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<title>Melissa Fay Greene's Occassional Blog</title>
<description>Musings and Stories about large family life from Melissa Fay Greene, author of There is No Me Without You.</description>
<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog/</link>
<item>
	<title>The Decision-Making Process</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[My husband, Don Samuel, and I have seven children: Molly, 25; Seth, 22; Lee, 18; Lily, 14; Fisseha, 12; Jesse, 11; and Helen Samuel, 10. Four by birth, three by...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[My husband, Don Samuel, and I have seven children: Molly, 25; Seth, 22; Lee, 18; Lily, 14; Fisseha, 12; Jesse, 11; and Helen Samuel, 10. Four by birth, three by adoption: Jesse came at age four from Bulgaria, Helen at age five from Ethiopia, and Fisseha two years ago at age ten from Ethiopia.





Two children ago, in 2001, I wrote a cover article for the New York Times Magazine about enormous families. 

I felt strangely interested in "mega-families," families with 18, 20, 24 children, usually a mix of biological and adopted offspring.

I wrote: 

"I wanted to interview mothers of dozens because, the older I get, the more I feel weirdly inclined that way myself. "Since when did you become the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe?" snapped a friend when I confided that we were thinking of adopting again, of adding a sixth child to our four by birth and one by way of Bulgaria. Even our fourth baby, nine years ago, provoked expressions of surprise from our family. When we adopted a fifth child, flabbergasted friends chalked it up to a mostly charitable impulse. But now, whispers of a sixth threatened to place me, in their minds, among the greats: the DeBolt family, Ethel Kennedy, Mia Farrow, Bobbi McCaughey, the von Trapp family singers and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to 69 children in 18th-century Russia."

This past spring, Lee, 18, having graduated early from high school, flew to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for three months, to volunteer in several orphanages, including the foster home of Haregewoin Teferra, the subject of my new book. 

Lee fell in love with many, many children in the course of his time in Addis: boys, girls, sibling groups, HIV-negative children, HIV-positive children. But the two he began lobbying seriously about were a pair of brothers, Daniel and Yosef Gizaw. They have waited for a family the longest of all the children at Haregewoin's foster home. As boys of 10 and 12, their chances of being adopted are minuscule. 

"You have to adopt these guys," he began to tell us in emails and phone calls.

"THey'd be perfect for our family," he pleaded.

"I feel like they're my brothers already."





We relayed this campaign to our children still living at home and to those far-away: Seth Samuel at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and Molly Samuel, working for ForestEthics, in San Francisco.

"How old are they?" asked Seth.

"Ten and twelve," I said.

"We have those ages already," observed Seth. 

"Uh oh, wait," emailed Seth the next day. "I used to be the fastest in our family. Since Fisseha came, I'm the second-fastest. If we bring over two more Ethiopian boys, I'll be fourth and fourth doesn't medal."

"No," emailed Lee from Ethiopia. "I'm faster than you; you're already in third place; if we bring over even one more Ethiopian boy, you'll be in fourth place so we might as well bring these brothers."

I presented this debate question at dinner to the four children at home.

"No, Seth is THE fastest!" everyone yelled. Even Fisseha agreed.

I sent these results by email to our far-flung youth, Molly, Seth, and Lee, and now Molly emailed back, rather plaintively: "Aren't I good at anything?"

I presented THIS topic to those at home the following night and a lively discussion ensued. "She plays that big... that big... that big violin," offered Fisseha.

"An upright bass," I said. "OK, that's true. Anyone else?"

"She's the best reader," said Jesse.

But Helen carried the day with her nomination of Molly's niche: "She has the cutest car."

My husband, Don Samuel, and I meanwhile had crossed from "How could we possibly do this?" to "We can do this" in the course of a day. We were in complete agreement. Though it looked absurd from the vantage point of our handsome, tree-lined Atlanta neighborhood and our community of friends with reasonable numbers of children like one or two, from the perspective of Daniel and Yosef in Ethiopia, we knew we could make room. 

Lee offered not to go away to college next year if we brought home the boys. He was planning to spend a "gap year" in Israel starting this fall and offered to waive that.

"No, we're the parents," we said. "We'll be adopting them, not you."

Somehow it was settled.

Fisseha, who is a one-man Outward Bound Experience (having lived for most of his childhood as a goat-herd in Ethiopia), went out to the driveway, selected and peeled a branch of wood, took a magnifying glass, and burned — with the sun's rays — the updated roster: 





(This post first appeared at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger)
]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-07</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-07</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview15</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview15</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Yohannes's journey</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[
The remarkable thing about a book tour is that the publicity reaches into wider territory than my usual neighborhood, telephone, or even internet contacts. Su...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[
The remarkable thing about a book tour is that the publicity reaches into wider territory than my usual neighborhood, telephone, or even internet contacts. Surprising connections and reunions occur. 

A year ago, in November 2005, my 24-year-old daughter, Molly Samuel, accompanied me to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to visit Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra (the subject of my book) and her two foster homes. 



A small silent boy of two, named Yohannes, attached himself to my daughter.

An orphan of the HIV/AIDS pandemic devastating his country, his continent, Yohannes - like many small children - barely knew what he had lost. Under the supervision of kind caregivers, he had enough to eat, clothes to wear, rubber flip-flops on his feet, a bed. He moved from hour to hour obediently, asking nothing of anyone, not feeling himself especially loved, not missing it. 

But Molly's arrival in the compound triggered something in Yohannes; an inchoate memory perhaps; a longing. He put up his arms. He needed her to hold him. He needed her never to put him down.





Molly, on the staff of ForestEthics in San Francisco, is not a wild fan of small children. She humors her six younger brothers and sisters, but has been known to protest, "For the love of God, will you stop with the noise?"

But Yohannes, sidling near her, closing his eyes, lifting his arms, needed her, and she complied. Every day that week, whenever Molly was in Haregewoin's compound, Yohannes was on her. From the clasp of Molly's arms, he laid his cheek on her shoulder. 

Did he fantasize that she would be his mother? He was too young to elucidate such a thought; but if she had carried him out of the compound in her arms, ridden with him in a taxi to the modern airport, and flown home with him to her San Francisco apartment, he wouldn't have protested. He would have awakened to the happy reality that once, long ago, he had had a mother, then he had lost that mother, and now he had a mother again. He would be a good boy, you could see it; he occasionally pulled back from Molly's shoulder to gaze up at her. He snuggled closer when other children romped nearby; he was claiming her.

It is hard to say goodbye to these children. None of them has a mother. Whenever I visit Mrs. Haregewoin's houses, a couple of times a year, the orphaned children pile around me boisterously; they call my name, cover me with kisses, twiddle my hair, sit beside me and on top of me. The older ones know I am not their mother and will not be their mother; but, when we are together, we act as if it is kind of true. I love these children; I've known many of them for years. On my day of departure, many of them feel sad. They pull away from me, refuse to make eye contact.

So Molly and I said goodbye to all the children at the end of our visit, and Molly had to ask a caregiver to pry Yohannes from her neck. He didn't cry. This was what happened with mothers. They went away. When we left, Yohannes was sitting on his little chair at the child-size table. He wasn't doing anything. He was just sitting. He had re-entered the rather blank state of existence that is the lot of an institutionalized orphan.

On my original author website, www.melissafaygreene.com, I posted a photo of Molly at Mrs. Haregewoin's house, holding Yohannes. 

Now it is the fall of 2006.

I receive an email from Calgary, Ontario: 

"Hello Melissa Fay Greene and family," it begins.

"In April of 2006 we traveled to Ethiopia to adopt our son, Yohannes, who was for a time at the Atetegeh Worku Memorial Orphanage in Addis Ababa. 

"Today, my step-daughter Kristin sent me an e-mail about your book release as she recognized Haregewoin's picture from our visit to the orphanage. 

"I checked as many of the links as I possibly could - a sponge for information about those who have been on a similar journey and any information that would be pertinent for Yohannes later in life. I found lots of both. I checked out your family pictures and, being a methodical person, I started with what looked like the oldest first - your daughter Molly. And there it was, a picture of Yohannes on Molly's knee. I called my husband with such fervour that I think he thought something terrible had happened to me. My skin was alive with goose-bumps!! 

"Anyone who has traveled to Ethiopia is permanently touched by the experience, and I thought that Molly might like to know that that little boy is now in Calgary, Canada as the youngest member of our family of six. He is thriving and probably wouldn't be recognizable without this sequence of pictures: 










Please share these pictures with Molly."

I forward these photos immediately to my daughter and she phones from San Francisco within the hour, shouting, incredulous and joyful.





(This post first appeared at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger)
]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-07</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-07</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview10</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview10</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>In London's BBC radio studio</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[
In the U.K. for my book tour, I am invited into the London BBC studio. I am interviewed for the World Service Outlook Programme. A BBC reporter in Ethiopia ha...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[
In the U.K. for my book tour, I am invited into the London BBC studio. I am interviewed for the World Service Outlook Programme. A BBC reporter in Ethiopia has visited Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra already; that interview will be spliced into mine, for a 30-minute program.

The producer, Krisztina Glausius, asks if I'd like to hear the Ethiopia tape that will be included in my story.

I sit transfixed as I hear Haregewoin's voice and the voices of children in the background. "Here are the very very small ones," says Haregewoin in a whisper, and I can picture them, the sleeping babies in their rows of cribs. 

"And how do you feel about foreign adoption?" she is asked as they step back outside, for Madonna and her adoption of a Malawi toddler are in the news.

"Very sad, I feel very sad for them to leave," Haregewoin murmurs. It amuses me that no one has given her talking points; she will say, as always, precisely what she thinks.

"And will the children still be Ethiopian if they grow up in foreign countries?"

"No, they will not," she says firmly. "They will be like the people of that country."

(This I know first-hand, for she has criticized my own darling child, Helen, by saying, "You have ruined her. She is no longer Ethiopian.")

"Would it be better for the children to stay here?" the reporter is asking Mrs. Haregewoin.

"No, look around. What can I give them here? No, they are too many. They must go. No one person in Ethiopia will adopt them. We are a poor country and we have too too many orphaned children. Look at them. They need parents." 

All these children — 60 of them now, in two houses, half of them infected with HIV — have come to Mrs. Haregewoin unofficially. She gets no government support. She is just a neighborhood lady, a kind person who — through the tragedies of her own life — happened to open her door to orphans of AIDS. Soon the police, social workers from other cities, destitute grandparents and concerned neighbors headed for her modest tin-walled compound and small brick house, delivering orphaned children to her. Often she opens the door of her compound in the morning and finds a neatly-swaddled baby waiting on the ground nearby.

Now the BBC reporter and Mrs. Haregewoin have moved to a different scene. They stand on the sidelines of a soccer game. I have been to this soccer field. This team was organized by my son Lee Samuel, during his four months in Addis with Mrs. Haregewoin this past spring and summer. He formed Haregewoin's children into a boys team and a girls team, and organized children in two other orphanages to play against them.








Two boys are being waved off the field. They jog over, panting, to be introduced to the reporter.

It is Daniel and Yosef. 

(The first thing Lee [who speaks Amharic now] ever told us about the boys was from the soccer field: "Yosef is an amazing athlete. Daniel is good, but Yosef is incredible. But Yosef gets upset if he loses. Today, Yosef missed a goal and stormed off. Daniel followed him and I heard Daniel say, "Yosef, remember our history. Don't get upset about this. This is not what to get upset about.")

Now they are being interviewed for BBC: "Do you feel happy about going to America?" asks the reporter. A bystander translates the question for them and I hear the boys reply, "Ow, ow. [Yes, yes.]"

Why do you feel happy?

The question is translated; Daniel, the older, replies; and the bystander relays the translation:

"Now we live in an orphanage. That is rather a sad thing for us. In America we will have a family."

Everyone in the BBC studio in London looks at me.

The entire world suddenly feels no larger than about two city blocks. Down the street we have my house and family in Atlanta; here is the BBC London studio; and just over there — just around the corner — are these two handsome boys, panting and sweaty, eager to jog back into their game, who will be our sons.


(This post first appeared at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger)]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-09</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-09</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview12</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview12</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>A Late-Night Conversation</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

A late-night internet conversation between The Author in Atlanta and her daughter, Molly Samuel, in San Francisco:
____________________

SUBJECT : check ...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

A late-night internet conversation between The Author in Atlanta and her daughter, Molly Samuel, in San Francisco:
____________________

SUBJECT : check Powells bestsellers!!
11/1/06 10:04 pm EST / 7:04 PST 

you're number three right now
____________

10:15 pm EST
WHAT????? REALLY??? 
____________________

7:19 pm PST
SUBJ: selling better than Barack Obama
but behind richard dawkins
__________________________

10:25 pm EST
I'm ahead of Monty Python!!!
This is fantastic news!
But it says it changes hourly.
I don't want it to change.
_______________________

7:37 pm PST
If you have quick turnaround with your website guy, you could probably make it link to Powell's and help keep your numbers up there. 
__________________________

10:39 pm
I already link to Powells.
______________________________

7:40 pm
In solidarity with you and Powells, I just ordered four books for myself from their website. 
None of them was yours, I'm sorry.
___________________

10:40 pm
YOU BOUGHT SOMETHING OTHER THAN MY BOOK FROM POWELLS???
Not to worry, I just bought my own book from Powells.
But not for myself; for a silent auction in Laguna Beach, CA, to benefit medical services in Ethiopia. They've been asking for a book.
Really.
They have.
Asking and asking. 
___________________________

7:41 pm
None of the four I bought has a chance of competing with you as a bestseller.
____________________

10:42 pm
I'm still number three.
I don't think they ARE recounting every hour, do you?
I hope they NEVER recount.
Now I really have to go to bed. 
Adieu! Adieu! (I'm going to start saying "adieu" to my minions of fans.)
___________________

7:43 pm PST
I could buy your book from Powells. I'll buy one for a friend -- for Dean!
__________________

10:44 pm EST
I didn't go to bed yet. 
Why don't I treat your friend Dean to a book from Powells??? 
They're SIGNED.
I'm very excited.
This is my first (and perhaps last) bestselling moment. 
_________________

7:49 pm PST
OK, you can buy him one... Let me look up his address -- he lives in SF too... 

