Calling All Cars

It’s been so long since I’ve written here. The last three months have possibly been the most challenging with Mihiretu yet. That said, I’m caught in a conundrum.  While I so want to share our story because I know there are many people out there who might get something out of it – adoptive parents, parents of kids with special needs, parents of adopted kids with special needs, parents, people who grew up feeling different, anyone who’s ever faced what seemed like an insurmountable hurdle, okay, ANYONE – while I know this story is well worth telling, I don’t want to tell more than Mihiretu, the future Mihiretu, would want me to tell.  He might not grow up to be a blabber-mouth like his mother.  I’m walking a fine line here so bear with me.

It really hasn’t been cute around here lately.  This kid with a long, difficult history and understandable delays hitting the structure of public school has been downright ugly.  The shit has hit the fan, all hell has broken loose, the wheels have come off the wagon, choose your cliché.  There has been a lot of screaming, hitting, throwing of rocks, kicking of chairs, chasing of dogs and climbing of furniture.  Every person in our family has been deeply affected, every relationship strained.  It starts at five in the morning and ends when Mihiretu passes out at seven.

Because of this crisis (of faith and otherwise) we have acquired a behavioral pediatrician, a full-time aide at school, a speech therapist, the talents of the school – and district – psychologists, a male babysitter to run Mihiretu to exhaustion after school, a behavioral consultant for the home and a couples therapist.  It’s been super fun.  Lining all this up, admitting it was needed, finding the money to pay for it, and continuing to work out the kinks has taken almost all we’ve got.  Though I imagine the situation must be improving, I still feel under-fire.  Mihiretu isn’t the only one with PTSD.

There came a point where I sent out an email to a few trusted friends.  The subject line: “Calling all cars”.  The message:  Help, help me, any way you can.  For awhile there, when things were really grim, I had friends taking my girls for play-dates, giving them rides home from school, dropping off dinner.  The very act of admitting that kind of defeat, of showing my need, was out of the boundaries of my character, was certainly out of my comfort level. 

Perhaps Mihiretu has pushed us, quite firmly this last time, towards asking for and receiving the help we need.  That’s growth I suppose.  We have far more support now, from professionals and loved ones, than we did six months ago.  Frankly, our lives have been extremely challenging since Mihiretu came home from Ethiopia, three and a half years ago.  That’s a long time to be overwhelmed.

It occurred to me the other day that I should have a t-shirt made for when I'm out in public with Mihiretu.  It would read "You fucking try it".  Might give the old ladies in line at the grocery store pause before offering advice.  Might quell the glares at the mall from the perfect blonde moms with their perfect blonde children.  Might be a good reminder to me; this is a hard road we've chosen.  I'm doing my best.  Don't believe me?  You fucking try it.

Wedding Crashers

Ben and I went to a wedding on Saturday.  It’s been a long couple of months with the whole Mihiretu-kicking-Kingergarten’s-ass debacle so the twenty-four hours away from the kids, dressed in finery, was a welcome departure.

To celebrate his birthday, Ben took the day off on Friday and rode his bike.  For ten hours.  That’s his idea of a really good time.  He did indeed have a really good time but maybe 42 is the magic number because from Friday night on through the weekend he had tummy troubles and non-stop hiccups.  We arrived at the wedding looking good but in full diaphragm spasm.

We’re at a stage where we don’t know a lot of people getting married.  The year I turned thirty, forget about it, lots of weddings, but now it’s pretty much dried up.  We’re in a slump until the second marriages and weddings of offspring start happening.  That said, this particular wedding was a first for both bride and groom.  I don’t know them well but what I know I like an awful lot.  Clearly in love.  No question they have a happy future in front of them.  Those are the kind of weddings you want to go to.

The groom is a cyclist (I can’t get away from them) and so, in the ceremony, along with the customary oaths of mutual respect, death ‘til us part, etc, (all completely within this couple’s capabilities) she vowed “I promise to never get in between you and your bike.”  I muttered to myself, “Whoa, that’s a big promise.  Good luck with that one.”

