Ask Three Questions, Have Some Turkey, and Call Me in the Morning

Unfortunate the aliens who someday stumble into the stratosphere over the United States during Thanksgiving and attempt to understand our national feast day by tapping into the media:

 “Countdown To Thanksgiving: Your 5-Day Emotional Cleanse”

“How to Survive Thanksgiving and Actually Enjoy Family and Food”
“Sticky Goo Makes Mess of Thanksgiving Holiday Travel Kickoff”

“95 Percent of Opinions Withheld on Visit to Family”

Given such spin, intergalactic ambassadors just might think the holiday involves something akin to gladiator warfare, sport, espionage . . . or a combination of all three.[1]  Yet within any hyperbolic statement there is at least an ounce of truth.  Someday techies may come out with an OVER/UNDER app for managing the pressures of the season — over-cooked turkeys, underprepared travel, overtired children, under-motivated shopping, overbearing in-laws, overextended finances and undermedicated hangovers . . .

until then, there’s a book for that. 

With one family member gone on vacation, last week was preternaturally quiet around our home, which opened up time for the rest of us to indulge in pleasure reading.  Somehow, appropriately enough, the picture books and poetry we pulled off the shelf spoke to the very essence of what it takes to enter a holiday with a modicum of grace.[2]   

The Three Questions was one of these books.  Loosely based on Leo Tolsoy’s “Three Questions,” it tells the tale of a young boy named Nikolai, who wants to know, as many thoughtful children do, just how he should behave to be a good person. 

“When is the best time to do things?” the little philosopher asks his animal friends as they walk the strand, “Who is the most important one? And what is the right thing to do?”   The beautiful heron Sonya, the acerbic monkey Gogol, and the lovable dog Pushkin have their ideas, but the preternaturally sensible little boy is not satisfied by their answers.  He decides to seek out the wise tortoise Leo for advice.

A little adventure ensues as the boy helps the ancient sage dig his summer garden, saves a mother panda and finds her lost child.  Yet through all these labors at the service of others, Nikolai discovers that Leo has evaded answering him.

“But your questions have been answered,” the old tortoise replies at the end of the story, surprised.  “There is only one important time, and that time is now.  The most important one is always the one you are with.  And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.”

From Jesus’s admonishments to Martha, to Zen koans, this important message reappears again and again in various proverb traditions . . . but never in such an approachable way for children. 

Written and illustrated with beautiful watercolor paintings by award winning artist and author Jon Muth, The Three Questions is a lovely picture book to give as a gift, or to pick up at the library in order to read with your children in the next several weeks.   Frankly, you might even pick it up just to read it in a quiet moment; as one celebration passes and preparations for others gathers force, this simple children's tale reminds us of our best selves, and of our own greatest desires for the extended holiday season.

 

---

[1] A set of conclusions charged with irony — after all, doesn’t the bizarre ritual of mercenary shopping on Black Friday look just like this?

[2] The origin of the word Holiday is “holy day.’ 

Halloween's Unsuspecting Heroes

Halloween should be reframed as the holiday of the unsuspecting hero.  It's time its mascots -- the monsters, witches, mummies, and jack-o-lanterns whose images haunt our houses and yards the whole month of October -- were replaced with images of the overlooked kids we know and knew: the anti-social, the pathologically shy, the sensitive, the awkward, the socially marginalized. 

Think of planting a cutout of Steve Erkel in the garden bed near your front door, or of finding an inflatable figure of Don Knotts to dance in the yard, illuminated, and you'll know what I'm getting at.  Halloween is a celebration of the deliciously awkward, the unsuspecting heroes in us all.

