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Well, it’s that time of year again – time to start looking for a preschool for your child to go to next fall.

Oh, who am I kidding, it’s already March.  If you haven’t found a preschool yet, it’s way too late.  You might as well just forget the college fund and start buying little Susie some quality ditch digging equipment.

Oh, how things have changed.  When I was a kid, back in the earth-toned dark ages of the seventies, preschool was exactly what the name implied.  It was a prior to school program, as in prior to any formal education.  It was a time to socialize, learn how to play with others, sing silly songs, practice counting to ten and eat celery with peanut butter on it.  The expectations for what you learned in preschool were pretty low, because back then, Kindergarten was still a time for socializing, playing with others, singing silly songs, counting to twenty and eating celery with peanut butter on it. 

Boy those days are gone.  When my oldest daughter started kindergarten, the teacher announced to the parents that all of the children would be reading by the end of the year.

Damn.  And this is at a public school.  At the fancy pants private schools, I can only imagine that their goal is to have the kids reading, doing basic trigonometry and mastering the oboe by the end of kindergarten. 

I get it.  Times have changed and parents, teachers and government officials are all demanding more of our kids and everyone is scrambling to comply, lest the Chinese beat us in everything from math to potato sack races.  I try to roll along with the new “normal” but I’m awfully skeptical of it. 

Recently on a stay at home dad message board, the topic of schools came up, specifically how do you find the best school for your kid.  Now, this message board is based in DC so it doesn’t exactly reflect the realities of middle America, but I was still amazed at how quick people were to dismiss their local public school, or the neighborhood preschool in favor of expensive private programs.  This is a particularly complex in the DC suburbs where most of the public schools are excellent.  But since there are so many schools, people become obsessed with which school is the “best.”  A school ranked in the top 20 nationally is no longer good enough if the school down the road is ranked in the top 10. 

And that’s just the public schools. Once you mix in all of the private schools, you really have a mess.  And of course, this is not just an issue for elementary or high schools, it is a problem that begins in the carpeted classrooms of the regions preschools. 

Which preschool is best is a pretty loaded question and one that has a lot of answers in this area, ranging from modestly priced church preschools to elite preschools with elite pricing scales to match.  Now, I don’t doubt that expensive preschools have nice programs.  For $12,000 dollars a year or more, they darn well better, but I sometimes suspect that the choice of preschool has a lot more to do with the parents than the children.  Does a child (any child) really need to be in a preschool that costs as much as many colleges?  Are the songs they sing in those programs that much better?  Is the alphabet they learn that much fancier?

I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about this issue for a number of reasons that I probably ought to disclose now.  Growing up my wife and I both went to public schools throughout our childhoods.  Some of them were good, some not so much, but they all got the job done.  Then as a teacher, I taught in public schools.  Now as a stay at home dad, I have somehow ended up as president of my son’s co-op preschool.

It is a small one room preschool with a single employee: the teacher.  The rest of the jobs are all done by the parents.  We take turns being the teacher’s assistant in the classroom.  We buy the snacks, we clean the fish tank and we vacuum the rugs.  It is a simple basic program that emphasizes play and socialization and learning to follow directions and has a secondary emphasis on academics.  It is in many ways a very old school kind of program.  It is also very inexpensive, around $100 a month and so it attracts a variety of families from different backgrounds and different income brackets.

I love this preschool.  It is a wonderful loving place that has done a wonderful job of preparing my children for kindergarten, but, more importantly, preparing them to be good friends and happy students.  My kids love going to school and all seem to be doing very well academically in elementary school.

Of course, I understand why parents might opt for something “fancier.”  As parents we love our children and want the best for them.  If someone can make an argument that this preschool on the right is better than the one on the left, then wouldn’t you put your kid in the “better” preschool?  And if you had the money, or even if you didn’t, wouldn’t you want to put your kid in the better school even if it cost 10, 15, or 20 times more?  I mean come on!  It’s your kid we’re talking about.  Of course you want the best for them. 

I have very good friends who have insisted on spending a lot of money to put their kids into schools that are deemed (by someone, I’m not sure who) to be “better.”  I guess the question I have is “what is better?”

Are they more academic?  If so, I’m not sure that’s always the best thing.  Are they bigger?  Prettier?  Have a higher “quality” of student (that’s a code word for whatever you want it to be). 

When it comes to “better” in education it is not always easy to determine what that “better” is and whether it is actually a “better” that will benefit your child.  There have been a lot of studies suggesting that a more academic preschool is not always the best thing for young children.  Three year olds need to play, they need to learn to interact with their peers, they need to experience fun and joy.  Multiplication can wait a couple of years.  Some studies even suggest that pushing academics too early can actually be damaging in the long run by decreasing a child’s intellectual curiosity and creativity.

I blather on about all of this so that I can introduce this story to you:  The tale of one parent who is suing a preschool for not providing serious enough instruction.

Our tale begins with a mother who after some finagling, arm-twisting, and years on a wait list finally got her child into a prestigious preschool that charges a tuition of $19,000 a year.

NINETEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR!

As you might have guessed this takes place in Dothan, Alabama.  (Just kidding, it’s in Manhattan)

Apparently the mother enrolled her daughter in the elite school and, as required, paid the full $19,000 tuition in advance.  (Holy crap!)  And then less than a month into school decided that the school wasn’t academic enough and wouldn’t get her child prepared for the elite elementary schools that you must get into to get your child into the elite middle schools that get your kids into the elite prep schools that get your kids into Harvard.  (Or, like my wife, you can just go to preschool in the basement of some church in upstate farm country and get into Harvard…. Whichever)

My favorite quote from the lawsuit is this:

“Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all, but just one big playroom."

How horrific.

Here’s the article from the Wall Street Journal:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576200972428113488.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

You know when the WSJ is being a little snarky that you’ve stepped over a line.

Ok, so what have we learned here?  Yes, there are some crazy people in New York City.  This is not exactly news to anyone who has ever watched an episode of Seinfeld.  But I think it hints at something a little broader here. 

They, society, the man, whoever, is out there shouting at us all the time that there is a “best” way to ________________ (fill in the blank – raise your kid, live your life, bake a pie).  And with many things it is easy for us to draw some lines of distinction.  Yes, I know that a Porsche is probably a better car than my Toyota, but they’ll both get me to the grocery store, and only one of them has the cargo space I need to buy paper towels in bulk.

However, with our children we are a little more prone to give into the irrational competitiveness of the “better.”  If someone else is going to a better school or on a better sports team or attending a better summer camp that will prepare them for a better college, job, life then don’t you think you should do whatever you can to make sure your child is in the better?  Don’t you want your kid to be, you know, better?

I guess I’m just not convinced.  Not all good jobs are stored in the Harvard Career Center.  Not all happy lives are a direct result of starting lacrosse classes at age 3. 

Yes, in this highly competitive world, denying your child access to the better can sometimes mean that they lose out to Timmy McStesspants but it in no way means that they are going to be less happy.

Most of us didn’t go to Harvard.  Most of us went to preschools that probably wouldn’t even be accredited nowadays.  Most of us sucked on lead paint coated toys and watched too much TV and didn’t spend nearly enough time preparing for the SAT.  And I don’t know about you, but I’m still pretty happy.  And I’m plenty smart and plenty content with life.  And whatever sadness and regrets I may have aren’t really related to what preschool, or college I attended.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t spend some serious time investigating what preschool your child should go to.  You want to find a place with a good, kind teacher who will teach your child to share and what the color blue looks like and how to draw a stick figure.  You want your child’s preschool experience to be a good one and you want the preschool environment to be a happy friendly one.

I’m just saying to be cautious of the “betters.”  Happiness cannot be applied into.  And joy can’t be bought, even for $19,000.  What your three year old needs is a place where he is loved and valued and gently taught how to work with other children.  And unfortunately, in 2011 America, they damn well better learn their letters, numbers and colors, or they’re going to walk into Kindergarten already behind.  But pretty much every preschool of any value will cover those basics, as will any parents out there smart enough to be reading this blog. 

And if you don’t agree with me, that’s ok.  What I’m saying may seem pretty radical in this day and age.  But don’t worry, if you think your kid needs the best, I hear there’s a really great preschool in Manhattan that has an unexpected opening.

Airports can be life sucking places.  They are the price you have to pay to get from point A to point B.  And they are almost never pleasant.  You stand around under the fluorescent lights waiting for them to allow you to be herded on to a silver tube.  And if they are late in herding you on to the silver tube, then everyone gets grumpy. 

I don’t know that there are a lot of riots that take place in airports, but it’s not usually where our better selves come out.  There tends to be an “every man for himself” mentality that envelopes an airport populace.

 “Screw the rest of you bubs, I’m going to get onto my flight to Akron first so that I can get an aisle seat!” 

So everyone is politely pushing and shoving and running through the airport, resentfully dodging the old people in the beeping golf carts just so they can get a marginally less crappy seat on an oversold cramped bus with wings.

It’s a mess and it is precisely the situation that is bound to make people grumpy and bitter.  I remember a few years ago, I was on a flight that had gotten delayed twice.  I had already missed my first connecting flight and was in serious danger of missing my next connecting flight which meant that there was a very good chance that I would have to spend the night in some God forsaken airport somewhere.  To make matters worse.  Everyone else on my flight was clearly in a similar predicament.  People were grumbling around me.  Babies were crying.  Self-important looking business men were speaking angrily into their cell phones.  And there was a huge line of people cueing up to take turns yelling at the flight attendants who manned the desk.

The whole thing was just a powder keg waiting to happen.  All it would have taken was someone getting on the intercom and announcing that the flight had been delayed five more minutes to set everyone off into a Cinnabon pelting rampage. 

How I wish, that at that moment, this had happened instead:

Apparently, Cyndi Lauper was in the midst of her latest world tour when she got caught up in every traveler’s nightmare – flight delays.  (See, even 80s pop icons are not immune to the travails of travel)  She was in the Buenos Aires airport and the natives were getting restless.  Apparently flights had been cancelled across the entire airport and the mood had gone from annoyed  to ornery to angry and was on a path to getting…. well, very angry…. When Cyndi walked over, grabbed one of the intercoms -  you know, the same intercom that had been announcing flight cancellations all day – and began singing:

“I come home in the morning light 
My mother says when you gonna live your life right 
Oh mother dear we're not the fortunate ones 
And girls they want to have fun 
Oh girls just want to have fun”

And within minutes she had the whole airport (or at least everyone within range of this guy’s video phone) singing along with her.

Now, I don’t know what happened next.  I’m not foolish enough to believe that the moment her song ended that peace and happiness broke out and that all of the planes began boarding, but I can’t help but think that everyone was in a much better mood than before Cyndi started singing. 

I feel like there are a lot of lessons we can draw from this. 

The main take away from this is that Cyndi Lauper is awesome.  Sure, Madonna had a few more hit singles and is still in freakishly good shape thanks to her yoga stuff, but I’ve always been partial to a little Lauper.  She-Bop, I Drove all Night, True Colors, All Through the Night, Time After Time – those are all great songs.  Plus, Cyndi has the added advantage of actually being able to sing, something I was never sure Madonna in all of her breathy, synthesized, groaning was actually doing.  I mean you have to admit, that for an aging pop star who had been sitting in an airport for hours, she sounded pretty good on that chintzy airport intercom.

 I’ve also always had a thing for Lauper’s outrageous Jersey accent and her appearances on Mad About You.  And, as I always suspected, it turns out Cyndi Lauper is just a much better person than most pop stars.  Can you picture Madonna going over to an airport intercom and trying to sing “Express Yourself” (or Born this Way, or whatever it’s called) just to try to make people happy?

Doubtful.

The second takeaway lesson here is that it doesn’t always take all that much to change people’s mood from one of angry wrath to that of, if not joy, at least mild pleasure. And it doesn’t need to be a celebrity either.  I remember one year when I was on an airport shuttle on my way somewhere for Christmas.  It was at the end of a long flight and everyone was tired and a little irritable.  Then a stranger, some gregarious twenty something, started yelling at everyone about “Christmas” and “cheer”  and the like and then busted out into an off-tune rendition of deck the halls. At first smiles started spreading and then we were each exchanging “can you believe this guy” looks with the people who we had been previously been actively avoiding eye contact.  And it wasn’t long before everyone had given in and was singing along.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you routinely go into places where people are tired and angry (for instance, prisons, or teacher’s lounges) and start singing to them, but at the same time, I think we often discount our ability to make life better for others.  We can be so encumbered by our own embarrassment and concern for stranger’s opinions that we are afraid to do anything that would impact other people.

And this goes beyond serenading strangers.  In public places, especially airports, where the assumption is that you know nobody, most people’s concern rarely extends beyond themselves and their suitcases.  We just want to get to where we’re going and avoid human contact as much as possible.  We try to sit in our airline seats so we don’t touch the person next to us.  After the plane lands, we jump up as soon as possible to grab our bag from the overhead bin so that we can be the first person off the plane and save ourselves that extra three minutes.  In airports, in particular, it is all about ourselves.

Which is odd, because if there was ever a time when we were “all in this together” it might be when we were sealed in a metal box flying 500 miles an hour, thousands of feet up IN THE AIR being supported by flimsy looking wings, invisible air stuff and, from the best I can tell – magic.  If ever there was a time to come together as one, you would think that would be it.  But instead, airplanes tend to be quiet, anti-social affairs.   And I suppose that’s not a terrible thing in and of itself.

But It sure is nice to, every once in a while see someone sacrifice a little of their “aloneness” to do something that spreads a little joy and engenders a little fellowship, because in the end, I think all of us – Girls and Boys, just wanna have a little fun.

Dairy is a pretty significant food group in our family.  We like milk and cheese and yogurt and sour cream and food that requires a cream sauce.  In fact I can’t think of a single dairy product that we don’t like.  I like just about every kind of cheese there is, from plain old cheddar to those weird veiny ones with fur growing on them that smell like feet.  There is hardly anything that can’t be improved with a little dairy.  Quick!  Think about your favorite meal.  Wouldn’t it be just a little better with some cheese on top?  From salads to steaks everything is better with a little dairy.

(This blog is brought to you by your local dairy council)

Perhaps, for us, it’s genetic.  My wife, Sarah is the granddaughter of dairy farmers who made their living milking 40 cows.  She has memories of going over to their house as a child and seeing all the cows lined up in the milking stanchions in the barn and helping to bring them hay and feed.  She remembers how they always had a pitcher of milk “fresh from the cow” sitting on the table.  It was warm and had a thick layer of cream skimming the top, with the occasional hair in it.  In general, it was pretty disgusting…….. but it was still a good memory and by golly it was always there.

Which, perhaps,  is why our family was thrown into such chaos last week when we went four days with no milk.  I’m still not quite sure how it happened.  Normally I buy milk two gallons at a time.  This means that we almost always have some on hand, however it also means that I always assume that we have some on hand.  This brings up situations like the one that happened last week.  I’ll be at the grocery store and think “Hmmm, do we need milk?  No, I think we’ve still got some in the fridge.”

The problem is, I often have difficulty remembering whether that half empty gallon of milk in the fridge is the first gallon or whether it’s our “emergency” second gallon of milk.  And, apparently this past week, I misjudged and remembered there being a second gallon of milk where there was none.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal.  I am in a store that sells milk usually twice a day.  Whether it’s the grocery store or Sam’s club or Target or the drug store or the gas station, I am around someone selling gallons of white gold for large portions of my existence.  However something went wrong this past week.

We just weren’t at that many milk supplying places.  I’m not sure how that happened, but our various journeys each day just didn’t take us to those stores.  Partly, I was a bit more of a homebody than I usually am.  I finished staining our stairway and I spent another whole day trying to remove a metric ton of leaves from our backyard that had fallen to the ground, gotten covered by snow and mud and then begun to decompose into a nasty, rotting, fetid layer of grossness.

It is also possible that I may have been at, say, a Target or a gas station and I just flat out forgot that we needed milk.  Now, this doesn’t seem like a very likely scenario so I don’t think we should spend any more time than necessary considering it. 

So, the long and short of it is that through almost all fault of my own, we were milkless for about four days, perhaps the longest we have gone without dairy in our entire lives.  It was miserable,  I don’t know how those Vegans do it. 

On the first day it was mainly just a mild inconvenience.  Sure, the kids whined about having to eat dry cereal, but we managed to get through it.  But the second day was rough.  I woke up shocked that we had forgotten to get milk again.  I tried to pass it off as no big deal, but the children were having none of it.  “But I don’t WANT to eat dry cereal again!”

So, Asher had a bowl of cereal with water on it.  It was like we were living during the depression. 

Can of beans for dinner, anyone?

You never think about how much you want and NEED milk until it’s gone.  We made it through the rest of the day without too many incidents, but then later than night I thought about baking some brownies, but what was I going to drink with them?  Apple Juice?    Gross.

This couldn’t be happening to us.

The next morning I got up and went to get a bowl of cereal, somehow (maybe I should see a doctor) not remembering that, while I had complained about not having milk all day, I hadn’t actually done anything about it.  There was still no milk, because I had, apparently, not bought any.  By now, the children were out for blood.  They were going into milk withdrawal and it wasn’t pretty.

“Where’s my MOO JUICE?!?” came someone’s voice as an empty cereal bowl whizzed past my head, shattering on the wall behind me.  I knew I wasn’t going to survive this one.  There was only one thing that was going to satiate their dairy lust.  I loaded all the kids in the car and we went out for donuts.  A good sugar fix is sort of like milk methadone.  It’s not the same, but it will get you through the shakes. 

So with a trip to Dunkin Donuts in the works and some careful planning about the rest of the day (no cookies, no brownies, no alfredo sauces, nothing that requires the extract of that sweet, sweet cow teat.)  we made it through the rest of the day dairy free.

Yes, we made it.  I got the kids in bed and, sighing, patted myself on the back for making it through another whole day without the….. DAMMITT!  I forgot to get milk again!

A long (and probably pretty uninteresting story) short, I left the house that instant to get milk at the local CVS.  (and dog food, our dog had a bowl of kibble dust that morning…. What was happening to me?)   

Our refrigerator now has an almost full gallon of expensive drug store milk sitting on the shelf.  When I announced this morning that we had milk again, the children literally all cheered as if some evil dictator had just been toppled. 

(honest to pete…. As I was writing this, my son just came in and asked for a cup of milk.  It’s like an epidemic)

So my kids all now have happy bellies filled with cereal and a generous helping of milk.  Order has been restored to our household and I have a big grocery trip planned today so I can purchase our emergency gallon of milk, some more dog food and all of the other stuff we need to keep this household humming and happy.  And I better get off my duff and get it done before lunch, because I’m pretty sure we’re out of bread.  And the last time I made the kids eat breadless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they hated it. 

It’s very hard to get that much peanut butter out from underneath a three year old’s fingernails.

Politics is crazy.

It usually is.  And I don’t know why I should even be surprised when it takes that occasional sidestep off the cliffs of vague reason into the far below undulating pools of insanity (did you like that visual? I spent 4.7 seconds coming up with it).  But every once in a while I open the paper and I have to take a moment to wonder whether what I’m reading is really true or whether I picked up a copy of The Onion by mistake.

For instance, now, in a time where our whole country is sitting in massive debt (unlike, you know, the last thirty years when we were sitting in massive debt),  At a time when we are desperate to figure out a way to simply fund our government, I expect there to be some disagreement on how to reach a solution.  Now, I am not so naïve as to expect that our legislators might sit down and agree to do something reasonable to deal with our current crisis – something reasonable, where both sides gave in a little, such as raising taxes on those who can afford it, AND reducing spending AND looking into changes to entitlements etc.  No, I’m not that foolish.

I would love to believe that in a crisis, both sides could agree to give in a little so that we could make some real progress.  Because the reality is that until we increase taxes AND cut spending, we’re never going to make any progress on this problem.  The reason we are here in the first place is because over the last twenty years, our governments have repeatedly cut taxes and repeatedly increased spending until we’re at a point where we have the lowest tax rates in the developed world and also some of the largest spending.  Now, I am not good at the maths, but I’m pretty sure that if you take in less and spend more, then this can become problematic. 

But again, as I said, I wasn’t expecting reasonableness.  We are in a period of time where taxes can never be raised, ever, on anyone, not even people making over a million dollars a year.  Never ever ever!  We also can’t touch our military spending.  Ever!  Ever!  Ever!  Or old people’s money  NEVER!   

So this only leaves a few things:  School lunches, Sesame Street, Education, AIDS prevention programs, Mental Health services, etc….  You know, that kind of stuff.  Of course, it can be kind of hard to cut these programs, because people like them and they actually do things for people, often poor people - you know, the ones Jesus was always talking about.  So it can be hard to figure out how to cut these programs without ticking people off.  So to do this, we usually get inventions such as “the shiftless welfare mom” or the “lazy unemployed slacker” or some other paper cut-out villain that we can use to justify cutting services that will drastically hurt people.

But in the past there have always been a few sacred cows in this battle.  I mean when was the last time you saw an ad deriding the “Corrupt Social Worker” or the “Greedy Nurse” or the “Lazy Soldier.”  No, these are fields that we don’t tend to criticize and with good reason.  They tend to not be paid extremely well and they tend to be made up of hardworking individuals.  And, partly, I think we pay a lot of lip service to these professions because, as a nation, we feel guilty that these people who do extremely difficult, often unpleasant jobs are paid so poorly.  So we figure that the least we can do is be nice to them.  I mean, why pay soldiers a living wage when we can “thank them for their service.”  Why allow social workers to earn enough money to keep them from having to provide services to themselves if, whenever we meet one, we can just nod our head and say, “wow, what a tough job.”

It used to be there was a time when teachers fell into this “untouchables” category (in this scenario I mean “untouchable” in a good way…. I guess)

Well not any more sister!  The war for the state coffers has a new bogeyman and it is your kids’ 2^nd grade teacher! 

I have never, in my life, seen teachers vilified in the way I have in the last few weeks.  Oh, it’s been building for a while, what with all of that waiting for Superman stuff, but boy it has shifted into high gear in the last few weeks.  And in Wisconsin of all places!

Wisconsin?  When did Wisconsin become the new home of crazy?  I thought we had decided to leave that to places like Florida, South Carolina and Arizona.    I always assumed it was just stress from the heat, but now here’s America’s frozen Dairyland jumping on the crazy train (too bad we’ve cut back on all of our mental health services.)

I do have to give it to them though.  It definitely takes some chutzpa to make a teacher the bad guy.  I mean, really?  Teachers?  You wouldn’t rather go after lawyers or bank executives or Wall street, or, hell, maybe even engineers or something?  You’re going to go with teachers?

This is a particularly bizarre story because, well, you remember where I was blathering on earlier in this piece about how each side should give in a little?  Well, in this case, the teachers have been sitting on a pay freeze for the last two years.  Now, that sucks, but given that the state (like most states) is in financial turmoil, I don’t know that this is unreasonable.  Ok, so no raises for the teachers.  We’ve all got to make sacrifices, right?

Well, then the governor says “ok, teachers, you greedy swine!  You also have to start paying for half of your retirement AND you have to start paying TWICE as much for your health insurance!”  The teachers, being sad pathetic creatures and understanding that the government really did have some financial issues, reluctantly agreed to these terms as well - what amounts to them taking home around 8% less in pay each month. 

And then the governor said, “That’s right you wussy little freaks!  So far, you have given me every single financial concession I have asked for and have gotten bupkis in return.  But I’m not through with you yet!  On top of all you’ve given me I’m going to remove your right to collectively bargain so that I can basically take away whatever else I want to in the future and you can’t do anything about it!”

And that’s when all hell broke loose.  It was on like Donkey Kong.

You’ve got to give it to them.  For a group of people who spend all day with chalk dust on their hands and who aren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom when they want to, they finally showed a little backbone.  And boy did they ever.

17 days of straight protests, day and night,  where they’ve taken over the entire state house!  When was the last time you saw something like that?  Seriously?  When was the last time in this country that we had a protest involving thousands of people that went on continuously for weeks?  I’m not a good enough historian to answer that question but I’m guessing you have to go back 40 or 50 years.  

And of course it’s gotten crazier from there.  The Democrats have fled the state and the Governor is refusing to compromise on anything.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  He simply said that he wouldn’t compromise on the collective bargaining issue or anything that “saves the state money.” 

So, we can all sit around and have a friendly negotiation as long as it doesn’t involve the union thing or money. 

So, what does that leave exactly?

It really is bizarre.  The teachers capitulated on every single financial issue but the governor decided to further punish them by trying to remove their right to collectively bargain – the entire point of the labor movement.  If the governor had a curly moustache and a pocket watch the whole scene would look like something out of a 1930s coal mine dispute.

Now, I will be the first to admit that our teachers unions haven’t exactly been on the right side of every issue.  I have a big problem with the whole seniority and job protection defense that the unions engage in.  As anyone who has ever taught or spent time in a school can tell you, there are some really crappy teachers out there.  There’s nothing revelatory about that statement.  Every profession has extraordinary individuals and incompetent ones, but the difference is that unions have made it virtually impossible to dismiss these people.  Oh, it can be done.  But it takes a whole lot more effort and causes a lot more grief that it ought to.

That being said, when you have a politician like the Wisconsin governor taking such broad swipes at education, you can see why people have pushed for a little more job security, so that their jobs are not held completely at the whim of whatever cost cutting politician wins 51% of the vote.

The reality is that teaching can either be the easiest job in the world or the hardest.  If all you do is print out a bunch of dittos and show up at school and pass them out all day and leave the second the bell rings, then it’s really not that difficult of a job.  It is essentially babysitting with a study hall aspect thrown in.  And Lord knows that I have been in schools with teachers like that.  It’s appalling and it’s the main reason that I get annoyed when unions fight so hard to make it difficult to remove incompetent teachers.

However, if you are truly doing the job of an educator (and most teachers are) it is a work your fingers to the bone, high stress, low benefit, often demeaning job.  (Want to go to the bathroom?  You’ll need to wait a couple of hours, or call the principal to ask them to send somebody to your classroom?  Want to go out for lunch?  Better wait till your teacher in-service day in three months.  Want to take a day off?  Sorry, you have 0 personal days, that’s what summer’s for.)

When I taught in Detroit I worked with a class of fourth graders who were reading on a Pre-K to 2^nd grade level.  Nobody was reading on grade level.  This was partly because of a couple of incompetent teachers working below me, but it was largely because of some greater societal issues that I had no control over.

So how do you teach kids who are all reading on different levels and who are in a class where the textbooks issued to you are between 2 and 6 years above the students’ reading level?  Well, I went home copied their textbooks and rewrote each book with text that corresponded with the different students’ reading levels.  That way we could all read and discuss the same story.  I got to school at least 45 minutes before school started and stayed an average of 1-2 hours after school got out.  I hated Sundays because the majority of my afternoon and evening was spent preparing lesson plans and grading papers.  Sure, I got the summer’s off, but then again I didn’t get paid in the summer so it’s not really that much of a benefit.

I worked my ass off as a teacher and most of my colleagues did as well.  No one goes into teaching for the money or the benefits.  In Michigan you are required to get a master’s degree to teach in the state, and yet you are still paid closer to that of a high school graduate (albeit one who got a job in a union).

Teaching is a job where you are supposed to educate, socialize, entertain and manage the behaviors of 25-35 children all day long.  Every child, no matter their background or home life is supposed to learn the exact same material at the exact same speed and if they do not you are labeled a failure.  I was usually given an hour and a half a week to plan 30 hours of instruction, grade papers, meet with parents, make copies, write tests, clean my classroom and do whatever else I needed to do, including go to the bathroom.  It’s a ludicrous job when done well.  The demands are extraordinary and the expectations are such that no matter how hard you try, you are likely to come up short on several fronts.  And for all this, I was being paid too much?

Do you know why lawyers and doctors don’t need unions?  Because they get paid pretty well without them.

Every one seems to be riding these Wisconsin teachers for their high salaries.  Really?  Has there ever been in a time previously where someone argued that teachers were paid too much?  Do you know what I was making when I taught in Mississippi, a state where teachers are not allowed to collectively bargain? 

$19,500.

Do you know what a teacher with a doctorate who had worked for thirty years made in Mississippi when I was there?

$36,000.

And to think that Mississippi ranks 50^th in the country for education.

In fact, most of the states that are not allowed to collectively bargain are ranked at the bottom educationally.  Coincidence? Why don’t you ask the underpaid, undervalued teachers who work there.

Honestly, I wish teacher didn’t have to unionize.  I wish that our governments and our voters valued the work that they did so much that teachers were rewarded with salaries and benefits and work environments that were so generous that people flocked to the profession and felt legitimately compensated for the work they did.  But that’s not the case.  Teachers have had to unionize and fight for every right that they have.  And because governments have pushed back so hard in the past and abused their teaching force, unions have fought for rights such as job protection that they, themselves, have ended up abusing.

The situation in Wisconsin is PRECISELY why teachers need unions.  If the government treated the profession with dignity, much of this would be unnecessary.   Again, the governor and the evil unions came to the negotiation table and the unions capitulated on everything including the equivalent of an 8% pay decrease.  And for this unions should be dismantled?  Because they are unreasonable and always ask for more?

As you may have noticed.  This touches off a nerve with me.  I worked hard as a teacher and while the pay was lousy, there was at least the sense that I was doing some good and that I was perhaps being appreciated.  Teachers and unions are not without blame in the education wars that are battling on.  But they sure aren’t the enemy.  It requires a dearth of intelligence and a lack of understanding of a teacher’s job to paint them as the bad guys in this dispute. 

Not every teacher is a saint and I fully support figuring out a way to get rid of the ones that are not doing their job, but for the ones that show up every day and work far harder than they have to and achieve far more than they need to, I applaud them.  I wish that we had the money to pay them what I believe they deserve.  I wish our country had a history of valuing people instead of taking advantage of them, such that unions never needed to come into existence.  But that is not the case. 

There are a lot of problems with education but teachers being overly compensated isn’t one of them.  I’m not sure at what point people making under $50,000 became the individuals expected to shoulder the most burden in our economic crisis, but it is shameful.  I admire the teachers and the unions in Wisconsin for being reasonable enough to accept a pay cut in hard economic times.  And I also admire them for standing up and fighting for the most basic rights that a union member has.

Governor Walker has unleashed some anger that has clearly been pent up for a long time.  And he may yet come to learn a little about union history that he has clearly missed.  Unions didn’t come into being because they had a right to collectively bargain.  They earned the right to collectively bargain by uniting in protest and refusing to work until their demands were met.

It doesn’t really matter whether unions have a legal right to collectively bargain or not.  Because as long as the people of Wisconsin have the human right to talk with one another, organize and decide to stand up to unfair and unreasonable government demands, then the Governor may be forced to collectively bargain with his teachers anyway.  Unless, of course, he wants to teach all 880,000 students in Wisconsin by himself.    Something he can’t legally do since he never finished college – one of the things we demand of our overpaid teachers.

