Monthly Archives: October 2011

Posted inHalloween

Wardrobe Malfunction

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D-d-d-d-de-Dora!

I don’t know what I’m gonna be for Halloween. There, I said it. I’m ashamed, but I said it. Halloween’s my favorite holiday. Not for the creepy stuff. Just for the costumes. Usually I decide on a Halloween costume on Nov. 1 of the previous year, but this year I’ve slacked off. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was burned by last year’s Halloween.

It started out great. We took a cruise in April and Rose had just gotten a bob haircut. She was wearing her backpack a lot and when we took her to Camp Carnival, the counselors said she looked like Dora the Explorer. Well, a lot of people said she looked like Dora, really. It wasn’t just the counselors. She loved the attention and she loves Dora, so she ate the whole thing up.

When Halloween rolled around, Rose decided to be Dora for Halloween. Excellent, I thought. Orange shorts, pink shirt, purple backpack – done. We wound up switching the shirt to purple because the backpack was already pink, but you get the picture. Easy costume and mom’s happy. Rose does not have the luxury of an expert seamstress at her disposal. My mom designed and sewed crazy elaborate costumes at my whim. She’d always complain that she hated to sew but when she cranked out a shark or a Pillsbury Dough Boy costume you could see she was great at it.

Dora was more my speed. I just bought some Mighty Mendit glue to repair damaged clothing, rather than subject our wardrobe to my sewing “skills.” Naturally I was thrilled when Rose wanted to be Dora. I bought the shorts, we had the shirt and backpack, and Matt made a “Map” to stick out of one of the pockets. I even got her hair cut in a wedge so she’d look more like Dora.

Rose’s school has costume days – several so the kids who don’t come every day get a chance to dress up. So the first dress up day, we dressed her in her Dora outfit, Map at the ready, and brought her to school. We took a few pictures and the school took some and she had a great day. The next day she wanted to wear her Cinderella dress-up dress to school. Fine. She did and she had a wonderful time.

When Halloween rolled around, Matt and I got into our costumes. I was an Old West hooker and he was Sheriff Bullock from Deadwood. He had even grown and tailored his facial hair for the costume. We dressed Christian in a monkey suit, so he could be Dora’s monkey, Boots. Then I said, “Come on, Sweetie. Time to put on your costume.”

“Okay,” Rose said, running to her dress up pile while I picked up her shirt. We met in the hallway, her with a Snow White dress in her hands, and me with her Dora costume.

“I’m gonna be Snow White,” she said.

“WHAT? No, Baby, you’re going to be Dora, remember?”

“Nooo, I want to be Snow Whiiiite!”

“But Sweetie, we said you were gonna be Dora. We got your hair cut and everything. And your brother’s Boots. How is he going to be Boots without Dora?”

“I’m gonna be Snow White!”

I clenched my teeth, “Fine. Put on your costume and we’ll go.”

Snow White -- aargh!

So we went trick-or-treating and she was Snow White. And everyone at the doors said she made a beautiful Snow White. I was so mad. First she decides against Dora and now people praise her for it. This happens when she decides to wear her sun dress in the middle of winter too. I tell her how inappropriate it is, we have a fight, and I say fine, wear it and freeze your butt off. Then everybody she sees tells her what a pretty dress it is, reinforcing her choice. Why doesn’t the world cooperate with me? It takes a village, people. You’re making me look like the village idiot.

This year, Rose wanted to be Ariel, the Little Mermaid, “with the tail.” I bought her the costume, but I’m worried. On the first dress-up day at school, she wore her costume. I didn’t even have my phone to take a picture but she was adorable and very happily dressed up. The second costume day, she told me she wanted to wear regular clothes. I said okay, and she said she didn’t want to wear a costume anymore. Trouble, I thought.

“What about Halloween on Monday, Sweetie? That’s another costume day and you have to get dressed up to go trick-or-treating,” I said hopefully.

“I just want to wear regular clothes,” she said. Crap.

