Step 32: My knapsack on my back

Out of the blue, I was contacted recently about a really amazing job opportunity. It truly is the chance of a lifetime, but it would mean a move across the country. If I only had myself to think about, I would accept in a heartbeat. With a family to consider, though, things are a bit more...complicated.

Nevertheless, Angry Driver and I have been seriously discussing our options.

On the one hand, much to our mutual surprise, we both actually enjoy living in Blahtown. It is a great city in which to raise a family: good schools, friendly people, low crime rates, enough to do without the nightmare traffic of major metropolitan areas, fun parks, etc. Our neighborhood is great. We love our home. My daily commute is less than 10 minutes by car. My current position has the advantages of very decent work hours, great coworkers, and a very manageable call schedule. I am one of the few practicing physicians in the United States who actually gets to spend enough time with her patients. I even get to make house calls, black leather doctor's bag in hand. So what's not to love?

This:
My job is not just a job to me. It is my career and my calling.

As it turns out, the very stability that should be so attractive to me as a mother of two young children actually feels a bit stifling to me as a physician and adult learner. I'm beginning to suspect that the scope of my practice has become too limited. Opportunities for true intellectual growth are rare. Challenges at this point are mainly bureaucratic. I see many possibilities for building a stronger, more dynamic program, but I don't think the system shares my vision of the future.

Also, it is horribly cold here in the winter. I mean it. It's cold. Right now it is 5 degrees. Last night, it was -19 degrees. That's Fahrenheit and, no, that is not with the wind chill. I'm telling you, human beings are not meant to dwell in such inhospitable terrain. I can't even fathom what this place was like before the use of Tyvek house wrap and central forced-air heating. If I had rolled through this state in a Conestoga wagon 120 years ago, I would've immediately turned to Angry Wagon Driver and said, "Keep it moving, pal. Oregon or bust." Even if we had arrived in spring (which is, admittedly, gorgeous here), I would've hit the dirt road come November and the first blast of frigid wind and icy rain.

And let's not forget the snow.

It's become so bad, there are times I even look forward to the arctic chill because it means that it is too cold to snow. And that's just messed up.

Two days ago, there was so much snow that I couldn't even get my car up the hill into our subdivision. After multiple attempts, I finally had to admit defeat and abandon my sweet powder blue Mini Cooper to the elements until the city deigned to plow the roads. Which they eventually did. The next day.

This new job would bring with it a broad scope of practice, close interactions with colleagues, and daily opportunities to teach medical students and resident physicians. And while I have a passion for improving the quality of end-of-life care in America, I also have a passion for teaching. In my experience, nothing forces me to innovate and improve more than being around learners. Also, while I would like to think that I improve end-of-life care for each of my current patients, I know that my impact would be exponentially greater if I can teach a few generations of young doctors to provide such care in their future practices.

As an added bonus, the new job is located in a wonderfully warm and sunny climate.

The cherry on top? Angry Driver's best friend and bromantic life partner lives there.

So what's a physician mother to do?

Perhaps I am putting the proverbial cart before the equally proverbial horse since the job has not even officially been offered to me. Still, Angry Driver and I have been weighing the pros and cons of a move. As parents, we try to hold adult discussions out of earshot of our kids (even Pearl, who doesn't understand most of what we are saying anyway), but there is a well-documented parenting phenomenon known as The Child Who Can't Hear You Repeatedly Asking Him To Pick Up His Toys Develops Super-Sonic Hearing When The Conversation Is Not Meant For His Ears.

I'm speaking, of course, of Bean. Not only has he managed to piece together that we are considering relocation, he is already lobbying for a swimming pool at the new house.

Bean has probably overheard more of our conversations than he should, but I suspect even Pearl has picked up on the emotional undercurrents of the discussions. She has taken to wearing a blue and yellow backpack from sunup to sundown. Inside, she keeps the usual toddler necessities: a random charging cord for an electronic device, a small jar of Play-Doh, a doll's shoe, and a roll of stickers. She removes it while sleeping and bathing, but aside from those irritating rituals, the backpack is both her faithful companion and oddly unfashionable wardrobe accessory.

