Jealous

Lately Doof has been asking me questions about his birth mom. I knew these days would come. In my mind, I knew exactly how I would answer him.

I guess I will preface this story by saying that my parents divorced when I was very young and they had nasty custody battles for years and years and years and years...you get the point. My mom was not very kind in speaking about my dad and many times I thought I was not loved by him nor worthy of love from others. It's so strange (and permanent) what a five or six year old mind can do to a person.

Anyway, I knew these days would come and I knew exactly how I would answer his questions. I would be different from my mother in handling things with Doof.  I would use my experience to be a "better" mother by answering him in a very loving way and making sure he knew that he was loved by her, even if only in the fucked up way she could muster. Well, I wouldn't say it like that, but I would make it sound all butterflies and bunnies and he would be satisfied.

These questions have been going on for a couple of weeks now and I was doing a great job of fielding his questions while considering truth and his feelings at the same time. I was saying things like, "She couldn't take care of you because she couldn't really take care of herself" and "I know she loves you because all  mothers love their babies". I was proud of myself for being so kind and thankful for my education in social work and therapy. But I am beginning to lose it. In the same amount of time this has been going on, I have found myself becoming uneasy and increasingly anxious about why he is asking these things. I have almost on numerous occasions told him things that he never needs to know. It won't hurt him to go through life thinking she actually loved him. It will only help him to think that he was not to blame, that he was always worthy of love. If he knew the things she didn't do for him, he may think he didn't deserve to be cared for. I have been up at night thinking about this stuff for weeks and even though I know what is appropriate and inappropriate to say to a wee boy...I am getting mad/sad/territorial.

And for some reason today I can finally name this feeling.

I am jealous.

I am not saying this is a mature feeling or that I have thought this out or even that I really understand it. But, ya know, I just don't want to have to share him. I am the one who was rocking him in the hospital those endless days. I am the one who was spending my nights laying awake worrying about him and his adjustment to our family. I am the one who signs him up for soccer and takes him to the practices and games. I am the one who does his laundry, packs his snacks, shows up for school functions, takes him to the zoo, the museum, the doctor, the emergency room. I wipe his tears. I laugh at his jokes and general craziness. I enjoy him. He consumes my every free thought, I LOVE HIM. He's MINE! And I should not have to share his heart.

But ya know what else is true? Because he is mine, I love him too much to break his heart and tell him all the things that she never did for him. All those little ways that a mother cares for her baby; the diapers, the doctors, the cooing, the holding, the playing...all those things she never did...

I need to come to a place where I am not so reluctant to share his heart with her. I'd rather share it and make it so full of love and positive images of himself and his life that it bursts rather than breaks. A broken heart can follow you around for a long time. A heart bursting with joy can carry you. But knowing these things and biting my tongue are two different things. And today I am really struggling with biting my tongue, which turns out to be a recurring theme in my life.

Pouf. Poof. Poop.

You know the usually-brightly-colored-meshy-things that you use in the shower with your body wash? I call it a pouf.  I think that's the technical term for it. Read the back of your shower gel.

Tonight I was totally confused when I ran a cool bath for feverish Doof and after dumping in all the toys he says, "Me and Stinks have the same poop now." What? You can imagine what ran through my head. It starts with "You better not have pooped in the tub" and moves into "Wait. How would you know that, anyway" and finally, "Poop? Really, Doof? For four years you thought you've been scrubbing yourself with a "poop"? It's not a poop. It's a poof. Or is it a pouf?" It was a little touch-and-go there for a minute.

Cuss

Me:  Hey, Doof, do you know what a cuss is?
Doof:  Yes.
Me:  Okay. So tell me.
Doof:  It's a sickness in your mouth.
Me:  Okay, then what's a swear?
Doof: You know. A pinkie swear.
Me:  Right.

Dessert Times Five

Doof has always been weird about eating. I cannot tell you the hours we have wasted as a family and as individuals sitting at the table waiting for Doof to eat, talking about whether he will eat this or that, talking about why he has these weird habits, planning new ways to get him to eat, etc. It is exhausting and I know better than to pay this much attention to it. I know that I cannot make him eat and that he will eat when he's hungry, but because I am a behaviorist at heart, I cannot stop myself from thinking about ways to condition him to do as I like.

It started years ago when Doof was in foster care. He was a sick little baby and was undergoing chemotherapy for a rare blood disease by the time he was thirteen months old. Side effects of chemo include the likely possibility of developing sores inside your mouth. Food starts to have a very different taste. Meat can taste especially bad and other things have no taste at all. This chemo treatment continued for more than a year, and then he had a bone marrow transplant. By the time it was all over and he was released from the hospital, he was two and a half years old. I guess it was the sores in his mouth, but this could would eat hardly anything. The only thing we could really count on was that he would never turn down a bottle of PediaSure. Besides PediaSure, orange Popsicles, sour cream and onion Pringles, chicken nuggets,  mashed potatoes, and ketchup squeezed from packets, the kid ate nothing. No vegetables and barely any meat for more than a year. Gross.

So, here we are, five years later and we are still thinking and talking about food all the time. He is small for his age and the three year old down the street weighs almost as much as he does. The endocrinologist is worried about his growth and has advised us to give him high calorie snacks before bed. Great. Sure, Doof, you can have a peanut butter and jelly and five cookies and a milkshake right before bed even though I just had to spent thirty minutes threatening you just to get you to eat your dinner. Here, son. Enjoy. It just goes against every logical bone in my body. But, I guess Doof has to grow. For now. After he's back on a growing trend, he'll eat WHATEVER I SAY.