Of course, there may be one good thing to come out of this whole mess. 

Mississippi has been really hoping that some state would come along and bump them up to 49^th.

So, to recap:  In the course of about 6 months, we had almost adopted two sets of siblings, only to have the adoptions fall through at, what at least felt like, the last minute.  And now, only a week or so after the most recent adoption has collapsed around us, we are told that there is another pair of Ethiopian sisters in need of a family.  Are we interested?

Are we interested…….. 

Are we?

The answer to that question seems like it ought to be a simple one.  Of course we are interested.  This is what we have been working for all these months.  This is what we told our social worker and everyone else involved that we wanted.  But still… are we interested? 

I’m not so sure.

On one hand -  Yes. Yes we are very interested.  And on the other hand…. We’re scared.  And broken.  And still reeling from the loss of the last adoption.  I know that we are not in a strong enough emotional state to really do this.  But what is the alternative?  To say no to a referral?  A referral that miraculously came within days instead of coming after months or years as we thought was likely?

I wanted to look at the referral.  I wanted it to be perfect, but I was worried.  My mind was still so much on the girls we had lost, how would I respond to two new girls?  How could we possibly make a healthy decision about whether to adopt them when our hearts were still with the girls from our last failed adoption?

Sarah and I discussed it, all the pros and cons.  And while we were both intrigued by a referral, we were somewhat resentful that this whole process had been so difficult and bereft of the joy and magic that seems to fill most adoptions.  I resent that we don’t get our exciting moment.  We have been robbed of that moment where, after hoping and waiting for months for the referral to arrive, you get the phone call and look with joy and expectation for the first time at the face of your child.

That is the magic moment of adoption and we weren’t getting it.  We were denied it because we were stuck so deeply in mourning and so emotionally damaged that we couldn’t bring ourselves to get excited for what should have been one of the most exciting moments of our life.  It was as if a loved one had died on the same day as a wedding.   The pain was so overwhelming that it was impossible to experience the joy.  But we couldn’t reject the referral without even looking at it.

I called our social worker and told her to go ahead and send us the referral.  But recognizing that we were both emotionally adrift, I told her that, no matter what, we were going to take at least a week to make a decision.  It would be way too easy to decide one way or another in a split instant, and I knew that was a mistake. 

A referral comes via email.  It contains basic factual information about the child such as their height and weight and any medical issues and it contains some information about their history and how they came into the orphanage.  But the information is limited and often vague, but all of that is a precursor to what any adoptive parent wants the most, and that is to see the pictures attached at the end of the document.

There are usually two pictures, a head shot and a full body shot.  They tend to be fuzzy, poorly lit, low quality photos and they are often taken soon after the child arrives at the orphanage, when they are scared and still reeling from the stress and sadness of having lost their parents.  In short, these pictures tend to be terrible.  But they are also the very first glimpse you will ever get of your child.  It is the adoptive equivalent of seeing that tiny heart beat on a sonogram.  For most adoptive parents it is the moment that can bring them to tears.  Looking at the picture for the first time is usually a parent’s very first instant of bonding with their child. 

I wanted for all the world to look at the pictures of these two girls and to just know – to have all the memories of our past referral washed away in a torrent of instantaneous love for these new girls.  I wanted to see in their faces something that would make me instantly fall in love with them and cause our doubts and concerns to disappear.

But life rarely provides that kind of certainty.  And I knew, based on the fact that earlier that same day I had shed tears for our previous loss that it was unlikely that these pictures would be able to change everything we were feeling in a single moment.  And yet still, I hoped that it would.  If for no other reason, I wanted to be released from the pain and released from having to make what would almost certainly be a difficult and complicated decision.  I wanted a miracle of certainty to save me from the complexity of life.  I wanted to have all of this put behind me in one spectacular moment of looking at a small picture which had been sent 12,000 miles through the air, only to land here awkwardly in my living room –a photo of a small girl asking me if I wanted to be her daddy.

And so I looked.

What I saw did not alleviate all the pain I had been through.  It did not instantly make me forget the past.  It did not wipe away all of my doubts and fears.  But, when I looked at the small smiling face of the girl that could become my daughter, I did feel my heart lift.  For the first time in a while, I felt a little hope return to this whole adoption process.  When I looked down at the shy little face looking up at me from the computer screen, I smiled back and thought, for the first time in a while that everything might be alright.

Of course, it would be nice to end things here, at this brief moment of optimism, but life is far more complex than that.  The two girls in the referral were sisters, aged 2 and 4.  They were both beautiful.  Their mother had recently died and their father was unable to take care of them.  The younger one’s picture had been taken days after arriving at the orphanage and her big brown eyes looked terrified at having been transferred from the only home she’d ever known to an orphanage hundreds of miles away.  The older girl’s picture was taken several months after she had been at the orphanage.  She still seemed nervous but her shy, sweet personality was starting to peek through in her gentle smile.

As promised, Sarah and I waited a week to decide on whether to accept this referral.  It was hard.  On the one hand we both acknowledged that in ordinary times - had we gotten this referral 6 months previously, or 6 months later - we would have instantly jumped at the chance to adopt these lovely girls.  But these weren’t ordinary times.  We were still very damaged after all that had happened, and our emotions were in retreat.  Aside from that small wisp of joy I had felt upon first seeing the older girl’s picture, I had been unable to summon up much emotion at all.

So, instead of being in a position where we could allow our initial reaction and feelings of joy and excitement to sweep us instantly away, we had to spend a lot of time considering this referral from an unemotional point of view.  We talked about whether the ages of the girls might be a problem since our boys were aged three and five.  We talked about the challenges of having five kids in school so close together.  We talked about the benefits of having five kids so close together in age.  We talked about how moving from a household of one girl and two boys, to a household of three girls and two boys would affect us.  We tried to think about all the conceivable pros and cons.  But the reality is that we had already reached those conclusions.  When we first decided to adopt, we had already gone through all these considerations.  The only decision left to make was whether or not these particular two girls were the girls that we would like to bring into our family forever.  And the only information we had to make that decision was a couple of photos and some extremely limited history.

We wanted that big emotional response to come in and provide the decision for us, to give the illusion that these girls were magically selected just for us and that this whole situation was somehow preordained, thus taking the burden of decision off of our weakened shoulders.

But in reality, the decision was not, “do we want these girls?”  That was easy.  Of course we did.  They were beautiful, lovely girls that anyone would be lucky to adopt.  No, from the moment I saw that picture, there was little doubt that we wanted to adopt these girls.  No, the real question was this: “Were we ready to adopt.”

This was trickier.  Sarah and I knew that we wanted to adopt.  But, the truth is, that we were in no position to do so.  We were still sad and angry and emotionally rudderless.  In the end there was really no other alternative.  We knew that we were not ready to adopt – that we still needed time to heal.

However, luckily……fortunately……. blessedly, that didn’t mean that we had to say no to these wonderful girls.

What is usually the worst part of the adoption process, the waiting, was now our ally.  We desperately needed time to heal and to prepare our hearts, our home and our family for a new adoption.  And, let me tell you, there is nothing that offers excess time like an international adoption.  Because of newly emerging regulations, a more vigilant immigration process and a thousand other factors, it would be a minimum of six months before we would be able to bring these girls home with us.  We needed time and that is exactly what we were provided.

So we said yes.

We decided to acknowledge that tiny overwhelmed voice in our hearts that was screaming YES but being smothered by the density of our pain!  We said yes because these girls were truly perfect for  us and we knew that in time our hearts would heal to the point that all of the excitement and enthusiasm that we so desperately wanted to feel would come rushing over us once again. 

It has been a month since we officially made that decision.  It would be disingenuous of me to say that we have healed entirely, or that I never think about the girls we were previously planning to adopt.  But with every day the pain of the past grows fainter and our excitement for the future grows stronger.  The months of waiting that, for a while, seemed like a blessing have once again become the burden that we knew they would be.  Every day I check my email ten, twenty, thirty times hoping that an update will come full of new pictures and stories of our daughters.  Every time the phone rings I glance eagerly at the caller hoping that it will be our social worker, telling us that we have gotten a court date and that it is time to get our plane tickets to fly out to meet our girls.

I have pictures of our beautiful girls in my wallet and, once again, the kids talk about their new adoptive sisters with one another.  We pray for them as a family and I dream about them at night. 

We have no firm dates, but our best guess is that the girls will travel home with us some time this summer.  Until then, there is much to do.  We have rooms to paint, beds to buy and, yes, still some healing to work through.  Every day I try to fight the tendency to hold back.  Like the two adoptions before this, there exists a small but very real chance that something could happen to keep this adoption from going through.  I try not to think about it.  I try to ignore the well intentioned, but unhelpful comments from friends that this was all meant to happen this way.  I can’t reconcile the pain we have felt with any true purpose, either for us or the children that will not be a part of our family.  But I do feel, as strongly as ever, that our family is destined for an adoption and that our three wonderful children will be ideal siblings for their new sisters. 

If we have learned anything in the last year, it is that the path of life is unpredictable, and all any of us can do is to keep moving forward, trying to choose the best direction possible for our lives.  I believe that these two girls are waiting for us somewhere further down our path.  Despite the troubles of the past, I continue to look forward and to peek around the bend in the trail ahead of us, hoping that I will catch a glimpse of our girls waiting patiently for us.  With every passing step, I know we draw closer to them and to the day when our beautifully imperfect family can be complete and we can all continue down this road together.

This past fall was a real time of change for us as we began re-thinking what we were looking for in an adoption and what we had to offer.

We had begun assuming that we would adopt an infant.  And I mean why not?  Infants are cute and smell good and fun to carry around and the general rule of thumb is that the younger the child, the easier they adapt to a new family.  So adopting an infant from Ethiopia was sort of our initial thought on what to do.  But our experience with almost adopting a pair of domestic twins began to change our thinking. 

For one, we got attached to the idea of adopting two children at once.  Initially we had thought that we would adopt one child and then possibly adopt a second one later.  But the twins forced us to realize that we could adopt two at once - that, although this would be difficult, we felt up to it.

Additionally, during the time that we had to consider whether or not to move forward with the twins’ adoption, we were forced to let go of the idea of adopting an infant and then begin thinking about what it would be like to bring a couple of toddlers into our house.  As it turns out, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that there are a lot of advantages to adopting toddlers.

For instance, did you know that there comes a time when small children stop pooping in their pants and begin using a potty?

It’s true!  And this seemed like a pretty good advantage.  But more than that, there are lots of other advantages to having an older child.  After about 8 years of almost always having an infant in the house, we had just reached the point where our youngest is three and a half.  And it is SO much easier.  Older kids can get themselves dressed and feed themselves and get in the car on their own and play with their siblings.  It makes going to the grocery store, or a restaurant, or even just hanging out at the house a million times easier than chasing around a completely dependent baby that does nothing but cry, poop and crawl around trying to swallow small toys on the floor.

I also liked the idea that our kids would be grouped together, age wise.  I liked that there would be a relatively small age range between our oldest child and our youngest.  Hopefully, this meant that our kids would grow up to be close as they played together and shared similar stages in life. 

And finally, we began thinking about our oldest daughter, Audra.  Conventional wisdom holds that it can be dangerous to “artificially twin” one of your children – that is, to adopt a child that is the same age as one of your existing children.  But Audra seemed like an exception.  She had always wanted a sister and had the personality that would really embrace having a sister her age.  She would love to take her sister around and introduce her to friends and show her how school worked.  She would love to share a bedroom and stay up late talking and giggling.  More than most kids out there, Audra would be an exceptional sister to a newly adopted child.  And the more we thought about this, the more we wanted to make that happen.

Partly, I sincerely believed that it would be a good thing for Audra and our family as a whole.  But also, I knew that most people who were adopting were in the position of only wanting to, or being able to adopt infants.  And the more I considered it, the more I realized that we were in the somewhat unique position to be able to adopt older children.  There is a tremendous need in Ethiopia (and everywhere) for older children to be adopted, and I felt like if we were able to do that, then we should.

In the midst of all of these thoughts that were rambling around in our heads, Sarah began looking at what is called the “waiting children’s list.”  This is a webpage featuring children who have not found homes yet.  Whenever a prospective adoptive family begins the adoption process, they fill out a form describing the kind of child they are looking for (example:  a healthy girl, under 18 months).  The children on the waiting list are kids who didn’t fit into anyone’s criteria.  It is largely made up of older boys, often between the ages of 8 and 12. 

Sarah would look at the list frequently.  It’s a heartbreaking thing to do – looking at pictures of children who so desperately want to be adopted but haven’t been.   It was hard not to call up and want to adopt every child there, but we were trying hard not to be impulsive in a decision where it would be very easy to let emotions override your thinking.   Then one day, Sarah was looking through the pages and came across a listing that seemed perfect.  There were two sisters on the waiting list.  One was an 8 year old girl and the other was her two year old sister.

All I can tell you is that there was something about this girl’s picture that touched our heart.  I wish I could explain it more deeply than that, but looking at this fuzzy pictures from 12,000 miles away there was something deep inside both Sarah and I that told us that these two girls were going to be our daughters. 

We requested more information and tried to do everything we could to be responsible and make a decision based on thoughtful consideration of what we knew about the girls and what we knew about our family, but in the end, there was nothing we learned that could change the fact that we had fallen in love at first sight.  In fact, what we learned made us all the more confident that this was the match for us. 

For legal reasons, we are not able to share pictures or names on a public site, but in private we showed pictures of our girls to our close friends, reveling in the fact that these girls would soon be a part of our family.  One friend even said that he couldn’t get over how much the older sister looked like Audra.  This was of course not even remotely true.  These two girls from different countries and different cultures looked nothing alike, but still there was something about them that did seem so similar.

We filled out the formal intent paperwork to adopt the girls and began from that moment on to think of them as our own.  However, this was back in October and there was still paperwork left to be done.  Our immigration paperwork had gotten stalled in an office in Missouri.  I spent weeks calling trying to get ahold of someone to find out what was going on.  I was becoming furious to think that our girls were in an orphanage in Ethiopia, unable to come home to be with us because some stupid government agency had to stamp some forms.

I was ready to join the tea party.

Finally we learned that our documents had gotten lost and that the reason we couldn’t reach our assigned INS agent was because she hadn’t been issued a phone yet.  Eventually, we made enough of a pest of ourselves that someone took pity on us and after overnighting some replacement forms, the final piece of our adoption dossier was completed. 

Then I took about 30 different documents that I had compiled and took them to my social worker and got them all notarized.  Then I went to the county office and got all the notary signatures documented as accurate, then I took all those documents over to the state office and got all of them affixed with a state seal stating that the authorization of the notary signatures was accurate.  So, I had thirty documents with a signature, attached to a notary signature, documented by a county authorization and attached to a state seal.  Who says bureaucracy is dead.

During the months it took to gather all of these ridiculously exacting documents, we were receiving regular updates about our girls from the orphanage.  Every few weeks we would receive an email with pictures of our girls and a report on what they were doing and how they were faring. 

There is something miraculous about this process.  Because without warning, one day you check your email and there is an innocuous message full of pictures and wonderful stories about your soon to be adoptive children.  It is virtually impossible to have a bad day when you receive one.

I transferred all the pictures over to my phone so I could carry them around and show them to friends, or just sit and stare at them myself whenever a quiet moment came around.  We had pictures of the girls printed up for the house and even bought a family tree frame for the grandparents that included our soon to be adopted daughters. 

Finally our dossier was completed and sent off.  It buzzes around the U.S. for a couple of weeks to various official offices before being sent to Ethiopia.  And from that point on the waiting begins until you get the phone call to bring your children home. 

