I love my weekends with GAP.  They take on all sorts of flavors.  There is the household-projects weekend wherein we tackle various and sundry tasks in a whirlwind of productivity.  There is the lazy-on-the-couchweekend wherein we watch football, movies, and Tivo’d episodes of Tosh.0.  There is the our-dance-card-is-fullweekend wherein we have an assortment of plans (and were able to find a sitter) and flit about the town being social butterflies.  There is the obligatory I-have-to-get-some-work-done weekend of telecommuting.  And finally there is the last variety of weekend when one of us flies solo because the other one is out of town; the I’m-on-my-own-and-loving-it weekend.

GAP and I both not-so-secretly love the solo weekend.  There is something utterly luxurious about having the house to yourself.  No negotiating over dinner plans, household chores, or what to watch on TV.  No waiting for the other person to be ready before you can leave the house.  No sacrificing your own intentions for the weekend because they don’t coincide with his/hers.  I don’t mean to confuse the issue – there are drawbacks.  No snuggling on the couch.  No shared experiences.  No intense conversation or inside jokes.  Nevertheless, a weekend to yourself and with your own agenda is, from time to time, an absolute gift.  

This past weekend was one such gift as GAP was out of town for a friend’s bachelor party.  (I will pause here to clarify that I was more spoiled by these weekends alone pre-kids.  There was another little person in the house with me this weekend, but as long as there are graham crackers nearby he’s pretty much up for anything.)  And with a weekend to myself on the horizon I made a long list of plans.  Not lunch dates or spa outings, but a collection of things I wanted to get done!  My list included:

Walk dogs (twice/day)
Bathe dogs
Go to gym
Get hair cut
Touch up paint on bedroom walls
Brush dogs (they shed a lot after a bath)
Catch up on laundry (approx 5 loads)
Hang family photos
Go to church
Go to grocery store
Volunteer at the hospital
Go for a run
Sweep/vacuum as needed (based on immense quantities of shedding)

As I entered the weekend I was a little bit skeptical that I’d piled too many things onto the list.  (In the interest of full disclosure I did have to get a sitter for the haircut and the volunteering.)  But as the weekend drew to a close I was amazed and delighted to have gotten it all done.  I was actually quite proud of myself.  Even amidst such a flurry of activity I had some wonderful times with Isaac.  He loves to “help” with projects, of which we had many.  And we read extra books before bed each night because I thought he deserved some spoiling too. 

With the weekend now behind me I’m rather confident that had GAP been in town I would have been less productive, not more.  There were moments when an extra set of hands might have been helpful, but being on my own this weekend meant that I was free to plow forward at my own pace.  As I reflect back it’s not that having GAP around impedes my productivity; he can be every bit as goal-oriented as I.  It’s just that when we are together (which is much more on weekends than during the week) we want to steal away moments just to be together.  And those moments come at the expense of my to-do list.

We seem to have a decent balance in this department.  We’re each away without the other a small handful of times throughout the year.  We relish in the return to single-dom with its greater autonomy and fewer compromises.  But at the end of the weekend we are happy to be back in the same house and making plans for the following weekend which we’ll spend together. 

I suppose my point here is to remind myself that I am an individual, apart from my husband.  It’s nice to be reminded of that every now and then, and to be forced to engage with it by setting out into a weekend whose path is charted by myself alone.  This particular weekend was one of productivity.  Others are characterized by old black and white movies and extra long pedicures.  Either way, I get to choose.  And that is luxury indeed.

Or perhaps, rather, a curse and a blessing.  For in this situation it seems that the blessing arrives eventually, but only once the curse has run its course.  A little background…

GAP and I have long wanted to adopt.  He has a brother and sister who were adopted and it was only a few months after we started dating that he confessed to me his desire to also adopt one day.  It had never occurred to me until then, and it wasn’t something for which I shared his passion initially.  But as I got to know his family; as I watched the video of his brother and sister joining their new family for the first time; and as they became my own family I grew to share GAP’s passion for adoption.  Since we got married our tentative family plan has always included two biological children and two adopted children.  That plan has also included children who are adopted outside of their infancy, since GAP’s brother and sister were older when they were adopted and he has a particular soft spot for kids he believes might otherwise be overlooked.  We believe – strongly – that adoption is one of the best things we can do.

