Space to Sleep

I haven’t slept through the night since the baby died. In the last year I’ve gone from up several times in the night with nursing/toddler waking, to a few months of asleep-when-my-head-hits-the-pillow, to periodically awake from pregnancy aches and pains, to just awake. I’ve become a tosser and turner. I have weird semi-realistic dreams. I lay in bed listening to my dog (and sometimes my partner) snore, song lyrics running through my head on endless repeat. Lately, the music has been Wyclef Jean (he’s an adoptive parent of a daughter from Haiti, too).

My brother gave me Wyclef’s CD Ecleftic right before we left Florida. Although the guitar part on 911 is awesome, what I’ve most been into is Wyclef’s version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. My partner knew the song from the first notes of the guitar (we thought he was just sampling Pink Floyd), but he sings all the lyrics:

so you think you can tell
heaven from hell
blue skies from pain
can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail
a smile from a veil
do you think you can tell
did they get you to trade
your heroes for ghosts
hot ashes for trees
hot air for a cool breeze
cold comfort for change
did you exchange
a walk on part in the war
for a lead role in a cage
how I wish, how I wish you were here
we’re just two lost souls
swimming in a fish bowl
year after year
running over the same old ground
what have you found
the same old fears
wish you were here

My insomnia is not helped by two of our kids–the wiggly ones–regularly arriving in our bed around three a.m. In Florida we had a king-sized bed. When everyone had migrated into our bed each morning (we’re usually all in the same bed by six or so) there was enough room for us all to stay put. At home, when child number four (whoever that happens to be) arrives in our very-small-feeling queen-sized bed, even if my partner is already in the shower, I have to get out of the bed–there’s no room for me.

44 Hours in the Car

We just returned from a much needed getaway: a family trip to Florida. This was the first beach trip for us with the kids; my partner and I both road-tripped to Florida with our families when we were children. As you probably guessed from the title of this post, we drove. It was 22+ hours in the car each way, with four kids ages 2, 3, 5, and 6.

The road trip of today is quite different than those I experienced as a child in the 70s and 80s. Most striking is the carseat factor. My brother and I used to set up in the back of our Oldsmobile station wagon. We had our own portable tape player back there. We’d sit and play cards, build with legos, and create fully furnished houses with paper and scissors and glue. We could lay down and read or nap. When we were crabby with each other, we’d climb over the seat and take turns sitting in the front of the car, chatting with whichever parent was driving. Not so today. My two youngest kids are in 5-point restraint carseats, my two oldest in 3-point seatbelts and full-back boosters. They can never sit in the front seat because of the air bags. They are stuck in their same in-car positions, staring at the same view, kicking the backs of the same seats, sharing (or arguing) with the same sibling.

Even with four virtually motionless children (ha!) here’s what made the trip doable:

• Coloring books: a pile of cheap $1 coloring/maze/connect the dot books (some sports and fairy ones, although none that are licensed). These worked for a while, although Gretel and Teri lost their crayon privileges on the way home for writing on many things that were NOT the coloring books.
• Small erasable magnetic writings boards
• Mini Etch-a-Sketchs
• Sticker activity books (I bought a new one for Gretel in Florida because her original one had very thin stickers that kept tearing when she’d try to peel them back.)
• Playmobile people with wheeled accessories (1 skateboarder, 1 biker, 1 motorcycler, and 1 roller-blader)
• Matchbox cars
• Recycled (we already had 2) and redressed dolls (pictured above)
• Magnetic activity boards: The ones I thought were going to be great (building houses and flowers) were terrible because the magnets weren’t very strong and kept slipping to the floor. But one of the hits of the entire trip was a Brown Bear magnet set I purchased for Teri, with magnets to match the illustrations from her favorite book. That bought us hours.
• Portable DVD players, and favorite DVDs from home (Cars, Happy Feet, Mary Poppins, Cheaper by the Dozen) and some new ones from friends (Kiki’s Delivery Service). We borrowed a friend’s old player, and at the last minute my husband bought us another new one ($90), which turned out to be good. We set up the first movie between the front two seats, made sure all the kids could see, and then found out that even with the volume all the way up Jaja and Rico in the third row seats couldn’t hear the movie. So we let them be in charge of their own DVD player with a different movie.
• Lap desks: 1 left over from college and 2 homemade (stiff cardboard, 2 squares cut from an old t-shirt, pillow stuffing, and duct-tape)
• A bag full of books: old favorites, a few library books, and our brand new collection of fairy tales featuring Black characters

The crowning glory of the vacation presents were these floofy little zip-up bags (okay, my girls AND my husband call them purses, sigh) that came with a matching fairy/dancer inside (pink, green, blue). If the store had sold four different colors, I would have purchased one for Rico as well. Instead, I found him this great little finger puppet person the same size as the girls’ dancers. Rico’s person has a mop of spiky blue hair and is playing a tiny electric guitar (he calls it his punk rocker). I found a small drawstring bag we had here at home, sewed a piece of an old woven belt of mine around the bottom, and Rico now had a fancy bag for his guy.

