned within a week of weaning both Gee and Cue and so why the untenable variation, body?

Unacceptable. Clearly sudden onset menopause. Or horrific raging infection from surgery nine months ago. Or cancer. I know that isn't funny, I was not laughing.

My routines vary for no man, nor child, nor uterus.

My irritation with the situation had grown exponentially over the past few weeks and had not been eased by the slightly sarcastic reception my "problem" received from Matt. To name one. Or the nurse at my midwife's practice.

Both of whom wanted to know if I was pregnant and when I said, um, magic pee stick says, "NO!" they were all, well, phew, wait, what's the problem again?

Schedules. Expectations. Menopause. Cancer. Stick with me here.

Matt took Ess and Gee and Cue swimming, which involved a lot of car switching and running about looking for things and then he left and I was late and I still hadn't fed the baby or changed out of my flannel pajamas. By the time I pulled myself together and got Nate and I loaded and flew down the hill and parked the car and realized that I was at an appointment to have my uterus examined with a baby and no stroller, it was far too late to do anything about the situation. Which is how I ended up flying into the office with Nate on my hip and way too many small, losable things in my hand. Wallet. Bottle. Keys. Cell phone. Really?

Sara was delightful and very non-judgmental about my crisis of period. She didn't even mention the nine-month-old in my lap or the fact that most people would probably just be glad not to be dealing with it yet. It's not menopause, she told me. Which was a relief, because I'm not ready. It's not cancer either. It's most likely your weight and we'll also check your thyroid.

So, yay! Here's your lab sheet for the blood test. So, not yay! Then, I got to have my blood drawn with Nate sitting on my lap, while trying to keep him from slobbering into and generally ruining my keys, wallet, or cell phone. Blood lady gave me a strained smile and said, "my, you have your hands full today don't you."

Well shit. I know, okay, I know. I'm not blaming this clusternugget of disorganization on my husband or anything but it is ALL HIS FAULT because he rushed me and he had all these stupid swimming needs. Like swim suits. And swim diapers. And I forgot to switch the stroller to my car. I CAN NOT THINK OF EVERYTHING. MY UTERUS HAS BEEN IRRITATING ME WITH ITS STUBBORN REFUSAL TO BLEED FOR WEEKS.

Which is Alanis Morisette ironic, right? Considering that nine months ago it made a concerted effort at bleeding me completely out of blood.

Do you have any idea how annoying Google is when you type in "sudden onset menopause?" Google is all, that doesn't exist. And you are all, I'm living it asshole, don't tell me how to feel. God. Is anyone else hot? That's before I even Googled "no periods" and "cancer." Let me just save you the trouble of ever Googling something like that. Every single thing that your body does is a symptom of something horrific and Google has pictures. The end.

All of this is neurosis under the bridge because it appears that the rational, non-OCD, anti-bizarre-hypochondriac explanation is that I need to gain five pounds because Nate sucked every once of fat my body ever made right out of me. I know. Poor me. Also, duh. One of the reasons I weaned him was that I could not stop losing weight no matter how much I ate.

I juggled my baby and my various bits of drooled on modern technology to the car. The rest of the day blurred into naps and snacks and then Matt again took all of the big kids on the city bus downtown. They love the city bus with all of the obsessive compulsive fixatedness that their insane mother could instill in them. I was supposed to pick them up downtown at 4:30 so that we could go to a restaurant for dinner.

We just like to torture ourselves, okay?

I made the brilliant decision to take the dog with me for the drive downtown. He hadn't been out in a while and he looked lonely. At the first stoplight, he stole a dirty tissue off of the console cup holder. At the second stop light, I tried to take it from him and he nipped my hand. My hand proceeded to bleed profusely where he caught it with his razor sharp little baby teeth.

Are you following this? Now I am bleeding profusely and NOT EVEN from the right place.

We ditched the dog at home and went to the restaurant. The kids were delightful, really, but it's incomprehensible how many wants/needs four kids can have in an hour at a restaurant. Every time we take them out to eat, Matt and I look at each other across the table as he feeds two and I feed two and six people talk at once and the baby throws my keys on the floor and we try not to choke ourselves to death stuffing bites in our mouths in between feeding kids and keeping things from spilling or dropping or banging and "little voices, use our little voices, please."

At home, we hustled them upstairs and I took a minute to appreciate that the kitchen and dining room were still clean. Oh yeah. That's why I love restaurants. After powering through bedtime and songs and books and kisses, I sank gratefully into a couch corner to Google thyroid - don't do that - and went to bed.

Which brings me back to 2:00 a.m., layng awake, wondering if I even hugged my kids all day? I did that mom thing we all do, tip toeing into their sleep-stale room, stealing kisses, smoothing blankets, taking a moment to appreciate their little faces, their curved bodies, their perfection. Promising, silently, that tomorrow, I'll focus, we'll move less and cuddle more.

Tomorrow will start with "tight huggins."

And it did.