I'm also getting totally obsessed with this. I'm checking Powell's again and again instead of making dinner.
_________________

10:49 pm
On second thought, I don't want Powells to see that I keep buying my own book.
You buy it for him, from you, and I'll transfer $30 into your account.
______________

7:50 pm.
Right, they'll certainly think it's a scam. OK, I'll buy it right now. Do you want me to include a note from you or from me?
_____________

10:51 pm
from you!! 
and from Bank of America.
Do you think it's going to slip in 11 minutes, at the top of the hour?
Should I go to bed first?
_________________

10:51 pm
I'll check in 11 minutes. I bet it won't change since it's late and probably not that many people are buying anything right now.
_________________

10:52 pm
it's not late in Portland.
_________________

10:53 pm
yes, but it's dark there, and I'm sure everyone has gone to bed.
_________________

10:54 pm EST
hey, I'm outselling the hell out of Dave Eggers. You know his new book is about Africa? It's fiction, about Sudan.
Well, I'm outselling him THIS hour anyway.
_________________

10:55 pm PST
Yeah, take that, you simultaneous book about Africa.
_________________

10:56 pm EST
I am having a touch of difficulty transferring $30 from my account into yours inasmuch as my balance is $9.17.
Ah, the life of the bestselling author.
_________________

7:56 pm PST
Should I transfer $30 to your account so you can pay for the book you just ordered for the group in Laguna Beach? 
_________________

10:58 pm EST
No, I just transferred $50 to you.
$30 for Dean's book.
And $20 just because.
Not just because I'm a bestselling author.
Just because I transferred it from Daddy's account.
_________________

8:01 PST
I just bought your book for Dean. Take that, Dave Eggers and Barack Obama. 
Please thank Dad for the part he's (I'm sure unwittingly, since he's probably asleep) done to keep you there for one more hour.
_________________

11:01 EST  SUBJECT: AM I STILL A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR?
You check.
I can't stand it.
_________________

8:01 PST
8:01 here; you're still number three.
And it probably hasn't even processed my order for Dean yet!
_________________

11:03 PM EST
Or my order for the philanthropists of Laguna Beach.
NOW I'll go to bed.
But this is so much fun.
What if this is THE high point of the book???
.....
oh gosh, well, THAT wasn't such a happy thought.
But this is fun to share with you!!
_________________

8:05 pm
I know! Checking to see if you've written back is just as exciting as checking to see if you're still number 3.
_________________

11:11 EST
I AM going to bed now.
Which I will do, confident that you, my dear, will keep vigilant watch through the night, rousing your housemates, neighbors, and colleagues, if need be, in the small hours of the morning, to rush to their computers to make purchases, in case my book begins to slip.
What if people suddenly want to read someone's addiction memoir?
What if they wonder just what heaven is really like and whether a loved one can return for just one day?
Like a lonely lighthouse you stand, keeping watch, keeping watch.
_________________

8:22 pm PST
Goodnight Mom.
I'll kick Eggers in the shins if he gets near you. 
_________________

9:01 AM PST    
Subject: YOU'RE NUMBER 2 at 9:00
Survival of the fittest, Richard Dawkins!
_________________

2:01 AM EST/ 11:01 PM PST
Subject: still number 2 at 11
Mom, if I don't get any sleep tonight, it is all your fault.
_________________

11/2/06 7:15 a.m.
SUBJ: still number two
I just told Daddy and he said, "What about other online sellers?"
"I said I'm not TALKING about other online sellers. It's Powells! I love Powells. I'm going to buy all our books from Powells."
And he said: "Well, don't buy too many or you'll push your book out of second place."
I told Lily that I was number two on Powells.com and she said, "What's in first place?"
I told Jesse and he said, "What's number one?"
What is it with these people? I only want to talk to YOU about it. Powells.com. Our secret love. See you tonight.








1.	J. Poneson says: 
November 10th, 2006 at 12:37 pm 
Hilarious!
I always wondered if writers watch those lists all the time to see how their book is doing. Thanks for sharing Melissa!

2.	mark elliott says: 
November 10th, 2006 at 12:38 pm 
here's hoping you keep kickin dave egger's butt!

3.	Don Samuel says: 
November 11th, 2006 at 12:37 pm 
Is that why the dishes are always still in the dishwasher every morning? I always thought you were working on a new book when you stayed up late.
Love,
Don Samuel -- your husband.

4.	dean says: 
November 28th, 2006 at 11:45 am 
Where is my book Powell's??? Who do you think you are to rob me of this precious Samuel family blessing?? Are you listening Powell's? I will have my revenge! (p.s. thank you Melissa!)



(This post first appeared at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger)





]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-06</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-06</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview11</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview11</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Lee's letters from Addis Ababa, Spring 2006</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

Our son Lee Samuel graduated from Druid Hills High School in Atlanta in December 2005; in February 2006, he flew to Addis Ababa as a volunteer for World Wid...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

Our son Lee Samuel graduated from Druid Hills High School in Atlanta in December 2005; in February 2006, he flew to Addis Ababa as a volunteer for World Wide Orphans (WWO).  His job was just to play with orphanage children, many of whom had just started receiving the life-saving anti-AIDS medications and who were feeling good for the first time in years.
Lee, a high school baseball player, who ran a neighborhood summer baseball clinic, had envisioned organizing the children into baseball teams.  This proposal was met with stupefaction and whining.  He organized "football" (soccer) teams instead, culminating in a little orphanage soccer league -- with coaches, rosters, and schedules -- which is still going. 





Here's his first letter home after a day with the children of AHOPE, an orphanage for HIV-positive children.







Hello there family.  Yesterday, my orphanage had a field trip to what I guess is the only amusement park in the country.  The 33 of us crammed into one van which is supposed to seat 8.  The ride was long, incredibly hot, and a few of the kids began throwing up on the bus (including one of the four kids perched on my lap), but otherwise, it was incredibly fun.  We discussed astronomy, European soccer, and the strengths and weaknesses of America’s and Ethiopia’s respective Olympic teams (“Why American runners get so tired after 10 seconds?”).  

On the bus ride, the kids gave me a full tour of Addis Ababa: “There is bank!”, “There is goats!”, “There is dying man with no legs!”  Also, the kids were always quick to point out every ferange to me (I can’t help but think that ferange really just means Crackah).  “LEE!!! FERANGE!” they would yell.  I think they wanted to assure me that I was not the only white person on the continent.  In response, I would point at any random person on the street and yell, “KIDS!!! ABESHA (which means Ethiopian)!!!”.  They didn’t think it was funny. 

When we got to the amusement park, the kids ecstatically took off in every direction.  There were swings, giant slides, a ferris wheel, and bumper cars.  Unfortunately, the bumper cars had no electricity so I had to run around pushing the children’s’ cars into each other.  I did this for about 30 minutes in 95 degree heat until I passed out from heat exhaustion.  They didn’t care.  They had a great time.  Those turkeys. Later, they forced me to go down the giant slides with them, despite the fact that about half of them are deathly afraid of heights.  I had to grab a child, place him/her in my lap, take off down the slide, sprint back up the slippery metal ramp, grab another kid, and repeat.  I went down the slide at least 75 times, always with 2-3 kids.  At American parks, they have attendants at the top of this type of attraction who tell the kids when to go.  Not here.  All of them would kind of just leap on to the slide at the same time and kind of tumble down in a heap.  One girl got halfway down and then wailed for me to rescue her.  I tried to climb down and get her, but i slipped and kicked her the rest of the way down.  Then we had lunch.  The food here is so delicious that I have gone through only a bottle and a half of Maximum Strength Pepto-Bismol in 8 days!

Lee






Dear Family:
Last night I slept at Haregewoin’s with all the kids.  We played dodgeball all afternoon, had a dinner of injera and kikwat, and then stayed up until 5AM playing Go Fish and watching Arab television.  

Thanks to dinners such as kikwat, I am quickly running out of my Maximum Strength Pepto-Bismol.  In addition to quickly following every meal, it has sort of become a staple of my diet: A Coke and some Pepto actually make for a delicious lunch.  My driver, Baby, is trying to convince me to try some of his favorite Ethiopian delicacy: raw meat.  He tells me that it gives you tapeworm about 15% of the time, but me contracting intestinal parasites is a risk he is willing to take.  

Speaking of raw meat, this morning I was witness to one of the most fantastic cultural clashes of all time.  Around 11AM, while I was still playing at the orphanage, a group of about 30 blonde blue-eyed religious Christian Norwegians came to see the kids.  They kind of stood on opposite sides of the compound staring at each other (believe it or not, Ethiopian orphans and Norwegian missionaries have little to chat about).  

The Norwegians broke the ice by lecturing on how much Jesus loves each and every one of us. A woman said: “Jesus died on the cross not just for white people, but for you all too.” Anyway, back to how this story is related to raw meat.  This week, a two-month fast (no meat, no dairy) begins in Ethiopia.  For the big, pre-fast feast, the compound had two sheep delivered earlier in the morning and I was excited to have some new playmates.  Sadly, halfway through the Norwegians’ rendition of “Jesus Loves You,” a man in the back began slaughtering the first sheep.  Unfortunately, it took 4 or 5 hacks to fully kill it, so it was loudly squealing/moaning right in the middle of the Christian hymns. It kind of sounded like this: “Jesus loves you this I know.  For the ERRRRRRGAAAACCCHHHHHHH . . . uhhh . . . bible tells me UMMMMMBLACCCCCHH . . . so.”  It only got worse as the sheep’s blood began trickling down and puddling at the feet of the horrified Norwegians.  They quickly said, “Thanks for having us,” and sprinted out of there while me while the kids jumped on me and all rolled around in the dirt/blood on the floor in hysterics.  I have sheep blood in my hair now.  I love Norway.

Love,
Lee 






Dearest family,

I slept at Haregewoin’s again last week and I brought my laptop along this time.  My grand plan was to show them the movie “The Sandlot” and then teach them baseball.  

The point of all this is for the kids to learn a sport in which I can beat them handily.  My already bottomed-out self esteem can’t take any more soccer game debacles.  

Unfortunately, they didn’t really take to the baseball scenes in the movie, but they liked when Squints kisses the lifeguard and when all of the boys throw-up at the carnival after taking chewing tobacco.  

When the movie ended, I asked if they wanted to learn baseball, but all they wanted to know was, “Why they no play football?”  

Later, I let Hailegebrial write an e-mail to the man in Lyons, France who is in the process of adopting him.  Here is an excerpt: “Thank you for sending me the CD player.  The CD player is very nice.  I like very much.  I practice my French every day.  Como Sa va?  i am sad because of celebrate Christmas without you.  But I am thinking of you always and it makes me happy.  I like very much the charger for the CD player.  It is very nice.” 

The following morning, I took Pinl, Hailegabriel, Betti, Mekdes, and Daniel (five of the kids from Haregewoin’s) on a field trip to the super-rich (and thus very un-Ethiopian) American private school for a small carnival they were having.  The place was so decidedly un-Ethiopian, in fact, that nobody there was able to communicate with the five Ethiopian children I had brought.  There was also no food there that the kids could eat during the Ethiopian fast months (no meat, no dairy) except cotton candy. However, there was a dunking booth, a video game room, a movie room, and a dodge ball playing area.  The kids instantly took to the dodge ball (which they learned from me) and beat the crap out of dozens of ambassadors’ kids.  Seeing the Swedish ambassadors’ son knocked out by Daniel and then running off crying was one of the proudest moments of my life.  

Later in the afternoon, I took Pinl (8-years-old) and Daniel (11-years-old) to one of the bathrooms on campus.  This was instantly the most magical and fantastic place the boys had ever seen.  First, they spent five minutes washing their hands in the miraculously hot water. Then, Pinl experimented with the box on the wall and discovered that it automatically dispensed soap when you put your hand under it.  This was the greatest thing both Pinl and Daniel had ever seen.  The two of them emptied two boxes getting so much soap, and then tried to run out the door to alert Hailegabrial of all of the fantastic things in the bathroom, but their hands were too slippery to open the door, so they had to run back and play with the hot water some more.  Then they saw the urinals and asked me what they were.  I told them that they were toilets, so Pinl quickly turned around and sat in one.  I quickly showed him how it is meant to be used, but he didn’t approve, so he went into a stall.  In there, the automatic flusher scared him and made him jump away.  Meanwhile, Daniel discovered the automatic hand dryer and was heating up his whole body with it, even taking off his shirt and pants to better feel the warmth.  After recovering from the shock of Auto-Flush, Pinl brightened up and joined Daniel, completely undressing under the hand dryer.  Finally, they both successfully used the bathroom, but then walked out without washing or drying their hands.  