It may seem to be a random suggestion, but it's not.  After all, who are the best beloved heroes of children's Halloween literature?  There's Charlie Brown of course, whose epic search for the Great Pumpkin was plagued with all sorts of disappointments, starting with his disasterous holeyer-than-swiss-cheese ghost costume. . . and Sam from Frank Asch's Popcorn, who in his attempts at being a gracious host to all of his friends at his Halloween party, buries his house in popcorn!  Also, who could forget Casper and Georgie, those sensitive ghosts who just couldn't pass muster in the haunting business. . . being, well, just too friendly and polite!

My favorite of the unsuspecting heroes of Halloween, though, is a little daschund named Oscar, who as the hero of Dav Pilkey's The Hallo-weiner is 'half a dog tall and one and a half dogs long."  Vertically challenged, soft eyed and sleek as he is, how he longs on Halloween to run with the big dogs . . . to embrace his inner canine with an appropriately threatening costume:  A mummy comes to mind  . . . or a dog catcher. 

But no.  Fate would have it otherwise.  As he arrives home on the eve of Halloween prepared to fashion himself into some sort of wonderfully scary thing, his loving mother calls her little vienna sausage over to her and unveils the Halloween masterpiece she has for him to wear:  a hot dog costume, replete with mustard. 

Poor Oscar.  Condemned by the fates of filial justice to wear such a ridiculous costume on such a potentially transforming night as Halloween.  He leaves the house sure that this hot dog combo will throw his social life, and any hope of respect among his classmates, straight to the dogs. 

Yet as he discovers through the course of the book, there's a blessing to be had in being just one half a dog high and one and a half a dog long. . . and one even to be had in wearing a bulky hot dog costume.

I won't give it away why.  Suffice it to be said that Dav Pilkey's The Hallo-Weiner is a great Halloween story to share with your children today, and everyday.  Or to just enjoy by yourself: in true Pilkey style, the language in The Hallo-weiner is playful and punning, a delight to the ear and eye of all!

In fact we love the story so much, I've bought three copies already -- one to replace the first copy we had, which was wore out by the time Pads came home . . . and one for the kids to give to their Auntie Weinie, my oldest and dearest friend, who at the age of six, and through no fault of her own, was rebaptized with the name by my mother.

The most memorable heroes of Halloween are those, like Oscar, who look forward to Halloween as an occasion to be transformed from their socially awkward selves through the mystic magic of the night.  It is only in their unforgettably humorous failures that they, and we, discover the strength of character they have possessed all along.  And that is seriously funny stuff.

Introducing Elegic Poetry to Children

Autumn graces our presence once again.  As the days have become (too) short, and the nights have become clear with cold, we hail the familiar salut! of the geese as we overturn the spent garden, and bid them a good migratory journey.

Inside later, nestled together in footie pajamas and flannels on the couch in our den, we read some wonderful seasonal elegies (n.b.  Not to be confused with seasonal allergies!) from Christina Rossetti’s 1893 volume of nursery rhymes, titled Sing Song:  

Fly away, fly away

 

Fly away, fly away over the sea,
Sun-loving swallow, for summer is done;
Come again, come again, come back to me,
Bringing the summer and bringing the sun.

Twist me a crown

Twist me a crown of wind-flowers;
That I may fly away
To hear the singers at their song,
And players at their play.

Put on your crown of wind-flowers:
But whither would you go?
Beyond the surging of the sea
And the storms that blow.

Alas! your crown of wind-flowers
Can never make you fly:
I twist them in a crown to-day,
And to-night they die.[1]

As with any well wrought seasonal elegy, these poems both commemorate something temperate — a bird, a flower chain -- and treat its passing as a phenomenon taking part in a larger cycle — of departure and return, of life and afterlife, of childhood fancy and adult rationality. 

Now is the time of the year for elegy . . . a time to commemorate the joy of the past summer, and the lush beauty it brought to our senses.  A time to set it in a broader cycle--the story of our lives, our collective memory.

After reading these poems together, I have used them to frame several conversations, and subsequently, activities.   Immediately following the reading of the first poem, for instance, we trying to imagine each speaker and her dramatic occasion in more detail:

• Why does the speaker in “Fly away” tell the swallow to fly away?  What does the speaker want the swallow to bring back? How does the speaker feel about the swallow’s leaving?

