pronoia

When I Say Everything Hurts, I Mean It

A few weeks ago I ready Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Eating." I'm sure I'd have gotten around to reading it eventually, because I love me some Michael Pollan, but it's the assigned reading for Wednesday's book club at work, so there I was.

It picks up where "The Omnivore's Dilemma" leaves off. I had heard that it was something of a retread, but where Omnivore is focused on the different methods of food production, Defense is about the implications of those methods for individual eaters. Unlike Omnivore, it answers the question, "so what the hell do I do now?"

Pollan argues that the answer to that question is three-fold: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And he further argues that we should all start vegetable gardens, because you can't get more local than your own backyard.

When I read Omnivore I wanted a garden, but mindful of our actual time, we opted for the CSA. Although I loved the CSA, it ended up being a bad fit for us--there were too many things we don't like and too many things we didn't know how to cook. With world enough and time, we could have fixed both problems, but we're not spending enough time cooking as it is, and if we have to look up what to do with celeriac, well, the reality is that it's becoming compost.

So this year, reading Defense, I got the gardening bug again. And this weekend, we started a garden.

This was no mean feat. Our yard is enormous, and the combination of torrential rains alternating with sun and my own health issues meant the grass had gotten more than unwieldy. Not only that, we don't have a really fantastic space for the garden outside the fence--our options were either too shady or too public, and I don't trust that we'd have any veggies left for ourselves. So we coopted a corner of the fenced-in part of the yard from the doggies and set to work.

Lucky for me, L&S both know how to make raised beds and were happy to pitch in. There's no way I could have done this without them, since together we spent two days to collect the lumber, cut the lumber, dig out the sod, construct raised-bed frames, fetch top soil and organic matter, and fill the damn things, and plant the actual plants. It turns out we only got enough soil for three of the six of them, and I didn't get as far as spreading mulch on the now-sod-free path, and it started to rain before we finished planting the plants we'd already gotten, but we have a garden! Sort of! We'll get the existing plants planted, and I'll spread mulch on the path, and when V comes in two weeks, I'll get him to help me complete the process.

All of that is to explain that today I am EXHAUSTED. My forearms hurt. My hamstrings hurt. My back hurts. But we're going to grow the foods we love -- tomatoes, basil, lettuce, spinach, peppers, cucumbers, thyme, mint -- and we're going to share, and we're going to see if we can successfully grow some of our sustenance.

It's a good kind of exhaustion.

Insensitive

On Sunday mornings, Ms. P and I go to the local hippie coffee house. She does homework; I read the NY Times and do the crossword puzzle. We get there around 8 or 9 at the latest, and L&S will often join us later in the process. It slows down the work considerably, but usually we've gotten enough done that it's fine.

Today, they spent the whole time ranting about how long this whole adoption process is taking them. I mean, the social worker can't meet with them for 10 WHOLE DAYS. In the end, it will have taken four or five months for the home study instead of three.

Two. Hours. To us. Whose process from decision to putting in the application (never mind the home study or waiting in the pool) will be measured in years.

We're both just drained and in tears. We're going to say something to them about it, but right now we can't see exactly how. Right now we're just nursing our wounds.

Insensitive

On Sunday mornings, Ms. P and I go to the local hippie coffee house. She does homework; I read the NY Times and do the crossword puzzle. We get there around 8 or 9 at the latest, and L&S will often join us later in the process. It slows down the work considerably, but usually we've gotten enough done that it's fine.

Today, they spent the whole time ranting about how long this whole adoption process is taking them. I mean, the social worker can't meet with them for 10 WHOLE DAYS. In the end, it will have taken four or five months for the home study instead of three.

Two. Hours. To us. Whose process from decision to putting in the application (never mind the home study or waiting in the pool) will be measured in years.

We're both just drained and in tears. We're going to say something to them about it, but right now we can't see exactly how. Right now we're just nursing our wounds.

Tax Day

Last night I sat down and finally finished my taxes. I did them originally in January, and we filed Ms. P's then as well, but she was getting money back and I was owing money, and so I sent hers and kept mine so we could eke a few more dollars of interest out of those funds.

I'm confronted with the extra-legal status of our relationship at many turns: when I sign up for an IRA and have to claim myself as single and my beneficiary as my non-spouse; when I get a new job and have to fill out forms; when I answer demographic surveys. But nowhere is this confrontation as prickly for me as it is when I sit down to do our taxes.

All of our money is joint money. We have a shared savings account, a shared checking account, and a shared money market account. Our retirement money is separate, as IRAs require of everyone, but our income and our expenses are so intertwined that there's no sense of "hers" and "mine"; there is only ours.