From the toilet episode, I took the kids to the video game room which was too mind-blowing to even be comprehended.  They sat there gaping at the screens for ten minutes before they mustered up enough courage to try to play.  Daniel, Mekdes, and Pinl were very interested in the blood and gore of Mortal Combat, while Betti liked Lord of the Rings better.  After a few fights with me doing most of the controlling, Daniel got the hang of Mortal Combat and began beating some white people.  His strategy was to constantly walk his character forward and hit the triangle button over and over again, disabling his opponent from ever blocking or fighting back.  He actually won a number of matches that way and made the Swedish ambassador’s son cry again.  While we were in there, Betti wandered off and ended up getting dunked at the dunking booth, fully clothed.  After coming back to me, she seemed completely shocked and hurt from the whole experience.  Seeing how upset she was, Daniel walked over and grabbed her hand, talked to her in Amharic for a minute, and then led her away to the boys’ bathroom.  I went in there after him and saw that he was showing her to undress and dry herself off under the automatic hand washer.  Never again will I take our western bathrooms for granted.

Love,
Lee






]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-03-15</date>
		<dc:date>2006-03-15</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview9</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview9</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Aging rapidly</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[Upon arrival in the U.S. on June 10, Yosef (who, like many Ethiopian children, had no idea how old he is) learned that, on paper, according to his Ethiopian bir...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[Upon arrival in the U.S. on June 10, Yosef (who, like many Ethiopian children, had no idea how old he is) learned that, on paper, according to his Ethiopian birth certificate, he was TEN, that he had turned 10 on May 28.  He was still in the orphanage on that (invented) date, so there was no birthday party. 
 
On June 16, mere days after his arrival in the US, we had a tremendous water balloon birthday party for Helen and for Yosef, as Helen insisted on sharing her party with Yosef.  A mob of children screeched out Happy Birthday to You, Yosef blew out his candles and he opened gifts.  That night he announced: "Now I am eleven." 
 
Today a late birthday gift was presented to Yosef.  As he eagerly tore into the wrapping paper, Daniel said, "Uh oh.  Now Yosef 12."  

                      

]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-06-19</date>
		<dc:date>2007-06-19</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview6</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview6</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Boxer Shorts</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[In July, I flew back to Addis Ababa with our oldest son, Seth. We joined Lee, who was already there, and we brought Yosef and Daniel to our hotel. They learned ...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[In July, I flew back to Addis Ababa with our oldest son, Seth. We joined Lee, who was already there, and we brought Yosef and Daniel to our hotel. They learned that very afternoon that we would be their family. The Gizaw brothers, their friend from the orphanage, Hailegabriel, and Lee's friend Ezra Silk, had such an uproarious time together in two hotel rooms that a gentleman from Nigeria, a United Nations official occupying the room next door, was obliged to call the front desk more than once to plead for quiet.

One evening, after a long day of sightseeing and soccer and frisbee, Seth herded Yosef into the bathroom, turned on the shower, pantomimed what was required, and withdrew.

A few minutes later, Yosef came dancing out of the bathroom dripping wet and stark naked.

Seth shooed him back into the bathroom, took Yosef's boxer shorts, threw them in after him, and closed the door again.

Yosef danced back out into the room, dripping wet and with the boxer shorts on his head.

He had selected two from among the dozen words of English he knew. As he leapt wildly into the room, he asked, "YOU READY?"

Lee later said of the boys: "These are the two happiest human beings I've ever seen in my life."











(This post first appeared at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger)
]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-08</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-08</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview13</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview13</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Their short-lived upper-middle-class life</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[Suitcases lie half-filled all over the house; we leave in a few hours for upstate New York, a vacation planned by our oldest daughter Molly.
 
"Mom, clothes, ...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[Suitcases lie half-filled all over the house; we leave in a few hours for upstate New York, a vacation planned by our oldest daughter Molly.
 
"Mom, clothes, where?" worriedly asked Daniel, after his new clothes vanished from his dresser into a suitcase. 
 
Hearing we were going by PLANE, after his zillion hours on the plane from Addis ONE WEEK AGO, Yosef groaned, "OH NO!  NO NO NO." 
 
(Waiting for departure from Addis, after three hours in the gate area, Yosef had asked Donny, "Are we there yet?")
 
I cannot relay to them what we're doing really, why we're going to leave this beautiful house, which has abundant food, air-conditioning, beds galore, new clothes, radios, televisions, computers, and bicycles, to go live in rustic cabins around a lake in the Adirondacks for a week, as the guests of the family of our oldest daughter's boyfriend.
 
I think they're going to understand it like this:  "Our new and oldest sister Molly has a boyfriend named Andy; and we are traveling to meet Andy's family, and they are poorer people, they live in a way more like poor Ethiopians, without appliances or indoor plumbing or many water balloons or a moonwalk; they live in simple cabins and they walk along mud paths and they must wash themselves in a lake and they must catch fish for their dinner.  Surely they must be very happy that their son has met a girl from a rich and house-owning family." 






]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-06-17</date>
		<dc:date>2007-06-17</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview5</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview5</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Post-Adoption Depression article excerpted in Adoptive Families Magazine</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

The new issue of ADOPTIVE FAMILIES Magazine includes a condensed version of my "Post-Adoption Panic" article.  [Click RECENT ARTICLES on this website for th...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

The new issue of ADOPTIVE FAMILIES Magazine includes a condensed version of my "Post-Adoption Panic" article.  [Click RECENT ARTICLES on this website for the fuller version.]

Post-adoption Depression ("PAD") is one of the rarely-discussed secrets in the adoption world. 

It's a not-uncommon malaise that tends to afflict parents who have brought home a child older than infancy, a child who is not their first. Research seems to indicate that first-time parents of babies are the least likely to suffer this bewildering let-down.  

PAD has remained rather hidden because sufferers blame themselves.  Sufferers are MORTIFIED, after months or years of planning for, saving for, preparing for, working towards, and finally realizing an adoption, to be less-than-thrilled.  Sufferers--no matter how chatty they've been on every relevant internet chat-list—suddenly log off.  If anyone asks, they bravely try to put a happy spin on the new family constellation, which in fact is making them reel in exhaustion and regret.  

Jan de Hartog, in his marvelous & funny & honest book, THE CHILDREN (NY: Atheneum, 1969) devotes Chapter 6 to “The First Panic.”

“Maybe you are so experienced, well balanced or just plain lucky that this will not apply to you,” he writes.  “The majority of us however are, within the first few days of the arrival of our new child from Asia, likely to go through a blind, witless panic. It will not last long, but it is an experience that none of us will ever forget.  The worst of it is… that it takes you completely unawares and that while it lasts you are convinced it will last forever..."

Later he describes being hit by despair on the very night his first little Korean daughter arrives, delivered to the de Hartogs out of a disrupting adoption. Jan is sent out the door by his wife and the social workers to buy milk and bread for the child:  “I went to the garage and pushed up the door;  that was the moment the panic hit me.  Suddenly, as I stood there in the darkness fumbling for my car keys, my knees gave way.  I leaned against the wall, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of despair that made me cover my face with my hands.  I saw my pleasant, well-organized life collapse in confusion… Everything I cherished and cared for—my peace, my middle-aged comfort, my serenity—was shattered by this stranger calling me ‘Daddy.’…"

Searching for milk at the grocery, he writes: “I roamed along the counters feeling old and hysterical, utterly unsuitable to be anybody’s father, let alone an Asian child’s.”

The good news—which is why it’s a shame to conceal the whole situation—is that, in time, all parties—parents and children—tend to find their places in the new-built family, and contentment is yours once again. 



]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-08-26</date>
		<dc:date>2007-08-26</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview18</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview18</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>And yet more confusion on space/time continuum </title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

“What did you learn today?” I ask the gangly new 13-year-old in the house. I enunciate clearly, using hand and eye gestures to relay the question.

“Mom!”...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

“What did you learn today?” I ask the gangly new 13-year-old in the house. I enunciate clearly, using hand and eye gestures to relay the question.

“Mom!” says Daniel in his emphatic voice.  “13 months.  Names.”

“You learned the names of the 13 months?”

“Yes.”

(“That IS advanced work,” observes my friend Sue later.)

“Daniel, we only have 12 months in America.”

“No, Mom.  13.  Teacher say.”

“I’m pretty sure about this one, kid.”

“Thirteen Mom.”

“Jesse,” I call to the sixth-grade resident Bulgarian. “How many months are there?”

“Four,” says Jesse.

“Um, Jess?  That would be the seasons.  What about the months?”

“Sixteen?”

“Thirteen Mom,” says Daniel.

This is going to be a long year. 




]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-03</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-03</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview20</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview20</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>INFORMAL GUIDE TO ETHIOPIAN ADOPTION</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

They are like children everywhere.  Those who have been loved and nurtured since birth --and cared for in decent orphanages--typically adjust very well to t...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

They are like children everywhere.  Those who have been loved and nurtured since birth --and cared for in decent orphanages--typically adjust very well to their new families.  My husband and I have four children by birth (Molly, 26, Seth, 23, Lee, 19, and Lily, 15) and we have adopted five children (in order of arrival:  Jesse, 13, came from Bulgaria at 4 1/2. Helen, 11, came from Ethiopia at 5 1/2. Fisseha, 14, came from Ethiopia at 10;  and brothers Yosef and Daniel Gizaw, 10 and 13, came from Ethiopia last June.)

(Yes, we’re finished.)

(No, I know I’ve said that before, but this time we really are.)

(Look, we ran out of bedrooms about four children ago.) 

(And no one's invited our whole family to dinner since around 1998.)



I have written elsewhere about our children’s adjustment (much of that material is on this website.)  In general, despite traumatic ups-and-downs at the start of each adoption (leading, in Jesse’s case, to my brief but full-blown case of post-adoption depression) (and leading, earlier this summer after Yosef and Daniel’s arrival, to my bursting into tears in the neighborhood swimming pool and fleeing for the parking lot) -- and despite seemingly insurmountable trauma in our children’s early lives -- all five of them have become our wonderful, ridiculous, gorgeous and noisy very own children.

But, like children everywhere, Ethiopian children who have suffered neglect or abuse, before or during their orphanage stays, can be much more challenging.   Adoption of severely hurt children should be undertaken by adults who know what they are doing. 

Like adults everywhere, Ethiopians love children.  I have met spectacularly generous and loving caregivers in Ethiopian orphanages.  I have seen orphanages that operate like jumbo families:  the big kids rush out the door to school in the morning, run home for lunch, do their homework in the afternoons, play football  (soccer) endlessly in the compound, carry about the babies and toddlers.  I have seen Ethiopian caregivers wearing the orphaned babies in shawls on their backs.  I have seen orphaned babies and toddlers included in the life of an orphanage compound, in ways unknown to the Eastern European orphanages I have visited.  All of this is good news for the Ethiopian children, and for prospective adoptive parents.  




Everyone remembers the brutal Romanian orphanages exposed to the world in 1989 and 1990.  Everyone recalls vividly the news footage of these child concentration camps.  In particular your extended family members and close friends remember the Romanian orphanages of 1989 and they are eager, now, to tell you about them, to warn you away from adopting an older child.

You have to do your homework; you have to proceed cautiously. 
Still:  Ethiopia today is not equivalent to Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania.



I have heard experts -- in the field of international adoption medicine -- bitterly lament how little homework some parents do.  “People spend more time researching their next car than their next child,” an international adoption doctor told me. 

There is a place for love and faith, dreams and hope, horoscopes and signs, on your adoption journey, but those heartfelt aspects of adoption should not, at the start, be your brightest guiding lights.

"Any child does best in a situation where the family's expectations and the child's abilities are in sync," says Dr. Dana Johnson, one of the pioneers of the pediatric specialty of International Adoption Medicine. "A child with low potential in an environment with high expectations is a recipe for disaster." He is quoted in a New York Times article that goes on to say:

"Unlike adoptions from the American foster care system, which are tightly regulated, international adoption remains a free-for-all. Established agencies prepare families for the risks and urge them to seek adoption screening. But unlicensed "facilitators" abound, matching unsuspecting parents with sickly children. 

"Compounding the inconsistent preparation are an array of vigorous marketing techniques used to find homes for children who are older or in ill health. They include photo listings on the Internet and programs that place children briefly with host families, for summer vacations or the holidays. Both can promote impulsive decisions, and experts worry that they may cloud the judgment of adoptive families who fall in love first and ask questions later." 

Access this article, "Seeking Doctors' Advice on Adoptions from Afar" by Jane Gross at: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/03/national/03adopt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Dr.+Dana+Johnson&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Then, read this book: 



It’s not as peppy or upbeat as many guides to international adoption; there are no cherubs, hearts, or rainbows in the illustrations as you’ll see on many adoption websites. This book does not pretend that your child is floating on a sun-kissed cloud amongst the angels while waiting for you to complete your homestudy; it’s not a guide for Dummies or for Idiots, and it doesn’t promise a baby in your arms by Christmas. It also does not specifically address Ethiopian adoption;  anecdotally, it does seem that fewer adopted Ethiopian children face many of the issues described in this book, such as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. BUT you should know what's out there in the world of international adoption.  This book will arm you with something more powerful than hearts, rainbows, promises, and heart-melting photographs:  facts. 

There are facts here about neglect; there are facts here about sexual abuse occurring in orphanages; there are facts here about tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD.)  This is not bedtime reading.  But it’s essential reading.  It may scare you away from inter-country adoption permanently.  But if you are still standing when you’ve finished this book, you’ll be stronger. 



