Radio Silence…

Sorry I haven’t been posting recently…I’ve been in a bit of a funk. This funk might be the result of any of the following reasons, in no certain order:

+ We in the SN world are busying our little waiting brains with trying to invent a new acronym for our signature posts. Let me tell you, anytime one is forced to come up with a new acronym–it can’t be good. This time the CCAA has implemented a new step in the SN process that happens after your dossier has been reviewed, but before the TA is issued.

They did this out of the blue. Without telling any agency types.

It is called a “Statement of Commitment,” which sounds an awful lot to me like those pledges Christian fundamentalist high schoolers are making to remain chaste until marriage. But actually this is exactly the same form that NSN aparents receive with their referral. It tells you who your child is and asks you to sign your names indicating that you want her, which of course I already did back on October 11th. They are now adding it as an extra step for SN aparents, and it will delay TA from 3 to 12 weeks. No one really knows for sure.

Does the word redundant come to anyone else’s mind?

The prevailing wisdom is that this new step is a reaction to the increase in disruptions we’ve been seeing over the past six months, but here’s the thing: it still isn’t legally binding, even if it is attempting to be psychologically so. Disruptions point to a sad state of affairs in terms of aparent preparation (or lack thereof), but disruptions aren’t preventable by adding a paper step to the process.

The acronyms being debated are LOA and SC…LOA for “Letter of Acceptance” and SC for “Statement of Commitment.” How about IJWMDN?

I Just Want My Daughter Now.

See? Funk.

+I got to see my father walk around my house at Christmas in his diapers (he gets disoriented finding his way to the bathroom). Although that cries out to be funny, it’s not. He has Parkinson’s. It sort of takes the wind out of funny, not to mention taking the wind out of everything else. I have a parent in diapers and an (almost) daughter in diapers, which makes me an official member of that sandwich generation. And it’s weird because I’m barely a parent, and yet I’m losing my parents. Those years of Norman Rockwellian, intergenerational bonding and holiday dinners and sharing of family stories belong to some nostaglic past, along with martini lunches and June Cleaver.

I’m realizing that this may be the true fallout of being an older parent…of “waiting” (even if it was not your choice) to be a parent. My parents waited until their 30s to have kids, and I am 40 having kids…which makes my parents first-time grandparents in their 70s. Which means they too are returning to being in a child-like state, if only because of their out-of-control bodily functions. I can’t imagine what that feels like. The idea of seeing your life as a bell curve is dismal.

+I have been thinking about the cockeyed way some countries might view our standing-in-line-by-the-tens-of-thousands-to-adopt-these-Chinese-babies while we bomb the hell out of babies in Iraq and Afghanistan or ignore the babies in Darfur. I think about this at 3 AM sometimes, and I am not a bleeding heart by any standard of measurement. It just seems a rather stark disjunction–from that other point of view.

Actually, I began thinking about this after the P@ula Z@hn debacle, when the Turkish-American panelist made his comments asking why no one is adopting Muslim kids…and that we wouldn’t want them to be near a chemistry class. Yeah, we all know that Muslim countries don’t ever send their children abroad for adoption, but what this guy was really trying to incite us to think about (I think…) is that it’s strange how we decide that some kids are indispensible and some kids are expendable. At least, our national behaviors would seem to indicate that we hold those dichotomous views. What does labeling someone a towel head have to do with adopting orphans from China? Well…maybe everything.

+It is so cold here things are cracking. Garden hoses, pipes, lips, ground, tempers. Cold, wind, and no precipitation. The only ice we have is in the birdbath. (Don’t worry, I bought a heater for it. I try to do right by my birdy friends.) We actually have a below-zero windchill. I hate windchill. If we never had to factor a temperature or anything else by using measurements that are merely metaphoric again, I would be happy.

+I actually do have some more posts planned…a post on the dollhouse my mom sent me for Emme Lu (which was mine as a child) that is some serious 1960s ranch house goodness…a post on the utter emptiness I feel towards the technological wonder that is Bloglines…a series of posts on this wacky ranch I live on…and a very special post that I’ve been planning for a long time on something I stumbled across a while back in the desert wilderness of southern Arizona. It’s sort of a bonafide secret.

Yours,
SBird
who is slowly working at pulling herself out of her purple patch of funk….