The Great Mud Pits and the Magic Rings

Five years ago I bought this house in hopes that someday I would be able to make some money off of it, that it would be a good investment over the long run and that in the meantime it would provide me with a roof over my head. That and that I did not want to move again - I hated moving.

Shortly after I signed my name on the dotted line I realized that I'd purchased a home with a wet scary spider basement in a mediocre neighborhood. The neighborhood was improving steadily as time passed but unfortunately the basement was just getting worse. When Nick moved in and saw the mess that I had made of the basement he was shocked: it was at this point a realm of what seemed at first glance like hundreds of standing pools of water much like the world described in the Magicians Nephew by C.S. Lewis, the world that with a magic ring you could jump from pool to pool, world to world, and experience something new.

We quickly started working on the basement. We patched holes, we chiseled out cracks and filled them in, everything was cleaned and etched, Drilock was applied, the basement was dry, then we waited for the rain to come. It came with a vengeance and the pools of water reappeared.

Our next step was to have dozens upon dozens of contractors come out to tell us what they would do if they owned this house. They came and they told and everyone had a different story. The most outrageous of all the plans started with knocking a huge hole in the basement wall and building a conveyor belt. His bid was about three thousand dollars more than any of the other bids. All of the bids however started with one suggestion - regrade the yard.

So we did. Or we tried to. We hired someone to come and regrade the yard, to put in a few swales and to remove the 70 years of dirt that had accumulated on the sides of the house and had built up over the siding and were causing some (in my hopes all) of the water to get into the basement. He came and starting digging and then he disappeared leaving his tractors and tools strewn around the yard. Our beautiful grass was gone and The Great Mud Pits appeared in its place. Our dogs were regaled to a tiny corner of the yard and mud began to rule our lives. For the next 3 weeks it rained almost daily and the the tractors sat. And sat. And sat.

After the sun came back into our lives the mud dried up leaving behind fossils of our former yard; remnants of grass pushing up through the cracks in the earth, parts of daffodils and tulip bulbs never to bloom again, and limbs of the four trees that had lost their battle against the dozer. The job still is looming over us and I'm in hopes that it will be done soon. I want to see what will become of our CS Lewis world in the basement and refuse to go downstairs again until the job is done. The truth is that I now want to move, I want to experience something new, but I don't have a magic ring to transport me into the next world, to the next house. For me, the magic ring will come when we have a dry basement and a buyer who really wants what I wanted: a good investment over the long run that in the meantime would provide them with a roof over their head.

I'm ready

Today I tried to do a little forced nesting to get the baby to come but to no avail. I've eaten the spicy foods, walked my legs off, tried raspberry leaf tea, eaten pineapple, had sex, and pretty much done everything that seemed healthy and was suggested for natural home inductions but for Castor oil. I really don't want to feel more miserable than I have to and all the symptoms I heard re: the use of Castor oil make me hesitate to try it. It seems that the baby should be here by now. . .

Not on my side

Sleep does not come easy any more. I'm not supposed to sleep on my back, I can't physically sleep on my stomach and when I sleep on my left side like 'they' tell me too sleep comes in bursts of time that last for a few hours if I'm lucky. Last night I was able to sleep for about 5 hours which was like eating a little bit of heaven and tonight after less than three I was up. I'm so ready to sleep on my stomach again.

My sinfull pride

Maybe I am a snob about adoption. I certainly have pride over my relationship with Sam and his family and wish that it was more common to have the level of openness that we have between birth and adoptive parents. I know that this type of relationship is not for everyone, it was difficult at first to move past thinking of myself as a parent and mold my role into what it is today. It hurt the first time he said mom and I knew for a fact that he didn't mean me and hurt even worse six years later when he asked if he could call me mom and I had to tell him no, that we would have to pick a name just for me but that it couldn't be mom. But does pride in what I have mean that I think it's best for everyone? I don't think it does. Just because I know how rewarding it is to have Sam and his family* in my life but this does not mean that I think that they type of relationship that I have would be best for everyone.

A few weeks ago someone approached me saying that something I had said months before hand had been grating her mind. She had asked me what I thought of the movie Juno and I had said something to the effect of "I was upset that it had been advertised as a movie about open adoption because it was not. I thought that it was a good movie but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has given a child up for adoption." She interpreted this as me saying that the movie was not good because it was not about open adoption.

Admittedly, this converstation was started with her saying that she was probably drunk enough to talk to me about this now (possibly this should be an article about the lack of interpersonal communication skills between the two of us and not about adoption?) but it really bothered me that she thought what I was saying was that open adoption is the only acceptable form of adoption. In fact, while it was the only option acceptable to me at the time, but I don't believe that everyone out there contemplating adopting a child out or adopting as a parent would benefit from it.

*It should be noted that I believe that open adoption that it only works if there is a mutual understanding about what the level of post adoption contact is going to be. If the desire on part of the birthparent is to have an open adoption they need state clearly what that means to them, weather that means visits once a week or once a month or a letter a few times a year the birth parent needs to address this in the early interviews and both parties need to be on board about what level of post adoption contact they are comfortable with. When interviewing adoptive parents I was lucky enough to meet Steve and Dianna when I did, they had a preexisting open adoption with their older son and happened to be a perfect match for what I was seeking.

