UnchartedParent.com

Lots of kids have “transitional objects.” For many of them, it’s a stuffed animal or a doll; for others, it might be a blanket, or a favorite toy train or any of a myriad of belongings. I still have my childhood transitional object: it’s an almost-forty year-old stuffed lamb that once, I’m told, was white in color, but now is a dark shade of gray. In earlier decades, I re-stitched its face and its paws, I brought it on every trip I ever took until I got married, and to this day, if one of my kids touches it, it takes all of my restraint to keep from slapping the offending little hand away from my prized, ragged possession.

Six-year-old “Jack’s” transitional object is also a stuffed animal, a fat red hippo that is gray and flattened on one side because Jack has used it as a pillow each night for about five years. As a typical six-year-old boy, he’s generally far more interested in Star Wars, Legos and scatological humor than stuffed animals, but that hippo is an exception. Do not mess with Jack’s hippo.

Stuffed animals as transitional objects make sense. They’re cute, they’re cuddly, and the personalities that our childhood imaginations assign to them grow and change as we do. They know all of our secrets, they can sympathize with our failures and they let us hug them in our victories—even the quiet victories we don’t want to tell anyone about. They are our fantasy friends, reliable and perfect in every way.

But someday, someone is going to have to explain three-year-old “Emmie’s” transitional object to me. Because as Jack settles down with his hippo to dream for the night, Emmie also checks her bedside to make sure that her security objects are in place: two boxes of Kleenex tissues.

Emmie possesses dozens of stuffed animals and other, more traditional objects from which to choose. She might carry say, a pink giraffe to bed one night, but if you take it away, she’ll simply pout and complain and then replace it with a brown bunny. But try to remove one of her tissue boxes—the plain cardboard variety they sell in the grocery store—and you will hear a protest so loud and teary that an uninformed bystander could only assume that some evil person just took away Christmas, Hanukkah and her birthday. I discovered this when, in a cold-ridden week, our house ran short on tissues and I tried to reclaim just one of Emmie’s boxes for my husband and me to share. We quickly decided it would be preferable to sniffle or blow our noses on the bedsheets than to listen to Emmie’s wails for the rest of the night. The instant I returned the tissue box, Emmie quieted and settled down to a victorious and secure slumber.

It sounds a little weird, but who are we to judge? We all have our peculiarities: my husband, for instance, would probably have nightmares and wake in a cold sweat if he tried to sleep without his Blackberry on his nightstand. (Okay, there’s one on my side of the bed, too, but I do turn it off at night and it is also my alarm clock, so that’s completely different!) To each his own, right?

Still, I’m looking forward to finding out someday from an older, more self-aware Emmie what this tissue-box attachment is all about.

In the meantime, I’d better stock up on extras boxes if someone catches one of those summer colds, because as sure as Jack will be sleeping with that hippo, I know this truth: it doesn’t matter how badly anyone else needs tissues, Emmie’s not giving up any of hers.

In my last post, I shared my daughter “Emmie’s” current attempts to understand her birthmother through the prism of her three-year-old mind. She’s starting to become more earnest in her requests to see her birthmother, and I am wrestling now with how to explain to her in a way that a three-year-old can understand that that is not possible.

But even if I succeed in this task, I am under no illusions that these questions will end at age three. Nor will they end at six, or twelve, or fifteen. Emmie’s questions and my responses will all have to mature as she does; as with all aspects of parenting, this exploration is and will be a work-in-progress.

I belong to several online, adoption-related groups and, by sheer coincidence, a discussion of this very topic in one of those groups popped into my inbox mere hours after I posted on Tuesday. One adoptive and foster mother in the group offered such insightful advice for how her family approached her seven-and-a-half year-old son’s questions about his Korean birthparents that I wrote to her and asked if I could quote her on my blog. She kindly assented, and so I offer here some examples of sensitive ways to explore these issues with adoptive children courtesy of Mary Jo Daly. She cautions that while these strategies helped her son, every child is different and just because something works for one child, that doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for another.

