Good Bye National Adoption Awareness Month

This has been one long month! I had no idea going into National Adoption Awareness Month that it was going to be so looong!  Race, religion, genocide, human trafficking, pre-birth matching, pass out cards, 40% off clearance sales, Hague Convention, zealots… The message I would like to get out is that there are 1400,000 kids in the foster care system that need permanent homes.  They need support, time, honesty and respect.  All kids come with some issues, but the ones foster kids come with are no more insurmountable than their international counterparts and apparently more attractive competition by any means.    I have read a lot of great posts this month and I would like to thank al of my readers and my fellow post a day bloggers: The Daily BastardetteReal...

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What in God's Name?

So how is it that well meaning people get it so twisted up?  We have private adoption agencies offering up black children for adoption at a 40% discount, or as commenter Maryann pointed out 3/5 of the value of white children. (Anyone remember that from your High School History Class?).     We apparently have some people who feel like they are “forced” to adopt internationally because they can’t afford a domestic white child and do not want to adopt a lower cost black child. Some believe and I fear that what we have are some “racists” adopting cheaper black children.” It has been my observation that people who hold...

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Q & A Gym Mom to Gym Mom / Coach

This was a great question I got from one of my readers, it could have been written by me 10 years ago!  I decided to reprint it (with permission) because I think so many of us as parents have been in this spot ourselves. Thanks for the great question.   Hi !Here is my situation.  L is my gymnast.  Always has been very good motor skills, very, very physical and utterly fearless. She tried gymnastics starting last spring.  It was a class where the parent was the spotter, which made me more relaxed.  It also meant I could help her to remain focused.  I didn't really have to say much to do that, but I think my just being there did.  This fall they decided to move her up to a new level because she is ability wise beyond that class she was in.  but this...

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Race, Religion, Foster Care, Adoption, and Cultural Genocide 2

 The way I understand the evolution of lower adoption fees for black children is that initially it was meant to encourage black families to adopt black child with the assumption that adoption fees were prohibitive for blacks.  Some may find that racist and offensive with in it’s self.  My experience tells me that there is more “adoption”, foster care, and kinship care going on in the black community informally than the record may show.  As the same (black) family that took me in and “adopted” me as a teen and young adult had also taken in and raised a boy from down the street.  A good friend of mine lived with a woman...

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Race, Religion, Foster Care, Adoption, and Cultural Genocide

"I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation." ~ Malcolm X Over this past week during Nation Adoption Awareness Month, I have not only read things that have made me shake my head, but have straight up pissed me off!   Let me start off with this from Malinda at AdoptionTalk: Race-Based Adoption Fees, then on to this little gem that Cricket at out of the fog called to our attention:  “10 Days Left for National Adoption...

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Happy Turkey Day

This is my superfluous Thanksgiving what we are grateful for post. My DH is not playing along – at all. As I walked out the door to go to Sam’s Club today I asked the kids to please pick up everything off the floor and put it away while I was gone so I could mop.  I arrived home to discover a miracle had occurred in my absence.  Not only had the toys been picked up, but Mad had swept the whole house!  (I am also grateful that I can flush the toilet now.) When Mad saw me with the Thanksgiving dinner fixings she said “Thank god we get to stay home for Thanksgiving this year!”  (Yeah, I agree) I asked Amélie what she was grateful for and she said “Christmas”.  She is totally psyched; she has made 3 different lists today alone.    CoCo keeps saying “Kiss-miss...

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A Wild Ride

Malinda at ADOPTIONTALK posted this article The Truth about Adoption - it's a wild ride! by  parenting While on one hand it is good to see a realistic perspective on the truth about adoption, I was a little stunned that it kind of left the kids who are in foster care flapping in the wind again labeled as damaged goods and pretty hopeless. Here is the comment I left on the article:  “Oh, my I am not sure how to react to this article.  As a 40 something former foster child, I agree that dealing with foster children is not all “sweetness and light.”  However, as some one who still has a panic disorder and some PTSD, I think that caring for foster children is well worth the effort. At one point in my life the death poll had me “dead by 21”.  At 42 I am the loving...

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KIDS, not puppies!

I had run across a post by an adoptee who, in her search for her birthmother discovered that her f-mom had already passed away, this person wondered aloud if this might have saved her further pain and rejection.  I thought it was a valid pondering.  I have often thought I may have been better off to be truly orphaned rather, than thrown away. Even though I was never adopted I was purposely and intentionally abandoned by my parents.  My parents did not want to raise children anymore, at least not inconvenient ones.  They continue to reject me whenever it is convenient to them to this day.  That is not to say I would...

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Stretching My Limits

Not Me (but I am sure I looked JUST like that!) I love what I do for work these days…I coach gymnastics. I have loved the sport since I was a kid and my friends and I would do split contests – I always won. To this day I can’t pass a curb with hopping up and doing a little beam routine, maybe a little relevé walk, an arabesque, split jump and tuck jump dismount, not much I am in my 40’s. My own children find it amusing and the older two are afflicted with the same urge for balance, but then we are cut from the same cloth, after all. Today my gym kids were having a hard time with a beam skill so I hopped up and did it to show them....

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Acceptance

There is a lot to be said to say about acceptance.  In my life acceptance has often brought about miraculous change.  At about 22, after years of trauma and growing up in foster care, I had accepted that my life was a raging mess, it wasn’t fair, and I didn’t make it, but I was the only one left to clean that shit up, and things began to change. Once I had accepted that I could not allow myself to pursue a baby by “any means necessary” and that we would be ok with out one – I became pregnant. Two more times I gave up the thought of having another child, and look at me now, barfly turned old woman who lives in a shoe. For the past two years I have looked at my CoCo and thought something was just not right, and now that I know for sure that it is not, I find myself looking at her...

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Better Late Than...

I had today’s post idea all ready to go.  I had thought about it on the drive to work, I thought about it all the way home.  All I had to do was get the kids settled when I got home and I would be able to bang it out too quick.  That is if CoCo would cooperate.  She has been pretty clingy the last couple of days and just outrageously cranky and needy today.  With my other two that behavior would have made me think “Ahh, we are headed for a break through”, but not with CoCo.  With CoCo the anxiety set in, I checked the children’s Motrin stash before heading out the door.  Illness and fevers with her put me on supper double high alert.  …That was, until I walked in the door and saw my 2 year and 8 month old CoCo crawling!    Crawling all the...

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