We’re in the not-buying mode around here, especially cheap plastic. But before we left on vacation, I was caving. I had lined up a sitter for the kids so I could go to a doctor’s appointment, and I planned to do a bit of car activity shopping at the same time. I confessed to a couple people I was planning to go on a junk run to Toys-R-Us. I haven’t been there in years. (Can I now just say what a horrible store this is? The lighting, the maze set-up, everything needing batteries, plastic that never ends, boys’ toys in black with guns, girls’ toys in pink with mini-skirts and make-up, AAK!) Anyway, on my 45-minute drive to my appointment, I had second thoughts. I didn’t want to waste money on toys that we’d give away when we arrived home, and I (still) didn’t want to support the companies that make those toys with our money. (Toys-R-Us was basically useless, even if I had gone in wanting to fill my basket with stuff I thought would entertain our kids in the car.)

Here’s the decision I had to make: was I going to buy my kids healthy toys? Or was I going to buy them racially diverse toys? Now, our existing home toy collection is heavy on PoC, more than half (by design, because every time I find something great, I buy it–even if I have to hold it for a year before giving it to the kids. We have this awesome zip-up space shuttle with two astronauts–1 Black and 1 White–that I bought when Jaja was 3 months old, and kept in a box for years). So I went with healthy, and pulled toys from home to balance out my new purchases. Those fairies and the blue-haired rocker in the little bags? All White. But they each had another little doll tucked inside the bag with them; the four dolls I added from our home collection were Black (Gretel had quite a story going about the two ’sisters’ living in her blue-feathered purse/house).

Racial balancing is something I think about every time I purchase an item that has a person in/on it. I skimmed all those sticker books to make sure there was a mix of people in them. I looked through the entire ‘natural’ toy store for something comparable to the fairies in their purses, something that had a little brown face to balance out the three little tan faces I was about to buy. (I just looked up the fairy/purse dolls online to add the photo link above; the company makes the dolls in six different coordinating colors–all six of the dolls are White.) Dolls and toys representing PoC are massively underrepresented in natural material and Waldorf-style toys, which I discovered while trying to buy a natural or organic brown-skinned doll for Jaja when she was an infant. There was nothing. Things have improved a bit in the past six years, but the fact remains that many of the organic toy companies are based in Europe (primarily Germany), and dolls of color in their collections are rare. This dearth of variety is what inspired me to make the kids’ winter-holiday gifts last year, and to start my neglected Etsy store.

Was every minute of the car ride all fun family sing-a-longs, cheerful parents, and four cooperative kids? Absolutely not. There were some hours when the kids slept, several hours of movie watching, and many many hours of activities, eating, fussing, negotiating, and the sometimes hysterically funny stereotypical parental warning, “Keep your hands, feet, and toys to yourself, or . . .” and there’s where it ended, and often when my partner and I would start to laugh. Because what exactly was the passenger seat parent going to do? Driving down I-95, we were just as trapped in our car seats as the kids were.

Seven

The last month has been a difficult culmination of the last two years–all in the quest for a seventh member of our family. We have been through two homestudies, six potential adoptive situations, and now the hardest part: a miscarriage. I had a great post brewing this spring about why we were not renewing our homestudy, why we are abandoning the domestic infant adoption system–and then we found out I was pregnant. My post continued to simmer, now with the added piece of pregnancy and why having a biological child was the way our family was finally expanding. Then came another first for me and for our family: our baby died and was born barely into its second trimester. We were devastated; we are all recovering. Gretel keeps saying, “Mama, I didn’t want our baby to die. I really wanted an alive baby.” And all I can say is, “Me too.”

The thing (just one? you may ask) that caught both me and my partner completely off guard was that this most recent event brought up all the potential adoptive situations of the past two years that didn’t work out. We are not only grieving the death of our baby, we are also regrieving some of the closest–and saddest–adoption situations of the past two years. The hardest are the kids who are now in foster care (instead of with their birthparents or with a family chosen by their birthparents), the children whose parents were unable to get their damaged lives together enough to make positive choices for their kids. I don’t blame those parents, but I am so so sad for their children. Months and years later, I am still sad.