The event was outside, the couple somehow landing on an eighty degree day at the end of October.  After the ceremony, as the crowd nibbled on crackers and brie, I found myself in the lucky position of chatting with the bride.  Like I said, I don’t know her well, so this was exciting.  In my giddiness, however, in my post-wedding, you’re-meant-for-each-other gush, I managed to gesticulate widely enough to karate-chop her wine glass from her newly bejeweled hand, sending it, and the red wine it held, smashing to the ground at her feet.  The crowd gasped, then seeing it was the bride with red wine splashed up her gown, mysteriously applauded.  Perhaps they thought it was on purpose?  Some sort of vaguely Jewish breaking of glass?  I learned later than everyone thought it was her that dropped the wine.  Criminally unjust.

I apologized, of course, profusely.  The bride was gracious, this woman is so poised it’d take more than red wine on her wedding dress to throw her off her game.  I told her that we were either going to be best friends from here forward or she was never going to talk to me again.  I fear the latter.

Later, much later, my hiccupping groom and I made our way back to our hotel.  At home we have a Tempurpedic mattress and so the hiccups of the previous night hadn’t really affected my sleep.  Here, however, we were on a standard mattress, on what turned out to be the equivalent of a bowl of Jello.  He’d hiccup, the bed would shake.  All night.

It’s kind of marriage in a nutshell, right?  You pledge to never get in between him and his bike.  You get red wine dumped on your white dress by a giggling acquaintance.  You go to bed on a jerking marital mattress.  If you’re lucky, that is, if you’re very, very lucky.

Sunny

For the last year we’ve been thinking about getting a dog.  If you know me at all, you might think that was a very bad idea.  I’m fastidious; I don’t like to get my hands dirty if I don’t have to, there is nary a crumb on my floor, the bed is always made, the house generally looks ready for a Pottery Barn shoot at any given moment.  Plus, my life is chaotic.  I have three strong-willed children, the youngest possibly the loudest person ever created.

We have thought, though, that a dog would be good for the kids.  Mae is all about animals – I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a vet as an adult – and until very recently the only pets she had at her disposal were three chickens and an elusive black cat who spends the majority of his time outside on the prowl.  Lana, to be frank, doesn’t give a shit about animals beyond naming them but, here too, is an opportunity to broaden her experience, maybe teach her how rewarding a relationship with a pet can be.  And then there’s Mihiretu.  If ever there was a child that could benefit from the non-verbal, unconditional affection of a dog, it’s him.

Because of Mihiretu’s unique history and accompanying set of issues, we considered a service dog.  First we signed up with Guide Dogs for the Blind for a flunkee (they call them “career change” dogs) but these dogs, because of their breeding and temperament, are highly desirable.  We’ve been on that list for a year.  We also applied for a therapy dog from Canine Companions, a service dog non-profit.  We were on the third round of the application process before they decided that Mihiretu was not quite bad off enough to be a recipient.  So we got on their flunkee list, also a long one.

We debated getting a puppy but that just seemed crazy.  I really don’t need more misbehavior in my house.  My friend, Ann, almost conducted a puppy intervention when I broached the subject.

And so we’ve been waiting for the right situation, hoping for a mature, sweet, well-trained dog who will not be freaked out by the loudest boy in the world.  A couple of weeks ago I got a call from my friend, Lisa.  She was in Bolinas at a yard sale and the family running the sale happened to be retired dog breeders and they happened to have two beautiful dogs that needed homes.  Long story short, Lisa adopted one dog, we met the other and said we’d pick her up in a few days.

In those few days, I got cold feet.  The breeders said the dog was a “dominant female”.  What that meant, specific to this dog, I couldn’t really get to the bottom of.  The thought of procuring a four-year-old dog with behavior problems that I couldn’t change was daunting.  I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  We passed on the dog.

A week ago Saturday, I was, for the first time in a long time, doing errands without children.  I stopped at Anthropologie (my happy place) to return something.  Camped outside was the Milo Foundation, a non-profit that rescues animals from high-kill shelters and fosters them until they find homes.  There were ten dogs or so barking it up and one of them was magic.  I saw her and thought, uh oh.

Sunny is three months old.  She’s some sort of labradoodle with maybe a little something else mixed in.  So far, she is calm, she is sweet, she is trainable, she is tolerant. She has hair instead of fur, for god’s sake.   I love her with an intensity I could not have predicted.  She follows me around the house, gazing at me adoringly.  She whines when she can’t see me.  She sleeps next to my bed.  I had forgotten how uncomplicated the love of a dog is.  Humans, very complicated.  Mihiretu, extremely complicated. This pup, just sunlight.