And yet, when I sit down to do taxes, there is hers and there is mine. Right now it's fairly simple: paychecks officially come to one or the other of us; interest income counts as mine because the account is "officially" mine, despite her being a joint owner; 401(k) payout taxes are officially mine. But what happens when we adopt a child? What happens if we, at some point down the line, buy a house together?

I know straight couples who buy houses together and have children together and choose not to marry. They willingly take on the extra burdens of figuring out taxes and apportioning fiscal responsibility in the most advantageous way. But we did choose to marry, and our choice has no bearing on our taxes, or our legal relationship to one another, or our ability to protect our family from fiscal disaster.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our taxes would have come out to about a wash and they would have been done three months ago. If we were able to file jointly as married, we would get the full "refund" of the economic stimulus package, instead of only getting half of it because Ms. P is far below the cut-off and this year, because of the aforementioned 401(k) fun, I'm over the line.

If we were able to file jointly as married, our outsides would match our insides, and we wouldn't exist in a kind of reality-shifting no-man's land that questions, at every turn, the actuality of our lives. There are days when the constant stress of having to assert the reality our lives, our relationship, our family becomes visible as stress, as a constant activity we engage in, and this is one of those days.

Weekend Update

• While reading the NYTimes on Sunday morning, I was suddenly overcome with the desire to attend a dance class. Not ballet, although I have more ballet training than anything else. I want jazz, salsa, modern, African--anything that's energetic and joyous. The yoga studio down the street, to which my mother gave me a 10-class card for my birthday, offers some good options, so as soon as my period tapers off, I'm heading down there.
• I've been listening to country music at work courtesy of Pandora. It makes me very happy for reasons I can't quite explain. Music is more important to me than I sometimes give it credit for. Despite not listening to much of any music all weekend, I had a full playlist of country music in the jukebox in my head. This morning's inexplicable choice was "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy." Shrug.
• I attended OldJob's annual fundraising gala on Saturday. The kool-aid has definitely worn off. My date, who was once my employee, stood me up because she flat-out forgot about it. I got to catch up briefly with those colleagues I love and miss, but I also watched while Mr. Burns gave credit for the school's success to those employees who have nothing to do with the students instead of the ones who have raised test scores, raised standards, raised the college enrollment, and otherwise made it a good and productive place to learn. Priorities much? I also spent the rest of the weekend saying "we" and "our" about it, while Ms. P gently corrected me. It was a relief to arrive at NewJob this morning.
• I bought an EEE PC, which is just the cutest damn thing ever. It's a tiny little Linux box that's the size of a fat moleskine, and it runs OpenOffice and wireless internet, which means I can take it on our weekend jaunts to the coffee shop and not feel deprived that Ms. P gets the "real" computer because she's doing homework. Not only that, it only weighs two pounds, so it's weight in my bag is negligible. And it's green. I'm a total geek.
• And speaking of geekiness, I'm also stripping, reformatting, and reinstalling the "real" laptop, since it has gradually acquired problems. After the reformat and reinstall, however, the "standby" option is still greyed out in the shutdown procedure. Anyone more computer-savvy than I am have any suggestions for what I do next? I did once have a computer that got infected such that I had to overwrite the harddrive by hand using some old Norton utility that displayed the 1s and 0s, but I doubt it's still around.

About Face

One of the weirdest things about moving to the for-profit world is that, suddenly, I'm in a world that thinks capitalism is just great.

I mean, I didn't grow up in the world of business. My father was in the military, and my mother, when she worked, was the scheduler at a home health care agency. While there were budgetary aspects to their jobs, neither of them were trying to maximize profits for shareholders. These weren't concepts I was familiar with.

My dad does love the stock market, but he also thinks the American economy is just seconds away from whole-sale collapse because we aren't on the gold standard. (I'll entertain the idea that our economy can go under, but not because of the gold standard or lackthereof.) Investing, in my dad's world, is pretty much all about complicated strategies to predict market fluctuations rather than an analysis of actual businesses.

My education didn't fill in any gaps, either. Capitalism is roundly critiqued in humanistic theoretical circles, and for some very good reasons: It reinforces existing inequities by confusing individual privilege with "talent" and "drive"; it equates worth with money; it undermines community; it puts individual good and collective good in competition with one another (and guess which one loses?); it manipulates us into an endless quest for more and more and more and we end up unhappier than ever.

And then I ended up in public education, and while public education is always and forever budget-conscious (because those budgets keep getting slashed), it's not about making money either. My friends are in academia and mental health care and non-profit work.

Now, I'm far more a Quaker than I am a Socialist, but I have some fundamental skepticism about the overall compatibility of capitalism with healthy human flourishing. And now I'm working for a company that makes its money helping people understand investing by understanding what makes a good company.

