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International adoptions out of Haiti are much in the news these days following January’s devastating earthquake.  In one article last week, ABC News introduced us to Duke and Lisa Scoppa, who just adopted two young boys from Haiti.  At first glance, this seems like it could only be a happy story (and so far as I know, it is).  But there’s a difficult side to adoptions like the Scoppa’s, one that sometimes goes unacknowledged: Haitian children adopted by white American parents are likely to struggle with their racial identities at some point in their lives, as are any other transracial adoptees.  As much as some people wish race didn’t matter, it does, and it’s not something that can be glossed over in any transracial adoption.

As is pointed out in the article, some people believe that black children should never be adopted by white parents.  I cannot agree with this position.  To my mind, a loving home and a loving, committed family is the paramount goal for any child.  But I have more than once met people, including adoptive parents, who have stated their belief that race is irrelevant and that their different-race children should not have harbor any racial concerns growing up because his or her parents believe that everyone is equal.  That sentiment, however well-intended, ignores reality, and we adoptive parents do our kids a huge disservice if we ignore that reality and fail to incorporate race-consciousness into our parenting.

At the risk of being accused of stepping even deeper into this minefield (hey, someone’s got to do it), it’s worth noting that the context of black-and-white transracial adoptions in the United States is somewhat unique, obviously existing within the context of the history of U.S. black-white race relations in general.  But that doesn’t mean that racial identity is only important for black children, or for black children adopted into white families.  Racial identity is meaningful across the board, and all parents who adopt transracially—of any race—need to integrate racial identity issues into the raising of their children.

The ABC News article is worth reading.  If you’re an adoptive parent of a child of another race who doesn’t think you need to worry about race, I’m going to go so far as to implore you to read it and think about the world from your child’s perspective, not your own.   

Even if you’re not an adoptive parent, it’s worth taking a couple of minutes to read the article and think about an issue that probably never occupies your mind.  Why?  It’s interesting.  It’s a change from using your coffee-break time to chat with your friends on Facebook.  And you might learn something.  What have you got to lose?

Don’t you hate it when you look back on an interaction with your kid and find yourself wishing you’d handled it differently?  Lately I’m finding myself in this situation a lot with four-and-a-half year old “Emmie.”

For example: a few days ago, Emmie had a complete meltdown because when she asked for another kid in the family, I said no. 

“But it’s not fair!”  Emmie crossed her arms, wrinkled her face and yelled out her protest.  Then the tears began to flow.  “I want someone else to be the smallest,” she continued.  She stomped her feet and kept her eyes on mine to see if she would get a reaction.

Now on any given day, Emmie by her count suffers through at least six or seven monstrous injustices.  Each of these is met with the level of drama she believes to be appropriate, meaning as much as she can muster.  So when I didn’t rise to her bait on the topic of bringing another child into the family, she took it to the next level: her mouth opened, her eyes screwed up tight and she dragged herself from the room as she let loose full-throated wails of misery.

No, I didn’t give a millimeter on that third-child thing.

Later, however, after Emmie had gone to bed, I recalled her complaint and I empathized.  Not about the request itself, which is obviously not her decision, but about the feelings that led to it.  I can imagine that it must be tough to always be the smallest in the family, the least competent in many areas, the only one who can’t read, the one who gets scared more easily than anyone else, and so on.  When I had the chance to think about it, I could see that being in that position day after day would be difficult and Emmie might actually deserve some sympathy and TLC to make her feel better.

But Emmie got neither sympathy nor TLC from me.  Instead, she received a show of complete indifference, because her method of delivering her message was so obnoxious, so rude, and so oft-repeated that I couldn’t get past it to see the legitimate, hurt feelings behind her attitude.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Aren’t I supposed to be the grown-up here?

As I’ve mentioned before, Emmie, is a bona-fide drama queen who can over-emote in any situation, turn any minor mishap into a volcanic, lava-strewn path of destruction.  She’s got the whole adolescent thing down-pat already, and she isn’t even five yet.  (When I say that I’m terrified of her tween and teen years, I’m probably understating my feelings.)  In short, she launches into her the-world-is-ending routine and I tune her out, over and over again.

