A Super-Quick Bit of Kvelling

I'm going to zoom in the door, say something, and zoom back out the door because I'm too frakking busy right now to have a life.

The Pipsqueak got straight A's on her report card!

She was having a kinda rough time with math at the beginning of the year (much like Mommy) and had been steadily improving while maintaining good grades in all the other subjects -- especially reading, where she's been consistently well above grade level since 1st grade. This semester something clicked in math class, and the rest is history.

We are all so proud of her, she's worked really hard on her own to do this!

Insights & Reminders

Sorry, gang -- this one's not directly about the Pipsqueak.  I have "adoption" as a keyword in my online newsfeed, and every now & then I'll find an article actually talking about humans. (I have yet to find a way to filter out the eleventy-seven thousand articles about animal adoptions and/or adoption of different technologies.)

Earlier today I came across an article, published online in the Irish online newspaper TheJournal.ie and written by Paul Redmond[1], that shows the impact adoption can have on a society or nation in general terms... and that (obviously) got me thinking.  Adoption numbers may be larger than the average person thinks; a 2012 study by the University of Oregon showed that 2.4% of all American families have adopted, and that 2.5% of all children under the age of 18 in the U.S. were adoptees. Of course, in cases like ours, it's obvious to even the most casual observer that Miri is adopted -- but there are many, many cases where the only way to know someone is adopted is to ask.

Adoptees have to face issues that the majority of people never even think of. For example, almost everyone reading this will know the date & location, and possibly even the time, of their birth; Miri's birthday is an educated guess based on a medical examiner's estimate of her age when found, and the most information she'll ever know about the location is that it's one of 61 counties in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region[2].  That may not sound too important, but that might be because it's not your identity that includes guesses & estimates instead of hard fact.  Extend that kind of fuzzy data into areas such as genetic background & medical history, and you've got a collection of cans of worms (potentially with teeth)  to deal with.

Most folks will think about that for a moment, shake their heads (maybe even think it's wrong), and go on with their day because of the, "it doesn't affect me directly" idea... but what are the actual numbers for people directly affected by adoption in some way even if they are not adoptees themselves?  According to several sources, 2.4-2.5% of the U.S. population is adopted, so many people might figure it's not a big deal... but worldwide, that numbers can be quite a bit larger.  Take, for example, the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post; it's titled, "So you think adoption has nothing to do with you?" and has its basis in an adoption-related scandal that shook Ireland some time ago.

The article points out that it's not just adoptees who are affected by adoption, and uses some very logical numbers to show that nearly twenty percent of the entire Irish population is directly affected by adoption. That got me wondering what would happen if the same analysis was applied here in the USofA.  First, you have the adoptive family, the majority of which include two parents.... so instead of one person affected, you have three. Then there are the biological parents of the adoptee... so now we're up to five people affected by a single adoption.  Even if we don't expand beyond those numbers (as the article does), that shows at least 12% of the U.S. population[3] is affected by adoption in a first-person, immediate family sense. Factor in grandparents (at least 4 per adoptee) and the number jumps to about 73.3 million people. Factor in siblings[4] and the number jumps to about 78.5 million people.

That's slightly more than the entire 2017 populations of California, Texas, and Georgia combined.

( . . . Whoa, Dude, that's a lot of people...)

Remember, these numbers are just for adoptees and their families (minus any siblings the adoptees may have in their bio families, a number I couldn't figure out).  Add in the number of people who are partnered with or married to adoptees, and the number grows to around 80.1 million. And if you really want to run into big numbers, try figuring out how many more people work with and/or are friends with adoptees and all of a sudden you're dealing with at least 160 million Americans.

So... Next time you think about adoption, keep in mind the fact that in some way it affects the lives of almost the entire population of the nine most populous states (California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina) combined[5].

So it probably affects you, too.  :-)

---

[1] You can read the original article at http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-so-you-think-adoption-has-nothing-to-do-with-you-3949070-Apr2018/.

[2] In her case, we can narrow it down to one of 11 farming villages and/or the nearby market town where she was found... not exactly precise data.

[3] A quick Google search for the population of the U.S. returns the number 325.7 million; if 2.4% of all Americans are adopted, that's a total of 7,816,800 people. Multiply that by 5 and you have nearly 39.1 million people affected in the first person by adoption.

[4] It is extremely hard to find good numbers on how many American families have adopted or how many have adopted more than one child, but my (admittedly rough) math left me with a guesstimate of about 2/3 of all adoptees having at least 1 sibling, which would be a total of 5,211,200 people (which I rounded down to 5.2 million).

[5] The number is potentially a great deal larger; my calculations included only two sets of grandparents (one per adoptive parent) instead of the actual four sets (adoptive mother's parents, adoptive father's parents, biological mother's parents, and biological father's parents). If you add in the second set of grandparents you'll end up with more than 191 million people directly affected in the U.S. alone.

YIKES!

Okay, this one's short... but has some meaning (at least for us).