• We pulled out his referral file. We read to him what he was like as a baby - from his height and weight right down to his “incessant crying.” I paraphrased his birthmother’s intake information, keeping it on a level he could handle at age 7. He especially liked knowing the time of his birth and the name of the hospital where he was born. From that, it became clear that he was looking for a connection to his birth - not necessarily to his birthparents. The loss of his birthparents really was more about making his birth story “real.”

• Our son was escorted (back then, travelling was not encouraged). I asked this group for photos of the hospital where our son was born and got a great response! These were absolutely one of the most healing (and moving) parts of the grief process. An interesting note: S__ (our son) tossed aside any pictures with people in them. He wanted photos of the building or rooms only. He did not say why - maybe it cleared the way in his imagination to place himself there.

• Lifebook!!! . . . S__ chose the photos to include. None were of life after Korea - every picture was of him with his foster family or of the hospital where he was born. Documenting his time before he was with us seemed very important to him.

• Pop culture. We began collecting Korean popular music and current Korean news stories. For S__, this grief stage was all about connecting to his past - his country, his culture, his birth. He is not interested in the least about anything “traditionally” Korean - he wants what kids are doing or listening to right now - what he’d be doing if he was still there.

• As tempting as it is, I avoid speaking for his birthmother - saying that she loved him, for example. I like to think she did (after all, who couldn’t love my son???), but the feelings she describes in her intake report are scared and worried. She doesn’t speak of love. I don’t say she didn’t NOT love him either - we just talk about what an enormous decision it is to raise a child and how difficult that would be when other factors - joblessness, parent’s young age - are thrown in. I’ve allowed S__ to draw the conclusion that adoption, in his birthmother’s case, was a very responsible choice - but we don’t talk about it as a “loving” choice. I think it leads to very confusing feelings and the fear that the choice could be made again by us. Children have their own logic, for sure.

Again, every child is different, as is every adoptive child’s story. If you read my last post, you know that I have already chosen a bit of a different approach for Emmie than what Ms. Daly suggests, but that’s because I know that Emmie’s story differs somewhat from S__’s. Thanks to Ms. Daly for allowing me to post her advice; as adoptive parents—as any parents—we need all of the resources we can get!

Before our vacation imploded on top of a mountain at the beginning of the month, we had a spectacular time at our annual, child-centered destination of Storyland. The kids twirled and spun on rides, watched a circus, got soaking wet at the splashpad and in general reveled in the best-designed theme park for young children and their parents I have ever seen.

They also got to meet a character or two. Particularly notable for three-year-old “Emmie” was her opportunity to meet Cinderella.

As with most three-year-old girls, the mention of the word “princess” sparks wide eyes and wistful fantasy in my daughter. Meeting Cinderella in the flesh was, then, a fantasy that came to life before Emmie’s eyes. (So what if Cinderella’s ill-fitting gown hung off of her fat-free bones and she looked as though she’d be joining her fellow teenage pals at the mall the second she was permitted to rip the plastic tiara out of her disheveled hair? To Emmie, a princess is a princess.) Emmie presented the princess with construction-paper masterpieces she’d colored just for her heroine, and when Cinderella asked Emmie to help her greet newcomers to the castle, Emmie’s enraptured expression made it clear that she thought herself to be the Luckiest Girl in the World.

Two weeks later, Emmie’s still talking about Cinderella and asking when she can visit her again. But now there’s a twist: Cinderella, she has decided, is her birthmom.

It has been policy in our house since even before Emmie came home at the age of four-and-a-half months to use the language of adoption freely. We want our daughter to know who she is and where she comes from; we want her to feel, always, that she can approach us with questions and explore her identity without any fear of disapproval or hurt feelings from her parents. There are no secrets here; why should there be?

So words like “adoption,” “birthmother” and “South Korea” are part of our everyday vocabulary. We don’t go out of our way to lecture Emmie or her older brother about Emmie’s origins, but when the opportunity arises to introduce these words (what preschooler doesn’t want to know “Where I come from?”), we take it. Thus, Emmie knows that she was born “with my birthmom in South Korea;” she can find South Korea on a globe. She and her brother both know that I am mother to them both, but I am also “Jack’s” birthmother while Emmie’s birthmother is someone else.