The view from here

So it's 3:40 am and I've been up for what seems like hours wondering if there is any chance that we might have figured out the date of conception incorrectly and that maybe, just maybe, this baby is actually due any moment now and not the nearly three weeks that it is in reality. I know that I've been asking the baby to come early for a few months now but it's starting to sink in that this might not happen. I guess I'll have to just come to terms with it if it does not work out the way I've been planning but I'm still going to put hope into the power of positive thinking. I'm sure this baby wants to come early. . . because I'm at a point in this pregnancy where I'm just so excited to meet the little bugger and want it to come and it feels pretty mutual to me. However, if Baby Miescher-Lerner is as stubborn as both Nick and I are (OK, I am) it might come two weeks late.

Email saves the day again

I was having a hard day at work yesterday. It was one of those days like Alexander has in Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day when out of the blue I received a email from Sam's mom. In it she said that she had gone to Sam's old school to pick up his workbooks and belongings to take them to his new school. One of the things in his desk was a notebook with each page corresponding to a letter from the alphabet. She said that she was reading through it because the goal of the notebook was to see how many works each student knew for each letter and she wanted to see what words he knew. On the B page it said birthmom and on the J page it said Jessica and on the K page it said Kansas. After telling me this she went on to say that Sam is very open about his relationship with me and that he loves me and that he talks about me often. She said that this makes her happy and that she loves me too. And after reading this, there I was, at work having a wonderful day and bawling over the nicest email I'd received in ages.

And the friendship remains intact

Last week I emailed one of my favorite best couple friends in utter defeat. I felt as though our friendship was altered somehow, like we had been distant for so long that it might have been too difficult a rift to mend. It's possible it was just the 37 weeks of pregnancy talking and not my real feelings but regardless, I missed them. I told them that lately I've felt as though life has gotten in the way of some of the little things I need to do. Things like sending Gran Fran a birthday card that I should have sent in August, visiting my parents who live less than 3 hours away - I have not been home to visit since right after Thanksgiving, and calling some of my friends who live far far away. And in telling them it made it all seem better to me, it made it just like I'd talked to them yesterday or had a hot chocolate with them last week.

I realized in writing them that I had been so caught up in my own life that sometimes I was forgetting about others, or maybe not forget just put them off (not that this would be more acceptable). It's like cleaning the house - I put it off for as long as possible until either N or I get so fed up with the mess we break down and have a marathon cleaning. Then the slippery slope starts again with the first dirty dish or dirty shirt on the floor. It's like that with contacting those I truly care about- it's easy to put of that phone call or email because I know that no matter how long it takes me to call that relationship is going to be intact with the first renewed contact. I'm positive that when both parties have time to talk or visit again I'll laugh until I either pee my pants or snort out loud. And now that I think about it, I'm OK with that.

The long bus home

Years ago I took a bus from Lawrence to Wichita. I can't remember now the reason for the trip or why driving was not an option, it's all lost to a dozen years of other facts and figures, but the fact remains that I took this trip. After the "should have been a three hours trip" turned into five and then seven it was overwhelming to finally arrive. I remember that Dad picked me up from the bus station and I was so glad to see him, just standing there like scene from a movie, wearing those jeans with the perpetually ripped belt loop and a blue (always blue) shirt. His Santa white hair was flying about in the wind and he had a jacket tucked neatly under his arm. Dad's clean figure contrasted with all the grime and dirt from the station and made me glad to be home despite the long drive.

Sleepless nights/one day at a time

It's getting early, almost 2:30 am and I've been up for hours. It's the third night in a row that my body has forced me awake and my mind is spinning faster than Lance Armstrong could peddle. I'm simply exhausted but my mind can't stop. And it's not as though any of these thoughts trucking through my brain are important ones- they are seemingly random pieces of information that have been driving in circles for hours, days even, that I can't seem to let go of. I've started to think that this pattern I seem to be setting up for myself is natures way of getting me ready for parenthood, a way of kicking me in the ass now to prepare me for long nights of feedings and diaper changes to come. However, there is a huge part of me that wonders if I'll ever be ready and if there is a way to prepare for this or if it's something I'll have to take one day at a time.

What you leave behind you

Eight years ago I had a baby and an adoption in one moments time. I told myself then and remind myself now that I made this decision because I had to make the choice between being a very good friend or being a very mediocre parent. I choose to be a very good friend and with that choice to have a very open non-traditional adoption. In a way, with the situation/type of adoption I choose, I get to be a bit of both. Not that I'll ever be mom to Sam, I'm more like a really fun young hip aunt or a fairy godmother than his mom. I'm not the one who wakes up in the middle of the night when he is sick or the one who has to stay up late at night helping him with homework, or the one who is there on a daily basis for hugs and kisses and all the bumps and bruises in life. Rather, I'm the one who sends packages of books and candy, calls every few weeks to be regaled with stories of hilarity and horror, and the one comes to visit every few months for a few (always to short) days. I'm also the one who now, eight years later has made the conscience decision to bring another child into the world and to raise it.

In 400-something BC Pericles said "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” and for years I've thought of this quote often. I mean, what exactly is it that we weave into the lives of others? As a birthmom am I just responsible for what I wove into Sam genetically or what I continue to weave into his life by being a part of it? And now, as a very soon to be parent of child number two, what will I be weaving into their life?