When I first started this blog I had the usual things parent-bloggers have: delusions of talent, some cute, quirky kids and the privilege to have the time and resources to take a step back and get a perspective from which to document our lives. But then something happened.

One kid became ill.

Not the kind of illness that can kill a child, thank goodness. But also not the kind of illness that can be cured with antibiotics or an outpatient procedure. This is the kind of illness that changes how the child perceives the world, perceives family and even the child’s own self. It is an illness that makes the child lose a sense of self-worth, and creates doubt in the child’s ability to interact with others.

And it is an illness that drives parents to search out different doctors and more doctors and treatments and books and camps and everything possible that might create some positive effect for the child, but it is all groping in darkness.

As time passes the parents realize that the needs of the ill child and their other children are getting further and further apart, and the parents get confused and exhausted and stressed by the desire to give all their kids the childhood they deserve, and find that it is impossible to provide for one of the kids, and may be improbable for the others.

The illness leaves no part of family life unaffected. It dominates the parents’ thoughts and a lot of their time. But it is hard to share the details with friends, to gain support and understanding. The ill child wants to conceal the illness, as if that were possible, from all, and the parents respect that desire, to a point. Distance builds between some friends and family, as they wonder what is going on with the family. Some folks don’t want to interact with the family of the ill child, some want to provide well meaning but unhelpful cures or treatments, and a few are able to just be with the family. Cherished are the friends, who, during a dinner where an episode occurs that involves children screaming at each other, doors slamming and things smashing against a bedroom wall, smile understandingly and refill the wine glasses.

And of course, the parents occasionally indulge in self-pity. Why us? Why our child? Why is the life we planned for and worked for not going according to the plan? Self-pity can turn to self-hatred and despair as the parents realize that no good outcomes were ever promised. Their kids, even the ill one, are alive and with a home to live in and food to eat; so much more than some kids in the world have. How can the parents possibly feel sorry for themselves when there is so much bad in the world and they are enjoying so much good? But their child is ill.

And years pass.

Two Brothers, Three Mothers

When we began to think about adoption we did a lot of research and reading. We went to agency information nights at first and then, once we began the process, we embraced all the many steps – the fingerprints, background checks, driving records, inspections, intense meetings with our social worker and many trips to the notary public. One part we didn’t pay much attention to, because we couldn’t, really, was the birth mother. Having already settled on adopting from Korea we knew that some of our fees would go to Korean programs that worked with birth mothers and also that we would not know much about our future child’s mom.

When his dossier came with his cute picture and the limited information about his mother and her pregnancy we went over the scant details with our social worker. Other than her height, weight and age, most of the other comments had to do with how she met the birth father and general lifestyle information. In response to our avalanche of questions our social worker told us that a lot of the information was nearly boilerplate. She’d seen the same comments in many other dossiers. Whether they were translator’s shorthand or the product of some bureaucrat’s typing we will never know.

And then he arrived. The first three months with him were absolutely wonderful. Having only one easy baby was so nice. We introduced him, joyfully, to our families and friends. We went places and walked around with him strapped to back or belly. We were enveloped in a happy little cocoon, imagining the world from his perspective, delighting in every coo and smile.

Then there was September 11, and the big unwelcome dose of reality. Pain, uncertainty, smoke and the never ending white noise of the scrambled fighter jets making their giant circles above DC, all day and all night, for weeks. I started looking at our boy differently. What had we done? What was this world we were raising him in? I still didn’t give much thought, though, to the world he’d come from.

Another few months and we found out that our assumption of infertility was wrong and by next September the twins came. Now life was more surreal than magical. Our little house got smaller and our time, money and energy evaporated. But as the twins approached four months and older boy was coming up on his second birthday we began to emerge from this fog, at least a little.

Then one evening we got a call from our social worker. That was unexpected, as at this point we’d done everything with the agency we needed to do, although we hadn’t completed all of the paperwork for finalizing the adoption.

She asked if we were sitting down. Using her measured mental health professional voice she explained that our older boy’s mother had just had another son, almost two years to the day from the birth of our boy. This new boy had immediately gone into the Korean adoption system where the records flagged him as having a sibling, our son. Korea contacted our agency and strongly suggested we adopt this boy to keep the siblings together. Neither the Korean adoption system nor our agency was aware that we had twins now. Surreality returned.

The few close family members and friends we confided this news to all shared the same opinion. We could not be considering adopting this boy, our fourth child two or under. All of these people had experienced our family, our harried existence, up close. They were not without compassion; we just seemed so over our heads already.

