Hello my Blogville friends, welcome back. I hope that you are looking forward to what 2024 will bring. Today I am sipping on a simple orange pekoe tea, with milk of course, as I reflect on past travel experiences and consider how it might be fun to share some of them with you. (Stepping away from the adoption theme for a moment.) Heck, its a new year, why not?
So while travelling in Southern Ontario this past summer a small group of us ordered, then pulled up to the drive-thru window at a Tim Hortons location to pick up and pay for our order. It so happens that we drove up just as a staff member was trying unsuccessfully to put a commercial-sized milk bag into its container which appeared to be quite the challenge. Noticing the struggle, her colleague took over (with a little heroic swagger I might add) and started fitting the milk bag into the large container. From the drive through window we had a perfect view as the events unfolded inside the restaurant. Coming over to the window, obviously still flustered, she tried to give us someone else’s order. Just as we were repeating our order for her we watched, mortified, through the pickup window as the milk bag literally exploded, sending milk everywhere. The ‘hero’ colleague was simply standing there in shock (and covered in milk) while a third employee quickly grabbed a mop and bucket to help the other two staff members with the massive clean up. Once the bulk of the mess was mopped up, the third employee finally comes over with our drinks and apologizes for the delay. He tries to explain that they had a little accident, to which we say, “yes, we saw”. He looks into our vehicle and quietly says, ‘and I wet my pants’ pointing down to them. Despite how he had phrased it, we knew he meant from trying to help out with the milk disaster, not that he had actually ‘wet’ his pants. We are also pretty sure that, in the middle of the night, this young man woke up reliving the milk disaster and suddenly realized that he had told a truck full of customers at the drive through window that he had wet his pants! On another day of this same trip our group decided to go into a Starbucks, yes folks, don’t tell Tim Hortons but sometimes I have a chai latte (with cinnamon of course) from Starbucks. Anyway, I am about to go and use the washroom when someone in my party warns me, “it’s one of those washrooms where you have to push the red button to lock the door”. I’m not that old yet, I think to myself, a little offended. I was able to lock the door uneventfully as per the instructions written under the big red button. However, as I sat there I suddenly looked around and realized there are no clear instructions about how to unlock the door! I remember thinking, “Oh no, how will I get out?” Okay, maybe I am that old after all. Anyway, I finish my business and use the provided bottle of soap to wash my hands. No taps on the sink means it is one of those designs that I have to wave my hands in front of the sensor in order to rinse the soap off of them. However, no matter how much waving I did, no water appeared. So, just out of curiosity, I reach over to the hand-wave-activated dryer. Nope, nothing. A power failure perhaps? No, the lights are on. Anyway, I grab some toilet paper, wipe the soap off my hands, and then finish cleaning them with soap from the little hand sanitizer container that I always carry with me. Reaching over with the rest of the toilet paper I pushed the red button to unlock the door. Nothing. Oh no, I’m trapped. Trying not to panic, I take a deep breath and try the handle, the door opens. Crisis averted, I’m free! In the meantime, my husband has been waiting patiently for his turn to use the facilities, so as we trade places in the tiny hallway I warn him that neither the water or the hand dryer work. “Just use your hand sanitizer”, I offer helpfully. With a questioning look on his face he steps into the washroom a little further, reaches over, activates the water effortlessly, then reaches up and dries his hand by activating the dryer. What the heck? Apparently I’m invisible. So I flippantly add, “oh and you don’t need to push the red button to unlock the door, just to lock it”. He gave me a rather sarcastic-looking ‘thanks for the tip’ expression as the door was closing. I hope you have read in a previous blog my adventures during multiple hotel stays in one trip so that you are aware how adventurous my trips tend to be. Recently we stayed at a Northern Ontario hotel where one of the rooms was being used like a waiting area, while another room was occupied by a white haired, white coated fellow