Incorrect.  Even an adorable baby girl can have suffered less-than-optimum development prior to her adoption.  She may have been malnourished in utero or post-natally; she may have been born into a family in crisis., to parents who were ill, hungry, or dying.  She may not have received blue-ribbon treatment on every stop along her journey from relinquishment to adoption.  She may have the potential to be the most marvelous little person on the planet, but she could require major assistance to get there.  Do your homework.

Meanwhile it’s possible, actually, to know a LOT about older “waiting” children in orphanages, so don’t shy away from considering them.

Five times now, I have been calmed (during the normal period of utter panic pre-adoption) by contact with and knowledge of an older waiting child.  After being matched (through Adoption Advocates International) with Helen, we started getting MAIL from her.  I got a glue-and-glitter-encrusted Mother’s Day card.  With Fisseha (also adopted through AAI), we got his report card!  “He has very smiling face,” a teacher wrote.  “I have very much love to him.” 

Don’t rule out an older child during your search for a baby girl.  Many wonderful families have been created because there were long waiting-lists for baby girls.  Baby boys are also very cute. 







Two steps:

(A) If you thought Bascom was dry reading, try this website: 
http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/intercountry/intercountry_473.html 

Here are the regulations, as laid out by the U.S. Department of State, governing inter-country adoption.  This will be your introduction to the marathon paper-chase that lies ahead.  You will need to meet the requirements set out by the Ethiopian government and by the American government.

Within the State Department website, you can look for country-specific information.  A click on ETHIOPIA will take you to this body of knowledge: 
http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/country/country_380.html 

But don’t despair after perusing the long, long list of requirements;  you are going to find an adoption agency to walk you through all of them.

The adoption of Ethiopian orphans by Americans is growing by leaps and bounds. The most recent data looks like this:

Fiscal Year       Number of Immigrant Visas Issued
2006                                   731
2005                                   440
2004                                   289
2003                                   135
2002                                   105
[source: http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/country/country_380.html ]

Because Ethiopia’s popularity is growing among American and European adoptive parents, the Ethiopian government is under pressure to standardize and manage the numbers of children in flux.  The courts are growing more strict; adoption personnel are growing more rigorous. Anyone who thinks that adoption is an easier route to family-building that pregnancy and childbirth has NOT looked at these regulations.

(B).  Choose an adoption agency.  This deserves an answer all its own.





You will need two agencies.

You will need a local adoption agency licensed to complete a homestudy for an international adoption.  This is not the agency that will lead you to your child.

And you will need an international adoption agency licensed to practice in Ethiopia. This agency does not have to be local. 

Here is a great chance for you to do thorough and ferocious research.

This may be the single most important choice of the entire process, as it will determine the shape and outcome of your adoption journey.

All adoption agencies are not equal.

The cuteness of the magazine ad, the animation features of the agency’s website, and the frequency with which the word “angel” is applied to orphaned children, may not translate directly into an ethical, transparent, affordable, and legal process for your family.

(Private – i.e. do-it-yourself-- adoptions are not outlawed in Ethiopia, but they put even more pressure on the courts and federal ministries to oversee children's welfare and they create (to my mind) a kind of Wild West atmosphere. I have witnessed behaviors I considered unethical – including blatent “child-shopping” -- as families zipped by taxi from orphanage to orphanage around Addis Ababa, browsing for children to adopt.  American agency directors could tell you horror stories about the families they've been asked to rescue from private adoption disasters. I do not recommend private adoption.)

As the popularity of Ethiopian adoptions grows, so do the numbers of agencies and facilitators operating there.  This means you must choose carefully.

One wide-ranging source of information about agencies is the EthiopiaAdopt list found at www.Yahoogroups.com.  Register with the list-owner and pose your question to the group:  “I’m thinking about using such-and-such an agency – can anyone tell me about first-hand experiences with that agency?”

Then stand back and watch the chips fly. Of course you’ll want to sift through the feedback you receive.  But it will be a prodigious start to gathering information. 

The U.S. State Department lists licensed agencies working in Ethiopia. And you may check with the Better Business Bureau in an agency’s home city. 

It is reasonable to peruse the agency materials and to ask for answers to questions like these:
   1. Are you currently licensed to handle adoptions from Ethiopia?  Since when?
   2.  Have you ever had your license suspended?  Why?
   3. How many Ethiopian adoptions have you completed? 
   4. Do you run an agency list-serv – a forum for pre- and post-adoptive families to converse online?  If not, is there a way for your families to communicate with one another?
   5. Can I have a hand in choosing my child, or will I be “matched” with a child by you? 
   6. What kind of information is available about children you place?  Will I see medical reports, photos, videos?  Will I learn about the child’s history prior to placement at the orphanage?
   7. Have you, the director, met the children?  Will you have met my prospective child personally?  If not, on whose word are we relying about the condition of the child?
   8. What is a typical time-line from the time I accept a child to completion of the process?
   9. How does the timeline for baby-adoption compare to the timeline for older child adoption?
  10. May I travel to meet my child before the process is complete?
  11. May I travel to pick up my child or do I have the child escorted?  Which do you recommend?
  12. Is it possible to adopt two or more unrelated children, or do you discourage it?
  13. Is it possible to meet my child’s birth-relatives?  Does my child have a living parent?  (Adoption is legal after the loss of one parent.)
  14. What is the cost for an adoption of one or more children?  Are there hidden costs?  Will I be charged for foster care while my child awaits completion of the process?
  15. What kind of post-adoption support does your agency offer?  If we have a difficult transition, will you be able to help me through it?  

Not all these questions have right or wrong answers.
You may prefer to have an agency "match" you with a child; you may prefer "waiting for a referral."
OR you may prefer to do as my family has done, which is to receive newsletters from our agency with photographs of older "waiting" children.
Virtually all adoptions of babies come through referral, through being "matched."
But many older child adoptions empower you with some degree of choice:  photos, medical history, a bit of video.  
Some agencies may prefer that you stay home; they will deliver your child to you.
Most agencies encourage your making the journey to Ethiopia, to get a glimpse of your child's country and history.
Meeting birth-parents and birth-relatives sounds daunting, for sure;  and IS daunting; but it can be one of the most powerful experiences of your life and a phenomanal gift to your child. 




I personally think it's a terrible idea.  

The kind of "child-shopping" that goes on in countries where parents fly in and visit orphanages has to be damaging to children examined and then left behind, and it places parents at huge risk of getting into legal and medical situations far over their heads.  Ethical agencies will tell you horror stories of the parents they've tried to bail out of failed 'indepdent adoptions,' where the facilitators turned out to be shady middlemen and the children turn out to be not exactly orphans, not exactly abandoned.  

"I am not opposed to independent adoptions," writes Dr. Jeri Jenista, a prominent pediatric infectious diseases expert specializing in adopted and immigrant children. "For certain parents - those with special medical expertise, who speak the language, who have lived in the country for many years, who have relatives or other close personal ties in the country – the independent process may provide a wonderful opportunity for an adoption meeting the family’s needs. However, most families do not have those special resources needed to accomplish an independent adoption. Indeed, even many prospective parents with those skills need help in other aspects of the adoption."

Read more comments by Dr. Jenista about independent adoptoin at: http://www.pnpic.org/jcics.htm 

Several years ago, I saw a bargain-hunting child-shopping couple drive up to Mrs. Haregewoin's foster home by taxi, and I've not yet quite recovered from it. They selected a sibling group of three, brought them into the livingroom, gave them gifts, murmured sweet nothings to them. They are wonderful children, those three -- a big brother of about nine  looking after a little brother and tiny sister; they'd been the children of doting middle-class parents.   "Do you like them?" the American dad asked his young teenage son, and the boy, obviously moved, nodded vigorously. The dad had tears in his eyes. "These are the ones," he said to his wife after the 30-minute visit. She tentatively agreed, but didn't want to commit without visiting the other orphanages on her list. They kissed the children goodbye, promised to return, and zoomed off in their taxi, leaving the three children a little bewildered.  They returned the next day, ready to claim the three children, BUT a cute pair of twin boys had arrived at Atetegeb in their absence.  On their way across the courtyard, the mom got distracted by the oval-faced freckled pair. "Are THEY available?" she asked.  They were.  Mrs. Haregewoin felt obliged to cater to the American couple, as all their paperwork was complete, including an approval from the Ministry of Children's Affairs.  This time the adults brought the twins into the livingroom and murmured sweet nothings to THEM."  "These are the ones," said the dad.  "You like them?" he asked his son.  They drove off with the twins.  The sibling set of three lingered in the courtyard for a long time after the parents left.  They were confused.  For a long time, they thought the American pair was still planning to return.

(The two brothers and sister later found a WONDERFUL home, by the way, with parents who used an adoption agency.)

The Ethiopian government already has its hands full trying to regulate international agencies setting up shop all over the country.  Don't add to the burden by peeling off on your own.  There may or may not be a child for you at the end of such a risky process.  There may or may not be bruised hearts left in your wake. 



Well, you may not know this.

You may not feel anything in particular, other than a soft stirring of curiosity.  You may feel – upon seeing a photo or film – “now THAT is one cute kid.”  

Is he or she the “right” child for you, the one destined by heaven to be yours?

Hard to say.

You’d hate to wish that anyone’s “destiny” included becoming an orphan. The child’s history is tragic; the child’s luck is about to change in a big way, beginning with your appearance on the scene.

You will, in adopting this boy or girl, make the child your own.  Your own life will swerve to meet the child’s; the two of you will begin to develop in tandem, becoming different people than you would have been without each other.  

Like many adoptive parents, I chafe at the term “biological” to designate only my birth children.  First because all children, of course, are the products of biology.  Second because aren’t my children by adoption also mine biologically?  We breathe each other’s air, prepare and share each other’s food, borrow each other’s combs and socks and pencils;  Helen sometimes falls asleep on my bed twirling her fingers through my hair.  Aren’t these somehow biological processes?  Aren’t our cells intermixing?  Haven’t the years of Berenstain Bears books I’ve inflicted on these children been immortalized as brain cells? 

In parenting your new child, you will make the child the right child for you.  Even if the relationship doesn't feel perfect or magical or pre-destined for the first few weeks (or months), just pretend that all is unfolding according to plan, according to a higher intelligence than your own.

The child will simultaneously create in you the right mother or the right father, the one who knows where to tickle, what to cook, which bedtime story to read, and which flavor ice cream flavor is the best, the ice cream flavor ordained by heaven to be the one you both happen to love. 






You’ve studied his or her photo for most of a year;  you’ve worn out the disc replaying the nanoseconds of footage.  In the film provided by the adoption agency, your child has not screamed or thrown food; he has not stomped his foot and made an angry face; the baby has not twisted away from you to avoid eye contact.  In the realm of photo and film and fantasy, the child is clean and polite.  The child is tall and strikingly handsome and academically gifted and developmentally on target. Regardless of age, you can tell this child is going to come straight home and begin by tidying up the kitchen and taking out the trash, before going on a bike ride wearing a helmet and observing all traffic laws and hand signals. This child is easily going to make Eagle Scout by 12.  

In real life, children are sometimes not so clean and polite.  They sometimes are quite short and dusty, they may have giardia or head-lice, and and it may be a few years before that academic brilliance presents itself.  The child will not know how to ride a bike and, after he learns, he will zig-zag in and out of traffic while you run down the sidewalk screaming and waving your arms.

Reactions upon first meeting range from “This is the child of my heart, thank you God,” to (my typical reaction) “If I run away right now and deny everything, can they still make me bring this child to my hotel?”  

Reactions vary from “That’s her!  I’d know her anywhere!  That’s really her!!” to “Has there been a mistake?  This child is really not as cute as the photo tacked to my refrigerator.”  

In my book, I describe this marvelous first contact with their daughter as experienced by Rob Cohen and Claudia Cooper:

           “On a morning of dazzling heat and brightness—denim sky sparkling with sunlight; dirt roads teeming with people,   donkeys, goats, and sheep; flags snapping in the wind; hundreds of tin shops and wooden kiosks displaying their wares—they rode by taxi to Layla House and honked outside the steel door. A guard pulled it open.  Kids spied them in the taxi’s backseat and scattered, sprinting in every direction and yelling Meskerem’s name.
&#8195;         
           "Claudia hadn’t met Meskerem on her first visit to Layla House. Now she shakily got out of the taxi and tried to acknowledge greetings from children who remembered her. Rob stood beside her in an agony of thrilling overstimulation,  trepidation, and excitement. It was all about to happen. It began.

&#8195;         "Meskerem came out the doorway of a far building and turned in their direction. They both registered instantly, “She’s  as beautiful as her pictures.” Thick, curly hair gathered back into a ponytail, tall, slender child, elegant face, the thick arched eyebrows and shy smile. She walked toward them sweetly, alternately looking at them and looking down at the ground; she carried herself gracefully all the way across the compound straight to them (they were paralyzed); she put her arms (she was nearly as tall as Claudia) around Claudia’s neck and delivered the great hug of Claudia’s lifetime: an unrelentingly hard, grateful, and loving hug, a hug that went on so long that Rob (towering over both of them) bent to be included. They held on to each other for a long time. The white sun edged an inch across the sky, changing the angles of silver light bending from car bumpers and wristwatches and window hardware around the compound; they hugged as classes changed and children danced around them and skipped away; they hugged for so long that, by the time they let go, they’d leapt across the oceans and continents, they’d reassured one another, they’d found one another.”





