The Initial Placement

After we had made our decision to move forward and meet Edward and the Duchess in person, we had to wait two weeks – perhaps the longest two weeks ever. Why the long wait? Who knows – I gave up trying to figure out DSS a long time ago. I could make up an explanation for you if you’d like. How about this – aliens abducted all the social workers and brought them to the outer regions of Orctar Six where they conducted behavioral studies before returning them to Earth two weeks later. Sounds good to me.

The morning we were to meet them I couldn’t believe how nervous I was – I just didn’t know what to expect. Everything DSS ever told us basically prepares us for the worst case scenario, and I knew that, but that didn’t help with the fact that this was a complete unknown. Before Mab and Achilles were born, I had met other parents who had given birth to children. I’d had the opportunity to ask questions and to observe on a somewhat close and intimate level with friends. But with adoptions, I’d only spoken to people who had adopted infants or toddlers, so there really wasn’t any frame of reference for me.

These kids were old enough to understand what was going on, even if it was in an abstract in somewhat unconscious way. They could understand the concept that their birth mom couldn’t take care of them and they were about to meet people that might take them home to live forever. I couldn’t imagine what they were feeling. I couldn’t even understand what I was feeling. All I knew was that I was nervous. Extremely nervous.

Stacy and I had put together a scrapbook to give to the kids – it had pictures of the kids, the house, the car, the cat, the bedrooms, etc. It also had pictures of our extended families and friends. It was a great snapshot of our lives at that particular moment and we hoped that Edward and the Duchess would enjoy it and want to see all the people in the pictures.

We sat in the hallway of the DSS office – which looks like a prison holding area complete with bullet proof glass – waiting for them. Stacy and I could hardly contain ourselves and every time we heard someone come around the corner our excitement reached a fever pitch. Each time a kid walked around the corner we made a mental calculation as to whether or not this is one of the kids from the pictures we had seen. Nope, too old. Nope, too young. Nope, lighter skin. Nope, straighter hair.

They were a little late, as expected, but when they came around the corner we knew instantly who they were – we knew these two kids were going to live with us forever, become part of our family. I can’t speak for Stacy, but I know I had to fight back tears for just a brief moment – I didn’t want that be my first impression. Instead, we watched quietly as Betty led them into one of the visit rooms, then came out to get us.

This was precisely the point when everything in our lives turned into a combination of a guessing game and an intellectual exercise. Do we give them a hug, shake hands or neither? How do you greet a four year old and a six year old who are going to become your kids? And do it without weirding them out, but without appearing cold. Make them feel loved at once, but don’t move to fast.

And like everything from that point on, the correct answer was to just let the situation develop and do what we felt was right. It’s still a big intellectual exercise and guessing game, but in the end, we mostly end up just doing what feels right.

In this case, Edward and the Duchess gave us hugs the minute we came into the room, alleviating the need for us to guess what would make them comfortable. How sincere those hugs were is still open for debate – as I’ll explain, there was lots of room for interpretation with everything the kids did at that point.

Another interesting aspect of this situation was that the Duchess and Edward hadn’t seen each other in over a month at that point. Because they had been separated earlier in the year, they only saw each other once a month or less, even though they lived within walking distance of each other. Why had they been separated? Good question, but no one could ever answer it except to say the foster family they had been living with requested that Edward be moved. Why didn’t they both move, you might ask? Beats me – I asked too, but like everything with DSS, approximately 900 social workers each have a different piece of information, but no one social worker has all the pieces and most of the time they can’t even tell you where to go to get the answers they don’t have.

For example – somewhere along the line it snuck into a DSS report that Edward and the Duchess’ biological father, Edward Sr., had been deported to the Dominican Republic. And for a year we thought Edward Sr. was Dominican. However, more than a year after the placement, we find out that not only has he not been deported, but he is probably not even Dominican. Apparently this one erroneous line made its way into the file and was duplicated over and over. Nobody can explain how it got there in the first place or who put it there (nor would it matter who put it there, because turn over is fairly high and the worker who screwed it up would likely be gone on to other things). In fact, this little error would come back to haunt us in terms of finalization of the adoption, but that’s a story I probably won’t get into until Year Two.

