beginning reader

Today Nia took a folder with her read-a-thon money to school with her. At our last PTA meeting, the principal and head of the PTA had agreed that surely every child would be able to raise $10, which actually seems pretty unlikely to me. But if the class averages $10/child, they’ll get some sort of reading-related treat I no longer remember and if the whole school hits a high enough target, the PTA will be able to bring in a theater troupe to perform for the kids and any extra money will go toward buying books they can read at school.

So at any rate, Nia went off to school this morning with enough money to subsidize half her classrom’s expected minimum level. I hope that means her class will meet its target! I’d said something on facebook about the drive, thinking that some of my relatives who know her might be interested in contributing or that I could hit up our neighbors without having to have her walk across the street. Instead, I got donations from friends from all over, parents and foster parents and non-parents, teachers and unemployed folks and my coworkers. I am so overwhelmed with this kindness from people who care about Nia and her schoolmates, probably half of whom have never even met Nia.

Friday after school, both girls went to the dentist and then we had a celebratory dinner out afterward. I took the girls to the bookstore down the street from the restaurant. Partly I was being selfish (and seriously, had me obsessed and dreaming furiously all weekend!) but I also wanted to get some new books for Nia to try to read.

On Saturday night, Nia read Mara a bedtime story for the first time ever. We’d had to go to a special shelf to find “level 1″ learn-to-read books at the bookstore, but we brought some home and Nia had puzzled through one with me in the afternoon (with some special help from Mara, who was able to sound out “sad” when Nia couldn’t) and then read it with a pretty high degree of comfort again that evening. Lee was astonished to hear her fluency because normally Nia is not much of a reader, though she enjoys writing and doesn’t generally make a fuss about doing her homework.

At this point, we’re all taking it as pretty much a given that Nia is going to be in first grade again next year. If she’s still with us, which is the most likely outcome, she’ll have her same teacher again. Her teacher has been there long enough to have been my teacher if I’d gone to the school and next year is her last year before retirement, but she’s still active and involved and I really like her, as does Nia. She thinks that Nia’s problems are not learning disorders (and the fact that Nia managed to learn a whole year’s worth of math in 3 months suggests the same) but a combination of being young — just 6 and a half when half the class has already turned 7 — and having gaps from her kindergarten and early childhood experience. If she can come in next year already knowing what the rules are an in a position to be a role model for less-experienced kids, which we know is a situation she loves, we all think she’ll be able to find a niche for herself where she can really succeed, especially if she can remember that she really does need to stop talking sometimes!

Now, though, first grade is so academic in ways it never used to be. Kindergarten is, too, and Nia started kindergarten last year in another state, then sometime in the fall was withdrawn from that school when her mom moved to the city where Mara’s siblings live, at which point she was eventually enrolled in a new kindergarten there, though not at the same school Mara’s siblings attend. (I’m curious about that and don’t know whether all the city schools each get a share of the kids from the public housing area or whether it’s that some streets in the development go to one school and some to another and because Nia lived up by Mara’s Grandma Joyce and not down by the siblings and cousins that she got bussed somewhere else.) One of the problems that brought her mom to the state’s attention was an inability to get Nia to and from school appropriately, though her mom was also active with homework and cares very deeply about Nia’s academic success. So then almost a year ago, Nia was removed from her mom’s care and sent out to a rural McMansion suburb where she was the only black child and the only child who couldn’t read in her third kindergarten that year for the two months or so that school lasted, and her teacher seemed (going by what I see on the papers Nia saved and what Nia’s prior foster mom said) to be uncomfortable figuring out how to meet Nia at her level and so chose to ignore her rather than try to get her up to speed or get supports in place to help her.

In any event, we enrolled Nia at the high-poverty school with a go-getter principal near us. I know most of our neighbors pay to send their children to private schools rather than be part of our city’s public school system, but I’ve been so impressed with the education Val and now Nia have gotten there and look forward to having Mara join in next year. I also feel more and more strongly that if more of the parents from our neighborhood <em>did</em> send their children, that the school would be a whole lot better. But from our middle-class perspectives, it’s hard to think about having to fund-raise to get something that seems as simple as a theater performance, and yet that’s the situation this school is in and the reality for the other kids who live in our city, who aren’t making it to the zoo and the children’s museum and art museum as often as Nia and Mara are, who don’t have the home libraries that we and our neighbors do. Okay, I’ll stop before I take off on a rant, but the more time goes by the more I’m taking it personally when I can tell people feel some kind of way about “those kids” when those kids are MY kids.