This can be a difficult time, as the waiting is hard and also unpredictable.  This was made all the more difficult by the fact that I became seriously ill.  By now it was early December and I came down with what I thought was a particularly bad flu.  A week later I was in the hospital undergoing the knife for surgery to remove a severe infection in my liver.  I was of course worried about the surgery and whatever danger to my life this might bring, but more than that, my very first thought was about how this would affect the adoption.  You had to be in good health to adopt internationally.  Would this disqualify me?  Would this delay the process?  It was hard for me to imagine ever getting over the fact that my illness had somehow kept these beautiful girls from becoming part of our family.

Luckily, my social worker assured me that this was unlikely to be an issue.  However, while I was in the hospital she did email to say that there was a mistake on one of our documents and that it needed to be corrected before the dossier could be sent to Ethiopia.

Are you kidding me?

So, Sarah, the non-hospitalized one of us, found the document, corrected it and got it sent on its way.  Finally, on the 23^rd of December, two weeks after having been admitted, I came home from the hospital having been poked and prodded in the most unpleasant of places.  I was battered and exhausted, but aside from coming home just in time for Christmas, I came home to the very, very good news that our dossier had arrived in Ethiopia and that it would be just a matter of time before the girls would be declared officially ours and we would be able to bring them home to meet their new sister and brothers. 

We got the news that our dossier had arrived in Ethiopia on December 30.  The year of 2010 had been kind of a rough year, but I had to say…. 2011 was looking pretty good.

Less than a week later I got a phone call from our social worker.  This was not unusual, but it was a call I always greeted with a little bit of hesitancy.  It could be that she was calling with the great news that our court date had been scheduled, but more likely, she was calling with bad news.  Probably another error had been found in our dossier or a piece of it had gone missing.  This would mean another week or two of delays as we scrambled to recreate the documents, get them notarized, approved and sealed and then shipped off to who knows where. 

When I picked up the phone, the first thing she said was, “Marcus, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.  We’ve lost the referral.”

Aaaarrggh!

Lost the referral!  What did that even mean?  How did they lose the whole referral?  These people were worse than INS.  I steeled myself for whatever Sisyphean task of gathering endless paperwork lay before me.

“What does that mean?” I sighed, “we’ve lost the referral?”

“This adoption is over.”  She said quietly.  “Other relatives have come forward to take the girls.”

At first, I sincerely didn’t understand what she was saying.  And then slowly, in waves, the reality of her words began to hit me.

We had lost the referral.  The adoption was over.  These two girls who we had been dreaming about, planning for and praying over every day and night for the last three months were no longer going to be our little girls. 

I was in a state of shock.

“This almost never happens….” She went on.

“And yet it’s happened to us twice now,” I corrected, interrupting. 

I was trying to be understanding.  I was trying to be considerate.  But in the rush of emotions there was plenty of anger bubbling up amidst the pain and the oncoming depression.

These were our girls.  Our girls!  We knew, theoretically, that things could still go wrong, but I don’t think I had ever taken that possibility seriously.  After all we had been through, it certainly seemed as if we had taken our share of whatever difficulty was required for an adoption and besides this just felt so right.  I had felt with my whole heart like God had brought these girls into our lives.  It had seemed crazy on paper:  two more kids?  An eight year old?  A two year old sister? 

It seemed completely wrong, but the more we had thought about it and prayed about it, the more sure I had become that It was absolutely right.  These were the two children that would complete our family in the most perfect way.  I stared at their faces every day and imagined what it would be like to have them living in our home as our daughters.  I imagined our five children playing together in the backyard.  I imagined having to stomp upstairs at 10:00 at night and shush the two giggling older girls and tell them to stop talking about boys!  I imagined each of our three daughters getting married as I held their arms and walked them down the aisle, their two sisters smiling as bridesmaids.  I imagined a Thanksgiving thirty years from now when my five children, their spouses  and my dozens of grandchildren swarmed around the house while I tried to get the largest turkey I could fit in the oven ready for dinner.

I was that sure that these girls were ours, that they were part of our family.  I knew that things could go wrong, but it had never occurred to me that they would ACTUALLY go wrong.  When things are so perfect…. when you feel so strongly that God has led you to this place….. how then could it all evaporate with a single phone call?

And yet that’s what happened. 

The days and weeks that followed that phone call were miserable.  It felt as if someone had died.  These two girls had only been “ours” for only a few months, but they felt for all the world like our children and losing them felt as if a part of us had been ripped away.   

In the coming days we had to tell our friends and our family about this loss.  We had to endure telling the miserable story over and over again.  We had to cry all over again when we told someone who truly understood our pain.  We had to bite our lip when we told someone who didn’t understand why we might be so upset.  I had to watch my children cry when I told them that the sisters that we had been talking about for months would not be coming to live with us. 

And then, as if the pain of this loss wasn’t enough, we realized that we also needed to figure out what to do about this adoption that we were in the middle of.  We had invested months of our life and tens of thousands of dollars.  We had done it gleefully with the knowledge that we would be bringing home these two girls that we were in love with.  And now, we once again found ourselves back at the beginning of a very long and very  emotionally treacherous path.

We needed to decide, again, what we wanted to do.  Did we still want to adopt siblings?  Did we still want to adopt at all?  There was certainly a part of me that just wanted to be done with the whole thing.  Should we just walk away and try to pretend that none of this had ever happened?  Was it even wise to once again expose ourselves to such potential pain?

We spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what to do, what direction to move in, but our hearts weren’t in it.  I felt emotionally numb.  We needed to make a decision, but I had no idea how.  The things we had depended on in the past – our hopes, our desires, our prayers – had all betrayed us.  I didn’t even know how to access those emotions any more.  So we did the best we could.  We tried to think about what would make sense logically, since that seemed to be the only resource I had to evaluate our options.

We decided to go ahead and ask for siblings again.  We knew that was what we wanted, but it was hard.  We didn’t want to simply try to replace the girls that were still so prevalent in our thoughts.   We kept asking ourselves, “what do we want,” and having to shy away from the true answer.  We knew what we wanted and we couldn’t have it.

Eventually, I made an appointment with our social worker and went in to formally fill out the document stating what kind of children we wanted to adopt.  We knew we wanted siblings, but beyond that we were open.  We wrote in a few vague preferences, but at every opportunity we mentioned that we were open to other options.  We had started off wanting an infant and had ended up falling in love with two older sisters.  The reality is that we didn’t know what we wanted.  We wouldn’t know until we could see it and think about how it might affect our family.  We had traveled so far on this journey and changed so much.  Who were we to say what we wanted any more.  There were so many different scenarios that might work.  And through all of this was the numbness.  We knew, intellectually, that we wanted to adopt and that there were certain scenarios that would be better for our family, but my ability to tell anything for certain was long gone. 

Our social worker explained that it was impossible to predict how long it might be before siblings that matched our broad preferences might become available.  Siblings did not come into the orphanage frequently and we could have to wait a year or longer, or it could be that a perfect match for our family could appear in as little as a month.  Because we were looking for something unusual (older siblings) it was particularly difficult to predict when we might get a referral. This meant that on top of the pain of having lost our girls, we were once again thrown, seemingly, back to the beginning of the process and faced with the knowledge that the end to our adoption process wouldn’t be coming in a few months as we had thought, but would most likely not come for a year or longer.  Somehow this made our loss feel doubly deep, as if we were somehow losing a year of our life on top of everything else. 

But despite the pain and the numbness, we knew that we wanted to adopt and we knew that with every passing day that we were being indecisive we were prolonging the time that we would finally be able to bring a child home.  And we also knew that a few days can make a big difference.  In international adoption the process is constantly evolving.   Countries change their regulations sporadically and it can have a huge impact.  Last year Ethiopia changed the process so that adoptive parents now have to travel to Ethiopia twice to complete the adoption.  And, of course, as a result of one impulsive parent, Russia closed their country to adoption altogether.  And then there are situations like Haiti.  A natural disaster can vastly upset the process.  There are always risks associated with this kind of process and delays, even small ones can be costly

So I felt under some pressure to go ahead and metaphorically get back in line.  We, once again, officially submitted our paperwork and went home to mourn and to wait, not having any idea how long each of those tasks might take.

But if this process has taught us anything, it is that life is unpredictable.  You can spend all the time you want guessing what is about to happen or how you think things will turn out, or even what you believe that you want.  But there is little certainty in life.  Things change, and experiences change you.  What you thought would happen can alter in a single earth shattering moment and what you believed you wanted can shift in ways that you never saw coming.  And this is where faith comes in. 

Believing that things will happen a certain way is a faith that is almost certainly destined to disappoint.  Rather, faith exists to show you that no matter how things turn out, there can still be goodness in the result.

I left the meeting with my social worker on a Friday, knowing that I likely had months and months of endless waiting before a pair of siblings would come along that would be the right fit for our family.  But like most of my other assumptions about how this process would go, I was dead wrong.

The following Tuesday, three days later, our social worker called to let me know that a pair of sibling girls had become available for adoption.  She had the referral in hand and was ready to send it to me, but she wanted to know whether we were ready.  She wanted us to know that we should feel no pressure.  If we decided to look at the referral, we should feel free to take as long as we needed to review it, consider it and then to accept it or reject it without feeling obligated one way or the other.  The only question was did we feel ready to review the referral?  Were we emotionally at a point where we could start down this road once again?

I wasn’t sure.  The numbness and the depression were still a very real and constant presence in our lives.  We were still mourning our girls.  Could we possibly consider new children so quickly?

I called Sarah at work and we had a quick talk.  As hard as it might be, we knew that, at this point, there was only one thing to do – only one direction we could really go from here.

NEXT – A New Direction

As many of you know, our family has spent the last year in the process of adopting a child.  For anyone who needs a quick reminder on how this all got started, here’s a link to the blog I wrote about it last April.

http://familiesonly.com/Community/blogs/overdad/archive/2010/04/27/an-unexpected-journey.aspx

You may be wondering why I haven’t blogged more about the process.  I mean, I managed to squeeze in blogs about my minivan and my kids’ birthday parties, commercials, youtube videos and at one particularly low point, an entire blog about cleaning out my junk drawer.

You’d think I could have made time to blog about our adopting a child.

Well, the reality is that there are a number of reasons I haven’t dedicated much time to this topic.  Partly, a lot of the process has been really boring.  You can only get fingerprinted so many times before it no longer feels newsworthy.  And while I don’t want to discount the time and effort it took to get several dozen documents notarized, verified and then state sealed (each a separate process) I wasn’t sure it made good reading.

The other reason, the main reason, is that things haven’t exactly gone smoothly.  We were told when we began this process that there is always some major complication in any international adoption:  your documents might get held up in the court process, your travel dates could be delayed, your fingerprints might be rejected.  It’s an incredibly complex and difficult process involving city, state, federal and international governments.  Something will go wrong!

We were told to expect something to happen and then to embrace that problem with the knowledge that everyone gets a roadblock and that this was ours.  So we went into this process with our eyes wide open – approaching each situation with as much patience, open mindedness and flexibility as we could muster.  And so when our first problems began to hit, we were ready.  When our second problems began to hit, we were still ready.  When our third and fourth problems began to rain down on us like fire from an angry God, we were starting to feel a little put upon, but still sort of ready.  But as the problems began to escalate from the minor to the life altering it began to take a lot of effort to even move forward through the process, much less blog about it and share our pain with the world (and by world, I mean all 37 of you). 

I don’t want to bore you with all of the details of our process.  There is nothing interesting about why it took us three months to track down a police officer willing to sign a piece of paper saying we aren’t convicts.  And there is hardly anything of value to be gained from recounting why it took almost four months to get the Federal immigration office to process some forms and record our fingerprints.  (Hint, INS loses things).  These are tedious and boring stories that caused months of delays in an increasingly complicated and frustrating process, but they aren’t necessarily worth hearing about.  At the time we were sure that these incredibly frustrating but generally minor complications were the worst of what we would have to go through.  Unfortunately, we were very wrong.

In mid-August, when we were still arguing with INS about where our documents actually were (apparently they were with an INS agent that could not be contacted, because she had not been issued a phone) we got an email from our adoption agency.  The email said that a pair of two year old twins had just become eligible for adoption.  This was a very rare occurrence because these twins were not from Ethiopia but were, rather, from a town in the same county we lived in.

Almost all of the domestic adoptions our agency handles are of infants.  They are almost always from young women who are pregnant and have decided to give the child up for adoption.  The arrangements are made before the baby is born and most of the time the adoptive parents bring the child home at a month old.  But this was a very different situation.  This was not a pregnant woman who had decided she was not ready to raise a child.  This was a mother who had been struggling to raise her twins for a couple of years and had finally reached the conclusion that she simply could not continue to raise them as well as her other children and so she wanted to give them up to be adopted. 

Initially, our agency looked into whether any of the adoptive parents in the domestic program were interested in the twins, but apparently everyone was hoping to adopt an infant and so they ended up forwarding the information about the twins to those of us in the international program.  I was actually driving across Nebraska on the way back from a three week cross country family road trip when I received the email.  It simply said that a pair of two-year-old twins might be available for immediate adoption.  I forwarded the email to Sarah and we both agreed that we should at least get a little more information.

I called up our social worker and she explained that the mother had signed over her rights almost two months previous and that the agency was looking to place the children with their adoptive family as soon as possible. 

If we decided to pursue this, it was gong to be a huge change for Sarah and I.  Up till that time, we had been assuming that we would be adopting an infant from Ethiopia sometime in the following year.  To change that perspective, to consider adopting two toddlers in a couple of weeks, was a massive shift in where we thought our lives were headed.  If we were to move forward, I would have to immediately buy new furniture and move our children from one room to another and drastically change how we thought we would be spending the next year of our life.

But it was also exciting.  The idea of not having to do any more of the tedious and time consuming international paperwork was very appealing as was the fact that we wouldn’t have to wait to adopt.  The idea of having four children under the age of 5 scared us a little bit, but the more we thought about it, there was something that also really appealed to us.  Our children would all be close in age and would hopefully grow up as close friends.  The more we thought about it, the more the idea appealed to us.  Additionally, our social worker shared with us that, while she didn’t want to pressure us in any way, that we were by far the best fit for these children of anyone who had expressed interest.

And so after a lot of thought and prayer and mental preparation, we decided to move forward.  We set up a time to meet the twins with the understanding that we would need to make a decision shortly thereafter.  Sarah and I were trying to be cautious and deliberate, but we also knew that there was little chance that we would say no.

About a week later, the agency finally arranged for the twins to be brought to the office for us to meet them.  When we got there, they were waiting for us in a small carpeted room with a couple of toys on the floor.  The children were quiet and seemed scared.  It was clear that they had some inkling of what was going on.  We later learned that this was not the first time that their mother had given them up for adoption.  She had done this several times in the past, always changing her mind at the last minute.  This time however, she had already signed away her rights a couple of months previous and she was well past the point where, legally, she could change her mind.

The children were both and I don’t mind saying that I had always harbored a secret desire to have twins.  We sat down on the floor with them and began trying to interact.  I pushed toy trucks around the carpet.  I stacked up blocks and knocked them down.  I read books out loud.  But the kids just sat there, staring at us.  They didn’t move.  They didn’t make a noise.  They just sat there silent as stones.

On some level I was expecting this.  This had to be a terrifying situation for two small children.  You are taken to a room that you are unfamiliar with, away from everyone you have ever known and loved, and then two strangers show up and start talking to you and trying to get you to stack blocks.    There was nothing natural about this.