During the course of our pre-adoptive parenting preparation, my husband and I were apprised of a common occurrence in young adopted children: idealization of the birthmother. Young children, curious about this important yet absent and unknown personality in their lives, have a tendency to create a fantasy about their “birthmothers.” As children grow older and their cognitive abilities develop, the fantasies can become more complex and be expressed with greater purpose, as any adoptive parent who has ever heard the words, “My birthmother would let me do that” can attest.

In Emmie’s young mind, Cinderella is perfection. So as she struggles to put a face on her birthmother and to understand this woman’s role in her life, she reaches for the ideal. With no actual information to go on, Cinderella gives Emmie something concrete, something she can understand. Now the word “birthmom” has a face, and an identity.

I don’t worry about this. Preschoolers are all about fantasy and the world of pretend. If Emmie still thinks Cinderella is her birthmom when she is twelve, well, then we’ll have a problem. But I don’t think that will be the case. Because while I don’t confirm Emmie’s fantasy, I encourage her to express it and to explore the possibilities of her birthmother. Yes, it’s a challenge to come up with an answer a three-year-old can understand when she asks why we can’t visit her birthmother “tomorrow.” (Everything that is in the future is “tomorrow” to Emmie, just like the entire past fits into the word “yesterday.”) But I try to rise to that challenge every time, because Emmie knows that she can ask me about her birthmother anytime, and I am always willing to have those discussions with her.

When Emmie says to me, “You love me,” I respond, “Yes, I do.” And when she says, “My birthmother love me,” I respond, “Yes, she does.” The Cinderella fantasy will fade with time. But the reassurances about where and who Emmie comes from, I hope, will stay with her for all of her lifetime.

I’ve got a splitting headache as I write this, and it’s all my fault. I know I’m prone to migraines, I knew my actions would result in one, but I kept going anyway.

My kids were laughing so hard, they almost peed in their pants. How could I say no? After all, all I was doing was blowing up rocket balloons.

For the uninitiated—which we were until now—rocket balloons are long, skinny balloons that an adult who possesses good lung power blows up and then hands to an eager child to release. When said child lets go, the balloon shoots into the air and, as the air passes out if it, it emits a loud, whistling sound while darting about in spastic, crazy patterns before falling, deflated, onto the grass, treetops, roof, etc.

It sounds mildly amusing, I know. But pretend you are a six-year-old boy. Then this is funnier than every potty-joke you’ve ever heard all rolled into one. And if you are a three-year-old girl who will laugh at anything your brother laughs at, well, there’s a recipe for two hysterical children.

The only downside with these balloons is that they require almost enough breath from the adult blowing them up to pop blood vessels in and around that grown-up’s eyes. After the very first balloon, I knew I was going to be in trouble. But watching my kids laugh so hard that they literally couldn’t stand up straight trumped my own discomfort; I couldn’t deny them and myself that pleasure. So I kept blowing up the balloons.

Now my head feels like a balloon, inflated to the point where it’s got to pop just to relieve the pressure. But I’m a parent, so pain is relative, inversely proportional to my kids’ happiness. My head is killing me, but even as I swallow the migraine-painkillers, I know that this is true: When my kids ask, I’ll go outside and blow up those rocket balloons for them again.

The best thing about the phone call described below is that I wasn’t the one who received it. (Apologies to my close friend and faithful reader who was.)

Imagine you are on a family vacation. You are fast asleep in your hotel. So are your husband and kids.

The phone rings. You groggily pick up the receiver and mumble something that is a cross between “Hello?” and “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.”

“Hi,” says the voice. “This is the front desk. Do you have a son named E___?”

Now you’re awake, because yes, you do have a five-year-old son who goes by that name. He’s sleeping, right?