And my kids are wonderful! The girls have been asking about getting more chores and so yesterday they scrubbed the bathroom and couldn’t wait to show off its shine to Lee, but also practiced dusting baseboards and bumping down the stairs on their bottoms while holding rags to the sides to dust the edges along the hideous carpet runner on the stairs. They played well all weekend while Lee and I were different strains of sick and pitiful and I know I’ll come home to big hugs and big smiles tonight. Then after dinner, Nia and I will sit down and maybe Mara will follow us and we’ll all read a story, or Nia will read to us. She’s grown up so much in the time that we know her and I’m so proud of that and excited about where it will take her next.

tiny addendum

I do know there will be times when Mara doesn’t want a white mom or lesbian parents and we’re as ready for that as we can be. Lee and I have both kind of shrugged when she’s been hitting us with the “I don’t want two moms!” thing, sometimes pointing out that actually she has THREE moms, so two isn’t even the problem. But I do know that’s a normal part of the development of most kids with queer parents or who are transracially adopted, and I’m not making light of that or implying we won’t deal with it. Just for now, neither girl seems to be dissatisfied with our family because she’s comparing it to that of her peers, just sometimes when she’s comparing it to the family she’d prefer to have if she were queen of the world. 

I am reminded of a friend of ours in our old town who asked what we’d do when our child asked why he or she didn’t have a dad and my immediate response was, “Who in our town has a dad???” Really, we’re so lucky that Mara and Nia do have parents who love them and have been involved in their lives. There are plenty of kids who don’t even have that, and while we’re the only lesbian foster parents at Nia’s school, those of us who are variants from the mom-dad-kids nuclear family seem to be the majority. 

I love that Nia’s fellow first graders were drawing superheroes and in addition to the capes and cowls you’d expect, there’s a Wonder Woman with a massive afro and another with a bright blue hijab. I love that our being out has been one factor in some of Mara’s young teachers being a little more open about their own sexual identities, though I don’t know that the kids are aware of much of that. I think it’s great that the girls are seeing lots of different kinds of families and that they have a huge number of people who count as the families who love them. As far as I know, Mara’s teen relative everyone assumes is gay hasn’t come out officially, but I’m glad our very presence was enough to to show that Grandma Joyce accepted our kind of family as being just as good as the others. There are many ways in which what we have to offer is a plus.

But I’m also realistic about how much we’re going to come up short. As I tell Mara now, I have white skin because I was born from the bodies of people with white skin whose ancestors mostly came from Europe. I can’t have brown skin and curly hair and the personal history that growing up black would have brought me. I can do all I can to foster their cultural health, but I can’t do it as an insider and that’s just reality. Going into foster care and being adopted out of it is not the ideal for any child, and adding an interracial lesbian couple as parents just makes it more fraught. I’m not saying all of this is easy on the kids. It wasn’t their fault they needed us and it wasn’t their choice that they got us. But they’ve chosen to love and trust us, and I’m grateful for that. And it was our choice to take on the hard job of dealing with the rest, too.

No Two Moms!

Mara’s been on a crusade to reform our family lately. For the last month or so, she’s mentioned periodically that she’s ready for Nia to go back to her family and that she’d like to trade her in for a little brother. (She always specifies that she wants a little brother who will be like her best friend, who moved here from South Asia and who, as she always reminds us, called her “MY Mara.” I also don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that she’s had two very close friends who are boys a year younger than she is when she has a brother a year younger than she is, but whatever. (And since I’m being parenthetical anyway, she didn’t know this but the first time she made that statement was right after Lee and I had decided that we’ll keep our home open for a little boy — preferably black or biracial ages 2-4, which is to say younger than Mara — for the rest of this year and then probably close to fostering after that, though the girls don’t know about this decision.)) At any rate, Nia has heard her say this and we’ve talked about it a lot. Nia isn’t offended because she, too, sometimes wants to go home, though not so much these days, and they both understand that it’s hard to be a sister.