who really, really looked like a doctor. Clip board in hand, a young woman was moving between both rooms escorting folks from the “waiting room” to the room occupied by the white coated gentleman. An elevator repair man and I were speculating that maybe folks were selling organs or something when he asked the young lady with the clip board what was going on. She pleasantly replied that a Southern Ontario hospital was holding a pre-surgical clinic for Northern Ontario residents. Who knew? I mean, it goes practically without saying that our room was located between the ‘waiting room’ and the ‘clinic room’. The sound of frequently opening and closing doors is still much less noisy than hotel hallway hockey practice, or having any hotel room adjacent to the pool area! When we returned home from our trip we of course needed some groceries. Exhausted after a full day of travel we stopped off at a local grocery store where we picked up a few basic supplies, eggs, milk, and such just to get us through the next couple of days. Then we headed for the nearest open checkout lane. At one point in the transaction I held up my phone for the the young cashier to scan my points card to which she said, “oh that one doesn’t work here” with a knowing grin. Confused, I looked at my phone and saw that it was my Tim’s points card app, not my grocery points card app. Just as we were awkwardly laughing at my error, the 6 potatoes I was purchasing suddenly flew out of the little plastic bag, and rolled across the conveyer area, one or two of them even hitting the floor. The young cashier and my husband located and gathered them all up. The cashier reached under her counter and handed my husband a new bag. They got the potatoes re-bagged and my husband closed the knot with a final tug, picked up the bag and the potatoes immediately flew everywhere again. I literally laughed out loud at the scene. Together they repackaged the potatoes, this time using a double bag approach and we were on our way. As I looked back she was still grinning and I imagined her thinking she did not get paid enough to work there. I hope you enjoyed a lighthearted blog in an effort to help you start 2024 with a smile! As ever, please feel free to leave a comment, so I know you stopped by, or if you have more private questions or thoughts please feel free to send me an email at ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com Please be assured that no one but me can access my emails. All the best in 2024!
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Greetings to all my blog readers who celebrate the upcoming Christmas holiday and to those who do not. I’m currently sipping on a candy cane hot chocolate as I compose a special brief, gift blog for you.
Christmas is a time that we think about gifts. Birth parents have given the gift of life. For many reasons, birth parents sometimes select an alternative plan for their birth child. They may have a relative that can give baby the love and care of a kinship family. When they do not, they may consider adoption. Adoptive parents have known grief and heartache. Rising up from the depths of their loss they realize that a child that is already born, or soon to be born, needs them, and answer that call, offering the gift of their love. Their adoption journey has begun, and it is often a challenging road to becoming parents. Newborns, children, and youth, born to unprepared birth parents have known loss. There is a trauma seed that has been planted in them, and their individual and unique life experiences determine its rate of growth, or can even render it dormant. Kinship and adoption families offer love to mitigate the impact of their loss and trauma. Everyone in each of these scenarios has something to share, and that is the gift of love. ❤️ Love gives birth parents the strength to look at the needs of their children above their own. ❤️Love gives adoptive and kinship parents the strength to give children a family. ❤️Love gives children the knowledge that they have two families, birth and adoptive/kinship. ❤️The love of family is the best gift of all! Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. 🎄 ‘See’ you all next year. Welcome back to Blogville everyone, thanks for joining me in a hot beverage, for me a lemon ginger tea, and another dose of my thoughts. Today’s thoughts are about assumptions in adoption. It seems commonly felt that a part of one’s identity is looking like their family members. Often in my life I felt that people would tell me how much I looked like my mom as a way of reassuring me that being adopted didn’t ‘show’.