I wanted a therapy dog.  I just didn’t realize I was the one who needed the therapy.

Eye of the Storm

I would tell you in detail about the hard time that Mihiretu is having in school but that’s his story.  Maybe if you catch him in twenty years he’ll lay it on you.

Suffice it to say, he’s struggling.  He’s acting out at school, he’s acting out at home.  He’s suffering.  As are the rest of us.

I’m on the phone.  With the principal, with neuro-psychologists, with behavioral pediatricians.

Ben is out of town, this week when the shit has really hit the fan.  He’s doing what he can from afar but, between phone calls, it’s up to me to calm myself down.  It was this time last year that I dove deep into depression. There are lots of triggers for me as summer turns to fall; ancient wounds from my childhood, fresher ones from adulthood.  I know that as the light grows golden, as the sun slants lower, I’m in dangerous territory.  Add to this the additional worry of Mihiretu’s school situation and I know I need to tread very carefully.  I take care of myself to take care of him.  The lower my cortisol levels, the lower his will be.

I have a number of tricks to ease my anxiety.  When I pry Mihiretu off me in the morning at school and sprint out the door before he can catch me, I just keep running.  I’m up to seven miles in this effort to quiet my mind.  At this rate, I’ll be marathoning by Christmas.  Or inducing a heart attack.

We acquired a couple of magic kitties a month or so ago – a pair of blue-grey kittens that look almost exactly alike.  They are Lucy and Ethel; Lucy thin and higher-strung, Ethel wider and mellower, with a penchant for flatuence.  They are incredibly tolerant and brave with the kids, particularly the currently shrieky Mihiretu.  In times of extreme tension, after a particularly tough phone call, I pull one – or better both – of these kitties on to my lap.  They purr, I breathe.

My latest crafty endeavor is rescuing old unfinished quilts at flea markets and completing them.  So if I’m really upset you’ll find me cradling kitties and hand-stitching a seventy-year-old quilt all at the same time.

There is my love affair with my cup of coffee in the morning and the glass of Sauvignon Blanc at night.  There is the 8:30 bedtime (yes, for me) and the ten solid hours of sleep (only interrupted to get into bed with Mihiretu once or twice when he stirs).

We will get through this, I suppose.  We will find the right situation for this boy, he will thrive.  I will be able to put down the phone and the kittens and the quilt and join the larger world.  In the meantime, Mihiretu, me, Ben and the girls, we must find our comfort, find our ease, in whatever corner we can.

Brave or Stupid

Mihiretu started kindergarten two weeks ago.  While it's been something I've been looking forward to for, oh, the last three years, it’s been a bit of a rough road.

On the first day of school, there were nineteen five-year-olds on their bottoms in a circle, sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce (no more "Indian-style", I'm afraid), thirty-eight eyes on the teacher, who was reading a book about the first day of school (kind of like a mirror in a mirror).  There was one child, one brown child, the only brown child, alternately clinging to his parents and wandering around the room saying "I see some-ting!"  

Finally, we had to go get the principal to hold Mihiretu so Ben and I could escape, to keep him from chasing us all the way home.  This was witnessed by a group of newbie kindergarten parents who were watching it all through the window (hadn't they read the back-to-school hand-out, god damn it?  No looking through the window?).  As Ben and I fled, they shot us comforting looks, reached out hands.  I wanted to slap them down, these people I’m sure I’ll know and love by the end of the year.  This isn't my first fucking rodeo and you have no idea what you're looking at. 

Over the last couple of days it's become clear that Mihiretu is, essentially, bullying his best friend in class.  He loves this boy; he's known him since the day he came to the United States, this boy's family is, for all intents and purposes, part of our family.  He wants this boy close, this boy is his transitional object.  And yet, like with every other person he loves, he tests him.  He wraps an arm around his friend and then pokes him.  He follows him to recess and then says he's playing a baby game.  If this boy goes to the bathroom without him he gets a swift kick.  I need you, I love you - will you still love me if I do this?  How about this? Will you leave?  Will you?  Ben and I won't.  Mae and Lana won't, at least while Ben and I have anything to say about it.  A five-year-old boy, also in his first days of kindergarten?  Not as sure a bet.

