Breaks

I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with my primary care physician. I adore her. I have followed her from one office to another, and then another. I would follow her wherever she goes, she is that remarkable: beyond compare (and I know many physicians). She is now ensconced at UCSF with the resources of a great university hospital behind her, and she's training up more physicians, giving me increased hope for the future. She recently made two great hires in her office for when she's not available, and that assuages my anxiety more than a little.

She had thought I'd come in only to adjust meds and do my three-month check-in, but no, I had my sternum issue (yes, fractured indeed, no x-ray needed, must be taped), and some new information.  She added to my Problem List: "Family history of early coronary artery disease." Sigh. We were talking about all I've been through in the past 13 years that we've known each other, and my near misses. She said she cannot believe that I made it through two pregnancies and didn't miscarry or die. I said that I don't believe in guardian angels, but I must have had one. She said, "Well I do believe in them, and you have an army. What about the portal vein clot? And a platelet count of 1.3 million? And the PEs? And your wrist? And now your sternum? Do you need some anti-anxiety meds?" I told her I was fine, I had only taken one Xanax so far and I'm set with my supply, although given current events, I am shocked that I am functioning so well.

She also encouraged me to sit down and write. She said, "I've told you for years. You write beautifully. Where is the story you promised me? We physicians need to push more, people need to push more, people need to know how important family medical history is for adoptees. What you have been through was unconscionable. You could write to help others; it might help you to get it out of yourself in more polished form. Plus, it's one hell of a story." I told her my ex had called me a "hilarious raconteuse" the other week. She laughed. "See," she said. "You have some momentum."

Then we had a great kvetch about EPIC, as she'd been through it two years ago and knew my pain. Many gratifyingly exchanged expletives ensued, apropos of choices and flowsheets and order sets and lack of support from management.

I have taken a long break from writing about my adoption-related pains for many reasons. But perhaps if I approach them more journalistically, and write privately, it will be cathartic. It would feel good to write. I've always felt that writing was my calling, but I've fought it. I am not sure why. The more people tell me to write, the more I shrink into my cave of "NO!"

I dreamed last night that I was back in graduate school, being dressed down for some slight by my adviser, the chilly one who was so cruel and valued nothing of me or my work. I have various theories about why she appeared to me out of the blue. Perhaps the most compelling is that she symbolizes the part of me that doesn't think I can or should succeed in writing my story. Since I was never very good at kowtowing to her at the best of times in real life, why would I capitulate to her now, in my head? Makes sense when I put it like that.

Perhaps, then, back to Anne Lamott's father's advice, I suppose, and the birds. Bird by bird. I love that book. And fighting my horrifyingly exacting standards, against which I do measure myself, despite what people may think. It only took me how many years to write my dissertation? Can we say perfectionist?

Resilience

I took a baseball to the chest last week, heard a crunch and saw a large bump growing. I didn't think much of it at the time. It was too big to be a simple bruise, though. I should have thought more of it. In retrospect it reminds me of when I broke my wrist. Now I am pretty sure that I fractured my sternum on the left. It never went purple. Just drained, went south and turned that sickening overripe banana yellow, leaving a huge knot on my second rib on the left. Yep, I'm guessing a fracture. I see my primary care MD today, and I will have her check it out. I am so fragile these days, thanks to the Lovenox and my BMI and whatever else. The injury never interfered with breathing or movement, so I blew it off. What's another fracture? Can't do anything for it, anyway, except pain meds and rest. Story of my life.

I saw a beautiful film yesterday, Blancanieves, set in 1920's Spain (primarily in Seville), and directed by Pablo Berger. Filmed in black and white, and silent, it tells the story of Snow White through a different lens: imagine her the daughter of a toreador, with an Evil Stepmother as dominatrix. She is rescued by seven traveling, bullfighter dwarves, who help her find her true identity in the ring. There is a very sad, Spanish ending that the Brothers Grimm would approve. Not Disney at all. I adored how the Evil Stepmother was dispatched, in an Picasso-inspired scene. The film tells a dark tale of loss and longing and redemption: there are no rainbows, but some brief moments of happiness to buoy your heart. I was cheering for Blancanieves to fight her way through the pain of parental neglect; her ability to forgive was inspiring. As one line in the movie said, to paraphrase, mourning the past is like chasing the wind. It's what you have now, it's your present actions that are your legacy. What are you made of? How do you prove that your soul is not oily and weak? How do you face down your bull? Will you run and hide? Can you?

This morning I attended a union meeting with fellow L&D RNs to strategize. It always feels good to vent and to plan. We have a strike on the horizon, as well as ideas for petitions and letters and a media event. It was reassuring to hear that most of us are struggling with EPIC, and to laugh that maybe all of the budget for STORK, which would have made sense, went to the ridiculous We Plus You campaign. Apparently it was decided that STORK wasn't needed for most of the hospitals, so it was voted down for us, when our huge unit needs it, requires it. But at recent bargaining, STORK was put on the table for perhaps a year from now. So we work on, together, stronger. We have each other, and we will fight. Word is, they don't like to mess with our unit because they know we will mutiny.

Vive la resistance!

Going There

I have found a safe place from which I operate. It's not a place I'd ever thought I'd inhabit; I fought it hard for a very, very long time. I used to think of it as a prison, but now I see that there are freedoms and limitations. There's always give and take.

I went out late on Saturday night for one last birthday hurrah with my friend, Nalini, to see Ken Loach's new film, The Angels' Share. It's dark and funny: a Loach social commentary, as expected. Some parts are absolutely hilarious; others completely heartbreaking. I was annoyed by the subtitles, however. I do understand that many Americans don't have an ear for Glaswegian accents, but Tim Rice's character spoke the Queen's English. Were the subtitles truly necessary? Would people have demanded refunds without subtitles? Has English become a foreign language? Why didn't they subtitle The Help? Are dialects too difficult? I was distracted and annoyed by the text. *sigh* That aside, one of the messages of the film is about making questionable life choices and paying the price for them; it's also about redemption, and giving people second (or third, or fourth) chances. What does it take to see and nurture a light in a lost person's soul?

I thought also about therapy last week (yes, I am still hanging in there for my husband's sake--don't ask). My husband wanted to talk about something going on in my life, but I declined. The therapist cannot keep up with me. EVER. She pisses me off. Hugely. It ends badly when I go there with her, always. She doesn't listen to me, I feel angry that I am paying $175/hour for someone not following what I am saying, and what I am saying gives access to part of myself that I have walled off. So. Not. Worth. It. Mark insisted, and I tried. I was giving a detail, slowly, articulately, and then she asked, immediately after I had said it, for exactly the information I had just given. I could not make this up. Mark then said, "She just told you that." Thank goodness, because I had smoke coming out of my ears and fire blazing out of my eyes. SERIOUSLY? She asked me THAT? Then she said that I am uncommonly perceptive and smart, and able to hang onto details better than most people. I hold people to my standard when they are not up to it. Maybe.

I asked my friend Katie about that today, and she agreed with the therapist that I am, when I am focused on something, an extremely sharp listener and very perceptive. I remember details for years if they are meaningful. She said that I am an excellent friend and expect my friends to be superlative; failure is betrayal. Well, yes and no. Katie and I have had fights. I know what her strengths are. I don't ask for things she cannot give. That's true for most of my friendships. I still think that a therapist, being paid $175/hour should have excellent listening skills. EXCELLENT ones. If they cannot remember what you said two seconds previously, where were they? Shopping in the grocery store in their head? Yes, people make mistakes, but this has been more than once. More than twice. It's a pattern, habitual. It's egregious. And annoying. So I won't go there, anymore.