Anyway, the kids hadn’t seen each other in a month. Nice situation. Nice planning. Nice follow through. Why don’t you take these two poor little children who have abso-fucking-lutely nothing but each other left in the world but each other to cling to in this miserable world and split them up? What kind of idiocy is that?

For us, though, it was wonderful know they were together again after a month, although the two of them were so emotionally stunted at the time that they didn’t even know how to act. Basically they pretended it was perfectly normal – as if they had seen each other all along. Of course, pretending nothing is wrong is probably a survival technique I’d hone pretty damn quickly if I were in the foster care system, too.

Another thing the kids picked up in their travels through life is how to quickly figure out what a person wants to hear and say it whether you can follow through or not. For instance, Edward says within 30 seconds of meeting us, “I want to come home and live with you.” Pretty much for no reason – he just blurted it out because he knew it would pack a big emotional punch.

Instead of sitting around inside the visiting room at DSS, the whole gang went to a local McDonalds which had a big play area attached – you know the kind with a giant tunnel system that looks like it was designed by the North Vietnamese Army? And the large ball-pit-of-unsanitary-condition? Kids love that kind of thing.

We all bought a meal and sat down to eat it while we quizzed the kids on different things.

“Edward – do you like to be called Ed or Eddie?”

“No.”

“Do you have a nickname?”

“No.”

“OK – it’s been nice talking to you.”

Later, we asked the Duchess whether she had a nickname or not. Not being the sort of kid to pass up an opportunity, the Duchess tried to quickly think of a nickname for herself.

“Big D,” she announced.

Which, if you are a linebacker for the New England Patriots might be a good nickname – the kind of thing that inspires fear in your opponents eyes. But as a six year old girl, I think she might have been able to do better than “Big D” had she been allowed more time to think.

This was my first introduction to the world of “truth,” “truth” and “I think this is the truth” that Edward and the Duchess lived with. Essentially, the truth can mean, “something I just made up to get me out of trouble,” or “something I made up because I thought this is what you wanted to hear,” or the ever so popular, “something I made up to get you to stop talking.” In the first few months, the truth was almost the truth.

Hell, no one had ever taught these kids how or why to tell the truth. As far as they were concerned, the truth was whatever popped out of their mouths. Add that to the fact that they had to do what they could to survive without the emotional bonds of a strong parental figure and you have the perfect recipe for not even understanding the truth, much less placing a value on telling the truth.

Anyway, Big D decided pretty darned quickly that she had made a mistake and didn’t want to be called Big D. Of course, after she’d been part of the family for a while, that nickname came back as part of our family in a fun way.

Up to that point in my life I had done some things that required stamina – stayed up for three days straight without food when I was in the Army. Worked two full time jobs at the same time. Went to school at night while working full time. Run road races. Quit smoking. Things that take a lot out of a person before during and after.

But this visit was absolutely exhausting. Unbelievable. I was sweating, tired, disoriented and completely lost by the time we said good-bye when we dropped them off at their foster homes. I’d spent about two hours keeping myself “up” and worrying that I was coming on too strong, not strong enough, too nosy, not interested enough – it was all incredibly confusing and like nothing I had ever done in my life.

And we were doing it again two days later. At our house. Without a social worker present.

Because it was already July, we needed to get the visiting process finished a bit ahead of normal schedule so we could have the kids in the house for at least a couple of weeks before school began. The visiting process usually takes about a month and includes a couple of overnights, then a weekend, etc. This is to help prevent people from returning the children like cold soup at a diner.

We had a plan for the next visit to be a day trip, followed by a couple more day trips and then an overnight, then a weekend, and then the move in, so we were cruising right along. We knew there was no way these kids were ever going back nor would there be any chance they weren’t moving in with us – we were invested emotionally now and I don’t think I could have handled the process being interrupted at that point.

So I spent quite a bit of time driving back and forth between Holyoke and Arlington. The ride was exactly 93 miles and took 1 hour and thirty something minutes on the way out, but for whatever reason it always took an hour and forty five minutes on the way home – go figure. I had all the rest stops, gas stations and landmarks mapped out in my brain and could almost do the trip in my sleep. Keep in mind that each visit required me to drive out and get them, bring them to Arlington, then drive them home at the end of the day, then drive back to Arlington.

