We officially got started with our adoption last week when our info packet (AKA “the MASSIVE binder that arrived by commercial freight in a large wooden crate marked ‘THIS SIDE UP’.”) – but today was our first official workshop as the process gets rolling.We met with our newly assigned social worker who proceeded to, somehow, shake me from my tree of confidence and, within the matter of an hour or so, turn me into a babbling, trembling idiot – and I’m positive this was completely unintentional on her part.Next we met with our program coordinator. Now, we are applying to the African American Infant program through WACAP and this program, by most standards, provides people with incredibly good odds for adopting a happy, healthy baby in a short amount of time without the legal risks associated with most domestic adoptions. That said, these are still, typically, birth mothers who *may* be relinquishing their children for nefarious reasons. Part of our responsibility in the process is to become informed about the issues that may come up during the referral process.I don’t feel that I’m a super square guy or anything. I mean, I was never really a party animal or anything, but I did me some mis-be-hav-in in my day so it shouldn’t be a big deal to think about what situations might contribute to a mother making the most painful decision of her life. But, as we sat there, listening to our instructions regarding becoming informed about the potential effects on a child of prenatal heroin use and how there are a entirely new classes of drugs out there (something called “poly drugs” which I take to mean, “We just kind of mixed a bunch of shit together and gave it a try and now Time magazine is warning their readership about it.”) and we, as responsible parents, need to get hip to all that street lingo so we can understand just how potentially harmed our future child might be – man! What a trip. Okay, sorry for the painfully long run-on sentence, but my point is that for something that figured would be more of a just an informal information session, I can’t believe how exhausted and overwhelmed I am.We continue the saga tomorrow and hopefully, with the aid of my much-smarter-than-I wife, I’ll be able to keep my trap shut and my energy up. We shall see.
I found myself in a weird situation yesterday, trying to explain to Chloe what “power” meant. It was in the context of the TV antenna and I was explaing how the the antenna sort of boosted the reception, you know, made it more powerful.
Chloe: “What’s power?”
Me: “um, …”
Jesus, what is it? Sort of a strange word in that it’s a concept that can apply to a lot of things and it doesn’t mean the same thing to them all. Chloe’s at a point, being 38 months old, that we’re trying to work on some value stuff now. Simple things, like “No pushing. Pushing hurts people.” These things often relate to personal safety, but can just as easily be about socialization and fitting in.
Power, as a concept, is entirely applicable to the conversation, but without talking about how power can be a bad thing (Hitler, multi-national conglomerates, our current “Commander in Chief”) it’s hard to talk about how it can be used for good. I think this is something my dear old college professor, Dr. Jim Wehmeyer, called “paradigmatic structuralism” – the idea that you must know one side in order to know the other.
So, I find myself – being unwilling to go into the intricacies of free-market capitalism, or the trials and tribulations of a representative democracy where the primary method of election carries some fatal flaws (that and the fact that 51% of the country’s citizens are TOTAL AND COMPLETE ASS-HATS) – still, without an answer to the question my three-year-old has posed: “What is power?”
We made the decision this weekend to file our application to adopt. While Kerri and I have talked about this option for a long time now, it’s become very real with that check for $250 sitting in our mailbox waiting to picked-up and delivered to WACAP. There are obviously a lot of things to consider and plan for now. But, on a larger scale, the decision as shifted my view of parenting and what it means to be a parent a bit.
As Chloe gets “older and wiser” I am seeing more and more that my presence in her life is not just about hugs and kisses and cuddles, but also about acting as a guide. Kerri and I are just present for a bit to help her figure a few things out, and then we’ll be gone and she’ll continue along on her crazy, adorable trajectory. The adoption process reinforces this even more so because of the missing biological connection. We’re sort of like guides-for-hire – management consultants for the very very young – with an amazingly long and complicated engagement.
The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
John Maeda’s pocket-sized (and appropriately enough, simple) overview of “Simplicity†is an interesting read and applicable to a number of people, I would guess. The guidance Maeda offers is theoretical enough to be interpreted by many disciplines, from UI designers to product managers, to sales teams, to writers and this was something that I really liked about the book.
I suppose this is a bit of a trick for many self-development authors—provide help in a bullet-from list that is just specific enough that most readers can find an application for it, while not being so vague that it limits market-share. Sort of like the horoscopes: chances are pretty good that something in there will apply to your current life in one way or another.
In any case, Laws of Simplicity has enough to offer that most people should find it useful and the chances are, if you read it and apply it, somebody, somewhere will be appreciative of your doing so.
Kerri and I have begun to talk more about another child. We’ve always sort of agreed that having two would be nice, but after Kerri’s horrific pregnancy we sort of took natural child birth off the table.
Adoption has come up many times when we talk about a second child. We adopted all of our dogs (two of which are greyhounds who have a surprisingly involved adoption process involving home visits) and I don’t mean to draw a comparison between dogs and kids, but idea of “taking over” for a birth parent isn’t entirely foreign. So, last week attended an adoption introduction at Amara. They specialize in placement of “special needs” children and are one of many options for adoption in the Seattle area. I found the whole thing much less uncomfortable than I had anticipated. While the process of adopting appears to be a painfully long and involved exercise in bureaucratic process, everyone is essentially advocating for the same thing—the love and care of a person.
We have several other agencies to visit, including WACAP, which we’ll be visiting this week, and many more “big†decisions to make before anything remotely interesting begins to happen, but I’m actually really interested in the process and I think/hope I grasp the importance of it.
Kerri just received the contract for her first book deal and spent some time reviewing it. What it boiled down to was that they were going to offer her an insanely small amount of money and strip any and all rights. Now… I think that some of the particularly poor pieces of this contract may be unique to this one publisher, but it sounds as if a lot of it is “industry standard.”When I think about how we treat our clients at work I realize that we truly value these people and want to help them to be successful. The book publishing industry, on the other hand, appears to be an opportunistic group of money-grabbers who care little for the artists they represent, apparently feeling that if one leaves, another one will just come along. In my mind, this is just dead wrong and a very very poor way to run a business. Fairness should always a paramount concern in business - sometimes it’s a hard pill to swallow because you can be on the short end of the deal, but in the end, it’s just the right thing to do.
This is a pretty neat idea. Nigel Godrich is currently producing a music program aimed at recapturing the excitement and creativity of the lost art of music videos. From the Basement has one episode available currently with plans for more. I love that his quote on NPR recently was something to the effect of “nobody’s going to get rich on this” - the artists donate/volunteer time.
Here’s what Kerri and I did for New Year’s Eve:
