Birthdate Reversion

Or: Why Adoptive Parenting Is Weird Sometimes

Remember our daughter's January birthday? No, you don't. You can't. You mustn't. Forget anyone ever said anything about January. This is not the birth date you're looking for.

Once upon a time at the end of our pre-child days, we received that most remarkable of phone calls, the one telling us we had a daughter waiting a world away. It was April, and she'd been born in December. On the very day we had delivered our completed dossier to the agency, in fact. What a story!

Oh, but there was more to story. Well, actually, less. That birth date was just an estimate and the orphanage doctor didn't think she could be that old when they took her in. We were told to consider her a month younger, January birthday. Okay, Ethiopian Christmas baby, that's cool.

Ah, funny story . . . (not really). There's this little thing in adoption called paperwork. Actually it's such a big thing that it consumes your life almost as much as an actual child, but I digress. The important thing to know about this paperwork is that the parts of it that come from another country may well be full of typos and translation errors and contradictory facts like, oh, say, two different birth dates. So while Anna's medical records show a January 2007 birth date, everything else says December 2006: adoption decree, Ethiopian birth certificate, visa, and so on. We've been observing the January date, but anytime I have to be able to actually prove it I have to remember to say December because that's what's on paper. Confusing and occasionally embarrassing (you don't know your kid's birthday, lady?).

So to make a short story boring (too late), I thought I could get these reconciled when we did the Oregon readoption process. A lawyer is now working on our readoption papers, and he says that there is no clear-cut process for changing a birth date, so while we have a shot based on the existing medical records, the court might refuse. We could try again with perhaps a new doctor's affidavit, but there's no guarantee on that either and, well, do you know how much lawyers charge for this kind of thing?

At this point we need it done--so there's no confusion as we get new insurance, doctors, etc.--more than we need to spend all kinds of time and money on the chance we can get the date moved one month. It just seems a bit silly to fight for now that we're measuring her age in years. And really, isn't it more fun to celebrate before all the Christmas hoopla makes you feel like if you have to deal with one more present or social gathering or baked good, your New Year's weight loss will start off with gagging on the birthday cake?

Still, it's weird. We're deciding our daughter's birthday? After we've celebrated it twice? Obviously she doesn't understand time well enough to realize this is a change, but someday she'll find out. The really difficult question to answer is why no one really knows her birthday. . . . Having no story of her to go with that day is one of the harder things for me to accept and figure out how to explain. But it's the reality that we will just have to grapple with one year at a time.

All that to say . . . hey, did you know our daughter's birthday is the exact day we dropped off our dossier? Cool story, huh?

Mark it down: DECEMBER. There is no January. If you send cards in January, we will tell her you are tardy and senile.

Born at the right time . . . whenever the heck it was.

As Bipolar as This Blog

First of all, could this blog swing any more wildly from cute smiley pictures to melodramatic bemoaning? I'm sure you're hoping not. Thanks for bearing with me through my e-published mood swings.

Speaking of mood swings, miss Anna is being extremely two this week. In the words of a Seinfeldian keychain, Ho-leeey COW!

This started Easter Sunday, the first day since our trip that we had any real goings-on. I don't know if her tiredness caught up to her and/or she thought we were leaving that evening (as most Sundays) or what, but after her nap she was like thirty inches of saran wrap--would not stop clinging to me and melting down into tears for no apparent reason. She was only really okay when I was holding her; even Aaron would not do.

Monday, again, she was a mess in the evening. The biggest meltdown was clearly a control battle: she put her baby doll and Pooh bear in her chair before dinner, which was all fine and adorable until it was time to eat and she would not accept them moving so she could eat. I can testify to the strength of the chair's 3-point harness. Then she decided that life and food were fine and dandy and was so cheerful I even let her baby sit next to her while she finished her chicken fajita with ketchup (blech); hence the photo.

I know toddlers want control in a world where so much is out of their tiny little hands. I try to give her choices, but frankly, she's not very good at it yet. She wants it all or doesn't know what she wants. Do you want this or that? This! NO, THAT. THAT! THAT! THIS! THAT! THWAAAAAAAAAAH! So sometimes choices helps and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes she blows a fuse before you can give her an opportunity to choose or do it herself. Looking for ways I can let her assert her independence harmlessly, though.

By the way, just how much cheese can a two-year-old eat before it ceases to be intestinally harmless?

I'm glad she seems to be settling down a bit here at the end of the week (knock on wood) because it is awfully tiring when every other meal, diaper change, step out of the room for five seconds yields a meltdown. Worse yet is when it can't even be traced to one of those things! She almost seems to just want to be held and even babied sometimes--a little regression going on. For example, she came along to Bible study with us Wednesday because I totally forgot to confirm a sitter, and she found a pacifier in the toys she dragged out from the nursery and sat on my lap sucking it for five or ten minutes. She didn't even use pacifiers as a baby but she knows what they are; her cousin we just visited uses one. So I held her and rocked her and told her she was my baby. You'll always be my baby.

I don't know that it has anything to do with this behavior (what would have triggered it in her right now, except maybe our trip away from dad, then back home away from grandma et al?) but this clingyness, plus coming up on two years since referral, reminds me that she is going to be becoming more and more aware of her adoption and we need to be talking about it and helping her understand it (as a two-year-old can). There are going to be times when she's feeling anxious or sad about it, though she might not know quite why, and needs those extra snuggles to feel secure that we will always be her family. That's a grace I hope I can always extend.

You'll always be a part of me
I'm part of you indefinitely
Girl don't you know you can't escape me
Ooh darling 'cause you'll always be my baby

Two Articles

I'd like to recommend this very thought-provoking article on transracial adoption from The Stranger: "Black Kids in White Houses." It raises many of the difficult issues we need to think about as white adoptive parents--even if we'd rather not. (Hat tip: Habesha Child.)

I also recommend this short article by Gwen Ifil, "The Malia and Sasha Effect."

I am taken by what America will now see in these two little brown girls. Not victims, like the little girls who died at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Not hoochie mamas, like the Black girls who shake their rumps in music videos. Just two happy, playful, well-adjusted future Black women. . . .

[Barack Obama] mused about what it would mean for other children to see his daughters running around on the South Lawn. "That changes how America looks at itself," he said. "It changes how White children think about Black children, and it changes how Black children think about Black children."

Symbols can be powerful, I agree.