UnchartedParent.com

If you are an adoptive parent, you know what this phrase means: “Gotcha Day.”

For the uninitiated, “Gotcha Day” is the name parents often give to the day that their adoptive child joins the family. Families often celebrate Gotcha Day much as one would celebrate a birthday, in part because birthdays can often be bittersweet for adopted children (or in some cases, just bitter).

The phrase is controversial in adoption circles, as evidenced in this article in Adoptive Families magazine written by a woman who finds the term “gotcha” more appropriate to use when killing a mosquito than in reference to the day her child came home. A quick perusal of the comments following the article shows a wide range of views from both lovers and haters of the word.

Personally, “gotcha” doesn’t work for me, and we don’t celebrate Gotcha Day in my family. When I hear the phrase, I hear an informality that doesn’t match the significance of my daughter’s entry into our lives as well as an implication of having captured a child. “Gotcha” to me sounds like something a child should either fear or hear upon being tagged by a friend on the playground.

I do not, however, take offense at people who do use the term. Different people approach words and phrases with different contexts, and if some people hear in the word “gotcha” only the loving embrace by parents of a child, I don’t harbor any objection.

Another popular phrase proffered to mark the day an adoptive child joins his or her family is, logically, “Family Day.” I like this one better, but it still, in my opinion, doesn’t fit my family. My adopted daughter is our second child, and celebrating “Family Day” on the anniversary of her arrival seems to imply that we weren’t a family until she joined us. Somehow, I don’t think my son would agree.

Celebrating the day our daughter joined us is complicated by practical matters, too. Should the anniversary mark the day my husband picked her up at the adoption agency in Korea and boarded a plane with her? Should it celebrate the day the wheels of the plane touched down on American soil a few minutes before midnight? Or should it commemorate the day my husband brought her down the jetway a few minutes after midnight and I got to hold her for the first time and whisper, “Hi, I’m Mommy”?

With all of this confusion, we have, up to this point, settled for celebrating both our children’s birthdays. Period. After all, we are thrilled that both of them were born, even if I only gave birth to one of them myself. But if “Emmie” someday needs something more, perhaps we’ll accommodate that in a way that suits our family. Maybe we will celebrate “Family Day,” but we’ll choose an arbitrary date to stand in for the joy we take in being a family every day (or on the low-whining days, anyway). After all, whatever term we use, whatever date we choose, the important thing is that however we got here, we are a family.

Well, Uncharted Parent and family made it back from our first-ever major road trip since now four-year-old “Emmie” came along. In all, I would rate our trip to Washington, D.C. a success—so much so that we’re thinking of repeating it next year. (I could, however, do with fewer screaming tantrums in the car and in the future, we will have to refrain from being such generous contributors to the D.C. economy). We escaped Mud Season in favor of a dose of true spring, my husband and I got to see friends and revisit old haunts and our children received an intensive introduction to our nation’s capital.

There are plenty of things from our trip I could blog about, but for this post, I’ll focus on the sights that left the biggest impression on seven-year-old “Jack.” Keep in mind that Jack is seven. And a boy. And seven.

What does Jack cite as his favorite part of the trip? What is he recounting with glee to his friends and his class at school? Was it the two Air and Space museums we visited, complete with spy planes, lunar landers and a Concorde? Was it the private tour of the east wing of the White House, the dinosaurs and insect petting zoo at the Natural History Museum or his first-ever, seven-and-a-half hour visit to a top-notch zoo? Was it our trip to the top of the Washington Monument or to the Jefferson, World War II and Pentagon memorials?

Remember, Jack is seven. Two events stand out for him as the highlights of our vacation:

1. The two “wild” ducks so used to being fed by tourists that they hopped up onto the paddleboat we rented at the Tidal Basin and kept us company as we pedaled along the water in front of the Jefferson Memorial (in fairness to Jack, this was very cute);

2. The cow at the petting farm at the National Zoo who urinated as we stood beside her, and her bovine companion who viewed this event as an opportunity to quench her thirst on a hot day. Yup, that’s right: as Jack will tell you between chortles, “One cow drank the other cow’s pee!” (No, I do not have a photo of this event to share.)

I told you, Jack is a seven-year-old boy.

At least I know he won’t forget our trip anytime soon.

Uncharted Parent and family couldn’t take a sixth straight April in northern New England, so we took advantage of the annual school escape—uh, I mean, vacation—week and drove down to our former home, Washington, D.C. Leaving aside the question of our sanity for embarking on such a road trip with four-year-old “Emmie,” who asks how much longer it will take to reach our destination when we drive from one town to the next at home, we’re thrilled to be in a place where spring is in full bloom in vivid pinks, fluffy whites and vibrant, vernal greens. It’s a welcome break from the brown mud that marks April at home.

This is, however, our first sustained period of time in a big city with Emmie and seven-year-old “Jack.” I’d always suspected that our children were blissfully sheltered growing up in a place where it is unusual to go about one’s business for an afternoon without running into someone you know. Now, with just a few days with the kids in Washington under our belts, we’ve confirmed what we believed: we are raising country mice.