Given all of this, you must imagine the sucker-punched feeling that developed in my stomach as I read this blog post over at NYT’s Motherlode.  It discusses one book and one documentary which speak some painful truths about this act which we like to believe is unilaterally positive.  Of course I understand that expanding your family via adoption carries with it some very different and pronounced growing pains.  But in all of my visions of a future with adopted children I’ve never played any role but the good guy. 

However, adoptive parents (particularly in the world of international adoptions where the kids tend to be a bit older – just the kind of adoption we intend to enter into) are not always seen by their adopted children as the good guys.  As it turns out many of these children no longer hail from orphanages, but from foster homes.  They may spend the first two or three years of their life with a single set of foster parents, who, by the time they are adopted, are the only family they’ve ever known.  I know a lot of two- and three-year-olds.  They know exactly who their parents are.  They know exactly what “home” is.  They know when things feel strange, and unfamiliar, and frightening.  I cannot imagine the traumatic horror that must ensue every time a little [insert nationality here: Chinese, Russian, etc] child is yanked away from their whole known world just because some nice white lady in the States will be able to provide him orthodontia send him to a four-year undergraduate program.  And yet, that is exactly what I plan to do.    

Yes, that last sentence is probably a bit dramatic.  In the long run most internationally adopted children are far better off in their adopted homes (with health care, safe housing, education, and a constant, supportive family) than they ever would have been as a product of the foster care system.*  But as a mother I can only imagine what my son would experience if he were handed over to another set of parents on another continent merely because their ability to provide for him surpassed my own. 

I’m struggling with this.  I do not have a tidy conclusion for you.  I believe that adoption is a good thing.  I believe that I am a good person trying to help make someone’s life better.  But I cannot yet reconcile the fact that for me to do this thing I believe is good, I must first do this thing I believe is horrible. 

If any of you has any experience in this realm (I’m looking at you, Jane!) I hope you’ll see fit to offer it here.  I’m really feeling quite lost at the moment.

*I mean no disrespect to foster parents.  Most of them are saints, doing hard work in imperfect circumstances.  I mean only to assert that the stability of a permanent family is almost always preferable to the uncertainty of most foster programs.

I spent a fair amount of time over the weekend thinking about traditions.  Specifically, I wondered what my own family’s traditions will be.  It was an assortment of hot air balloons that sent me on this mental tangent.

Every year our city hosts a hot air balloon race.  The race is always held on a Saturday.  And on the night before they have what’s called the Balloon Glow.  All of the balloons are inflated, but tethered to the ground.  After the sun sets the inflated balloons synchronize their flames so that they all glow in unison.  It’s really pretty amazing.

Many families take blankets, camp chairs, picnic suppers, and make an evening of it.  Even if we’d had the forethought to plan such an evening, IEP’s bedtime would have cut us short.  But as I watched children running around, parents sitting back watching them, and a backdrop of glowing hot air balloons I thought ahead to next year.  IEP will be nearly three and I wonder if we might be one of those families relaxed on blankets enjoying a perfect autumn evening.  And I wonder if we’ll go every year; if the Balloon Glow will become one of our family’s traditions.

I look back to my own childhood and think fondly of some of our traditions:  Sour cream coffee cake and scrambled eggs on Christmas morning.  Playing miniature golf during vacations to Colorado.  “Going around the table” during dinner after church every Sunday and contributing our own responses to a common question. 

As I think about these things I’m struck by the fact that I have no idea how or why or when each one originated.  I’m quite confident that my parents didn’t set out to make them traditions.  They evolved organically – threads in the fabric of our family that emerged into a pattern over time.

So, back to today, and back to my family.  Here is my question:  Must traditions evolved organically?  Or can we be proactive about creating them?  And if they come about on purpose, are they cheapened by that genesis in any way?

I suppose, more than anything, I hope that my family has traditions.  I hope that we will have quirks and idiosyncrasies that are enduring and beloved.  I hope that our traditions are remembered affectionately by my children when they are grown.  I imagine that every family has traditions of some kind, and that ours will be no exception.  But we are still a young family and most (if not all) of our family traditions are still to be born.  So I am left to wonder what they will be and where they will come from.  My mind could go in a thousand directions with a topic like this.  But I suspect I will be best serve by letting our traditions develop on their own.