I have seen inside this child's soul.  I have held him just after he's awoken, rubbed his back, run my hands through his soft curls, heard about his dreams.  This child, this kid who is disruptive and troubled and, hell, a bit of a bully, he's also so soft way down deep. And so hurt.  It's so hard to see him causing hurt, both to others and, ultimately, to himself.  It’s so hard to see him struggle.

In the first days that Mihiretu came home to us, I kept thinking, “Am I brave or stupid?”  The answer, in the end, is probably both.  Maybe not stupid, per say,  but terrifically, dangerously optimistic.  I’ll adopt a toddler from a poor African country, it’ll be fine.  It has not been fine, and this is where the brave part comes in.  It has been more than fine, Mihiretu is more everything than almost any other kid I know.  More charming, more maddening, more troubled, more heart-wrenching.  He is the bravest person I know.  I guess I can try to muster up a little bravery myself.  I think we’re going to need it.

Bike Widow

I’m a bike widow.  Perhaps widow is too strong a word as Ben is, thankfully, alive.  Let me put it this way, Ben is involved in a long-standing affair with a two-wheeled contraption.  It started before he and I ever knew each other.  They are very much in love.  It’s a little like Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.  Which puts me, not unflatteringly, in the role of Diana.  I’m working on my shy smile.

He escapes the house, he occasionally escapes the state, even the country, to spend quality time with his gal.  They scale mountains, take in glorious views that can’t be seen by car, sustain dramatic, bonding injuries when they mistakenly fly into trees.   They go where he can’t go with me.  He is king of the mountain and she his trusty mount.

As we eat breakfast he covertly checks Strava on his computer, an ingenius website designed for cyclists to compete with each other without actually riding together - a cyber war of the egos, a high-tech pissing contest.  I awaken to the sound of the Tour playing on his phone.  “It’s the final mountain stage,” he’ll solemnly confide to my half-opened eyes.

Cyclist friends of his can’t get over that I do not ride a bike.  Okay, I do, occasionally, for transportation, but – and this is stunning - I’ve never been on a mountain bike ride.  For these friends, who know him as a U.S. Cup winner, a World Cup champion, this is a little like finding out that Netanyahu is in a raunchy liaison with the Pope.

He has his bike, his one pure passion, his one sure-fire happy pill.  I have my children, my writing, my deep friendships, him.  I run, I do yoga, I sew, all happily.  But is there one thing that totally lights my fire the way the bike does his?  Why, no.

I’ve been grappling lately with this question: How deeply am I living?  It’s no doubt spurred by my mother’s recent death – life is short, blah, blah, blah.  Probably also by my age – who doesn’t think these things in their forties?  Menopause is somewhere on the horizon, a death of sorts.  A friend made me a mixed tape (okay, CD) for my birthday and a song came on the other day that made me happy.  I was singing, I was doing a little car dance, I was, for the moment, fully in the present, feeling my body in the world.  I know that’s how Ben feels on the trail.

Ben has his bike, he has his work.  He has things beyond the sometimes mind-numbing sameness of caring for children and house.  My mother devoted herself to her husband and her children.  When my father died and we kids were gone she didn’t have much left.  The story is more complicated than that, of course, muddied by depression and eventual dementia, by extreme introversion and mortal psychic wounds.  But I can see some parallels.  I pour myself into these people.  I have a very fine mind, well-educated and thirsty, chemically unreliable yes, but intellectually sound.  I am extremely capable in all sorts of settings but in my dark moments it seems like all I do is plump pillows.

It doesn’t help that virtually every message I get from the outside world belittles the work I do. In the novel I'm currently reading, one of the protagonists, a forty-two-year-old, well-educated, deep-thinking housewife is termed (by another – jealous - mother) as “not a feminist” because she doesn’t have a job beyond raising her kids.  Reading this, I felt like I had stepped off a cliff while picking wildflowers.  Really?  I’m categorically denied feminist credentials because I don’t get a paycheck?  Because I don’t “work outside the home” (I guess in that definition carpooling and grocery shopping don’t qualify as work)?   I’d really mean more to the world at large if I dropped the kids at the Y and spent my day at an office?

A fellow parent, a dad, recently asked me, so well-meaning, simply wanting to know me better, what I do while the kids are at school.  I was completely stumped.  I fucking run around is the answer, picking up the four pair of underwear Lana discarded on her floor that morning, filling the fridge with food that the children just might eat, volunteering in loud and sticky classrooms, getting out for a run or a yoga class, shifting the laundry from basket to washer to dryer to basket, scrambling to catch up before I have to fetch the three-ring circus from school.  It’s all so boring, though, as a response, as an encapsulation of my life.  So sad.  Finally, at a loss, he managed, “Well, it’s good you have yoga,” which made us both laugh for its earnest hopelessness.