This type of attitude is often a challenge for me. When one does not physically resemble their adoptive family members, as is usually the case in intercultural adoptions, it seems to inspire comments from others. Even when it is a cultural match, it still seems to welcome comments from others. This brings out many emotions for me as the comments are often confusing for young children. There are people who actually look like their dogs but you don’t hear people saying, ‘wow your German Shepherd has many of your features, the breeder did a great matching job!’ As an example, take the person sitting on a bench at the mall, relaxed, and just people watching. Say they see a child of Asian descent come out of a book store with their Caucasian parent. Seriously, you can literally see the little smile of approval as they silently applauding that Caucasian adoptive parent for ‘saving’ that poor Asian child. Silently they watch that parent/child interaction and think how hard, and expensive, it must have been to have gone through an international adoption. The bench sitter smiles and is just about to comment, likely words of praise for having ‘saved’ this little child, when the other parent comes out of the book store to join them. Suddenly the bench sitter realizes that the child’s other parent is of Asian descent. So many people still “judge that book by its cover”. For example, when people see a mixed race family they automatically assume ‘adoption’. Not only adoption but what I call, ‘good deed adoption’. I believe people think of International adoption as some kind of humanitarian mission instead of simply as a way to grow their family. Personally, I don’t think these internationally adopted children feel like they have won some kind of prize, or family lottery. I think they not only feel the loss of their birth parents, but also the loss of their birth extended family members, and additionally, they likely feel the loss of their entire country. Imagine, thinking no one in your whole country wanted you or could look after you. Interestingly, when your skin colour matches your parent’s skin colour you are not immediately recognized as an adopted person. I remember people telling me how much I looked like my mother, and that the agency had done a great job matching us. I hate to break it to people but physical resemblance is not necessarily a consideration when matching children and adoptive families. I also hate to be the one to inform folks that, in my personal case, the worker simply called my mom, gave her my age and gender, and asked her if she would be interested. To the best of my knowledge, no photos or physical descriptions were exchanged between the agency and my prospective adoptive parents prior to meeting my new mom and dad. The first time my mother laid eyes on me was on the day the worker dropped me off, had lunch, and left to drop off another child with another family. I think you would be surprised to learn how many people think that workers try to disguise a child’s status as an adopted person by making sure they look as much like their adoptive family as possible. That simply is not true. In my career as an adoption worker, I have worked with many birth mothers who actually looked for qualities in prospective adoptive families that were opposite to the type of family they grew up in. For example, a birth mother who was raised as an only child will sometimes only consider families that have an existing child. They might only consider families who are active, or families who like to travel, and even families where the mom does not work outside of the home. Personally, I have never had a birth mother ask me to look for adoptive family where the child will grow up looking like the adoptive parents. Sure, things like skin colour might be considered by birth parents, but in my experience they just wanted to make sure their child did not ‘stand out’ as having been adopted. Older children who are being considered for adoption have the opportunity to make a ‘wish list’ of the type of family profiles they would like to consider. Their wish lists often included things like if the prospective families had pets, if they had other children, what they liked to do for fun, if they liked music, or if they knew how to play checkers. In my experience these children and youth were not worried about looking like their new parents, they were more focused on being accepted by them and by how they would have fun as a family. Sometimes it was as simple as whether or not they would have their own room or whether or not there would be someone there when they got home from school. I have never met a child or youth whose wish list included, ‘I don’t want to look adopted’. Realistically, there are many examples of people’s judgement of families in general, not just adoptive ones. For example, I’ve heard things like, “I don’t know what happened to her, born to a family of musicians and she is tone deaf.” Or “Funny how he is the only kid who enjoys participating in sports in that family.” Having been in their shoes as an adoptee, when I was preparing children and youth for adoption placements as a worker, I would let them know that everyone has an opinion about families in general, and especially about kinship and adoptive families, but that the only opinions about their adoption and their adoptive family that really count are their own. I hope it helped prepare them for the people who are judgmental and opinionated in our society, being adopted can be hard enough. Thank you for joining me today in Blogville, it makes me so happy when you drop by. Please feel free to leave a comment here, or send me your comment privately through my email, ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com ‘See’ you next time. Welcome back to Blogville my friends, thanks for joining me today. I am drinking a lovely