I have a favorite child: IEP.  He is my smartest, funniest, cutest, and most affectionate child.  He is the most obedient and the most eager to please.  He is the most intuitive and the most insightful.  He is the most articulate.  He gives the best hugs and kisses.  He is my favorite child.

He is also my only child.

While I assume that the moment that Baby #2 arrives (no time soon, for those keeping score…) I will no longer have a favorite child.  I will have two children whom I love differently, but equally.  Always equally.  Right?  Not necessarily.

According to Dr. Ellen Libby, author of The Favorite Child, it is actually quite common for parents to favor one child over another.  The conclusions she draws in this article are not surprising: specifically that favoritism can cause depression in both the favored and unfavored child, and that favoritism in general affects the entire family. 

What the article doesn’t address (perhaps the book does, but I haven’t read it so I can’t comment) is what causes such favoritism in the first place.  What is the catalyst for favoritism?  And how early does it start?  Does it begin when a child adopts hobbies and outlooks that are similar to the parent’s and helps the parent to relate to that child?  Does it begin when a child is a colicky baby and the frustration the parent feels during that phase is sustained over time?  Is the same child always the favored child?  Or does it vary over time?

These questions fascinate me.  I wonder how many parents will admit to anyone, or even to themselves, that the decks in their hearts are not stacked equally.  It must be a gut wrenching reality to face.  But I suspect that facing it is the only way to keep it from poisoning your entire family.  I also suspect that dealing with such psychological undercurrents is a major task.  Libby offers some tactical pointers, but while they may be valid I find her proposed antidotes to be trite:

• Listen to each other. 
• Respect different viewpoints. 
• Strive to accept the truth of different perceptions. 
• Work deliberately at not being defensive. 
• Feel safe to express words of personal truth. 

“Feel safe to express words of personal truth”???  Really??  I have to believe that handing down that little gem to a 13-year-old sitting on the “unfavored” side of the equation is probably as valuable as telling him to “harness his inner calm and stay tuned to his feelings of worth” or some such nonsense.  Wholly abstract and completely impossible to interpret.  

I don’t know what Baby #2 will be like.  I have no idea how my feelings for my children will differ.  I like to believe that I will love and care for them equally, and that the burden of favoritism will not exist in our family.  I cannot be so arrogant, however, as to assume that such biases could never happen to me.  And I hope that such awareness (and, if I’m being honest, a bit of fear) will help me to identify and address such preferences the moment they surface.  I am not a perfect parent (news flash: “Goodnight Goon” scares the bejeezus out of toddlers…) but I hope that in admitting my imperfections I can mitigate the damage they cause.

I am from three shelves of family photo albums whose pages have grown brittle and yellow with time, a set of brass and wrought iron fireplace tools that were handed down and are worn from use, and a red and green leather bound set of the complete works of Charles Dickens.

I am from a single story ranch style home with two fireplaces, a broad deck, and an extra bedroom with blue carpet where my mother watched us in the back yard as she ironed, learning to parallel park between coffee cans on the riding lawnmower, and the sounds of the high school marching band floating through my open windows in early September.

I am from zinnias and marigolds and phlox, giant elm trees that split down the middle during the biggest ice storm of my childhood, and azaleas that flush hot pink for a fraction of a moment each spring.

I am from family vacations filled with silly putty, mint flavored Chapstick, endless games of travel bingo, and stops at every historical marker, Sunday dinners of roast chicken and mashed potatoes and “at least one green vegetable”, and unflappable precision in the matters of grammar and usage.

I am from a cultural polyglot, from operas and rodeos, minor league baseball and Broadway musicals, roadside motels and historic B&B’s.

I am from casseroles and whole wheat bread and after school snacks, bedtimes and phone curfews, and weekly chores for your weekly allowance. 

I am from the belief that life is a banquet table from which I may choose, that you address your friends’ parents as Mr. and Mrs. unless they tell you otherwise, that you don’t have to like it but you have to try it, and that maintaining relationships with family over distance is always hard and always worth it. 

I am from a childhood on horseback, fitted breeches and tall dress boots and banded collars, fringed leather chaps and size 6 7/8 hats, the number 477 pinned to my back and ribbons pinned to my bedroom wall, strong legs and a graceful torso, and greater confidence astride a mare than on solid ground.

