March 5th, 2010
Whenever my husband, Tim, and I reminisce about activities we used to do B.C. (before children), one of the first to come up is swimming. I don’t mean splashing around in the shallow end playing “motorboat, motorboat,” or sitting on the pool deck and clapping during our kids’ swimming lessons (as much as I relish both of those activities). I mean getting in the water and swimming laps hard enough that you elevate your heart rate and get that longed-for endorphin hit, the one that leaves you a much calmer and happier person than when you started.
I grew up around water, in an old stucco house in New Jersey a block from the Atlantic Ocean. Summers, I spent every day fully immersed, riding waves for so many hours that when I finally emerged late in the afternoon, the tips of my fingers were shriveled and my throat was raw from swallowing so much salt.
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January 30th, 2010
I first noticed the girl because unlike every other teenager in our Marin neighborhood, she walked everywhere. I’d be washing dishes at my kitchen sink and see her through the window, coming down from one of the houses at the very top of the hill, the ones my husband Tim calls McMansions.
She always walked with her head down, her pale face framed with curly brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, earphones stuck into her ears; and she always wore the same outfit: gigantic over-sized gray sweatshirt printed with the name of a fancy private high school, black leggings, and red running shoes.
And she was skinny. Too skinny. “See that girl?” I said to Tim one day as we stood by the kitchen window and she passed by. “That girl is borderline anorexic.”
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January 4th, 2010
For the next few months, we’re trying something new at the Writing Mamas website. Our founder, Dawn Yun, will hand off the duties of editing and posting blogs to three salon members. I’ll serve in the position in January, Claire Hennessey in February, and Li Miao Lovett in March.
I’m pleased to be able to give back something to the group that has given so much to me. When I joined some five years ago, I knew that I had a story to tell—a behind-the-scenes account of my daughter’s adoption from Guatemala—but I lacked the discipline and skill to tell it. Where to start?
“Just write 250 words,” Dawn said at the first Sunday night meeting I attended. “One page.”
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July 18th, 2009
Recently, I was at Home Depot when a white man came up to me in the aisle and jerked his chin in the direction of my shopping cart where my two children, ages 7 and 4, sat chomping on hot pretzels.
“Where are they from?” the man asked. “Mexico?”
“Guatemala,” I said uncertain where the conversation was headed.
“Well,” said the man, folding his arms. “Let’s hope they bring something good to this country, instead of just taking everything.”
When I told this story to a friend in my neighborhood, another adoptive mom with a daughter from Guatemala in addition to two blonde-haired biological kids, she nodded.
“I was at Walgreen’s with the girls, and Maria wandered down the aisle with a candy bar in her hand. A man came up to her and said ‘You know you have to pay for that, missy.’” My friend shook her head. “Mind you, Maria’s two blonde-haired sisters were walking around with candy bars in their hands, too, but he didn’t say a word to them. Only to Maria.”
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May 21st, 2009
For three years I’ve been petitioning the Department of Homeland Security for the return of my daughter Olivia’s sealed adoption file. First, with forms to Immigration in Los Angeles, then with letters to Immigration in San Francisco, and finally, with appeals to the behemoth keeper-of-all-records in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
Access to that file is my right as a United States citizen, guaranteed under the Freedom of Information Act. Which doesn’t mean they make it easy.
Parents like us who adopt children from Guatemala are handed a sealed envelope at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City and instructed to surrender it sealed and intact at the first point of entry, which for us was L.A. The temptation is to steam the envelope open and make copies of everything in it: original photographs, birth certificates, foster care facts, birth mother information. But who would dare take that risk? It took almost two years to get our daughter home, and that only happened after I moved there for six months and learned enough Spanish to plead our case myself.
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February 12th, 2009
Whenever people tell me how artistic my four-year-old daughter, Olivia, is, I instinctively think, “Anything but that.”
Maybe during the Renaissance, when artists had patrons and kings commissioned portraits; cathedral ceilings were blank canvases, literally, and manor houses had wall space to spare. Or even during the WPA: Sure it was a Depression and everyone was hungry, but at least the government was keeping a handful of muralists and photographers gainfully employed.
But to be an artist today is to suffer.
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January 12th, 2009
The way other people hate food poisoning or a bad case of the flu, I hate being cold.
I can’t function cold, at all, and by cold I mean any temperature that dips below fifty degrees. My teeth chatter, my lips turn blue and my toes go numb. All I want to do is wrap myself in a wool blanket, huddle in front of a roaring fire and eat large amounts of high-fat carbohydrates. My husband sleeps in shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton bedspread we brought home from Guatemala; beside him, I sleep in flannel pajamas and a fleece sweatshirt under a layer of comforters so thick he calls it the “iron lung.”
Cold is the reason I moved to California, so that I wouldn’t have to be. Like Scarlett O’Hara raising her fist to defy hunger at the end of the first reel of Gone With the Wind, I vowed, growing up in a one-hundred year old house in New Jersey that lacked insulation, that as soon as I had a choice, I would never be cold again.
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November 7th, 2008
I lived in Antigua, Guatemala, for six months while we were adopting our daughter, Olivia, who was born there, and sometimes in the late afternoon she and I would sit on our living room sofa and watch the Teletubbies.
The show was perfect for us because although it was taped in English and dubbed in Spanish, it’s also largely non-verbal, making it one of the few things we could actually understand together.
There’s a section in the show where the tummy of one of the Teletubbies — I forget which one — turns into a kind of rectangular TV set, and leads the viewer into a scene far away.
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October 3rd, 2008
My son, Mateo, wants to be a Rockette.
He saw them twice last year on television, first performing at the Thanksgiving Day Parade and then in a one-hour special during their annual Christmas Spectacular.
From the minute that line of thirty-six tap-dancing showgirls shuffled onto the TV screen wearing furry red Santa skirts and dazzling smiles, Mateo was transfixed. My normally rambunctious three-year-old boy sat staring at the images as though he’d been hit with a stun-gun.
“Look, there are the girls on a double-decker bus! Sneaking around in Santa’s workshop! And now getting shot by a cannon and falling backward—stiff, like this!—in outfits like wooden soldiers!”
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September 21st, 2008
My husband’s return from work every evening at seven-thirty p.m. infuses our home with new energy.
Olivia needs to eat a second dinner on Daddy’s lap, while Mateo suddenly develops a hankering for cheese sticks. Then, everyone needs a Popsicle, followed by a tickle session, and, often as not, some kind of group dance performance that involves music, the louder the better.
This frustrates me because I’ve spent the previous three hours wrangling my children through the dinner, bath, pajamas, tooth-brushing routine. My goal is to settle them down, not rev them up.
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