Letting Go

The countdown to Manchild finishing school has begun: 40-something days till final exams. And frankly, we're both poo-ing our pants. Neither of us is ready for this. How the hell did it happen so quickly? 

Preparations for the final day and Valedictory Dinner are well underway. I know this because the school recently sent me a terrifying and inordinately long e-mail. Terrifying not just because I had to cut through all the dross and dodgy syntax to work out what the hell they were trying to tell me — leaving me trembling at what they might be teaching my kids about good writing — but bowel-looseningly terrifying because of this section of the communication:

 ...I am inviting you, as a parent of a 2015 Year 12 student, to join us in this recognition of students by writing a letter to your son or daughter. It may be a chance to let them know how much they are loved; express some of your fears for them, as well as your joys or tell them how proud you are of their achievements – it is entirely up to you.
This letter is confidential- please do not let your son or daughter see it or know that you are writing it so that it will be a surprise when it is given to them at the House meeting. The Year 12 students will have a chance to reflect and take some time before their final Assembly. In this time the letter from you would be read. It will be a meaningful time for each student to be able to reflect on their relationship with their family... 

Last day of school... Ever...

A meaningful time to reflect on his relationship with his family?

Seriously?

So his final day of school isn’t going to be about throwing eggs from the bus and getting his uniform signed by his peers then?

Really?

Are you sure?

Have you met my son?

And after the week that we’ve had — a phone call and two emails to let me know about his 'behaviour' and failure to apply himself, plus a detention for arriving late to a class carrying a cheese toastie and cuppa-soup  — right now my letter to the Manchild would begin something like this:

Dearest Light-of-my-life,

It somehow never occurred to me that my amazing intelligent son would spend his last few weeks of school being a total dick. Why don't you just pull your finger out... and your head in?

I'm pretty sure that's not what  they're looking for from me.

 

My whirling panic about WTF to write stirred a memory of a piece about his  first day of school I wrote for a parenting magazine all those years ago. I found a copy filed on the first external hard-drive I ever bought. Here’s how I started that article:

Suddenly, my big tall boy, who’s always looked so much older than his few years, had shrunk. I watched him through the blurred filter of tears I knew he mustn’t see. Attention focused on the task of tying his shoelaces, he wore the face of one who understands the burden of responsibility. Heavy black shoes and long baggy shorts emphasised his thin brown legs.

I resisted stepping in to help him. With the task completed to his satisfaction, he looked up and beamed. Such a familiar smile. The one he’d worn the first time we saw him. The one that enchanted everyone when we carried him proudly through those big customs doors at the airport more than four years ago. The smile that makes my heart sing and his eyes disappear in his face.

My baby boy was ready to start school. And he was so proud.

For so long – understandably – we parents, mothers especially, focus on the desire for a baby and the delights that becoming a family can bring.

But those babies are with us for a blink.

Too soon they are independent people – off to make their own way in the world, facing experiences that do not involve us, trying to make sense of a life that so often has no reason at all. That’s what we want them to do. That’s what we raise them to do. But when they actually set off to do it, we feel a deep sense of sorrow, even loss. We cannot protect them from any hurt they may face...

 

And here’s how I finished it:

 It makes my throat constrict and my heart pound whenever I have to wave good-bye and head back home on those days when he has trouble disengaging from me. But this is only the beginning. We have a long way to go. I’ll get over it. But that big smile at pick-up time —  the one that makes my heart sing and takes me back to a hot afternoon in Seoul when I first met my son, I’ll never get over that. 

He used to have trouble disengaging from me.

Now, for his last day at school, the situation is reversed.

I think I know where to start my letter.

3 Things I've learned from Mindfulness Meditation

Do you ever have an a-ha moment that leaves you wishing that whatever it is had never actually occurred to you, but had remained locked in the box marked ‘Blissful Ignorance’?

No?

Well, I do. All the time.

Maybe it’s part of being an over-thinker.

Maybe it’s because until now I’ve been lacking in self-awareness.

Or perhaps I’m just weird.

Anyway, as I get older, as inevitably I do, my memory is becoming shitter and shitter still. If walking determinedly from one place to another and then standing perfectly still wearing a bemused expression ever becomes an Olympic event, I’m a shoe-in for a medal. Ditto for the Where-the-fuck-did-I-put-that World Championships.

So, in an attempt to stem the flow of stuff I used to know into the Post-menopausal Blackhole — and as part of the therapy needed for me to learn to tame the Black Dog — I’m having a go at Mindfulness Meditation.  Just twenty minutes a day of focussed brainwork, specifically designed to help me be more calm and aware and focussed. Brilliant.

I’m a complete novice at this. I’ve never even attended a yoga class. But I’m learning things about myself already and I’d like to share my first few realisations.