This post doesn’t wrap up where I wish it did.  I’d like merely to say that Emmie is young and she’ll grow out of this behavior as she matures.  I do hope and believe that this might be true (although I suspect several doors will be slammed right off their hinges before she gets there).  But the one who needs to improve her act more immediately is me.  Yes, it’s appropriate for me not to succumb to her demonstrations, nor to give in to unreasonable demands just because Emmie knows better than anyone how to turn on the waterworks.  But it is my responsibility as her mother to identify the real issues beneath the preschool drama and try to teach her other ways of dealing with her feelings.

It’s one of those things: my daughter’s having the temper-tantrums, but I need to do a better job, too.  I’m the grown-up; damn, now I need to act like one.

So, I was going to write a lovely post about my four-and-a-half year old “Emmie” and her excitement at seeing the new queen of ice skating, Kim Yu-na, win the gold medal at the Olympics.  Emmie’s delight over Kim’s (or as Emmie calls her, “the Korea girl’s”) well deserved victory had me pondering a swirl of thoughts about identity and positive role models, culture and international adoption and watching your child find pieces of herself in places both expected and not.

But I’m not going to blog about that after all.

As you might be able to tell, my mind is a bit befuddled as I write this post.  The reason for that is not uncommon, but the fact that it happens to all pet-owners at various points in their lives doesn’t make it any easier to handle.  Here’s it is: I just picked up my sixteen-year-old cat from the vet after being told that she is very ill with a progressive, terminal disease.  I won’t know more about how much time she’s got left until later in the week, but the furry, black-and-white friend who’s been with me longer than my husband or my kids will not be with me much longer.

I know, she’s a cat.  And to most people, she’s not a very friendly one.  She’s never really gotten over the fact that I got married, is still somewhat stunned about the first kid and utterly stupefied about the second.  She’s learned to tolerate them—because she’s never had a choice—but she’d be happiest if the three of them all took off tomorrow and didn’t come back.  She has no use at all for anyone else; most people who visit my house don’t even realize I have a cat.  Charlie’s ideal world consists of her and me, which is how it was when I got her.

My kitty has been my pal through a lot of heartache.  She was there for the lonely times and she saw me through my own prolonged, serious illness.  She never complains about how messy I am or how off-key I sing in the shower.  Since the kids have showed up, she’s made it clear that she’s felt neglected, and I do feel badly about that.  But for all the jokes I make about cat puke in my shoes or having to kick her out of my office so I can write, the truth is that she’s been my friend for almost sixteen years and I am going to miss her.

Now I move into that veterinary dance of juggling medical treatments and pet quality-of-life issues, sizeable bills and our tightened budget.  A series of decisions is coming, none of them good, and I’m not looking forward to any of them.

And then there are the questions of what to tell the kids and when to tell them.  Charlie mostly ignores the kids, but she’s the only pet they’ve known and this will (in all likelihood) be their first experience with death.  As in almost all cases, I plan to be honest, but as we don’t have all the facts yet, I plan to dole out the information on this one in controlled doses.  There’s no point in upsetting them with the end result now when we know so little about the steps along the way.

I could conclude here with a characteristic statement about how this is all part of parenting, part of life, blah, blah, blah.  But I won’t.  It’s a sad day, and I’ll leave it at that.

Few people like to think of themselves as one among thousands, an invisible personality indistinguishable from all of those who surround her.  Now that I consider myself a creative type, I like to believe that I’m a singular individual who has something distinctive to offer the world.  My thoughts are unique, my kids are unique and no one’s mind works exactly like mine.

Time for a reality check.

I can try to be as unique as I want, but life provides reminders that in some ways, I’m not only part of a group, but I’m smack in the center of a group that has been targeted, analyzed and successfully marketed to, and it’s about to happen again.  There I am, pushing my blue shopping cart with the gummy toddler safety straps through Toys R Us when Steve Perry starts serenading me about his “Open Arms.”  I know his crooning is aimed right at me.  I can’t deny that highly paid marketers are firing my senior prom theme song straight at the heart of countless women my age to render us teary-eyed with nostalgia so that we’ll feel comfortable remaining in the store a while longer and handing over a bit more of our money.  