It began when Jack began to ooh and ahh over the height of the “really, really big buildings” in downtown Washington. (If you’ve never been to Washington, D.C., there is a longtime ordinance in effect that restricts the maximum height of all buildings to a stature that would make the buildings in any other major American city laugh in derision.) It continued when we realized how deeply Jack suffers from cultural deprivation: we brought our paleontologist to the Museum of Natural History, which he enjoyed immensely, but he positively skipped with excitement at a nearby sculpture garden and gleefully pretended to accompany the buskers at the Metro stops with his invisible wind instruments and steel drums.

The most striking evidence of the sheltered nature of my children’s upbringing, however, came from Emmie. To translate the significance of our destination into four-year-old terms, we’d told her that we were going to visit the city where President Obama lives. But we didn’t expect the connection she would make between her president and the rest of the world. We were walking through a Macy’s near the Pentagon when Emmie spotted a dark-skinned, African American employee. She stopped in her tracks and stared at the man, then turned to her father and inquired loudly, “What color is Barack Obama’s skin?” (Fortunately, the man laughed at her.)

In some ways, our little northern New England existence is as idyllic as one can reasonably expect in the twenty-first century. We love where we live and for more reasons than we can count, we wouldn’t think of moving. But we can no longer avoid the truth: our little country mice need to get out more. From here on in, Uncharted Parent will be making a more concerted effort to get her kids out of their backyard and into the rest of the world.

I love spring.

It isn’t for the weather, to be sure. Here in northern New England, spring is more accurately called “Mud Season,” and April weather is variable enough that it’s still not safe to store our winter jackets.

There are special occasions we celebrate in spring, like my daughter’s birthday, Passover and Maple Sugar season (don’t laugh; this is a singularly New England tradition as well as a sweets-lover’s dream). We engage as a family in anticipatory reveries of summer, of long days in the park or at the beach, barefoot picnics in the backyard and being able to leave the house without donning four sets of snow gear over our sweaters and our fleece. But even those things aren’t what I’ve come to love best about spring.

For me, spring has become the time of inspiration, renewed resolve and an awakening that is akin to that of the bears who are now stirring not far from my backyard.

In spring, I’ve noticed, the words begin to flow like maple sap, words that must have lain dormant over the winter but that thaw and show themselves on my computer screen in ways that can surprise me. Two years ago, characters I’d never met introduced themselves to me as I took in the budding crocuses and daffodils in my new front yard, and I began writing out disorganized pieces of their story. Last spring, a months-long quandary about how to encourage that story out of the seemingly hopeless mess in which it was mired melted with the last of the record-breaking snow and a narrative was born.

This year, I’ve been frustrated over my apparent inability to immerse myself in this story for the limited pockets of time I have each day for my writing. Momentum has built for my fiction writing in only when I’ve had chunks time which last three hours or more, and as a writing mom with little kids, those large blocks of time have been as rare as a northern New England road free from frost heaves.

But spring, it seems, has come to the rescue once again. I may not feel spring in the cold bite of the wind when I step out of my front door, but I know it’s here because suddenly, I can write again. Without focusing on the problem, I’ve discovered a new way to achieve my momentum with the characters in the story I’m writing and a new ability to discipline myself to study and write in small chunks of time whenever I can grab them, every day. What seemed an enormous obstacle in March has melted away in April, and while I may not write brilliant thoughts for my characters every time I put fingers to keyboard—frankly, it’s a fair bet that most of them aren’t so brilliant—at least I know that now, the words will come, just like the warmth of spring.

Spring is a time for renewal, for emergence, for inspiration. This spring, I’ve found a way to make writing and parenting more compatible. What will you find?

If you are sick of matzah already, you are probably: a) Jewish, b) over the age of twelve and c) like most of the rest of us. (Also, you may be tired of sweeping under your kids’ chairs after every meal and monitoring their, ahem, input and output to avoid the annual Passover constipation.) It’s only been a few days, but a piece of toast would be oh, so good right now.

If you’re looking for a little variety, here’s a Passover dinner we discovered last year that is neither roast chicken nor brisket and is actually yummy: matzah pizza.

Yes, you heard me.

It’s ridiculously easy. Give each family member a square of matzah and spread on the jarred spaghetti or pizza sauce of your choice (basic is better here; lumps of tomato, etc., will just get in the way). Then let everyone pick from a selection of ingredients: thinly sliced vegetables like zucchini, peppers or onions; tiny broccoli florets, torn veggies like spinach or arugula or strips of meats like salami. Then sprinkle on your favorite cheeses; we used mozzarella and parmesan. Place on a cookie sheet in a 400 degree oven and bake until the cheese melts (about five minutes). Use a large spatula to transfer the pizza to plates and dig in.