Speaking The Language

Doof Malloy, our oldest son, is adopted. (I will probably call him "Doof Malloy" in this blog for two reasons. One, that's one of his nicknames. Two, he's got a pretty unique name given to him by his birth mom and if she were ever to find this blog and decide that she needs to have him back, I don't want to make it any easier for her to identify him that it would already be. (He's the black kid who acts like a wild animal and lives with the crazy white people in the very un-diverse small town.) And besides, he's MINE, bitch! Get to steppin'!

Fortunately for him, he was adopted by people who are just as untame as his biological folks obviously were. He fits right in here with us and our menagerie of pets. He growls at people he has just met. He runs on all fours like a leopard chasing a gazelle. (I would say, "like a gorilla". but I am trying not to be inflammatory in any way. (Side note: I NEVER knew that "monkey"was a derogatory word used to marginalize black people. Did you guys know that? When I met Doof, one of my friends would swing him around in his blanket and call it a "monkey swing" and boy, oh, boy! When a black lady overheard that that shit hit the fan.) One of the things I love most about this boy is that he is ridiculously creative. He operates on a level different from almost any other kid I have ever met. To us, he is a bit strange at times, but in an endearing and clever way.

When we first adopted Doof, we were busy working and I was also pursuing a Masters degree so we were rarely home. Doof was in preschool and went to pre-K at the same center and we didn't know any of our neighbors for more than two years. We were just never here. Actually, as I am remembering it, I recall a really typical Doof moment. Okay, let me set the stage here. It's a nice spring day. We have all of the windows open to let in the fresh air. Music is playing throughout the house. We're doing some cleaning. I notice when I look out the window in Doof's room that the little girls across the street playing outside in their driveway. We don't know them, but we see them outside sometimes. They're cute. So I send Doof to his room to put away some of the toys I had found throughout the house and I go about my business. After about ten minutes, I haven't seen Doof, so I go to check on him. He's only four. He might be doing something dangerous. I walk around the corner into his room and guess what I see? (Actually, don't guess. You don't stand a chance of guessing this.) There is my precious Doof with his bare asscheeks wiggling in the window. My son is MOONING the little girls across the street. Given ten minutes to himself, he actually took off his pants and  underwear and mooned the girls across the street in broad daylight with the window open. Shocking behavior.

Back to the purpose of this post.

So, when Doof first came to live with us, he would say strange made-up words consistently to describe things. In the bathtub, he would sit Indian Style (I capitalized this out of respect to our Native Americans.) and call the water in the little circle inside his legs a "souk". In context: "Mom, look at all these toys in the souk!" or as he is pouring water into the circle, "Mom, there's a waterfall in the souk!" or when you pull the drain, "NO! MOM! MY SOUK!!!" Another favorite word was "chuff". He would use it like a curse word. If he dropped something, if he lost something, if he broke something...just "chuff". My husband and I still like to use that word. It's a good one. Doof is also famous for making up new superheroes. Teddycow Light Chopper is just a stuffed animal, but it's worth mentioning because it's a funny name. Lightman is actually a storm trooper figurine but he has different powers now. There are more...but I don't care that much because I am a girl.

When I finished my Masters program and started working and then got fired for asking to be paid (that'll be a good future post), I was home a lot more and I got to meet the folks across the street. They're wonderful people and very open-minded and they love us a lot and we love them a lot. In fact, the youngest daughter in that family is Doof's best friend. Her name is...hmmm...let's call her Trouble Smarty Sasspants. She is the only other child I have met who really speaks Doof's language. Smarty is the female version of Doof, but maybe even a little bit more...comic strip character-ish. She is the perfect mix of boy and girl. I don't know how to describe her in a better way that that. Anyway, these two kids have a lot in common, including their weird language thing. They both have these crazy vivid imaginations and their minds meld together in a perfect storm of made-up words, superheroes, safari adventures, and wild west shootouts. It's a ....um... special kind of friendship. Like two amputees in a sack race. Now why in the world would that analogy pop into my head?

It's worked out very well having Smarty and her family right across the street. They have formed such a wonderfully strange friendship and I hope Doof will have Smarty in his life for years and years to come.  This is partly selfish on my part because I think of her as a daughter after all this time and partly because I know how important it has been in my life to feel understood. It's rare that you find someone who understands you and accepts you...someone who speaks your language. Smarty fills that need for Doof and I like to watch it. Recently I have been worried about Doof for some not-so-fun reasons. For now I find great comfort that Smarty has probably mooned Doof from her bedroom window, too.

Inspire Your Children

Every morning, every evening, it is the same thing over and over. "Z, go brush your teeth. And do a good job." Oh, I know what the hygienist says because she says the same thing to me every time we go there. "Mom, you have to help him brush until he develops good habits. You should be helping him every time. First, he can brush and then you get a turn." Whatever. Who really does that, anyway? So, on the irregular somewhat occasions that I actually brush after him, I notice that he has done an ABSOLUTELY SHITTY job of brushing his teeth. I usually brush after him when I walk by the bathroom and he is just standing there either a) sucking on the toothbrush, b) smearing toothpaste on the counter, or c) rinsing the toothbrush obsessively.

Well, finally I had reached my limit. The kid is now SEVEN years old and since before he turned FOUR I have been brushing his teeth with him and hounding him about the proper technique and blah, blah, blah. He's old enough to be brushing his teeth well on his own and to give a shit about it.

I decided to take action. He needed to know what the consequences would be if he continued NOT brushing well and flossing. So I did what every concerned parent would do. I forced him to look at the Google images for "meth mouth". He peeked through covered eyes and begged me to not make him look. I mean, I get it, kid. That shit is scary-looking! 

He brushed and flossed this morning...for a LONG TIME.

Curtsy.