As the man with the oh-so-soothing voice croons: ‘Just focus on the breath. Notice the rhythm. Feel the motion of your body. Relax into the regularity of the pattern…’ this is what happens inside my skull:

What pattern? What regularity?

No rhythm. I have no rhythm.

How deeply should I be breathing? Crap, I’m such a shallow breather.

As easy as breathing… isn’t that how the saying goes? Or is it as natural as breathing? Not relevant… focus on the breath…

Which breath? The in or the out? No, it’s both… He said both.. In through the nose and out through the mouth… How hard can that be? … Well, clearly too hard for you, Dickhead, coz you can’t do it right.

Shit, Wendy, get it together…  just fill your lungs with air and then push it out again.

Count… yes, maybe if I count …

Realisation Number 1: I don’t know how to breathe.

The simple task for yesterday was to be aware of the motion of my body each time I sat down or stood up. To be present to what I was doing just at those moments. If I could be mindful of my sitting/standing even fives times in the day, the croony guru assured me, that would be good. The aim is for those moments to be anchor points to my being present to my own actions.

My results were significantly sub-good.

Zero.

Not once did I catch myself in the movement of sitting. It wasn’t until after my bum hit the chair that I remembered the task. And by the time I stood up, I’d forgotten again.

Realisation Number 2: I’m a slow learner with a disconnect between my brain and my bum.

Which leads to Realisation Number 3: This is gonna be a long journey.

All tips, advice, suggestions, wise counsel or pointy-fingered cajoling will be gratefully received.

Good talk, Son...

We recently acquired a ridiculously snug pre-loved couch. It has been broken-in and worn-soft by friends who, sadly, could no longer accommodate it. The possibility of said-couch ending its days waiting dejectedly by the gutter for the hard-rubbish collection was too horrendous to contemplate, so we lugged it and its two comfy-chair buddies down to The Rock where they seem to be enjoying a whole new batch of bums on seats.

Yesterday, Manchild was lying full-stretch on the new old couch while I sat ensconced in Comfy-Chair B with my knitting. The footy was on the tv. Manchild and I support the same team, and although this has been a disastrous season, we remain blindly hopeful that one day soon they will rack up a win. With yesterday’s opponents being almost as hapless as our lot of late, we both harboured a tiny optimistic flicker that this just might be the day.

Manchild had been out late Saturday night. He’d stayed at a mate’s house after a big social event and the lure of the couch was far stronger than the pull of his desk. Even with final exams less than ten weeks away, that damn desk remains a pathetic weakling in any tug-of-war… food, sleep, music, computer games, sport on tv… they all win without even trying.  Anyway, he must have been extra-tired because not only was he lying down, but he was snuggled under a blanket. He looked particularly calm and just a teensy bit vulnerable. I could see the little boy he used to be hovering just under the surface. He was warm and settled and focussed on the football. So I did what all good mothers of almost-grown-up sons do.

I seized the opportunity to start a particularly annoying conversation, confident that he couldn’t be arsed getting up and walking away:

You looked so handsome last night. Did people tell you how great you looked?

Yep.

Lots and lots of people?

Yep

Male and female people?

Yep.

What about one special person? Is there one special person that makes your heart go pitter pat?

(Crickets)

 IS there? Is there someone special?

(Crickets)

A special girl? … or is it a special boy? Have you even decided that yet?

(Crickets… with the slightest suggestion of upturned corners of the mouth)

Aha… I saw that!  You are listening…So IS there?

Stop talking Mum.

As far as conversations go between Manchild and me, that was a pretty good one. 
No mention of food on his behalf or dirty washing on mine.

And our footy team did win.

Score!

Yesterday was a good day.

Of Friendship and Feet

 I’m not sure how to say this without it sounding like a pathetic cry for help… or an attention seeking teenager’s lament. It is neither. It is what it is. And it’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now, gathering momentum, growing obese and knocking other stuff around as it travels. So I’m setting it free. For it’s own health.

And mine.

I’ve never had many friends. I was never one of the popular kids, never a cool girl, not someone to be seen hanging out with. I’ve never been part of a sporting team, or one of the arty crowd, nor even queen among dorks. I don’t think I’ve ever had a tribe.

Like most people, work-me and social-me have often blended. Work colleagues have become the people I socialise with, and some of them have come to be what I might call friends. That’s usual, right? Because most often it’s those with whom we spend the most time that become the source of our circle of friends…. Isn’t it?

Is it?

Is it a truism that our friends are drawn from the group with whom we spend the most time? And that who we have as friends, therefore, changes as our life-situation changes? 

Is friendship transient?

Or do friends meet in unexpected ways? Untold spontaneous ways? 