 Photographic evidence to support my claim 

of the backpack's ubiquity in my child's life.

It's possible that she's already packing for the big move, but I think the more likely explanation is that she enjoys the comfort of the backpack's weighty embrace and the stability that comes with knowing that one's personal treasures are always within easy reach.

To a certain extent, I find the backpack-wearing adorable. However, when I was a child, my mother used to derive great pleasure from publicly embarrassing me by loudly and repeatedly singing a horrid song from her own childhood. The only words I ever heard (and, quite likely, the only lyrics my mother knew) were the following:

Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
My knapsack on my back.

Here's a link to the song which, I have just learned courtesy of that modern miracle known as Google, is called The Happy Wanderer. If you really want to torture yourself, try listening to the actual tune. And when it becomes stuck in a perpetual loop through your auditory cortex, don't say I didn't warn you. After all, I did describe this song using words like "horrid" and "torture".

Courtesy of The Happy Wanderer, all I can think of when I see this adorable tiny tot shlepping her ugly blue and yellow backpack is the chorus of this song. Thanks, Mom. I owe you one.

Even Bean, who talks big talk about wanting to live near the beach and have a swimming pool, seems to be subconsciously giving voice to his insecurities. About a week ago, he suddenly and inexplicably began constructing small beds for his stuffed animal friends. At first it was a bed on the floor for a small stuffed black cat; the "mattress" was his own white cotton blanket, the "comforter" was a dishrag, and the "pillow" was a wad of folded Kleenex. Cute, certainly. Harmless? So I believed.

The next night, Bean proudly showed me how "Mousie" nestles into a "sleeping bag" (child's slipper) next to his pillow.

A few afternoons later, I discovered that "Hottie" (his name for his lovey - don't ask) enjoys camping beneath the chair in Bean's room.

Within days, his bedroom morphed from a standard boy's sleeping space into a veritable barracks for plush boarders. This is what I came home to tonight:

 The nice thing about a Kleenex pillow
is you don't even have to get up to blow your nose.
Frankly, I'm surprised the Kleenex people
don't market this already.

 I think the cat toy "puff" is meant to entertain the stuffed guinea pig

The mouse in the middle appears to have scored the bigger bed.

What's up with that?

Is there a parenting lesson buried in all this madness? I suspect there is. What is that lesson? I'm not too sure.

Maybe the lesson here is that Angry Driver and I should only speak to each other between the hours of midnight and 4 AM, when we can be reasonably certain that Bean is asleep.

Or perhaps the lesson is that children express their feelings and insecurities through play, and we as parents need advanced degrees in psychology to uncover the hidden meanings behind what appears on the surface to be innocuous recreation.

Or maybe - just maybe - the lesson is that kids are weird. And because they are weird, they do things that are bizarre and amusing to adults.

I think I'm going to go with that last one.

Step 31: Is there a translator in the house?

One of the most disconcerting aspects of parenting my internationally adopted child has been the notion that my child - my child - speaks a language that is completely foreign to the one I speak.

Big deal, you might be thinking. Babies speak a foreign language that consists entirely of wailing, strange guttural mumblings, and odd orificial emanations, and yet, parent and child eventually arrive at a sort of mutual understanding. How can parenting a foreign 3 year old really be that different?

It is different. Much different.

I parented Bean from the time he was a zygote onward, and I will be the first person to tell you that I didn't understand anything about that child until he was at least six months old. He screamed, arched his back away from me, and caterwauled like a cat on ecstasy, and I had no idea how to appease him or respond. The difference between Baby Bean and Newly Adopted Pearl, though, is that in the case of Bean, no one knew what he wanted. Angry Driver was mystified. Our friends and family were at a loss. Even the lactation consultant declared that she had never heard/seen anything like him and she excused herself from my room on the maternity ward so fast I assumed I had just delivered Rosemary's Baby and no one had the courage to tell me to my face.

The difference was that with Bean, at least I had an ace in the hole. I could always make something up and everyone would assume I was right because I was his mother and, after all, who could possibly know him better than me?