But Mara has also started complaining about having two moms. First she had plans about which of us should move out so her dad could move in and she could have a mom and a dad, but she realized that would be inadequate because she likes Lee and me to both keep playing the roles we already do. 

We’ve finally made it to the playgroup for kids with gay parents, and the only other child of color was also the only other child with a foster care history and the only other child whose parents were an interracial couple, so that was interesting. (There are other people who fit those categories in the larger group, but they just weren’t there that month.) Then last weekend we had our friends who run the potluck over, a black mom and her two black girls the ages our two will be in a few more years plus the mom’s white fiancee. This is going to be an ongoing thing because we all like each other a lot and had a blast, but also because each of us is the only other interracial-lesbian-couple-with-two-black-girls the other family knows. So I think once a month we’ll all go to playgroup and once a month we’ll do something with just our two families, and that’s both the weekends that their moms have custody. Even though all four girls are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, I think it will make things easier for them to see another family with the same or at least a similar setup. 

We had a family meeting earlier this week to address the “No two moms!” shout that’s been punctuating Mara’s interactions with us lately and also that Nia has started addressing some of her frustrations with Lee by saying that she doesn’t want to live with Lee. They loved the family meeting and keep asking to have one every night, but I think we’ll settle for one a week. We talked about parents’ jobs and judges’ jobs and who gets to decide who lives where and does what and why, and even though the girls didn’t get the answers they’d been requesting, they were happy with the outcomes of the discussion.

Mara snuggled up to me last night at bedtime and said, “It’s hard having two moms and it’s hard to be a sister!” I was sort of glad she’s picking up the language from me (“it’s hard” or “I’m having a hard time” being one of their standard ways of asking for emotional help because that’s how I always frame it for them, but also that HAVING two moms is a situation in which she finds herself but BEING a sister is about how she is actively involved in her relationship with Nia, which doesn’t involve a whole lot of parental control. When I talked to her about this, wondering whether she was jealous of the kids in her class who have a mom and a dad, which seemed weird since they’re definitely in the minority, it turned out that what she meant was that she misses her first parents and she wishes she could have been raised by them. Having a mommy and a mama is an ongoing reminder of that broken history for her. And so I hugged her and we talked about how of course it was hard and sad and that it makes me sad for her and for them, that when Lee was a little girl she was also sad about missing Leah and angry that Leah and Richie weren’t doing the work to raise her. Mara really seemed responsive and had a lot to say about all of that, 

And then there’s race, of course. At one point, Mara’s comment was that she wanted me to leave and her dad to move in so that everyone in the family could have brown skin. It seems that most of the time, Nia wants to have white skin because it makes her sad to see the shelves and shelves of dolls with white skin and the people on commercials with long hair she’ll never have while Mara wants me to have brown skin and curly hair because she wants us to match and wants my visible differences to disappear. They’re both having to grapple with a culture that values whiteness, and they’re doing it in age-appropriate ways, but it really is heart-breaking to watch sometimes. I had to stop at the drug store to pick up some more decongestants last weekend and Nia, in a very offhand way because she’s trying on how she talks about our family, told the woman sorting makeup, “I have a white mom!” as we walked by. All I can do is support them, let them experiment with how the feel and what they think, but from the outside it’s hard. 

Meanwhile, Mara is seeing her dad more often but not her mom as much, and taking her to her grandma’s grave seems to have calmed a lot of her concerns about death. Nia is not getting that same level of family connection, but for the most part she seems okay with that and is using the time to mentally separate her identity now from her history, which I think is good and bad but also only a step along her process to however she’ll end up seeing herself eventually. And Mara’s desires are complicated by the fact that seeing her dad means getting to eat her favorite cake at the restaurant where he works and her desires to see her mom are really about wanting to see the baby who lives in that house. She certainly gets something out of seeing her parents, but I think she takes that part of it for granted and is into the personal perks at this point!