Then today Nalini and Boreth suggested that I see the new Terence Malick film, To the Wonder. But I couldn't bring myself to go alone, after reading several reviews and thinking about how it's about failed love and aloneness. I have quite enough of that in my own life, thanks; even if there are exquisite scenes of Paris and Mont St.-Michel, and Ben Affleck is handsome, no. I knew that if I went alone, I would go to a place in myself that I don't want to visit. I cannot go there. It's walled off. Must. Leave. It. Alone. My dragon, my emotions, are sleeping. I should not, must not, cannot wake them.

Never, never, never growing up did I think I would become Queen of a castle with many keeps and labyrinths. I love to stay out in the gardens, or in the library. Love the library. I enjoy having people in for tea and discussions, but nothing more.

I remember starting graduate school in my early 20's and thinking that the older graduate students were strangely hard and jaded. I see now that cynicism is the result of a life lived with disappointment, and finding one's way through the ruins, regardless. Not being unhappy, necessarily, but seeing the greys and blacks as well as the bright colors in the world, accepting them all, and finding peace with one's lot.  It's more difficult some days than others. It's not as simple as being either an optimist or a pessimist. Most days I am both at once, before breakfast. I would be at home in Wonderland.

This being a roundabout way of saying I made a choice to avoid the aesthetic melancholy of Malick in favor of Pablo Larrain's film No, about the campaign to unseat Pinochet in a plebiscite. It was a thoughtful film, with its own difficult components of brutality and longing and beauty. I was a callow teen-ager when the events it described took place; I appreciated learning more about what happened then (albeit in this form, perhaps not the most reliable source).

I feel energized by the film to to go my union meeting on Wednesday; there is always a worthy fight. The film also reminded me of a Argentinian photograph I'd seen at the War/Photography exhibition, Marcelo Brodsky's Class Photo, 1960, that he'd annotated: some were disappeared; some had moved abroad; some refused to speak to him; some were married with kids; some were merely "VIVE" or alive. I stood in front of that photograph, reproduced in large format (117 x 174.6cm) and cried for almost half an hour. The damage wrought by war on a generation was like scars, inscribed in words. Terrifying, horrifying visual violence.

It seemed that the main character in No, Rene, dealt with his own trauma in many ways by not going there; by working in advertising; by refusing to look at the truth and atrocities of the dictatorship. Or maybe by looking, but by holding part of himself back? How can you begin to process so much pain? It reminds me of the feelings my friend Daniel describes upon reviewing card after card of deceased children, archived in his orphanage, in Beirut.

Sometimes, if you go there, you get lost. And don't come back.

Quotidien

A day like any other. Almost.

It's my birthday today. I made it through another year, one full of hope, disappointment, change and hope again.

I was thinking of notable birthdays past: surrounded by friends in England 23 years ago as I turned 21; in Paris 21 years ago; driving to LA with a fever 18 years ago; being gloriously drunk 17 years ago with my closest friends at a huge party in my honor; eating pizza in London 16 years ago (rather a more sedate affair). Since then, it's usually been marked much less dramatically.

I was thinking about reading in an article in The New Yorker last night about Noah Baumbach, in which he said he wrote a screenplay "about realizing that you're not the young people anymore." Aging happens to everyone, but it's rather difficult to swallow, nonetheless.

I am excited to be seeing Richard Linklater's Before Midnight in a few weeks at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and watching Jesse and Celine's characters and relationship mature, just as my generation has grown up. What is left of our passions from our 20's? What kind of people have we made ourselves into? I am curious to see what tale the film tells about us now.

But before I mourn my youth entirely, I wouldn't call myself quite dead, at least not yet. I may have wished myself so, more than once, but forces have thus far conspired to prevent that eventuality. I am pleased now to have reached a place of peace where I value myself and see that I still have much to offer the world.

Who else, as on a day like today, would take my kids to sketch wildflowers at Land's End in San Francisco? Who would talk about the camera obscura and da Vinci, when Tobey asked? Who would debate the relative merits of Odilon Redon and Henri Fantin-Latour in the 19th-century gallery with Mark, who is biased against Symbolism? Most important, who would love my family as I do?

There are things that make me me; some of them are frustrating, I grant. Some of them I don't like, and I try to change. But some of them are worth celebrating, and I love the people who see and celebrate them with me. The restlessness and itchiness of youth (read: lack of faith in myself) seem to have faded. That is a huge, welcome surprise.

Thus on with the day-to-day task of living: may it bring more unexpected joys, woven in amongst the dark threads I know so well.

Today, in honor of my dear Symbolistes: Redon's Vase of Flowers, 1901, that I admired this afternoon

And

Woman Asleep

Within my young friend's heart what mysteries keep
aglow, soul from this sweet mask breathing a flower?
From what vain aliments does her candid ardor
kindle this radiance in a woman asleep?

Breath, silence, dreams, insuperable lull,
you triumph, O peace stronger than a tear,
when the heavy wave and vastness of this full
sleep in such an enemy's breast conspire.

Sleeper, golden heap of shade and surrender,
your formidable rest is laden with such boons,
doe among the grape-clusters stretched in languor,

that, though the soul be off in hell's communes,
your body with the pure belly a limp arm hides,
watches; your body watches, and my eyes are wide.

Paul Valéry/trans. C.F. Macintyre

Onward, Soldier!

Meltdown.

I had my EPIC meltdown. Two and a half weeks in. I was told it was inevitable. I had watched others crumble. I had been irritable, but I'd avoided the complete show. Until yesterday.

We Plus You Sutter implemented new online charting, which is great, in theory. What's not great is that they bought a new system without asking for RN imput, didn't train us properly, changed protocols without telling us, have not provided enough support, and expect us to do nursing and about 85% more charting. It's onerous, and frankly unsafe.

On my first day with EPIC, I had two patients and triaged someone. It was very stressful. I did okay, and ploughed through a delivery. The system went down at midnight. On day FOUR of Go Live. What kind of planning is that? Whew.

But yesterday, bad communication, disappearing orders for magnesium sulfate, not having what I needed to able to take care of a patient after an hour in the PACU? I understand that as a team, we are all learning, but I felt that the MDs were treating my patient like we were still in what we call the "playground," where it's about practice--but my patient was real! Very real. In pain, and on critical meds. Medications would come and go from the administration record. It was frankly unbelievable. Two RNs by my side were equally astounded. I threw up my hands and apologized to my patient. "I am so sorry. I cannot take care of you properly like this."

I went to the hallway, took a breath, and began to cry. Shit. That was the second time I've ever cried publicly at work; the first was when I heard that my uncle died. I felt so unprofessional, but I was so profoundly ANGRY. I work in a tightly knit unit where there is a great deal of support, but I hate the atmosphere right now. HATE IT. It's poisonous. Everything that's awful is magnified.

I hate that we have the cheapest model of EPIC, and that it doesn't mesh with our fetal heart-rate monitoring software. I hate that you cannot look at the chalkboard and get a quick overview of what's happening with each patient. I hate that our unit is being punished for being activist. I hate that I feel I cannot be the best RN I can be with all the new constraints. This is not why I changed careers to serve others.