Who’d have thought that having a kid would ruin Halloween? I thought it was going to be fun. She’d be all cute in her outfit and we’d take her trick or treating. I’d inspect the apples for razors and she’d flit around on a sugar high. Halloween the way it’s supposed to be. At least now we live in a trick-or-treating neighborhood. For Rose’s first Halloween we walked for blocks and blocks looking for friendly houses and we only got to about three. And here everyone goes into town and trick-or-treats at the shops downtown. I’m a Halloween purist. You trick or treat in your neighborhood and that’s what we’re going to do.

I don’t know what to expect from Rose this Halloween, and I’ve made up my mind not to care if she doesn’t wear her 30-dollar-outfit-that-I-bought-with-a-gift-card-that-was-supposed-to-be-for-me-because-I-didn’t-have-enough-money-that-day. No, I won’t care.

I’ve invited some families to join us for trick-or-treating and more importantly, drinks. Because if I’m gonna get through this Halloween, I’m going to need some help. I am looking forward to the company and the drinks and I’ve decided I’ll focus on that instead of costumes. I do have my Old West hooker costume to drag out in case I want to dress up. I know I’ll get the urge that day. But this year I’m going to ignore my Halloween control issues and just let kids be kids.

Posted inAdoption • Parents

Whom it may Concern

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“I’m concerned about this relationship,” my dad told me, upon hearing that we would stay with my birth mother during our visit to New York.

“What are your concerns?” I asked.

Offering some clarity, he said, “I’m just concerned.” I prodded some more but he didn’t come up with anything but, “She gave you up forty years ago.”

I had the opportunity to hear his objections again, but I blew it. We were at his house, visiting him, discussing sleeping arrangements, when I told him we did not plan to stay with him as he thought. He had even removed the cover from the daybed, offering the sheets that had been on the mattress since we slept there two years ago. Instead we would be going to my birth mother’s house the night before our flight.

“Let me tell you something!” he began.

“Let me tell YOU something,” I countered. “She’s five minutes from the airport. If we stayed here we’d have to leave at four in the morning to make our flight.”

That shut him up. At my expense, I realized. I wanted to know his objections to my relationship with my birth family but I was so used to arguing with him that I just jumped on him at the first opportunity.

It wasn’t until we were at lunch that I asked again what his concerns were. “Think about it from my point of view,” he said.

“Well, they don’t want money or a kidney,” I said, knowing that he thought my birth family wanted his money. My dad just looked at me as I told him how they’d been giving us gifts all the time. So we dropped the subject. He remained quiet during the rest of the meal, and didn’t talk to us when we returned to his house. He wasn’t being spiteful. That’s just the way he is. He doesn’t feel like he has to talk to people who’ve traveled thousands of miles to see him. We went back to his house, and when the silence got to be too much, we left.

As we drove away, Matt explained my dad’s point of view. “He sees you’ve got all these new people and he thinks you don’t need him anymore. He’s old and you’re the only family he has left. He can’t say that, but that’s what he means.”

“Ohhhhh.” I said stupidly.

“Maybe you should ask him for money. That would show that you need him.” Matt can always make me laugh.

I wouldn’t have understood my dad’s position in a million years. I’ve always seen him in a perpetual state of annoyance, so I have never given him credit for having any other feelings. We once had a huge fight during which he said “You hurt me!” I was shocked to find out he had feelings in the first place and even more shocked that I’d gained access to them. I thought of it as an accomplishment. After all the times he’d hurt me, I’d finally gotten to him. Plus, saying I hurt him was the most intimate thing he’d ever shared with me.

I figured I’d hurt his feelings again, so when we got home, I called him. I told him that I wasn’t replacing him or my mom, and that he’d always be my dad. He listened and talked about how my birth mother had abandoned me for 40 years and how difficult I was to raise. Then he said something that I’d never expected to hear.

“We’ll I’m glad she gave you up because we got to know you.”

That is, without a doubt, the nicest thing my dad’s ever said to me. Since my teen years, I’ve gotten the impression that he thought my whole adoption was a mistake, until he told me that. I’ll hold on to that sentence forever.

I’m sure my dad isn’t having warm thoughts about my birth family, but that’s just the way he is. I am glad that I was able to clear up his confusion and address his concerns, though. And I am really grateful that the whole discussion sparked such a warm (for him) sentiment. It’s true that meeting my birth family is opening a whole new chapter of my life, but hearing my dad say something so nice was the climax of our chapters so far.