Our one sided interactions went on for at least 15 minutes.  And then on about the dozenth time that I casually asked them to pass me a block, the little girl reached down and tentatively picked up a block in her small palm and handed it to me. 

Up until that point, I had been nervous.  We had in no way formally committed to adopting these children, but everyone involved basically knew that we were leaning that way.  But I also knew that we had to be responsible to our own abilities and our other children.  And as we sat there trying unsuccessfully to play with the twins, I began to worry that maybe we weren’t cut out for this.  That maybe these two children needed more than we would be able to provide – maybe they were too damaged for us to overcome.

But with that one simple motion, the placing of a block in my hand, I knew everything was going to be ok.

It was like breaking the wall of a dam.  I was passed one block and then another and then another.    Within minutes both children were running around pushing cars, kicking balls, knocking over towers of blocks- doing all the things that normal two year olds do.  Minutes later, the little girl was sitting in my lap listening to a story while the little boy was playing catch with Sarah.  Whatever doubts and concerns I had had were erased away.  These children were going to be perfect for our family and we would be able to provide them with the loving, attentive home that they clearly, so desperately needed.  I looked across the room at Sarah and without saying anything it was clear that we both felt the same way.

After about half an hour more of what can only be described as a pretty joyful time of falling in love with our children, it was time for them to go.  I carried the little boy out to the car and he held on to my neck as if he were clinging to life itself.  It was heartwrenching, but it was also beautiful and exciting and overwhelming.  These children were going to be in our home in a matter of days – a week or two at the most.  As I put him in the car and buckled him into his carseat next to his sister, my mind skipped ahead to all of the things we needed to buy and to do to prepare for two more children in our house.  I thought about all of the questions I needed to ask so that we could be fully prepared.  “What kind of bed do they sleep in?”  “What foods do they like?”  Do they sleep in the same room, or separate?”    This was going to happen and we needed to be ready.  It was a lot to consider but I knew that we were up for the challenge.  God had led us this far and I had little doubt that he would guide us the rest of the way on this extraordinary journey. 

Sarah was waiting outside with me and before we went back into the agency, we spent a few moments talking, saying aloud what we already knew – that we had both decided that within a matter of days the two beautiful children in the backseat of that car would become our son and daughter.  We walked into the agency to meet with the social worker.  There was a great deal to work out and precious little time to do it.  When we walked into her office, the first thing she asked us was what we thought and we told her that we were ready to move forward with the adoption.

It was at this point….. the point where we had just spent an hour falling in love with these two little people and made the momentous decision to bring them into our lives forever, that she told us that there was a slight problem with the adoption.

A problem?

How could there be a problem?  The mother and the father had terminated their rights months ago.  One of the reasons we had been comfortable moving so quickly was because we had been told time and  time again that this was a sure thing and that, for the children’s sake, we needed to get them into a permanent home as soon as possible. 

But apparently, despite the fact that the mother had terminated her rights, the termination paperwork was still waiting to be approved by a judge.  It had been signed and notarized and was perfectly legal, but it hadn’t quite made it to the top of the local judge’s pile of documents to be signed. 

The twins were still living with their mother while an adoptive family was being found and their mother had changed her mind.  She had decided that she did not want to give them up.  Normally, her rights would be terminated and this wouldn’t be an issue, but since the paperwork had not made it through the system and because she was still in “possession” of the children, there was no way to move the adoption forward without the mother’s consent.  Short of waiting for the paperwork to become official and then showing up at the mother’s residence with a police escort, there was no way to force her to follow the decision she had already made. 

So we waited.

We were told time and again that this never happened.  That once parents’ rights had expired, that the adoption always moved forward and that this was just an extraordinary set of bizarre circumstances.  But that didn’t make the situation, or the waiting any easier.

We waited days and then a week, every day hoping to hear whether the mother had changed her mind, or whether she was going to choose to raise the twins herself.  As we pleaded for more information we learned that this was not the first time that this had happened.  Apparently this mother had put her children up for adoption multiple times, always changing her mind at the last minute.  Although this time, she had waited too long and her legal rights had expired.  This was a trend.  When she got tired or overwhelmed she would put the children up for adoption, only to swoop in and bring them home at the last minute. Things had never progressed as far as they had with us, where adoptive parents had come forward, met the children and agreed to adopt them.  So it was unclear how things would work out.

And so we waited.

And then the phone call came.  The mother had decided to keep the children.  She would not change her mind.  This adoption was over. 

It would be hard for me to express the kind of depression that this evoked in us.  For weeks I had been carrying around a picture of the children, our children, that I had snapped with my cell phone camera.  I would stare at the picture at all times of the day.  Imagining what our lives would be like with two little twins growing up in our home.  Over and over again, I would play the image in my mind of the girl handing me the block for the first time.  I would close my eyes and still be able to feel the tight, almost desperate grip of the little boy’s arms around my neck as I carried him to the car.

It was devastating.

I was depressed and angry and simply overwhelmed with emotions.  We spent weeks mourning our loss and also mourning the fact that we needed to start again with all of the remaining damn paperwork on our international adoption that was now weeks behind schedule.  It was difficult to even want to begin the adoption process again when we, just days previously, thought we had finished it.  But I tried to put my anger aside and with a somewhat mindless determination began working at everything else that still needed to be done to adopt a baby from Ethiopia.  I began gathering signatures on documents and calling the INS to figure out what had become of our application.

We tried to move on, to leave the loss of the twins behind us, but it wasn’t easy.  Although it had all happened quickly and over a short period of time, there had been an intensity and excitement to those emotions that was hard to let go of.  The reality was that the process we went through of deciding whether we could give up the idea of adopting an infant and instead adopt two toddlers had altered our thinking.

In some ways, adopting an infant is easy.  The child is less likely to have experienced the trauma of growing up in extreme poverty.  They will not remember their family or country.  They will only ever remember you as their parent.  For these reasons and others, the vast majority of people wishing to adopt from Ethiopia are seeking infants.  Ethiopia is such a victim of disease and poverty, that unfortunately there is no shortage of mothers who are forced by circumstances to give their babies up for adoption.

But having already made the decision to bring two siblings into our home, Sarah and I began thinking more and more about the idea of looking for siblings in Ethiopia.  At first we were inclined to look for younger siblings – children that would be younger than our youngest child, Micah.  But we were told that we might have to wait a very long time for a pair of siblings that so specifically met the age requirements we were looking for.

This was also hard, because having been so close to bringing a child home, it was that much more difficult to think about waiting a year or longer.   And so we waited.  We worked on our documents and hoped that something might happen that would allow us to be matched with the children that would be right for us.

We thought and hoped and prayed that somehow God would lead us to some kind of answer through all of this.  That somehow there would be some reason to this chaos and pain that would result in our ability to create a family for a parentless child – and a child that would complete our family.

We pressed forward, relying on faith and hope.  And much to my surprise, we did find just what we were looking for.  In our confusion and frustration we discovered things about ourselves and about our family that led us to find the most perfect children for us to adopt.  We could never have seen it coming.  And we never would have found them without going through the trauma of first committing to and then losing the twins.  I don’t know how much I believe that “things happen for a reason.”  But I do know that the things that happened to us changed us and led us to reach conclusions and make decisions that we wouldn’t have otherwise. 

We still thought about the twins daily, but through that pain we discovered something wonderful.  Two somethings wonderful, in fact.

NEXT:  Surprising Siblings

Ah Valentines day.  The day to celebrate young love.

Ok, I know it’s supposed to be the day to celebrate all love – young love, old love, middle aged love.  But the reality is that it truly is mostly for young love.  The rest of us are just too tired. 

Sure, we might get around to making reservations somewhere, but then you have to find a babysitter that isn’t dating anyone and so you just end up with some sullen weepy teenager forcing your kids to sit in the dark and listen to Justin Bieber songs while she cries into a pillow and texts weepy faced emoticons to her friends.

No, it’s young care-free love for whom Valentine’s Day is truly designed.  These are the people who buy $70 boxes of Godiva chocolates and Hallmark teddy bears that sing Billy Ocean songs and who make sure Victoria’s Secret has a good first quarter profit.  By middle aged love, the best you’re likely to do is try to make sure you put on the underwear without the holes in it.

When I asked my wife, Sarah, what she wanted to do for the big V-day she sighed and said.  “I don’t know.  I guess we could go out to dinner… but then there’s all that awkwardness with the crying babysitter and the Justin Bieber songs….. maybe we should order in sushi and watch TV.”

Very romantic. We could probably just wear our holey underwear for that.

So, maybe instead of focusing on the current state of our Valentine’s Day, perhaps we should take a short walk down memory lane on a visit to Valentine’s Day Past.

15 years ago Sarah and I celebrated our first Valentine’s Day together.  This was back in a time when I was more romantic and we were both less tired.  We were in college together at the time and had been dating for about 9 months.  I must have sensed that things were going to work out, because about three months into our having started dating and 6 months previous to February I had already begun planning our first Valentine’s day together.

I told you I used to be a romantic (or creepily optimistic, depending on your perspective)

You see, I knew Sarah loved the musical Les Miserables, so it occurred to me, “I bet I could get really good seats if I ordered them 6 months in advance.”  Turns out I was right.

So having done that, back in August, I hadn’t put a whole lot of effort into any other aspects of the evening.  But as Valentine’s Day neared, I realized that we would also need some place to eat.  Now at the time, I was a college student in a small town in the middle of New Jersey.  I had little to no money and had zero experience finding a nice restaurant for a romantic evening.  I grew up in a town where Applebees WAS the nice restaurant. 

I had no idea how to go about finding a nice place to take a girl that didn’t have fried mozzarella sticks on the menu.  So I did the only sensible thing I could do.  I asked the women who I worked with in the college career center.

I had a work study job in the career center and was very friendly with the women who worked there.  I explained that I didn’t have a lot of money (a serious consideration in upscale suburban New Jersey) but I was looking for some place that I could go that was close by and that we could get a reservation for on Valentine’s Day.  After some thought and consultation with one another, the career center staff agreed that Daniel’s (or something like that) was a good choice. 

Now, we had to have dinner and then drive into New York City, fighting traffic on a weeknight and then park and get to the show by 8:00.  So taking that all into account, I made our dinner reservation for 5:30. 

Perfect!

So, at 5:00 I picked up my beautiful girlfriend, who I believe even wore a dress (one of the few times in her life) and we headed off to dinner at this little local bistro.  We parked and went inside. On first glance the place seemed nice.  It was dark with low ceilings and was completely bereft of the loud music and “crap nailed to the walls” motif that Applebees employed.

The elderly waitress sat us down at a nice table for two on the side of the room.  At first I was surprised that it wasn’t very busy.  This was Valentine’s Day after all, but soon people started to trickle in.  Well, hobble in is probably more accurate.  I can’t say whether it was the restaurant, or simply the fact that we were eating at 5:30, but we were the only people there who were under the age of 65.  At first this was sort of an amusing curiosity, but it became more awkward as the evening went on.  There was no music playing and no one was talking.  So Sarah and I spent the meal whispering to each other so as not to disturb the sound of forks clinking against plates and dentures.  Especially since we were mainly whispering about how frickin’ old everybody was.

That would have been all well and good except for the fact that the food seemed to also cater to the elderly pallet.  There were a lot of items with gravy on the menu.  And for a salad we were both served a little cocktail dish of cottage cheese with a cherry on top.  I wouldn’t say that the meal was a disaster, but aside from existing as a culinary cautionary tale it added little to the evening.

However, it did end early, so we had no problem fighting our way through traffic, crawling through the Lincoln Tunnel and getting into a garage with plenty of time to spare.  We made our way over to the theater, looking perfectly dorky as a couple of twenty year olds dressed up in a suit and dress to go see the same show as a busload of sweatshirt wearing tourists from Indiana. 

Sarah was, to this point, still unaware of what we were doing for the evening.  We walked into the theater and I handed the tickets to the usher who walked us into the orchestra and then down, down, down, to the middle of the front row where our seats were located. 

You could see the sweat on Jean Val Jean’s forehead.

It was a pretty perfect evening after that.  We went back and …. Well, the rest of the evening is really none of your business, but I think it involved some kind of dessert and probably some necking. 

My point is that I was a lot more romantic 15 years ago before children and laundry began to eat up my free time and ability to leave the house without having to pay another human being to come to the house and watch said children.

I began writing this blog on Monday morning, Valentines’ Day.  (I know… it takes me forever to write these things).  At the time the whole blog was going to be about how time changes things and it’s easier for the youngn’s to take advantage of Valentine’s Day while us old people just spend the evening sitting on the couch and breathing heavily, but somewhere in the midst of my writing the article, I became dissatisfied with our plan to eat take out sushi and watch tv.  That didn’t seem like enough.

So Monday afternoon, while my kids were at a playdate I searched recipes on my phone, scribbled ingredients on the back of a wadded up piece of paper and then took a trip to the fancy grocery store down the road.  I bought fancy cheeses and blackberries and ciabatta and two live lobsters that they just put in a bag and handed to me.  That’s right.  No cutesy box, no little tiny napkin of chloroform over wherever the hell their noses are.  Nope, just two live, squirmy lobsters in a plastic bag with a price sticker on the outside, as if it was simply deli meat.

But, we managed to get home without the lobsters escaping and making a break for it along I-495 and I then spent the rest of that Monday afternoon cleaning the house, setting the table and massacring two helpless crustaceans in a pot of boiling water. 

I made the kids pizzas in the shape of a heart and sent them to bed early.  And then my beloved wife and I celebrated our 15^th Valentine’s Day by sitting down to a romantic fireside dinner with French onion soup, Lobster newburg and Chocolate Mousse.

And then we sat on the couch and watched TV.  Heck, it was what my wife wanted to do.  We were both pretty tired.

And then, we cleaned the dishes away and us two old married folks spent a few moments looking back on the last 15 years of being together and the many Valentines Days - some memorable, some not – that we had shared together.  And then we…well, the rest of the evening is really none of your business, but I think it involved some kind of dessert…

… and probably some necking.  

There is an old saying that you can usually find embroidered on ugly little pillows or written on the sides of coffee cups at Cracker Barrel.  It goes:  “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”

It’s supposed to be a funny, ha ha moment for the kind of people who are still amused by that kitten that is “hanging in there.”  I want to say up front that I don’t own anything with this phrase on it.  That being said, I have been thinking about it a lot this month, but for me it needs to read like this:

“Of all the things I’ve lost,  I miss my butt the most.”

I lost a lot due to my recent illness and surgery.  I lost a lot of time.  I missed all the Christmas preparations.  I wasn’t able to go to any of my children’s holiday concerts.  My wife and I missed the chance to get away for her birthday as planned.  I lost the ability to lift things heavier than a milk jug and I was unable to go see Paula Poundstone because I was rolling around in bed clutching my side in agony.

But of all the things I had taken away from me, I think I shall miss my buttocks most of all.

You see, due to the fact that I didn’t eat anything for about two weeks and then only ate jell-o and ruby red grapefruit juice for the week or two after that, I lost about 20 pounds.  (Super Diet Tip!  Get a massive Liver Infection and you can lose up to 10 pounds a week!)  Normally, this would be a good thing.  I’m not a particularly large person, but like just about anyone over 35 who is not training for a marathon, I could stand to lose a little weight.  My belly in particular has grown more outward than I would like and it would be great to eliminate some of that.

I remember lying in my hospital bed pumping morphine into my system in an attempt to overcome the waves of rolling pain and thinking to myself, “well at least I will have lost some of that weight I’ve been trying to lose.” 