After I collected myself and gained counsel from the wise, I decided to focus purely on my patient and chart what I could, and to say the hell with the rest, filing a Technology Despite Opposition form from the union. My charge RN said she would run interference with the MDs, one of whom said she is so fed up she is in "bitch mode." Okay. And that makes communication easier...how?

I get it. We're all fried. But the patients are being sacrificed. We Plus You? LOL

One more day, one more day, one more day. And thus into battle go I.

Before the Charge

The night is still and the air is keen,

   Tense with menace the time crawls by,

In front is the town and its homes are seen,

   Blurred in outline against the sky.

The dead leaves float in the sighing air,

   The darkness moves like a curtain drawn,

A veil which the morning sun will tear

   From the face of death. -- We charge at dawn.

Patrick MacGill

Accidents

That we would do, 
We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh, 
That hurts by easing.

Shakespeare, Hamlet IV, vii, 132-137

I have been mulling over small events that lead to bigger events, and how sometimes we fight these things, and how sometimes we must accept what we don't necessarily like.

At dinner with Mr. Nearly Perfect the other night, Nalini was telling him and his wife about my period of depression and suicidal ideation, which wasn't my crowning moment of glory. I cannot remember now what it felt like to be so hopeless, to feel so unmoored to humanity, but I do remember it was awful and painful in the abyss. I have been depressed before, and Mr. Nearly Perfect had helped to buoy me up through some of it. I was embarrassed to have him hear of this one particular episode. I didn't want him to know, to think I was weak.

But his response was, "I am glad that you fought so hard. I am glad we didn't lose you." It's hard for me to allow myself to be vulnerable on that level to people in my real life, to people I am afraid of losing.

I was talking to my friend Katie the week before, about emotions bleeding over and crippling people in work and everyday functioning. I tend not to think of myself as strong, and she called bullshit on me. She said, "You were the top of your class always, even when you were bullied and hated yourself because you know how to compartmentalize your emotions. You don't think you do, but you do. That's why you can work and have relationships and live, even when you're fucked up beyond belief. You only let certain of us see it. Less functional people self-sabotage. You don't."

Maybe Thomenon was right when he said I was stronger than I believed. He is a survivor of genocide. I don't know how he does it. He says it's because there's no choice. He says that it's the same for me.

I know that I am not the product of a love match. I am the accidental baby of a one-night stand. Given other circumstances, I would have been aborted. I am okay with that, but I am here. I did always hate myself, and tried to prove to myself and others that I was worthy of their love, that I was good enough. Somehow, I guess, I only did self-sabotage in relationships; it was about my heart. Not work or education. And maybe now, I see that what I was looking for, I always had.

This accident of my conception and birth was beyond my control, but I am connected by it to people nonetheless. Through the accidents of gene combination, I am clearly the progeny of this man, if you compare our faces:

My grandfather had the benefit of youth when that particular photograph was taken. LOL

And, as Mr. Nearly Perfect said, when looking at this photograph of my younger son, "Now there's a resemblance."

Again, the roll of the die of DNA. My elder son looks nothing like me, except for his eyes. It's all his father.

So many accidents. As an anxious person, accidents bother me, set me off balance. How do I deal with the resulting mess, the chaos? I become a deer in the headlights in the face of mess. Not so much actual mess, sadly, as my husband would say, but intellectual mess. Life is messy; children have helped me accept that. Things do not go as planned. That's all right. I deal with that at work, as well. We hope for a vaginal delivery, but we don't always get it. When that fetal heart rate dips, we run to the OR. Such is life, and protecting it.

What I do love is that the accident that resulted in me perhaps might not have been the catastrophe so many people painted it to be, or the catastrophe I took it to be. I still have quite a few things to say. What a relief! Getting older certainly does have its advantages.

Perception

I am back from two days in Los Angeles.

I went with my dear friend Nalini to visit the War/Photography exhibition at the Annenberg Center for Photography. I was fascinated, but I felt that some necessary voices were absent. I cried. I fell in love with some soldiers; I questioned myself and my beliefs. I was horrified. I felt that I lacked the courage that people in my family have had, fighting in these wars. I mourned again not knowing my grandfather William. I thought of what my brother told me of his experiences in Afghanistan. I felt very small.

It's also very safe to look at these images in a building in Los Angeles. Aestheticized violence. I don't know for a minute what it's like to be under fire, to worry about being under fire, or about starving, or about much related to poverty or being truly dispossessed. I am overprivileged.

I felt guilty ogling one particular photograph of a man, taken by Harold Bristol, protege of Edward Steichen, showing a male nude, wet and sweaty, just after he had saved a downed pilot in the Pacific, and as he manned guns in a plane. Clearly, the photo [PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, 1944] is about the male body and sex, but the context is unexpected. It's disturbing and arousing and strange.

So much of war photography is about masculinity, hyper-masculinity, white masculinity, and defining it as unstoppable strength. It was moving, beyond moving, then, to see photographs like Al Chang's A grief stricken American infantryman whose buddy has been killed in action is comforted by another soldier. In the background a corpsman methodically fills out casualty tags, Haktong-ni area, Korea, August 28, 1950.

The holding of a comrade who is broken, grieving. A man allowing another man freely to express his emotions (of sadness, not rage). How often does that happen?

And I think again of my father-in-law and my grandfather, in WWII, fighting on opposite sides: my grandfather in his tank division, moving eastward, and my father-in-law on the Russian front until wounded, then fleeing west and hoping to avoid slaughter by the Russians.

My husband recently returned from visiting his dad, and asked him more about his experience in the war, and how it felt to kill someone, and how many men he killed, etc. In one battle on the Russian front, apparently his division ended up with more Russian POWs than they could keep and they killed them all. It sounded horrific. I was glad I didn't hear the story. I recently tried to watch Band of Brothers and couldn't make it past episode three. It's not that it isn't great acting. It's just that it's too real. I can watch the zombie apocalpyse and pretend that it's okay. But WWII really happened.

I have heard that my grandfather came back from WWII with PTSD that landed him in the hospital (I do come by my mental health issues quite honestly). According to a book I read, his tank division was involved in liberating a concentration camp. That task would be enough to fuck me up for a lifetime.

On another note, while in LA I had a lovely dinner with Nearly Perfect Man on Paper and his wife. It feels amazingly good to have great people in one's corner and to feel cared for; when I wrote recently that some people really understand me, I was speaking the truth. I also found that I remembered wrongly why he and I had not gone to museums when we were in Paris in December of 1995. I asked, "Were we museum-ed out or something? I can't remember why all we did was go to Pere Lachaise and do oddball things." He said, "I cannot think of a time ever when you'd be museum-ed out. It was because of the big strike. No museums were open. We tried the Centre Pompidou, the Musee Rodin, etc., and gave up. So we walked everywhere in the bitter cold and had fun anyway, looking at public sculpture, at the Opera Garnier, at the Arc de Triomphe, etc." Oh, yeah. The strike. We almost couldn't fly to Provence. I have a fairly remarkable memory, but not a perfect one. I was thankful to have him help me remember.

Mr. Nearly Perfect on Paper eagerly asked for a full recounting of my search and reunion, which Nalini helped me to provide. His evaluation and support were spot on. He has clearly never forgotten the needs of the little girl in my heart (and I am both fortunate and grateful for that). He even went so far as to bring me an unexpected present: a t-shirt from the Math Club at his institution, run by his undergraduates. There was a Math Day in honor of a woman mathematician who had taught both at Goettingen (where my husband got his Math degree) and at Bryn Mawr in the early 20th century. She was instrumental in the field of Math in which Mr. Nearly Perfect works. Always the thoughtful, creative one, is he.