I am from Sunday school and the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, a large steel cross that loomed over my head in the sanctuary and whose replica sits on my nightstand, red choir robes with white stoles, and silver trays that were passed down the pews on Communion Sunday.

I am from weekend outings to tiny rural towns, chicken fried steak and cherry cobbler from rusty diners with linoleum tile floors, and the news from Lake Wobegon.

I am from a Catholic prep school with magnificently pitched roofs and a three-story tower with a spiral staircase, pep rallies for Friday night football games, unparalleled teachers, and unreasonable levels of peer competition.

I am from a small private college where everyone knows your hometown and your major, chatty sorority chapter meetings and raucous fraternity parties, and professors who were known to call your dorm room if you overslept for a final.

I am from Bob and Rosemary and Jack and Frances and Jeff and Jan, from hand-stitched quilts and homemade pie pastry, from handwritten letters, hugs and I love yous. 

I am from a family that is not perfect but whom I love, the need to carry them in my heart, and the willingness to try things my own way.

With my entire family arriving shortly for the holiday weekend, I have thoughts of heritage on the brain.  In that vein this post was inspired, with permission, by Lindsey’s poem at A Design So Vast.  As a related aside, I will be taking Friday and Monday off from blogging to spend time with my family, and I will see you back here next Wednesday.  I hope you all have a lovely holiday.

This is the story of two blogs and a cookie. 

A couple of weeks ago fellow blogger Jane reposted a piece she wrote last winter about a Random Act of Kindness.  The second time around WordPress picked it up and featured it, driving huge numbers of readers to Jane’s site and leaving their own RAOK stories.  It was really inspiring.

I wanted desperately to jump on this do-gooder bandwagon, but the deck seemed stacked against me.  I simply couldn’t find the right opportunity to inject my goodness into the world.  I saw an old woman walking home from the grocery store on an especially hot day and offered her a ride.  She gave me the sign of the cross and said, “Bless you” in heavily accented English, but turned me down.  I rarely go through drive-thru windows where I might pay for someone’s order.  I didn’t see elderly people needing help crossing the street.  I was striking out left and right.  I decided to stop obsessing.

Then last week my sister Anne wrote an impassioned post about how a simple coconut macaroon helped her through an especially difficult year of graduate school.  I was moved by her post and decided that I needed to make my own batch of macaroons.  Later that day I got an e-mail from Anne which was a forwarded message from my 90-year-old grandfather.  A reader of her blog, he thought her macaroons sounded delicious and asked for the recipe.  Having made them myself I recognized that this was slightly more complicated than your average cookie recipe and potentially out of the culinary reach of a man who has probably never cooked anything more complicated than a bowl of oatmeal.

And then it hit me!

The recipe made nearly 30 cookies.  GAP is not a coconut lover and had no interest in the macaroons.  I have no business eating 30 cookies by myself.  And I could only in good conscience allow IEP (who, it turns out, is a coconut lover) to eat little bites here and there.  The answer?  A care package.

I transferred several macaroons to a Ziplock bag, wrote an accompanying note, and went to the UPS Store.  A couple of days later a truck pulled up in front of Granddaddy’s house and handed him a box that he was not at all expecting. 

That evening I received an e-mail from my grandfather which said, in part, “I couldn’t imagine what it could be as it wasn’t Xmas or my birthday and I hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon.” (As an aside, I just love that my 90-year-old grandfather e-mails and shops online.) “Imagine my surprise to open it and find it was a macaroon package from my oldest grandchild.  I had one for dessert and it was delicious.  In fact I had to make a big decision whether to eat another or not – so they would last a little longer.  Thank you so much.  I think this is the nicest ‘unexpected’ present I have ever received.”

It wasn’t anonymous.  It wasn’t for a stranger.  It wasn’t even entirely random.  But I think it captured the spirit of the little movement that Jane started.  Thanks, Jane, for providing me with such inspiration.  And thanks, Anne, for speaking directly to my sweet tooth.  You were both unwitting accomplices in making an old man very happy.

The idea for this little duet of posts first came to my mind several months ago.  If I’d had my thinking cap on I would have posted them in conjunction with Mother’s Day.  Alas, I did not.  So here they are now, awkwardly located between Father’s Day and the 4^th of July.  Such is life.

