In Which I Realize How Lucky We Are ~ by Jay

It's been ten days since we met Laura - ten days in which nothing has changed, and everything has changed.

When I started writing for this blog and was trying to find my voice, my anxiety about my (minimal) relationship Laura bubbled up to the surface and spread into my first post. I was scared, and I felt guilty, and I was stuck between what I thought I could tolerate and what I knew was right for my daughter. I read that post and I feel an overwhelming sadness; there is so much fear and projection in those words, and not a insignificant amount of arrogance, covering up the terror.

In the three years after I wrote that, Sam and I worked hard to get to where Eve needed us to be, to answer her questions honestly and sit with her while she struggled with her loss and her emerging sense of identity as a girl with two moms. In order to support her as she reached out for Laura, I had to grab hard onto my own sense of authenticity. Eve needs to know that Laura is her real mother, and in order to cope with that I had to develop and cultivate my own deep internal sense that I was real, too. It's not Eve's job to make me feel OK about my role. That's my job. I'm the grownup.

Bit by bit I faced the things I thought I couldn't face, the words I didn't want to hear from Eve, and the calls and Emails from Laura. I tolerated the anxiety and the discomfort every time Laura pinged me to chat on Facebook, and then it got to be too much and I blocked her. I made Sam answer the phone when her number showed up. But I was committed to arranging for Eve to meet Laura , and so I kept putting one foot in front of the other, convinced that it would be an agonizing afternoon and equally convinced that I had to do it.

And then there was no agony. There was no anxiety. There was no discomfort. There was just Eve, and Laura, and the rest of the family, and their joy in being together. Since that day, Laura has called more often and started to text me. I've unblocked her on FB and we chat almost every day. Tonight we used Skype for the first time and Eve insisted I be part of the conversation (she also insisted on trying to get the dogs to sit in front of the webcam. I was more cooperative). No anxiety. No fear. Just certainty that this is the path we were meant to walk.

I've recently started following links to blogs about open adoptions (starting with Dawn, who I've been reading for over a year), and I found Mama C and her boys. Today Mama C explained myself to me. She was talking about her shifting relationship with her son's first mom

I have made up so many stories about her judgments of me. And that stems really from my judging her.

As I said, in my comment, yes yes yes. So much judgment. So much fear of that judgment being turned around on me by Laura. I was feeling pretty good about where we are in this journey, and the way all our work has paid off...

and then I read Heather's piece. Beth, Heather's daughter's first mom, was planning a visit last weekend, and she ran into a lot of difficulty - some logistical and some emotional. I don't know if Beth ever got off the bus, and I am standing there with Heather holding those two little hands, worrying - and I am also myself, feeling incredibly, deeply grateful for Laura. Not just for the gift of Eve, but for her steadiness and willingness to wait for us and then to welcome us into her life, which must have seemed like a sudden change to her.

Yes, we worked hard, and yes, we are committed to giving Eve what she needs, but in the end we are mostly just astonishingly, amazingly lucky that Eve's first mother has the grace and emotional stamina to enter into this journey with us.

Last week Eve sent me an Email, the complete text of which read "I HAVE TWO AWESOME MOMS". Yes, Evie, you surely do.

The Way I Walk ~ by Tigermom

1.47 miles. 26.53 minutes. Modern Family episode "Unplugged."

Tigerdad says, "There is always 30 minutes for a walk."

No Walking Today ~ by Tigermom

No walking yesterday or today.

Yesterday, I minded the cubs and their friends all day.

Today, I decided to change over my summer clothes to winter clothes.

T-shirts did not seem like helpful choices this morning.

The Way I Walk ~ by Tigermom

1.96 miles. 38.43 minutes.

I finished Gangs of New York. I feel almost immune to the graphic violence in the movie now. Ick.

The Way I Walk ~ by Tigermom

2.16 miles. 40.43 minutes.

Making headway on Gangs of New York. I could finish it tomorrow if I muster up the energy to walk again.

The violence is intense, but so is the suspense.

The Way I Walk ~ by Tigermom

35 minutes. 1.91 miles. Half way through watching Gangs of New York.

I will finish that movie one day.

The Way I Walk ~ by Tigermom

Just back from a week at theme parks complete with mostly terrific fried theme park foods.

I have been walking all day every day, but without a pedometer.

Today I got back on the treadmill.

4.03 miles. 71 minutes.

I had a lot of TV to watch.

Wish me luck, I am off to the mall now.

26 Things I Love About Sam ~ by Jay

One for each year we've been married

1) I love his beard. When we met, it was an unruly mixture of red and brown; now it's a neatly trimmed blend of white and gray. I've seen him clean-shaven for precisely 24 hours in the 28 years we've been together, and that was just weird.