After discerning that the speaker observes summer’s passing in the migrating swallow, we draw the dramatic occasion for the poem into context with our own lives, thinking more specifically about the plants and animals whose presence in our lives changes at turn of the season. 

• How do you feel about the end of summer?  What will you miss the most?  What are you looking forward to in the year to come?

• What signs in the environment make us aware that summer is coming to an end?  What “sun-loving” creatures in our own yard are saying goodbye to usas they curl up and become dormant, burrow, or fly away?  Which creatures are already gone?  How do we know?  What trace of themselves have they left in your memory?  In our yard? 

Then, we take a walk through the yard, ambling along our favorite hiking paths with little purpose other than witnessing the passing of a season, the start of another one. 

I set the children to the task of listening to the silent speech of the ‘sun-loving’ creatures in our environment that are saying goodbye for winter.  They take photographs of the plants making their "farewell speeches", some of the images of which are presented here. 

Then, the children write their own elegies in the spirit of Rossetti.  Here are two examples of the elegies that they have written:

Summer, fall, winter, spring, come in time. 

Always.
Every season have fun, but when winter comes,
cold will arise from the dark starry night.
 
Goodnight, goodnight, firefly,

if you're near.

I'll miss your glow when winter comes

rolling from another country 

and wish you were here. 

I'll pretend a fire made of stones

is your light shining bright.

---

[1] This poem is a round, or a dialogue, and the dramatic occasion for the poem is easier to understand if one person reads the call out (stanza one) and another, the response (stanzas two and three)

We are well to remember, however insular our lives, that we do not just move through seasons; they in fact move through us, part of the intricate machinations of our own beings. Even adults have much to benefit from reading elegy now and then — if only to remind ourselves, as in Judaic wisdom, Gam zeh ya'avor , “this too shall pass” — be it joy, be it sorrow, be it summer, be it autumn, be it beauty, be it ugliness.

Among my favorite adult oriented elegies are Thomas Grey’s “An Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: to a Young Child”, and Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” The acuity of each of these poems as an act of perception invites us to actively commemorate our own passings, to locate them within a larger cycle of growth, of meaning.

Striving for Eudiamonia

When homework time makes
you feel like this, you need a
little Aristotle in your life.

“Am I done practicing yet?”
“Am I done with reading?”
“How many more minutes?”
“Am I done?”

Time is of the essence . . . especially for a child whose homework is assigned in time form.  Read for 20 minutes, dictates one assignment book, Play for at least 15 minutes a day, reads another.

“No,” I reply, feeling a transformation into Mr. Hyde coming on, “You still have a few more minutes.”

This repeated question day in and day out seems to take on that rhythmic quality of a metronome, but actually, I can feel it slowly mortifying my brain into blood-orange marmalade, just like those other great existential questions I have faced with increasing frequency since I took my first initiation rites into parenthood —

Are we there yet?

Why?
Why not?

                             “ . . .How ‘bout now.  Am I done yet?” 

Sigh.  Welcome to a new school year. 

The strange thing is, my irritation at the question actually masks an even bigger anxiety.  My fear is rekindled at the turn of every new year: when, if ever, will my daughter’s passion for a subject be ignited?  When will her motivation to wrestle with the problems set before her become internalized?  When will the process of learning become its own reward?

Last week, as the showdown between the clock and the homework, (not to mention my temper and my better judgment) began, I sensed Aristotle’s specter passing through the room wearing dark sunglasses and a solemn frown, shaking its head slowly as it passed through the garage wall. 

Aristotle (right)
and Plato (left) in Raphael's
The School of Athens. 

"Eudiamonia can’t be taught,” it said in a whisper, coolly touching my shoulder, “only self-cultivated in fertile soil.”

“I know, man,” I said under my breath without realizing it.  “I know.”

