Pembirdie

Category: family

  • Book review: “You Should Be Grateful”

    “You Should Be Grateful”: Stories of race, identify, and transracial adoption, by Angela Tucker.

    I came across Angela Tucker while googling adoption. I listened to one of her podcasts. She comes across as a gracious, well-spoken, intelligent and empathetic woman.

    You Should Be Grateful tells part of her adoptee story and her perspective from working at an adoption agency and mentoring adoptees, as well as incorporating research and philosophies related to adoption and transracial adoption in particular. (Transracial adoption referring to people adopting a child of a different race/ethnicity/skin color.) Ms. Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted as a young child by parents who also adopted multiple other children of various ethnicities and raised her in a loving, supportive environment. Despite having a closed adoption, Ms. Tucker was eventually able to track down and reconnect with her birth parents, relatives and half-siblings.

    Although I think it’s becoming more common now, historically there are more narratives from adoptive parents than adopted children, and while no doubt every adopted child’s story is different, reading about an adoptee’s experience is valuable. Ms. Tucker writes generously and honestly, both about the excellent upbringing her adopted parents provided her and her irrepressible longing to know her birth mother, as well as the complicated emotions that were part and parcel of finding and connecting with her birth family.

    In the book, Ms. Tucker introduces three words/concepts that were new to me:

    1. Hiraeth (here-eyeth): A deep yearning for a home that never was. Angela makes the case that all adoptees have some degree of hiraeth.
    2. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. (A neologism coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.)
    3. Sondersphere: A realm where every person in an adoptee’s life has a place–where birth parents and adoptive parents and biological aunties and foster parents and adoptive cousins all exist together. (Coined by Ms. Tucker, based on a word coined by John Koenig.)

    Another concept she discussed was that of a “ghost kingdom,” essentially what someone imagines their life would have been like if an event (such as adoption) had not happened.

    Ms. Tucker is not anti-adoption, and she is not anti-transracial adoption although she raises a lot of concerns. However, as the word “sondersphere” suggests, she is strongly in favor of adoptions being widely open. While she understands that adoptive parents have a responsibility to care for their child’s wellbeing and that birth parents may very well not have the capacity to be a healthy presence at times, she argues that honest information sharing is the best policy. In her own experience, she found that connecting with her birth family actually strengthened the (already strong) bonds she had with her adopted family. I could see adoptive families having concerns that if their bond with their adopted child is not very strong, bringing in the birth family could weaken them further. At the same time, those concerns are centered on the adoptive parents, rather than on the child.

    Ms. Tucker also touches on the microaggressions that transracial adoptees may face, and helpful or unhelpful ways their adoptive parents interact with their race. She believes it is imperative for transracial adoptees to interact with children and adults who share their birth culture so adoptees can connect with that aspect of themselves, rather than ignoring it’s existence. Interestingly, she includes a discussion of how assigning food-labels to a racial characteristic (“chocolate” skin, “almond-shaped” eyes, “oreo”) carries the connotation of being able to eat, and therefore dominate, the person with this trait. I’m still on the fence on what I think about this one. This afternoon I called my cat, “honey.” My dad and mom called each other this all the time. Were they subconsciously trying to dominate each other? I think not.

    Of course, reading a book like this, I can’t help but relate it to my own experience, not as an adoptee but as a member of a household that included two transracial adoptees, my African American youngest brother and Chinese youngest sister. Their adoptions were closed. We grew up in a small town in southwest Nebraska, where there were two other (also adopted) Black kids, one other (also adopted) Asian kid, and one (also adopted) Indian kid. There were a decent amount of Hispanics who mostly stayed together and everyone else was White. We had an (also adopted) Korean aunt, a Black uncle, and an (also adopted)Korean cousin, but they lived far away. I’m not aware that my siblings had meaningful, sustained relationships with any Black or Asian adults during their childhoods. We did not participate in an adoption-related activities or camps, that I am aware of. As a kid, I truly did not believe racism was still a problem.

    I know now that I was wrong.

    My brother experienced things growing up that I didn’t know about until much later in life. I don’t know about my sister, but she’s shared events from the past few years that demonstrate she deals with microaggressions on a regular basis. (Recent example: her boss said she was a standout member of the ESL program at work.)

    My siblings have never seemed interested in talking with me about being adopted, or about the emotional struggles they may or may not be going through. I wonder if they have experienced “exulansis.” I’m sure I haven’t presented as a great listener. While I don’t think I’ve ever felt that they “should be grateful,” growing up I never considered they would feel different at all. I wish I’d known better.

