Growing Family

Tea Time

Last time we were in Nashville it was December. I had spent a long day out and arrived at a restaurant for dinner with a table full of my closest friends. As I unwrapped my scarf and coat, shedding layers like an onion, I turned to the waiter and said "would you please bring me a cup of tea?"

What could be better? A warm cozy restaurant, a dozen lovely friends to catch up with, the promise of tasty food and a good goss, all started with a strong cuppa to settle in?

The waiter looked at me, puzzled, "Tea? What kind of tea were you..." he trailed off, unsure. 

"Oh, any good black tea - "Lady Grey is my favorite, but Earl Grey, even English Breakfast would be fine."

He set off, as if I had asked him to fetch me an oompaloompa. 

He straggled back with one tired sachet of Orange Pekoe, and a cup of tepid water. "I found this in the back, will it work?"

Listen hear, dear people, tea can change your life!

It can be as fancy or as casual as you like, with caffeine or not, but the ritual of tea time is something worth building into your routine.

Australians have morning tea time and afternoon tea time, but you can drink tea all day long. The point is to stop, sit, and savor a ritual for at least five minutes. Tea time is the pause button built into our busy lives.

I see one main issue keeping Americans out of the tea market, and it is the electric tea kettle. Nearly every Australian kitchen will have an electric kettle on the counter top, ready to go at a moment's notice. You hear your neighbor walking up to your door? You pop the kettle on. You hear a friend's car door slam as they bring your kids home from school for you, you pop the kettle on. You have a tradesman in your house fixing something, you offer him a cuppa. Tea is the first step in hospitality.

Tea is the indicator of how long someone should stay when they drop in at your house. "I've just put the kettle on, would you like a cuppa?" means "set your things down, let's sit and chat for a bit." 

Tea is the best way to comfort a hurting friend. Many a troubled time has been talked through over a nice, sweet cup of tea.

There is a whole language surrounding how a person takes his or her tea. "White with one" means milk and one sugar...you get the idea. 

It may sound like an exaggeration, but there is very little in life that cannot be at least improved by a cup of tea. Personally, I drink herbal tea in the morning, and sweet milky black tea in the afternoon. Chai Lattes are reserved for when I'm out with friends, or on days where I really need comfort in a cup.

On a day like today, cold, rainy, with autumn colour showing, a thermos of tea is the best way to get me through ballet practice where the parents have to wait outdoors, under cover. 

How about you? Do you drink tea?

 

 

A Poem

May 5, 2013

To My Sleeping Foster Son

There is a tiny place, a detail of your composition,

where the intended heart distance fails me.

Your pink sherbert lips dip into a dimple,

tucked into the soft roundness of your golden honey cheek.

The dimple deepens when you fall asleep

in your carseat on a Sunday afternoon,

your lips loosened, fuller, like pillows after a shaking.

I wish I could love you warm and sleeping with sunshine on your hair forever.

You won't know me anymore, but my heart will always know you. 

 

Counting my Blessings

It is Mother's Day and today this line is echoing in my head "...if you're worried, and you can't sleep, just count your blessings instead of sheep. That way you'll fall asleep counting your blessings."

 

Today I am thankful for

The baby I carried and lost, who I believe I will meet in heaven.

My brilliant son, almost eight years old, and his family and our opportunity to love them too.

My resplendent daughter who amazes me with the depth of her kindness and generosity.

My shimmering towheaded little son, who stands taller than I, when I sit on my knees. He moves my heart.

My foster son who has stretched my life into new areas of grace, and who will have my heart forever.

My own mother who carries me, even from this distance, and who sculpted my life into a beautiful shape before I ever knew it. 

My father, who remains the pinacle of strength and entegrity in my eyes, through all life's seasons.

My husband - I still tear up in wonder, that I get to curl up at night with the most amazing man I know.

My darling sister who is bold, courageous, and beautiful.

My brother and his family, each one of them so unique and engaging, and adorable.

A family-in-law that is robust, joyous, and embracing.