I love that Ben has something in his life that he loves, something beyond me and the kids.  I love that he’s fit; his body is beautiful.  Our prospects of a long and healthy life together are good.  But I’m jealous.  Maybe, though, I’m not jealous of the bike, that bitch on wheels.  Maybe I’m jealous of him.  Maybe I need to make room for something – or things – that make me feel alive, vital, that I’m living this day like it’s my last.  Something that is just mine, that has nothing to do with my roles as mother and wife.  Something that sets me free.

But in the meantime, maybe less NPR and more music, less Facebook and more writing, less talking and more singing, less running and more dancing, less indoors and more outdoors, less routine and more surprise.

Teddy

My kids have never really been stuffed animal people.  Oh sure, the girls would go wild for some cute and cuddly chipmunk or lemur they’d spot at the gift shop at the zoo, beg and plead and carefully carry their new baby to the car.  They’d name it Sarah, snuggle it for the majority of the ride home and then it would join the legions of Sarahs that had come before in the many stuffed-animal-laden wicker baskets in the playroom.

Mae, largely unsentimental, does have Doggie, a small beagle-like creature that she received before she was even born.  That dog has traveled to Ethiopia, Alaska and New York City - where he was mauled by an overly playful Great Dane.  Panicking, I swiftly sewed the pieces of Doggie back together, frantically assuring Mae – and myself - “He’ll be fine, this will be fine.”  Somehow, through great will and fine sewing, he lived to see another day.  His ears are crooked and his nose is in a different place but he’s the more adorable – and adored - for it.

A couple of months ago, shortly after Mihiretu got his cast off his very broken leg, he took up with a large white teddy bear.  This bear had sat on the bunk above him for well over a year, it had been in our family for ten, but it wasn’t until recently that it was deemed important.

Shortly after he began toting the bear around the house, Ben asked Mihiretu if he had a name.  Mihiretu gazed at Ben like he couldn’t quite believe his stupidity and replied, “Teddy.”  The “duh” went unsaid.

Teddy is now a must at bedtime hours.  He is tucked in alongside Mihiretu, he must be retucked if Mihiretu (and Teddy) wake in the night, he journeys in the crook of Mihiretu’s arm into our bed in the morning, where he must be tucked once more.  If there’s a cuter thing than a sleepy, leggy, Ethiopian child hauling around a white fluffy teddy bear, I’d like to see it.

On a recent morning, Mihiretu, breakfasted and dressed, and Teddy, a captive witness to breakfast and dressing, ran into our bedroom at full speed.  They wiped out dramatically.  I dropped the mascara I was applying and ran to Mihiretu’s aid but he had bounced back up before I could reach him.  Teddy, however, was still man-down.

“Oh, Teddy,” Mihiretu squeaked in an even higher voice than usual.  “Are you okay?”

I returned to my eyelash grooming as Mihiretu cradled Teddy, crooning, “Teddy, did you bake yo’ weg?  Oh, Teddy, it gonna be okay.  Here come the ambu-ance –“ lots of Mihiretu-siren wail – “We gonna go ‘ospitle, Teddy.  Don’ worry, Teddy, don’ worry.”

Now this is not unusual behavior for a child I realize, but it is unusual behavior for this child.  This child who spent his first year with us angry and aggressive, a permanent scowl on his gorgeous face, swinging his fists at any opportunity, and his second year slightly less angry and slightly less aggressive, scowling and hitting perhaps only seventy-five percent of his waking hours.   To see him, at the beginning of his fourth year here, show any form of empathy, to a fantasy creature no less, to see him have some understanding of his own trauma around his own broken leg and our parental reaction to it, well, that was really something.

By tending to Teddy as his does, Mihiretu is finally admitting how he wants to be cared for, admitting that he likes the cuddles, the kindness, the nurturing, that perhaps he even needs them.  He is telling us that he is finally, fully, ready to love and be loved.  He’s so filled up he’s got some to give.  For now that love is being spent on a big ball of cotton batting and polyester fur but, hey, first Teddy and then the world.