And what about those Olympics ads NBC has been running reminding us that all of the medal-winning, awe-inspiring athletes owe their success to their hard-working moms?  Yup, aimed right in my direction.  As a mom, I’ve now internalized the relationship between maternal labors and parental pride, so I see those ads, swallow the lump in my throat and acknowledge that all I need to do is buy the right laundry detergent, and in ten to fifteen years my children will not only win medals, but they’ll thank me when they stand on the podium. 

I try not to fit into too many molds, but sometimes I can’t escape the fact that I’m an overeducated, forty-something, soccer-and-ballet mom of two.

Those common demographic categories are one thing.  But imagine my surprise when I learned that there’s a whole new demographic for women like me, and his name is Timothy Hutton.

Yes, that’s right: THE Timothy Hutton.  Ordinary People, Falcon & the Snowman, Taps—you know the one.  It turns out that @TimHutton  (What?  You don’t speak Twitter yet?) is prince of a whole demographic of literary-minded women who are devoted to his intellectual musings, his sensitive-guy portraits and his current television show, Leverage.  And I’m one of them.

It began innocently enough.  I started watching Leverage because a friend writes for it.  That’s it.  There was no sighing, no mooning over Hutton or anyone else on the show.  It’s about thieves and other criminals, and stuff blows up on a semi-regular basis.  It’s not the type of show I usually watch.  But I believe in supporting people I know and like, and anything written by someone who falls into that category will always rate a chance or two in my book.

Leverage, as it turned out, was good.  The premise is intriguing, the plots intelligent with twists that aren’t always predictable and the show actually includes character development, which for me is the silky-textured, melt-in-your-mouth, sweet dark chocolate of any media.  So now I’m a fan.

And, as it turns out, a classic Timothy Hutton groupie.

An article at The Daily Beast last month characterized Hutton’s female following, drawn to his sex appeal and to his consistently thoughtful literary discussions on Twitter.  Both of these qualities have bled through to many of the characters the actor has portrayed over the years.  Certain women are drawn to this type of man, and he’s tweeting with many of the most literary-minded of them on a regular basis.  With regard to Hutton’s followers, the article stated, “Many of Hutton’s thoughtful, sensitive-guy characters have felt custom-made for a bookish girl folded into the corner bench of a local coffee shop, devouring novels and—just maybe—penning one of her own.”

Sound like anyone you know?

Apparently, there’s a whole demographic of women like me out there, and we all revolve around Timothy Hutton.

I suppose if I’m going to be one in a crowd, women who go for “thoughtful, sensitive-guy characters” and love books so much that they may even be writing their own is a respectable crowd to be in.  It’s not that I object to the more typical forty-something groupings, mind you—my wide-eyed excitement at hearing Men at Work’s “Land Down Under” on the radio last week as my eight-year-old son rolled his eyes leaves me unable to deny certain herd realities.  It’s just amusing to discover that I’m part of a whole family of sisters in literary love, and our common link is an actor, who, I’m somewhat abashed to admit, would be a perfect choice to portray one of the main characters in my novel-in-progress. 

So now that I know about @TimHutton, have I become one of his followers?  You bet.  I’d be a fool to ignore someone so ideal for me. 

But I’ll only go so far.  After all, it’s not like I sit around wondering if or when he’ll follow me back.  Oh no, not at all.

It’s true, but it’s so not fair.

I’m ordinarily not one to cite my own, anecdotal experience as proof of a greater truth—okay, well, maybe I am.  But now actual research supports what I’ve experienced almost every night for the past eight years, and I’m feeling so vindicated that I’m going to share it with you.

Ladies, you know how it is.  You’ve made it through another day with too many temper-tantrums and not enough coffee.  You’ve finally made it to bed and fallen asleep.  You are OUT, and it’s good.

