Ring Out the Old, Ring In the... Older...?

Wow, waitaminit, not ready here... Where the heck did December go?  (Come to think of it, aren't I supposed to be getting ready for Halloween in a couple of weeks...?)

No, seriously -- in some ways, this year roared past while in others it couldn't be done & over with fast enough for me.  Still, in the waning hours of 2019, there are some milestones to look forward to with the coming year....

A new decade AND a double number year.  Okay, I know this isn't even remotely adoption- or Pipsqueak-related, but I'm a sucker for these milestones. This will also be the only time in my life when the year is a double number, so I'm looking forward to being able to write the same two digits twice for a few months.  (Anyone seeking to spoil the moment by pointing out that some measures of time have the new decade beginning in 2021 will be soundly and firmly ignored.)

The Pipsqueak's first graduation.  I have to admit that the idea of a "graduation" at the end of 5th grade is a bit out of what I used to consider the normal progression of school, but I'm aware that I'm so "Old Guard" that I what I was guarding ain't there no more.  When June comes around, Miri will be done with elementary school and come September (actually, August 31st) she will be traveling to a different building and starting middle school.  My sister's long-long-ago statement, "...and I'd like you to help teach the baby to drive when she turns 16" is suddenly looming much, much larger. Yikes!

The Pipsqueak officially becomes a Tween.  To be honest, this is one of the scarier milestones of the coming year.  I spent several years commenting, "I fear my niece as a teenager" because of her innate, undying, unvarying, and unwavering hard-wired knowledge of The Rules Of How It All Should Work and her equally strong feeling that she can enforce said rules -- but she's also a really caring, empathic, concerned, and loving person at her core so I don't expect anything beyond the usual hormonal insanity that afflicts the species.  Even now, I keep getting surprised at how "old" she's become, her ability to reach (juuuust) things on the top of the fridge, her ability to lift her ridiculously heavy school backback and a full bag of groceries at the same time, and her knowledge & awareness of what's in the news.  (All that is tempered by the ongoing presence of Doggie and Kiki, the little-girl giggles, and the occasional need to cuddle with Mommy.)

And, finally, one of the most mind-blowing milestones I never really thought ahead to...

The Pipsqueak will be home for A FULL DECADE.  As the saying goes, "The days are long but the years pass swiftly."  It's gotten a little more difficult over the years, but I can still remember the emotions of those last several months of waiting... waiting... waiting for the adoption process to grind forward to the point where there was actually a child involved on the other side of the world.  I'll be revisiting that last block of pre-Gotcha time (and the first few post-Gotcha months) here during 2020, but as a bit of a look ahead...

The photo folders on my laptop labeled "Snowmageddon 1" and "Snowmageddon 2" are dated December 19th & 20th, 2009.  That snowfall was actually somewhat welcome because it gave us good reason to stop worrying about The Wait for a while, to deal with something that had "right NOW!" status, and that didn't require the filing or renewal of more paperwork.  By the time winter of 2009 had rolled around, it would have been correct to say AJ had gotten a little brittle -- that we all had to some extent -- just trying to power through the apparently never-ending wait for the Chinese government to process her adoption application.  We had no way to know that a scrawny little baby girl had already, months earlier, been abandoned at the Wushizen medical clinic and was now getting an end-of-year physical exam... or that seven months later, just as she and my sister were beginning to learn how to be a daughter and a mother, we would be given precious photos of her that coincided with our digging out from the first one-two punch of a series of winter storms that local folks still refer to as "Snowmageddon."

The photo above is from December 23, 2009.  It is one of a short series showing Miri (apparently) shortly after her medical exam, nicely bundled up and awaiting her bottle.  We would see it for the first time in July of 2010, but it is one of just five photos from that winter. (I have two from June and two from October as well, along with a nice series from the week before Gotcha Day, thanks to our amazingly caring & conscientious Chinese guide.)

So, as 2019 comes to a close and 2020 prepares to move in and decorate the place in its own style, I'll leave y'all with a little end-of-year dance that Miri and one of her friends choreographed for a video they made a few days ago.  I wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year to come, and a safe & happy New Year's Eve, and thank everyone for coming along on the journey so far!

 

Cultural Priorities

I've mentioned (and joked about) the fact that this family celebrates a new year at least three times more often than the average American family: the Chinese New Year (on a lunisolar calendar, so it wanders between January 21st and February 19th); Rosh Hashonah (also on a lunisolar calendar so it wanders between September 5th and October 5th); and the standard Gregorian New Year (a solar calendar, so it's fixed on December 31st).