Not only that, Ms. P and I just opened IRAs. IRAs make investing real, unlike 401(k) plans, which mostly involved my picking two or three investments out of the fifteen available Morningstar listings without understanding a damn thing.

And so somehow, I need to start thinking about business and capitalism in a broader way. I still think many things about it suck, and we're not going to be buying stock in tobacco companies, industrial food production machines, or anything that strikes us as fueling the things we're fighting against with other choices, but still. Not all companies are bad. I'm working on this one.

Listening

When L&S first started really looking into adoption again, I told them how much reading blogs had been valuable to me in thinking through the process. I was thinking about Shannon and Dawn, Nicole and Jenna. I was thinking about issycat and Jae Ran Kim.

Two weeks later, L told me that she didn't know what blogs I'd been reading, but all the things she'd learned on blogs about the home study process were dead wrong.

It's a small thing, really, but it's illustrative of our different journeys to this same place. I know that the adoption agency will answer all of the factual questions I have about the home study, the fees, the forms, the process, and the wait. That's what they do.

But what they can't answer -- no matter how progressive they are, no matter how much they believe that the best choice for most women considering placing their children for adoption is parenting those children, no matter how much they advocate open adoptions -- is what that experience is really and truly like for the people involved, because at the end of the day, adoption agencies serve adoptive parents. Not children. Not expectant parents considering adoption. And I want to know how people have really experienced adoption, in all of its complicated facets.

That's why I read blogs. I read blogs written by women who placed children for adoption, some of whom have open adoptions and some of whom don't, some of whom are very angry and some of whom aren't. I read blogs written by women who have adopted children, some of whom are parenting transracially. I read blogs written by people who were adopted. And as I read I'm conscious of the blogs that don't exist, so far as I can tell: narratives by fathers, first or adoptive; narratives by people who have no issues whatsoever with their position in the triad and so don't talk about adoption.

I know that none of these blogs is representative -- none of them can stand in for the whole. But I'm not looking for the one Truth of adoption. I'm looking to understand the range of experience, the range of what people go through when they become part of the triad. I want to know what goes unsaid in everyday life because everyone's afraid of hurting everyone else's feelings. I want to know, from the perspective of first parents and people who have been adopted, what adoptive parents do wrong, what they get wrong, where they go wrong. I want to know where some of the obvious and common landmines are, knowing as well that every adoption has its own landscape born of the specific people and moments involved.

Sometimes reading adoption blogs is painful, given my strong desire for a child. I have spent a fair amount of time questioning the ethics of adoption itself (more on that in a later post), and yes, sometimes I've flinched away from the raw pain I've come across. Sometimes I don't want to hear what people have to say, because I, too, want to live in the fantasy. I want to drink the Kool-aid.

But I'm conscious of the fact that, as a prospective adoptive parent, I'm the one with the privilege. I'm the one the system is set up to support and respond to. And because I have that privilege, I have a responsibility to question it, to listen to and take seriously the voices of people who don't have the privilege, to use what privilege I do have in ways that dismantle the privilege and address the oppressions that are part and parcel of privilege. To do any of that, I have to listen. And so I read blogs, which, although always and forever partial, are also in many ways more honest than any lecture, workshop, or face-to-face conversation could ever be.

I'll be more stressed out about the logistics when we're dealing with the actual application, I'm sure, and to be fair, that's where L&S are. But I'm suspicious of a tendency among adoptive and prospective adoptive parents to ignore the voices of first parents and adoptees. I'm suspicious of the sugarcoating, the whitewashing, the assumption that if you just don't look, everything is peachy-keen. I'm suspicious of the assumption that agencies can provide everything one needs to adopt ethically.

At some level, all of that is about the desire to pretend on some level that adoption is "just like" birth, that first parents aren't part of the equation, that we don't need to know or understand any of the messy undersides of a difficult and complicated situation. I can't be part of that. So I read my blogs, keep up with the stories, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, and the struggles, because it's in the best interests of the child I hope one day to parent.

Short Notes on Blog Silence

• My supervisor got called to jury duty--for three weeks. So in addition to figuring out what the hell is going on, I'm also taking on some of his job. It's a little stressful, and I'm more likely to dive in headfirst in the mornings than write a blogpost and say hi to you all.
• When I left SchoolJob, I turned in the laptop I had there. I opted not to go out and buy one since I want to be a little less plugged-in when I'm not at work. This is, on balance, a wonderful thing, but it means I'm not so bloggy as before. Which, I know, wasn't that much.
• I've got a lot of things percolating--adoption, investing, spirituality, friends, food (again). It's not cooked yet, not any of it, so I'm letting it simmer.