Was this required? Technically, no – I could have made the social workers do it, but that would have meant waiting around for specific days when they could schedule it and coordinate for one worker to pick up and one to drop off. Worse, it could mean a social worker sitting there and watching the visit, which was always a pain because they just didn’t seem to understand when to shut up and let things happen on their own. Which is why I ended up making the trips each time we had a visit. As a general rule, I would drive out and pick them up while Stacy was at work and then when I got back she would come home.

Rather than give you a detailed (read: boring) description of each and every visit, I’ll just tell you about the highlights of the visit process.

During that second visit, Achilles and Mab met Edward and the Duchess – at that point, to them this was just a big play date so there really weren’t any problems with the dynamic. It was a semi-cautious affair and everyone (including Stacy and I) spent most of the time being extra attentive and generally trying to be as nice as possible (“nice” being the perfect word for it – bland and cautious “niceness”). It’s hard to really get to know someone when you aren’t just becoming friends, but becoming related. I would imagine the bride and groom in an arranged marriage must experience similar feelings.

We brought the kids to the playground, the beach, and the water park to avoid just sitting around the house during these visits. As time went on and the visits got longer and longer, Edward and the Duchess’ personalities started to come out more, which, because of some strong and sometime very annoying habits, made things a bit more dicey, but we’ll get to that later.


The visits are over, the placement is a go and we are scared shitless the night before the move in.

Of all the things that happened and all the emotions I felt throughout this entire process, the one time that stands out the most was the night before the kids moved in. I was scared. Very scared. More scared than I have ever been in my entire life. More scared than the time the grenade blew up beside me, more scared than the time I was hanging upside down underneath a helicopter 100 feet in the air. Thoughts were racing through my mind and I almost couldn’t get a hold of myself – it was like nothing I had ever experienced.

What have I gotten myself into, I was wondering. And I felt awful for thinking that way because already I loved Edward and the Duchess and I knew I wanted them with me, but I was starting to really panic and worry that this was a mistake.

First off, there was my energy level. I was exhausted beyond any exhaustion I had ever felt before. I mean, I am talking exhausted beyond the point of being able to even think, and that was from visits that were lasting a couple hours or a night at a time. I could tell this was definitely going to be the most difficult undertaking of my life.

Now, I’m not one to worry in a big way – I don’t lay awake at night worrying about much of anything at all. Ever. Ask my wife, who is a worrier and doesn’t understand how I can shrug some things off with a “Eh, whatever happens, we’ll deal with it,” attitude. I don’t know how I’m able to do this, given that I am certainly able to get agitated at something as it is unfolding – if someone decides to run the clothes dryer full of rocks and sticks to “fluff them up” then I can assure, I will get angry – noticeably so. But, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I know three days in advance one of the children is going to attempt to ruin a major appliance. How? I don’t know – pretend I was looking for my bowling ball in the hall closet and I found a fortune telling monkey who agreed that if I released him he would tell me what will happen in my laundry room three days in the future – even with the curse of having this knowledge, I wouldn’t stay awake worrying about it because there is nothing I can do – the monkey said so.

That doesn’t really make any sense. Just pretend I didn’t write that. The monkey wrote it.

Where was I? Oh yes, the point is that I don’t worry about things, but I was worrying all night thinking we might have gotten ourselves into something we couldn’t handle. There had only been one other time in my life when I felt a similar feeling of Dear Sweet Pete What Have I Done.

My first night in the Army I arrived at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri at about 0200 – that’s two o’clock. In the morning, for all you civilian types. It was another 2 hours until we completed paperwork and finally got off to bed. Obviously, I had been prepared to get up early when I joined the Army, but in this instance I actually thought to myself, “I only went to sleep at 4 in the morning – clearly they will let us sleep until eight or nine.” You can imagine my disappointment when a sergeant woke us up by walking down the aisle banging a lid on a garbage can.

I jumped straight out of bed with a feeling that can only be described as a cross between abject terror and complete Dear Sweet Pete What Have I Done.

That feeling was back as I imagined what the coming weeks were going to bring. I tried to calm myself by telling myself that the things I knew – this was merely a single difficult stage in this process and that it couldn’t possibly be this hard forever, right? The kind of things I knew were true, but they did no good at all. I was completely freaked out. Freaked out. All night long. Freaked. Out.


