Inventory

Miss I has mastered polite conversation. "Hellooo," she says, drawing out the o's. "How are you?" She waits to be asked "How are you?" in return, so she can say "Oh, I fine." But it sounds like "tine."

How am I?
I've been hobbled. I've been sick for a few months, as I've said before, but I've been recovering. Then I stupidly took a fall and I'm hobbled again. Not badly incapacitated, just a bit unsteady and a lot sore. And I'm closer to buying a new house this week. I have two major deadlines coming up (they are actually just past, if we take MidMarch literally). And I'm a wreck. But that's nothing in comparison . . .

I've sent you over to Mia, as I often do, because she's positively brilliant and I am sure that you will love her as much as I do (even when what she has to say is hard).

Something has happened and it isn't quite fair. Mia, bless her, was willing to continue what has been the hardest conversation about adoption reform in a long time. Hard because it was impossible from the outset because on some level aparents want to accept adoption and its associated losses as a necessary evil and because in general it might not be. Difficult, too, because the burden of sharing that basic truth has fallen to adoptees and first mothers. Again.

I started a list of non-radical things I'd like to see, as an aparent, and something more radical and far less possible -- finding a process that rehumanizes us all. But then I read Nicole's most recent post, in which she posts links to her writing on the possibility of and specific steps toward reform. So I'm reading hers first. I hope you read them, too.