I could list pages of thanks, sunny spots and cups of tea, a lovely home, and health all round, a fluffy pooch and loyal friends. My life is overflowing with goodness. I'm counting my blessings.

Russia, in my eyes at 14

This week my dad posted a video to my Facebook wall. Tender Moments Caught on Russian Dash Cams is a collection of videos from the dash cameras many Russians have mounted in their cars. My dad felt that the video was heartwarming, and many comments lauded the compassion and kindness of Russians. Watching the video did take me back, but to a different set of memories.

It was just about eighteen years ago that I landed in St. Petersburg, fourteen years old and wide eyed.

We first bunked with another expat family who quickly showed my mom the ropes. Finding food wasn't as simple as going to a grocery store. Rather, there were markets, and street peddlers and tiny wooden doors near your ankles where you knocked and then called in "white" or "brown," hoping bread was available. 

Our hosts left for a furlough and we were left in their apartment with lofty ceilings, and a view into the courtyard. 

One day I went with my mother to the market by the metro. I don't remember the stop now, but it was central. My mother would remember. 

We were shopping, rehearsing "2 kilos potatoes" in Russian under our breath, I'm sure. English was not an option, so the Russian we'd learned before coming, along with our charades tricks were all we had. 

I saw an elderly man reach out his hand and take an orange from a vendor's table, while the vendor was otherwise engaged. Or was it a youthful man? 

The vendor turned on him, as if he had a sixth sense for pilfering, and set to beating the old (young?) man viciously. The beaten man fell to the ground, and the vendor continued to punch and kick him where he lay. 

I was terrified. It was just an orange. I was just fourteen and had never been hungry. I was just fourteen and had never seen violence. I think there was blood.

Our diet consisted mostly of bread, Edam cheese (we collected the red waxy coating and formed it into people and sculptures, it softened with the warmth of our fingers), pasta, potatoes, and tomatoes. On the corners, near the metro, stood babushkas, shrivelled grannies with faces like wrinkled dates, and gnarled hands clutching forest-foraged berries offered in newspaper cones. Glassy red berries the size of coffee beans, with a translucent skin that popped a flood of tartness in the mouth. Plump raspberries always had one or two bleeding, crushed against the newspaper. In the winter there might be hazelnuts.

The newspaper cones held the most wonderful treats; they went down heavy in the stomach when I thought about that little granny taking the train to the countryside to search for them in the brambles, carrying them carefully home, to be my afternoon snack. 

Living in Russia was the first time I understood that it could be hard to live in the world. 

In the video you can see strangers helping the aged across the street. You can see strangers rescuing wandering, naked children, fallen invalids, and lost animals. I see a place where I first saw life in peril, and a thinning of the divide between life and death.

I am reminded of the pale grey light in winter, and the rain, and the immense snow and cold. I remember the crunch of boots under my casement window, and the last drunken songs ringing out around two a.m. before the street grew quiet. I remember hearing the stories, all winter long, of men falling into snowdrifts drunk, and never rising again, of homeless people, freezing in the snow.

I was terrified most all the time. I think that is okay.

I know there is beauty in Russia, and I saw that as well. Watching this video brought me back to that feeling of peril, of danger, of uncertainty, and how it looked and felt to my fourteen year old self. It is good to remember.

 

Hard Slogging the School Hols

Today is the last day of the autumn school holidays. I'm sure I've said it before, but I LOVE Australia's system of four terms broken up by holidays. Just about the time you think "I can't do another freaking DAY of driving the school run, it's holiday time!

In the last year I feel like I've finally figured out what I need to be my best self/mom/partner and even how to accomplish that with the kids home from school. Since I am an introvert, and I love people, I have learned how to pace myself to have time to recharge before being social again. During the school holidays that looks like not scheduling constant activities, and also enforcing an afternoon "quiet rest" time where I get 1-2 hours of alone time. 