“He’s down here, in the lobby.” You glance at the clock and read 5:30—that’s a.m. You bolt out of bed and run down to the hotel lobby in your pajama’d, disheveled, panicked state to find your angel eating Cheerios and watching cartoons, and, as my friend put it, “Happy as a little clam.”

His explanation for unpadlocking the door and padding into the hallway, down the stairs and into the lobby: “I was hungry.”

He wasn’t hungry by the time my friend got a hold of him.

He wasn’t happy anymore, either.

Like I said, I’m glad it wasn’t me.

Ever heard of Mount Washington?

It’s the highest peak in the northeastern United States (6,288 feet), located in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The highest wind gust ever measured on the Earth’s surface was recorded there in 1934, at 231 miles per hour.

Tourists and New Hampshire residents alike scale the mountain by foot, bicycle, railway or car; one can pick one’s poison. The website for the Mount Washington Auto Road states, “A drive on the Mount Washington Auto Road is a drive unlike any other.”

I had no idea how true that was. Because as of today, Mount Washington can add to its list of distinctions that it is the final resting place for the transmission of my car.

Imagine if you will steering with the utmost caution up a steep, winding mountain road that is characterized by nauseating drops of hundreds of feet without the protection of guard rails and is dotted with barrels of water marked “For radiators only.” Now imagine your loving spouse at your side and your cherubic babes in the back seat, all trembling with anticipation at the prospect of reaching the summit and visiting one of the world’s most famous weather stations. In your spouse’s lap rests the “My Car Climbed Mount Washington” bumper sticker they give you at the entrance booth when you begin your ascent.

Turns out they hand over that damned bumper sticker a tad too early. Because now imagine the same picture, only just after you reach 5,000 feet in elevation, the car shudders, jerks and smoke begins pouring out of the hood faster than you can say “It’s a long way down.”

There’s no need to go into the rest of the details. Suffice it to say that the afternoon and evening involved a rescue van, a specially equipped flatbed tow truck, a fast-food cheesy-cracker dinner for the kids, more than two hours entertaining the kids in a closed visitor center (the guy who stayed long after closing so that I would have a place to wait with my kids was unbelievably nice), and hundreds of dollars of cab fares and towing fees. And we haven’t even rented a car yet or fixed (or replaced) the transmission.

Vacation is supposed to be about getting away from it all, about relaxing. Right?

Is it vacation yet?

I try to teach my children that the world can be a beautiful place, that most people deserve respect and that their father and I made a wise, careful choice in determining where we would live and raise our family.

So imagine my dismay when I opened my morning newspaper several days ago and was confronted with a letter from a local resident that led me in turn to write the following letter to the editor:

Re “Indoctrination,” (Monitor letter, June 21): ______ of Pembroke wrote about the alleged “continuing agenda of the worldwide Jewish plan of cultural engineering.”

Every time we witness a monumental sign of progress in breaking down long-held stereotypes, prejudices and barriers - such as the recent primary contest where the two front-runners for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. presidency were a woman and an African-American - someone like ________ steps up to show us just how far we still have to go. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism: We don’t need any of it. ______ reminds all of us who believe in equality that we still have a lot of work to do. 

                         (Printed in the Concord Monitor, June 24, 2008; please note that I have redacted the original letter-writer’s name because I don’t want to give this individual any wider recognition than he has already attained)

I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this stuff, but I have to say that the original letter nearly made me spit my morning coffee onto my paper.  This kind of thinking should have been put to rest long, long ago, but it is still with us, and my little corner of the country is not immune.

It’s not what I need with my morning coffee, and it’s not what I want my children to learn.  As parents, we should all do our part to ensure that viewpoints like these go the way of the dinosaurs when it is our children’s turn to run the world.

I recognize the signs.

His name escapes her mouth at every opportunity.  She smiles and flirts in his presence.  Her day is brighter when he is there; disappointment clouds her face when he is absent.  I know that her heart actually beats faster whenever she talks about him.

Is it true love?

Who cares?  She’s three years old, for God’s sake!