I am among the fortunate.  I have two invaluable role models in my life; two women, whose imprint on me is indelible, and whose guidance and influence are among my most treasured possessions.  They are my mother and my mother-in-law.  Over the years the lessons they have imparted have become guideposts for my life, and I find it only fair that the rest of humanity should be equally blessed by their wisdom.  And so here, in two parts, I will share with you some of the most important things they’ve shared with me.

“Listen to your elders.”  I don’t know that she’s ever said it in those words exactly, but that is one of my mother’s marquis mantras.  During our teen years (and beyond) this lesson became a point of teasing and was (is) just as likely to be phrased as “Mom loves old people,” as opposed to the more quotable version above.  Nevertheless, both versions are true. 

The American culture (unlike say, Asian cultures) is not one that values age.  We spend gozillions of dollars trying to halt the aging process.  Hair color, Botox, sports cars, Viagra, face lifts, and the like serve the master of youth.  And in our quest for eternal youth we tend to forget that those who have traveled further down life’s path may have learned a thing or two along the way.  My mother, on the other hand, has never lost sight of that.

Because she likes tangible projects, and because she is a talented seamstress, my mother has participated for years in her church’s Project Day.  Lest its somewhat generic name confuse you, Project Day is a sewing circle of sorts, wherein women from the church gather to create clothes and blankets for needy people – usually babies.  They piece and tie quilts.  They sew little cotton shirts for African children.  They hem receiving blankets and burp cloths.  And the soundtrack to all of this stitching is the telling of their life stories. 

My mother (who was about my age when I was born – I’ll let you do the math) is by far the youngest member of the group.  Most of the women are well into their 70s, and some into their 80s.  Many are widows.  Some have lost children.  Collectively they’ve faced cancer, betrayal, divorce, and children moving away.  They’ve also been blessed by family, health, grandchildren, and community.  They’ve witnessed and experienced all of the good and all of the bad that life doles out.  As my mother aptly put it once, “There’s nothing these women haven’t been through.”

When Mom was in the throes of wedding planning for her daughters, they’d been there.  When a friend was diagnosed with brain tumors, they’d been there.  When her children moved away, they’d been there.  When her first grandchild was born, they’d been there.  And with each rite of passage they handed down their wisdom and perspective as my mother was christened into another of life’s little clubs.

In today’s world of “newer, faster, cheaper” we are inclined to believe that these things always add up to “better.”  But I’ve learned from my mother that this isn’t always the case.  What holds true for cell phones does not bear out when applied to people.  We are complex creatures.  Our elders may not know how to program a DVR.  They may not know how to record an outgoing voice mail message.  They may not understand the humor on 30 Rock.  But they know what to do when your child falls ill.  They know what to say when your cancer goes into remission.  They know what to do when your husband loses his job.  And they know what to do when your garden produces way too many zucchini.

It is with time that we accumulate experiences, and with experiences that we accumulate wisdom.  And it is because of my mother that I both understand and appreciate the rounded edges of an old person’s wisdom every bit as much as the sharp corners of a young person’s wit.

There are these things that make me happy.

Like these guys, one so much larger and the other so much smaller than I, and yet we all fit together perfectly.

Like this rainbow, which glistened in the sky after buckets of rain fell on us one evening last week.

Like these ever-shedding dogs, whose kisses are sloppy, whose smiles are genuine, and whose love is unconditional.

And like this tiny blond curl, which bends up over the edge of his perky red cap and makes me melt just a little bit.

This theme of this post is “Memory”, as part of Momalom’s “Five for Ten”.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am newly obsessed with The Pioneer Woman’s blog.  Yesterday when I pulled up her site I was delighted to see that her latest recipe was for Hot Cross Buns.  My mother made Hot Cross Buns on every Good Friday of my childhood.  And while I have lovely memories of coming home from school to find a fresh batch on the kitchen counter (sometimes with extra frosting left in the bowl!) my favorite Hot Cross Bun memory comes from my adulthood, and from China.  This story is not meant to be thought-provoking or challenging in any way.  Rather it is a cherished moment of my life that I felt inspired to share. 