I took full advantage of this. "He's just over-tired," I would confidently declare to wide-eyed strangers as I hauled my screaming infant-seat bound boy out of Target. "He just doesn't feel well," I shared in my best Expert Mom voice as I yanked a stroller full of yowling baby across the waiting room of the doctor's office. In truth, I had no idea what this bizarre side-burned living football in a sleeper thought or felt, but who was going to contradict me?

Eventually, Bean learned my language (English) and I learned his language (Klingon? Tuvan throat singing?) and parent-child harmony ensued.

With Pearl, she speaks a real, actual, exists-on-this-planet language (Mandarin) and I ... don't. 

Don't get me wrong. I've picked up a few Pearl-words here and there, such as the three variations of "ba ba" (Daddy, poop, and hold me, which when you think about it are really more similar than one might initially assume), "shuǐ" (water), "coolah" (drink), "shay la" (put me down, or let me do it), "shah lay" (lie down, or go night-night), and "nuey nuey" (kiddie version of urinate). Unfortunately, anything more complex than that appears to be lost in translation. Various attempts on my part to produce Mandarin speech have all evoked the same response in Pearl: polite indifference, as though by pretending I didn't speak at all, we can both avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging my linguistic inadequacies. 

During our first week or so together, Pearl primarily limited her verbal communiqués to a few words here and there, mainly uttered in either a dissatisfied scream or a soft little whisper.

 Just imagine Nicolas Cage doing a film in Mandarin

 and you will have the perfect mental image

 to accompany that description. 

Over the ensuing weeks, she gradually expanded her communication outreach attempts to include a fascinating ritual in which she repeatedly pats my arm, points insistently at some ambiguous object in the distance, and utters a stream of sounds that I can only assume represent real Mandarin words. Usually, these proclamations are accompanied by rapid establishment of eye contact, a quick smile, and a cunning nod of her sage little head. My usual response to these wise declarations consist of something along the lines of, "Oh, yes. Of course. Um, I know that car is really noisy," or some other idiotic non sequitur. Amazingly enough, Pearl seems satisfied with my ridiculous responses about 90% of the time which, in my mind, means one of three things:

1) She assumes I understand her language but that for some mysterious reason, I elect to only respond to her in gibberish. She further assumes my bizarre answers are contextually appropriate.

2) She knows I don't speak Mandarin but in order to keep from going crazy in captivity, she's determined to keep talking anyway. I know why the caged bird sings, indeed.

3) She's messing with me. She ain't saying $h)&.

OK. I think I know what you are thinking here. You are probably saying to yourself, "Hey, Crazy Lady. Three year old Chinese orphans do not mess with their new parents by engaging in fake conversations. They do not purposely try to make their parents feel stupid by spouting incessant gibberish."

My old self would have agreed with you. Really. But I have evidence to back up my claim.

Here it is:

Despite uttering nonstop streams of sounds aimed at Angry Driver, Bean, and me, Pearl absolutely refuses to speak in front of anyone who knows Mandarin. She wouldn't speak to our guides in China. She won't speak to Chinese teachers at Bean's music academy. If a person even remotely appears as though he/she could possibly know Mandarin, my darling Pearl clams up faster than a North Korean caught with a pen camera at the Pentagon. That's right: Pearl is a racial profiler. And I have yet to locate a single dark-haired individual who is exempt from her policy.

Heaven knows I've tried to provide her with opportunities to impart her wisdom to me via the miracle of translation services. I've tried English-to-Mandarin phrase books, iPad apps, friendly appearing Asian strangers (OK, so I profile people too. Don't you judge me). No luck. While we were grocery shopping two weeks ago, I actually seriously considered approaching an Asian woman at the customer service counter in order to beg her to just tell me what my little girl wants me to know so badly. The only thing that stopped me from making a complete fool out of myself that day was my certainty that Pearl would either refuse to speak at all or perhaps even worse, she would smile endearingly, wave, and say "hello!", thereby causing the woman to think that I don't know simple English when I hear it and cementing my reputation in the community as a loon.