However, fate is cruel.  From what I can tell, I lost absolutely zero fat cells.  I don’t know if fat is integral to a recovery from an illness or if God is just funning with me, but my belly, if anything, is actually larger than it was previously.  Perhaps this is because all of the muscles I had in that area, that I could at least flex to provide the momentary appearance of thinness, were sliced in two and then sewn back together.  I don’t know, but I have made zero progress in removing the fat I was hoping to get rid of.

No, apparently all 20 pounds that I lost were of pure muscle.  Now, for people who know me, this may come as a bit of surprise.  I think most people who have seen me would be surprised that I had over 20 pounds of muscle to begin with.  You see, growing up, I was what you would call scrawny.  There are lots of other things you might have called me as well (since you were probably one of the cool kids) but scrawny would definitely have been in the mix.  So I’ve never had any more muscle on me than was absolutely necessary to comport my body from one place to another. 

However, the one asset I did have was that I looked pretty good from the waist down (ok, don’t read too much into that).  I have always had thin but well muscled legs that led up to a very firm, nicely defined tushy. 

It was literally my only asset.  I’m perfectly respectable looking but the only people who have ever called me handsome are my wife and my mother and they are both contractually obligated to do so.  But my bottom could hold its own.   I don’t know that any women would ever take the time to check me out when I would, so alluringly, bend over to pick up a penny off the ground, but if they did, I dare say they would have been very impressed.

So imagine my disappointment when I got home from the hospital and after a few days of taking it easy, decided to actually get dressed in a pair of jeans.  It was weird, because I was still buckling my belt in the same hole.  I had really been hoping to go down a hole, but no.  My little belly still stuck out slightly over my belt, forever vanquishing whatever dreams I had that I would emerge from surgery with a slim and well defined Brad Pitt six-pack (albeit a six-pack with a jagged scar running across it.)  No, instead of a six pack, I still had my 2-liter hanging there.  Oh well. 

But then why did my pants keep falling down?

I couldn’t figure it out.  Over the course of the day, I kept having to yank the back of my jeans up like I was some idiot rap-star wannabe.  Not only that, but my underwear also started sliding lower and lower until I would catch an unpleasant breeze on my cheeks.  It was the damndest thing.  I literally couldn’t tell what was happening that would cause me to have the same waist size and yet have pants that didn’t fit any longer.  And then I looked in the mirror and saw it.

My butt was gone.

It was literally gone!  Where once there had been a firm, well sculpted derriere that Gwynneth Paltrow would have killed for, there was now just an empty pocket of air residing in the back of my jeans.  I remember staring in the mirror and saying out loud.

“Dammit!  That was literally all I had!”

My wife, Sarah, came in from the next room, “What’s wrong?”

“My butt!” I said, “It’s gone!”

“I know,” she said, and then reached around to grab what was no longer there.  What was once a couple of firm, nicely dimpled melons, now looked more like a pair of meringue pies hanging limply downward.

My Gluteus Maximus was now a Gluteus Minimus.

My Luscious Rump was now a Mushy Lump.

My Badonk-a-donk was now a Badon’t-a-don’t.

How did this happen?  How did I go from “lean, but could stand to lose 10 pounds,” to “scrawny and could stand to lose 10 pounds.”  So now I am just stuck with a thin frame, some excess fat and a total lack of muscle definition.  That is deeply unfair.  And let’s be honest.  If I can’t lose weight by having a massive illness and surgery, then what am I supposed to do?  Diet and exercise?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I have three kids!  Eating and sitting down are the best parts of my day.

How am I supposed to muscle up my backside now?  If I couldn’t manage to put on any muscle in my twenties when I was doing things like exercising and jogging three miles a day, how am I supposed to do it now in my late thirties when I spend most of my waking hours behind the wheel of a minivan or contemplating which cream sauce will go best with the beef tenderloin?

I knew that there would be changes as a result of this illness and surgery.  I knew I would be left with a massive scar across my abdomen and I knew that a knife cutting through several layers of muscle and tissue might have some side effects, but I sort of thought my rear end would be left intact. 

So, if you see some guy walking around with a pair of jeans that appear to hang straight down from the back belt loop as if he’s been in some tragic accident and is in desperate need of a butt transplant (J. Lo, are you reading this?) then that’s me.  Try not to stare.  No one really stared before, but I was at least comforted by the fact that if they did stare, they might have enjoyed it.  Now…. no more.

To my derriere, I say one final au revoir.  You were a good friend.  You always supported me when I needed you.  You helped me keep my pants on and my back pockets placed perkily where they should.  I, and my Hanes boxer briefs shall miss you dearly.  I hope, wherever you are now, that it’s a better place and that you’re happy.  I’ll never clench again, trying to impress my wife, and not think of you.  So long old pal.  Live thong and prosper.

R.I.P.

My Bum

1973 – 2010

As you may recall, there was a pretty important football game on the television box last Sunday.

And I am thrilled to report that my team, the McKinley Fighting Titans won the championship on Glee!

Very exciting.

Of course, there was also that other football game that preceded the McKinley one.  Perhaps you watched that as well.  This game is called the superbowl and is primarily known for having really good commercials, which is a very weird thing to be known for.  Now, most of these commercials were a bit odd – monkeys dancing around in an effort to sell beer or cars, or foot powder  -  or scantily dressed women dancing around in an effort to sell beer or cars or domain names. 

But the one that caught my attention and caused me to rewind the footage for my wife to see was the one for Chrysler that featured Eminem. Take a minute and watch it.

At first glance, it’s an odd duck.  There are shots of smoke stacks and an aggressive sounding announcer talking about how Detroit is kind of a mess.  And then you see some weird looking guy driving a car and it takes you a minute to realize that it’s Eminem.  (Or at least it took me a minute.  I kept thinking “Why did Chrysler get such a homely guy to drive that car?”)

I’ve talked to a few of my friends about the ad.  For people who have no connection to Detroit, it didn’t seem to have made much of an impact.  They either didn’t remember seeing it at all, or got it confused with the commercial Eminem did for Lipton Iced Tea, which involved a Claymation Eminem stomping around a doll house yelling at people.

The foxsports website listed all of the commercials from the superbowl and allowed people to rate them.  This one was had a 71% positive rating and is listed as the 37^th most popular commercial from the night…… not very impressive.  In fact, it came in behind such commercials as Rosanne getting hit by a tree, a dragon drinking coca cola, something featuring Kenny-G, and some really redundant talking babies.    http://msn.foxsports.com/video/shows/super-bowl-commercials-2011

What’s interesting is that, while the commercial seemed to be completely overlooked by most people, it really affected me.  I teared up a little watching it and I really don’t care anything about Eminem or Chrysler.  What made the 90 second spot powerful was that it wasn’t about Eminem and it wasn’t about Chrysler -  it was about Detroit. 

If you haven’t lived there or worked there, it probably meant nothing to you, but if you’ve ever spent any time in the city, you recognized each landmark that they showed in the commercial.  You recognized the smokestacks driving into town.  You recognized the statues.  You recognized the art deco buildings.  You recognized the Diego Rivera mural and you sure as hell recognized that mighty black fist of Joe Louis hanging like a dare in the middle of Jefferson Avenue.

For anyone from Detroit, this commercial was powerful. 

When I looked on facebook later, everyone I knew from Detroit had posted something about the ad.  Some of the posts were serious, some were comic, but they were all proud.  For people with a connection to the motor city, there was a conviction that this commercial had somehow gotten it right – that it had portrayed Detroit in all of its history, pride, misery and success.

I taught in Detroit for two years before our daughter was born while my wife attended law school at the University of Michigan. I taught third grade at an elementary school that was on one of the wealthiest streets in Detroit, or what used to be one of the wealthiest streets.  Beautiful old mansions lined the avenue, most of which are still in decent shape, but some have begun to give into the general decay that surrounds the city.  More than a block or two to the left or the right of this former home of auto barons, the houses become smaller, more dilapidated and the income of the residents changes dramatically.  This is where my students came from.

Although our school was situated on a row of million dollar homes, the families that attended this school were almost all on free lunch.  They came to school scarred by the drugs, poverty  and general malaise that had taken over their community.  They were small black faces that walked by the gated homes of the wealthy whites who lived one street over.  There were many students who worked hard and showed up every day prepared for school, but there were many more who, even in third grade had already given up on school.  They had examined the circumstances of their lives and the lives of the people around them and reached the hard to argue with conclusion that school was unlikely to change their circumstances.

I taught students in third grade who were reading on a pre-kindergarten level.  I taught kids who got to school early every day because they were hungry and needed the free breakfast we provided.   I taught students who acted as parents to their younger siblings – cooking them meals, getting them dressed, walking them to school.  The toughest, angriest boy in my class would leave the school every day, patiently,  gently,  taking his younger sister’s hand as they walked home.   I taught students who were neglected, who were abused, who felt emotionally abandoned.  I also taught students who were strong and determined and full of pride.  The whole range of talents, challenges, successes and defeats existed in my classroom

You don’t need to look much farther than an elementary school to understand the potential and the challenges of a city like Detroit. Children are a microcosm of the society around them.  They reflect the attitudes, dreams and challenges of the community.

Sometimes both the beautiful and the miserable would all be wrapped up in a single incident.  One of my students, I’ll call him David,  was very behind academically and struggled to maintain his behavior on a daily basis.  He was living with his elderly grandfather.  His mother had succumbed to drugs and his father was nowhere to be found.  His grandfather had difficulty walking and cataracts so bad that he couldn’t drive.  It was all he could do to keep his grandson fed.   David only owned a couple of sets of clothes that were rarely clean and had learned to turn his anger and shame at his situation against those who might attempt to torment him. David and his grandfather lived at the very bottom of what a life in poverty can inflict and still be able to allow survival. 

One day, David wasn’t in school and I later learned that his grandfather had passed away.  To our knowledge, there were no other relatives that David could live with and that he was inevitably heading into the foster care system.   There was a week where we didn’t know what had happened to David or where he was. Our school counselor finally learned that the members of David’s church had gotten together and decided to give him to one of the families in the church.  David moved away to where this family lived and attended another school.  We never really saw him again.

You can say that this was a triumph of community – of how people, even in the most dire of circumstances have learned how to take care of each other.  But you can also see it as an absolute failure of the social services system which exists to help people and is mandated to ensure that each child is growing up in a safe environment.  I have little reason to believe that David is in a bad situation.  But I also have no way to know that.

The people of Detroit have learned that their government will not necessarily be there to support them and protect them in the ways that it should.  With a corrupt mayor in jail and a city in economic and financial shambles, the people of Detroit have many reasons to give up, but instead they keep fighting.  They continue to take care of each other the best they can - working around laws and practicalities when necessary. 

Detroit is a failed city.  It has been run through again and again by the swords of racism, white flight, class warfare, corruption and an economy that has begun to hurt even those on the top.  And yet there is still a pride in this town.  While the rest of the country thinks of Detroit mainly as a joke, the people there continue to take pride in their history - the birthplace of Motown and the auto industry, storied sports franchises, and performers ranging from Aretha Franklin to Madonna to Eminem.  It is easy to see most of Detroit’s successes in the rear view mirror.  But there is fight left in the people of the motor city.

The students I taught were beautiful and brilliant, and at times ignorant and infuriating.  They were born to shoulder the past mistakes of their parents and their city’s iconic and flawed history.  They were great kids and I loved every day I taught them, even as they made me yell and cry and gnash my teeth.

Anyone who has spent time with the people of Detroit can see both the pain of the past and the potential of the people.  Detroit may be a city that, as that commercial says, “has been to hell and back,” but for the people of the city there is a belief that maybe, just maybe, they truly are back from Hell and can once again begin moving forward.  Detroit has a new competent mayor, a revived auto industry and a people who are hungry for a revival that has been a long time coming.

I guess I’m not surprised that people from Maryland or Kentucky or California didn’t quite get that Superbowl Chrysler commercial.  But for the people who have seen the pain and the promise of the citizens of Detroit, it struck a chord.  It was honest and it acknowledged what people know about the city and what they don’t.  For me and for many others, sitting there enjoying an afternoon of meaningless football, that silly commercial brought back a little bit of pride to a city that hasn’t seen much in a long time.  And I think for many citizens still living and struggling to survive in that shrinking and damaged urban landscape, it gave them a reason to, like Joe Louis, raise their fist and keep on fighting. 

It was Saturday morning and we arrived at the hospital around 9:00am.  We had left the kids with my sister-in-law who thankfully had been visiting for the weekend and was in full support of me going to the hospital since she could apparently hear me moaning in pain upstairs.  Apaprently, at one point my wife was talking to her about what to do with me and my sister-in-law sagely asked “Well, if one of the kids were acting like he is, what would you do?” to which my wife responded, “Oh, I would have taken one of the kids to the hospital a long time ago!”

And that’s how we decided not to let me die at home.

By the time we got the hospital I was in bad shape.  All sense of shame had left me.  As soon as we passed through the automatic doors I hobbled over to a wheelchair lined up against the wall and collapsed down into it.  This walking stuff was for regular people.  So with my head hanging down to avoid the bright lights, my wife, Sarah, wheeled me over to the emergency room.

I have since learned that Saturday morning is a great time to go to the emergency room.  I recommend it to everyone.  Evenings are bad, because that’s when the emergency room is filled with drunk drivers and bar fight victims and frat boys who got paddled too hard.  But Saturday mornings are mainly just filled with idiot husbands who finally came to admit that their seriously disturbing symptoms might require some medical care.

We were whisked through registration and into a small room to wait for the doctor in under 15 minutes.  I was truly miserable.  I can’t say I wanted to die, but a nice relaxing coma or near-death experience seemed like a pretty good option.  My biggest fear while waiting for the doctor was that she would tell us that I was ok – that Nurse Helga was really right and that I just had some kind of virus and that I should go home and just suck it up and quit being such a wuss.

I couldn’t go back home.  I couldn’t return to lying around waiting for my next feverish chill attack to come.  I couldn’t do it!

A few minutes later the doctor came in.  I told her my little story about the flu like symptoms, the pain in my side, the horrible chills and sweats, the brown pee and how I had been diagnosed with a virus.  She asked me a couple of questions and turned to my wife and casually asked, “Did you notice that he’s yellow?”

Sarah stared at me for half a second and the expression on her face clearly said “Holy %$&!  He’s yellow!”

Apparently a week of lying on the couch, in the dark, with a pillow over my head had disguised the fact that I was turning colors.

So after this 2-3 minute evaluation where the doctor never actually touched me, she said, “Well, we’re definitely going to need to run some tests.  At first glance I would say that this is either Hepatitis or gall bladder disease.”  And then she left.

Holy crap!  Those are like real problems.  I tried quickly to remember from my extensive watching of Grey’s Anatomy whether gall bladder disease was the one where the doctors were always yelling at each other, “No, Dammit!  We have to operate now!  If the gall bladder ruptures, it will kill him!”

Meanwhile, Sarah was tapping away on her blackberry looking up WebMD facts.  “It sure in the hell better not be Hepatitis,” she says to me, “because it says here that it’s only transmitted sexually.”

I tried desperately to think if I had had sex with anyone recently, but I couldn’t come up with anything – I mean, I was married.  I was pretty sure I was in the clear….. then I started trying to remember if I had been in any weird communal hot tubs or something, but by that point a nurse came to wheel us into another room.   She hooked me up to an IV with pain killers, anti-nausea meds, and antibiotics.  Then she wheeled us out into the waiting room.  After about 10 minutes I was already starting to feel better.  I was sitting up with my head held vertically for the first time in a week.  I had never been so happy to be sitting in a wheelchair watching CNN on a tiny tv.  I kept saying to Sarah, “I feel great!”  “This is awesome!”