So in case people want to know how we’re doing, it’s that. Nia wants to be white. Mara wants to be back with her parents. They both know that’s not going to happen. Lee has made big strides in interacting with Nia in a way that doesn’t trigger fears from her former life, and that’s led to a lot of unexpected hugs and happiness from Nia directed toward her. I’m glad I got in the middle of things and held a family meeting, and I’m reminded again how much being a parent for me means paying attention to what I think the girls are trying to say and help them find the words to say it without putting my own words in their mouths.

So we talked about “No two moms!” and why it’s not a useful rallying cry. If you want more chicken at dinner, you don’t get it by saying “No more french fries!” If you want more chicken, you need to tell me that you want more chicken, and even so sometimes we will have eaten all the chicken and you’ll have to wait until next time. If you say you want no two moms, that’s not going to happen in this family, and Mara knows about the judge who decided she’s a part of our family forever. (Yeah, someday we’ll get into the details on how I don’t actually have rights to her and that judge actually opposes families like ours, but for now we’re focusing on other things. She’s five. And Nia is already obsessed with the idea that we should and will get married since our friends are doing it, so we’ve got plenty of family pressure on our plates already!) One phrase we’ve had a lot of luck with is telling the girls, “If you need extra love, you need to tell me with your words rather than your behavior.” They do know that they can ask for extra love and do so regularly. Unfortunately what they’re telling me right now is that they want extra love from people who can’t necessarily give it to them, want things that they can’t have. And while that’s reality, it’s a sad reality. And it’s hard. And I’m not saying we’re doing any of this right or trying to set out a framework others should use, but we’re muddling through it. We have a long weekend coming up for these two moms and two kids and I think all four of us are looking forward to it.

updates

I haven’t written here in way too long, though I’ve wanted to. I’ve been sick and now I’m sick again, though it’s nothing dangerous. The girls are wonderful. Nia was chosen as student of the month for her class (just as Valerie was last year this month, so we’ll see if Mara can keep up the pattern next year in kindergarten!) and I had a good meeting with her teacher last week. Her lawyer and both caseworkers are coming over later this month before court, and I suspect that means that her caseplan is going to be changed to adoption. I guess we’ll know more about that soon. I’m sorry that her mom hasn’t been making progress and that Nia is having to deal with so much sadness and uncertainty, but she’s doing it amazingly well.

I think, too about the shadow children. Val and Alex have been gone for a year now. I talk to Colton pretty regularly, but Rowan isn’t a part of our lives right now, though I’ve heard he’s spending more time in our area. I miss him very much and hope he’s doing okay and that I’ll get to know first-hand someday soon. I don’t expect to hear more about Val and Alex, really, though I think of them often and Mara has been talking about them more lately. Mara’s siblings seem to be doing okay living with relatives, but because I’ve been contagious I haven’t gotten to see them yet. That will change when it can.

Lee and I are doing well, too, though we have moments of seriously getting on each other’s nerves. We’ve learned and grown so much in this last year and I’m incredibly grateful to have her as a partner in whatever happens next for our family. Today is my birthday and she’s worked with the girls to make a lot of lovely things happen for me. 

I do have a lot more to say, more than this, but I want to say how grateful I am for the people who’ve commented to say this miss hearing about us, for the people who don’t say that but still read. It’s been hard to figure out how to balance writing what I want to and still being respectful of the privacy of others. I took a break from twitter for that reason, because I’m tired of venting online and it’s not productive for me. But I do want to be able to write here and I expect to do so more soon. I love that I get to do this, all of this, parenting, blogging, loving someone who loves me! I am so fortunate in so many ways. (But also sick. Blech!)

thinking about contact

In thinking about contact and what my obligations are to Mara’s family, my first priority has always been in keeping her connected to her siblings. (Even that is not entirely true, since the only other of her dad’s kids she knows is her one full sibling, but I hear from her mom that her dad’s older children are aware of her and want to meet her soon, which would be great.) I like both her parents and appreciate having them be a part of her life, but ultimately the choice of whether to be there or not is up to them. Her young siblings, though, didn’t get to choose to be separated from their sister and I feel like I have an extra strong obligation to make sure they don’t lose contact with her. (Obviously this is on my mind even more now that none of them are with the aunt with whom I’d cultivated a good relationship, though the great-aunt they’re with now was so lovely to me at Mara’s grandmother’s funeral and made a point to tell me to pass on the family’s love to my “wifey” too.)