But here’s the thing:  even if your first moments are nothing like that, your life can still turn out fine.  

All my children have been shy upon first meeting, head down, refusing eye contact.  

They’ve all turned into boisterous and normal children eager to make eye contact, especially when it is far past their bedtime, finding 11 p.m. a wonderful moment to snuggle and to look up and to ask, trustingly, hopefully, about a little something glimpsed in the Limited Too catalogue. 



 
You’ll be exhausted beyond human endurance.  

After months of paperwork and anxiety, you’ll have flown 20 or more hours to Addis Ababa to meet your new child;  you’ll have taken charge of the child, whose language you don’t speak, whose daily habits and schedule you don’t know, and who may or may not be thrilled to spend time with you;  you’ll have flown with this child back across North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean; you’ll have changed planes, had layovers, and endured long lines.  You’ll be dead on your feet before you enter your own foyer, lugging the suitcases filled with colorful Ethiopian baskets, ready to begin your new family life. 

Behaviors that have been displayed by newly-adopted children traveling 20 hours by air have included energetic screaming and kicking and fleeing up and down the aisle, throwing up, throwing food, throwing tantrums, marathon sleeping, entering a trance-like state of sheer panic, and/or excellent dinner manners and calm movie-watching. .

Our ten-year-old son Fisseha was thrilled beyond words to be given airplane head-phones;  he donned them instantly and enjoyed them greatly for three-quarters of an hour.  Then I discovered that the head-phones were not plugged into anything.  He was simply enjoying the new head-wear.  When I plugged him in, a look of astonishment crossed his face, and the music and static distracted him for a good three hours.

Jesse, crossing the ocean by air at age four-and-a-half from Bulgaria, came to believe (we surmised) about two hours into the flight:  “This is it.  This is America.  This is my new life.  I have got to get out of here.”  He was fleeing up and down the aisles in search of an exit and a fast boat back to Bulgaria.  He sat down in the middle of the aisle and rocked back and forth, the orphanage self-soothing scary-looking rock;  in my arms, he flailed and screamed and kicked.  He kicked the seat in front of us so hard and frequently I feared we’d injure the man.  Late in the flight I suddenly remembered:  “Benedryl!  We were supposed to have given him Benedryl to help him sleep!”  As he writhed and flailed and screamed, I got a cap-full of Benedryl between his lips and waited, my arms and back aching, for it to kick in.  It kicked in as we were in descent towards Atlanta.  We carried his sleeping body off the plane and into immigration, where he slept on the carpet during our wait, and he slept in luggage claim and he slept on the car-ride home and straight into his new life. 

The good news:  you’ll likely not be the only new parents bringing home a terrified Ethiopian child on your international flight.  Worst case scenario:  you make rueful eye contact across the cabin.  Best case scenario:  the kids find each other and laugh and whisper and play the card game UNO until the movie starts.  

Helen, age five, was divine;  Yosef & Daniel, 10 and 12, were delighted and well-behaved and took these photos mid-air.  








 

Things can get really hard.  The demands of a baby, young child, or older child may far outweigh your earlier estimate of what you could handle.  You may find yourself blinded by fatigue, bleary-eyed with regret and confusion.  You may hear the word “Mom” more often than human ears can withstand. There’s a sort of “buyer’s remorse” that can kick in, after you bring this precious and long-awaited child home.  You wouldn’t be the first to wonder, “WHAT was I THINKING?”  

I’ve written elsewhere about post-adoption panic (see RECENT ARTICLES), which hit me hard after Jesse’s adoption in 1999.

Part of what was hard about it, for me, was that I’d never heard of it.  I didn’t know what was wrong with me.  I reached the conclusion that what was wrong with me was that I had ruined my life and the life of my family permanently, and there was no escape, and it was all my fault, and it would never get better.  

It’s really hard to think rationally when you’re in this state.

In TWO LITTLE GIRLS: A Memoir of Adoption, [NY: Berkley Books, 2006],  Theresa Reid writes of despair after the adoption of a second daughter, Lana, a three-year-old from Ukraine:

“I have no patience for this new child, who gets up two or three times during the night, and never sleeps past five-thirty A.M., who is hungry and desperately needs to eat, who asks for food, and then, when I hopefully, lovingly put food before her—even specially prepared food she has eaten happily before—cries and whines and angrily pushes it away.  “Nyet!” she shrieks.  “Nyyyyyyyeeeettt!” as she shoves it off her tray, kicking and flailing, then slumps in her seat with her head down and cries.” 
Reid phones her adoption agency for help (I did the same in 1999), expecting to be offered support.  Instead (as I was), she is met with confusion and bewilderment.  

“I may be at my wits’ end,” Reid writes of her thoughts after ending that phone conversation, “but I think I can objectively say that this is NOT okay, to put together extremely challenging family constellations and then walk away.  I hang up, abandoned, angry…”  

The good news is that, in most cases, these can be the disharmonious opening notes of a love story. An out-of-synch beginning is not predictive of the parent/child relationship. 

My tips for getting through a rocky and nauseating depression after the arrival of your child:

(1)	Take really good care of yourself;  do whatever it takes to get enough sleep, including spending the night at a friend’s, including arranging for naps.  Nothing else will work if you’re sleep-deprived.

(2)	Make yourself eat and shower and exercise.  

(3)	Get help.  Hire help if you need to.  While a babysitter is there, sleep or exercise or read or eat.

(4)	Put Feelings on a back-burner.  This is not the time for Feelings.  If you could express your feelings right now, you’d be saying things like, “Oh my God, I must have lost my mind to think that I can handle this, to think that I wanted a child like this.  I’ll never manage to raise this child;  I’m way way way way over my head.  I’ll never spend time with my spouse or friends again; my older children are going to waste away in profound neglect; my career is finished. I am completely and utterly trapped.”  You see?  What’s the point of expressing all that right now?  Just put Feelings to sleep.  Instead, live a material life.  Wake, dress, eat, walk.  Let your hands and words mother the new child, don’t order Feelings into action.  

(5)	Pick up something to read that carries you away.  I’ve found that reading about Paleolithic art engenders deep calm and a sense of remove.  There’s something about studying 40,000 year old cave painting that makes you feel you can survive the sound of your new child’s voice the next morning.

(6)	Let yourself off the hook.  This is not your fault.  You’ve done a grand thing—you’ve gone out into the world in search of a child and, despite every obstacle over tens of thousands of miles, you’ve brought the child home.  You’re exhausted.  This is all really hard.  If it were easy, everyone would do it.  You’re doing fine.  Just rest up, find something to laugh about, and give Feelings the month off. 




Yes!  There is a wonderful adoption literature.  Prospective adoptive parents have a special hunger for information and for stories, and, later, a special need to write about what they’ve been through.

My all-time favorite adoption book is THE CHILDREN by Jan de Hartog (NY: Atheneum, 1969), a Dutch Naval writer, a WWII hero. Living in the U.S., the father of grown children, he became unexpectedly the middle-aged father of two little Korean sisters.  Though many recent books cover similar ground, full of modern and post-modern psychiatric jargon, there’s little missed by old Jan de Hartog, who turns a wry phrase.  You can find this out-of-print book through online booksellers. 

In Chapter 12 -- "Clinging" -- he writes of an experience with which many adoptive parents identify – the ferocious attachment to one or the other parent.  Addressing you, the mother, he writes: [after clearing the hurdle of the child's coldness to you, the mother] 

"... you will suddenly find yourself confronted with a hunger on his part for physical closeness, so ravenous and insatiable that chances are you may end by being sincerely worried whether there isn't something psychologically wrong with him.  Even to the most extrovert and sensual among us there comes a point beyond which the need for being hugged, caressed, kissed and snuggled turns from an uninhibited desire for affection into a obsession that soon makes us do the opposite of what we are so breathlessly urged to do:  we draw away in alarm and confusion...
       “... All children from Korea or Vietnam are literally starved for affection;  once they surrender themselves to you, there is no moderation or restraint until their desperate craving is satisfied...
       "Those few months are likely to be trying.  In the beginning you may enjoy his total and unrelenting claim on your full and constant attention.  But the desperate tightness with which especially the very young child will clasp your leg, clutch your arm, cling to your neck until you have to carry him with you from morning to night may well alarm you.  The thing is to try and relax.  Let yourself be kissed, hugged, nuzzled, nibbled and beset by frenzied embraces like any simian mother, whom you can observe in any zoo.  Your colleague among the gorillas goes about her monkey business totally oblivious of the huge-eyed, frantic young clinging to her breast, waist or even tail with all the sumptoms of utter terror.
       ... You will have to resign yourself to the circumstance that, for the next few months, you will be carrying a small shivering body attached like a leech to some part of your person during most of your waking hours and, once he has overcome his initial exhaustion, your sleeping hours as well.  But I assure you that this is normal..."  


It is normal to feel panicky after you’ve committed to a child.  Here are a few books in which I took great courage and comfort, if only to find myself in a community of mothers and fathers also experiencing longing for a child.  

, edited by Susan Alpert—tidbits & excerpts, paragraphs gleaned from here and there over a half-century of adoption writing, like a Readers Digest’s Quotable Quotes dedicated to the world of adoption.  I read this book to pieces.  During the waiting period, when you wonder whether you’ve lost your mind or are going to lose it, why not see what Harpo Marx and Jack Benny once said about the adoption of their children? 
, edited by Susan Wadia-Ells (Seal Press, 1995)  
by Patty Dann  (NY: Hyperion, 1998) Poignant longing for and search for a baby.
, edited by Jill Bialosky & Helen Schulman (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1998)  Some of these essays are the best pieces on adoption anywhere.  You just don’t want to miss Tama Janowitz on “Bringing Home Baby” from China, one chapter of which reads only, “The horror.  The horror.”  
by Joyce Maguire Pavao (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005)  Not to be missed!  Valuable insights into truth-telling within an adoptive family.
, edited by Pamela Kruger & Jill Smolowe (NY: Riverhead Books, 2005)  I’d like this book even if it didn’t include an essay of mine.
by Beth Nonte Russell (NY: Touchstone, 2007)  A fantastic portrait of falling in love with a baby; and one of the most real and engaging babies to appear anywhere in adoption literature.  I could do without the dreams of a past life and of destiny, and I feel that the adoptive mother the author accompanied to China was deserving of greater empathy, as she was clearly in the grip of post-adoption panic.  But I could not have done without this baby.
 by Jana Wolff: honest misgivings about transracial adoption.
, edited by Amy Klatzkin (Yeong & Yeong Book Company)  Wonderful medley of how-to essays (my least favorites) and idiosyncratic truthful memoirs (my favorites.)
 by Janis Cooke Newman (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2001), honest, lyrical, reflective, about a couple's longing for a child and the fears that beset them in the face of many rational reasons to turn back. 


TO COME:  ISSUES IN TRANS-RACIAL TRANS-CULTURAL ADOPTION






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</content>
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		<dc:date></dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview4</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview4</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>But No Ferrets</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[


"How can it be possible," my children are asking, "that all these years, whenever we ask if we can have a ferret, you say, 'No, they're too much trouble,'...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[


"How can it be possible," my children are asking, "that all these years, whenever we ask if we can have a ferret, you say, 'No, they're too much trouble,' but when Lee calls from Ethiopia to ask if we can have two more brothers, you say 'OK'!?"

"That is odd," I have to agree.

"And they?re really coming, Daniel and Yosef?"

"Yes, they're coming."

"So, can we have a ferret?" 

"No." 

"Why?" 

"They're too much trouble."



















(first posted at www.PowellsBooks.blog during my stint as guest blogger) 






]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-11-08</date>
		<dc:date>2006-11-08</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview14</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview14</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Book Tour:  First Night Out</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.
 
“Two people stopped by the desk on the way in,” says famous bookseller Carla Cohen in her warm-hearted and gene...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[Politics & Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.
 
“Two people stopped by the desk on the way in,” says famous bookseller Carla Cohen in her warm-hearted and generous introduction, “to tell me that Melissa Fay Greene is their favorite author.”
 
She sits down, crosses her arms, and beams at me and at the audience as I get up to speak. 
 
So I begin:  “I’d like to thank my mother-in-law, Ruth Samuel and my brother-in-law, Bill Samuel, for telling Carla Cohen on the way in that I’m their favorite author.”
 
The audience includes, I later learn, a woman who knew my grandmother (Mary Pollock, 1890-1981) in Macon, Georgia in the 1950s and '60s.

It includes a man whose late mother was a close friend of my late mother; their gravesites lie near one another in the Jewish cemetery in Dayton, Ohio.

It includes my friend Tema’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law; and my mother-in-law’s close friends; and my brother-in-law’s mother-in-law; and a close colleague of the man whose mother is buried near my mother.

It includes a woman named Judith who is the first-cousin of my friend in Atlanta named Judith, and a woman known to one of the Judiths, I forget which. 
 
The woman who knew my grandmother in Macon, Georgia, in the 1950s and 60s doesn’t seem to have brought anyone.
 
The audience includes a man (he tells me after the event) whose wife’s cousin was necking in a convertible in the parking lot of The Temple in Atlanta on the night of October 23, 1958. Later that night, in one of the first salvos of the massive white resistance to desegregation, The Temple was bombed. In 1996, I published a book about it, called, predictably, THE TEMPLE BOMBING. 

The man’s wife’s cousin never told her parents and never told the police that she had been necking in the parking lot a few hours before the clandestine visit by domestic terrorists. Now elderly, she had confided in these younger relatives only recently. 