A couple of days ago, as she is wont to do, the Pipsqueak was purposefully being silly-funny while talking with Grandma & Mommy. As the conversation progressed, she got sillier until the following exchange occurred:

AJ: You're weird!
Miri: That's because I don't know who my mother is!
AJ: [ . . . ]
Miri: (smiles)
AJ: _I_ am your mother.
Miri: (giggle)

If it hadn't been for the giggling and continuation of the silliness, this would've been an even scarier exchange (for us grownups, not Miri)... but while it's the kind of thing that just does not have any of the weight or meaning (if it even occurs at all) in non-adoptive families, its meaning in any form for an adoptive family can range from a sideways way to say, "I've got a lot going on inside my head, folks" to a neon sign saying "Welcome to No-Man's Land (Remember to Duck)" or worse.

Every once in a while, usually quietly, almost always like a bolt out of the blue, the Pipsqueak will make a statement or pose a question that lets us know she's very much aware of the lack of direct genetic links to her family.  It's obvious she's working to resolve whatever questions & issues are quietly occupying some percentage of the CPU cycles in her mind as a background process that only she's aware of, but to date she's only made us privy to those questions & issues on an almost random, piecemeal basis.

We're actually lucky; Miri is quick to identify (and defend!) us as her family, and gets upset when Mommy's job gets in the way of Mommy-Daughter time.  While her inner diva puts in an occasional appearance (usually uninvited), the issues are those of any nearly-nine kiddo and/or based in something not working out the way she wanted it to/thought it should. Like this most recent exchange, she'll sometimes trot out something about being adopted as a momentary tease or even a joke... but every time she does we all take it as a sign that she's working on the differences & issues that she's become mature enough (I almost said "old enough" but sometimes she blows us away with a maturity beyond her numeric age) to wrap her mind around.

AJ and I have slowly been building a library of adoption- and identity-related references & resources, both for us and for the  Pipsqueak, and I'm beginning to think we'll be delving into it sooner rather than later.

Parenting is neither easy nor for the squeamish... but when you throw adoption into the mix, its "interestingness" jumps to a whole 'nother level.

AND ON A LIGHTER NOTE...

The five of us spent Wednesday driving around the Gettysburg battlefield (AJ took off work and pulled Miri from school).  We missed doing this for the past two years because of assorted weather and/or health issues, but everything worked out this year so we jumped on the opportunity.

And why, I hear you ask, were you all driving around a civil war battlefield looking at monuments on a schoolday?  Well, it's simple...  Gettysburg was one of the very first places our folks stopped on their honeymoon so we've turned it into a family celebration of their wedding anniversary.

Oh, and that first trip?  It was SIXTY-FIVE years ago.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Happy Eastover Fool's Day!

Just a (slightly late) quickie...

Things are still a bit crazed on my side of the computer screen, but we did take the time for a quiet family seder on Friday night for the 1st night of Passover, and joined our Uncle & Aunt in VA for the 2nd seder.

This was the first year that the Pipsqueak could really handle reading the four questions[1] and she more than rose to the task.  There were a couple of little glitches with some unfamiliar words (Dude, some of those words are said only twice a year!) but the phonetic Hebrew was more than recognizable and the English-language versions were as good as any we'd heard.  Miri was so proud of her reading skills that, as we went around the table with individual readings from the haggadah[2] during the seder, there were several times she specifically asked to read some of the longer passages herself. (As you can imagine, there was a lot of kvelling going on in the room -- and AJ & Cousin E were both very relieved that the Four Questions was no longer their job.)

On the 1st, we joined some very close friends (the term "extended family" is heard often) for our annual Easter celebration & egg hunt. Since one had grown up Jewish, they want their kids to understand that part of their family heritage -- so we all did a very fast (think Warp 8) abbreviated seder that explained the holiday, its meanings & traditions, and the associated foods to everyone before digging into food that we all wanted to keep eating long after our bellies begged us to stop. We then had the kids occupy themselves while the Grownup Brigade hid brightly colored plastic eggs filled with candy all around the yard -- and this year we didn't get rained on while doing it, hooray!  The egg hunt was its usual fun, loud, chaotic self, and I'm proud to say that a couple of the eggs I hid were bypassed several times before being found. (Should I be concerned that I'm proud of making something more difficult for a bunch of elementary school kids?  ...Naaah!)

I have a bunch of photos of these & other events, but I'm still in the process of clearing space on my laptop to download them so I'll make some more detailed posts with photos in the coming weeks.

Oh, and of course there was a Winter Weather Advisory posted for that night... but the stuff all melted by mid-morning so that was OK.

More (and better) posts coming soon, I promise!




[1] During the Passover seder, it is traditional for the youngest person present to ask four specific questions about what makes [this] night different from all other nights, leading to the retelling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt as mandated in the Torah. People with a cynical bent -- you know, people like yours truly -- have been known to mutter the introductory phrase, "M'a nishtanah haleilah hazeh mikol ha'leilot..." ("why is this night different from all other nights...") under their breath when things go wrong in everyday life.

[2] The haggadah is a book used specifically at the Passover seder; it has all the prayers, readings, blessings, commentaries, etc. and leads the celebrants through the seder in the proper order. There are modern abbreviated versions that just hit upon the major prayers & readings that can guide a family through the pre- and post-dinner portions of the seder in maybe an hour, while more traditional versions can take several hours to read through. (My folks both have childhood memories of sitting impatiently at the table from sunset until late at night before dinner was served, then finishing the post-dinner portion of the seder well after midnight.)