And since I parenthetically brought up Grandma Joyce’s death before I meant to, I’ll say that some of my thoughts about family contact stem from all the emotions her death brought out in me. I’d only known her nine months and we were just starting to figure out what the dynamic between the two of us was, though we clearly respected each other’s love for Mara. So losing her meant not only losing that relationship but realizing how close I’d come to never having a chance to help Mara get to know her at all. Mara took her grandma’s death hard, and has been commenting on it every day for the last few months. Earlier this week, and partly in preparation Grace’s memorial service today, I took Mara to the cemetery where her grandma is buried, as is the sibling who died before she was born. We tramped through the snow and Mara looked at the dirt and we talked about how Grandma Joyce’s body was in that dirt and that’s why she can’t “be back alive” or come to dinner or any of the other things Mara has asked for. Then the whole way home, Mara and Nia peppered me with questions about death and the specifics of Grandma Joyce’s death and burial. Mara had a weepy meltdown later that evening, but since then she’s seemed better with the idea and doesn’t spend as much time talking about being sad about her Grandma.

She does still say, if she’s sad or thoughtful, “I miss my Grandma Joyce.” Before that, it was “I miss my Lulu Veronica” and before that “I miss my Daddy.” As each of those pieces has been filled in for her, she’s stopped (mostly) using those as catch-all terms for her sadness or discomfort or whatever it is she’s expressing. Before any of those, though, she used to talk sometimes about missing “My Papa who Lives in the Forest.” That was back when Lee and I had no contact with her family at all yet, and so we didn’t know if Papa and Daddy were the same person or what was going on. But at Mara’s great-aunt’s house at the family get-together right after Grandma Joyce died, Mara’s mom Veronica walked Lee a few blocks away to the big house where Mara’s paternal grandfather lives, where trees run down to the river. When Mara was a baby and before her parents separated, they lived for a while with this grandfather. I get the feeling Mara and her mom might have stayed there even after her dad was gone, but I rarely get much of a timeline from anyone on when things happened. So now we know where Mara’s Papa’s forest is.

But Mara’s dad has been clear that his dad doesn’t want to know Mara. Mara’s mom reiterated that too. I’ve googled him, though, and found a lot of interesting things. He’s the guy to talk to in our area if you’re interested in local black history, which I am. I found an article mentioning a black church where the stained glass windows were paid for and then dedicated in memory of parishioners, including an ancestor of his (and thus Mara’s). I believe that Mara was named for his mother, though she had the more traditional pronunciation and maybe spelling of the name. He’s been active in reaching out to other people in the community, but he’s cut his son off and they haven’t seen each other in quite a while, maybe years. Knowing that Mara and Lee would be gone for a few days, I brought home a dvd from the library that I know includes an interview with him. Tonight or tomorrow, once Nia is in bed, I’ll sit down and finally see Mara’s Papa for myself.

So the question is whether to contact him when I’ve been asked not to do so. Lee is inclined to say that if Mara’s dad says he doesn’t want to be in touch with Mara, we respect that. Me, I have a hard time believing that a man who cares so much about the children who attended the first black school in our town before our 110-year-old house was even built would probably also want to know his own granddaughter, or should at least be given the chance to make that choice himself. I want to send him a letter and a few pictures. Honestly, I’m not going to defer to Mara’s parents’ wishes on this, though I am waiting until Lee feels ready to do it. If he doesn’t want to know Mara, well, nothing will change on our end. But if he said something he didn’t really mean in a moment of bluster when he was sad about losing his granddaughter and angry with the parents who were failing her, I don’t want him to have that stand as his final decision about his role in Mara’s life.