But this was our son’s brother. He was, in the strange and rubbery way adoption makes this, family. How could we not adopt him? But we could not. We had to. We couldn’t. We didn’t.

Our agency was understanding. Our social worker let us know that the Korean system would probably not even allow it once they found out about the twins as it violated certain regulations about number of children within number of months, let alone the number of square feet in which we were all crammed. This mitigated the grief and guilt for me, somewhat. Our agency was also willing to place our boy’s brother with a family that was nearby and would be interested in having a relationship with us.

Little brother arrived and we met him and his family, all of us trying to be happy and playful while being near tears. And soon after we made the decision to move down here, away from little brother and his family. We saw them again, shortly after we moved. The boys were about three and one and, although curious, really didn’t have any way to understand who they were to each other. Then too much time went by until we finally went back to visit and stayed with little brother and his family, and then again too much time went by.

I found myself getting mad. We kept going up there – why weren’t they coming here? Why were they always gone when we made our summer trip to DC for camp and visiting? But the anger wasn’t really about them. I know I felt, feel, guilt and anger about not stepping up to adopt little brother when we had the chance. And then moving away. Even though it truly was the right thing that we did, or rather didn’t. I know we would have coped somehow but it would not have been a good thing for our kids, for our marriage, for us, to have brought in another baby at that point.

And so we went up there and visited little brother and his family this fall. The boys are old enough now to know exactly who they are, at least in relation to each other. And little brother is so obviously and beautifully in his family, where he is loved, cherished and nurtured. I still feel some sadness and regret but I am also feeling the wonder of it all. How strange these families work! Siblings that share no blood and friends that do. Strange interrelationships like little brother’s friend from down the street who came over to meet our older boy because he couldn’t wait to meet his pal’s brother. Marvelous. Mindboggling. Magical. So there it is. Our family has three kids, and our older boy has two brothers and a sister. New math at its crazy best.

Kodak Moments

Since he first learned to ask to see them, our older boy has been enthralled, possibly obsessed, with pictures and videos. He has watched the video of his own arrival (at the airport, not the hospital) dozens of times and has spent many happy hours looking through stacks of pictures, remembering old neighbors, special days and places.

Somewhere along the way he also became enthralled with the envelopes the pictures used to come in. He considers which is finer: the envelope with the picture of the over-exposed little girl or the boy blowing a bubble. He spends long minutes trying to decide whether the picture with the patented photo correction treatment is better than the one without, and he asks me and M over and over which one we like better.

And the name: Kodak. So bizarre, so made up. He loves it.

This is an obsession I can relate to. Kodak and I share a hometown, and when I began to explore the many thrift-stores of Rochester I found lots and lots of Kodak cameras which I started to buy, quite inexpensively. As my collection grew, friends and family began to pick up cameras for me and I began to amass variations: the same camera but one made in Rochester, another in England and still another in Canada. Or different years with different lenses. Or special cameras made for dentistry, that were basic snapshot cameras but with focal distances of nine inches to one foot, with a little string measuring tape attached so that the hygienist could hold the string against the patient's gum and then pull the camera back until the string was taut to get the picture perfectly in focus. Those cameras had special flash covers so if the bulb exploded, as they sometimes did, they wouldn’t burn the patient’s face.

When I was only a little older than our older boy is now I had a Kodak Instamatic that took film that came in black plastic cartridges and used Flashcubes that had four bulbs in each cube and would pivot 90 degrees every time a picture was taken. Film was expensive and I hoarded my pictures, passing up many opportunities to snap so that I’d still have a couple pictures left when an even better thing to photograph would come along. I never had as many flashcubes as pictures so I would ration my indoor shots. Pressing the shutter was always a leap of faith because it could be weeks or even months before I’d ever see the picture. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the picture was of, when I’d finally get the roll developed.

So when he asked if he could take some pictures of flowers on a grey day last week, I gave him a brief lesson on the digital camera and turned him loose while I did some chores. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he was eager to download the pictures to the computer so I plugged the camera in expecting to find four or five and HOLY COW he took TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PICTURES! Actually, somewhere in the twenty minutes he gave the camera to his brother so he only took 201. The following pictures are all by the artist, exactly as he took them. But not all 201. No way.

Riding in 2008 and before

I started working on this entry a while ago and got waylaid, by the holidays and life, yes, but more by a growing feeling like I wasn’t getting at the real deal. At the time I thought I was going to write about a neat ride that I took part in – I can’t say I rode it because I only rode a little of it but I helped crew it and was there, at least in body, for almost all of it.

