American Family

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Yesterday, I visited my grandparents for our annual (adult) easter egg hunt. I found out my grandpa, who had a heart attack about 18 years ago is due for a heart catheterization next week.

My grandpa is an old school small-farm farmer who worked for himself most of his life. He also served as a township trustee for his small rural community for a number of years. Because of that public service, he is entitled to buy the same health insurance as state employees at the same price. This means his surgery is affordable for my grandparents and prolonging his life won’t make them lose their home or farm.

Thank you Taxpayers!

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In other news, here are some links I have found interesting in the past week or two:

The Triviality of Emotions in Chinese Culture – I am still trying to figure out what this means for my relationship with L’s family.

Interesting article about the lives of Chinese students in America. Mr. A’s dad went to college in the same tiny farm town my parents grew up in. I can not imagine how isolated he was then. The nearest Chinese restaurant was 25 miles away back then.

What happens when or if those Chinese students go back home?

I know Dooce already linked this one, so 99% of the free world has seen it, but I am going to link it again anyway. Things are changing everywhere, even the places we think it might be most unlikely.

Stuff (and staging)

Today, I did a little spring cleaning and pre-staging in the girls’ rooms. I have written before about my war on Stuff and Clutter. Despite the general messiness in the rooms, once they were cleaned up, it was clear we are winning the war. Each girl keeps all her toys in her own room. The only exception to this is games and puzzles in flat boxes which are stored in our game/playroom.

In this round, I consolidated both girls’ books into one book shelf and removed a too-tall shelf from M’s room to make it roomier-looking for staging purposes. I will let her have it back in the rental, if there is room.

I give you these photos as proof. Also, I would like staging suggestions and help figuring out what kind of accessories I need to add. Accessories are not my strong suit. I am not removing the girls’ pictures from their rooms, though the rest of the house will be stripped of family pictures for the most part.

M’s Room:

Should I get a different quilt or comforter? What should I put on the wall there? It needs more color. Also, I will get some kind of small throw pillor (or two) to go with the white pillows.

I still need to recover that chair seat with a darker color fabric.

This is the bulk of M’s toys. She also has a box of pokemon guys and pokemon cards in her closet that she wants to sell soon. Her books are currently located in L’s room. The majority of these stuffies will be packed up for staging.

M’s closet. Pokemon guy box. Random pillow and blanket on the floor. I don’t know why.

L’s Room:

I have a bunch of different fabrics to frame to hang over L’s beds instead of headboards. Kind of like this. I am also going to make poofs to hang from her ceiling like this.

Those two small pictures will be replaced by a mirror and the picture over the fireplace will be framed. Should I removed the doll house from the fireplace?

These are all the girls’ books, except for holiday books which are going into the basement temporarily. I need some kind of decorative crap to sit on top of the shelf.

L is much more of a clutterbug. She is the queen of little bits of crap and toys that come with 4,000 accessories. Today, she agreed to let about 1/5 of her toys go to make room for the new birthday presents she got. This is what is left, minus a new American Girl doll and a few other things she currently has laying around the living room. The box on the top shelf is empty, but it hides a messed up spot of paint on the closet wall.

I am open to any and all staging ideas. Bonus points if you have pictures I can copy. I know the rooms look very white, but the walls are actually cream and the floors are stained quite dark. We aren’t painting them colors, but I am open to pretty much any other suggestion.

This is hard.

L’s birthday is coming up. I know this is a hard day for her birth family because it is also the day L left her mother’s arms and went to orphanage. The scene has been described to me and to be honest, when I imagine it, I feel like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. I can not imagine how hard it must be for her mother.

But right now, L’s birthday is not hard for L. She doesn’t understand the timeline of her losses yet. She isn’t interested in that level of detail. She has never asked about it and I haven’t told her. To L, birthdays are exciting, fun days of celebration and presents.

Her parents have requested a phone call “so her mother can hear her voice” on her birthday. On the morning of her birthday, actually.

I don’t want to do it.

I do not want to have this phone call where tragedy intrudes on L’s birthday. Not in these few remaining years of innocence. Not before she understands the gravity of the day.

I do not want this phone call.

I do not want to hear the sadness in their voices. I don’t want to hear their longing. Not on this day she has been excitedly counting down to for the past three weeks.

I do not want to start the day with a kick in the gut. I want sunshine and rainbows and butterflies on this day.

But really, this is about me, not L. L likes to talk to her parents (for the few minutes she can keep her attention on a phone call). She is excited to tell them she got her ears pierced as an early birthday present today. And almost certainly she will tell them about her princess cake.