And in all of this, as I talk about what I owe to the various people involved, the person who truly has my allegiance is Mara. She’s made it clear she wants to see her Papa again, which tells me I should get on the ball in contacting him, which is why I brought this movie home and will let Lee look at him (which she really wants to do) and hear him talk and see if that makes him real in a way that makes her want to contact him even if that’s not what his son thinks he wants. I don’t want to see an obituary and know that we missed our chance, though I also don’t spend all my waking moments hunting down the relatives we don’t know.

So I guess I do have a certain amount of clarity about this. In the last six months when Mara’s mom has complained about some of the things her sisters were doing or not doing, I made it clear that I wasn’t going to get in the middle of it. I didn’t get in the middle when one of the aunts was angry with Grandma Joyce and venting to me, and I understand why Odelia has talked to me about her frustrations with the kids’ mom because she knows that I’m raising one of Veronica’s other children and it will make sense to me even though I’m also not going to have the same exact frustrations because Veronica and I don’t have the same history. It’s been very clear that there are a lot of different versions of the truth running around that people tell themselves in order to feel okay about whatever they’ve done, and I include myself in that group. I don’t need to judge the veracity of the pieces when what I’m doing now is holding onto all of them for Mara so she can patch together her own understanding someday. I hope she’ll be able to do it not only based on what she hears but on what she knows and has experienced growing up in contact with her family. But I hope, too, that someday she’ll see those pieces of stained glass that are part of her heritage and maybe that she’ll see them with her Papa. She has so much love to share and I’m delighted that Lee’s family is finally getting to experience that in person, but I want that to keep expanding along all the branches of her family. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

endings

We have a lot going on right now. Lee’s sister (bio aunt) Grace died on Christmas morning after about a month in hospice. Today Mara and Lee are flying out for her memorial service and so Mara can meet Lee’s family and see where Lee grew up. I get to hold down the fort with Nia and the pets and hope that everything goes well even though Mara’s first adult tooth just broke through her gum and she’s been decidedly not happy about much of anything lately and even though Lee promised she wouldn’t go back for this funeral because she didn’t think she could handle it. I think it will be good for both of them and good for bonding them in a new way.

On Christmas Eve, I got a call from Mara’s aunt Odelia while we were at my aunt’s house eight hours away, feasting and enjoying ourselves. I knew she’d be having a hard time on her first Christmas without her mom, but it was even worse than that. The state had removed Mara’s three siblings still living with her as well as her four biological children. Her children were placed with paternal family and Mara’s siblings went first to a neighbor and then to their great-aunt while her daughter waits to pass a background check to be able to take them in. It’s not clear to me exactly what happened, but I really wasn’t surprised that things had come to a head and the home was no longer safe enough. Odelia is not going to try to regain custody of Mara’s siblings. She would prefer that they go to us, because she thinks no one else in the family can raise them properly.

Lee and I would prefer not to add three children to our home right now, because I’m not sure we could handle the stress. But we also love these three and have always said that we wanted to be a resource for Mara’s siblings. As a middle ground, we’ve agreed that if the initial kinship placement doesn’t work out, we can keep them for a few weeks while a better placement (kinship or foster) is found. I’ve made all of this clear to our worker and the supervisor of Odelia’s caseworker, though I don’t know what it will matter in the long run. Regardless of what we want, if they come into foster care proper we will get the call and we’ll have to make a decision. Well, we’ll make the decision that I’ll take the parental leave I’m due for a new foster placement and we’ll take them on short-term so they have a safe home where they know the people and know the rules and know the place while something else gets figured out for them. I guess.

(What I want is to have Trinity come live with us. I think that eventually paternal family might come forward for Franca and Andre, who’ve had more contact with their dad and his family this past year. I don’t see that happening for Trinity and her needs are the highest of the three, which makes it less likely there will be a family member volunteering to meet them. It would also be sort of insane to be adding another 6-year-old when we have a 5-year-old and a 6-year-old already and are feeling stretched a bit thin at times by just that setup. But it’s what I’ve always wanted, and there’s still a chance Nia might go home, in which case I’d definitely end up heartsick if we didn’t step up for Trinity when we could have and instead ended up with just Mara, not that having just Mara wouldn’t be wonderful in its own way. On the other other hand, it’s likely Trinity is the kind of kid who will blow placements and we’ll end up with her again. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Lee feels pretty strongly that adding Trinity would be too much, but it’s Trinity! I’d love to have the other two too, but she just needs so much and loves so much and has lost so much that she’s in a special separate category for me.)