“He wasn’t Jewish?” I ask, "the man she was with?"

“No, he was Jewish all right,” says the wife, “but he was a lot older than she was and her parents wouldn’t have approved.”
 
Other than the mothers-in-law and the brothers-in-law and the relatives of friends and the friends of relatives and people who come from or have been to Ethiopia and people whose relatives were almost eye-witnesses to dramatic historic events about which I have written major works of nonfiction, there were also... there must have been... if I counted correctly.... somewhere, the two people who told Carla Cohen that I was their favorite author.
 
]]>
</content>
		<date>2006-09-27</date>
		<dc:date>2006-09-27</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview16</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview16</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>More confusion on the time/space continuum</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[When our daughter Helen came to our family from Ethiopia six years ago, she was delighted to learn about her birthday. She learned that it was on June 16 and th...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[When our daughter Helen came to our family from Ethiopia six years ago, she was delighted to learn about her birthday. She learned that it was on June 16 and that she was going to turn six.
 
June 16, 2002, arrived, a party was staged, thereafter she was six.
 
A few weeks later, in a happy reverie, she asked, "When will my birthday be next year?"
 
"June 16," I reminded her.  "Your birthday is on June 16."
 
But she reacted with shock and disappointment:  "June 16???  AGAIN??  I DID June 16 already."
 

                                                             




 
Our new son Daniel's birthday (according to his birth certificate) is July 14.
 
The birth certificate said he turned 12 on July 14.  But that seems impossible. If he was 11 when he arrived in America this past June, he instantly became the tallest 11-year-old in North America.
 
Surely he turned 13 on July 14. (Or sometime this past year.)
 
We didn't have a party for him on July 14 because (a) the birthdate had fallen into disrepute with us and we are trying to sort it out; and (b) many family members were at sleepaway camp or out of town.
 
So we arbitrarily made a birthday party for him yesterday, so he wouldn't feel left out.
 
I didn't understand what he meant, the night before last, when he asked me, "14?  Mom tomorrow 14? 14?"
 
"No," I said, you'll be...  well, let's just say you're 13, even though your birth certificate says you're 12. We'll try to correct the birth certificate to reflect your understanding that you are 13."
 
This was not a reasonable explanation to a non-English-speaking person.
 
He tried again:  "Tomorrow 14 Mom?"
 
"13, we can say you're 13 rather than 12."
 
He wanted to try another tack. 
 
But he didn't have any other tacks, other than reversing word-order. "14 Mom tomorrow?"
 
"I don't think you're 14.  Let's stick with 13, OK?"
 
"Oh my God," he said.
 
Daniel often says this, slapping himself in the forehead, when our conversations hit the wall like this. Which they do several times a day. "Oh my God" signals a throwing up of hands, a complete abandonment of the attempt.  He walked off in his gangly stork-like way, his shoulders prematurely hunched.
 
It just hit me:  "14" referred to July 14.  He was asking me if yesterday, August 1, was July 14, since we told him his birthday is on July 14.
 
These poor children are lost in time and space. 





Daniel came home from his first day of American seventh-grade with some remarkable reports.
 
Of his ESOL classes: "Friend me yes," he told Donny.  "Many friend me, one French he speak Malaki; one Mexican he speak French, two African." 
 
"What do they speak?"
 
"Mexican."

A few days later he had more happy news from ESOL:  "New friend Mom me good friend."

"Where is he from?"

"China."

"Nice," I said.  Then, unable to resist, I asked, "And what does he speak?"

"Korean." 

I burst out laughing.

"Oh my God," said Daniel.









]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-08-01</date>
		<dc:date>2007-08-01</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview7</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview7</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Emotional Rollercoaster </title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[


Let it never be said that I mislead people to believe that older-child adoption is easy.

I flew home this past Thursday afternoon, after helping Lee mo...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[


Let it never be said that I mislead people to believe that older-child adoption is easy.

I flew home this past Thursday afternoon, after helping Lee move to Oberlin College, to discover that Yosef was not speaking to Helen and that Fisseha was not speaking to Jesse.  The former was due to some perceived insult;  the latter was due to the borrowing of shoes without permission.  Kids passing in the hall were deliberately bumping meanly into each other. Fisseha took his dinner plate into the livingroom to avoid sitting at the same table with Jesse the Evil Shoe-Borrower. Helen and I took a long look at each other, excused ourselves, went upstairs to my bedroom, fell into each other’s arms, and cried very hard.

“I’m not saying Yosef and Daniel should go back,” she sobbed, “but I just don’t feel close to anyone in the family anymore.”

The next day, the sight of sweet potatoes in a kitchen drawer brought me to tears, because they were there for LEE, and the appearance of SETH'S Crocs on DANIEL's feet made me weepy. (Seth moved to New York City last month for work & graduate school.) (Seth hates those Crocs.) 

The departures of the hilarious and playful and sweet older brothers have left all of us bereft.  This seems especially unfair since Donny's and my THEORY was that we would AVOID the pain of empty-nest by continuing to FILL the nest.

“This isn’t really working,” I told Donny that night.  “We get the pain of watching the older ones leave anyway…”

“And we don’t get to go to Paris,” he finished.

The next morning I typed “HELP” to my across-the-street pal Andrea Sarvady.  (I had ridiculed Andy the first time she ever emailed me: “You could open your window and SHOUT and get the news here faster,” I had replied. Now we email constantly, though if I lean back, I can see her house through a window.) 

Andy ran over.  I wildly gestured and cried to express all that was going wrong.  “The older three,” I gasped, “Molly, Seth, Lee, so wonderful, such wonderful people…Lily, Helen, wonderful…”  

“Got it,” said Andy, “but right now, the boys are a train-wreck.”

I nodded, couldn’t answer.

“Can I do something here?”

I nodded again.  Andy is a middle school teacher and counselor and a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist ( http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/woman/entries/2007/09/01/are_americans_t.html )  I hoped the help she was offering was not going to include having my family described in “Woman to Woman.” I hoped our household warfare would not figure prominently in the column she was composing about Iraq.. But I was humbly willing to accept anything.

“I’m going to meet with the boys this afternoon,” she said.  “I need two things from you. Get a poster-board ready for me. And send me a list of the issues here. We do this at school all the time.  Let me take this one.” 

I wrote out this list for Andy:

___________________________________________________________

"Unpleasant behaviors include:

--Getting mad at each other over small things

--STAYING mad at each other – bearing grudges for days and days

--Giving each other the silent treatment

--Giving Mom or Dad the silent treatment (this is called “sulking”)

--Eating dinner elsewhere to avoid someone in the family

--Hitting;  hurting each other in play, accidentally; hurting each other deliberately.

--Acting annoyed when asked to help clean up, to take the garbage cans out, etc. 

--Borrowing something from a sibling -- or taking something from a sibling -- without permission;  failing to give it back when it's asked for. 
 
--Refusing to share something for no reason.  This is a family; we should share.

--Acting entitled to all the good things – new clothes, bikes, cell phones for the 3 older ones, computers, TVs – without earning it through good citizenship at home.

What we want is:

A house where everyone feels safe.

A house where everyone feels valuable.  

A house with a happy and playful mood, not an angry grudging mood.  

This is not a playground, it is a house.  This is not a free-for-all, it is a family."
__________________________________________________________

At five p.m., Andy breezed back across the street with the erect posture and vigor of a successful woman who has only three children.  

“Okay, guys!” she called without preface.  “Come on, let’s go!” Bewildered (the new guys barely know her), Fisseha, Jesse, Daniel and Yosef obediently followed Andy downstairs to the rec room. Lily, Helen, and I were banished upstairs.  Azeb, our Ethiopian babysitter, joined Andy as translator.

Andy, a master of plain-speaking with middle schoolers, said:  “Guys, Team Samuel sucks right now, you know what I mean?  If you all are a team, you’re losing.  A team of babies could beat Team Samuel right now.  You’re not pulling together.”

(She’d told me earlier she wasn’t planning to go near touchy-feely stuff.  “I don’t care about their feelings!” she’d laughed.  “They don’t love each other--I don’t care!  They have to behave.  This is strictly behavioral.”)

“Now I’m your mom’s friend,” she said, “and your mom has told me what’s going on here, and I don’t like it.  Here’s a list I got from your mom about some of the things happening at home.”  Then she read my list.

They slumped back into the sofas, she said, but they didn’t disagree.  

“I’m not saying it’s YOU or it’s YOU,” Andy said, pointing at them. “I’m not interested in who is doing what.  I’m just saying that THIS is all happening in YOUR FAMILY right now and it doesn’t feel good.”

(Azeb, translating, was less discreet.  As she translated my list into Amharic, she added helpful hints like, “Yosef this means you" and "Yosef you know you did this one" and "Yosef, listen closely to Andy."

“Now,” said Andy, pulling out the poster board.  “I want some suggestions on how to make Team Samuel work better."

The boys raised their hands!  Each had a suggestion.  The poster board reads:  

_______________________________
       TEAM SAMUEL
1.	No fighting
2.	Don’t do the things on Mom’s list.
3.	Talk—don’t just act mad.
4.	Don’t be annoying.
__________________________________

I would have loved to see the boys raising their hands.

“I want you all to be GREAT tonight and tomorrow,” Andy said.  “I don’t want to hear, ‘But it wasn’t on the list that I couldn’t get up at 4 in the morning and watch TV.’  Just be great – you know what great is.  IF you’re great, your mom will take you to the movies tomorrow night.  Whoever is not great gets to stay home.”

The boys ran up the basement stairs.  Daniel found me first and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.”  Jesse said:  “I’m sorry, Mom.”  Fisseha said:  “I’m sorry, Mom.”  Yosef said:  “I hate Azeb.”

Then they and Helen went outside and played basketball together for an hour until dinner.

They all came running in, sweaty and happy, and Yosef yelled, “Team Samuel!”

After dinner, first Daniel, then Yosef, hugged and kissed me and thanked me for dinner.

The next morning we took children to the Atlanta Ethiopian community soccer practice;  Daniel, Fisseha and Yosef were foolishly placed on the same team.  That team won 14 to 1.  “Team Samuel!” they laughed as we drove home.

They were all great and that night I took them all, plus so many of their friends it required two cars, to the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen in my life:  “Balls of Fury.”  Idiotic. 

They were still great the next day.

By the end of Labor Day weekend last night, there was a bit of chafing.  Jesse and Yosef had a bad run-in during a front-yard soccer game, so Yosef acted sad and slept by himself on the sofa last night.  But after so many hours of greatness, I was inclined to be lenient.

I’ve learned a few things:

1.	The children at home also are missing Seth and Lee and the fun of summer with them.
2.	Even without all the younger ones at home, it still would not be appropriate for me to move into the dorm room next-door to Lee at Oberlin, nor the apartment downstairs from Molly in San Francisco, nor the apartment down the hall from Seth in Queens.
3.	I miss Molly, Seth, and Lee every day, every hour.  Twenty children underfoot at home would not change that. 
4.	Andy says that the children’s vastly-improved behaviors won’t last.  
5.	That seminar called “Letting Go” offered to parents during Oberlin’s orientation?  that seminar I made fun of?  I should have gone to it.  







]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-04</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-04</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview21</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview21</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Dancing moments</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[I came home last night from a PTA meeting and found Lily, 15, and Helen, 11, and Yosef, 10, dancing in the kitchen.  Lily & Helen were showing Yosef the trottin...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[I came home last night from a PTA meeting and found Lily, 15, and Helen, 11, and Yosef, 10, dancing in the kitchen.  Lily & Helen were showing Yosef the trotting hand-clapping knee-slapping country dance for Cotton-Eyed Joe, singing aloud, and Yosef was dancing a traditional dance from his Guragge ethnic group, arms extended, hands clasped, legs galloping.

I left the kitchen to greet others. When I returned, Lily and Helen were doing the Guragge dance and Yosef was dancing Cotton-Eyed Joe.  





Later I confided in 13-year-old Daniel:  “I'm feeling homesick for the big kids.”

“Mom!” he barked.  “You sick?!”

“No, not ‘sick.’ ‘Homesick’ – it’s a feeling inside, of missing people. You know, like Lee just left to go to college?”

“I know this!” he said.  “Me this.  Family gone.  Trip gone.  Oh my God I say, this family.”

He was talking about his feelings after our spring break trip to Addis during which he met Donny, Lily, Fisseha, Jesse, and Helen for the first time.  He felt homesick for our family after we left.

Later we overheard Daniel phoning Lee at school.  “Lee!” he barked.  “You sick?”  
]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-05</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-05</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview22</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview22</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>New sons have arrived, birthdays are celebrated </title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

Yosef and Daniel Gizaw, brothers of about 10 and 13, arrived in Atlanta this past Sunday, June 10.  My husband Don Samuel flew to Addis to file the I-600 an...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

Yosef and Daniel Gizaw, brothers of about 10 and 13, arrived in Atlanta this past Sunday, June 10.  My husband Don Samuel flew to Addis to file the I-600 and to bring them home. Of course now I get to say: "Of our nine children, you delivered two."
 
I've known the boys for years, as they lived at Mrs. Haregewoin's house;  in fact, the boys' photos are in my book.  At the time we prepared it for publication, I did not know they were going to be my sons.  It took our son Lee, then 18, living in Addis last spring and visiting Haregewoin's every day, to fall in love with them & phone us often to say, "Please, we have to adopt them." Lee, who spent the past year in Israel, flew to Addis last week to join his dad in bringing home the new brothers.
 