It isn’t found on our local bike club calendar. There is no food or water at the rest stops and the route isn’t marked on anything but the maps handed out at the ride start. No patch for participating but someone did make up stickers this year. The attitude is pretty much keep an eye out for others and take care of yourself.

The ride is called the Dynamo, named after a similar ride in England, and our version starts out on pavement but pretty quickly moves onto dirt and continues to go back and forth, with quite a bit of dirt, for the rest of the 130 or so miles. A fair bit of the route is through land as desolate as can be while still having some road through it, and it has a major dirt climb at about mile 105, along with regular rolling terrain. Everyone needs to bring anything and everything they may need for the ride but thanks to our generous friend Basil we did have a support vehicle to carry all the tools, clothes, spares, pretzels, Sparks, Clif bars and everything else we brought.

The kicker, of course, is that the ride starts at 10:00 on Saturday night. PM. Here we are at the start: This ride is problematic in a number of ways: 130 miles is a long hard weekend for me, not one ride. The ride left at 10, got back to town about 9:30AM, had eight planned rest stops plus breakdowns, peeing, etc which ate up at least two hours of the elapsed time, so these guys were hauling acre through the night, which is not my specialty. And most of all, I like to sleep at night.

When I was the age of a lot of these guys I would have shown up and tried to do the whole ride, suffered mightily, maybe even cracked and took the sag the rest of the way but I would have gone for it. Why not? Back then I lived in drafty apartments with nobody depending on me in the morning and nobody making the bed all cozy. But now I’m closer to 65 than 21 and I have needy little morning people and a cozy bedmate so why bother? Haven’t I grown up and come to my senses?

Apparently not.

As I tried to noodle through the question of why I was there I kept coming back to a story that my father told me many times. He would have been maybe 16, which means it took place in 1934. On summer evenings, as often as possible, he and his two best friends would oil up and adjust their bikes and cruise all over town. These are my personal pep boys, Marty, Milt and Jack. Dad talked about going through Durand Eastman park and how wonderful and fragrant that was, and maybe they’d stop and sit at the beach for a while. Back then, Rochester was a beautiful and prosperous city with Lake Ontario beaches and plenty of glacial rises to sprint up and glide down. He and his buddies would ride all over town, checking out girls, laughing and racing each other when the moment seemed right. And they would always end up at his uncle Henry’s sandwich shop. Henry and his wife and daughter lived behind the shop and he would let the boys have anything they wanted – homemade ice cream, cookies, candy, corned beef sandwiches, whatever. And then, full and happy, the boys would cruise home a little more slowly because it was dark now, and get ready for bed dreaming about when they would be able to do this again.

So maybe I’m hoping to get a little bit of that warm, ‘riding with the guys’ feeling as I lined up with Kyle, who is a joy to watch ride a bike and boy can he ride, and Blake who rode the whole thing on an old cheap bike converted to a single speed, and Kurt who generated the electricity for his lights (instead of using those wussy battery lights like everyone else) and Mike who brought a small consignment store’s worth of clothing from multiple decades and sports, and Jonathan who rode the team issue race bike right down to his name and country flag on the top tube and who was so grateful when Mike dug into his duffel bag and pulled out a down jacket for him at one particularly cold time of the night, and Marshall who is definitely old enough to know better but doesn’t act or ride like it, and Johnny who rode his 29er mountain bike with disk brakes, shock fork and smooth tires and it didn’t slow him down a bit, and all the rest who, when it got really cold in the dead of night would turn towards the sag car when it showed up like zombies in a horror movie and shuffle over with blank eyes and drape themselves over the hood or press hands, feet or cheeks to the lights or hug the wheels to get at whatever warmth could be had. And when the ride was finished, tired, happy, starved, they went to the Little Grill for breakfast. Nothing like riding with your friends and then grabbing a bite afterwards.

I never rode a bicycle with my dad, but once, when I was in high school, I found a matching his-and-hers pair of old balloon tire bikes in the trash, which I took home and completely went over, polished and tuned them and gave them to my parents as gifts. When I unveiled them on our driveway, my mom looked at hers like she was wondering what in the world she would ever do with this. Dad, however, got on his and rode down the driveway, turned left and went to the stop sign, kept going and rode out of sight, eventually coming back to the stop sign from a different direction and glided back to our driveway with a smile of pure delight. It had probably been 30 years since he was last on a bike and I don’t think he ever rode one again. Maybe that’s why I ride, too. Milt - May 18, 1918 --- January 3, 2005

Photographic Evidence the Blogger has Ridden a Bike in the Past Ten Years

This was taken at the local Bike Club Century last month but there is nothing in it that would indicate it wasn't ten years ago. Not the bike, the clothes or the goofy expression.