And his wife is very, very cool (not to mention that she has figured out how to deal with his quirks, way better than I ever did). She, in fact, has a search mission of her own: she is looking for a surprise older sibling who was adopted out. I am hoping to help her with this search. It was fun to brag about Mr. Nearly Perfect a little, with her (all those languages he speaks! that Gainsborough portrait of his ancestor!). And to hear her complain, and to know what she was talking about, too--his shortcomings are not unlike my husband's (but my husband is definitely more of a pushover).

I am pleased with the way in which I spent my time away. I return refreshed, although the War/Photography exhibition was harrowing on multiple levels. I cherished the opportunity to be with one of my dearest friends (I didn't wail in Times Square this time!), and I reconnected with someone who also knows me very, very well (or at least once did, and still clearly does on some levels). It was lovely to hear that I am not a museum Nazi from at least two people I care about.

Perception is powerful. We all want to be seen and loved for who we are; that is one of the best gifts we can receive (or give to someone, if we are perceptive enough, in return). If that is my birthday gift this year, I will be very pleased.

Analysis

My immediate family has or is doing DNA analysis through 23andMe. I sent off my test in February, and my results came back about a month ago. I had an almost out-of-body reaction to them. They were different-ish than the results I had received from the DNATribes test, for various reasons (analyzing mitochondrial DNA for the maternal line only instead of looking at autosomal data, etc.). My ancestry proved both more and less amorphous than before.

I am, according to 23andMe, 99.5% European: 6.1% French and German, 4.9% British and Irish, 0.8% Scandinavian, 0.7% Finnish, plus 53% "Nonspecific" Northern European; 10.8% Ashkenazi plus 0.2% "Nonspecific" Southern European; and 23% European mutt that is indecipherable as any particular group. Then there's 0.2% North African, and 0.4% "Unassigned." Curious.

I suppose that all my German jokes must cease; I cannot say that I am actually French and not German out of that 6.1%. Funny. I do feel vindicated by the 10.8% Ashkenazi, as I have written before. Although I never would have thought of myself as Jewish (being raised by Scandinavian and Irish people who told me that my background was German and Irish, which it is, at least in part), I was recognized as one by members of the tribe when I was 18. They knew, I didn't. That sixth sense of belonging?

I remember when I first contacted my brother, and I asked, "Are we Jewish?" He said, "No. Why?" And we aren't, technically, since my mother and grandmother aren't. No one had ever asked my brother if he were Jewish (maybe it's the difference in our looks, or the way I carry myself, or the different company we keep?), but we have Ashkenazi blood in our family tree somewhere. I wonder if I can figure out which ancestors.

I have spent so much of my life imagining links to unknown people, and thinking that I do what I do because of some gift bestowed upon me by an ancestor. I still believe in the power of genes, to some extent; I see genetic influence in my own biological children, all the time: quirks of grandparents or of their father and me, working themselves out in new ways in my sons (interests, intellectual strengths, expression of emotions, etc.). I am realizing, however, that there are too many variables to tease out any particular, meaningful influences. I owe biology; I owe nurture; I owe myself; I owe my friends; I owe the School of Hard Knocks.

My interest in and facility for languages, for example. My aparents are not language people, not one bit.  I have always loved languages, and began studying French when I was eight, and picked up German high school (I loved reading the Chalet School books as a girl in England, and thought that having different language days at boarding school would have been great--immersion, baby!). I added on Russian and Greek, Latin, Spanish, Irish, Welsh through the years. I mean, if you learn one Celtic language, why not attempt two, so that you can read the Mabinogi in the original? Yeah, big geek. I know.

I have mentioned before that my nmother, C, majored in French and Spanish and taught languages as her career. I only learned this when I was 28. It wasn't some "dream" that I wanted to be like her all my life. It was simply serendipitous, while it makes sense. But at the same time, I take that interest to a degree that is obsessive compared to my mother, who likes languages, but taught them as a job and doesn't choose to read books in foreign languages for personal enjoyment.

Age and friendships have also shaped whatever my genetic inheritance was. It doesn't hurt that Thomenon, one of my best friends, grew up speaking French and was immersed in French culture through the armature of colonialism. He introduced me to Trenet and Piaf, because his parents and aunts listened to them. He has helped me to think critically about Duras and Baudelaire in ways that I wouldn't on my own. He corrects my pronunciation with a raised eyebrow and loving shake of the head, having been put through his own wringer, with the nuns, chez his aunts, and at the Sorbonne. He thinks so poetically, I cannot but help to try to do the same. Now I can also add my own experiences to thinking about poetry and drama and literature, having been around the block more than a few times myself (as I've written before, some literature becomes more meaningful with age).

I began by saying that I had an out-of-body reaction to the results. This was, I believe, because I see myself as not belonging, in particular, to anyplace or anyone (except, perhaps, to my children). I may have successfully walled off my feelings and desires (or, I hope, reconciled with them), and for a moment, reaction to what I don't have flashed through the wall. I have spent too many years, though, thinking about the what ifs, or wanting to know things that might illuminate some secret part of me. I would undoubtedly have been a different person, had I not been placed for adoption, but the life I am living now is all I have.

All this to say that my DNA results mean something, something big perhaps, but are still only a drop in the bucket of understanding myself. How much of me is "nonspecified," meaning it's as amorphous as I want it to be? There is no magic key to understanding me. Only time and interest and patience.

I am all for taking some parts of DNA results as they are today with huge grains of salt: my report also said that I was likely shorter than average (nope, taller) and had a worse than average memory (nope, make me laugh!). Shoddy science, relying on only analysis of isolated gene expression and studies with a sample size of 20 or less. Humans are far too complicated to quantify in that manner. *sigh*

On the positive side, the DNA test did figure out my 35% increased risk for blood clots. LOL If only I (and my MDs) had known that five years ago. But then I wouldn't be as thin as I am today. Thank you, blood clot! /sarcasm

The Beauty of Metaphor

I recently finished a remarkable book of short stories by Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain, reviewed in the NYT here. I am not easily persuaded by contemporary authors to love them, and can count only on one hand the number whose books I wait for with eagerness, or whose stories will energize me when I see their names in Granta or The New Yorker. I am a hard customer, for sure.

That said, a few weeks back, I was poking around our local bookstore, one of the few that Amazon hasn't killed yet. I read a few pages from The News from Spain and found myself transported. Wickersham's voice spoke to my cynical soul. There were no secret mothers in this book, no adoptees (Colm Toibin, one of my favorite writers, recently pissed me off by extolling family secrets in "The Summer of '38"). Alleluia for Joan.

In particular, I loved her discussion of unruly emotions in the last story of the book. She used the metaphor of servants, doing our bidding, or not doing our bidding, or beating us up. It's admittedly a white, upper middle-class metaphor, and maybe I like it because of my penchant for British history and Henry James. Who knows?

But still...her words are evocative, at least for me.

"it occurs to me to return to the servant metaphor--to invoke again those evil retainers, to add new members to the staff, who were by now holding me captive, doing whatever they wanted. Rage: a stable boy, unwashed, brutal, very strong, barely capable of speech. Shame: the housekeeper, a tight-lipped woman dressed in black with sparse greasy scraped-back hair, who hissed excited filth at me and watched--to guard against impropriety, she said--while the butler stripped me naked and beat me."