This is about me.

It is about me not wanting to bear witness to their loss. I don’t want to rake my fingers through their agony on this day. I can’t bear knowing their lost child is back in their lives but is living half way across the globe. I don’t want to hear the kindness in their voices when she is on the line, only to be smacked in the face with the fact that she is unable to really speak to them.

I do not want this phone call, but we will do it. We will do it because they asked and we have their child. We are the ones who will watch her open presents and blow out her candles. We are the ones who saw her bravely get her ears pierced without a single tear. We are the ones who will hold her on our laps and exclaim over how big our 6 year old L is compared to yesterday’s 5 year old L.

These parents never got to know 5 year old L at all. The met 4 year old L for one brief winter’s day in a hotel in China. Her mother only held a newborn L for a very short time before sending her out into the world alone.

We will do this phone call because this is open adoption.

Open adoption is not about me and what I want. Open adoption isn’t about sheltering L from her losses, even though I wish I could.

Right now, on this day, the phone call is about L’s other mother and what she needs.

Openness means allowing L’s parents the space to tell us what they need from us. It is about being one big family for L, even when I wish we weren’t. It also means knowing that L’s parents’ pain is a thousand times worse than how I feel, every single day. Openness means I will suck it up and make this phone call I dread. I will do it because they love her and miss her and they are her parents too.

But that doesn’t make it easier to feel what I feel. This is hard.

mega millions

Someone on facebook asked what you would do if you won the Mega Millions lottery. I know I am not going to win, but a girl can dream.

If I won, the first thing I would do is hire a lawyer to set up a trust to help us stay anonymous. Then we would probably set up a charitable foundation with a specific portion of it before we started having any fun.

Once that was sorted out, the top thing on my list of things to do would obviously be to build a house. If I had all that money, I would bulldoze our old house (or sell it to someone for $1 to cart it away in one piece to a new foundation elsewhere to appease the historic architecture committee) and build on our two lots together. I thought briefly about buying another house in our town, but I love our location very much. (In real life, I guess this means that building right here is not a bad option.) Then I would build a big house and hire someone to come twice a week and clean it and do my laundry.

I would set up a trust fund for Mr. A’s mentally ill family members so they could live a little more comfortably than they do now. I would also set up education trust funds for my kids and future generations of the Am Fam so they won’t have school loans. Maybe I would also set up a fund to pay for the last year of school or vocational training for some of my friends’ and relatives’ kids. They would have to have had good grades and figured out how to finance the first 3 years themselves.

I would take L to China more often, probably twice a year, to visit her family. I would also try to get them visas to visit us here. I would hire a chinese teacher to live in an apartment over our garage to teach the girls Chinese every day.

I would ask Mr. A to quit his job and work at another less stressful/time consuming job. I can’t imagine that he would ever want to not work at all, so tht would be my compromise.

I would go on vacation and trips more often. I would like a yearly trip to Hawaii or somewhere warm. Oh, who are we kidding, I would want a condo there. There is also an awful lot of the world I would still like to see. Africa would be near the top of my list.

I would probably buy a slightly nicer used minivan, or at least finally buy a hubcap to replace my missing one. I would let Mr. A get a used car with power windows.

When I look at what I would do, I realize that there isn’t much I would change about the life I have now. I would only like to make where we are and what we love to do more comfortable and have less worries about future debts. I think that is a pretty good sign.

Debt (less not more)

I just realized I forgot to mention something HUGE that happened.

I have ~~complained about~~ mentioned my school loan debt…not infrequently (here, here, here). Debt drives me absolutely crazy. According to the post above, I had about $15,221 in grad school debt in April of 2010.

By taking a little extra money from here and there (including a generous tax return), I am proud to say I paid off my loans in March of 2012.

I don’t have any more personal debt!! Hooooray!

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to not have that debt hanging over my head any more.

As a family, we still have a substantial chunk of Mr. A’s law school debt left. While I don’t like that debt, it isn’t nearly as stressful to me as my debt. Thankfully, the interest rate is low and the payoff timeline is long. Also, his remaining debt is from federally subsidized loans, so if he dies, they evaporate. This is important to me because I (and his estate) will not be responsible for it.

As happy as I am that I am done paying off my loans, I am also thankful they were at such a low interest rate while I was paying them. My loans were federal subsidized and unsubsidized loans, as were Mr. A’s.

Thank you Taxpayers for making grad school and law school possible for us! And for loans that go away with death!

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Stuff (and staging)

This is hard.

mega millions

Debt (less not more)

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