There was only one problem.  They told me that I couldn’t have anything to drink.  Apparently there was a chance that I would go into surgery that afternoon and they wanted me to be ready.  This would normally be simply annoying, but there was something about this illness that was making me unbelievably thirsty.  All week I had been drinking Gatorade, water and fruit juices by the gallon.  I was always thirsty.  Even immediately after I had just finished a glass of Glacier Freeze Gatorade I would be dying for more. 

So after about 5 minutes of sitting happily in the hallway, I got thirsty.  After about 10 minutes I stopped watching the TV and just stared at the vending machine down the hall wondering what was available.  After 15 minutes I started talking about it.  “You know what would be great?  Some Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice.  Why don’t we go check and see if they have any.  It would be good to know for later, don’t you think?”

Sarah did not think.

After a while I got wheeled off for a cat scan and then an MRI and then an X-ray and then some blood work and then another, longer, 3-hour MRI.  All day long I was being wheeled from one place to another while everyone tried to figure out what was wrong with me.  And everywhere I went, every person I met, I asked if they knew whether I could have something to drink.

It was the only thing I could think about.  They were literally sending me into an MRI machine for an hour at a time to determine how many vital organs should be removed from my body and all I could think about was that damn bottle of ruby red.  I imagined it sitting there in the machine.  Cool and frosty, just waiting for someone to hit E9 so it could drop down and become my delicious beverage.

We finally got a room in the ER and I was given all manner of drugs and pain killers including one where the nurse said, “this is going to make you feel like you’ve had about three beers.”  Now, I’m a light drinker so as soon as she zipped that into me, I was flying high, but all I could say to her was, “Do you know when I could have something to drink?”

We were watching TV to pass the time before I got dragged off for the next medical investigation but I couldn’t concentrate on the shows.  We were watching an old Knight Rider episode and I kept turning to Sarah and saying, “Hey did you see that Tab he’s drinking? That looks delicious!  I would kill for a Tab right now, and I really really hate Tab.”

I was becoming obsessed.

Eventually, late in the evening a surgeon came to visit us.  He explained that I had this large infection in my liver.  Somehow an infection had taken up residence in my liver and begun to create a series of abscesses that were filled with the infection and had created a liner around them that made them less susceptible to antibiotics.  These abscesses were slowly killing me and would probably require surgery.  Also, my gall bladder looked “sludgy.”

“I see,” I said, “but by any chance do you know when I might be able to have something to drink?”

The doctor told me to wait a little while longer.  After the doctor left to go decide whether or not to split me open with a hatchet, the nurse snuck in and said, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you just seem so miserable….”  Then she gave me this little tiny pink sponge on a stick and one of those tiny cups they give you pills in with a single tablespoon of water in it.  She said I was allowed to dip the sponge in the water and rub it on my gums.

I couldn’t decide whether this was a blessing, or just deeply deeply cruel.

Eventually it was decided that I could be moved into a regular hospital room, although I had to wait because the nurse upstairs didn’t want any more patients.  Oh, she had room for more patients, she just didn’t want any more, so I stayed down in the Emergency Room, which was ok because they had much better drugs.  Eventually, at 11:00pm they moved me upstairs and set me up in a nice room overlooking the parking lot. My cranky nurse who hadn’t wanted me showed up and hooked me up to some kind of new antibiotic.  I asked her if it had any side effects and she replied, “I don’t know.  I’d have to look it up.”

Uh, ok.

But all was forgiven when I asked her the question I had been asking all day long and she replied, “yeah, you can have something to drink.”

She returned with two mini cans of Shasta Diet-Gingerale and I have never had something that tasted so good in my life.

The rest of my hospital stay was about what you might expect, as long as you expected that I would be in the hospital for two weeks, have one major and one minor surgery and spend enough time in a cat scan that I could run the damn thing myself.  I had to be wheeled everywhere.  They affixed a little sticker to my door that said “Fallen Star.”  It was a nice way of saying that I was an invalid and that some beefy intern would have to wheel my giant bed to all my different medical appointments.

It took four days before the surgeons were sure what was wrong with me and confident about the best way to proceed.  On Thursday they wheeled me into the ER, drugged me up, and then sliced a foot long gash across my abdomen.  They took my liver, and using an ultrasound, located the abscesses (which were all internal to the liver) drilled various holes into the liver and one by one drained all my little pocket of poison.  They also removed my gall bladder for good measure (it being sludgy and all) and stapled me shut…. No, literally, they used staples.  I looked like Frankenstein.  They also set up three tubes coming out of my body that drained gross liver fluids into these little rubber bulbs that hung limply by my side collecting nastiness. 

I discovered later that they also catheterized me.  Which led me to the disturbing realization that, somewhere, wandering around Annapolis, is a woman who grabbed ahold of my penis and shoved a tube up it.  If we live here long enough, there is a very good chance that one day we will both be standing in line next to each other at Starbucks and, with any luck, neither of us will recognize the other.

As you might imagine, the post-surgery was brutal.  Apparently, those muscles in your abdomen are really important.  You use them for all kinds of things like sitting up and walking and raising your arm and turning your head.  It would take me minutes just to sit up and sometimes as much as half an hour to make it to the bathroom and back - tubes dangling out of my side, staples glistening in the light.

After a day or two I finally had an appetite back.  I had been eating a “liquid meal” which, for breakfast, would consist of juice, chicken broth, and the the most horrid jell-o ever created by humans.  Oddly enough, this was also exactly what you would get for your liquid lunch and liquid dinner.  When they finally said I could have a regular meal, I was thrilled.  It tasted like manna from Heaven, although I believe the technical name was “beef stroganoff.”

The next week was a series of working to achieve simple tasks like standing, or sitting in a chair.  Eventually I worked myself up to walking, starting off with short trips around the room and eventually making it out into the hallway.  I would circle our floor, leaning on my wife, having to sit and rest several times along the way.

During this time I came to understand what anyone who has ever spent time in a hospital knows – nurses are some of the hardest working most underappreciated people on the planet….. and, also, some of them are incompetent, unpleasant hacks.  I came to experience the full range of nurses who exceeded all of my expectations in caring for me, advocating for me and attending to all of my needs and concerns.  And there were other nurses that I couldn’t wait for their shift to end.  7:00 was sort of like Russian Roulette.  You shoved a bunch of nurses in the chamber, spun it and waited to see who showed up for the next shift.  (Let’s hope it’s not the crazy one!)

Finally, after two weeks of operations, recovery, intense medication, suppositories, unbelievable pain and a lot of visits from friends and family, I finally came home the afternoon of December 23^rd,  just in time for Christmas.

The doctors never figured out exactly what caused my near death experience.  Apparently, the bacteria that infected my liver is a common bacteria that is normally found in your mouth.  Maybe I bit my tongue or brushed my teeth too hard and at some point some of that bacteria got into my blood stream and decided to take up residence in my liver, causing my whole body to go haywire.  Apparently a case like this only comes into the hospital every year or two.  One of the surgeons told me I was writable – they could write me up in a medical journal if they wanted. 

The best explanation anyone has had for why this happened to me was “bad luck” - nothing more, nothing less.  There’s no reason it should ever happen again and after a couple of months of antibiotics and a slow physical recovery from the surgery, it should be like none of this ever happened at all.

It’s been about 6 weeks since the surgery and I am only, just now, beginning to feel like myself again.  Yesterday, for the first time, I started to get up early again in an effort to get my blogs written.  Hopefully by next week, my output will increase from my current once a week posting schedule (which in itself is a step up from the two month long absence during my illness).

So, for your sake and mine, I am looking forward to life becoming normal again and being able to blog about all of the things happening in my life, such as the exploits of our three children, the fact that we’re in the process of adopting two more, the normal ups and downs of my life as a stay at home dad, preschool board president, church member, dedicated husband, political junkie and, in general, just being someone with an opinion about everything.

Oh, and did I mention that I was so close to Barbra Streisand last week that I could have spit on her?  I mean, really!  I could have actually spit and hit her in the face!  We were that close!

Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it next week.

It’s good to be back.

To the regular readers of this site (By this I mean a couple of relatives, my wife and my friend’s mother in Michigan) you may realize that I haven’t been posting many blogs lately….. well any….. at all.

To be fair, my blog output hasn’t been all that great in the last year anyway.  Back in the day, I used to blog four or five times a week (oh, 2009, what a great year you were) but things have kind of tapered off since then.  For most of 2010, I would start off every week aiming to do two or three blogs but I would often be doing well if I managed to squeeze out one. 

What can I say, it’s been a busy year (I accidentally just typed that it had been a “Busty” year.  That would have been a very different blog entry… thank goodness for the backspace key)

I’ve got all three of my kids in preschool or elementary school and have spent large chunks of my time working on adopting a couple more kids from Ethiopia  (that’s right, if you think my blog output has been a little weak lately, just wait till we get two more kids).

Anyway, this was all well and good.  Things were busy, as they are apt to be in any family with children and a neurotic dog, but I was still getting a blog or two out each week and some of them were actually not too bad, but then somewhere around early December, the blogs just stopped.  In fact, I believe that my last blog was dated December 1 and was the first part in a two part series about my Thanksgiving weekend in upstate New York.  Many people have been waiting for months to hear about the rest of my Thanksgiving, which, to be honest, seems pretty uninteresting in late January.

I know there has been a lot of speculation about what happened to me.  Here are the three top theories as I understand them:

1)       Tina Turner finally took me up on my offer to become her consort and I have been whisked away to her lakeside home in Bavaria where I spend my days clad in gold spandex and feeding her strawberries while “Private Dancer” plays in the background.

2)      The demented throngs of Twilight fans (also known as Twi-Hards – really?) have kidnapped me and dismembered my body in a blood soaked ritual as retaliation for my making fun of those goofy Twilight books (Go Team Mike!)

3)      I fell into a crevasse and my arm got trapped under a big rock and it has taken me two months to hack it off using only a Bic pen and the shards of a loose tooth filling.

You will be, understandably, shocked to learn that none of these things are actually true.

As it turns out I simply had the flu, which turned out to not actually be the flu, but rather…, well, let’s start at the beginning.

Way back, many many moons ago, in a politically turbulent era known as 2010, I was a healthy happy young man.  Thanksgiving was over; I was blogging happily about it and gleefully doing some online Christmas shopping when I began to get the slightest sense that I wasn’t feeling well.

I felt a little achy and a little abnormally tired.  It was the sensation you get when you’re pretty darn sure that you’re about to come down with the flu, but you choose to convince yourself, instead, that you’re just having a bad reaction to the new Taco Bell Grande Porko Gordita.  However, the next morning, I knew pretty darn well that I was getting sick.  So I did the only logical thing I could do – I continued on like everything was normal, going about my every day errands until I found myself too incapacitated to continue and collapsed on the couch in a bout of fevered exhaustion.

I was ill in the night, which is apt to happen, but I was surprised that I still felt miserable the next morning.  Normally when I get the flu, it’s a painful but quick 24 hour deal that is over after a night of lying on the bathroom floor drenched in sweat with my cheek pressed to the cool, cool tiles.

But when I woke up this morning I was still miserable.  So I did the only thing I could do - I got up and  drove the kids to preschool and pretended I was getting better. 

I was not.

The rest of that day I continued to get worse.  I was feverish and freezing at the same time.  I had a killer headache and would find myself drenched in sweat and then so cold that I would shiver in convulsions while my teeth chattered.  And, as if that wasn’t enough, I had this bizarre pain in my side and shoulder that was so excruciating that I couldn’t roll over in bed.  I spent my days lying on the couch with all the lights off and my head under a pillow. 

I told myself that if I was still sick the next morning I would go to the doctor (a pretty bold step for me).

I was.

So, I made an appointment and dropped the kids off with a friend and drove to the doctor.  Of course, I didn’t meet with a doctor.  That’s only for celebrities and Saudi oil barons any more.  I met with a nurse practitioner.  Normally, I have nothing against meeting with a Nurse practitioner.  They seem to know what they’re doing and they’re allowed to give you drugs, so whatever. 

My nurse practitioner was named Nurse Helga and, yes, she looked exactly like what you might imagine a Nurse Helga would look like.  I told her all about my ailments, fevers, chills etc.  I told her that it basically felt like a really, really bad flu, which was odd since I had already gotten a flu shot.  I then told her about my wacky shoulder and side pain.  She dismissed those with a wave of her hand and told me she needed to do a flu test.

A flu test basically involves shoving a foot long Q-tip up your nose and swishing it around a bit until it gathers just a little bit of brain matter on it and then they test it to see if you’ve got the flu. 

So Nurse Helga assaulted my left nostril and then left for about 10 minutes while I laid down on the examination table and covered my eyes with my arm.  Then Nurse Helga returned and said that, “Just as she suspected” it was not the flu.  I had a virus.  An unnamed virus that was going around that exhibited flu like symptoms.  It would last about a week.  So there was really nothing to do but go home and wait it out.

This was good news and bad news.  On one hand, I was really glad this wasn’t something  serious, I mean can you imagine?  Right now before Christmas? 

On the other hand – a week?  Who has that kind of time to be sick?  And besides, I was only a few days into this misery.  If I was supposed to be sick for a week, I was probably going to get worse before I got better.

I did.

Oh, I was miserable.  I spent all day lying in bed or lying on the couch drenched in sweat, yet freezing to death trying to stave off the chills.  There were times where I would run as hot a bath as I could and just lie in it, trying to warm my body up for a few minutes.  The pain in my side got worse to the point that there was only one position I could lie in that didn’t send waves of pain through my body.  I was thirsty all the time and couldn’t drink enough Gatorade but couldn’t stand to eat anything.  I tried to force myself to swallow a few saltines, but it was work.

But that’s what being sick is.  I had an unnamed virus.  What are you going to do?

So I suffered on through a few more days of misery, each morning waking up after a night of fitful sleep hoping that I would be better.

I was not. 

In fact, I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like I was getting worse.  But how could that be?  The only solution I could come up with was that I still wasn’t to the half-way point of the illness when I would transfer from constantly getting worse, to constantly getting better. 

However, I was really, really getting worse.  For the first time in my life I kind of wished I was in the hospital. I knew that there was nothing they could do for me, but I figured that maybe they could put me into a medically induced coma until I was better.  I was just so miserable.

This pattern, of physical misery, extreme pain, dire thirst, sweats and chills continued on for several more days.  There were a couple of times where I would wake up in the middle of the night, having soaked my clothes with sweat, and being chilled so much that my body started to shake in convulsions.  I would run a hot bath at three a.m. and soak until warmth creeped back into my body.

And then one afternoon I was going to the bathroom and noticed that my pee appeared to be brown.  Well, I couldn’t really be sure.  Our house was built in the seventies and all the toilets are black or brown, so you’re never really sure what color anything is.  But it really looked brown.  I assumed it must have something to do with drinking so much but not eating or, heck, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, my poor wife had been in the midst of her busiest work week of the year and found herself having to come home early, pick the kids up from whatever angelic friend had offered to take them and then bring them home, feed them, put them to bed and work late into the night while I moaned on the couch and begged for more Gatorade.

Finally, on Saturday morning, after a horrible night of sweats and baths I woke up to a series of chills so bad that I went into what must have looked like an epileptic seizure.  I was shaking so bad that I could not stop.  My body was convulsing violently and every shiver would push against my side sending a shockwave of pain from the oddly tender area in my side.  I literally could do nothing but lie there and shake.  And in between chattering teeth and cries of pain, I told my now freaking out wife, to run the hottest bath she could.

