Am I Blue?

Tonight was Charlie's blue belt test. Needless to say.....

Stop, Thief!!!

More from the darker side series: One of the things I learned during my pre-adoption training is that if the child comes from a hard environment into what he perceives as a fantasy world where everything seems perfect, he (or she) will work very hard to be perfect so he can fit in. The child is deathly afraid of being sent back, and so becomes the perfect little angel. Always agreeable, always helpful, always...perfect.

But he can't stay perfect forever, and the point at which most kids break is six months. At that point, they start wondering whether we could possibly love them for their REAL selves, and they start pushing the envelope and acting up to test us. Their mental process at that point works something like this: "Well, they might not love me if they really knew who/what I am, and although I like it here, I just know they'll send me back someday if they knew how really bad I am--after all, my REAL parents did that. So if I show them now what I'm really like, at least I KNOW they'll send me back, and I'm the one in control of the situation, I won't be caught by surprise, 'cause I know what they'll do."

Heart-breaking, isn't it? Children actually believe that they did something bad to cause their birthparents to abandon them. What they don't realize is that WE ARE THE REAL PARENTS in this case, and we're onto them. We have to love them through this time and prove that they aren't going anywhere.

In Charlie's case this was, thankfully, short-lived.

On the dot of six months (right on schedule!) one day I had the sensation that some money was missing from my wallet. I never carry a great deal of cash, and honestly usually don't know down to the dollar what's in there, but I just felt like something was missing. So I decided to pay better attention. Sure enough, within a few more days, a $10 bill went missing, and this time I knew it was gone. I had last seen it the evening before, and shortly after that had stopped for gas. Charlie usually gets my card out of my wallet for me as we pull up to the pump, so I had a pretty good hunch when and where it had gone missing.

I was at my office, and I have videoconference ability to reach Charlie from there. Still, just for due diligence's sake, I called oldest son Rick to make sure he hadn't borrowed it, though he always lets me know if he needs to borrow anything. He hadn't. So, I called Charlie to ask if he knew anything about it. He said that he bet it fell out of my wallet and rolled under the seat of the car, and he'd be happy to check once I got home.

Yeah, right. My suspicion is that he would have gone to look for it while "palming" the bill so that he could miraculously produce it.

Well, I was headed to school after work that night and wouldn't be back until he was asleep.

When I got home from school, I did check under the seat of the car, just to be absolutely sure it wasn't there. Then I came in the house and talked to Rick to fill him in on the sitch, and said "Go get him up."

A sleepy, bleary-eyed Charlie comes down the stairs. I asked again about the $10, and got the same story as earlier--it must have fallen under the seat of the car, and if I would let him go change into his clothes, he'd go out and look for it.

Hmmm.....lemme 'splain somethin' here, kid. First, I looked under the car seat already, and guess what? It isn't there! Now let me demonstrate something. Here's my wallet. See how my cards are in the snap section, and the money is in the zip section? That means that the money was zippered into this section and couldn't get out because you only opened the snap section to get the card out for me. Oh, but let's just suppose I accidentally left the zipper section unzipped. Gosh, the darned paper money just won't fall out! (I'm shaking the wallet upside-down really hard at this point.) And gee, let's look at this--if somehow a bill did fall out (I pulled one free and let it fall), IT DOESN'T ROLL. So it isn't going under the car seat.

Okay, now I think we've established that the money did not fall out and roll under the car seat. I want to get to the bottom of this, and it's late, and I want to go to bed, too, so I will simply tell you that if you lied to me, yes, you will be punished. But if you CONTINUE to lie to me, the punishment will be even greater--you will not be going to deaf camp. So, I'm going to ask you one more time: What do you know about the $10 missing from my wallet?

I unzipped the wallet while you were pumping gas and saw the money in there and took it and put it in my pocket and I have it upstairs and if you let me get up I'll go get it right now and give it back.

He sang like a canary. Who needs waterboarding????

Yes, he was punished for the initial lie, so that he would know that misdeeds carry consequences. But he got to go to camp, and he was still entrusted to get the card out for me when we pulled into the gas station, although he knew I was keeping closer watch on the money in there.