2) I love the way he plays in the water. A 50-year-old man who still loves to do cannonballs is my kind of guy.

3) I love the way he talks seriously to kids. Sam treats kids like people. He pays attention to their ideas; he asks real questions and he listens carefully to the answers. He gives them real science to chew on and makes it completely accessible, no matter how young the child is.

4) I love the way he has fun with kids. Sam is the goofy guy playing peek-a-boo with the baby in the shopping cart. He's the dad solemnly telling his daughter and her friends that they can't go in the yard because there's a rare monkey-eating scorpion on the loose back there. He sets up water slides and makes things fly up in the air and sneaks up behind our oh-so-sophisticated daughter and reduces her to giggles.

5) I love his cooking. Sam analyzes something he likes and figures out how to re-create it at home. He invents dishes. He makes amazing desserts. Years ago, when I was on call at the hospital one residency Christmas, he was bored at home and made a black forest cake for the dinner we provided (with friends) for the residents and attendings who were working that day. The resulting masterpiece took him all day and looked like it had come from a very good bakery. He's never made it since, but he's still proud of it.

6) I love his passion for his work. When we started dating, we were writing our senior theses and we used to meet in the middle of campus, me coming from the library and Sam from the lab. One night he came racing up the hill, full speed, looking as if he was lit from within. He'd figured something out - I have no idea what; I didn't understand it at the time - and the sheer joy of the discovery poured out of him. He still lights up like that, and he still loves to explain what he's learned (and sometimes I even understand it).

7) I love his ridiculous, juvenile, pun-centric sense of humor.

8) I love that he's amazingly handy. Well, it's amazing to me, anyway. My father couldn't change a light bulb (that is not an exaggeration) and I grew up thinking you paid people to fix loose hinges. Sam can repair plumbing, install sinks, rewire light fixtures, replace drywall, build boxes and shelves and odd-looking scientific equipment, cut rocks in half and break almost anything up with sledgehammer. The very first night we spent together, he repaired the broken doorknob in my dorm room with a sharpened pencil. There's a little MacGyver in my husband.

9) I love his capacity for forgiveness.

10) I love his sense of direction, which is far better than mine except in Big City, where he always gets turned around. I also love that he never forgets how to get anywhere. The summer after we graduated college, we took a trip to New England and he navigated us unerringly to see the Old Man in the Mountain (when it was still there). He'd last been there at age 6.

11) I love his curiosity.

12) I love the way he's embraced Judaism for his own reasons - not for me, or for our marriage, but because it's right for him.

13) I love that he actually explains technology to my mother. Patiently. Repeatedly.

14) I love that he helps me do crossword puzzles, but only when I ask him to.

15) I love that he is the best gift-wrapper I've ever met.

16) I love that he can make everything fit in the trunk, or the cooler, or the suitcase, or the closet.

17) I love that he loves the number 17 as much as I do.

18) I love that he says I look nice when I'm dressed up, and also when I'm wearing jeans a T-shirt, just because it occurs it to him.

19) I love that when we sing together, he unintentionally sings harmony - he's always a third off from my pitch.

20) I love his vision. He looked at our crowded, overgrown, chopped-up backyard and imagined a clear expanse of grass with masses of flowers at the edges and connected patios near the house, and over two summers he made that happen (using the sledgehammer; see #8).

21) I love the tallis he made the year he was studying for conversion. It's a watercolor quilt of a tree of life, made out of hundreds of tiny squares of fabric and finished with tzitzit he ordered from Israel and knotted himself.

22) I love that he's always warm when I'm cold.

23) I love that he's taller and bigger than I am. I love the sense of safety and comfort when I'm enclosed in his arms, and I love the way my head fits just under his chin.

24) I love the places he's taken me to that I would never have seen without him - the national parks, the little coves along the Pacific filled with tide pools, the undeveloped hot tub on the side of a mountain in Nevada, the shores of two Great Lakes.

25) I love that he's a teacher. Not by profession, but by nature. See #6. We spent a wonderful 10 days rafting down the Grand Canyon 11 years ago, and there he was with all that geology and 15 people who actually wanted to hear what he had to say about it. He was in heaven, and it was glorious to watch.

26) I love that he loves me, and that I can see that in every choice he's made about our relationship from the very first night.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart. We've now been married more than half our lives. Here's looking forward to the next half.