Differences

This is an essay I wrote for an adoption website, which is why it has a slightly different tone than my usual writing. It's gently arguing a point and it assumes that readers don't know my family at all, unlike my friends who read my thoughts on this blog and are so consistently gentle with my heart. It is, I think, my response to comments that I have read countless times around the internet when adoption disruption comes up. The comments that say: How dare she. She WOULD NEVER "give away" a biological child.

I'm posting it here because I get emails from frightened parents struggling to attach with a child. I want them to hear, over and over, that they are not alone. That if they make it, and most of them do, they have my awe, and if they don't, I know their grief.

**************************************

My daughter threw a four-hour temper tantrum the other night from midnight until four a.m.

She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t frightened. She doesn’t suffer from night terrors. She’s generally a sound sleeper. She was angry that we put her to bed fifteen minutes early (a common consequence in our house) and she knew exactly when her displeasure would make the most impact.

I don’t say that casually. I try hard not to attribute adult motives to my children’s behavior, but I know my daughter and she knew, at a four-year-old level, what she was doing. It was a long night and I worked hard, very hard, harder than I can ever convey in black and white type, to control my irritation, to react to her from love, but with consistency and firmness.

Over three hours, I gave her several options for letting out her emotions. I gave her three warnings about disrupting the sleep of her siblings and then I removed her to a safe room on a different floor of the house with a blanket and pillow where, robbed of control over our family’s sleep, she cried for a while and fell asleep.

My boys - I have three boys - My boys do not behave this way. So what, right? Your daughter is hard? She has some emotional issues? Sounds like you deal with it all right. Thanks. I try.

What if I told you that my adopted daughter threw a four-hour tantrum? My biological boys do not behave this way. Gasp. Whisper. Awful. How could she? How could she compare them that way?

Every once in while, a conversation about my family, my amazing family with birth and adopted children about the same age, will tiptoe around the question that I think about a lot. I will see it on the tip of someone’s tongue and see them swallow it. It might be the most taboo question of adoption, certainly of families with birth and adopted children.

Is it different?

You know what? Brace yourselves because this generally isn’t allowed in polite, “PC” discussions of adoption: It is different. Parenting my adopted child is different than parenting my biological children. It is more difficult. It is more delicate. It is less intuitive. It is sometimes a struggle. Bonding with my fourteen-month-old adopted daughter was very different than bonding with my infant sons. It was much slower; it involved some difficult emotions; it required deliberate choices. Three years later, though we are definitely attached, the process is still on-going in some ways.

But, that’s not the whole answer. The problem is that the comparison “adopted to biological” is useless because it isn’t my daughter’s “adoptedness” that makes her harder for me to parent. Not at all.

The word “adopted” is merely used as an incorrect, cover-all substitute for issues that often, although not exclusively, occur in adoptive families. If I unpack the word “adopted” and call the differences by their correct names, I find that adoption is not where the difference lays.

Parenting a child with a history of institutionalization is different and often more difficult than parenting a child that has never experienced an orphanage. Parenting a child with a history of trauma is different in every way than parenting a child with no trauma history. Bonding with a child who first met you at fourteen-months-old is different from bonding with a child from conception.

There’s nothing wrong with different. Parenting a child with significant medical issues is different than parenting a child without such issues. Parenting a shy child is different from parenting an aggressive child. Parenting a fourth child is different from parenting a first child.

We do, however, need to stop dancing around this question and look the differences square in the face so that adoptive parents are prepared, educated and supported. Because there is one difference that tears families apart. Parenting an unattached child. Attachment, which is a two-way process, child to parent and parent to child, makes all the differences in successful families no matter how they came to be families.

I remember the exact moment that I knew our oldest son shouldn’t stay in our home. He was five years old and he had been home just six months. We were on hour three of a four-hour screaming tantrum. My lip was puffy and bleeding where he had unintentionally smashed his head into my face, wild with fear and rage. He lay beside me, restrained as gently as I could manage to prevent injuries.

My two eighteen-month-old children, my adopted daughter, also home with us six months, and my biological son, hid behind a chair, eyes wide and bewildered. I kept my face blank so that he wouldn’t see my anger, my fear, my dislike, as I stared at my babies crouched down and huddled together. I put out a hand to my younger son and said, “it’s all right, your brother is mad, but we’ll be all right.” I didn’t fool a single person in the room. My barely walking children didn’t believe me. I could see it in their eyes.

In my heart, right at that moment – and it was not our oldest son’s worst moment, not by far – I put them first. I wanted the fear erased from their eyes and I was willing to sacrifice my son’s needs to do it. I put him in his room and shut the door that afternoon. I walked away and played with my babies while he raged and drooled and tore his bed apart and sobbed. I knew it wasn’t what he needed. I knew that the most important thing in the world was for him to bond with parents. For him to feel safe and loved through his rage and fear and I couldn’t give it to him.