Somehow, this school holidays, things seemed to go off the rails. One child got lice (and we know how much fun that is for a family of six, even if no one else gets infected!), three got seriously sick with a horrible flu that had a long incubation period. Just when you think "yes! we're clear!", someone else turns up with a fever and we're back in quarantine. We also had a friend and her son staying with us in the period of time between shipping the contents of their house, and leaving to return to Canada. 

Personally, I am in a season where I am battling some stress and anxiety, and we have had lots to do during the time we are meant to be relaxing.

So, yeah, we did some fun things. There was the camping in Kiama...one or two play dates (one that ended in a trip to the hospital for my poor friend M, with her daughter having a double break in her wrist from falling off a cubby house!). Somehow in the mix we lost track of the quiet rest time, and Finch has been in our room at night because he's sick. So, my sleep has been interrupted at night, and shortened with his early waking.

So, contrary to how I usually feel, I am relieved that the kids are returning to school in the morning. The holidays have felt very demanding, and I have felt ill-equipped to respond to everything on my plate. 

That's really okay, I'm not going to feel bad about it. We may not have had a glowing, stellar two weeks, but my kids got to play together, and enjoy doing some hard work with The Captain and I, and just having a break from the routine is good for them, I know.  I'm not going to get hung up on what might have been, but just be thankful for the break, and also for a great school and teachers to return to. If they had been sick during school, they would have missed a cumulative two weeks, so it's good that didn't happen. 

Elsa Walsh makes a good point in her article - I will embrace my "good enough life". Read the article, it is a good reminder that we don't need to be superhuman women, mothers, and in our careers, we just need to find a good enough balance that we will be pleased with when we look back on our life from the tail end of it. 

Living with Diversity (thoughts on Anzac Day)

Before we moved to Sydney in 2008, I spent a considerable amount of time wondering about what shape "diversity" would take in our lives here. I wrote about it here, and I still think the questions I had from that side of the move are valid. 

Our daily life turns out to be incredibly diverse, and I gave an example of that in this post. I wrote about one of my only negative experiences with a school here. Incidentely, that post was one of the only things I've written that someone really got upset over. Odd.

Five years in I think I can feel the nuances of issues surrounding race, ethnicity, and culture more than I could in the beginning. To oversimplify, I would say that in middle-class suburban Sydney, race doesn't matter. Culture is celebrated, and ethnicity is a non-issue. 

In America I feel like there is pressure for immigrants to surrender their cultural identity, or at least water it down significantly, in order to assimilate into American culture. Here it feels like maintaining cultural duality is encouraged (like my girlfriend who had an arranged marriage, and goes to all sorts of Sri Lankan balls and festivals, but is Aussie to her core). 

I've had a few experiences lately that I thought might illustrate how being part of a diverse community can take work, and we become responsible for living together or pulling apart. 

I am currently attending a group speech therapy program with B. The class is held at a community health center in Sydney's "most culturally diverse suburb". On the first day I noticed that I was the only anglo (white) parent attending. No biggie. English fluency was more of an issue. When we went around the room to share our reasons for attending, I had to really focus to understand the parents around me.

After a couple minutes I started to feel slightly annoyed that people kept talking while each person introduced themselves. "How rude", I thought. The talking didn't stop and it really started to bug me. To me, talking while others have the floor is really distracting and shows poor manners. After a bit longer I realized what all the talking was. Most of the parents in attendence had a translator talking in their ear, helping them understand things they weren't catching. Right then I had an opportunity to stop being annoyed and instead be thankful that there was access to translators for the families that needed them. How great is that? Still, each week, I have to be okay with the chatter that would otherwise irritate and distract me.

Another setting that continues to be an opportunity to be inclusive is school. Our school is very diverse. You can't tell by sight who speaks fluent english and who does not. While I have made some excellent friends at school, there are plenty of people I am friendly with, but where I have not pursued building a friendship because of a language barrier. It can be challenging to stop and chat with someone when you're not sure how much they understand of what you are saying, and the conversation topics are limited. Language really can play such a major role in the ability to connect, and I have to make a choice to engage with acquaintances where the conversation does not flow easily.