And again:

"You meet someone, you fall in love but you are able to keep your feelings mostly hidden; occasionally they cough, or break a dinner plate, or burn down the kitchen (accidentally? On purpose?), but mostly they stay out of sight when other people are around. At night they have run of the house. It's a creepy, even sinister menage. An outsider who happened to glimpse it might be horrified--might as you in a whisper if you needed to be rescued: Wouldn't you like to call in the authorities? But no, you're fine. It's your own lunatic household; you know how everything works. You've all been together for so long that the servants have acquired a battered credibility. They've endeared themselves without ever having become likable. You respect one another's endurance."

Oh, the kitchen burnings I could describe. Lovely, delicious metaphor.

I am having dinner next week with Nearly Perfect Man on Paper and his wife. I know he will appreciate this metaphor, having endured many of more than a few of my servants' roundly recalcitrant outbreaks. I am glad that we're attempting friendship, of the real and not metaphorical kind. Some people do simply understand you; finding them is difficult, keeping them can be hard, as well. But it's worth it, especially if you're an eccentric. I daresay he, being an eccentric math professor juggler, might have discovered that I am not so bad, either; we used to finish one another's sentences in multiple languages. I was joking with him about what it's like teaching math to today's youth, and he said that respect for math is what it's always been, and they'd better keep off his lawn. Sense of humor is intact.

Age has the great effect of sanding off one's sharper bits, as well. We will see.

Pure Horror

When are babies removed from parents at birth? When parents pose an imminent danger. I see this happen only very, very, very rarely, due to extreme drug use, and even then, the baby is in the NICU, not forcibly removed.

If you can, read 7rin's blog post (excerpted below) and watch this video and tell me that trafficking isn't happening. This makes me ill. Adoption as an institution is sick. Where is the real help for these parents? To keep them a family?

What about the trauma visited on them? Why? She is promised clean clothes. How comforting is that in the midst of loss? As the father said, this stealing. One woman says, "We'll talk again, when you're calmer." Reassuring her? Patronizing? WTF? As someone said, it's Stalinist.

This baby is being released for adoption, no doubt. A beautiful, white, boy baby, one day old.

Thank you, 7rin, for bringing this to the attention of the community.

I first started this post in reaction to 6th March’s Daily Wail Mail article, social workers arrived at hospital to take woman’s baby while she was in labour.

A mother is demanding an apology from social services after her baby was taken away from her as soon as she was born.

Kelly McWilliams, 36, claims that social workers arrived at her bedside while she was in labour and took her newborn daughter Victoria into foster care.

I’d already posted about this subject before (AMBER ALERT! Missing child snatched!) and wanted to look at it in more depth. However, due to my entire crapness at getting things done, the post has been sat here as one of my many unfinished drafts.

Friday just gone (5th April), there appeared yet another post about a Social Services (Staffordshire, again) snatching (literally) a newborn from its mom. This time, it’s an extremely harrowing video showing the newborn being snatched from its screaming mom’s arms.

Dissonance

I was thinking about my DNA results this morning--more about that another time--and my being 10% Ashkenazi. Several of my friends, when told, said, "Duh!" I love that. As I have written before, more than once in my past I have been grabbed by fellow students to be taken to Hillel meetings. Or Jewish boys have thought for certain I was in the tribe. Well, sort of, in a very remote way. It was strange to be recognized as being Jew-ish without having a clue about it myself.

And then...I get some photographs on my phone, from my husband, who is visiting his dad in Germany. They are reminders of the stash of photographs we can never put up on the wall. EVER. Of course, forget the one of Opa with Goebbels at Hitler Youth Camp. I find them fascinating as historical documents; they're nerve wracking otherwise since I know the sitter.

And the Ahnenpass, the official Nazi-enforced family tree/document to "prove" that there was no Jewish blood in the family.

It's just one of those days of clashing.

I think *I* have identity issues? My kids are going to have quite their own.

The More Things Don't Change

I credit Addie Pray for bringing me into the fold of online adoptees, nearly five years ago. She is another Missouri adoptee, and she has been active in the slow slog towards getting Missouri adoptees their OBCs. As she wrote on her blog about four years ago, "let's face it, Missouri needs a kick in the ass." *sigh*

This year there was a proposed bill that seemed like more of the same of what we already have or have had, what with requiring CIs to go between adoptee and first parents, and notarized "permission slips" and paying whatever costs the CIs come up with in finding our first families--too much room for abuse, and no respect for adult adoptee integrity. I know exactly whom my agency would appoint: the same CI who was abusive to me and my mother before. Why would she be more efficient, except that I could give her telephone numbers and addresses? I cannot imagine she'd be more on the ball, or kinder, or charge less. I have read online that she's told more adoptees than me that their first parents want nothing to do with them. I wonder to myself, "Did she actually find them? Or did she phrase introductions so coldly that things were made impossible?" Hard to tell; I am skeptical and not particularly forgiving.

I know that some people in Missouri have just loved their CIs, and more power to them. That's beside the point, however. I consider the CI system itself infantilizing. Arguing about "good" versus "bad" CIs is details, not substance. Why should any of us be required to pay anyone to do this go-between work for us to the tune of $500+ (that some people cannot afford, btw); why should we have to be treated as potential criminals; why should the state be involved to such a degree in people's business in the first place?

How about a bill that allows adoptees to go to the appropriate courthouse, pay a fee, and get her or his OBC? How about that? Oh, yes, then the CIs would be out of work; I am sure they're lobbying in favor of those "closeted" mothers, and guileless little adoptees, their meal tickets.

Getting one's OBC is about getting a document that everyone else has a right to have for themselves: it's a government-issued document about ourselves. It's not about searching, or not only about searching. I found my family without mine; many people do. OBC access is a matter of integrity, a matter of insisting that the state not sanction secrets. That's why clean bills are so important. Why are some individuals simply more fortunate, more deserving than others? I have lived too long on the margins among the outcasts to agree that it's all right to create more fortunate/less fortunate groups and hope for more change down the road. Wait for what's right.

I refused to write letters for in support of HB 252 this year. I find its terms unacceptable and unconscionable. I include the part related to me below, emphasis mine. And especially fuck permission slips, written for adults. We are not children.

453.515. 1. (1) For all adoptions completed on or prior to August 28, 2013, an adopted person who is at least eighteen years of age, born in this state, and provides proof of identification, or the adopted person's lineal descendants if the adopted person is deceased, may request that the department of social services, the child-placing agency which processed the adoption, or the court personnel make reasonable efforts to notify the birth mother and birth father of the request of the adopted adult or the adopted adult's lineal descendants to request their consent to release a copy of the adopted adult's original birth certificate. If the department of social services does not have sufficient information or resources to locate and notify the birth mother and birth father, the department may refer the adopted person or the adopted person's lineal descendants to, or work in conjunction with, the child-placing agency or the court to notify the birth mother and birth father of the request of the adopted adult or the adopted adult's lineal descendants. The department of social services, the child-placing agency, or the court may charge actual costs to the adopted adult or the adopted adult's lineal descendants for the cost of attempting to notify the birth mother and birth father. All communications under this section are confidential. For purposes of this subsection, "notify" means personal and confidential contact with the birth mother and birth father of the adopted adult, which initial contact shall be made by an employee of the department of social services, the child-placing agency which processed the adoption, court personnel, or some other licensed child-placing agency designated by the department of social services, the child-placing agency, or the court. Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the disclosure of communications privileged under section 491.060.