And then you hear a noise.  Maybe it’s a cry.  Maybe it’s a cough.  Or if you’re me and mother to a child like four-and-a-half year old “Emmie,” maybe it’s a string of incomprehensible words spoken in a tongue only known to residents of the Underworld and those they try to possess in their sleep.

Whatever it is, it’s coming from your child.  You hope that it’s part of your dream, but it continues and you have to admit to yourself that it’s real.  So you glance over at your spouse in the hopes that your partner in all things and at all times will volunteer to take this baby-call, but he is fast asleep.  For real.  That kid could be screaming right beside him like someone’s pulling off her toenails and he wouldn’t hear it.  So you curse your beloved and his ability to sleep soundly through his offspring’s cries, and you tend to your child yourself.  Then you can’t fall back asleep, and all the while, he’s slumbering, like, well, a baby (which, as an aside, is the most idiotic simile I think I’ve ever heard).

If this sounds like what goes on in your household, the good news is that you are not crazy.  The bad news is that apparently, these reactions are part of human genetic makeup, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

A study released late last year evaluated which sounds were most likely to wake men and women from sound sleep, and found that the triggers were different.  Women responded to babies’ cries, while men were more likely to awaken at the sounds of threats to the entire home and family, such as buzzing flies or windows rattled by the wind.  (Hey, I didn’t conduct this study.)  So as much as you might want to curse your partner at 3:00 a.m. for sleeping through yet another of the baby’s teething episodes or the preschooler’s nightmares, it really isn’t his fault.  (Note: this study was commissioned by Lemsip, a manufacturer of nighttime cold-and-flu medicine.)

Now before everyone goes crazy telling me about all of the exceptions out there: yes, I know.  There are exceptions to every rule, and some of you are my friends.  But this study doesn’t surprise me because I live it every night.  And now I can’t even get mad at my husband anymore because science says that he sleeps through the kids’ cries because of his biologically driven impulse to protect our family.  Way to go, science.

One more thing: it turns out that yup, women take longer to fall back asleep than men do.  Yeah, thanks, I knew that.  My husband can go through an entire REM cycle before I’ve even returned his “good night.”  I’m still working through a twelve-step program to learn how to forgive him for this.

So ladies, the next time you look at your partner slumbering peacefully beside you while your kid wails, don’t get mad at him.  It isn’t his fault.  As for you, gentlemen: remember that the decision of whether to get out of bed when your child cries at night rests with your partner.  Treat her well, or she will reach into her own evolutionary bag of tricks and find a way to make sure that you do wake up.  And it probably won’t be pretty.

Sometimes these things just come at you from unpredictable directions.

On our non-snow day earlier this week, eight-year-old “Jack” pulled out one of his favorite DVDs, BBC’s Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.  I’d seen several of the other videos in this series before, but not this one.  So I joined Jack for a few minutes to see what he was watching.

This particular episode focused on Africa’s Australopithecus (an extinct form of hominid that may or may not be ancestral to homo sapiens, for those of you who’ve forgotten that particular genus in evolutionary history).  We watched the now extinct, bipedal hominids fight off predators and work their way through complex social dynamics.  Then a new female joined the subject group, and one of the males took an interest.

The camera focused on the male as he drew closer to the female.  The camera then zoomed out so that other Australopithecus were in the foreground, but viewers could clearly still see the new couple farther away.  The male knelt down to face the female and then he leaned forward and got closer to her as she leaned back.  A grid of out-of-focus squares then appeared on the screen, obscuring the pair.  Why?  You know why.

But Jack didn’t.

“What’s that?” Jack asked, annoyed.  “Why are they doing that?  I can’t see them.”

“They’re blocking the two Australopithecus right now because they are mating.”

Jack has watched dinosaurs and other ancient creatures mate on the screen for years.  He understands that this is how dinosaurs made new dinosaurs, and that animals continue to mate for this purpose today.  (I suppose one could construct a reasonable argument that once you’ve watched a realistic simulation of two diplodocuses mating, there’s not much left in terms of animal procreation that will surprise you.)  Jack didn’t understand why the Australopithecus should be any different, not even when Kenneth Branagh’s voiceover mentioned that Australopithecus developed the new and unique characteristic of facing each other during mating. 