For over a week, I survived the days by keeping him separated from my younger children, and also from me, and then I looked my husband in the eye and told him that I was not, in any capacity, meeting this child’s needs. I was not prioritizing him, as a mother would, not even sometimes. I was not the mother that he needed, one devoted completely to his care, his comfort and his bonding.

I could look down the road, five, ten, twenty years and see a boy, a teen, a young man, who felt marginalized and bitter, who didn’t understand the concept of family, who had a certain amount of loathing and disdain for women. I could see, clearly and painfully, the damage my choice could do.

When someone really wants to hurt me, they’ll ask or comment that they don’t understand how my daughter can ever trust me. How she can ever know that she is a part of our family forever after “what we did,” in disrupting our adoption of our oldest son and finding a home where he was prioritized, not managed. What will you do if she is difficult? If she is rageful? If she acts out?

My daughter is difficult. She does act out. She has post-institutionalized and mild attachment disorder behaviors. She is manipulative at times. She throws the occasional four-hour tantrum in the middle of the night. Tantrums that I am able to support her through, with (mostly) patience and consistency. We set calm and careful limits and enforce them with love.

The difference is that we are bonded. She is attached to us and we are attached to her. Her needs are equally important to me as those of my other children. It wasn’t always easy getting there, but it was worth it.

That is the difference that attachment makes. Attached children and parents make it. Parents finding their way through the attachment process need support and understanding. In those instances when significant barriers to the attachment process exist in a home, scathing condemnation of the family for not viewing their adopted child “the same” misses the point. Parenting an unattached child is not the same. Parent and child relationships that don’t attach aren’t necessarily the best choice for anyone involved and that is why, in some cases, adoption is not forever.

How to spot a mother of four

1) She sometimes neglects to wipe the snot off of her kids' noses. What? It's just coming back. That crusty stuff serves as a barrier diversion for further leakage.

2) She fills up her baby's bottle at a public water fountain. Sterilization is overrated. I mean that.

3) She sits on her butt at preschool, watching, as her two-year-old pulls a small basketball hoop over on himself. He's learning about gravity. It's like a science experiment. When the horrified mom closest to him apologizes for not stopping the crash, she shocks her further by saying, without thinking, "not your fault, I watched it happen, I should have gotten off my butt sooner."

4) After being up from 1:00 a.m. until 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning with a feverish two-year-old screaming about pain in his ear, she feeds everyone, puts them in front of a movie and showers before heading to urgent care. Because she's dirty. And ear infections do not constitute a crisis. In fact, anything less than broken bones, copious bleeding or difficulty breathing does not constitute a crisis. She also takes all four of her children to urgent care with her, despite kind offers by friends to keep a few (making her FANTASTICALLY easy to spot at urgent care). WTH, urgent care is the ninth level of hell anyway, what's a few more whiny children.

5) She catches her four-year-old son licking every single piece of mushroom he just sliced for dinner and throws them in the pot anyway because Oh My Holy Hell she is not going back to the store with all four children.

6) If you see her at Starbucks with only her nine-month-old son, you can identify her because hers is the only baby sitting on the floor gnawing on someone else's discarded Starbucks cup.

7) She lets her ear-infected, horrifically snotty two-year-old help put the cheese on the top of the pasta bake. I mean, really, his brother already licked every mushroom and the whole family is exposed to his snot smears all over the house anyway.

8) Her nine-month-old's first solid foods were chocolate chip mint ice cream, rice cereal, bananas, with a spoon from the banana, frosting, frozen blueberries and refried beans. In that order. Her first three children had only one of those things before their first birthdays.

9) She lets aforementioned disgustingly snotty two-year-old play with every single piece of Tupperware in the Tupperware cupboard because how else is she ever going to manage to throw together even the easiest of dinners? And then, after dinner, she puts the leftovers into one of said Tupperware containers without washing it. What's the point? See above re: licking of mushrooms and snotting on cheese.

10) She does not invite people over for dinner. For obvious reasons.

11) If you spied her through her broad front windows having dinner with her children in her dining room on Easter, the seventh day in a row that her husband worked a ten hour shift, you might see a glass of wine at her place. Can you blame her?

12) If you happen to run into her on a rare and much coveted outing on her own, you will know her by the spring in her step, the frantic way she stops every few minutes as if she's forgotten something and then remembers and continues on, and the slightly crusty something, we are hoping not snot, on the shoulder of her shirt. Or in her hair.

13) She might, occasionally, let the new puppy sleep on the baby. Because he's so quiet when he's sleeping. Not anymore. At eleven weeks, the new puppy officially weighs more than Nate.



Dog is freaking HUGE. Thankfully, for my sanity, baby is still little.


14) She's deep down, peace in her soul happy. She laughs a lot. She's too busy to sweat the small stuff. Most days. Unless the small stuff is whining and then she sweats them quite a bit. (Couldn't resist, fourteen is my favorite number.)

Maybe I should have titled this, "confessions of a mother of four." Anyone have a good one? It's quite liberating.