            (2) If the birth mother and birth father consent to the release of the original birth certificate, the department of social services, the child-placing agency, or the court personnel shall obtain a copy of a notarized form developed by the state registrar provided by the court and signed by the birth mother and birth father, if known, giving consent to release the original birth certificate and provide it to the adopted person or the adopted person's lineal descendants. The adopted person or the adopted person’s lineal descendants may obtain a copy of the adopted person's original birth certificate in accordance with subsection 5 of section 453.510 upon presenting the notarized consent form to the state registrar.

            (3) If the birth mother or birth father does not consent to the release of a copy of the original birth certificate or cannot be located, such copy shall not be released. The adopted person or the adopted person's lineal descendants if the adopted person is deceased may request that the department of social services, the child-placing agency, or the court personnel contact the birth mother and birth father again not less than three years after the date of his or her original request and not less than three years from the date of any future requests.

            2. Upon the birth mother's and birth father's death, the adopted person or the adopted person's lineal descendants if the adopted person is deceased may obtain a copy of the original birth certificate from the state registrar.

            3. Any time a copy of an original birth certificate is obtained under this section, the state registrar shall issue an uncertified copy of the unaltered, original birth certificate to the adopted person or the adopted person's lineal descendants if the adopted person is deceased. The copy of the birth certificate shall have the following statement printed on it: "For informational purposes only - not to be used for establishing identity."

Who Will Pay for Greed?

My union is still in contract "negotiations" with Sutter Health, a Utah based not-for-profit hospital consortium. I hate them. So much.

I am glad to have my union to protect me, but Sutter is doing all it can to bust the union. We have been striking and fighting not for raises, but simply to maintain our contract and *safe* working practices for over 18 months.

My unit, Labor and Delivery, has the most activists in our two hospitals. All of us in L&D but ONE honor the strike. That's over 150 nurses on the line. We are punished routinely for this with not enough staffing when we need it. Last week, for example, night shift had only 14 nurses with a board that called for 24 nurses just to be safe. Our charge RN called the managers to ask for time-and-a-half to call nurses in to work at 3 am. I mean, who in their right mind is going to come in to work when it's slammed, as a favor to the employer? Seriously? Patients were waiting in triage, delivering in the hallway, bleeding. It was unsafe.  The manager: "No. We cannot authorize overtime because the union is voting on a strike next week."

So management has made the decision to jeopardize patient safety because we RNs are entitled to strike  under labor law. It's horrific, and punitive, primarily to patients.

We have had multiple near misses for bad events. What will it take for them to meet with us to talk about patient safety? One death? Two? Three? How many dead babies?

We had invited the Chief Nursing Executives to meet with a union committee focused on patient safety for over a year. No response. A month ago, they finally agreed. They asked as many L&D RNs to come to the committee meeting as possible to talk about what we've witnessed. Many of us did. Then the executives canceled at the 11th hour and sent designees from HR instead, who, by the way, are now called "Business Partners," just to make it clear they're not there for us, but for the corporation. The Business Partners, moreover, had nothing to do with staffing, and nothing to do with L&D. Interesting. They promised to take our messages to management, but after the meeting never returned our e-mail or telephone calls. Interesting. In true punitive form, HR hijacked *our* meeting to tell us that we were "unprofessional" for not treating traveler RNs (the ones who were scabs for our strikes but then hired to help out sometimes when our staffing was low) politely enough. We said that we were polite, but that we didn't need to be friends with them. He rolled his eyes at us. How professional is that?

So no change.

Then yesterday a follow-up meeting was scheduled, and HR was told that they were not invited. It was for the nursing executives *only* to attend with us. HR told us that it was five "Business Partners," plus the nursing executives, or nothing. Our contract states that we cannot deal with HR directly, but that if the nursing executives designate one of them as proxy, that is all right. ONE person, ONE proxy. Not five plus three. There was a standoff outside the door, and HR would not let the executives speak when we invited the executives alone inside. We consequently did not let *any* of them enter our meeting. It was a union meeting, a closed meeting. Clearly, HR wants to police us and the executives so that nothing is promised (i.e., no money is spent). It's sick.

Oh, and one of the "Business Partners" told our Labor Rep that "so many RNs in a room is intimidating." Well, maybe to him. But the nurse managers MANAGE all of us, so it shouldn't be all that intimidating if they're doing their job right and want to listen and make change.

Please, no one tell me to hear Sutter's side. Don't tell me that it's expensive to hire staff. It's morally wrong to have someone die when conditions are known to be less than what the state demands. We are writing up exceptions and letting everyone know. It's not about their feelings v. our feelings. Sometimes, there is a WRONG side. We have a moral obligation to do no wrong, not just take the patients' money (or MediCal).

I don't want patients to suffer, but apparently Sutter thinks $$$ comes first. Which is crazy, given all the overtime they end up paying us, anyway. I am going to file an affadavit and stand before the National Labor Relations Board, if needed, regarding the committee meeting fiasco. It's harrassment and unacceptable.

Sutter is trying to break our resolve to stand together. They won't do it. Stay tuned.

Creating Meaning

Since my trip to see the Drawing Surrealism exhibition at LACMA, I have been thinking about Apollinaire's calligrammes, which aren't surrealism proper but are so fraught with curious meaning. They have been talked to death; earnest people make calligrammes for their loved ones all the time. They're the poetic equivalent of Monet, really. But still I love Apollinaire's originals.

They're dark and can be quite nasty, despite their outwardly cheery, pretty facades. The political and emotional messages are fabulously pointed.

As in, how can a horse be "all horribly/dreadfully/terribly"? Think about it. Fantastic. Of course, now thinking about it, it's a juxtaposition of the horse, and a description of himself, his signature. I wish I had that kind of deprecating humor and moxie. I might say it, but I wouldn't write it.

And speaking of the French, I recently discovered a group that has revived the old song tradition that I so love. For some reason, blogger won't let me use accents, which is embarrassing, but they're called the "Tetes Raides." They appeal to the nostalgic nerd in me who idealizes the 30's and 40's. I especially like this collaboration with Jeanne Moreau.

Competing Memories, Persistent Memories

I went to the ballet last Friday and saw a production of "Nijinsky," John Neumeier's take on what went through Vaslav Nijinsky's head during his last performance in 1919. It touched on the highlights of his dance career, his loves, war. There were moments in which persistent memories abutted competing memories; Nijinsky would be torn away from one lover by remembering another, for example. Or he would remember dancing Le Sacre du Printemps while a passage from La Sylphide would glide through.

It resonated with me. As well as Nijinsky's madness, of course. Always the madness. But is it madness, or is it simply trying to make sense of things that don't made sense, that cannot make sense? When does reverie bleed into trauma, pleasure turn into self-hatred and doubt?

I have been thinking quite a bit about the past, and mourning, and remembering, and revisionism, especially in trying to make sense of a relationship of mine that failed sixteen plus years ago now. I am finally seeing that I was rather doctrinaire, and different things are coming into focus that are helpful.

