Saturday morning Matt suggested we all go for a walk in half an hour. I'm happy when he isn't working diligently because otherwise I feel guilty as hell for wanting to sit on the couch, snuggle by our newly installed energy-efficient stove insert--(always happy to plug a friend, let me know if you want me to add a link to your site :-)--drink my coffee or tea and let the morning sink in. In half an hour we all pile into the minivan with little ado (although Ted decides with five minutes to spare to take a quick shower.)
The day is glorious! A brisk December, sunny, blue-skied day. As we start to walk we see that everybody but Mom (me) is slightly under-prepared for the briskness. I give Kyle my extra fleece hat since my hood'll do. But when Ted gets cold I remove my down-coat hood and place it over his thin sweatshirt hood which he tolerates for a while. Then Kyle, 12, Ted, 9, and I (age to remain unspoken) race past the rest to warm up by sprints. Kyle beats me. Dang, he's fast! Soon all are sprinting and frolicking to get our hearts pumping and warm up. Incredibly the other 12 year old, Aaron, is playfully rough-housing with Ted who lives for attention from his older brothers, yet rarely gets it (except the negative kind.)
Janet, 10, (my adopted from China at 8, identified as transgender at 9 daughter) walks beside me asking questions about her future. (Transgender shows up in the spell-check as unknown.) Maybe she'll style hair. I tell her if that's the case, she doesn't need to go to college, she can go to Beauty School. She sagely insists that she needs education, to learn about the world anyway, before she'd study haircare. Next she imagines maybe just doing make-up. We muse about doing makeup for the stars, and maybe doing behind the scenes stage work in middle school to get started. While her imagination wanders, her attention remains focused, her questions clear and intelligent, pausing to listen to my responses.
People imagine that we must always be second-guessing our decision to adopt, considering the child we imagined was a son would in reality become our daughter. Didn't we just a little bit regret it? I won't speak for hubby, but for me the answer is not due to gender identity. In fact, the knowledge we saved this child from certain life-time torment, discrimination, years of hiding her true self, or even possible suicide serve to help me feel more certain that adopting her was essential, even though we didn't know this would be the case at the time we made our decision to adopt.
On the other hand, the fact that she turned out to have ADHD has certainly caused me to wonder whether this adoption was such a great idea. In my lesser moments that is. From day one she was bouncing off the walls. Her random singing, repeated inability to join and follow conversations prompting uninvited interruptions, screeching screams, these made us second guess. That we would have such a thoughtful, delightful conversation on our walk around the college campus would have been hard to imagine a year ago. Thank goodness for pharmaceuticals. Even if they did lay off my husband (see first post).
Back to the campus. We stopped in the campus cafeteria. The lobby had a warm, inviting gas fire and chairs to sit by. This, a far cry from my nephew's college campus where numerous fast food outlets in a mall-like setting serve as a food-plan option. I had heard this were now a commonplace college installation. I was relieved that at this small Quaker-founded college, integrity still remained. Further, the menu was made up of locally grown produce. Last year I worked at a community college where my colleagues were proud they were making a difference in struggling kids' lives, students with full-time jobs and babies who needed the kind of leg-up a community college gave them. They were right, I know. Yet I felt so enlivened by the hope of the ideals of this likely privileged college campus. I hope they have a good scholarship program to serve that underprivilidged community that could also benefit from this environment.
Next we stopped in at a bagel joint not far from the edge of the campus. We sat in over-stuffed chairs and ate our fare. Aaron wondered about the $130 a year bottomless cup offered by the place. We had an impromptu math lesson, determining how many cups you'd have to drink a month to make it worthwhile. Then a marketing lesson on the fact that the frequent visitors would probably buy food, making it worthwhile for the vendor to offer this promotion. It felt interesting and not preachy.
Stopping by the Canada Goose infested pond, after tip-toeing across the green poop infested lawn, the boys tossed pebbles onto the the thin ice. The sound they made clinked like a spoon on a glass of wine, in a satisfying way. We watched a car pull up and a women threw bread to the geese. Even as we tsked her act, bad for the birds, bad for the campus, we enjoyed seeing the water fowl slip and slide on the ice racing after bits of bread.
On the last leg of the walk Aaron unsuspectingly stepped in a sinkhole of mud, filling his shoes and socks. He limped bravely, uncomplainingly back to the car. We recalled how when I was pregnant with Ted, Matt and I had taken the 2.5 year old twins down this same section. They had howled and cried, wanting to be carried. Too heavy for Matt to carry both, and for me, pregnant, to carry any of them, we cajoled and bribed them, Matt ending up picking them up for short distances, relaying them one by one down the path, them bawling the whole time, back to the car. Things had certainly changed for the better.
On the way home in the car I glowingly praised the family for such a pleasant outing. Then unwittingly raised the fact many a recent outing ended in intrafamily bitterness. Matt probably rightly chided me for ending my praise on a sour note. Oh well. It was still an almost-perfect day.
ps: Okay, this was a pretty good post, but aren't the depression posts funnier?
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