Caribbean Chai tea as I write today’s blog. I’d like to offer a warning to gardeners out there as this is a story about carrot failure/success (lol) but it is also much more about what I learned. I have a half barrel in my front yard that came from my husband’s family. For generations this oak barrel held many wines made by his grandfather, his uncles and his father. Sadly, just like many other traditions, these activities have been lost as these family members left us. Those are incredible family memories for my husband, so, many years ago when we moved into our then new home, my neighbour kindly cut one of those barrels in half for us. I repurposed the barrel by filling it with soil and starting a new tradition; experimenting with planting different seeds in my new ‘garden’. My father, an avid gardener, thought this experiment was not only hilarious, but destined to fail. When I planted purple potatoes I thought my dad would fall over laughing, that is until I sent him pictures of my fall harvest. Sure there were only 8 or 10 of them but they were healthy and pretty good sized. Each spring he started asking what the big experiment would be this year. After dad passed, I would think of him every time I planted, tended, and harvested (most of the time) something new I had tried growing in the barrel. Lately, my young granddaughter has been helping to choose the ‘crop’ and prepare the barrel to plant seeds. It is wonderful how she takes each tiny seed in her little hand and places it gently into the soil. Each time she visits she looks in the barrel to see if there are any new sprouts. If an errant ball, frisbee or badminton birdie launched by her brothers or cousins happens to land in the barrel, the guilty party is given her best stink eye and a warning to be more careful. She will then rush over to make sure all is well in the barrel. This year we planted heritage carrots, the multi-coloured ones, in our barrel. They really weren’t doing well and as she inspected them she found the ones that were growing, were only growing on one side of the now somewhat tipped barrel. She inspected the carrot tops and suggested to her grandfather that the barrel was ‘too tippy’. So my husband and our young grandsons heaved and pushed and finally lifted that barrel until she and I were able to shove an old patio stone under the sinking side of it. She inspected the crop, and announced that things should be better now. In all actuality carrots should be planted in a garden, not a half-barrel, if you want them to do well. So what did we find at harvest time the other day? We found 16 of the tiniest carrots I have ever seen. The biggest one was just the size of my palm and the smallest, just slightly bigger than my thumbnail. What did my granddaughter see? As she pulled each one up she marvelled at it’s colour, she had never seen a yellow carrot! Or a red carrot! She was enamoured by the fact that they were the tiniest, most colourful carrots she had ever seen. Her narration of the size or colour of each carrot that she pulled from that soil reflected a pride in her crop that only a child could feel. I noticed that when she plucked the first carrot, with the excited vigour of a young child, and saw how tiny and fragile it was despite the large green foliage above ground, she immediately reigned in her harvesting technique and began tugging ever so gently and with such care. It was incredible to see that level of caution from such a young child based solely on what she thought the carrots needed. It was a proud grandmother moment for sure. As I watched her caring for, and then harvesting her little crop so carefully, I suddenly thought about adoption and that barrel. The ‘natural’ place for carrots to grow is obviously in a garden, but I saw in my granddaughter great pride in what these little carrot seeds had achieved while living in a different environment than most carrots. When I witnessed the love and care my young granddaughter invested in these little carrots, I felt it was much like the love and care my adoptive parents gave to me, and it was enlightening. Since the carrot seeds weren’t planted in their ‘natural’ environment, she instinctively felt they needed extra care and attention; just like children in adopting or kinship families. We need to stop telling adoptive parents that they should raise their adoptive children ‘as if born’ to them, because the truth is that they were actually born to another set of parents. Instead, we should simply advise adoptive parents to do their best raising their children, and like all families before them, seek support from their extended family and their community because parenting is a tough job. There is much research today about the negative impact of adoption on the adoptee. While I concur with much of the research, and agree in principle about the impact, I also wonder about the impact of not having been adopted. If adoption didn’t exist, I might have grown up in foster care or group care, eventually aging out and being abandoned by the ‘system’, much like the unplanted carrot seeds left behind in the the little packet. Though the trauma of adoption has stunted my emotional growth in many ways, my parents always took great pride in who I am and in what I could accomplish, just like my granddaughter is proud of her little carrots whose seeds she rescued from a little packet and gave them a chance at life. I believe that so many feelings of self-worth and self-image are impacted, even mitigated, not by how you were valued when you were born, but by how you were valued by those who nurtured you. As always, your comments are welcome here, or by sending me an email at ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com. ‘See’ you next time. Welcome back to Blogville, will you join me in a green tea as you read today’s blog post? I’m so glad you are here.