What does it mean to put someone first, to love them? Does it mean that they have to be with you all the time? That others cannot love and appreciate them, too? I was so very young and scared. I remember, in particular, when I was planning to walk to receive my master's degree. My then-boyfriend was going to be the best man in a college friend's wedding, in Idaho. My graduation weekend conflicted with the wedding, which meant I could not attend the wedding: all my family would be in Berkeley and had to be entertained. My guy really wanted to be in the wedding. I felt horribly betrayed by this preference, although he made it back in time for my actual graduation ceremony. In retrospect, his choice seems like such a petty thing to worry about, but at the time, it felt HUGE, absolutely as though he didn't love me at all. (I was 25 at the time, with not that much else to worry about.) Shouldn't I come *first*? Looking back, I see that I spent so much energy in that relationship being highly anxious about whether he loved me, when now, being secure in who I am, I can see that he really did love me all the time--just perhaps not in the all consuming way I wanted then. It's very sad. I might have been a very annoying girlfriend, I realize. I am sorry now that I was so insecure and lost that I spent New Year's Eve in Provence crying; that I moped in Scotland; that I didn't have it in me to be, to enjoy the moment. Especially because we were so alike in very many ways. But somehow I think that learning to live in the moment is something that had to come with age, at least for me.

I cannot say that our relationship would have survived had I been more secure in myself back then (I was the one who ended it, eventually), but it would have probably made for many fewer nights spent crying and singing to Gloria Gaynor.

The strange thing is that I always think that when I exit someone's life, I am erased. I remember them, but they don't remember me. I am like a ghost. Or they hate me, or some other such extreme thing. Especially because I have been in relationships with people who resolutely cut off contact without a word, and when I try to approach them even decades later--some of the ones I have truly cared about--they are still and silent as a tomb. I figure that either they continue to see me as the crazy fool I once was, or, as a wise friend recently suggested, they are unwilling to go bumping around in the basement of their feelings. Blinders and complacency do have much to say for themselves in terms of self-preservation.

I am therefore pleasantly surprised when people who clearly, truly did once love me are receptive and warm and kind. They are validating me outside my own mind; I mattered to them, as well. That is an amazing feeling.

My recent excursions into the past have thus been fruitful in that I have discovered some compassion for myself. I was so lost, so blind, so insecure. I created disasters in my head that weren't real and then possibly made myself live them, over and over. People do love me, even if it isn't exactly the way I might have imagined or hoped that they would.

That's what I've been missing: faith in myself and in others. Not faith in everyone, but faith in the right people, without willfully misreading the signs. I welcome those memories, competing and persistent, as they help me to learn new things about myself.

What Is the Starting Point?

I was thinking recently about the notion that adoption exists, that it simply is, and that we must deal with it. That we must find our home within it, as it is, or make pleas for small changes in the name of social justice, and be happy with glacial responses ("Hey! It's progress!). That if we're polite enough and use the subjunctive case with precision, "the powers that be" will grant us a seat at the table, and we can effect change. To be joyful with acknowledgments of small change; to accept everyone's opinion as "only their opinion" as though that isn't dividing and conquering in one fell swoop.

Well, adoption simply hasn't always existed the way it does today. To take adoption in 2013, and say that I must be polite to those suffering from Adopter Savior Syndrome as the starting point (offending them only scares them away!) is granting those in power the parameters of the discussion. I am angry. I don't want to be a house slave. I am well trained enough to be one, but I don't want to be one.

I work every day with people who are more disenfranchised than I am. Who live on the margins of society, and who are denigrated for being there, who are blamed for their "problems." No, American culture is far, far, far from equal for all. Even given the same education, some people are disadvantaged. They don't know that they're entitled to the same funding and concern as upper middle-class students of the dominant culture. I read an article in The Times in December, about three young women of color in Texas who did not manage to make the big step up in class, even given their considerable brains, because they lacked social and institutional supports. Another man I know is a professor at a local community college that used to provide services primarily to minority, low-income populations in the Bay Area. Many of these students lost their financial aid, however, because they didn't know how to ask for help with forms; because they had questions but didn't feel entitled to go to office hours, and so on. One particular student failed a required class called "Career Planning" and thus lost his grants: otherwise he had straight A's. First of all, who among us privileged people ever the hell had to take a class called "Career Planning" in college? What the hell is it, anyway? Why would that even be required for an A.A. degree? [Please don't answer that: it's a rhetorical question.] Second, if he'd felt entitled to more (which he didn't, sadly) he could have gone to the professor, or the dean to argue the decision. That's what all the people who went to college with me did when they were unhappy with anything; then again, their parents were paying $25,000+/year. Entitlement is taught as part of social privilege; it is an invisible cloak for those who have it, and it can be devastating to those who don't have it. Anyway, the local community colleges are now filled to the brim with middle-class white kids who are deferring entrance to four-year schools to save Mom and Dad money. Their parents pay the bills on time, they come to school reliably, etc. Who do you think has been squeezed out by this influx of middle-class kids? Yes! You're right! The very students whom the community college were supposed to be helping in the first place.

Then I was mulling over, again, this idea of the history of adoption, and of culture. I was reading a friend's blog and his thoughts on how the West projects onto Islam its worst fears. It scapegoats Muslims for what it fears most in itself, and within that unadmitted conceit, the notion of "saving" children is even more repugnant. His writing on adoption and the power of language here is particularly powerful, although he is always worth careful attention for his insights.

I suppose I am a socialist at heart, at the very least, maybe even a communist. I am coming out the closet. I do know that I am sick to death of totalitarian regimes, adoption included.

Representations of Self

I noticed that members of the Open Adoption Roundtable are doing a blog hop around art that they have in their homes. I am neither an open adoption blogger nor a serious artist/collector, but as I was in my kitchen this morning, I thought that I could share some of the works I have hanging in my home and why they represent me (if it's not immediately obvious).

On my long-ago trip to India, my friend Thomenon and I went to the Jama Majid (great mosque) in Old (Mughal) Delhi at 5:30 in the morning. The light was perfect. We wandered around, talked to people, listened to the fountains, and I watched the cats with delight. I took a slide of two men, after asking their permission, as they were talking on a porch (it was going to be for teaching purposes, back in the dark ages). I was surprised how beautifully the image turned out. My husband had the slide restored and made into a picture on canvas, that we mounted in the kitchen. The scene reminds me of my trip, and I imagine the men's friendship. I can remember the coolness of the marble under my bare feet, and the smell of the city. It's intensely personal.

On the other side of the kitchen are two photographs. One is a documentary photograph (copy of an original from the 20's) of a lid of a casket from the tomb of Tutankhamun, from which I taught my kids some rudimentary hieroglyphs, and how to read cartouches (pretty much all I know, to be honest). I love that the form of the lid is a cartouche.

Next to it is a print of a photograph by Charles Sheeler, the American photographer/painter, who did some photography for the Metropolitan Museum in 1943. He took this marvelous shot of some arms from a Neo-Assyrian relief, showing a king, Assurnasirpal II, and his cupbearer. Considering how blocky and schematic much of Neo-Assyrian art can look, I love the articulation of the muscles and the jewelry. Sheeler made such an interesting choice in how he framed this, with the phallic dagger hilt, the snake's head on the cup, and all. It's 100% testosterone. I wrote my A.B. thesis on the Neo-Assyrians and have a very soft place in my heart for the art of these warlords.