“Mom?” Both kids had looked up at me from their activities, half bemused, half concerned.  I could tell by their faces that they were wondering who I was talking to this time.

“Never mind,” I replied.  “This time I’m just communing with my favorite Greek philosopher.” 

Eudiamonia.  It roughly translates from Greek into the term flourishing — and was used by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics to name the state in which all human capacities are in perfect balance.   

The happy life, Aristotle argued, is determined by excellence in one’s activities, because "Excellent activities or their opposites are what determine human happiness or the reverse. […] no function of man [sic] has so much permanence as excellent activities (these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge)."

Excellent activities are not purely those with good ends, though of course doing good for its own sake is a noble activity.  But excellence is also a way of approaching the tasks one is faced with, a will to do the very best one is capable of for its own sake:

For the man [sic] who is truly good and wise, we think, bears all the chances of life becomingly and always makes the best of circumstances, as a good general makes the best military use of the army at his command and a shoemaker makes the best shoes out of the hides that are given him; and so with all other craftsmen.[i] 

And learners, too.  A couple weeks ago, when I asked my first year advisees to write an educational autobiography, two of them wrote histories illustrating Aristotelian excellence. 

Micah described how when he was in the third grade he worked long and hard on a portrait of his teacher.  With markers he “detailed every eyelash and pore” of her face, completely absorbed in making the image of her as wonderful as he thought she was.  When he showed his mom the final work, she pointed out that it lacked a neck.  Instead of being disappointed in her response, or angry in himself (or fate) for not doing it correctly, he turned right back around and started the portrait again from scratch.  “I wanted her to be perfect,” he said. 

Eudiamonia, baby. 

Caroline also told a personal narrative that would have earned her props from Aristotle. She had signed up for an A.P. English class fall semester of her senior year, intent on working harder than she ever had for a course, just to prove to herself that she could.  She wrote on Dostoyevsky, the final product being “a good paper. One of the best papers I’ve ever written,” as she told us.  The teacher gave it a failing grade.  “She didn’t receive it on the snow day it was due even though I had sent it, and considered it late.”  While formally challenging the grade through the rest of the year, Caroline didn’t become embittered or even feel the grade reflected her competencies.  “I showed it to anybody who was interested in seeing it, knowing it was good work.”

Aristotle is right, we cannot teach eudiamonia — only give it recognition it when it expresses itself in our homes and classrooms. 

. . . and as I become more fearful that my daughter may never experience the pleasure of hard work, may never cultivate excellence in her activities, or thereby reach eudiamonia, she undermines my slightly-over-the-top idealism yet again.
 
“Mom,” she says, having closed her homework folder. “Can we read some more of Elizabeth’s Royal Diary later?”

“Absolutely,” I reply, coming out of my reverie. We picked up several of The Royal Diaries last week, and had started reading about Queen Elizabeth I’s life in the 16^th century over the past few nights.  Although written for a slightly older reading group, Miss S. seemed to be enjoying them . . . asking as many questions as there were sentences in each entry, actually.

“Perhaps you can read a couple entries and then I can read some,” I suggest.

She looks at me quite solemnly.  “No Mom.  I want to read the whole thing by myself.”

From the garage (or is it my heart?) I can hear Aristotle's specter softly doing the jig.  "Sounds like a wonderful idea," I reply.

---

[i] Nichomachean Ethics lines 1105b-1130b.  The Complete Works of Aristotle. Jonathan Barnes, Editor. Volume Two.

Thirteen Reasons Why to Read this Young Adult Novel Whether or not Your Children Can (Part Two)

So true to the title of this blog, let me give you thirteen reasons you should pick up Asher’s book now. 

Reading this young adult novel can help us start thinking seriously about how to promote our childrens’ abilities to develop healthy relationships with their friends now, for the long term . . . and promote their abilities to develop a healthy relationship with their own selves, no matter what and who they become.