That guy could sure use to lay off the whoopie pies and boy could he use a new bike.

Both of which he is working on. Stay tuned.

Six Years Ago

Six years and a month ago M was big. Very big. She was bulbous, spherical, taut with the twins crammed inside her and she had lost that pregnant ‘glow’; it had been replaced by an ever-present film of perspiration since every movement, every action took so much effort. She was big and pink and shiny and she was at the point where she grunted, pursed her lips and sighed a lot, but never a deep sigh because she had no way to take a deep breath with all those babies filling her diaphragm.

Then one rainy day, six years and a couple of weeks ago, she got that blank look on her face, that inward stare that meant she was joining thousands of years of women in that sacred primal birth space. And I saw that look and knew it was time for me to start pacing, boiling water and chain-smoking, even though I didn’t smoke. It was also time to call her parents to come up and stay with Older Boy who was exactly 20 months and one day old.

This is what Older Boy looked like around then.

M seems to be glaring in all the pictures she is in and none of them are electronic but here is a picture of what her parents car looked like at that time.Once M’s parents arrived things had gotten far enough along that the doula thought we should head over to the hospital. When we got there they took M away through some doors and I paced and chain-smoked and then we took the babies home.

OK, not really.

We settled into one of the birthing rooms that had soft lighting and lots of wood and a window that looked out over the parking deck. I unpacked the music that we never listened to and the snacks that we never ate. And then, for the next 24 hours or so M worked and worked and grunted and squatted and breathed and did everything possible, while I held her hand and mouthed “what is going on??” and “what do I do now?” to the doula.

At some point, I’m not sure when, things got surreal and numbers began to change and monitors began to beep and brows began to furrow and the Doctor bustled in and everyone began to murmur and it was agreed that these kids were not coming out without a struggle and M didn’t have the struggle left in her, so they moved us to the surgical area and everybody scrubbed and gowned and got ready.

When we moved from the birthing room to the operating theatre it reminded me of when we were in New York City with some friends. We had finished a wonderful dinner and probably a little too much wine and we were tired out but we set out on an adventure another friend had told us about. We went to the Essex House hotel on Central Park, took the elevator as far as it went, 40 floors or so, then found the stairs and went as far as they went, to a big thrumming mechanical room, and then found a door that put us out onto the lower roof of the building and we walked around the roof, following the outside wall of the mechanical room until we found a rusty iron ladder which took us all the way up to the very top of the hotel, right under the giant “Essex House” sign.

It may have been 11 at night and there were huge floodlights focused on the sign and everything up there was bright and buzzing. But the view was breathtaking. Like this, but try to imagine it at night:

But it was absolutely terrifying and I had no idea how we would ever get back to our regular lives again and what if something went wrong, what would we do? How did we get there? I mean, I know what sequence of events transpired to get us right there right then but really, how did we get there?

The operating room was also bright and buzzing and was crammed with people: me, M, the doula, the anesthesiologist, and because M was carrying twins they had two of everyone else: two Doctors, two surgical nurses, two newborn nurses and two other nurses whose jobs appeared to be to root around in the back of everyone elses gowns and check all the buzzing pagers, let the pager wearer know what it said and then call from the OR to say “the Dr. is a little tied up at the moment but she advises you to go to the hospital and she’ll see you sometime after you get here.”

And then they were there, alive and out.

It was the next morning before everyone was where they were supposed to be in the hospital and I finally called home to tell M’s parents the great news. After the congratulations and inquiries as to statistics and health, we all agreed that it would make sense for M’s parents to take Older Boy home with them for a few days until we were home with the twins. At that point, M’s dad ventured, quietly, “well, there is one thing…”

“Somebody stole our car from in front of your house last night.”

So the twins birthday will always be paired, in family lore, with the night Grandma and Grandpa’s car got stolen from in front of our old house.

The car was found, eventually, and M’s parents drove for a long time after that before trading it in on something newer. And the twins, well, we won’t be trading them in any time soon.
Happy 6th, you two. It is so nice to have you here in our family.

More Ways to Tell You are Visiting a Plumber

A water fountain,

a work sink,

a bathroom that is nicer than any in our house, and

all of these are in the garage.