While the "regular" (Gregorian/solar) new year can be a relatively big deal for us (assuming, of course, anyone manages to stay awake until midnight!) and Rosh Hashonah is one of the few Jewish holidays we consistently make a point of attending services for, Chinese New Year was just a curiosity for us until 2005, when Chinese culture suddenly began to play a role in family life.  We attended and/or volunteered at several celebrations during AJ's paper chase, stopping only for the last year pre-Miri (after so many years of The Wait, we were all getting a little brittle by that time), and since Miri came home we've made a point of attending and/or volunteering at every Families with Children from China (FCC) CNY celebration.  It's fun, it breaks the monotony of often-grey months, it gives us a chance to catch up with a lot of other adoptive families, and -- despite my putting it last in this sentence -- the most important point is that celebrating the Chinese New Year is one of a limited number of ways Miri can experience at least some part of her birth heritage firsthand.

In other words, Chinese New Year has been pretty much A Big Deal 'round these parts for nigh on two decades.

Except... Well, my niece is an active young lady.  Public school, Girl Scouts, Chinese Dance, Dance Team, Patrol meetings, the list goes on... and somewhere in that mix, Chinese New Year has slowly receded back to really more of just a fun thing to do than A Cultural Thing to partake in.  So here comes the big Twenty-Twenty on the Gregorian calendar, a double number that happens only once per century.  In China (and many other Asian culures), it is the Year of the Rat -- more specifically, the Yang Metal Rat, with the shīn heavenly stem and the zĭ earthly branch.

And we're not going to be at the big FCC shindig to celebrate.

Y'see, a certain someone -- I'm not going to mention her name at the moment, but she's my younger sister's only daughter -- has a dance competition the same day as the FCC event.  Although there was some mention of the importance of following through on responsibilities to teammates in competitions, the choice was very much left up to Miri to make.  And she immediately chose the dance competition both because she felt to miss it would be to let down her teammates... and because it was more important to her than the big annual Chinese New Year celebration.

Let's face it: Miri, and her fellow adoptees born in China, are not "Chinese;" they are genetically Asian with varying but usually large percentages of Han ancestry. They are actually American kids, brought up in the States, attending the local public schools, celebrating Indpendence Day and Thanksgiving with their families every year, speaking vernacular American English, singing songs from Disney movies and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers (and now a bunch of recording artists I'm suddenly too old to have ever heard of!), eating pizza and hotdogs and tater tots and cheeseburgers and General Tso's Chicken and Egg Foo Yung (well, some of 'em, anyway)... I could go on but you get the idea.  China is the place where they were born, with different local cultures within an encompassing generalized culture but none of the kids in our group were old enough to form anything but nebulous memories; it's a heritage that they know makes them different from many of their peers but that so far has not really defined who they are.  Even with localizing "China" to the province, county, and/or ethnic minority the kids come from seems to leave it very much on the other side of the world; for this years "Around the World" night at school (the last!) Miri made a poster featuring the specific region where she was born rather than China as a whole, and learned a lot while doing it and yet still shows minimal interest in learning any more even when gently pushed in that direction by Mommy.

Miri is rightfully proud of her talent & abilities when it comes to Chinese dance, and she has worked hard to master some of the necessary skills -- but she is equally proud of her position on the competitive dance team of the (Western style) dance studio where she spends many hours every week, and of her being able to join the Patrols at school and winning the first "Golden Belt" award of the school year.  She's tried to learn Chinese, but only picked up a few individual words over several years and has since stopped (but is interested in learning Spanish).  We've mentioned the idea of a "heritage tour" when she's older and she has expressed interest, but she speaks about it the same way she speaks about attending college "when I get a lot older" while waxing eloquent on how important it is for her to have a bat mitzvah when she turns 13.

So it was really no surprise when she chose, very quickly, to be with her dance team at the year's first competition rather than attend the usual annual Chinese New Year celebration.  I'm certain that our "MIT" group's annual tradition of getting together for a celebratory group luncheon shortly before or after the actual date of the new year will continue... but I'm beginning to wonder if last year's big CNY shindig was our last for a while.

My niece has her priorities, and she's old enough to be setting them for herself. I'm curious to see

how other choices pan out...