At any rate, I’ve told the family that I’m willing to do respite this weekend when I’m home with Nia, in part to see how Nia does with the siblings. She’s spent significant time with them twice and had a great time once she warmed up (which is not a hard process for such a friendly extrovert) but I know it would be hard for her to have to deal with “sharing” when she considers Mara her sister but that doesn’t mean Mara’s sisters are her sisters and so on. Plus Nia wants to spend as much time as possible with her best friend Katrina, a neighbor who was adopted out of foster care and whose mom is Nia’s favorite of the first-grade teachers. We’ll have plenty to keep us occupied regardless of what happens, and I think that’s sort of a mantra for the family at the moment, how we’re living all of our lives. There is plenty going on even when nothing’s going on and we’re managing through that all right so far.

relief

I took Mara to see her mom, Veronica, yesterday afternoon. Her mom talked about how it’s going to be a depressing Christmas for her, but was lovely with Mara. We had some good conversations, got some pertinent medical history, and Mara was able to drop off the gift she’d chosen for her, proudly announcing “And it’s skin lotion!” Veronica and I both laughed about what a surprise it would be when Veronica opened it, and she had a candy cane for Mara. She got to see Mara’s beginning locs and was very supportive and encouraging about that and about getting Mara’s pica treated. She got to see Mara’s version of the moonwalk, which was adorable.

Veronica is visibly not pregnant now. There was a baby in the household, but the baby was seven months old and obviously not hers. I have no idea what happened between the beginning of November and now that changed things, but since she never told me she was pregnant I didn’t feel like I had room to ask. I was supportive in the general conversation about grieving during the holidays and I’m really glad she feels comfortable talking to me about some of the sensitive topics in her life. I really do like her, and it was great to see her looking as healthy as she did.

I know that one way or another, this is one more loss for Veronica, who’s lost so many loved ones already, but I was worried that no matter what, the state was not going to let her bring a baby home to the house where she’s staying. I was at least as worried that adding a baby to our lives didn’t seem like the right step for Lee and me, but that having Mara’s baby sibling go to another home also felt unthinkable. I’d been getting stronger and stronger in my resolve about saying no, but I’ve simultaneously been getting extremely sad about that.

I don’t know what happened and if I ever do it won’t go on the blog, but since I brought up the question of whether we would be making a decision about the baby, it’s a great relief to be able to say that this is no longer a concern. As things in Nia’s case seem to be trending toward termination of her mom’s rights and thus adoption, I’m glad we don’t have to factor a baby into the equation. And again, I can say what I’ve said before, that I hope Veronica won’t have another child until she’s ready and able to parent effectively. I would love to see it work for her, but I was really scared about how this would work out for all of us and I’m semi-selfishly glad that it somehow has without my having to be more involved.

Tonight, Lee and Mara are supposed to see Mara’s dad and maybe her little brother, who’s been visiting their dad more frequently lately. Veronica confirmed that Mara’s dad’s older kids know and ask about Mara, so we may be able to meet them soon, which I would like. I’ll do something with Nia’s hair (took out the ballies her mom had put in because the tightness was hurting her and the ballies were falling out of the bottom and she kept begging me to change it, which I think was for pain rather than aesthetic or emotional reasons) and she and I will go to a neighborhood Christmas party the next-door neighbor who kept the girls while we were traveling is trying to make a new tradition. I’m sure Lee and Mara will meet us there later, and the girls are excited to get to show all our neighbors “their” room where they slept! This weekend we set out for the land of cozy fires and family together, I hope without leaving their other families behind in any way except the physical. I will focus on the girls I have and all the families they have, the ones I know and the ones they know and all the ones we don’t know or may never even know about. There are so many people who love them and whom they love, and I’m so overwhelmingly grateful to be one.