It can remind us that silence can be irrevocably destructive; as a parent, it is better to start a conversation, than to wait for it to happen.

It can encourage us to reflect on the cultural messages and images our children have access to in our homes and beyond, particularly (as is evident in this novel) those in which the objectification and sexualization of young women is a norm; as a consequence, the book helps us think about how to address, interrupt, and challenge those messages for and with our children.

It fosters really important considerations about how closely we listen when our children talk about their days and lives now, and to set better patterns of engagement . . . so that they know they can rely on those communication lines being open when they need them later. 

It helps us to start conversations with other people who we think may be addressing these issues right now — teens in our lives, parents and educators; it also enables us to start thinking seriously about how much we are invested in knowing and conversing with our childrens’ friends now, in order to build those communication lines we will seek out and rely on later.

It provides an invaluable opportunity to observe the subtle and diverse varieties of bullying that are happening, so as to normalize our discussion of bullying with our children.  If they can understand it as a social phenomenon, they can recognize it early.    

Reading the book can also provide an invaluable opportunity for our children to see us read.

Moreover, the novel can inspire us to start conversations with our children about the feeling of shame . . . about how their own felt sense shame when they break the cookie jar or lie can be destructive or instructive: destructive when they choose to suffer it in silence, instructive when they allow us and others who love them to help them address it and work through it.  It's a lesson that translates.

Lastly, the novel encourages us to reflect on how we overlook and elide conversations with people who, in that moment, just may need us most.   

One thing the novel doesn't address is something for which we can turn to the suicides that have happened in the past year: how technology facilitates the bullying process.  Thinking about the forces of cyber bullying, in conjunction with Thirteen Reasons Why, can help us, as parents, to establish clear parameters for our childrens’ use of technology.  It can inspire us to have important and repeated discussions with them about the ethical and moral responsibilities that come with having access to phone, facebook, and video/audio technologies.  

This is a novel that inspires reflection, critical thinking, engagement.  It's a great read, and an important read to read now. . . and again with your children as they enter young adulthood.


Part One 

Thirteen Reasons to Read This Young Adult Novel Whether or Not Your Children Can

Several weeks ago I unexpectedly found myself with an extra 36 hours on hand and absolutely nothing to occupy them, having missed the flight that would get me home.   Though I sorely itched to get there, the layover ended up being a rather convenient inconvenience; I can’t remember the last time I had so much unabridged time to read.

The second of the three novels I had the chance to sweep through in Terminal G really left its mark. 

For several months, both on NPR and in bibliophile circles, I had been hearing about this sleeper hit — Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why.   When I hit Hudson Books and saw it on the racks, I picked it up eagerly.

While initially marketed as a young adult novel at its release in 2007, Thirteen Reasons has a much broader audience following the tragic suicides that made national headlines last year . . . young men and women such as Tyler Clementi, Phoebe Prince, and Raymond Chase, youth who killed themselves in response to the bullying that either slowly, or violently, eroded their self worth and their sense of hope in the future.  As bullying has once again became an topic of national discourse, so this book has started to help frame a dialogue for educators, parents, and young adults.

Thirteen Reasons begins as high school student Clay Jensen finds a package lying on his stoop.  Inside are 7 tapes, each one numbered in succession.  Curious, he goes to the garage, where his dad keeps the old boom-box with a tape deck.  He pops the first tape in.  Wafting over the air, he hears the unmistakable voice of Hannah Baker, a girl in his class who killed herself with an overdose of prescription drugs barely two weeks earlier. 

Before she actually did the deed, Hannah had decided for her death not to be in vain; in the days leading up to her suicide, she made thirteen recordings.   They not only recounted the events that played a role in her decision to kill herself, but identified the people who played a role.  As she states at the beginning of tape one:

“The rules are pretty simple.  There are only two.  Rule number one: You listen.  Number two: You pass it on.  Hopefully, neither one will be easy for you.”