Move In Day

The best part about move in day – and by “best part” I mean “worst part” – was that they were thoroughly baffled as to what was really going on. That’s not to say it hadn’t been explained to them because we had been telling them for weeks that when they moved into our home they were never leaving again (although there is some question as to how well the social workers had actually explained it). I mean, we didn’t say it so it sounded creepy, like a guy from a horror movie talking about hitchhikers who ask to use the phone or something. But we spent a lot of time trying to tell them that this was their “forever home.”

This may have been where we went wrong. “Forever home” is a term that get bandied about in the DSS system – kids who are in foster care are told they are waiting for a forever home. The problem is, most of the kids end up jumping from foster home to foster home, so the idea of permanence becomes kind of lost and forever home becomes a fairly meaningless term. The kids here the words, but don’t necessarily grasp the full impact of the meaning (obviously, this varies with age, mental ability, length of time in foster care, etc. As always, your mileage may vary). Consequently, we discovered fairly quickly that Edward and the Duchess weren’t fully prepared to accept that the family they just joined was going to be their family forever.

When Betty showed up with the kids, the Duchess had a duffle bag full of clothes and a case of old Barbie dolls. Edward had a duffle bag with clothes but no toys. The clothes both of them owned were almost entirely second hand – Edward had a couple of t-shirts with dates of events that happened before he was born. Imagine that you are five or six years old and everything you own in the world fits into a small bag and is second or third hand.

These kids were starting from scratch with us – no, I take that back. These kids were starting at less than scratch – scratch was fifteen thousand feet above where these kids started with us. Not only was their birth mother totally unfit to take care of them, but there wasn’t even an extended family qualified to take care of them (and hell, to DSS “qualified” simply means “not high when we drop the kids off”).

Think about your family growing up – even if you think you had a dysfunctional family that didn’t seem to get along or have anything in common. Think of your mother and father. Now get rid of the father and replace him with a series of other men, none of whom treat you well, many of whom have been in and out of jail and have drug and alcohol problems. Imagine your brothers and sisters and how even if you weren’t best friends, you were there for each other in the worst of times. Imagine your older sister has to take on almost all of the parental duties because your mother is so depressed she can spend entire days without getting out of bed. Your older sister - only 8 years old herself -has to get you dinner and keep track of you. The closest thing to support you get from extended family is when an aunt threatens to call DSS if your older sister doesn’t start going to school.

Now imagine your mother – who has had an open file with DSS for more than a decade – starts to leave you and your siblings alone, including the new born. She is warned by DSS repeatedly not to do so, but continues. Your life is not going very well for you, but at a very minimum, you have a place where you belong. A family. To an outsider, this is a dangerous situation and it’s only a matter of time before one of the kids gets hurt or dies from the constant neglect, but as a kid you don’t think this way – you just know how this is how things are and always have been. As far as you know, this is the only way life goes on for anyone. This is life – it’s just how things are. You may be hungry much of the time, you may be neglected by your mother and your father has never been around, but this is your family – this is your life.

Then it happens. Your mother leaves you alone again and someone from DSS comes by the house while she is gone. And everything you know – everything you are comfortable with, everything you love in the only way you know love comes crashing down.

Then, the police come into the apartment. Then, other social workers arrive. The few clothes you own are put in a bag or a box and you are taken away – crying, frightened and confused. Your brothers and sisters are split up and taken to different homes. Some go with their fathers, some go to foster care and you and one sister go to a kinship placement with a distant cousin. Everything you know is gone. The only thing you have left is your one sister out of the six siblings.

This kinship foster placement quickly turns into a nightmare itself. No effort is made to welcome you into the fold. Already in a fragile state, you are treated with disrespect and mentally abused. The only good thing is that this placement doesn’t last very long.

You and your sister move to a group foster home (known in the old days as an orphanage). From there you are sent to another home. More than a year has gone by now and your mother has not visited you once, even though she had the opportunity and permission of DSS.

Then comes the straw that broke the camel’s back – you are moved from this foster home without your sister. As always, you have no idea why you are being moved and you are scared and now completely alone in the world. You spend three nights in a row in three different houses while they try to find a more permanent foster home. This new home is full of foster children – the foster children are a job more than anything else for your new foster parents.