Daniel is tall and very thin and gangly.  All the clothes I had for him reached only his ankles and his wrists.  "Nice," he said, so earnestly.  "Nice, I like."
"No," we all said, "too small, too short."
"No," he insisted.  "NICE."
 
I swept new pants from the racks of Target yesterday, handed them over, shooed him into the bathroom to change.  He emerged shyly, in pants that actually covered his ankles.  "Too big?" he asked.
 
He is cautious, quiet, and watchful like a young deer, as if he's about to dart away.  Mostly he's watchful over Yosef, for whom he assumed chief responsibility after their mother died four years ago (their father had died a couple of years earlier.) They have the happiest memories of their parents, their house, their animals in Woliso, but they have been sad a long time.  Daniel, I think, will always be acutely, in some way, Ethiopian; clearly he stared down the long road to nowhere, to lousy education and joblessness and hunger. Yet he seems to have protected Yosef, who gleams with pure joy and love of life.  Donny had emailed me from Addis: "Daniel chuckles over Yosef like an amused grandfather."
 
He also emailed, from Addis last week: "Last night we went to the Italian restaurant near the Yilma Hotel. On the way back on the pitch black 'street' (i.e., dirt and rock road), we bought a very heavy six-pack of water. Yosef lamented (sarcastically) that he was not very strong, and couldn't possibly take his turn carrying it. At that moment, he fell into a pot-hole up to his waist and Daniel said, "And not very smart either." 
 
Yosef is like a young seal, with a smooth shining face and smile, packing incredible speed and agility in a small package.  He is a comedian.  This we knew.  "When Yosef speaks, everyone around him, even adults, laugh," Lee had told us last year.
 
Today is Helen's 11th birthday (she arrived in the US five years ago); we had a tremendous birthday party yesterday afternoon and evening.  It started, really, at 3:00, when she got home with three girlfriends from art camp; and all afternoon more & more friends arrived, boys and girls, black and white Americans, one other Ethiopian girl.  Since Yosef, on paper, turned 10 recently,  Helen shared her party.  We had two cakes with soccer decorations, and Helen's friends brought gifts for Yosef, too.  A rented moonwalk was pumped up in our driveway;  and Seth, 22, a recent graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, headed for the NYU Steinhardt School of Music this fall, spent HOURS standing at the kitchen sink filling up water balloons and storing them in laundry baskets.  I'd gathered probably 18 water guns; and a knock-down drag-out water-gun water-balloon fight began that lasted for HOURS.  Water smashed against the windows and front glass door of the house; the floors turned to pools; the back porch ran with gullies.  I ran about taking pictures and throwing down towels until a blast of water hit my head or back and sent me running for cover, huddled over the camera.   I made phone calls in search of more water balloons and mothers arrived with bags of them. Seth and Lee, 19,  were in the thick of it, as were a few little kids who'd lingered long past the dropping-off hour. Neighbors stood in their yards and watched.  "Why," I wondered, "did I spend a hundred dollars on the moonwalk when this much fun can be had with balloons?" Late in the day, I noticed children running through the house from the kitchen with cooking pots filled with water, which they dumped off the deck onto the heads of water-ballooners in the thick of battle.  THAT I had to put a stop to, for purposes of water conservation.  "See?" I told visiting mothers.  "I have standards."
 









We've had many grand water battles over the years, but this may have topped them all.  I got blurred glimpses of Yosef and Daniel running past, armed to the teeth with balloons and water-guns.  I saw them playing wild soccer inside the moonwalk.  I saw them jumping on the trampoline in a tangle of kids.  I saw a six-year-old girl threatening a pack of older kids with her plump water-filled pink balloon and warning, in a high but firm little voice:  "I am NOT afraid to use this."
 
Later HORDES of dripping kids piled into the kitchen for the cakes, and sang first to Helen, then to Yosef.  Yosef followed Helen's lead in blowing out the candles.  When one remained lit, he plucked it from the cake, held it to his lips, and gave it a delicate puff. But my favorite scene of the day was the look on Daniel's face as the mob of children sang Happy Birthday to Yosef.  Such a kind, poignant, open look, such bewildered happiness.  "YOUR birthday NEXT month," I told him, but he waved that away.  THIS, he showed me, was all he really wanted.
 
So now I must go pack, and bend a hundred times to pick up balloon fragments sprinkling front yard back yard deck porch driveway and sidewalk as if from a ticker-tape parade.


















]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-06-16</date>
		<dc:date>2007-06-16</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview2</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview2</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>At the dentist</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[Neither Yosef nor Daniel had ever been to a dentist before.  The backs of their teeth were black.  Each sat a long time in the dentist's chair while I flipped t...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[Neither Yosef nor Daniel had ever been to a dentist before.  The backs of their teeth were black.  Each sat a long time in the dentist's chair while I flipped through magazines in the waiting room.  I visited each boy occasionally, giving feeble pats on the arm in encouragement.  Neither had cavities.  "But their teeth are very worn down; they have no ridges; their teeth are like middle-aged people's teeth," the dentist said.  "It must be from eating something very hard."

"Did you eat something very hard in Ethiopia?" we asked Daniel, after Yosef had skipped outside to play with his prize, a bouncy-ball.

"Yes. Hard," he agreed in his sing-song voice.

"What did you eat that was hard?" she asked.

"Ice," he told the dentist.  "Ice very hard."

"You ate ice in rural Ethiopia?"

"Yes, very hard, ice."  He demonstrated how hard you have to bite to chew ice. 

"Ice? you grew up chewing on ICE in your VILLAGE?" I tried to confirm. (These boys had lived in a house of mud and grass, 50 miles from electricity.)

"Very hard, Ethiopia ice," he said, then went outside to try his bouncy-ball. 




No wonder they've been hit so hard by Atlanta's heat wave this summer -- they're Eskimos!

By mid-July, day after day of 100-plus temperatures, I think both boys were wishing they'd read the fine print on the adoption paperwork. Perhaps they should have waited for a nice family from Minnesota or Saskatchewan to come along.  One day Yosef simply refused to go outside.  He had HAD it.  "In Ethiopia," mused Daniel, squinting into the distance to remember, "INSIDE hot.  OUTSIDE cool.  

"In America: OUTSIDE hot, INSIDE cool." 

If only I'd known their true history:  I should have been giving them very hard ice to chew on all summer. 
]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-09</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-09</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview25</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview25</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Parenting Skills</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[




Unhappiness again.  Yosef, age 10 (and very cute), provoked Fisseha, age 13 (and very strong), who slugged him.  And threatened to hit him again if he...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[




Unhappiness again.  Yosef, age 10 (and very cute), provoked Fisseha, age 13 (and very strong), who slugged him.  And threatened to hit him again if he kept being a pest. Yosef came weeping and whining to me, and made a great point of showing he feared for his life. All this happened at a lovely Erev Rosh Hashonah dinner at our friends’ elegant and art-filled house. What cranky children. We made it home that night, and everyone dressed up the next morning for synagogue, but rifts deepened. There were any number of people now to whom Yosef was not talking, including Helen, which hurt her feelings.  Fisseha & Daniel became jolly pals, by comparison, yukking it up. After services, we went to our traditional First Day Rosh Hashonah lunch at the home of other close friends, trailed by a crew of well-dressed sourpusses. Yosef managed to shake some hands, then descended to the basement rec room to observe ping-pong games.  Helen ran upstairs to report that Yosef was hiding, afraid Fisseha was going to hit him again.  I drifted upstairs in my friend’s house to visit the bedrooms of her three sons. All young adults now, none was home for the holiday; their bedrooms were immaculate and vacuumed, the beds tightly made. The sports posters and books dated from an earlier era in their lives.  I missed these boys, friends of my older sons. I missed the years they were all taping up baseball posters in their bedrooms. I remembered thinking one day, as I dropped off Lee at the Little League park, that baseball must exist because baseball-playing little boys were so adorable to their mothers, and the clackety-clack of their cleats across the parking lot such an endearing noise.  

Back home after lunch, hostilities worsened, with Yosef screaming in the backyard that Fisseha was throwing rocks at him.

I was near screaming myself now.  I took Fisseha aside and commiserated.  “I know it’s hard to have new brothers…”

“Not Daniel,” he said.  “Daniel’s not hard.”

“OK, I know Yosef can be a pest, but I need you to stay calm, to be a team-player.”  Etc.

He seemed unmoved.

“You don’t have to go to syngagogue tomorrow,” I suddenly told him.

“WHAT??” He was shocked.  I felt terrible. We always observe two days of Rosh Hashonah in synagogue.  

“I didn’t see you enjoy any part of the holiday,” I said.  “You were mad last night at dinner, this thing with Yosef is ruining it for me, you were indifferent today.”

Now I’d hurt his feelings.

I tried to fix it. “I didn’t say you HAD to go to school;  I said you COULD go to school.”

He shrugged.  “I’ll go to school,” he said.

Azeb, a gentle and kind middle-aged Ethiopian woman who has babysat for us for five years, was giving Yosef a talking-to in the kitchen in Amharic. 

I went on a walk.  I lingered, stayed away most of an hour, considered how unnecessarily difficult we’d made our lives.  What if our older children’s rooms were immaculate and empty, like the bedrooms of our friends’ three sons?  What if?   Instead, they were crammed and doubly-jammed with extra beds and World Cup soccer posters. 

I ran home in a cloudburst. The landscape was suddenly drenched, the trees bending, the gutters flooding.  I heard shouts in the backyard.  Four of my children—Yosef, Helen, Daniel, and Fisseha—wearing raincoats, were jumping on the trampoline and sliding across its slick surface, crashing into each other with great hilarity.  I ran into the house, put apple slices and cookies on a plate, and carried the snacks outside under an umbrella.  “Watch!” they yelled, showing me how the rain allowed them to slalom across the trampoline.  They devoured the apples and cookies.  They were all happy.  What wonderful children!  How cute and funny!  I really must be doing something right after all.  They ran in later, dried off, and had a lovely evening.  Lily, 15, extraordinarily tolerant and funny, organized board games.   This morning they all got up nicely, and got dressed up, and went to synagogue.  Such handsome children!  So well-dressed and polite!  Life is a breeze, when you’re such great parents as Don and I are. 

After synagogue, I had a chance to tell Azeb what a lovely surprise I had yesterday afternoon, coming home to find the children peaceful and playful. I tried to relay what wonderful children they really are, how they mended their ways, cheered me up, saved the holiday, and all on their own. I implied that my own kind parenting style had inspired them.

“I told them,” she said.  “I told Daniel and Yosef.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them they need to behave," said Azeb.  "I told Yosef, 'Five years I work here, I never saw behavior like this.'  I asked Yosef, ‘What happened at the foster home, if you acted like this?’  ‘I got hit,’ he said.  ‘I know that,’ I said.  ‘Your new mother won’t hit you.  But I will hit you, just like in Ethiopia, if you don’t behave. Do you want it to be like Ethiopia?  Do you want me to hit you?’” 

Next thing you knew, the children were all the best of friends, hopping together on their trampoline. 

No hitting of children, needless to say, will take place in our family.  But I enjoyed the sound of laughter in the backyard far more than the sound of whimpering around the holiday table. 
]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-14</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-14</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview26</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview26</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Daniel Discovers Text-Messaging with Lee</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[Lee, at Oberlin College, was startled to get a text-message from Daniel at 1 a.m. on a SCHOOL NIGHT.
I was in Milwaukee on the book tour and heard from Lee the...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[Lee, at Oberlin College, was startled to get a text-message from Daniel at 1 a.m. on a SCHOOL NIGHT.
I was in Milwaukee on the book tour and heard from Lee the next day that the children's hours, back at home with Daddy, might not be everything I'd hoped.

Daniel (12:58 AM) allolee

Lee (12:59AM): How are you Daniel? 
Daniel (1:00AM): Iamfaynehawareyou 
 
Lee (1:01AM): Pretty good. I'm going to visit some friends tomorrow. Why are you not asleep now? 
Daniel (1:03AM): Okbay 
 
Lee (1:04AM): Hahaha. Ok. I was just asking though. I'll see you in 30 days. 
Daniel (1:09AM): Iseeyouto30DAYSOKBAY 
 
Lee  (1:10AM): Bye Daniel. I miss you. 
Daniel (1:12AM): Imisstobye ]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-09-26</date>
		<dc:date>2007-09-26</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview27</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview27</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>The Songs of a Summer Evening</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[

Last night a friend and I took five of the children  (Helen, Yosef, Jesse, Daniel & Fisseha) to the neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant, Moya. 

The waiter,...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[

Last night a friend and I took five of the children  (Helen, Yosef, Jesse, Daniel & Fisseha) to the neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant, Moya. 

The waiter, besieged by excited voices, lost in the un-ending order, finally asked me, “Are you ordering the entire menu?”

“I think we are,” I said.

Helen and Fisseha surfaced from behind their menus to say, “And take-home, too."  

And everything should be served with the maximum quantity of flaming red-hot pepper heat, the children specified. 

Platters arrived, and arrived, and arrived.  There was Doro Key Wat (chicken stewed in berbere (red pepper) paste and served with hard-boiled eggs), Sik Sik Wat (beef stewed in berbere), Yemiser Selatta (lentils with jalapeno peppers) Timatim Fitfit (diced tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapeno peppers) , Tibs Wat (cubed beef simmered in berbere), Gomen (fresh collard greens simmered in spices) Miser Wat (hot spicy lentils), Shiro (spicy pureed split peas), and – above all – three orders of Kitfo (beer tartar, served raw.) 