Why I Love My Husband ~ by Jay

Because in the midst of the Christmas season, as he tells me about his Email exchange with another completely clueless teacher who doesn't understand why he objects to her use of Santa as a teaching tool in a public school, he stops and says "I bet you feel like this all the time because of all the misogyny and gender stuff you see everywhere. I mean, I notice that stuff, but you must feel it in a completely different way. You must be angry all the time".

Ready Or Not.....~ by Jay

Today we went to visit Laura.

A year ago, Eve said "I'm tired of this. You always tell me we're going to visit Laura, but we never do". She was right. We'd been saying "someday" for a few years now. We had to turn "someday" into "now".

That meant we had to do our own work first. When we started meeting with the therapist, she asked what we needed to get ready, and I didn't know how to answer.

I'm still not sure what I needed - what we needed - but whatever it was, we must have found it. After a bit of backing-and-forthing during which we held our breath, hoping that Eve would not be disappointed, we made a date for this afternoon and tried to cope with Eve's excitement. On Thursday, she said "You don't know what it's like to have never met your mother". It's true; I don't know what it's like. Tonight I could see on my daughter's face that it is complicated. Yes, she got what she wanted. She now knows her birth mother and her brother and three of her cousins and an aunt and uncle. She knows they love her. She knows people who look like her, and who can tell her stories about her biological grandparents and great-grandparents. She's part of a big Italian/German family, with an African-American uncle and biracial cousins. She can fill in the other half of her family tree.

And yet tonight she is here, with us, and they are there, living without her. As Eve pulled up her covers at bedtime, she said "it would be so different if I lived with Laura". Yes, it would. I managed to bite back the comment about how much smaller her room would be and the chance that she wouldn't have an iPod and a DS and real Uggs, and said "That would make you happy". She didn't agree with me. She paused for a moment and then said "But I wouldn't know you and that would make me sad".

I've lived in fear of this day since we brought Eve home from the hospital. I used to think that having Laura as a part of our lives would make things too confusing and too difficult. Today I realized that she always was a part of our lives. Now she's real, not a fantasy or a wish. It was always complicated; now it's visible.

We were ready.

Linky Linky Time ~ by Jay

Clearly, I'm reading more than writing at the moment.

Chally has an awesome, brave and well-written series going at Feministe. I'm learning a ton, not just from Chally but from the thoughtful commenters.

In the second installment, Jadey made me sit up and notice:

{B}asically the first rule of white club is that we don’t talk about white club.

Read the series.

The Legacy of Privilege ~ by Jay

Tim Wise has it right.

There’s a big difference between guilt and responsibility. Guilt is what you feel for what you’ve done. Responsibility is what you take because of the kind of person you are, right? And so if I see a set of social conditions that have been handed to you, and which not only did wrong by others but elevated me and give me advantage that I did not earn, it’s not about beating myself up, I’m not responsible for that having happened, I’m not to blame for it, so guilt is totally unproductive. But in order to live an ethical life, to live ethically and responsibly, I have to take some responsibility for the unearned advantage, which means working to change the society that bestows that advantage.

'tis the Season

As Tmae says...'tis the season for being annoyed.

In two weeks we will celebrate our 26th anniversary. Sam's sister has known us that entire time. She has received mail - snail and E - from us. She has sent us birthday cards, hand-me-downs for Eve, and a variety of Christmas packages.

And still, still, the card arrived today addressed to us as The Lastnames - Sam's last name.

I have never used Sam's last name. She knows that.

Nearly 26 years. I think it's time to give up.

What I Learned Today ~ by Tigermom

No walking on the treadmill today.

I had a time this afternoon when I could have hit the gym, but I chose to spend the time with my parents before they left town. We compared notes about the meeting sessions we had each attended, I told them about clinical correlates of the research that I see in my practice, I showed them some popular youtube videos to catch them up to the rest of the world, I taught my dad how to use his phone's camera and send the pics to my kids.

In short, we had a blast.

What did I learn? I learned that sitting on my duff can be just as invigorating as building up a little sweat (glow?) on gym equipment.

I had planned to write about what I learned in my sessions, but living life is sometimes so much more interesting.

The Way I Walk and Meeting Highlights ~ by Tigermom

2.7 miles and 46.23 minutes listening to a shuffle of songs my kid downloaded to my ipod.

No TV in front of the hotel treadmill, but music was a nice change of pace. Music allowed my mind to wander which has to be a good things in this day of programmed days.

Today I learned:

That psychiatric illnesses are probably not all genetically determined nor are they probably not all environmentally determined.

- Implication: there likely won't be one genetic cause per psychiatric illness. So no magic discovery and consequent magic cure.