And stick.

Like when you comment on a blog that speaks to you from another part of the globe, and you end up connected to someone you’ve never met. The way pen pals used to be connected. The way women once wrote to random soldiers just so they knew someone at home was thinking about them. 

Words connecting lives through space and time.

Over the past few years, I’ve been consciously reaching out to people who I

once called friends. People with whom I spent a great deal of time. People with whom I shared many experiences, thoughts and conversations — one I spoke to almost every day while our children were young, another loomed large during our adoption journey, a third was once a regular companion on outings. And there are others. People who have known me for decades. People I thought would always be my friends.  

Almost all of them have dropped away.

They were pleased to hear from me… or seemed to be… when l reached out to try to reconnect. I believed they were happy for me to travel to their homes when I asked if I might do so. And travel I did. But that was where the contact ended. My visits were followed by silence. 

The same nothing.

And I find myself damp with the fug of rejection, wondering just what friendship looks like.

Then dampness chills to brain-freezing realisation that the common denominator is me.

But I asked someone I don’t know if she’d knit me a pair of socks as a physical reminder of the unfathomable way in which words can connect lives. And she said, ‘How big are your feet and what colour do you like?’

And better still, she knitted herself a pair too.

In the same colour.

The colour of friendship.

I should have listened to the watchman: A book review

Like hordes of other book consumers, I recently devoured Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. And I feel a bit grubby about it. It didn’t exactly give me a pain in the gut… or the heart… it was my conscience that ached. 

With all the controversy about whether Lee was duped into agreeing to publish her manuscript by a greedy relative and/or lawyer and/or agent and/or publisher, the morally sound course of action would’ve been to refuse to pay for the novel. But I desperately wanted to read it. And I’m way too impatient to hang around until our ill-equipped local library found the time to purchase and process it. Besides, by the time the book landed on July 14^th the library reservations list was already heavy with equally-curious readers. Mine would have been a long wait. So I visited the local bookshop and bought a copy.

The winter weather gods have been particularly wintery this year. They seem to be taking special delight in dealing out Saturdays that are snap-frozen followed by mostly sodden Sundays. Perfect reading weather. An anticipated book always deserves an extended first sitting.

And a pot of tea.

Or a bottle of wine.

Before I started, I knew that Atticus is revealed to be racist. Or rather that the Atticus of this manuscript is racist. Because this is not a sequel, even though it has been published after Mockingbird, and despite the fact that the narrator—then Scout now Jean Louise­­—has grown to adulthood. So Atticus isn’t a person who’s changed his mind. If we are to believe that this is the first rejected version of life in Maycomb, Alabama, then this is not a changed Atticus, but a different Atticus – a completely different character in a different time (as is the confusing Calpurnia). This is a different plot in a different manuscript. A weaker manuscript. I knew that, yet as I read, my love for the Mockingbird Atticus Finch still had me hoping there’d be a plausible reason for him to be closed-minded. (There isn’t.)

So what did I think of Go Set a Watchman? I thought it was patchy and largely unconvincing. There were certainly chunks of engaging writing… bits here and there… not pages and pages. I thought much of the dialogue was more like diatribe, and found some of the characters to be so sketchy that their motivation was unclear… or absent. Quite honestly, I didn’t care what happened to any of them. I was not absorbed into their world.

At several points, I found myself wondering whether what I’d just read would make sense if I wasn’t already familiar with the events and characters of Mockingbird.  And towards the end… well… it all became so awful that I struggled to believe Harper Lee wrote that bit at all. The conspiracy theory that other writers cobbled together what Harper Lee had left incomplete—or had abandoned — is more credible than some of the conversations and actions of the characters. 

So did I enjoy the book?

Yeah, sort of. Nobody was forcing me to finish it, I did so of my own accord.

Would I recommend it?

Only for the curiosity factor… or as a comparative study with Mockingbird to teach editing.

Should I have waited in line to borrow it?

Yes. I should have listened to the watchman.

The blurb trumpets that this is ‘ a landmark new novel’ that ‘imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee’. That Go Set a Watchman serves as an ‘essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to a classic’.

Crap.

This is not a ‘new novel’. It’s a flawed manuscript. And as it creates very little sense of either time or place, it fails to add any ‘depth’, ‘context’ or ‘meaning’ to Mockingbird. Zilch. Nada. Mockingbird doesn’t need any of that anyway.

Those responsible for publishing this work clearly did not heed the Biblical inspiration for the title:

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.  (Isaiah 21:6)

Me-thinks all they saw-eth was dollar signs.

This feels like a well-orchestrated cash-grab… and I fell for it.

What about you? Have you read it? Do you intend to?

Do you think I’m being harsh? 