The tapes were to make their rounds to each person involved in her death . . . to be listened by each person in their entirety . . .  or a second copy would be released to the public.

It was a guerilla tactic, perhaps, but one which creates a framing device for this novel, which recounts Clay’s struggle to make sense of his role in the affair — an interior monologue that runs parallel to the monologue Hannah has recorded on her tapes.  


As he moves through their town, a celebrant at the altar of all the sites in which she was slowly, silently degraded into despair, he becomes increasingly aware that the violences we are capable of committing to another person take all forms: carelessness, silence, rumor, emotional manipulation, objectification, outright aggression and, of course, passive aggression.

We readers become increasingly aware of them too.


This book made me reflect on my own adolescence: was this how it was when I was in high school?  I don’t know.  . .  to say I was oblivious of the goings on of high school is an understatement; I was an absolute social moron, and rather embraced it. 

Perhaps that saved me. . . more likely, I think now, it made me unwittingly part of the problem. 

Whether your children are 2 or 12, the time to read Thirteen Reasons Why is now.  Read it to prepare yourselves for thinking about the world that our children are entering into.  It is one where bullying takes extraordinary new forms: it is often sexualized, it often involves refined acts of psychological manipulation, and it all too often is a contagion, wholly inescapable for its victims, due to the powers of internet technology.

Part Two

The Lexicon of Us: Crafting a Family Dictionary

Several weeks ago, Miss S. came into the kitchen preoccupied with her hair again.  I am beginning to suspect it may be the cross she has to bear from this point onward . . . at least until the real metamorphoses begin in her late twenties. 

That morning I tried not to make notice of how, as she moved between the pantry and the refrigerator, her hands kept on fluttering up, like restless hummingbirds, straightening and smoothing her thick, dark tresses.  

Finally she couldn’t take it any longer.  “Mom, is my hair straight?  It feels tallywallytopsicated.”

 
“It’s lovely.  You look just like Veronica Lake.” 
 
A huge sigh was exorcised as she stared wearily at me and said nothing.  Finally she spun on her heels, defeated, and turned to leave the room.  “Fine.  I will marry Paris.”
 
“You mingo!” Pads charged her with between mouthfuls of cereal.

I laughed in spite of myself at the exchange, which anybody else would think gibberish: Tallywallytopsicated?  Mingo?  What does marrying Paris have to do with anything, and who the heck is Veronica Lake?

We, of course, know . . . but then that’s the point.

Every discourse community, be it a family or otherwise, uses language idiomatically, that is, in an idiosyncratic way.  Some references emerge in one generation and thrive . . .  others ride the skirts of emergent cultural forces . . . still others are spawned from the personal whimsy of a speaker.

Language is no different than a gorgeous, motley fingerprint that each of us leaves over everything we touch and feel and see, really. . . and though we hardly ever notice the smear of it in the context of speaking  . . . the trace of the words we use identify us uniquely.

The joyful challenge is to learn to pay attention to how we, and others, use language, and what the language each of us uses silently says about us.

“We’re going to write a family dictionary,” I told Miss S. later that day.  “We’re going to write dictionary definitions for all the expressions we use at home.”

“Why?” Miss S. asked, all but rolling her eyes.

 “Well . . . so that other people who come to visit might be able to figure out what we’re talking about,” I replied, “And so that you and Pads have a better idea of the history of where some of these words and expressions come from. “

“Okay. . . “ she replied warily.  “Can we begin with tallywallytopsicated, since I made that word up?”

“You bet.”

I sent S. to get the dictionary, and we opened it up.  Choosing the entry for the word case at random, I explained why all the parts of a dictionary definition are there:  spelling, syllable analysis, phonetic spelling, grammatical structure, definition, context, synonym and antonym families, and — as is in the case of my favorite dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical record of a word’s first use. 