This is where you are starting when our family wants to take you in. This is what you have been through when our family promises to love you forever and never let you go, no matter what. This is what your view of the world is when you move into our house, and now we’re going to ask you to try to start moving forward and become part of our family.

If you were in this position, how vulnerable would you be willing to make yourself? How open would you be with your heart and your feelings? Would it be easier to love or to hate? Would you even be able to tell the difference?


Needless to say, Edward and the Duchess had developed a slightly armored outer layering. By “slightly,” I think you know I mean, “slightly more armored than an M1 Abrams tank.” Both had their own special defenses which were as different as they were annoying. Is annoying too strong a word to use for my own kids? Maybe, but that’s the way it was – these were defense mechanisms which got in the way of reaching Edward and the Duchess on any level.


The Kids

The Duchess is a big girl. Her birth mom is slightly taller than average and her birth father was six feet seven inches. She’s tall enough compared to everyone else her age that we have often questioned whether or not there is a possibility her birth certificate is wrong and that she’s not a year or two older than they thought. On top of her height is the fact that she is solidly built – not that she is heavy, but she is rugged.

Consequently, people always think she is older than she is and even those who know how old she is tend to subconsciously expect more from her because she seems older. Which was extremely unfortunate for her given that she was actually less developed mentally than the average six year old. At the time she moved in, she sucked her thumb whenever she was in any situation in which she felt uncomfortable. The situations that made her feel that way were varied, but can generally be summed up as “most of the time.”

Whenever you got anywhere near the Duchess or made any sort of contact with her, whether it was to hold her hand or grab her arm to prevent her from stepping in front of a train, she did the same thing: squirm out of the way and make a tremendously obnoxious “Nnnnnnnn” sound. She cried several times a day about pretty much everything. She talked about missing her babies (meaning the two youngest girls – one of whom she had never lived with and, at the time, had probably only seen once or twice), but it was obvious she didn’t feel as much for them as she did Juliet who had really been the closest thing to a mother she had known. When she cried that she missed Juliet, it made my heart break. I wanted her to be able to see her siblings and her mother, but that wasn’t the way things were working at that point. It was tough.

Both Stacy and I spent many nights lying with the Duchess in her bed as she cried herself to sleep. She was a mess, just like you would expect her to be.


Edward handled things in a different way – where Duchess displayed her emotions openly and frequently, Edward would simply pretend nothing was happening. He was so detached from everything that went on it was incredible. Had they give and Academy Award for Best Actor in a Shitty Situation, he would have been up on stage thanking his agent and all the people who made it happen. When I say Edward didn’t show his emotions, don’t mistake that to mean he didn’t show emotions at all – he showed all kinds of emotions; unfortunately, none of them were ever what he was actually feeling.

By the time Edward came to live with us, he had become a master manipulator – he could and could read people immediately when he met them and within a few seconds he could decide which personality to give them to get what he wanted. He could give you his Mr. Happy and upbeat personality, he could give you his Mr. Angry and defiant personality, he could give you his sad and withdrawn personality. As I introduced him to friends and family, I was always amazed to watch him work his magic, particularly when it was compared to the Duchess. When Duchess met someone new, she would grunt and flop around and generally act like a mutant on drugs to prevent having any real interaction with people, whereas Edward would just work them and work them until he had them wrapped around his finger.

Unfortunately for Edward, his act didn’t work with us. After you know him for more than a week, you can actually start to see what he is doing when he talks people. So, Stacy and I had to be careful what kinds of strings we let him pull. Obviously, we wanted him trying to make connections with us, but we wanted him to be the one making the connections, not some concocted personality. That way, when I tucked him in one night and he touched my face and said, “I wish I were white like you,” I could tell he didn’t really wish that, but that he was saying something he thought I would like to hear. Having a child who is constantly wheedling for attention in this way can be disarming and dangerous – disarming for the parent and dangerous for the child. If Stacy and I had let ourselves take the things Edward said at face value, we could have ignorantly assumed he was well adjusted and happy without a care in the world and nothing could have been further from the truth.