“So why can’t we see it?” he asked.

Remember my philosophy: honest, thoughtful questions deserve honest answers.  “Australopithecus were pre-humans.  They were closer to humans in the animal chain than other animals you’ve learned about before.  And when humans mate, we consider that private.  It’s not something we watch.”

Jack was silent.

“Do you know what it’s called when humans mate?”

“No.”

“It’s called ‘sex.’  Have you heard that word before?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what sex is.  And it’s not something we watch, so they are not showing the Australopithecus mating.”

I waited for possible follow-up questions, but there were none.  As I’ve mentioned before, that’s Jack.  Either he thought about what I told him for a while, or he didn’t.  Either I was successful in beginning to illuminate in Jack’s mind the similarities and differences between the animal mating he watches on his paleontologically inclined videos and human sex, or I didn’t.  Until some scientist invents a way to examine a child’s brain even as the gears are turning, I’ll probably never know.

This is how it is with kids.  You think you’re doing one thing, and then suddenly you’re doing something else.  Videos progress from point A to point B in a predictable order.  But life with kids starts at point A and takes some major detours along the way.

That’s why the journey is so much fun.  After all, once you see a video, you know how it ends.  All the prehistoric beasts die out.  Yawn.  But add kids to the equation, and suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a conversation about Australopithecine sex.  With kids, anything can happen.

I was planning to begin this follow-up to last Thursday’s post by mocking Washington, D.C.  I love the place, but when PunditMom tweeted yesterday that officials had finally decided to remove snow from a major D.C. thoroughfare by closing that road at 10:00 a.m. to bring in the equipment, I tweeted her back to confirm this absurdity. 

“Saw it with my own eyes,” she replied.

I laughed out loud—a superior, northern New England guffaw.  More than a week after Snowpocalypse, D.C.-area kids were still home from school and the region was really just starting to dig out.  Up here, that would never happen.  Because we’re not snow wimps, right?

Well, I guess it’s time to eat a little regional, frozen crow.  As I write this post, eight-year-old “Jack” is sitting on the floor beside me, completing the long-term homework I scrounged up to give me a few minutes to get some of my own work done.  Why?  Because there’s snow in the forecast.

Yes, that’s right: all area schools today are closed and there’s nary a flake of the white stuff in sight.  Apparently all it takes up here is a month without our usual snowfall to make us forget that WE ARE NEW ENGLANDERS, DAMN IT, and we don’t run scared from the thought of a few inches of accumulation.  So the joke’s on me for making fun of the mid-Atlantic, and I suppose I’ll pay for my actions later in the week when I go to the grocery store and discover that there’s no milk, toilet paper or bread to be had in the entire state of New Hampshire.

(Side note: Jack just finished his homework and is now bouncing an eraser off the carpet next to my desk.  He’s already asked me to watch him play computer games.  I’m checking now for Olympic broadcasts.  Please, oh please let the Olympics be on right now.)

In other follow-up news:

Nanaimo bars – Holy cow, are these things really found all over British Columbia?  If so, I don’t know how all of the province’s residents don’t weigh a thousand pounds each.  I thought the ones I concocted from this recipe were good, not great, but they were strangely addictive.  I couldn’t stop eating them.  Essentially butter and sugar with a little cocoa thrown in, I figure each bar translates into a week on the treadmill.  But I ate and ate for three days until they were gone.

(Update: no Olympic broadcast right now, but there’s a new Dinosaur Train in the DVR.  God bless you, PBS.)

More Olympics – We didn’t know that the actual opening ceremony wouldn’t begin until 9:00 p.m., at which point my kids were beginning to spiral into tired sniping and whining.  But we watched the pre-ceremony coverage as we picnicked on the living room floor and we oohed and aahed over the montages of spectacular Canadian scenery.  We still plan to watch the Opening Ceremonies when we get a chance—perhaps when they cancel school tomorrow in the event it does actually snow here.  And it turns out that there are any number of fun things you can do with your kids around the Olympics.  For some ideas check out this article on TheGoodStuffGuide.com.