I could barely SIT near the steaming platters; I hid behind my glass of pineapple juice, occasionally nibbling humbly on a dry roll of injera.  Even the cold diced tomatoes had been mixed with chili peppers and brought tears to my eyes.  “Mom, try this!” the children offered.  “Not hot, Mom.”

They weren’t trying to trick me.  I tasted, then wept, as I have the pepper-processing ability of an infant.  

Children ate until they could eat no more.  

Then they ate more.

Then they pushed back from the table with their hands over their stomachs and groaned with happiness.

Then they pulled back to the table and ate more.  They ate it all. 

Exuberant, fueled by injera, super-charged by jalapenos, the five children, ages 10 to 13, excused themselves, thanked the owner, and hurried out the door. In the parking lot, they carried each other piggy-back and began playing chase. Then they ran piggy-back races. Then they ran walking races.  Then they ran backward races.  Then they ran bend-over-like-this-with-your-arms-hanging-down-like-a-monkey races.  Then they ran let’s-slam-full-tilt-into-Mom’s-parked-car races.  Then they ran stick-out-your-butt-and-waddle-like-this races. I waited at our table on the patio for the bill and for the carry-out order, thinking, “Worse case scenario?  Anyone who objects to the behavior of four Ethiopian children and one brown-skinned Bulgarian Roma child in the parking lot will NEVER link them to ME.”

I was wrong.  “Your children are very excited,” said entering customers.  

On the car ride home, it began.  

First a gigantic long drawn-out belch from Jesse in the far back seat.  It sounded like the roar of a lion.  The others laughed appreciatively and felt inspired.  My calling, “Jesse! Say ‘Excuse me,’” did not inspire.  Yosef followed with a high-pitched yelp of a burp.  Daniel and Fisseha shared enormous guttural noises like yawning hippos and Jesse roared back from so deep in his gut it sounded like he was about to throw up. “Stop!” I cried.  “This is gross!” I cried.  “Enough already!” I cried. Helen—petite and graceful Helen—then out-did them all with a belch that seemed to emerge from the center of the earth.  I kept my eyes on the road.  The belches and burps were constant now, overlapping, obscene, high-pitched and low.  It was a thunderstorm of laryngeal gas. I lowered all four windows and opened the sun roof.  I dared not look at the friend in the passenger seat beside me as I was completely helpless to stop the chorus.  Cool air blew in from the dark streets, a needed counterpoint to the windiness inside the car.  

The non-stop yawp and yurk and urrrp, and the fetid air, began to remind me of a still pond I once visited in Vermont. After sunset, the Spring Peepers (Yosef) and the Wood Frogs, Green Frogs, and American Toads (Fisseha, Daniel, Jesse) launched into song; and, most thrilling, the American Bullfrog (Helen) sounded bass notes so powerful they seemed to ripple the surface of the pond.  Blat.  Skirrr-up.  RRRRRups.  Unable to silence the children, who grew more delighted with each ear-splitting digestive pronouncement,  I tried to appreciate the rough song and gassiness of the belches as a natural phenomenon.  As I held onto the steering wheel with both hands, I told myself:  “Vermont.  Think of Vermont.”

At home, I ordered all the children to stay in the front yard to finish.  

“We’ll stop, we’ll stop!”  they cried, eager to come inside.

“No, I’m sure if you were capable of stopping, you’d have stopped in the car when I asked you 20 times.” 

“No, we can stop!” they said with big smiles.  

By which I gleaned that the orchestral concert of burp music had been staged, in large part, for my benefit.  

There were small lapses and peeps all through the evening, but I never could catch the transgressors, as they somehow managed to stay both out of sight and within earshot of me. 












]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-10-08</date>
		<dc:date>2007-10-08</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview30</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview30</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Landscaping</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[We live in a very pretty neighborhood of tree-lined hilly streets, upon which acorns fall and bikers coast and squirrels do double-takes. Children in back-packs...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[We live in a very pretty neighborhood of tree-lined hilly streets, upon which acorns fall and bikers coast and squirrels do double-takes. Children in back-packs hike up and down the sidewalks crunching through the leaves; and people of all ages tend their flower gardens and fill bird-feeders and prepare jack-o-lanterns amongst tasteful arrangements of cornstalks and hay bales.  

My family has, by far, the most hideous front yard in the neighborhood.

At any moment I expect to hear a brisk knock on the door from representatives of the neighborhood improvement association, giving us 48 hours to pack up and leave town. “We don’t want trouble,” they will say.  “We just need you to go.” 

For many years, my husband Donny struggled to raise—and did raise—pleasant crops of grass.  The grass was never abundant, as the shade from the massive Tulip Poplar tree screened out the sunlight, but the yard was green and soft and shiny.  I remember this.  You could, like, sit on the grass in the front yard.  You could lie back on the grass and look at the sky.  Bald spots got filled in with clover and wild greenery and it grew long enough that a lawn-mower left nice back-and-forth stripes. It looked like the other yards:  grass, hedges, brick walk-way. A light game of badminton left plastic birdies dangling on the grass.

Sometime this summer, after the arrival of Child Number Eight and Child Number Nine, the yard took a bad turn.  The new boys brought the soccer-playing cohort to at least seven children on a slow day.  Someone dragged the portable soccer goals up the driveway and nailed them into the front yard.  The stampede of cleated feet ground out the clover. Over a period of about three weeks, the lawn surrendered and died. Georgia has been parched by an historic drought this year, so the soccer players raised dust like broncos kicking up dirt at a rodeo. Finally only thin sideburns of old dusty grass stood at the far sides of the yard, as if someone were sketching a rectangle using green crayon.  The solid middle of the rectangle was brown. We had created, in our very own midtown Atlanta neighborhood, a Third World soccer field.
   
I didn’t realize how far we’d declined from neighborhood standards until my son Lee arrived home a few days ago for fall break.  Lee’s not a big lover of landscaping.  He’s probably never even noticed landscaping before.  But he got out of the car from the airport, glanced left, and said, “Oh my God.”

Then, finally, a long-prayed-for rain arrived.  It rained yesterday, really rained.  Long grey hard rain.  A thrill ran through the house.  It used to rain nearly every afternoon of every summer day.  Atlanta used to have a rainy season.  Then the heavens dried up.  The sky was as hot and dry this past summer as my front yard. So yesterday’s rain—and running to roll up the car windows, and running to park the bikes under the porch, and realizing that team soccer practice was cancelled, and turning on lamps in the livingroom—felt new.  Rain!  Children tore out of the house to look at it, to look straight up and feel it.  The children ran out, skidded across the new slick mud of the front yard, and fell down.  This was funny.  This had to be repeated.  Look!  If you took a running start, you could slide sideways in the mud and leave a trail.  Better barefoot.  Better, for boys, without shirts.  Better barefoot, no shirts, and wearing too-small raincoats.  Better playing soccer in the mud, in the pouring rain.  Better yet:  dodgeball.  Dodgeball with a dripping mud-covered soccer ball that hit the victim with a momentous whomp.  Better still:  hold umbrellas, tap-dance barefoot in the mud, dodge the mud-ball, then pick it up and hurl the dripping thing.  Rain and mud coated the children.  I flew about inside gathering towels. “What is this like?” I thought happily.  “Oh!  It’s like a snow day!”  Years ago, when my oldest kids were little, we could expect at least one school-cancelling Snow Day a year.  The snow usually melted by mid-afternoon, with temperatures returning to the 50s, but for a few uncanny morning hours every year, we were transported to a different world, a Northern world of frozen branches and white yards.

Here, finally, after a season of drought, we had a Rain Day.













The kids now were whooping, screaming, dancing, and melting with mud. They were one with the mud.  They WERE  the mud. Then, abruptly,  they wanted to take showers. “Whoa!  Whoa!  Wait!” I yelled, trying to block them from stampeding through the house.  “You come in through the BASEMENT door, take off your clothes at the DOOR, and use the BASEMENT shower.”   Despite these helpful tips, many waited till my back was turn to squeeze past the front door and up the stairs, leaving footprints unique in their size and depth. 












The front yard today, in the lingering drizzle, looks like a drenched sheet of paper upon which a preschooler finger-painted, smearing all the colors together into one sickening yellowish-brown.  The yard is streaked and curlicued. A blown umbrella sits inside-out in the puddles.  The yard is beyond hideous.

And yet—this is true—when I just went outside to survey the damage to our reputation and to the neighborhood’s appeal, I spotted, rejuvenated by the rain, stirred up in the mud-stew, a few pale-green hopeful tendrils of new grass. 
]]>
</content>
		<date>2007-10-24</date>
		<dc:date>2007-10-24</dc:date>
		<link>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview32</link>
		<guid>http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/blog?op=dview32</guid>
</item>
<item>
	<title>Halloween Horrors</title>
	<description>
		<![CDATA[How do you explain Halloween to newly-arrived Ethiopian boys?  They nodded with polite interest every time we tried to prepare them.  Daniel formed the impressi...]]>
</description>
	<content>
		<![CDATA[How do you explain Halloween to newly-arrived Ethiopian boys?  They nodded with polite interest every time we tried to prepare them.  Daniel formed the impression that it was necessary to badly scare the people answering their doorbells, in order to get candy from them.  Consequently he changed his mind about the nice Spiderman costume I’d brought home for him from Target.. He wanted something worse-looking.  A friend spared me the dreaded pre-Halloween visit to Party City and took Daniel herself.  



He arrived home from the strangest shopping trip of his life, hurried into the bathroom, and emerged looking like Something from the Crypt: tattered clothes, protruding ribs, and three-dimensional dabs of  blood everywhere.  The mask was a scrunched leering bony bloody half-skinless skull under wild matted grey hair.  I screamed appropriately.  He was ecstatic.  “I do Dad now!” he said and tore upstairs.  His earnest awkward gait was evident under the layers of ugliness.  There was a shout upstairs.  Then Daniel reappeared. “I do Dad.  Now I do Lily,” he cried, and dashed off again in his loping gait.  

After these successes, he spent a long time in front of the bathroom mirror.  He came out with his costume neatly folded under his arm.  Suppressing a smile, he predicted: “Many candy me.”

But his Halloween was not a success!  Donny and I wanted to walk with him, and Jesse offered to escort him, but Daniel said, “Go my friends,” which meant he would tag along with Fisseha to join crowds of other seventh-grade boys and girls. The first unhappy surprise for Daniel was that Fisseha strolled out at dusk in jeans and a t-shirt, while Daniel was dressed as Death Warmed-Over.  He panicked and ran back into the house to change.  “At least take your costume!” I said, hating to see him disappointed.  So he wore the bloody black costume pants and a t-shirt.  Fisseha and his friends were not really planning to trick-or-treat;  as seventh-graders, they’ve nearly aged out of that activity, but I’d wanted Daniel to have one shot at it. 

He hurried behind Fisseha and followed him to the most popular and crowded Halloween neighborhood, one in which families cover their yards, rooftops, mailboxes, and bushes with out-size spiders and inflatable black cats and blinking lights and flickering jack-o-lanterns.  There is a Haunted Trail in this neighborhood, where witch’s cauldrons steam with smoke and live severed heads rest smilingly on a picnic table and middle-school boys dressed as ghouls leap out from behind gravestones.  What happened next is a subject of dispute. 

“He leave me,” Daniel accuses Fisseha.  “I new.  He know.  But he leave me.”

Fisseha is indifferent to this charge.  “I know!” he says, about the fact that Daniel disappeared.  “I looked around and I didn’t see him.”  Fisseha had spotted two eighth-grade boys from his soccer team who invited him to join them, and he’d peeled off from the seventh-grade group for a while.

“Why didn’t you just call Fisseha?” I asked, as everyone that night used cell-phones like walkie-talkies to find one another.  

“No my phone,” he said.  “Costume no pocket.” 

Daniel found himself alone amidst hundreds and hundreds of bizarrely-dressed white people, while manufactured fog leached into the streets and taped screams bleated from speakers. Surely there were kids all around him whom he knew, who would have helped him, but make-up and masks disguised them.  He panicked.  He managed to fight his way out of the neighborhood, find the right direction, and stride home.  Both Helen and Lily, out with their friends, saw him coming down the hill towards our house and they called to him. Head down and silent, he angrily waved them away. He loped into the house, ran down the stairs to his bedroom, locked the door, and got into bed.  He responded to none of our entreaties, over the next several hours, to come out and try again. When I finally got into the room, he pulled the blankets over his head and rolled over to face the wall.  

He was darkly furious the next day, boycotting Fisseha.  I brought home a bag of candy from CVS to give to Daniel after school, and he said, eyes lowered, voice low, “No Mom. No candy me.” 

“Daniel,” I said, sitting beside him on the porch. “Listen, Fisseha did not mean to lose you.”

“Yes Mom.  He leave me.”

“Daniel, there were a million people there, he was running around with many friends…”

“No Mom,” he said, which meant:  end of discussion.

But my friend Kathryn Legan offered the good advice to keep telling Daniel the rational information that Fisseha had not lost him on purpose. “People do hear you,” she says, “even if they appear to be completely opposed to the information.  They do take it in.”

So I kept it up.  “Daniel, Fisseha asked you to come with him.  Why would he have done that if he meant to ditch you?  He didn’t lose you on purpose.  He couldn’t find you and you didn’t have your phone.”

And so forth.

He tilted into a depression of loneline