For dessert, try a little Nutella spread onto your matzah. It had never occurred to me to use the chocolate-hazelnut spread during Passover before this year, but a friend turned me on to it and now I’ve consumed almost a whole jar already. (Uh, thanks?)

Bon appétit!

Holidays that center around food are my favorite, no matter which culture may be their source. Passover is no exception, and I’ve spent a good portion of my day today making dishes for tomorrow night’s seder. (Yes, I know, there’s that whole thing about being liberated from Egypt, etc., but be honest: what are you looking forward to more? The hours you’ll spend trying to get your kids to pay attention to the story even as you consider just how quickly you can skim over the Plague of the First-Born so that you satisfy religious obligation without giving your preschooler nightmares for a year? Or the gefilte fish, the matzoh ball soup, the brisket and the flourless chocolate torte that will follow?)

I’ve stolen a few moments away from the kitchen as my raspberry coulis cools (that’s for the chocolate torte) to write this post. So far, I’ve made four—yes, four—charosets for the seder. (For the uninitiated, charoset is a mixture of apples, nuts, wine and other stuff that symbolizes the mortar the Hebrew slaves used between the bricks they were forced to lay in Egypt.) I made a traditional charoset for the seder plate itself, but for dinner, I like to branch out and create different versions for everyone to taste. My favorite thus far is an Iranian charoset that includes bananas and cardamom; you can find the recipe at the Cooking Light website by clicking here.

New for me this year is a recipe I stumbled across on a blog called Mac & Cheese for Charoset truffles. The recipe seemed too bizarre to pass up. The results were impressive, and I had trouble finishing the truffles without eating every other one I prepared. I should note that I modified the recipe as presented because I didn’t have enough dates and I thought any charoset recipe ought to include apples in some form to be genuine. So I added approximately one-half cup of dried apple nuggets to make up for the date deficiency. As Mac & Cheese advises, you can vary the recipe in many ways to achieve a result that works for you.

Well, I’m done here. There’s a pot of raspberry coulis in the kitchen calling my name. If you’re Jewish (or if you hang out with Jews), enjoy the seder—especially the food.

I call it the Washington Post rule, but you can substitute the name of your local newspaper. Any name will do.

The point is that you need to learn it and live by it. Once your kids start surfing the Web and sending emails, you need to teach it to them, too.

What is the Washington Post rule? Just this: Do NOT write anything in an email that you don’t want to read on the front page of The Washington Post.

A soccer coach for girls ages six and seven in Scituate, Massachusetts is learning this lesson now, and it’s one he should have known all along. He sent an introductory letter via email to his team’s parents, one he claims he intended to be humorous. Even giving the coach the benefit of the doubt, the problem was that some of these parents didn’t know him at all and thus received his words without any of the context surrounding the coach’s writing. There is now a raging debate in Scituate about whether the coach is an offensive moron or merely misunderstood, camera crews and police are showing up at the little girls’ practices and the coach is a coach no more.

The lesson we can all learn from this debacle—if we don’t know it already—is that in a society where our most popular entertainment is personal confession and where we can instantly connect with millions of people around the globe, communication often feels anonymous. We post something on a blog or other website, hit the ‘send’ button on an email and never worry about it again. It’s quick, it seems fleeting and either we target a specific recipient or, often, we assume that because everyone else sends stuff out into the internet, what we put out there will blend into the sea of anonymity and never have individual repercussions for us.

But none of that is true.

Just because modern communication feels anonymous, that doesn’t mean that it is. When you send an email, you are sending it to people, all of whom will imbue your words with their own, particular contexts. Here is where the coach violated another basic rule of communication: know your audience. You wouldn’t tell that story about the first time you ever got drunk in the same manner to your best friend, your mother and your eight-year-old child, would you? You’d tell it to each of them differently, because the context surrounding your relationship with each of them is different. Well, the same principle applies via email. The soccer coach in our story didn’t even know some of the recipients of his email, so his sarcastic, alleged humor had to stand on its own, and it’s no stretch at all to understand why some parents found it offensive.

Furthering the lesson, emails can be forwarded and thus read by people the writer never intended to view them. They can also be—and who hasn’t done this at least once?—sent to the wrong person by a simple slip of the fingertip. When you send something out there, you have to be certain that you can live with the consequences of an unintended readership; in other words, you need to know that you can cope if what you write ends up on the front page of The Washington Post.

(A parallel lesson is that anything you post on the internet is NOT anonymous. Just ask all those interviewees who lost jobs because their potential bosses read their Facebook pages.)

As parents, we think about how to keep our kids safe as they are introduced to the online world. We know that there are scary people out there, and we need to teach our kids the rules for becoming part of the global community while they explore it. But maybe we parents need to take a few moments every now and then to examine our own communications habits and make sure we are employing sound judgment ourselves. You can skip that self-analysis, of course. Just assume that everyone will take your words as you meant them and that every tap of your keyboard will come out all right.

But then don’t be surprised if one day your bon mots turn around and bite you in the behind.