    Cautions regarding this book: it is certainly not from a Christian perspective. It trends toward “wokeness” but I don’t believe to the point of being unhelpful. When describing group discussions with adoptees, Ms. Tucker is always careful to describe that she introduces her pronouns when starting the discussion, which is something that goes along with LGBTQ+ affirming practices.

    SDG

  • Gaps in my financial experience

    Because of my parents’ generosity, I don’t have experience with two major expenses that it seems a majority of people have to deal with: student loans and a mortgage.

    My parents funded 529 college savings plans for all of us. Thanks to my highly specific skill at excelling at standardized multiple choice exams, scholarships covered my college tuition and half of my medical school tuition, but the 529 plan paid for college room and board and the other half of med school. (I think I paid for the four pre-med classes I took at USD, but they weren’t very expensive.) (I also know my 529 plan didn’t pay for it all, Mom moved some around from my brother’s plan, as he had an all-expenses paid education at the Air Force Academy.) Making it through college and medical school without student loans is a major boost and has no doubt saved me countless worries.

    When my husband and I decided to move back to Omaha, Mom told us we didn’t have to worry about applying for a loan: she’d give us the money for the house, and we’d pay her back. In retrospect, I don’t think we set the arrangement up correctly – turns out you can’t just give someone a large sum of money and have them pay you back without some contractual and estate planning considerations – but this arrangement has worked out great for us. Turns out there are a lot of extra expenses you don’t have to worry about when you pay for a house with cash. We have a very reasonable “mortgage” payment that I transfer to Mom’s bank account every month, and with the inheritance we received from various estate sell-offs (again, a major boost!), we’re going to have her paid back in the next seven years, God willing.

    As a result of my family’s wealth and generosity, I won’t be able to offer advice based on personal experience for several areas that typically have a large impact on a person’s financial life. This is a good problem to have, but something I will need to keep in mind when I’m tempted to compare my financial situation to someone else’s.

    SDG

  • On death and dying

    I haven’t had as much experience with death as some.

    On one hand, my childhood contained plenty of animal death. Cows died sometimes. My dad shot three of our dogs when they got too old to move, and we tearfully brought another dog to be euthanized at the vet when it was diagnosed with diabetes. Countless cats disappeared, and more than a few kittens kicked the bucket, some in gruesome ways. One night when I was ten or eleven, I wanted to feel sad (kids are weird) and tried to tally up all the animals I knew that had died. I can’t recall the total but it seemed like it was over fifty.

    On the other hand, I was spared the death of someone I loved until after college.

    My dad died in a plane crash the summer I turned twenty-three – that was my first real experience.

    A fact about me I’m ashamed to share: I’ve never performed CPR in a read code event. The opportunity never came up in med school, and when someone coded in the ICU during residency and I saw everyone lining up for their turn at chest compressions in what seemed quite obviously to be a futile attempt at resuscitation, it didn’t seem like giving a few of my own chest compressions was going to help me or the patient.

    I’ve observed several codes, none of which ultimately was successful. (This demonstrates how few I’ve seen, because statistically in the hospital about 1/3 to 1/4 are at least successful at restarting the heart.)

    I didn’t pronounce someone dead until my fellowship year. An older woman in my care had been placed on comfort care with the goal of leaving the hospital on hospice. She wasn’t doing well, but had been stable for several days. Right before the end of my shift, her nurse paged and asked me to come up, because my patient had died. In a moment of gallows humor, I had a shock when I was listening for a heart beat and watching the patient’s chest – it was rising and falling. Then I realized her air bed was still on. The nurse turned it off, and she was still.

    Our daughter, Lindy, died in our arms. She just gradually stopped breathing. The nurse listened to her heart and said she had died, but when the nurse practitioner came to confirm, her heart was still beating, slowly. It kept beating for a few more hours as we held her close in the hospital bed.

    Yesterday I spent the afternoon sitting next to a great aunt who is dying. Part of the time she moaned and moved her head back and forth, most of the time she slept. I don’t think she knew I was there. Her pulse was high, probably 120 beats per minute. Still breathing steady but sometimes with a rattle. I sat with her in the hospital in July and thought she was dying then, although she’s further down that path now. I don’t know how long her earthly journey will continue. Sometimes it happens so quickly, like with my dad. Other times over a few hours, with Lindy. My great aunt is taking a harder, longer road, God only knows why.

    I hate death. People say death is just a part of life, but they’re wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

    What I do know is that the God of the universe experienced death as Jesus Christ, and he conquered it.

    Resurgam.

    SDG

  • Maybe we’re not going to see the world?