Posted inParents • relationships

What Might Have Been

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Last week I wrote about visiting family – the lies we used to tell, the ways we kept our distance. This week, I met some new family, and I can’t believe the difference. I went to New York to visit my birth family. They’re not like the family I grew up in. Nobody had to lie. We didn’t have to stick to safe topics of conversation. Everyone was very warm and welcoming. I know that if my own mother had ever had a baby as a teen, out of wedlock, she would have done all she could have to keep it secret from our family, and this kind of reunion would never have happened. read more

Posted inEmotional Intelligence • Parents

Programmed to Deceive

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“Tell them you still play the piano. Make sure you don’t tell them about detention. Don’t tell them about that math test. Tell them about the paper you did for English.” That was just some of what my mother would say every time we saw family. We always put our best foot forward, but we also hid our worst foot behind us. read more

Posted inParents • Seniors

Swing and a Miss!

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What’s going on with my dad? Usually when I call him, he regales me with the fascinating tales of his latest dental work, how the dentist’s receptionist doesn’t like him and how he’s trying to negotiate a deal so he doesn’t have to pay (is it any wonder she hates him?). Not so the past few phone calls. Right now, my dad’s living an exciting life.

A couple of months ago, my dad told me he had a fall. He was up on a ladder, above a small stairwell, and got his foot stuck in the ladder. He couldn’t get his foot unstuck, so he decided to have a “controlled fall.” The only control he had was that it was his decision. So the ladder came crashing down, he fell onto the stairs and he hurt his back. He went to the doctor, who said he hadn’t broken anything. My father has the posture of a question mark because of osteoporosis and it was a good six-foot fall. How is it possible he didn’t break anything? I was worried. About fifteen years ago, his sister’s decline started with a broken tailbone.

My dad talked about the fall for weeks, until he had another piece of news. He was in a car accident. For once, he called me on the same day, after he got back from the hospital. Usually he calls me a week after something big happens.

Just like every other bad driver I know, someone hit him and he was not at fault. Weird how that happens, huh? He was driving along, didn’t remember which street he was on, when a young girl came sliding across the wet road. He stopped, and she hit him head-on. His airbag deployed, and hurt his chest, and the seat belt caused a bad bruise. At the hospital, they told him he’d broken a rib, and they’d found an enlarged aorta. They offered to pay for an ambulance to take him to another hospital to treat the aorta, but he refused because he’d have to pay for his own way home. He did visit a cardiologist shortly after the accident, and the doctor said his aorta’s size was normal for his age. So he’s got no heart issues right now.

The next time we talked, he told me he’d had quite an adventure. He was sitting in his car outside Wendy’s, enjoying the air conditioning, when a rattily-dressed young man approached him. He said, “I remember you. We used to work together.” My father has not worked in 22 years. He responded something like, “At IBM in Fishkill, for the little French guy?” and of course the guy said, “Yeah. How are you?” Then he explained that he lost his job and his son had just died and he was headed up to Rhinebeck to make funeral arrangements. He could use twenty bucks and a ride to the Peekskill train station, he said.

Once he’d made the request, he walked to the other side of my dad’s car and got in. My dad didn’t know what to do, so he let the guy make a few phone calls on his phone, and decided to give the guy what he wanted to get rid of him. He gave him the twenty bucks, and a ride to Peekskill – but not the train station, he told me proudly. “Best twenty dollars I ever spent,” he said. The guy did get out at Peekskill and did not ask for anything else, thank God.

My father is eighty-two years old, and I can’t help but get a picture in my mind of the Grim Reaper, swinging his scythe at him, an announcer declaring, “Swing and a miss! Swing and a miss! Strike three! He’s outta there!” How is he surviving all of these incidents? I don’t want to sound like a ghoul, it’s just that the last life-threatening incident, when he fell through the ice while skating, happened thirty years ago. And now he’s had all of these narrow escapes in a matter of months.

The only conclusion I can come to is that I don’t know what’s happening. I believe that when it’s your time, it’s your time, no matter what happens. I should have learned that with my mother. She always thought death was imminent. She was healthy, just paranoid. And she suffered from Alzheimer’s for thirteen years before she died. My dad is just luckier than most 82-year-olds. And I’m glad he is.