Here’s a peculiar way Edward’s defenses manifested themselves: he couldn’t feel pain. Literally, he was almost unable to register when he had hurt himself. He certainly couldn’t cry even when he had done serious harm. For example, a little more than a month after he moved in, Edward cut his finger off - this is a long story explained elsewhere in the book, but for this part we’ll make it interesting and say that he lost a finger in a sword fight with a pirate – and he never cried. He got up, whimpered for a moment and then never said another word. Never complained the five hours he waited to got to surgery, never complained in the recovery room, never complained the four weeks he wore a cast, never complained when the doctor used a pair of pliers to pull the pin out of the bone and through the end of his finger with no anesthetic. No pain at all registered in his brain.

Like physical pain, Edward was able to shelter himself from emotional pain. The second visit we had with bio-mom didn’t go particularly well – it was one of those situations where bio-mom was in a very depressed state and the kids were tired anyway and it was a very teary and emotional good-bye. When we got back to the car, Duchess was a mess – a complete basket case and I literally had to sit on the sidewalk with her for 20 minutes while she sobbed in my arms. When I finally got her calmed down enough to get in the Red Dragon and go, Edward says to me, “I didn’t cry.” Which was true – he didn’t cry. And you would have to be made of stone to not cry at that visit. It was a nightmare.


Things have changed for the healthier with both kids, to be sure, but those first couple of months were both heartbreaking and extremely grueling.

Every School Year Is The Same

The first day of school is such an exciting event – the children are happy to go and see their friends and eager to meet their new teachers, school clothes have been bought and the day has finally arrived when the children who have been waiting with great patience finally get to wear them. Their mother and I hold hands with each other as the children skip merrily along their way to school, each with a new backpack filled with binders, pencils and erasers. The sun is shining, birds are singing, and the smell of hope is in the air and you can just see the joy in their eyes as they embark on the brand new journey that is another year of education.

If you believe anything we have ever done in this family resembles something that organized and peaceful, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Here’s the way it really went last year:

The night before the first day of school we end up scrambling to purchase one new outfit for each child so they can at least show up the first day in new clothes. Why didn’t we go shopping before? Possibly it was because we are lazy morons, but also possibly due to the fact that we were short on money and time until that moment (and we probably still had neither the time nor the money to get the job done). After the kids were in bed, I sneak back out to find school supplies, but because most other families in the state were more organized than I was, the supplies are sold out – Staples looks like it has been looted in a riot. The only thing left in the store are six other disorganized parents and a box of pink typing paper. I kick one of the other parents out of the way and purchase the typing paper – it will have to do for now.

Even though we planned to get up and get ready over an hour before school starts, we managed to get out of bed with 30 minutes left, which means we must START DOING THINGS AT FULL SPEED AND FULL VOLUME SO THAT EVERYONE WILL KNOW I AM SERIOUS AND THERE ARE ONLY FIVE MINUTES LEFT HURRY UP AND EAT YOR LUCKY CHARMS! Once breakfast was over and the teeth had, ostensibly, been brushed (that is, if teeth can be brushed in the five seconds they were in the bathroom claiming to have brushed them – never mind, they’re mostly just baby teeth anyway), we rush out the door, run half way to school, realize that two kids have forgotten their backpacks, another has forgotten to pack snack and another feels like he is going to throw up.

Note: Whenever we have mass confusion at the house or anywhere else, the children find it helpful to either throw up or threaten to throw up. If they can’t muster a vomit, it is completely acceptable for the dog or cat to vomit as an alternative.

We neared the playground as the bell rings and made it to the lines just as they are filing inside. Because the first day of school is always special, I snapped a photograph of the back of their heads as they went into the building. Then I went and sat down, exhausted, and rejoiced at the fact that I now had six hours alone. I’ll tell you how I screwed that up in just a minute.

Note: Perhaps you are thinking that it is a shame that I was only able to capture the back of the children’s heads in the photograph, but you’d be wrong – it doesn’t matter what the photograph actually looks like because no one will ever see the finished product, anyway. What happens is this roll of film stays in the camera for about a year, then when it is finally finished it gets thrown into the bin on top of my dresser with the other 90 rolls of 35mm film which have been there since the beginning of time. I suspect that if someone were to develop those rolls of film there may be photographs of actual dinosaurs on there – that’s how old some of that film is, I tell you. The point is not to get the picture and look at it, the point is to take the picture and know that I’ve taken it. I think.