The parental high point of our Olympic evening came after a historic trip down Olympic Memory Lane that included photographs of President John F. Kennedy.

“Do President Kennedy and President Obama know each other?” asked four-and-a-half year old “Emmie.”

“No, President Kennedy died a long time ago.”

“Before I was born?”  (Emmie divides time into B.E. and A.E.: Before Emmie and After Emmie.)

“Yes, long before you were born.”

“Even before Mommy and Daddy were born,” my husband added.

Emmie’s hand flew to her face to cover her open-mouthed gasp, but her wide, startled eyes revealed her shock at the mere idea of an event that occurred so very, very long ago.  Sigh.

Finally, Lunar New Year: we stuffed ourselves so full of bulgogi, duk guk and, in my case, kimchi that we barely had room left in our stomachs to finish the last of the Nanaimo bars.  I tried Vietnamese waffles made with coconut milk for the first time and loved them, and I sampled more Chinese dishes than I could count.  We spent another Saturday afternoon with the fantastic students who run and participate in the Korean Students Association Big Brother/Big Sister program at Tufts University and then partied with friends in the evening.  There’s another community party on our schedule for this Friday and we can’t wait.  (Keep your fingers crossed that it’s not cancelled out of snow-panic.)

Okay, I’d better wrap up this post now; Dinosaur Train is almost over.  I’m supposed to be working on an article today, but I’m skeptical.  If only it would snow, I could stuff Jack into his snow bib and jacket and send him out to play.

And as for you folks in the mid-Atlantic: go ahead, take your best shot at the New Englanders who looked down our cold noses at you over the past two weeks.  It turns out we’re snow wimps after all, and we deserve it.

Oh, Mid-Atlantic, I feel your pain.  No, really, I do, because I lived almost half my adult life in the D.C. area and I know what happens when it snows there.  It’s not pretty.  School superintendents’ fingers begin hovering above the “No School” button as soon as there are rumors of incoming flakes.  A quarter-inch of accumulation means that you take your life in your hands every time you drive your car.  (If you learn nothing else from all this snow—once it’s plowed—remember this: for the love of God, DO NOT SLAM ON THE BRAKES when you start to skid.)  Things have improved a lot from the days when I worked on Capitol Hill and a few inches were enough to shut down the government—I have very fond memories of sledding behind the dormant, snowfall-hushed Capitol on trays we borrowed from the U.S. Senate cafeteria when all but the hardiest souls were wrapped in blankets in their group townhouses—but three feet?  OMG.  I hope you made it back from Giant and Safeway with lots of toilet paper, bread and milk and are right now nice and warm in your living room or kitchen, trying to pacify your restless kids while you figure out what to do with your time given that nothing but last year’s transportation hearings are being shown on C-Span.

One thing you can do if the roof of your house is not well-sloped is get out on the roof and shovel off the snow.  No, I’m not kidding.  We do it all the time up here.  Being trapped in your house for a few days is one thing.  Having to dig out from a roof cave-in and replacing the roof and everything in your house once spring comes is quite another.

Of course, as my New England readers know, the irony of this situation is that we wouldn’t mind a little snow up here.  The half-inch we got yesterday was nice in that it covered the large, brown patches, but it doesn’t really make for good sledding and skiing.  None of those nor’easters that took out the mid-Atlantic have shown their faces in the real northeast.  And while I’m not exactly complaining, the whole thing does seem a bit weird, doesn’t it?

(Yeah, I know.  Local friends, when we get pounded in late April, you can blame me for tempting fate.  But maybe Pat’s Peak will give me a complimentary pass for a day of tubing?)