“Emmie” is deep in the throes of not the first, but the second serious crush of her life.  (The object of the first crush, a tall, dark and handsome six-year-old, seems to be weathering her fickleness well.  All signs indicate he never had a clue and probably wouldn’t have cared if he did.)  This time the boy is blond and freckled, with an impish smile and a fun-loving spirit.  He was in “Jack’s” kindergarten class and Emmie always asked her big brother, “Was P____ there today?” 

The end of kindergarten would be cause for despair but for the fact that P____’s little brother just happens to be in Emmie’s daycare class.  Moreover, Jack has asked for some playdates with P____ this summer, so Emmie knows she is likely to have multiple chances to come into contact with the object of her affections.

As her mother and an adult, I ought to be able to dismiss this preschool crush with a shrug and a laugh.  But here’s my problem: Emmie at three seems to possess greater innate instincts and skills with the opposite sex than, well, I may ever have had.  She plays with the older boys on the playground, tells them what to do and issues her orders so sweetly that they obey.  She joins in their games but without them even realizing it, she soon has them playing the games she wants to play.  She smiles at them, laughs at their jokes and bats her eyelashes.  She’s amazing.

And she’s three.

Emmie’s father and I have long joked that when she is a teenager, we’re going to need to place bars across her bedroom window to prevent her from sneaking out to join her six boyfriends, all of whom will be waiting for her.  Most of the time when we say this, we are joking.

So go ahead, P_____, revel in Emmie’s feminine attentions for now.  You never can tell with girls, you know: you’re not her first, and I don’t think you’ll be her last.

And my husband and I will begin looking into installing those bars any day now.  

Uncharted Parent is swimming in a sea of end-of-school-year picnics, birthday parties, kids who have outgrown their summer clothes, first-grade “move-up” events and that dangerous, empty abyss that lies between school and summer camps wherein children require constant and increasingly inventive entertainment.  Thus, I’ll be back next week (June 24) with a new blog entry—if my computer is still speaking to me by then. 

It seems ironic to be writing about hell freezing over in the midst of near record-breaking heat, but I can’t think of any other explanation for the events of the last two days.

Sunday morning, three-year-old “Emmie” said, “I want to wear underwear.”

Yeah, sure, okay.  Here’s your underwear, and I’ll have the extra underwear and shorts standing by for when you pee in the first set.  We’d been through this approach-avoidance dance many times before.

“I want to pee and poop in the potty today.” 

Yeah, sure, whatever.  You always say that.  And it’s always followed five minutes later by, “I don’t want to pee/poop in the potty today.”

But then an unprecedented event happened.  Emmie peed and pooped in the potty, and, save for one tiny, unintentional accident, achieved underwear success all day!

Pigs flew!  Lightening descended from the sky!  (Okay, the pigs were actually sleeping at a farm we visited, and the lightening was heat-based, but it was close enough.)

Now, I know you think this is no big deal.  After all, as I was frequently told by others, “She’s not going to go to high school in diapers.”  But I wasn’t so sure.  This is the kid who not even a week ago proclaimed her absolute antipathy for all things potty-related and insisted she wanted nothing to do with it until she was four.  (Yes, she’d actually set that timetable for herself.)

Sunday night, my husband said, “She’s potty-trained now.”  Enraged, I chastised him for jinxing this one good day we’d had of Emmie doing the very thing we’d been longing for.  “Come on,” he responded.  “This is how you always said it would happen.  One day, she would just decide on her own, and that would be it: she’d be potty-trained.  She just needed to believe it was her decision.”

I was afraid to agree with him, but I knew he was right.  This is the same child, after all, who cried every night at bedtime in her crib for two years until one day she announced she was done with that—and she was.  She’s the same little girl who one evening last week refused to consume a plateful of her favorite foods for dinner because she felt she wasn’t getting enough attention at the table; she’d rather go hungry than find herself in a situation she can’t control.

So she decided, we cheered and praised and plied her with rewards (yes, it was her decision, but a little positive reinforcement couldn’t hurt) and, so far, it seems like my husband was right: the intractable Emmie is potty-trained. 

And it’s a whole lot cooler right now deep beneath the surface of the Earth!