    I am on the Internet a lot (sigh) and spend a lot of time reading personal finance blogs. It seems that people blogging about personal finance, financial independence, and FIRE have something in common besides wanting to be good with money and to retire early and do whatever they want (like blogging): they all love to travel.

    Now, a lot of these blogs also happen to be geared toward physicians or high earners, so I guess that should adjust my mindset somewhat, but it’s common to read about people spending 20-50 grand a year on travel. Which makes my eyes widen a bit.

    It’s not just on the blogs. At my job, every new hire gets introduced by a faculty member at one of our monthly meetings. Invariably, at least one slide on their introduction PowerPoint will show them hiking, posing in front of a big building, etc., and we will be informed that this person “loves to travel.” Colleagues discuss their European vacation plans.

    Admittedly, this is selection bias. People don’t talk about how they aren’t going on a European vacation, and bloggers tend not to post about how they spend $2,000 on travel this year, not because they were awesome at credit card hacking but because they just didn’t travel anywhere other to visit their parents a few states away.

    Of my immediate family, baring the one who is incarcerated, I am probably least traveled. I was born in Europe but we moved to Nebraska before I could remember anything different. Since then, I’ve been to Mexico and Canada a few times, Peru, some of the Caribbean (on a cruise), England, and Uganda. The sister after me has spent the last two years of her life in Uganda, went to Egypt on a work trip there, visited Israel in seminary, toured through Italy and Ireland during Bible college, went on a river cruise from Austria to the Netherlands a few summers ago, and is currently visiting a friend in Finland and a cousin in Switzerland. My brother went on a world tour after graduating from the Air Force academy including more places than I’m aware of, and spend three years with his wife in England where they went on frequent trips to France, Poland, Greece, Germany and more. My youngest sister studied abroad in Spain. My mom and dad met in Japan and spend the first few years of their married life in Europe. Enough said.

    Actually, typing out all the places I’ve been is making me realize I’ve actually been to quite a few places. Ok, so this is my privilege speaking. Nevertheless…

    When I read and hear about other people’s adventures, part of me feels jealous, like I’m missing out on awesome experiences. Another part of me acknowledges the reality: I’ve been pretty busy for the last 9 years (medical school + residency + fellowship + moving, having a baby and starting my first attending job), I’m a homebody, and my husband accepts traveling as a necessary evil of being married to me.

    While I do hope to visit (some more) cool places some day, I think don’t travel will ever be a major category in our budget, unless we start paying to bring people with us. (That is a distant dream of mine!) That’s ok. My homebody heart and my husband are happy.

    SDG

  • The joy of cooking with cans

    When I was young and dumb(er), I viewed my mom’s cooking with snobby condescension. I read cooking blogs, like Smitten Kitchen and Mel’s Kitchen Cafe, like it was a full time job. (Full disclosure, I still read these blogs, and have made delicious recipes from them!) When blog authors wrote about how beans-from-scratch are so much tastier and almost no more work than canned beans, I believed them, although it never seemed to turn out that way with my recipes. I shuddered at the jar of pre-chopped garlic in Mom’s refrigerator. I turned up my nose at Mom’s generous use of onion power and garlic powder in place of onions and garlic.

    I have gradually come to an appreciation of Mom’s cooking. No, appreciation is too dry of a word: an admiration. She served up made-that-morning meals five to seven days out of the week, consistently ready by noon, all while taking care of five kids, feeding bucket calves, going to morning Bible study, and supervising our homeschool activities. And you know what? They tasted good. Dad was always raving about Mom’s cooking, and while he may have not been the most discriminating judge, I can say that as kids we generally didn’t have reason to complain.

    Using canned goods and seasoning packets was part of how Mom pulled it off, and I now recognize it as a feature, not a bug. Although we do not have any children requiring our attention, my husband and I manage to make meals with much less consistency and timeliness than my mom did. (Maybe kids force you to be structured? I’m making excuses for ourselves.) I’d prefer to eat supper by 6:30 PM, but more often than not it’s after eight. When we whip up a old standby, however (almost invariably using some kind of short cut such as canned beans), there’s a better chance I get food in my belly before I get hangry.

    In conclusion: Canned beans are easier and faster than making beans from scratch, and give you a more consistent product, don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. My mom is a great cook, way more experienced and effective than I am, and she doesn’t shy away from using cream of chicken soup or a boxed cake mix. Do what you have to do to get food on the table.