Most importantly, we ended the night with a hug and "I love you" signs after the tears and threats were over, and he felt secure not only that the rules were in place and enforced, but that he wasn't being sent anywhere, ever. No matter what.

East Coast Tournament

Charlie competed today at the Eastern Regional Karate Championships. This is where martial artists from New York down to Florida converge on Rockville, Maryland to compete for bragging rights on being the best on the East Coast.

Last year was Charlie's first time there, and he left empty-handed after underestimating how hard it was to go up against the best. This year, he went in with a little more determination. I think he still underestimated it some, since he won all three first-place trophies at the state tournament a couple of weeks ago. He figured he'd just walk in and clean up again. Well, it didn't happen quite that way.

But he did win the third place trophy in kata! He's definitely making a name for himself. To win anything at all in this tournament is really a big deal. (I never won anything there.)

Here's a picture of the trophy and the trophy winner. If this is just the third-place trophy, can you imagine how big the first-place trophy is??? These are serious trophies! Charlie is thrilled to have one to adorn his mantel.

His next belt test is the second week of June. Hopefully he will get his blue belt then. Feel free to leave a blog comment to encourage him to study and practice hard--I'll be happy to interpret what he doesn't understand!

Here's a video of the third-best green belt kata performance on the East Coast:

Food Fight

Continuing with the series of posts about some of the challenges we came up against, I thought I'd mention an issue that we had that I wasn't prepared for despite all the "training" I went through. One of the things I learned during the prep period for the adoption was that orphans have food issues. Lots of food issues. It's not unusual for orphans to hoard food. The usual scenario in an orphanage is for the food to be set out, and the kids who are fastest get the most to eat, the others not so much. Since the kids aren't always confident that they'll get enough, they try to hide food when they can get away with it. So even when they get adopted, they aren't always sure what's going on, and even though they may get enough food at a meal to feel full, they still aren't confident that there will be more later, and they continue to hide or steal food to store up.

Charlie spent 11 years in that environment, and I found out from someone who knew him back then that yes, Charlie was fast. He got plenty of food--and promptly started passing it out to the little kids. Charlie has a soft spot for the young ones. Knowing all this, I expected him to have food issues. I was prepared for that. But they didn't surface the way we were expecting.

To start with, Charlie liked good, healthy foods and lots of them. But he never got into the junk food scene. He was utterly convinced that eating any sweets at all makes you fat. Cake? An invention of Satan. But fruits, vegetables, rice, noodles, meats, eggs? Bring 'em on!! He ate, and ate, and ate, and never seemed to really gain a spare ounce on his frame. That's when I realized how fast he was growing. For a Chinese kid, he was turning into a giant. They thought he was tall when I adopted him, but in the space of four months, he had grown three inches, and before his first year here was out, he was five inches taller. He is now taller than I.

He started coming home from school with headaches. I didn't make the connection to food right away--when my other son had started having chronic headaches in school, it was because he was dealing with a difficult social scene and didn't want to be there, so naturally I started trying to find out what about school was bothering Charlie. He said nothing was wrong. He just had headaches.

One day the school called me and said he had a fever and joint aches, I needed to come get him. So I went and picked him up. By the time I got there, the fever was gone, but he was still achy. The next day, he was still achy, but had no other symptoms whatsoever. But he was ravenous, and when he made a comment about breakfast and lunch at school being very light, something clicked in my brain.

Charlie was dorming just a couple of nights a week. On the days and nights he was home, no problem. He could eat as much as he wanted for breakfast, and then even though lunch was light, he got home from school early enough that he could eat another meal. Then he'd have yet another meal when I got home from work and made dinner. And THEN he'd eat something, usually fruit, before bed. But on the nights he was dorming, he didn't get that bedtime snack, he didn't get enough at breakfast, and lunch was light. By the time dinner came around, he had a headache because he wasn't getting enough calories to sustain the wild growth spurt his body started once he was getting enough food on a regular basis.

That explained the joint aches and constant injuries, too. His body was growing so fast that the growth plates at the ends of the long bones in the arms and legs were soft and weak. Playing hard was putting too much stress on them during this spurt, so they ached.