Pearl is crafty so I refuse to discount Theory 3 completely. The rational part of my brain (yes, such a thing does exist) suspects, though, that Pearl is just doing her best to communicate with her strange new family, just as I did my best six years ago to find a language Bean and I could share. Since she is now starting to mix English words in with her stream-of-consciousness version of Mandarin, and Angry Driver and I have been known to ask her things like, "Did you ba ba in your diaper?", I think we are currently enjoying some small measure of success. Pearl probably doesn't want to talk to Chinese people because, at least on some level, she's worried that they will remove her from the land of French fries, light-up shoes, ice cream, adoring hugs, and beds with slides and return her to a bare crib in a Chinese orphanage. That is pure speculation on my part, but if you could see the immediate blank mask that descends over her face when an Asian person tries to speak with her, you might suspect the same thing.

Perhaps I'm just hyper-sensitive because I can't pretend with Pearl the way I could with Baby Bean. Pearl and I look so physically dissimilar, her ramblings are so fluently non-English, and my responses to her entreaties are so patently un-Mandarin, I often presume that it must be obvious to anyone within earshot that I do not speak Pearl's language. And, if I can't even understand my own daughter, what kind of mother does that make me?

That wasn't rhetorical. But being as this is a blog and not a panel discussion, I will attempt to answer my own question. I guess it makes me the mother of a daughter who has her own Origin Story, her own unique history that intersects with my own unique history at this particular point in time and space. In a few years this era in our lives together will be a memory for our family and we will have (best case scenario here) discovered our own harmonious rhythm. My hope is that when that time comes, I will understand both the language of my daughter's spoken words and the more subtle vernacular of her soul. 

In the interim, we continue this hard work of building a family. Or, as I secretly suspect, my children just keep messing with me to make me look incompetent. One or the other.

Step 30: In a world...

I don't consider myself to be a doom and gloom kind of person. I'm not a "prepper" or a conspiracy theorist. Generally, I don't tend to think of the world as a scary place. I have fears and anxieties, to be sure, but I'm doing my best to raise children who feel empowered to go out and live their lives armored with education, curiosity, open-mindedness, and a healthy sense of self-preservation...but not a paralyzing fear of new places or immediate mistrust of people who don't look/think/believe/behave as they do.

I will not become one of those inevitable aging individuals who asks, "What is this world coming to?"

My insurance policy will not be a steel-walled bunker in the backyard.

After all, the Earth has spun on its own axis and whirled around the sun for billions of years now.

More than likely, the planet will keep right on spinning for millennia.

Humanity has existed for quite some time as well. And in all that time, people have done amazing things, inspiring things, cruel things, and indifferent things. From the first tribes brave enough to cross narrow bridges of land to settle new continents, to explorers bold enough to dream of colonizing Mars, humans have shown a capacity for daring. From the first artists to create crude drawings on the walls of caves by the light of dim fires, to engineers who construct wonders that touch the sky, humans have strived to bring permanence to an ever-changing planet. From the first raiders who pillaged tiny villages to armies that seek to eradicate entire populations, people have demonstrated a willingness to harm their own species. From the first dirt road traveler to hurry past as a beggar is beaten and robbed, to urban residents who silently steel themselves against the cries of a woman stabbed to death on the street below, humans have displayed breathtaking indifference.

More than likely, humans will continue to do what humans do for generations to come.

There truly is nothing new under the sun, right? We don't affect the universe nearly as much as we would like to believe, do we?

I get it. There are good people and there are bad people. There are bad people who do good things and good people who do bad things. There are people who only think of themselves, and people who always put the needs of others ahead of their own. Some people alter the world in ways that seem impossible and others appear to leave no mark at all. And on and on and on.

Lately, though, I can't help but wonder what type of planet my children - and their children - will inherit.

As years go, 2015 is in its infancy and yet, it is already off to a rocky start.

First, there is this man, an Arizona cardiologist and anti-immunization advocate who recently gave the following interview, as reported by CNN:

"It's not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [a child like Maggie] to be supposedly healthy," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place."

"I'm not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure," he added. "It's not my responsibility to be protecting their child."

CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill.

"I could live with myself easily," he said. "It's an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I'm not going to put my child at risk to save another child."

He blamed the Jacks family for taking Maggie to the clinic for care.

"If a child is so vulnerable like that, they shouldn't be going out into society," he said.