Losing this bio baby, and contemplating the rollercoaster of the past few months, I have (however temporarily) inadvertently achieved a sense of peace about life–a kind of internal peace that usually eludes me. I am at a place where I finally know that if I have my partner and my children, all else is just icing on the cake of my life. I have spent a good part of my adult life theoretically/intellectually believing this to be true while behaving and feeling as though I needed countless issues lined up just so for me to be okay. I want a lot of things for my children, my family, all children. (You know, world peace, socioeconomic justice, interracial unity, not much.) Although I haven’t lost my drive to make the world a better place for everyone to live, I have narrowed down what is most important for me, for my life. I often get lost while trying to take care of everyone else in my immediate family, in my extended family, in the limitless family of mothers and people of color and parentless children everywhere. I lose myself in what I think the world needs–and I totally forget to consider what I need.

The physical and emotional slowdown that losing this baby required helped me reaffirm the essential elements of myself, my life, and my dreams. For me (aside from the health and companionship of my partner and four children) I want only two things; they are separate but related. First of all, I do want a bigger family–two, maybe three more children–no matter what our life looks like, whether we must remain in a virtually monoracial town, are able to move to our dream town, or finally become organic farmers. With this pregnancy, we had moved into the big family mindset: test driving a 12-passenger van, thinking about bedroom configurations and years more of diapers. I was lurking over at Lots of Kids, pleased to find families who feel that four or five children is at the smaller end of family size. At the same time, if our family is in fact complete with these four brilliant, beautiful, wild children–that is okay too. A plan is nice to have, but it doesn’t mean that whatever else happens in spite of the plan won’t work out at least as well as the perfectly executed plan might have. (This would be one of my big revelations–my husband thinks it won’t last. I am such a planner.) Part two of my wish involves moving to a more racially diverse community: for me, for all our kids, for our Black daughters (no surprise here), but suddenly I don’t feel so frantic about it. I know it will happen because my husband and I are both committed to moving. The sooner the better; but if it’s not tomorrow–I can live with that.

Right now I am purposefully entrenching myself in the day-to-day job of being the primary parent to four bright and active children. I am working on our homeschool plan for next year, wrapping up this year’s ’school’ work, and focusing on being in the moment with my silly three year old who tonight at dinner requested a “pink zucchini with a little skirt” (that would be a bikini, as her brother pointed out) and my six year old who said to me this afternoon, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this question for a week: Why do Gretel and Rico get to see their birthparents everyday, and Teri and I don’t?” I’ve got a double fulltime job around here; I have to remember that daily and give myself a bit of a break: for serving mac and cheese for dinner again (what can I say–it’s their favorite) or for letting the ten loads of laundry sit clean but unfolded on the couch. It’s when I start to get on everyone else’s case that I know I’m really in trouble–because what that means is that I’m not satisfied with my own performance.

Being a parent is a hard job–and so is being a kid. If I can cut myself as much slack as I do my five year old (”He’s doing the best he can!” I argue on his behalf at least once a week) then I’ll be okay. I have a quote by Max Ehrmann tucked in the corner of our bathroom mirror. It reads:

Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

Complexity and Fertility

Over the weekend we spent time with a group of families/couples. There was a meeting followed by a meal, although (and I didn’t know this going in) for the duration of the meeting the children and I were sequestered in a finished basement, which was not really set up for little kids. For two long hours, I was down there with all four of my kids along with three other kids and their moms.

Our basement group included a mother and her only child. The mother spoke only Spanish to her child, and her child only spoke Spanish back to her. We speak a little Spanish, and have several friends with Spanish/English bilingual children (in our friends’ families, one parent’s first language is Spanish). I talked to this mom a bit, introduced myself and my kids after we arrived. She volunteered (in English) that Spanish is not her first language, or her bio child’s. That’s pretty much all she ever said to me.

Because this mother and her child would only speak Spanish, they couldn’t/didn’t talk to anyone else (adult or child) who was sharing this very small space. My Spanish is rusty, but I could understand everything this mother and child were saying–but my kids couldn’t. And the other mother and children present didn’t seem to know any Spanish. It was like being back in high school when two of my best friends learned/invented a secret language they called ‘Gibberish’ (think of complicated pig-latin).

Our friends who are raising their kids bilingually speak Spanish and English to their kids, and they translate for my kids after they say something to their kids in Spanish. (And they are happy to converse in English with my kids and with me.) The exclusionary style of parenting, choosing to converse with your child in a language nobody understands when you both also speak a language everybody else present both speaks and understands, was so unbelievably rude. It came off as the we-are-so-important-we-don’t-have-to-consider-anyone-else philosophy of living.

I often struggle to connect with parents who purposefully have just one child. In my experience, these parents are more likely (than the parents of 2+ kids) to act as though the sun rises and sets over their perfect child. I have struggled through parents-of-onlies who allow their child to cheat at games, cut in line, and snub other kids, and other parents who perpetually treat their single growing child as though they are a baby (picture a parent feeding every bite of a meal to an able-bodied grade-schooler).