 S. wasn’t so much as impressed with my explanation of the purpose of each part of an entry as she was using the entry as a model for her own entry:

Taly/waly/top/sicated.  She wrote diligently (with my guidance).

 
“What does it mean, exactly?” I asked her, having always assumed before that it meant crazy, given the contexts I had heard the word in.

 “It means. . . “ she thought silently for a moment, “dizzy and hot.”

We wrote the phonetic spelling and definition down, along with a sentence for context.  In the final word, Miss S.’s first entry looked like this:

Taly/waly/top/sicated:  [talie walie top sick ated] (adj.): 1. Dizzy and hot.  I am talywalytopsicated after going on the rollercoaster.  Orig. Miss S., general speech. 2011.

This last honorarium delighted her, as did the discovery of the origins of the Veronica Lake reference, and that of ‘I will marry Paris’, which she wrote in subsequent entries:

“Fine, I will marry Paris” (exp.): 1. Whatever, I have no more to say about that.  You want me to clean the dishes?  Fine, I will marry Paris.  Orig. Mom, Uncle Gwa, William Shakespeare, and Jerry Springer.  1995.

“You look like Veronica Lake” (exp.): 1. Your hair is beautifully wavy in the fashion of Veronica Lake, a famous actress from the 1930s and 40s.  Orig. Great Grandma Dorothy, general speech.  1970. 

As we wrote the expressions down, I filled her mind with moving pictures of my young adulthood and childhood. . . of my grandmother telling me my hair looked as lovely as Veronica Lake’s one morning as I entered her kitchen as a child, and then having me watch the classic comedy The Major and the Minor with her, so that I could see whom it was that she was talking about .  .  .

Each word a world of family memory, of shared contexts.

“Hey mingo!” Pads said coming into the room, to no one in particular.

Miss S. and I looked at each other and laughed, gathering up our entries.   It would be a few years before we could have him write up a dictionary definition for that one.

The Most Important Story We'll Ever Write

Late summer.  As the cicadas yield their song to crickets, I am overcome by the presence of someone whom I have never met.  For hours at a time, I find myself carrying on animated conversations with her, becoming forgetful and preoccupied in our silent communion.  This oratory in my head provides the basis for a letter which I write each year to this woman . . .  and then stick in a black letter box, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent. 

As my son’s birthday approaches, I know that I am not the only one watching his movement thinking about the milestones he has reached in the past year and imagining those to shortly come.  Half a world away, in a perpetually green and verdant land, there is another mother silently marking the days to the anniversary of the day in which she gave birth to a baby boy.  Perhaps she too writes a letter to him, as she did after his birth . . .  and then she too sticks it in a box shuffled away somewhere, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent.

 Adoption is often filled with such silent observances of grief.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how our home, our story as a family, is filled with gaps — full of anecdotes and infant pictures of one child, lacking for the other.  A genetic inheritance we can map across one child’s personality and physique, and can only intuit in the other.

As my son matures, he will begin to not only see these gaps, but feel them, as if they were black holes in the story that connects him to us.  Even now, as he asks for pictures of himself as a baby, I wonder if he notices that within the pictures I show him of himself, he is a chubby faced toddler, rather than a newborn in arms.  

When we are born, we enter a story
to which we may or may not have access.
For adoptive families, this can be a
source of grief. 

Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that we are born at least twice — once, in body, and second, into a narrative — a story of the people (family, nation, religious group, etc.) which we are born into.  Our full development involves mastering these narratives, and then integrating them into a narrative which we alone can tell.

With this in mind, I feel the need to prepare the space in which he can enter the story of his life, a story that will both honor his journey home to us, and that will create opportunities for him to ask questions about it.

This year for his birthday, we are creating a book that will tell the story of my son’s journey home.  

The plot will have some significant gaps, not all the characters will have names, and the book may be riddled with increasing numbers of unaddressed letters.  Soon enough, he will begin to have questions, but most importantly, he will have a story he can recognize as his own.