I have so loved living in Sydney in our circle of friends, where I am often in the minority, or where no two people in a group come from a shared cultural background. Sydney's inner west is so wonderful in that way. I like this climate of diversity where culture is celebrated, and yet race and ethnicity do not limit or define you. Most of the time things run incredibly smoothly, and sometimes I get to choose to do a tiny amount of work to maintain Sydney's strong welcoming spirit. 

 

Thinking About Adoption...Again

It has been a while since I've written much about adoption here. I have had a season of being disengaged from the adoption scene while having my head down parenting the children I currently have. Also, being in Australia, where adoption (especially international adoption) is so rare, there is very little to engage with in my local setting. 

Before adopting I was such an adoption advocate. I did hundreds of hours of volunteer work and internships at Bethany Christian Services. I read every book on their resource shelf, as well as everything I could get at the library, and buy on-line. I even wrote my senior thesis on transracial adoption. I was on discussion forums, and eventually I started this blog.

After adopting our son I changed my tune. Living with the daily awareness of the tandem reality of my son's mother's loss that resulted in my gain was so painful, and I felt such guilt for benefiting from her troubled circumstances. I saw in her loss, and I am witness in my son's life, how real the ongoing losses in adoption are.

As the pro-adoption message began to take root in the evangelical church, I found myself using my voice to speak on behalf of first parents, as best I knew how. I became an advocate for reform. I questioned everything. Then, we moved to Australia, and I became increasingly distanced from adoption culture (mostly centralized around American trends and practices, which outnumber all other nations).

This week I have read a number of things that have had me thinking. First there was Tara Livesay's piece Primum non nocere - First, do no harm. Without claiming to have the answers, she so bravely spoke out on behalf of women and families whose children are being adopted to families overseas. The thing about her piece that so resonated with me is how we, as prospective adoptive parents, can be so willing to come alongside and help a woman/family/nation in crisis if the end result is us getting a child, but if we have nothing to gain in the outcome, our dedication can become non-existant. I'll just leave that right there because it is challenging me in a very personal way and I need to chew on it for awhile.

Next was Kathryn Joyce's Mother Jones piece Orphan Fever: The Evangelical Movement's Adoption Obsession. Her story centers around Sam and Serene Allison, Nancy Campbell, and the Above Rubies magazine. The Campbells are personal family friends, my mother has written for Above Rubies, Nancy was at my wedding shower, I was at the welcome home luncheon our church organized for Sam and Serene's newly adopted children, and some of the Campbell girls continue to be friends of mine, so this story is very near to my heart.

Back in 2005 we had adopted Small Sun, and the Campbells were really starting to advocate Christians adopting orphans from war-torn Liberia. I was extremely concerned about a number of factors that I discussed with my mother, in hopes she might have opportunity to address them with Nancy. I felt that the types of adoptions many families were pursuing - large siblings groups, disrupting the birth order, older unrelated children, and severely traumatized children being added to already large families with little to no adoption training or resource or support was a recipe for disaster. I found myself, the die-hard adoption advocate, waving red flags right and left. I didn't want to squash their heart's response to help orphaned children, but I felt that there was not due consideration given to the actual reality of what adopting these children would mean. 

Luke 14:28 says "For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?" I've always felt that principle holds true for a family embarking on an adoption journey. Of course we can never fully know what life holds, but I think when we are talking about taking responsibility for a child's life, for the rest of ours, we need to do due diligence to count the cost. Research. Pray. Seek council. As best as we are able, we need to understand what we are undertaking and access whether or not we have the resource to do it well.

My other concern was purely an ethical one. How transparent was the process of adoption in a country in distress? 

I don't find the Mother Jones article to be offensive. To be honest, I don't know the true details of what happened in the Allison home. I do believe that from every level - personal, agency, and governing body, it should have been glaringly obvious that there was not enough training, resource, and support system to help those placements thrive. In my opinion, there were failures at every level.

We need the scrutiny of agencies to help us identify weak spots in our parenting resources. We need governing bodies to hold fast to what they deem is best for their nation's children. 