Are you going to take a stand and not read it? 

I’d love to know.

Without Ease

For a number of reasons, I’ve been missing from this blog for a while now. Missing-not-in-action. 

 Granted, it’s not a very large number of reasons and, to be perfectly honest, quite a few of those not-very-many reasons are so limp they could barely stand up, but one particularly dark beastie has been keeping me silent. The words have been there, though, milling about inside my skull, pressing uncomfortably against the temporary fencing —hoping to slip through a breach or anticipating this inevitable opening of the gate.

During the hiatus, Charlotte over in Sweden was kind misguided enough to consider me worthy of the Versatile Blogger Award. Thank you so much.

And the marvelous Mary-Anne, up there breathing life in Canada,   challenged me to write a paragraph without using the letter ‘e'. I said I’d give it a go, and I did—but until now it has been silenced by the dark beastie.

Silence broken.

Sounding Old

I’m finding it’s not so much wavy vocal chords and lack of puff that signal how old I am, it’s wind. Lots of wind. Occasionally, nasty stomach gas slips out (TMI?), but mostly I’m guilty of involuntary gusts of lung air that assault my world with sounds approximating whoomph…. hoougggh …  aurrrghhhhhh as I hoik my body upwards from a chair, or out of a low-riding car. It’s nasty.

Happily, though, much puff… wind from this old bag… can still pump through songs from my youth. Songs bursting with story and mood-inducing history that play almost continually as I mark my days with words, tapping out my worldly spot by placing symbols in a syntactic row.

Mother Bear... or adoptive mother dragon lady?

U

What I'm about to say may alienate and polarise. I might be accused of being melodramatic... or self-indulgent... or extreme. And so be it. Everyone is free to stop reading at any point...

Being an adoptive mother is different from being a birth mother. Yep... no shit, I hear you say. And you'd be right. I'm stating the obvious. But today was one of those days that made the difference so real that I want to puke. So real, that I have had to sob. So real that I cannot sleep until I have written this.

My daughter (I just deleted all the adjectives I wanted to use to describe how brave I think she is) had an interview today at the Department of Human Services with two social workers she'd never met before to explain why she wanted to be allowed to see the file that contains the recorded details of her birth while we are in Korea over the next couple of weeks. 

She had to demonstrate that she has the maturity to discover nothing... or everything about her identity. 

She had to answer questions about whether she imagines that her birthparents might now be married and she has full siblings. She hadn't... until that suggestion was put to her... 

She had to explain how she feels about going to Korea and why she wants to see her adoption file to two people who do not know her... or me... or us as a family... or our experience with intercountry adoption or the Korean adoption community... 

She had to convince two social workers who have never been to Korea... and never met the people at the adoption agency in Seoul who made our family possible... that she was ready to see what details may exist about the conditions of her birth.... two people who know nothing of us and have lived significantly less of the adoptive experience and of Korean culture than we have. 

Immeasurably less.

Yes... they were doing their job. And certainly they are both delightful people. Gorgeous, both of them. Don't get me wrong.  I understand that none of their questions or comments were intended as barbs, nor even intended to be seen as a test. They were doing their job. But their job requires them to determine what might be best for my daughter.... MY DAUGHTER... a person they'd never met before... 

Mother Bear Me wanted to roar... burned to rage. But she couldn't. Daren't. Mother Bear had  to be quelled. Caged. She had to be still and quiet... to deny all her instincts. She had to  watch her cub in anguish and pain... and stay calm.  She had to trust that her baby girl, trained to be brave and strong, would find a way to hold her head up in the face of heartbreaking anguish. 
And she did. 
We both did.

I have never been more proud of my daughter. 
I have never been less in control as a mother.

It was a huge day. 
Tonight has been tears and hugs. 
 
Other mothers think I'm over-stating the situation, or being histrionic when I try to explain that adopted kids have a tougher road to walk and that being an adoptive mother has challenges other mothers cannot comprehend.
Today was one of those days.

I'm not seeking sympathy and I'd never want to discredit anyone else's pain. 
I love my life.
I am nothing but blessed to have been allowed the privilege of raising my two children. We have a wonderful and complex family life. Like all families.
But I have no idea what to expect next week after our meeting at the adoption agency in Seoul. 

Neither of us do.

I am not a birthmother.
I am not the birthmother of my children.
I am mother to two children who were born of other women. 
I am mother to two people whose mothers relinquished them because they believed that was best for their children.

I am not what's best...
Sometimes I'm not even what's good...
But I am Mother Bear.

Next week, Mother Bear will have to sit by as her cub discovers everything...
Or nothing...
There will be more tears and hugs... 
of the joy of discovery...
or the pain of never knowing...

We are both scared, my baby girl and I.