The step beyond the only-childers (these people are rarely part of our circle–wonder why?) are the childless-by-choice. I’m talking about adults who purposely choose not to have any children in their life (not biologically, not adopted, not step, not foster, not guardianship, not living with their sister and her two kids–none). There were some of these people at this meeting too. Liberal, over-educated bobos who somehow think it is reasonable for little children to be neither seen nor heard. People who pretend children under the age of ten are not actually there. People who don’t acknowledge kids, who don’t even look at them, smile at them, speak to them, help them, move out of their way. People who glare at the parent (me!) when a child brushes against their leg trying to squeeze by.

What’s beyond childless-by-choice? The people with no children and no pets (yes, there were some of these people present as well). It’s not that I think everyone should have children (or dogs)–not in the least. What makes me skittish is that in my experience people who have chosen not to have children (or children and pets) view their life–and by extension the world–as an eminently controllable thing. The neat, organized life of Choice A leading directly to Point A, with no annoying detours in between.

My life with four young children and one large dog is messy, chaotic, loud, dirty, constant, and (mostly) fun. Many of the moms I know with 3+ kids, especially if the kids are closely spaced, understand the parenting part of our life. But if my friends with 1 or 2 kids struggle to understand how (and why) we do things the way we do, we must apear completely crazy (and hey–they treat us that way) to the no-pets/no-children/1-perfect-child sets. I realize children inevitably create a bit of chaos, I want to say, but you’re scorning the future leaders of the world.

As one of our children’s (young, active, single) uncles said, “Children are so exhausting and irrational!” Uh . . . yep. We were all children once, as exhausting and irrational as the best of them. The adults who cannot find it in their tidy hearts to–at the least–acknowledge the existence of these little people in their presence, I just don’t understand them (and honestly, I don’t like them much either).

At the meeting there was a family with an internationally transracially adopted toddler. The toddler was the only child close to Teri’s age. Teri and the toddler eyed each other, as only tiny children can. I tried to make small-talk with this mother. She turned her back to me. I tried again later–twice–and she literally turned away. I watched her talk to other people, even discuss her child, and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I mentioned this snub to my partner as we drove home. He immediately said, “It’s probably because you have bio kids.” (Picture me smacking my forehead–Duh!) Like most adoptive parents, this couple is likely infertile. I forget that fertility/infertility is often still an issue for parents who have already adopted. (I’m more mindful of infertility issues with pre-adoptive/waiting couples.) It used to be that I really didn’t get the fertility-bias thing. Since I have always planned to adopt, I didn’t think it would have been a big deal to me if I hadn’t been able to have bio kids. And then a strange thing happened.

At a certain point in our family-building we were planning to adopt, and then it seemed as though we weren’t going to be able to. My partner floated the idea of having another biological child instead–and I was so opposed to getting pregnant again at that point in time. I realized that I didn’t just want a child, I wanted a child through adoption. And suddenly I understood a piece of infertility that had alluded me for years–beyond the grief of not being able to pass on your genes, to see yourself in your child’s face and temperament (not always a good thing, I tell you), there is the additional piece of infertility that frustratingly denies you the ability to do something very basic that you always thought–assumed, even–you would be able to do.

For us, becoming both adoptive and bio parents was relatively simple. In our adoptions, we had one quick match, one ‘instant’ baby, and no failed placements. With our pregnancies, we had two ‘instant’ conceptions and no miscarriages. In the building of our family, our biggest hardships (if you could even call them that) were financial (adoption) and my health (serious problems during and after Rico’s birth from undiagnosed eclampsia).

We interviewed pediatricians while waiting for Jaja to be born. While talking to one doctor (who we eventually chose) we mentioned that we hoped to have a biological child about 18 months younger than Jaja. “You should know,” the doctor said, “after trying to conceive for six months, only 50% of couples are pregnant. Only 80% of couples are pregnant after trying for one year.” She issued these numbers as a warning to us. We talked about these ’statistics’ on the way home: we didn’t want our kids to be years apart. Somehow we didn’t factor in that we were both in our mid-20s, completely healthy, taking no prescription medications, hadn’t been using any medical birth-control for several years, and nobody in any part of our families has ever had any fertility problems (including mothers giving birth at 37 and 40 years old).

Jaja and Rico were born 9 months (plus a few days) apart. That was a busy year.  And that was (and is) complicated in all different ways, some ways in which we (as parents) have absolutely no control.

I embrace that intricate and intimate complexity. To me, those are the most rewarding parts of life.

New Family Blog

I’ve launched a new Sky Family Blog.

Come on over and check out what the Sky kids are up to these days. This new blog has kid stories and bits of family activities with photos! Photos will not include any identifiable face shots (not after that crazy White Supremacist thing last summer), but you’ll still get a peek into the Sky family daily mayhem, I mean life : )

Please Note: In the ‘Also by…’ section, you may notice that the Etsy links are not fully active. I’m hoping to have my online store up next week, and I’ll let you know when those links work.