It took forever to fill up.  I can’t be sure, but I’m fairly certain that the bathtub took approximately 4 hours to fill.   I couldn’t wait that long and I begged Sarah to bring me glasses of hot water so I could try to warm myself from the inside.  I downed three or four of them to no avail.

Finally the tub was ready and I limped over and lowered myself into it waiting for the hot water to finally push the chills out of my system.  After several minutes the chills began to lesson and my body began to still.

And that’s when I vomited all over myself.

A few minutes later Sarah came up from getting the kids breakfast to check on me and that’s when we decided that maybe, just maybe, it was time to go to the hospital.

NEXT!

Coming up in our next exciting blog!  Hospitals!  Emergency Rooms!  Possibility of Sexually Transmitted Diseases!  And More!

The Journey is Half the Fun

No, no, I think I got that wrong.  I meant:  “The Journey halves the fun.”

Oh, driving to New York is tedious.  Mainly because of one thing – Pennsylvania.  

I’m sure that there are lots of things in Pennsylvania with value.  I know they have some kind of bell in Philly which is famous for being poorly made and I know that a bunch of people died in Gettysburg and I know that Pittsburgh has…., I don’t know…. something.  But all of that is negated by the fact that Pennsylvania has some of the worst roads in the country. 

The roads are poorly, designed, poorly laid out and poorly maintained….. and I live near Washington, DC, a city that believes that having two interstates connect in more than one direction is just overkill.

Luckily, the worst of Pennsylvania’s incompetence (their inability to realize that plowing snow off the roads would be beneficial) was not on display this weekend.  However, I did still have to deal with the inanity of their construction.  Normally, we drive up to my wife’s parent’s house on Thanksgiving morning.  Between her work schedule and the long drive, it is virtually impossible for us to get off any earlier, which means we are always rushing up Thanksgiving morning trying to leave early enough so that our 7 hour drive doesn’t delay Thanksgiving dinner too much and trying desperately to find the one, sad, McDonalds that is still open in Shamokin so that we can get some lunch on the way.

Well, this year my wife found an amazingly low priced plane tickets (Baltimore to Ithaca - $60.  How is that possible?) so I loaded up the kids and the dog and took off Wednesday late in the morning.  This seemed like a great plan until I came to the sudden disturbing realization that everybody else in the world left for Thanksgiving on Wednesday and that there was a reason we had decided against this so many years ago.

Somewhere around the hour and a half mark that I had spent crawling my way through Harrisburg on their interstate beltway that appears to have been laid out by drunk people and inexplicably goes through most of their downtown, through a series of cloverleaf on-ramps that connect the various major interstates, I began to wonder if it was too late to just turn around and head back home and try again tomorrow.

It was

OMG! He is Just SO Gorgeous!!!!

To pass the time on any long drive I like to bring along a book on tape.  I normally bring along something pretty mindless so that if I my thoughts wander while I’m driving (Oh, that’s a pretty barn, I wonder how old it is….  Oh, look, wind turbines, that’s interesting….. I wonder what the main employer in this area is…. HOLY CRAP THAT SEMI ALMOST KILLED ME!) I don’t miss too much of the story.  Usually, I get detective stories, spy thrillers and the like.

However, since I used to teach school, I also try to keep up with the newest children and teen books that come out, especially those that seem to have worked their way into the national zeitgeist. 

This is my convoluted explanation for why I was listening to Twilight.

I knew that it had sold a billion copies and that teenage girls everywhere were gaga for vampires.  I knew that my local Barnes and Noble had four bookshelves dedicated to books in the category of “Teen Paranormal Romance.”  I knew that a few months ago, Sarah and I were going to an 8:00 movie one night and stumbled across the hundreds of pimply faced girls (and a few 40 year olds) lining up hours early for the newest movie, all wearing their “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” buttons.

So, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

At first, I had no idea what the fuss was about.  The books aren’t badly written, but the writing sure aint good.  And the author seems to feel that the best way for you to grasp her themes is to beat you over the head with them.  Here is a sample passage the best I can remember it:

“I looked into Edward’s gorgeous amber eyes and I could hardly stand their intensity, because they were just so gorgeous.  His heavenly face was impossibly handsome.  How could any one person be that good looking?  I couldn’t believe that anyone that beautiful was looking at me with those intense good looking gorgeous eyes.  He was like an angel with skin sculpted out of ivory and a face that was just beautiful and gorgeous and oh my gosh did I mention how gorgeous he is?”

Yeah, we get it Bella, he’s cute.

For awhile, I had no idea what the attraction to this trite little book was.  It was poorly written, poorly constructed, with poorly defined characters but… omg, I totally wanted to find out whether Bella and Edward were going to hook up!  And if they did, how would that work?  Surely there wouldn’t be any necking and probably no heavy petting (we’ll leave that for the werewolf) so what would happen?  Oh my gosh, he’s just so dreamy… but a little bit dangerous!

I kind of get it.  It’s a weird little book.  I can’t put my finger on what makes it so intriguing, but it is.

It probably didn’t hurt that at the time I was driving through northern Pennsylvania where my biggest decision was whether to stop at the McDonalds in Frackville or McAdoo.

But here’s my biggest concern. All these girls reading these books seem to be dividing off between Team Edward (vampire) and Team Jacob (werewolf).  Well, let me suggest an alternative.  How about Team Mike?  Mike’s a nice guy.  He seems friendly, and cute enough and he has the advantage of being human so he’s not trying to constantly fight back the impulse to rip off Bella’s head and use her jugular as a straw. 

So, I get it.  Edward’s handsome, but come on, let’s hear it for Team Mike.  He even has a great slogan: “Mike – He won’t accidentally kill you in his sleep because he got a little thirsty”

Satan Clause’s Macabre Sleigh

My in-laws live in a very rural area of upstate New York.  It’s a beautiful area and their home is one of my favorite places.  It looks out on rolling hills, a 2 acre pond and countryside as far as the eye can see.

Pretty much everyone around there hunts, so you get used to seeing a lot of guys in bright safety orange and the occasional moron in regular “go ahead and shoot me” camouflage.  You also get used to seeing deer tied on to bumpers and living rooms with deer heads etc. 

That’s all well and good. 

What you don’t get used to is the family at the end of the road.

Right before you turn on to my in-laws’ road you pass this run down farm.  The family is clearly big on hunting.  I know this because they always have their kill on display.

Part of the deer hunting process is that you have to skin and gut the deer to get to all that deliciously gamey deer meat.  (For the first 8 years of my marriage, a regular meal was venison stroganoff until my grandmother in law stopped canning it)   Well most people have the human decency to skin and gut their prey somewhere that is a little out of the way, perhaps a shed, or at the very least, the back of the house.

Not these gentlefolk.

They have erected a 10 foot beam that hangs 8 feet or so above the ground in their front yard.  And from that beam they hang all of the deer they have killed by their little hooves and then skin them and gut them right there for all passerbys to see.

This would be ok if…. ok, I take this back, this would never be ok, but it would be more ok if they would then remove the filleted carcasses once they were done with them, but this takes a marginal amount of effort and therefore is not worth it.  The remains of the deer are left hanging until they have completely rotted away or been dismembered by roving animals - the massive gut pile just being left there to rot openly in the sunlight, usually not disappearing completely until after the spring thaw.

This means that every time you drive by you get to see the carcasses in further states of decay.  When I was up there for Thanksgiving they had skinned all of the deer but hadn’t gotten around to cutting the meat off, so the four skinless deer hung awkwardly from the beam, their muscles and tendons gleaming red and white as the noon day temperatures climbed into the low forties, presumably rotting the meat they would later eat.

As the winter progresses and we come back for Christmas and springtime, the carcasses get smaller and smaller.  This one has a leg ripped off by some animal.  You can now see through to the ribs of the next one, until finally by Springtime there’s usually just a femur hanging limply from the beam waiting to be ripped down for some midnight raccoon snack.

I have come to think of this as the unholy reindeer for Satan Clause.  If Santa were in fact the devil and instead of bringing presents, he would, say, fly through the air on a cast iron sleigh harvesting souls, then I can only imagine he would use a fleet of inverted skinless deer to pull him along.  Or at least that’s what I always think about as I drive by. 

I’d provide a picture, but I am 1) too scared to stop and take one and 2) afraid that PETA would single me out for punishment.

Good to the Last Drop

My father in law doesn’t drink coffee, but luckily my mother in law does, so upon waking up I am always welcomed by a nice hot cup of coffee to take the chill out of the New York winter air.

This past Thanksgiving I was about halfway through the day when a lingering headache started to take up residence in my skull.  It felt kind of like a caffeine headache (thank you so much addictive beverage) but I had already had my standard two cups of coffee that morning (a dosage that, depending on who you believe, will either kill you or stave off heart disease).

I didn’t think much about it though.  We were about to sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner that was delicious, as always.  During the meal, it was easy to ignore the headache, but that became more difficult after I had polished off my second helping of stuffing

It was, however, not difficult to come up with other ideas for what could be causing my headache.   The house had gone from a few people that morning to a Thanksgiving house full of adults and  kids all competing for space and running around hopped up on pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce.

I had another cup of coffee with dessert hoping that would help my headache when my mother in law saw me wincing.  She asked me if I was ok, and I told her about my headache and how I was hoping this third cup of coffee would be the solution.

“Oh, I doubt it,” she said, “this is decaf!”

At which point I took some aspirin and single handedly polished off a 2 liter of Dr. Pepper.

In the final installment in this two part series of Thanksgiving memories, you can look forward to the following snippets.

The World’s best Turkey Sandwich

An Invisible car and Souvenir Soap

Time Travel to the 1950s

Hippies Invade Upstate New York

and finally

Breakfast with Satan

I haven’t blogged anything in a couple of weeks. 

I’ve been busy and we’ve had family visiting, and there have been lots of leaves to rake and blah, blah, blah, excuse, excuse, excuse, the past is past, whatever, whaddyagonnado?

Anyway, if I was a better person and life had not conspired to keep my insightful witticisms out of the public eye, there have been several stories over the last week or two that caught my eye.  The cruise ship where rich vacationers “lived a nightmare!” on an exotic ship without power for a couple of days, while cholera spread through Haiti.  Or there was the apocalyptic event that was an interview between Susan Stamberg and Coolio discussing cranberry relish.

 Had life been different, you might have been subjected to full length rants about these stories where I tried to tie them to current social realities and an overall examination of our human morality. 

Instead, I’ve had to abandon all of that to get to the story that truly matters.  The story I’ll call: “The Mystery of the Cell Phone Time Traveler and the Inbred Morons Who Thought it was Real!”

Ok.

My homepage is the MSN webpage.  Why?  I don’t know force of habit I guess.  Anyway, every day I read through the random collection of news headlines, political updates and entertainment fluff that they compile on their page.  Well, a few weeks ago there was this odd headline that read something like:

“Time Traveler Caught on Tape?”

Apparently, someone came across an old clip from a Charlie Chaplin movie that shows an old woman (man?  spy?  Alien?) in the background who is walking along and appears to be holding something (a cellphone?  A star-trek communicator?  A rabbit?) to her ear. 

Now, I didn’t watch the video, I just read the headline and I thought, “well that’s stupid, of course it’s not a cellphone” and clicked on the story about Glee star Lea Michele posing in (inappropriate?) provocative pictures in a magazine.

I thought nothing more of it.  This was just the stupid video of the day.  Tomorrow would be a squirrel on roller skates and the next day would be an elderly person dancing to Lady Gaga.  But then a couple of days later, the cellphone time traveler story was back.  This time with an even more exciting headline.

“New Camera Angle reveals more of Cell Phone Time Traveler!”

Jiminy Christmas, what was this nonsense?  I decided to click on the video.  If everyone was going to be talking about this around the water cooler, I wanted to be ready.  To be fair, I have never been at a water cooler and talked with someone in my entire life.  The last time I even saw a water cooler was in the waiting room at the auto service shop and I didn’t talk with anyone about anything, because, you know, it was an auto repair shop,  but honestly, you never know when you might be harmlessly getting water in your flimsy cone shaped paper cup and the guy next to you says, “Hey, did you see that time traveling cell phone thing on the youtubes?”

You don’t want to be a loser and have to say, “uh, no.”  So, I clicked on it.  And for those of you out there who may have the same irrational fear of being trapped, unknowledgeably at a water cooler then here it is:

Ok, I watched it and here’s what I decided:  Yes, it does look like that old woman person is talking on a cellphone, but I still don’t think she’s a time traveler. Let me walk you through my logic (stay with me here).

First of all, there’s an old saying that goes “If you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.”  That basically means, if you see something, assume the most logical scenario.  If you are walking in a field and you hear hooves behind you, without even turning around, you can deduce that the hooved thing is more likely to be a horse than an exotic animal from Africa.

Let me translate this saying to make it relevant to our story:  “If you see an old woman in a movie from 1928 holding her hand to her ear, assume she’s hard of hearing, or cold, or crazy, or ANYTHING EXCEPT A TIME TRAVELER!

Of course this logic is shot to hell by the fact that there is actually a zebra right there in the video, so, I suppose, if you heard hooves and it turned out that it actually was a zebra then I suppose the most logical conclusion about crazy old people is that they are time travelers.

I don’t like to expend too many brain cells on this kind of thing, but to take it a step farther let’s think about the whole cell phone thing.  Let’s just say for an instant that, yes, it is absolutely some old woman who is carrying a cell phone.  She has traveled back from the future to 1928 and has gotten lost on the set of a Charlie Chaplin movie.  She’s enjoying being in the past, but she needs to make a quick phone call to….to….

To whom exactly? 

Who the hell is she calling in 1928?  A fellow time traveler?  Maybe their time travel vacation is over and it’s time to meet up at the Delorean?  I suppose that’s possible….. except…. how the heck are they making this phone call?  Did they bring back a cell tower with them in their time machine?  Did they stick a bunch of towers all around the studio lot so they could get some decent 3G service with their iphones?  And if that’s the case, why not help us all out, and deliver some of those to 2010 so I can get decent service in my house.

Come on?!?  How do you see an old woman with her hand to her ear and the best conclusion you can come up with is “time traveler?”

I sighed at the ignorance of the American public and mentally moved on.  Surely, that was the last I would see of this inanity.

You’d think.

And then a couple of days ago, I saw this headline.

“Mystery of cell phone time traveler solved!”

Apparently, some nerds with even more time than I apparently have for this issue have deduced that she is not REALLY a time traveler talking on a cell phone, but in fact some old lady who is hard of hearing and is holding a small ear trumpet like, say, this one:

http://i.livescience.com/images/ear-trumpet-1-101028-02.jpg

Of course, to further complicate things, if we go back to my original, already disproved theory that “if you hear hooves, think horses not zebras,” then we have to admit the horrible truth that this person COULD NOT HEAR ANYTHING!  ZEBRAS OR HORSES! 

So, hence, she must be a time traveler.

This truly is a conundrum.  I think you can see why it’s taken me a couple of weeks to pull all of these pieces together.

I must say, it doesn’t bother me that this clip, or this discussion exists.  There will always be some crazy person who sees cell phones in Charlie Chaplin movies, or Jesus in a puddle of pancake syrup, or satanic references in a Justin Bieber song (that’s not just me is it?)  But I do worry that this was so popular that it made the headlines section of the webpage on three separate occasions.

Are Americans really that stupid?

Well, let me put it this way:  If you hear IQ points…. you might be best off assuming it’s a bunch of zebras.