Given that we northern New Englanders are being deprived of our usual tools for winter entertainment of the kiddos, it’s fortunate that this weekend brings with it a host of non-snowy opportunities for fun.  It’s a crazy weekend in our observe-everything-we-can household.  It’s Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year and the beginning of the Winter Olympics all at once.

Let’s dispense with Valentine’s Day first, as this is the member of the trio about which I am least enthusiastic.  The kids picked out cheap Valentines for their classes at Target, I pasted their butts to chairs to get them to fill them out, and today or tomorrow they will bring them to school and trade them in for a couple of dozen other cheap Valentines and bags full of candy to contribute to an early onset of tooth decay in my eight-year-old son’s emerging adult teeth.  Yeah, Valentine’s Day is overrated.

On to Lunar New Year, known in Korean as Solnal.  If you’ve heard of Chinese New Year or the Vietnamese Tet, this is the same holiday.  It’s one of the two biggest Korean holidays and one we celebrate at home.  We’ll attend a thematic party or two, and four-and-half year old “Emmie” will show off her new hanbok (traditional Korean dress) at each of them.  I’ll make the traditional duk guk (rice cake soup; Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee’s recipe in Eating Korean is awesome).  We get to spend time with friends and eat terrific food; what could be better?

And as if that weren’t enough for one weekend, we’re getting all excited about watching the winter Olympics.  My kids weren’t old enough to appreciate the winter Olympics four years ago, and here are my predictions: Emmie will be enthralled by the figure skating, and eight-year-old “Jack” will pronounce ski jumping to be the coolest thing he’s ever seen, seconded only by luge and skeleton.  And my husband will make us watch curling.  (Please let curling only be broadcast when I am sleeping.  Oh, damn, we have a DVR.)

Also, because I am a geek, we’re going to turn the opening ceremonies into a fun learning opportunity.  (Oh, quit your groaning.)  We dined on Chinese food on the floor of the living room while we watched the Beijing ceremonies last time; this time, I’ll be making salmon, wild rice and Nanaimo bars.  We’ll find Vancouver on the globe, maybe put together a North America puzzle, and ring in the Olympics in style.  Because that’s the kind of family we are.

One more thing: I hear Vancouver is actually hurting for snow.  So D.C., Baltimore and Philly folks: if you could just send a foot or two of your fluffy, white stuff up their way, they’d really appreciate it, eh?

By now, everyone who isn’t living under a rock has heard about the American group from the New Life Children’s Refuge that was arrested trying to whisk thirty-three alleged orphans out of Haiti following last month’s devastating earthquake.  The Haitian government is furious and has charged ten of the Americans, who admit they did not go through official procedures or assemble the required documentation, with kidnapping. 

The missionaries claim that they were just trying to do the right thing.  But as it turns out, many of the children they tried to bring across the border into the Dominican Republic aren’t orphans at all.

Child trafficking in international adoption is nothing new.  To put it in cold terms, there is a market in developed countries for babies.  Where there is a potential profit to be made, there will always be callous individuals who try to operate outside the official market and ignore human suffering in order to rake in cash.  Dishonest people see the large amounts of money prospective parents in developed countries are willing to pay in order to bring home a son or a daughter, and they want in on that financial action. 

Perhaps the most squeamish aspect of international adoption for some adoptive parents is the nagging fear that despite all best efforts on their part to do the right thing, someone in the chain of people who ultimately connected them with their child was dishonest and as a result, their child really wasn’t an orphan at all.  Most adoptive parents couple their own need for a child with a desire to give a home, a family and love to a child who otherwise would not have these things.  The idea that somewhere along the line, some bad actor might have intervened to steal or buy a child from someone who never wanted to give up that child in the first place makes most adoptive parents cringe.

Many people decry the amount of paperwork and fees that change hands in international adoption.  There is much criticism that the amounts of money are too high and make trafficking attractive, and that the paperwork is too onerous for people who simply want to open their homes to a needy child.  I’ll grant that some of the fees may be exorbitant and in some places, portions of the money that changes hands really are bribe money.  These are imperfect processes that ought to be fixed.  But overall, the fees and paperwork exist for a reason: to support a tightly run, carefully executed process whereby every child adopted is known to be an orphaned child or a child knowingly surrendered by a parent who believes that she cannot be mother (or father) to that child.