If you’re not familiar with Hot Cross Buns, you can learn a quick bit about them here.

I was 26 years old.  I was less than a month away from my wedding.  I was in Shanghai in the middle of a two-week business trip to my company’s Japan and China offices.  So things in my life were pretty calm at the time.  Right.

I’d spent the first week of the trip in Japan.  Sushi, tempura, industry trade show – all the usual suspects.  The second week took us to Shanghai for a 5-day training session with our Pac Rim distributors.  We were staying at the St. Regis hotel which was then, and is still, the most mind-bogglingly luxurious hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  I had a personal butler assigned to me at check-in.  The room was huge and stunning; the bathroom even more so.  Every time I left my room – even if it was just to run down to the hotel gym for a quick workout – someone came in and refolded the towels, tidied my toiletries, smoothed the duvet, and tucked under the corners of the toilet paper.  And every afternoon around 2:00 a snack was delivered to my room on a silver tray.  It was usually a pastry of some kind.  Something delectable that made me slide to the floor and want to never return home.  (What wedding?  GAP once lived in China.  Surely I could find a back-up version of him running around somewhere, right?)

I spent each day in a hotel ballroom, giving presentations on the key selling points of my company’s products, changes to the competitive landscape, and pricing and discount structures.  I’d eaten all of the local fare that had been served and had, for the most part, been delighted by how much I loved it.  Cuttlefish, jellyfish, whole roasted fish, seaweed salad, etc.  Business dinners each evening featured dishes that rotated among the traditional menus of our distributors’ home countries – Thai, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia.  I was lost in an international smorgasbord.   

I’d gone sight-seeing with a colleague one afternoon and eaten dumplings purchased from a street vendor that have never been matched by any I’ve eaten since.  The bread was fried crisp on the outside and chewy underneath.  The broth inside was rich, salty, and surprisingly hot.  It dripped all the way down my forearms and I actually licked some of it off.  The bite of pork in the middle was tender and fatty and melted on my tongue.  I was in a food nirvana.   

I was also reaching a saturation point of visual stimulation.  Ancient gardens, Confucian temples, giant Buddhas everywhere.  My colleague and I had a personal local tour guide for two days who took us into nooks and crannies of her city that we’d never have found (or braved) on our own.  I was absorbing the culture around me like a parched sponge.  I had moments of homesickness, but for the most part I’d been able to separate myself from the impending wedding and gotten lost in the world around me.  And so it was that when Good Friday rolled around at the end of my trip I was barely aware of it.

That day our business agenda reached its scheduled afternoon break.  I returned to my room upstairs where I looked forward to slipping out of my heels, collapsing onto the fluffy bed, and delicately tearing into whatever scone, éclair, or other confection might be awaiting me.  I opened the door, walked into that now-familiar and serene retreat of a room, and stopped cold.  There, on the silver tray, was a porcelain plate with two Hot Cross Buns. 

They were beautiful.  Golden dough glazed with egg whites and studded with raisins.  Iced by hand with careful, but not perfect, crosses.  I was so touched by the gesture that I almost couldn’t bring myself to eat them.  But I did.  They lacked the delicate crumb and subtle sweetness of my mother’s, but it was irrelevant.  I was as far away from home – geographically, culturally, metaphorically – as I’d ever been.  And yet a hallmark of my childhood sat before me on a silver tray.

I still don’t know the answers to all the questions that spun through my head as I ate my Hot Cross Buns.  How did they know these tiny details of Christian culinary heritage?  Did they know I was a Christian?  Did everyone in the hotel get Hot Cross Buns for their snack that day?  Or was it just for the Westerners whom they thought might enjoy a taste of home.  Did they have any idea how their thoughtfulness would strike deep to the heart of me?

Since I’d left home after college I’d never made Hot Cross Buns of my own.  I guess I didn’t realize what meaning they held for me.  But in that moment I became keenly aware of their significance; significance to which I’d been heretofore oblivious.  The next year I made my first batch of Hot Cross Buns.  They too didn’t measure up to my mother’s, but they were good.  And they were mine.  And it felt good to take my traditions into my own hands.  I have plenty of time to perfect my technique.

I haven’t made them every year.  But I will make them this year.  I think IEP would like them very much.  And I want his memories of them to be as ingrained as my own.