  • My rich person life

    Growing up, I didn’t think we were rich. Maybe that is how it is for most people who are, in fact, wealthy. In our small town, it was easy to recognize the people who had money: they lived in big, fancy houses and drove big, new cars, and attended the big, prestigious events. In retrospect, I’m not sure how fancy and prestigious you can get in a town of 2,000 people, but there were definitely people at the top, people at the bottom, and a whole lot of people in the middle.

    That’s who we were, middle people.

    Sure, my dad’s family owned thousands of acres of land and raised 3,000 cattle each year. But my dad worked 7 days a week in punishing weather conditions and was lucky to get a week off a year. (On Sundays he got up early to double feed the cattle before church.) Sure, we bought new Suburbans with a custom pink stripe on the side. But then we drove them for 10 years or 200,000 miles, whichever came first. (Later, we moved on to a new Sienna with the same pink stripe.) We rarely ate out; Dad said, Why go to a restaurant when your mom makes meals just as good or better? (There were also just four or five places to eat in town.) On trips, we ate from the Dollar Menu at McDonalds, and when Dad discovered $5 Little Caesar pizzas, that become the trip meal of choice. Our family vacations mostly consisted of driving to visit family in Michigan, Colorado and Washington. (We did go to Disney World once.)

    I remember one summer when Dad did a “series” on our family values. We had devotions every day after lunch, and similar to Rechab giving a charge to his children to avoid drinking wine and living in houses, he gave us his rules to live by. He mentioned that if we wanted to, we could afford to buy a new vehicle every year, but he and Mom chose to give the money away instead. This did not leave much of an impression on me, mostly because buying a new vehicle every year seemed like the peak of foolishness. Why buy a new vehicle when the old one is working perfectly fine?

    In retrospect, maybe I should have been more impressed. Over the years, I have become more aware of the wealth my dad’s family possessed. This became more evident when Dad died, and Mom suddenly had a lot of money, millions of dollars, on her hands. It became more evident when my paternal grandfather died, and the long process of selling the ranch began, the end result being the distribution of high seven-figure amounts to each of his five children.

    I worked in high school and had a very, very, part-time job in a lab for a few years in college in addition to working summers, but I never used that money to pay for anything I actually needed. I got a scholarship that covered college tuition, but my parents covered the cost for student housing, my car, parking, and insurance. When I was home for three months looking for a job after my dietetic internship, I didn’t even consider offering to pay rent while I lived at home. Half of medical school was paid for with scholarships, but the other half was covered by Mom. When we moved to our current location, Mom bought our house with cash, and we’re in the process of paying her back.

    And, to be honest, this seemed pretty unremarkable to me. Yes, I realized I was lucky to have my parents pay for my tuition, but the rest of it seemed par for the course. (Not the house thing, but it wasn’t surprising.) What are parents for, if not to help their kids out as they get started in life?

    I am slowly realizing that the only way this can seem normal to me is because I have grown up as a rich person. Kind of how a fish does not think it is remarkable that it lives in water.

    This realization has not happened due to an internal process, but rather because I married my husband, who I thought was a middle person like me. As it turns out, he may be a middle person, but growing up he was a middle person whose family was constantly flirting with the bottom.

    My husband likes to remind me that he grew up in the ghetto. The nicer part of the ghetto, to be sure, but still a place where he learned early on how to distinguish the sound of gunshots from the sound of fireworks. In my husband’s mind, a dishwasher is a signifier of luxury. His parents had six kids, and between number two and three made the decision that his mom would stay at home with them- something that no doubt had a positive impact on their lives, but also significantly reduced their bottom line. When able to, the kids went to work, and portion of their paychecks went toward paying bills. I was astonished to learn that one of my sister-in-laws, who had gotten a full-ride scholarship in college, took out loans so she could give the money to her parents. Every child has a story of finding money missing from their bank account. This is treated as a matter of course – the bills needed to be paid.

    As two people who both saw themselves as middle people (now- I think my husband would have seen himself as coming from the bottom earlier in his life), there have been moments where we learn things about each other that seem unfathomable. His sister’s college loans story, for me. My mom giving us $15,000 to buy a car when mine abruptly stopped working, for him. I was grateful, but not surprised; after all, she was going to do the same thing for my brother. That someone would have $15,000 available to gift was almost more than my husband could comprehend.

    Two years out from fellowship, I make a very nice salary. My retirement accounts don’t have too much in them yet, but we’re starting to make up for lost time, and I don’t worry that we won’t have enough. I don’t think I’ll ever reach the level of wealth my grandfather or even my dad had, which is fine with me. I still think of myself as a middle person, although I joke with my husband that he married a rich wife.

    And really, I guess I am.