There is a "hot/cold empathy gap." ie when feeling one way, it is nearly impossible to imagine feeling another way. Real life examples abound. Some simple such as being unable to imagine feeling hungry after having had a huge meal. Some familiar to psychiatrists such as depressed patients being unable to see past their bad present state to see good from the past or potential good in the future.

- Implication(s): Medical decision making. Can doctors not in pain adequately treat a patient's pain? Can patients know what end of life care they want if they are currently healthy? Can a person in the midst of drug craving make balanced decisions?

Acute and chronic stressors change the frequency and intensity of how neurons fire their electrical impulses in the reward centers of the brain.

Implications: People react differently to one time big stressors versus chronic "mild" stressors. Neither are so great for us.

Happy Chanukah! ~ by Jay

We've had three nights of Chanukah - two at home and one at shul, where we have an annual party with lots of hannukiyot and latkes and singing and general merriment and mayhem. We weren't surprised that Eve asked for Dance Dance Revolution for the Wii, or a fancy silver sequined backpack, but we didn't expect the cake decorating kit. She's thrilled with all of her presents (so far) and this year has really enjoyed the gift-giving as well. Eve gave me the best Chanukah present I have ever received: she made me a scrapbook with pictures of her, complete with lettered captions and neatly-done stencils. The last three pages are blank. I asked if she was saving those for new pictures and she said "No, Mommy. Those are for you and me to do together so we have a project".

Sam gave me a pair of gorgeous opal earrings, but I like the scrapbook better.

For those who are in the darkling part of the year, here's hoping for light and love and joy. And for everybody, here's a little Chanukah/pop culture fun.

Mistake or Blessing? ~ by Tigermom

I have been frantically doing a number of things this week to get myself out of town for this meeting I am attending with my parents.

Many have been expected preparatory activities, like filling the fridge for Tigerdad and making a coverage sign out for Covering Colleague.

Many have been unexpected preparatory activities, like the five hours spent replacing my iPhone - the speaker stopped working so I couldn't hear what anyone was saying - and the necessary work that results, like putting my contacts back on the replacement phone - no I did not upgrade because I am cheap.

Many have been things Tigerdad has been doing like arrange the gymnastics for transporting Cubs 1, 2, and 3 to activities far and wide across my far flung home area. All while he prepares for a humongo project at work and worries about how to be a single dad and responsible professional.

Of course, some things will get lost in the shuffle. I expect a forgotten this or that on my part or on his.

What I did not expect is what happened.

My departure was timed and went off perfectly.

Until I got to the airport.

They had no record of me. Yup. No record of me.

I moved to the long ticketing line. She did not have me in the system either.

Turns out one of the things lost in the shuffle was double checking my flight arrangements. Fortunately, the nice ticketing agent found me in the system for tomorrow. Same flight I had thought was for today. And the return flight is in there as originally planned.

So I caught a taxi back home. Climbed into bed. Scared the daylight out of Tigerdad. Told him the story and we laughed with relief, because now there can be some semblance of balance in our day today back home. The kids can get taken to their activities in a relaxed way, Tigerdad can get some work done, and we can all have dinner together.

Now, the hotel reservation is another story altogether...

The Family Business, II ~ by Jay

Tigermom's post about being in the family business made me smile. I started to write a second paragraph on my comment and then thought "hey, wait! I can post on this blog, too!".

I'm a third-generation internist - both my grandfathers and my dad (plus a first cousin once removed). I love my work, and I loved sharing it with my father, but unlike my friend Tigermom I am not sure I made the best decision for myself. As I wrote a few years ago, I think I am at heart a family doc (and yes, there's a significant difference, even though in the US they are both primary care specialties).

And yet I can't say I made a mistake. Internal medicine has been good to me, and being part of the family business was, as they say in the commercials, priceless.

The Family Business ~ by Tigermom

I share my profession with my father and mother.

My father is also a psychiatrist and my mother is a therapist. Their jobs have made for fascinating dinner table conversations and trips to mom and dad's offices. I entered psychiatry fully prepared for the wild rides, fun, challenges, and satisfactions. But I also did some soul searching before I jumped in. I wanted to be sure that my choice to become a psychiatrist was in fact my choice. And it was. Sharing it with them has been the icing on the cake.

Turns out that even with all the preparation, my own experiences have been my own. Mine often mirrored parts of theirs, but never fully replicated theirs. And I think we all have enjoyed hearing about the differences.

So, the three of us are attending a meeting together this week. We have done so in the past as well, but with my kids in tow and the meeting as a pretext for time with grandma and grandpa. But this time it is just the grown ups, sharing our work.

As Mama says, there are no do overs and I want to savor the time together.