Haitian officials are right to prosecute the Americans who, whether or not their hearts were ever in the right places, chose to bypass rules and regulations meant to ensure that every child adopted out of Haiti was truly eligible for adoption.  We may not like the red tape, but laws are there for a reason.  Even in a time of national crisis—perhaps even more then—children and their biological parents need protection.  Adoptive parents need this certainty, too.

We can complain all we like about bureaucracy—and I certainly did my share when I was dealing with it—but government requirements are necessary to ensure that when we adoptive parents open our arms to our children, we are welcoming into our hearts children who can truly and legitimately be called our own.

I’ve blogged a fair amount lately about conversations we need to have with our kids.  We need to talk to them about how babies are made and when we think it’s okay to have sex.  We need to warn them about drugs and equip them to make good choices when they’re faced with tough situations.  We need to educate them about racism, sexism, anti-name-your-religionisms, homophobia and a myriad of ways human beings seek to devalue other human beings.  There is a world full of dangers out there, and as parents, we need to swallow hard and talk to our kids to prepare them as best we can for whatever they may encounter.

Some of these conversations, however, are so distasteful that they make you feel guilty just for having them.  All of the topics I mentioned above are tough, but none of them left me feeling so repelled or so sad as the talk I recently felt compelled to initiate with eight-year-old “Jack” about staying safe when going into a public men’s room on his own.

Up until now, I or my husband has always accompanied “Jack” into public restrooms.  He still comes into the women’s room with me, and frankly, no one has ever looked at us twice; most people understand the world we live in.  But when Jack turned to me in a nearly deserted toy store in our quiet town at 8:30 on a Saturday evening and said he had to use the restroom, it seemed foolish to insist he use the women’s room.  We were standing next to the men’s room, no one was around, and Jack hasn’t required assistance in the bathroom in years. 

“Go ahead,” I said.  “I’ll wait for you right here.”

Jack walked through the men’s room door, and I realized that we had just turned yet another corner of both his childhood and my parenthood.

When Jack emerged a few minutes later, I drew him to a corner of the store.  “Jack,” I said, “You’re getting old enough to go into some men’s rooms by yourself now.  So we need to talk about being safe, because,” I stopped and took a deep breath, “because sometimes bad people go into public bathrooms and they look for boys so they can do really bad things to them.”  I felt like I’d just taken Jack’s innocence, wrestled it to the ground and now knelt above it, my dagger aimed at its heart.   

But I had to keep going.  I reassured Jack that most people will only be interested in their own business.  But some people have darker intentions, and you never know who those people are.  I specified that he should never let anyone touch him, especially in his private areas, and that he should try not to speak to anyone at all in a restroom.  I told him that he should immediately get away from anyone who made him feel “weird,” and that he should have no compunctions about yelling if someone refused to leave him alone or made him uncomfortable.  And I assured him that if he shouted my name, I wouldn’t hesitate to barge into a crowded men’s room to answer his call.

Jack nodded at everything I said and told me that yes, he understood.  But what made this conversation so difficult was that I knew he really couldn’t comprehend the horrors from which I was trying to protect him.  His mind immediately moved on to Legos and soccer balls, and he bounced off to meet his father and sister at the front of the store.  But I felt like staying behind and crying, or at least taking a shower to wash off the filth that was the reality to which I’d just introduced my son.

I’m blogging about this nastiness because I know how tempting it is not to talk about it with your kids.  No caring parent wants his or her child to find out the worst things that can happen.  But it’s our responsibility to recognize those shifting moments when we must educate our kids at the expense of their innocence. 

I can’t know, of course, if I picked my moment correctly or if I said the right things.  I can only hope that I did and continue to be alert for the next time Jack needs to know an unpleasant truth.  I can feel sick about it later, but it’s my responsibility to ignore that feeling and do what is best for my kids. 

As parents, that’s all—and everything—that we can do.