Question for adoptive parents. When you notice the child you have adopted examining your face, do you assume that they are examining your face and imagining what their birth parent’s face might look like? I suggest that you not assume they are looking at the differences between your face and theirs. They may actually be examining the similarities. Remember, even children of a different culture than yours typically have two ears and two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a forehead, cheeks, and a chin, just like you do. These features may look very different or very much the same as yours. I suggest asking children to identify what is the same between the two of you, and what is different. If a child has dark skin and you are very pale-skinned, they are going to notice. If you try to tell the child you actually have the same skin, just different shades of it, they may find that confusing. Talk with them about the differences in your skin. After all, their brown eyes and your blue eyes are different for a reason, their hair may also differ from yours, along with their body type, height and weight. These differences exist because they have been adopted. Talk about that. Your child will recognize and identify your face simply because it is the face of their parent; the parent who tucks them in, reads them books, tells them “no”, and takes care of them. Is that not the most important recognition? Sure, they may wonder why their face is very different from yours (if it is), but parenting is not about looking the same, it is about being recognized and identified as their parent. Children may look more like their birth parents, especially in the case of intercultural adoptions, but when they look at your face, they know. They can see who you are, more importantly, who you are to them. Even children who maintain contact with their birth family members know who their parenting parents are. Most children at one time or another fling angry words at their adoptive parents when they never, or rarely, do this with their birth parents. This usually happens simply because they know they can risk sharing their frustrations and feelings with you, and that, no matter what, you will still be there for them. I remember as a child and then as a youth always being physically compared to someone in my adoptive family. Mom would say that I was tall like my dad, or like her mother. My dad would simply say I was tall for my age, then, without thinking it through, would sometimes say I looked like a ‘hockey stick with hair on it’. Yeah, go ahead and cringe, I know I did. My dad tried to navigate uncomfortable things with humour. My mom, I think, was just trying to make me feel like I belonged. I think she truly believed that if I thought I looked like someone in my adoptive family, I would not try to shake my birth family tree. I think she was just trying to make sure I felt like I belonged. How I remember it is just having a strong sense of wonder. I would wonder if I looked more like my birth mother or my birth father. If I passed them on the street, would I recognize them, I wondered. I would look with interest at people in my school who looked even the slightest bit like me and wonder; Did their mother have a baby before them with another man? Did their father make someone else pregnant before he met their mother? Could they be a half-sibling to me, or maybe even a full sibling? This wondering had nothing to do with loving my adoptive parents and everything to do with simple curiosity. So many adoptees today are spared that wondering. They may have actual pictures of birth parents and other birth relatives in a life book that was gifted to them in the adoption process. They may have contact with birth relatives with whom they can compare their likenesses and differences. I think that it would have been pretty neat if that could have happened for me. Who I looked like may have helped me see into my future. When you are young the following questions can matter a great deal: Would I be tall, or slender? Should I consider athletics? Would I get bad acne in adolescence? What changes could I expect in my body as I grew into an adult? These are just some of the many things I had wondered about. That being said, I never had to wonder about the faces of my adoptive parents. I knew the shape of their faces by heart because I saw them every day as they parented me and helped me navigate through life. I knew the colour of their eyes, how they darkened when I misbehaved, and how they lit up with pride at my accomplishments. I knew that my dad was tall, and strong enough to carry me on his shoulders and that the world looked very far down when he did. I knew that my mother’s arms fit around me just right and that her hand always seemed to have a tissue there for when my heart was breaking. I knew that I was fair-haired while both of them were dark-haired but my mother often warned that their hair would get lighter as it turned grey from worrying about me. ‘No one knows a woman’s true hair colour anyway’ my dad would say. I would know their hands anywhere; I ran from them when I had misbehaved and I ran to them when needed help. My dad’s hand and fingers often gripped a pencil tighter and tighter as he tried to get me to understand math, an ongoing exercise in futility. My mother’s hands were always busy creating sweaters, hats, and scarves; her fingers deftly running the Singer sewing machine to create pants long enough for me so I didn’t look like I was ‘expecting a flood’. When I looked at my parents, all I saw was love. It never mattered to them that I was born to other people, I was theirs. It was their responsibility to turn me into a productive and kind human being. They took on that responsibility through paperwork, not labour and delivery, but they took that commitment very seriously. As an adult, through changes to adoption disclosure laws, I got to know the faces of my birth parents. I got to know the faces of my birth half-siblings. This information did fill in some lifelong gaps for me. My birth father was a very tall man, with blue eyes. My own face is reflected in the photographs of my birth mother, uncannily so in fact. But when you talk to me about my mom or my dad it is not my birth parents’ faces I see, it is the faces of the two people who shaped me to be who I am today, my adoptive parents’ daughter. Thanks for reading! As ever, I would love for you to share your comments. If you prefer a less public forum to do so please feel free to email me at ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com. See you next time. |
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January 2024
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