February, 2001: This has been a really busy month for me, although not in any way related to our adoption-- more's the pity! We had semester turnaround at school on February 2 and I've got three and half new classes, so every two to three weeks, I teach four classes each day. Luckily, I'm sharing the extra class with my friend Cathy, who is a wonderful teacher, and whose style is very much like my own.
The very good news though, is that my principal asked me if I wanted to take over the library next year, since our librarian is retiring. Right now, it's part-time, which means I'd have four sections of library and two and a half of English. That would be perfect. I wouldn't be out of the classroom completely (which is my favourite thing!), but I also wouldn't have the horrendous workload that a full-time English teacher has. I'd have much more time at night and on weekends to spend with my children! I have to take the Additional Qualification course for Library Part 1 this summer, but that works out really well too: Matthew will continue at daycare; I'd only have to drive to Hamilton; and, hopefully, we'd travel to China in August. Once our baby is home, I'll be off work on parental leave for almost eight months. I'll have to give up my Creative Writing class and WIER (writers in electronic residence), but I prefer to teach the older kids anyway in OAC, especially since that course will be gone in two years.
The egroup that I started for Canadians adopting from China has about 120 members now. It's growing slowly but surely and I've already discovered so much valuable information. Anybody who wants to join should go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/canadiansadoptingfromchina
March, 2001: We just got back from spending four great days at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville, about three hours north of Toronto in Muskoka. We went on a maple sugar bush tour with a horse-drawn wagon and sampled maple sugar toffee, made in the fresh snow. Matthew loved that! We also went snow-tubing and swimming in the indoor pool. The snowbanks were enormous and it snowed each day that we were there. The trees were coated in ice and sparkled in the sun. It was spectacular. I kept thinking, "This time next year, if we can come back, our daughter will be with us and we'll be taking both of our children to all these activities." (Each time we do something as a family, I remember that this time next year, there'll be four of us, instead of three.) I found a store in Huntsville that had the Chinese Zodiac animals. I got Matthew the Year of the Pig stuffed toy and our daughter the Year of the Dragon. Both are beautiful, although Matthew is rather indignant about being a pig. He thinks it's unfair that his sister will (most likely) be a dragon. I tried to explain to him that a person doesn't have a choice about which animal represents his year of birth, but he insists he wants to be a dog. Hopefully, he'll understand when he's a little older. Thank God I have Matthew to keep me busy and focused. If my daughter was my first child, I think this waiting would make me crazy!
VERY STRANGE! The oddest thing happened today. I was reading the messages on the August DTC list and a woman posted that she thought only Asian children were pretty. She went on to say she feels sorry for women who have Caucasian babies. She prefaced her remarks with "don't read this if you have bio children" and ended her message by saying she didn't intend to offend anybody. Hmmm. I wonder how she'd feel if somebody reversed the ethnicity in her posting and made a racist pronouncement about Asian children's physical appearance? I seemed to be the only bio mother on that list who found this comment disgraceful, however. Everybody else who responded to my protest rushed to defend the woman's observations, saying things like: "Caucasian babies are pale, bald, uninteresting and anaemic-looking. Only Asian and African babies are beautiful." A bio mother said: "I didn't think my daughter was beautiful when she was born." An adoptive mother said: "You love where you serve," and that was her justification for making value judgements based on a child's physical appearance. According to her logic, if you really love your child and "serve" her/him as a parent, then, hey! it's okay to denigrate others to elevate the child you love. Since they were all basically pronouncing me an idiot, because I was misguided enough to claim that all children are beautiful, simply through virtue of the fact that they ARE children AND that it's an affront to judge any child based on her physical appearance, I was totally stunned. I discussed this with two of my non-Caucasian friends to get their opinions. I knew they'd be perfectly blunt with me if they thought I was being overly sensitive. Much to my relief, they told me they thought these "list people" were crazy. They said it would be like them adopting Caucasian babies and then saying how unattractive their own bio children were in comparison. We came to the conclusion that this is another one of those "people" things that we are totally incapable of understanding-- a subconscious need to believe "whatever I have, or whatever I will get is obviously superior to what anybody else has or gets." I immediately thought of Gertrude's famous line in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." My friends and I both wondered how comfortable these women would be with their adopted daughters' race, since they seemed to be in such denial. Interestingly, about a week later, in a book I was reading about parenting an adopted child of a different race, the writer said that one of the things a parent must do is make it absolutely clear to the child that ALL cultural and racial groups are valued, NOT just the child's own. That way the child can't ever think: "My Caucasian parents only pretend to respect my ethnicity because it's mine." The child must see that everyone is equally worthy of respect and consideration. I'd assume one's own ethnic group MUST be included. Besides, in North American, with whom do these people think their children will socialize? Even if they live in predominantly Asian communities and their daughters are around many Chinese people-- they're still going to have Caucasian peers and relatives. |