What really made sense once I realized all this was his hunger pains. Charlie had grown up under-nourished and growth-stunted, but because it was constant, what he lived with was an ongoing, gnawing sense of hunger. But once he started eating more and growing suddenly, when he got hungry, he was hungry RIGHT NOW and had to have food RIGHT NOW because he would start getting sharp stomach pains if he didn't.

He was literally in more pain from hunger now than he had ever been in the past.

Time for Mama Bear to take action. I promptly dashed off an e-mail to his social worker at the school and to his teacher, explained the situation and Charlie's past experiences (they were unaware of any of this), and they agreed that if I were to send in a bag of healthy foods in his luggage on dorm days, they would give him extra times throughout the day and evening to be able to eat some supplemental meals.

That solved the problem, and that situation lasted for several months. By the time Charlie started high school, his growth had leveled off some and he was eating much more normal-sized meals and not as many of them, so he has been managing just fine with dorming at the high school without having to take any supplemental food.

It just hurts to think of the constant sense of hunger he used to know, and to watch him back in the days when he would feel physical pain from sudden hunger. It hurts even more to remember the faces of all of his friends that I saw at the orphanage and know that they are still living with that and there's nothing I can do for them.

So if you're skeptical when someone tells you to clean your plate, that there are starving children in China, the answer is yes -- there really are.

Cleaned Up!

We interrupt the "dark side" blog series to bring you a public service announcement: Charlie attended the local level karate tournament today and cleaned up ALL THREE first-place trophies (kata, sparring, and jujitsu) for his division. That's my boy!

He has another tournament at the end of April (this is the entire East Coast tournament), and then in June he will hopefully test for his next belt level (blue).

The meaning of courage

Charlie is one of the bravest people I know. Maybe even THE bravest.

Up to now, a lot of my blog since Charlie has joined our family has been all the funny stuff that happens when four cultures (American, Chinese, hearing, and deaf) collide. The blog was an affirmation that melding that many cultures can work, and indeed it has. But has it all been a bed of roses? Not by a long shot. My friend Jen (author of the Four Little Hawks blog on my blogroll) recently opened up about the issues and problems she is facing with her children, two of whom were adopted from China, and one of those two who is deaf. Her openness and willingness to share have given me courage to talk a little here about some of our darker moments and discoveries...not as a sympathy-getter, but more to show other adoptive parents or those considering adoption that even the greatest success stories have those dark times, and we get past them and can still consider our experience a success.

I'm going to start a series of blog posts, a little bit at a time, and each will deal with some of the issues we have run up against, some of which I was prepared for and expecting, and some of which totally blind-sided me. But in dealing with each of them, I have come to not only love but respect this child more and more, and I am sometimes in awe of the fortitude he had.

I knew the day Charlie signed his Chinese name to those papers in court that he had a lot of courage, but I really had no clue then just how much. He, the product of a society without faith, took an incredible leap of faith that day, and I can only now appreciate just how much he was risking in his own mind.

It was different for Charlie than for most other Chinese adoptions. For most orphans, the choice is taken out of their hands. Some loving couple here in the U.S. or elsewhere sees the child's profile, feels a stirring in their hearts, and whether they acknowledge it as a call from God or just call it fate, they somehow know that they are supposed to go get that child. They make all the decisions; the child has no clue what is going on until the day the staff at the orphanage take the child to some far-away city, sign over custody to these strangers, and walk away and leave the child with these people who look and smell different, and eat way different foods, and even use funny-looking toilets that these kids have never seen before and are sometimes terrified of.

But if the child is over 10, it's a whole new story. Children over 10 have to AGREE to the adoption in court before a judge. The deaf ones, especially the younger ones, usually don't even know what they're agreeing to, because they have never gone to school and they get by with whatever home signs they create for themselves at the orphanage, which doesn't exactly lend itself to in-depth conversations when they are the only deaf children there in a sea of hearing children. The staff usually don't learn any more "sign" than what is needed to give the child orders regarding personal hygiene. So they certainly can't tell this child that he or she is about to be adopted and will need to give permission. The child signs the papers with the Chinese equivalent of an X (an inked thumbprint), because he also has never learned to write, and it is pretty much the same as the other adoptions at that point, because now the child is committed and the parents are making all the decisions.