Next to my bed I have a framed print of the white hart from the Wilton Diptych, representing Richard II. I see it every morning when I awake. It reminds me of my childhood in England; my lithe staghounds, the Arts and Crafts Movement (which mined such objects for inspiration); Catholicism (it's part of an altarpiece); and peace. I apologize for the not-so-lovely photograph, but the glare on the glass was hard to avoid. (You can see my elder child, currently ill, lying in bed and reading if you look hard enough.) I couldn't get a decent picture because of terrible lighting, but I have a framed print of the scene of Virgin, Child, and Angels from the Diptych over my desk; the blue (surely expensive lapis) of the Virgin's and angels' gowns is calming, and I can always use the blessing of the Madonna.

And my muse, this young woman with a stylus (sometimes identified as Sappho), watches over the living room and my collection of books. I have adored this Roman wall painting from Pompeii for decades; she reminds me of myself. When I first put this up, Dad saw her and said, "Oh, it's YOU!"

Women's Bodies

I have had some rough cases at work recently, dealing with demises of babies close to term, but not quite. And having to help moms deal with their losses, and their tipping over the edge into despair that was truly psychosis. Extremely sad to watch. I felt powerless to do anything except to sit there and listen.

I am dedicated to helping women and children be healthy and safe. Every day at work, my goal is "Healthy mom, healthy baby."

And then I read horrible stories about women being sent to jail for ridiculous things concerning pregnancy, mostly because of their race and class. I hope you will read this article and think of ways in which we can work together to advocate for women who don't share the same privileges we do. I've copied the first paragraphs below.

Pregnant? That Might Get You Arrested

—By Kate Sheppard

Abortion continues to be a hot-button issue in the US, as dozens of states have passed measures to limit women's access to the procedure. But even women who want to be pregnant are not free of legal restraints on their bodies, as a new paper in the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law demonstrates. In many instances, women have been arrested, institutionalized, or subjected to unwanted medical interventions due to their pregnancies.

The paper looks at 413 criminal and civil cases from 1973 to 2005 in which women were subject to legal action related to their unborn children. In all the cases, the women were deprived of their own civil liberties by legal authorities claiming to seek protection of the fetus. Many dealt with charges related to drug or alcohol use during pregnancy, refusing to follow doctor's orders, or for miscarriages that were blamed on their actions (even if there was little to no evidence to prove that those actions led to the miscarriage).

In a piece at RH Reality Check, the paper's authors detail some of the examples they found in their search of legal and public records, as well as media accounts. Here are just a few of them they include: 

• A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her by a health care provider.
• In Texas, a pregnant woman who sometimes smoked marijuana to ease nausea and boost her appetite gave birth to healthy twins. She was arrested for delivery of a controlled substance to a minor.
• A doctor in Wisconsin had concerns about a woman's plans to have her birth attended by a midwife. As a result, a civil court order of protective custody for the woman's fetus was obtained. The order authorized the sheriff’s department to take the woman into custody, transport her to a hospital, and subject her to involuntary testing and medical treatment.

Fifty-two percent of the women in the cases they found  were African American. Seventy-one percent were likely low income, as they were represented by indigent defense in the legal case. Sixty-nine percent were under the age of 30, and 56 percent were in the South. And, lest you think these are mostly old cases, they found more than 25 in 2005, the last year included in the paper. The authors also said that, while not included in this research, they are aware of at least 250 cases since 2005.

Reactive Attachment Disorder, Racism, and Resistance

I have recently felt over, so over being adopted; not that I can erase it from my identity, but that I am too busy just living to focus on anything remotely related to its thorniness or boggy idiocies. I have had nothing meaningful to say about adoption, and I haven't being reading much of interest, either. Novellas, short stories, and criticism are more up my alley at the moment.

I was moved, however, by my friend Daniel's thoughts on Reactive Attachment Disorder as he expressed them over at Transracial Eyes. I encourage you to read his post, if you haven't already.

Here are the first wonderful, challenging paragraphs:

I’d like to touch back on to two discussions we’ve had so far, one on nature vs. nurture as posited by Snow Leopard, and the other one having to do with Russian adoptions, and the idea of a second-best race-based adoption, i.e., one that does not (seemingly) require those adopting from having to mythologize their ability to raise a transracially or transculturally adopted child.

The reason I think this deserves more focus in terms of Russian adoptees is that from the web sites that I’ve seen on so-called Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), the majority of the children so diagnosed seem to come from predominantly “white-identified” countries: Russia and Eastern Europe, read: those places deemed as deserving salvation from Soviet-era “Godless Communism”.

Much of the RAD diagnosis is focused not on the adoption itself, but instead on the child as manifesting an “illness” that needs to be corrected via a variety of therapies physical and psychological that I believe would constitute torture if performed on prisoners of war, as defined by the Geneva Convention.

So much of the discussion that needs to be had here seemingly can’t be had, if only because at first glance we are not dealing with a question of “racism”. I would like to challenge this, while also pointing out that the notion of “adoption” is just as culturally specific as the psychological diagnosis of RAD, along with the racism implied.

Fresh Starts

I saw The Life of Pi today, and even knowing vaguely what the book was about (I don't read an overwhelming about of contemporary literature, and hadn't read this one), I wasn't prepared for the harrowing emotional experience I felt while watching the narrative unfold. I adore Ang Lee as a director, and he didn't disappoint, but the story of a young man and a tiger lost at sea, the young man having lost everything else, was brutal. The angry sea, the shipwreck, the lives taken by the water, the inescapable fear.

I thought certain parts of it, in which the boy takes in the lessons of many different religions and synthesizes something out of them for himself, was interesting. Having a friend who has written academic papers at length on Vishnu and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, the references to Vishnu on the Cosmic Ocean were familiar, as was Krishna. I have been to religious festivals in India, and seeing the people and the lights and the gods brought back happy memories. I loved it when the young Pi questioned the priest about why God would send his Son to suffer for us, and Pi kept retuning to ask more questions, looking up at the Stations of the Cross in the church in the hills near the tea plantations.

There were layers upon layers of meaning in the film; as A.O. Scott said in a discussion of narrative in film recently, it's both a reminiscence and a fable, "about the nature of storytelling itself." Given the Indian context of the story, I was surprised not to have Buddhism in the religion mix. With all the animals around, I was reminded of the jataka tales, or stories about the previous lives of the Gautama Buddha in which he lived as various animals and performed good works.

I also thought much about aloneness and making hard choices, losing faith (or perhaps gaining it), and not wanting to be alone and obscure: your narrative, oral or otherwise left untold. And now, thinking about it, it is interesting that the Indian man from Pondicherry shared his story as an oral narrative while the white man will be the one to write it down. Hmmm.

As much as I like my solitude, the kind of solitude endured by Pi and Richard Parker was terror inducing. There were moments when I couldn't watch at all, and crouched with my head in my lap. It was more triggering than any film I have seen since I cannot remember.

Worse for me even than Mother and Child.

And yet there are such strands of pleasure and the sublime in it that I can relate to on both visceral and intellectual levels that I cannot stop thinking about it.

The ending made me think of fresh starts and personal narratives and how stories are told are "preferable" by one group or another. There is always something lost in the telling, no matter how you weave your story; it is most important, however, that your story have meaning for you.

And so ends November. I doubt that I shall have the fortitude to blog every day in December, but I shall try not to be overwhelmed by personal lassitude wrought by National Adoption Awareness Month.

ETA: I posted this last evening, at 11:45, but Blogger failed me. So it turns up as a December 1 post. It is a fresh start.