Jonathan Merritt pushed back against the Mother Jones piece with his opinion - Mother Jones’ shameful attack on the Christian adoption movement. I have to say, I found things to agree with here as well. Adopting a child from an institution is a very sacrificial thing to do. Of course the individual or family that does so benefits from having a child in their life. At the same time, parenting a child that has experienced neglect, trauma, or abuse, is a demanding task (I speak from my experience as a foster parent, as parenting my domestically adopted son was not characterized by the same effort as my foster parenting has been). Adoptive parenting is hard. Do people do it just because it's trendy in their church? I find that hard to believe. 

I don't have any answers. There is alot to think about, and maybe I'll get back to talking adoption around here a bit more in the future. We'll see. 

Gulping Beauty

Does anyone else crave natural beauty like a long drink of water? I find I need natural beauty to feed my spirit and my soul. I am restored by taking in a view, admiring the angle and intensity of the sun, feeling the texture of a leaf, and warm sun or wet rain on my skin. It nourishes me. 

Last weekend we went to Kiama, a little coastal town South of Sydney. I have been wanting to go there for ages. The landscape around Kiama is the closest thing to perfection I can imagine. Rolling green hills, dotted with grazing cattle, descend to wide, shallow beaches where the water is clear and azure.

Kiama, camping with friends, was just what we needed.

Month 9

Little B has been with us nine months now and it is really getting agonizing. The longer he stays, the more he is really family. The longer he stays, the more our hearts will tear when he goes.

When B came, he seemed stuck in a cycle of fight or flight that lasted months. His "resting" or normal state seemed to be fear and panic. Now we go longer and longer between upsets. Tonight there was no tantrum at all in the evening/dinner/bedtime routine. This is a miracle. 

B's language is finally developing, and after hard work in speech therapy and continual coaching at home, he is putting three words together. Tonight I heard "more cracker, Daddy" and I turned to face the stove as tears sprang to my eyes. He has to work SO hard to get those three words together, but for Daddy, he'll do it.

Today B saw a wedding picture where The Captain and I are walking, our backs to the camera, from a distance. He looked at it and said "Daddy!" He recognizes a distant strong shoulder as his Daddy, even though he really isn't. 

Attaching to a family is hard work. He has come so far. This is the hardest part. Giving and receiving love that cannot last. 

Happy Australanniversary

Five years ago today we stumbled off the Fiji Air flight where we had sipped guava juice for what seemed like a lifetime. 

I've told the story so many times. It is one of life's moments that freezes, like a snapshot, and does not fade over time. It is part of our family narrative, and I will keep retelling how the light was like vibrating neon, greener than green, in a southern spring thunderstorm as we left my parent's country home.

How we sat, wet and dishevelled in the air conditioned airport, with our beautiful lifelong friends. They might not have understood our need to fly away, but they wished us well all the same.

We had two children then. Small Sun, two almost three, and Sprout, still lacking hair in any significant numbers, and sucking three fingers together with her palm away from her face.

My mother came along to help us, and I am sure my dad cried as we left.

The layover in Fiji was bizarre, we stumbled into this new life.

You know how I cried in the car from the airport, luggage lost, terrified on the "wrong" side of the road, dismayed at the lack of apparent colour in the foliage, and the drabness of the suburbs. 

You may know that I thought we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. At our hotel I was unable to keep myself from falling asleep, crying on the bed, believing myself to be pitiful, but unable to hold back the dissapointment, leaving my husband and mother to care for my children.

The luggage was lost, so we made a bed out of cushions for Sprout in the corner. She was small enough to sleep on two pillows.

While I slept, my mother took stock, got us sorted, and found food, so that I woke up to a world less frightening than the strange one I had fallen asleep to. My mother, she is amazing.

Around 4 am the birds started calling, and in my jet lagged stupor, I truly wondered if there were monkeys in Drummoyne?

Day by day our circle widened, and has until this day, five years later when I sit, snug with a rug on my lap, and the rain misting outside, an Australian citizen who has never felt more at home than I do now.