Right. Just when I start to think (hope, really) that education, medical training, certification exams, and licensing boards produce caring, compassionate, and intelligent physicians who promote the very best practice in terms of individual and public health, people like him open their mouths and prove that humans are fundamentally incapable of bringing order and reason to the universe.

And then, there is the story of an extremist group so despicable, they broadcast videos glorifying the executions of aid workers, journalists, photographers, civilians, and soldiers. I refuse to view or perpetuate their propaganda (hence, no links to the reports), but who can read a story of this army burning an "enemy" pilot alive without despairing for the future of this planet and its inhabitants?

Sadly, I'm beginning to suspect that there are many people who can hear about cruelties on a small or grand scale without missing a beat. Not to mention the architects who draft plans for such atrocities. Or the foot soldiers who carry out the acts.

Could not one soldier step forward and say, "This is wrong. Let's not do this"? Nobody was willing to insist, "I will not participate in this, and I will not permit this to happen"?

Who knows? Maybe the published video was the third take, and the first two tries had to be aborted because someone (or multiple someones) refused to perpetrate horror on a fellow human being.

Or, perhaps, these fighters are so blinded by hate or religious fervor or insanity or who-knows-what that they truly believe that they occupy the moral high ground.

And what about those of us who watch the videos (or don't watch) and do nothing? Are we good? Are we bad? Are we indifferent? And, yet, what can be done? Is the answer more violence? More war? More humanitarian aid?

If the old adage is true and there really is nothing new under the sun, then it may be that the Internet just makes the best and worst of humanity more accessible to an international audience. My secret fear, though, is that we have not learned from history and that we will never learn from history.

All too often in recent days, I look at my precious, sweet, curious, loving children and silently worry that they, and their descendants, will become part of a human race that turns away from knowledge, revels in divisiveness, reacts with schadenfreude to the suffering of the vulnerable, and turns an indifferent cheek on injustice.

Are you familiar with action movie previews in which the disembodied voice-over artist (AKA Don La Fontaine) ominously intones, "In a world where..."??

As in, "In a world where gummy bears run out of gummy bear juice..."

Ok, I made that one up, but the voice-over narratives really do exist so just bear with me here while I try to (finally!) make my point.

Well, my inner voice-over artist says things like:

"In a world where communicable diseases can be easily contained or eradicated but ignorant fear mongers refuse to protect themselves and others..."

Or

"In a world where democratic governments unapologetically spy on citizens, persecute whistleblowers, and justify torture..."

Or

"In a world where fanatical armies broadcast videos of horrific murders to promote their vision of the ideal moral society..."

Or

"In a world where people shoot commercial airplanes full of civilians (including 80 children) out of the sky with surface-to-air missiles and no one ever faces prosecution..."

Or

"In a world where a man goes to jail for years for stealing a car but CEOs get bailouts and golden parachutes for cheating millions of customers..."

I could go on and on and on.

I suppose that, at the end of the day, the best I can do is try to do more good, do less bad, and be less indifferent. The best I can do is raise children who do the same.

Nevertheless, I'm thinking of becoming a prepper. I'm contemplating that backyard bunker.

I would like to think that my children are not picking up on my paranoia. Unfortunately, I have to admit the following events occurred under my very own roof yesterday:

I returned home from work to find Bean waiting for me at the door. Squirming with excitement, my six year old Bean asked me if I wanted to see the fort he built. Happily, I allowed myself to be dragged by the arm into our home office. What I found was a blanket draped over the armchair. Beneath the blanket were some snacks, a few stuffed friends, and the tiny plastic safe in which he keeps his treasures. The sign taped to the chair read "Panic Room". Beneath those unsettling words, I read the words "No Pearl" (except he used his sister's real name and not the pseudonym I use for blog purposes).

Trying to maintain a neutral expression, I asked Bean why his sister can't be in the panic room. His response?

"She can - on alternate Mondays".

Um, what? I didn't even know where to begin with this one but since I'm reasonably sure that I've never articulated the words "panic room" or "alternate Mondays" in earshot of any child, much less my own child, I'm choosing to blame Angry Driver.

Perhaps he has his own fears for the future of humanity.