But Charlie--he had been sent to school, he could read and write, and he could hold in-depth coversations. Not with the orphanage workers, because they never did learn sign. They simply got two inches from his face (as though his sight were the problem) and spoke very loudly (like that would help him hear better) and expected that he could read their lips. But with the kids and teachers at the deaf school--ah, there communication could be had.

What I just found out not too long ago, what left me in awe of this kid's resilience, is that once the word was out that Charlie was to be adopted, by an American family at that, a campaign was set afoot to persuade him to not agree to the adoption. Teachers at the school told him and the other children that Americans adopt kids to use them as servants and then kill them. Giving a small element of credence to the story were recent articles about one family who starved their adopted Russian child to death and another family that abused their adopted child and beat the child to death. (The starvation episode was actually here in Maryland, 2005.)

Can you imagine the pressure? The only adults he's ever been able to truly communicate with are telling him not to agree to this because he will end up dead. The other kids are telling him the same thing.

Here I am, literally on the other side of the world, with no clue of the pressure he is under over there. I'm dealing with my own set of pressures here, stalking FedEx delivery personnel, driving the people at my adoption agency nuts. Then a miracle happened, and I found a liaison, someone who could get word to Charlie for me, someone he would occasionally sneak out and visit with while he was "home" at the orphanage on the weekends.

And so the letters started. (See the blog during the timeframe of about July/August of 2006 to December 2006 if you don't know what I'm talking about here.)

Now Charlie is getting it from both sides: People at the school are telling him don't go, but these letters...this person he has never met is saying he will have equal status in the family as her other son? He will have not only responsibilities, but equal rights?

He's torn. He wants to believe the letters, he really does. But then he goes back to school for the coming week, and they're at him again--don't do it, you'll be killed. And they have printouts of news articles about Americans killing their adopted children to back it up. But then he goes back to the orphanage, and there's another letter...this woman is writing to him faithfully, keeping him informed on the delays, telling him details about life over there. Maybe this family would be different from the ones the people at school are telling him about?

Somehow, he got a defiant streak in him and decided to go ahead with it. But he didn't tell them. He never did get to tell them, because one weekend when he went back to the orphanage, they simply didn't send him back to school, because the adoption date was imminent. Once the CCAA had approved the adoption, it was a definite, and they didn't need to spend the money trying to educate this one any longer, they could just keep him there and wait until it happened, and let the new parents take on the expense of educating him.

I have no way of knowing what his decision would have been had he not received those letters, but I thank God for the angel that was our go-between, because I believe that tipped the balance in my favor. Charlie signed those papers knowing there was a chance that he could end up abused or worse, figuring that if that happened, he would just try to run away and survive as best he could--in a country where he knew nobody and nothing.

What is scary, and has not yet come up in conversation, is this: What about his life there was so awful that he was willing to take that chance?

We got into a discussion recently about what his future would have been there and what it is here. He thinks that when he aged out of the orphanage, they would have tried to keep him on as hired help, because he was pretty handy and industrious about cleaning things and fixing things. But he understood that was the best-case scenario. (If you don't get that reference, read the blog post titled "The future of deaf orphans in China.") When he first got here, he had no clue how far he could reach. His big aspiration in those days was to be a cook in a Chinese take-out restaurant. Then, because we kept telling him "deaf can, deaf CAN--this isn't China where deaf can't," he moved up to wanting to OWN the restaurant. Now he's talking about being the engineer who plans it. He's knocking himself out at school so that he can learn enough to be accepted to NTID, a technical college for the deaf, where he can try for an engineering degree. Deaf CAN.

He found the courage to sign those papers on 12/28/06. That's really all that matters.

I have just been summoned--he wants to read me a story.

I'm so in awe of this kid.

A stunning piece of writing

I was checking out Cody's parents' blog to see how they were doing now that the rush of Cody's wake and funeral were over with and reality starts to settle in, and noted that Mickey had linked to the blog of a friend of his who had written a post entitled "Goodnight Moon" after leaving the viewing.

Her post is a stunning and evocative piece of writing asking--and trying to answer--some of the questions that arise when a child dies. I'll link it here in case anyone is interested.


Goodnight Moon

Rest in peace, Cody.