Because I had six hours each day, I decided to take a job painting a friend’s house. Which made no sense at all. I’d decided to go back to school, try to keep up with the housework and be home in time to pick up the children each day, so I added painting a house on top of all that? What can I say – I don’t learn well from my mistakes.

As if that were not enough of a drain on my time, the kids all came home from school with the dreaded “information cards.” Let me explain these little things to you with a metaphor. If I you were to read a book that was equal in length to the amount of time it takes to fill the forms out relative to the amount of time I have available to fill them out, you would need to read Don Quixote and the bible during a commercial break while watching Friends.

Each child in school (and there were four of them remember) had three of the little forms to fill out. All three forms are exactly the same. Why did I need to complete the forms in triplicate? Why wouldn’t one form be good enough for all the children? Why did I have to fill out the forms again every year – couldn’t they have just verified the info from the year before? Why was the system not computerized? If not computerized, could they not at least have been on carbon paper? Are our schools so backwards that we have not yet reached the same level of technology as people in 1806?

I never got an answer to these questions. I never had time to ask these questions. I was far too busy filling out these forms on 3x5 paper. Each form had a lot of questions – I didn’t count, but if I had to guess I would say it was in the neighborhood of 11,000 questions. In triplicate. For four kids. Many of the questions were simple, such as the child’s name, and my name and pi calculated to the 23rd decimal (3.14159265358979323846264, in case you are wondering). But as I went along, the questions got a little harder. At least, they got harder for me.

Race (check only one): White/African-American/Hispanic (not black)/Asian/Native American

Now, in case I failed to mention it, or haven’t otherwise made it perfectly clear, we have race issues in our family. I don’t mean we have a race problem – we haven’t had riots in almost a year – but race is an issue we have to deal with. The Duchess, Edward and Lady McBeth are all Puerto Rican and, as such, have dark skin and curly hair. To look at Edward, you might assume he is Hispanic, particularly if you are Hispanic and are hip to the subtle differences, but the majority of white people would just call him black. Duchess and Lady even more so because their facial features are even more African in nature. Which makes sense, since black Puerto Ricans are largely descended of people from the Congo. They also have much influence from the Taino population which was native to Puerto Rico prior to Columbus. In truth, there is also a heavy dose of white European ancestry as well. Due to the conditions the natives and slaves endured in the 16th and 17th centuries, Puerto Ricans are a heavily mixed ethnic group, as well as a very confused group (it is almost impossible to accurately track lineage). Essentially, to be Puerto Rican means to be part native, part African and part European.

So what the hell do I check off on the little cards?

In reality, this is not what ran through my mind when I was filling out the forms. My first thought was that I would need to have at least one beer while I was filling out forms. My second thought was that it would probably require two or three. But my third thought was that this was a bullshit way to phrase the question.

Hispanic, not black? What the hell? They are Hispanic and black. And Native American, too, although the Native American is not recognized by the federal government (like the Inuits in Alaska – also not recognized as “Native American.” Funny, I don’t think they got here after us). And the Hispanic is Spanish, therefore, white. Why can’t I chose more than one? This doesn’t even make any sense. This little form was beginning to piss me off.

In the end, I chose “African-American” because that is how they will be perceived by most people who meet them. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was betraying some of their heritage by not choosing “Hispanic.” I crossed it out and thought some more.

Having an interracial family presents some challenges, sure, but it also provides some entertainment. For example, the Duchess was playing basketball last year at the Boys and Girls club. She and Stacy were sitting on the sidelines waiting for her group to start as the previous group was finishing up. Apparently there were a few African American families there, which stands out a bit because Arlington is a fairly white suburb. Duchess picked up on this and said, “There’s a lot of brown people here.” Stacy agreed and nothing more is said for a few minutes, then Stacy asked Duchess if it bothered her to have a white mother. Duchess laughed and said, “Does it bother you to have a brown kid?” It’s so nice to hear little kids talk about race because to them it’s all simply about what someone looks like – there are no culture differences, there is no history, there is no racism. If only there were some way to keep them in that state of innocence.

With race, that’s just the beginning. I like to refer to our family as interracial, because, duh, that’s what it is – it covers more than one race. Intertwined. Intermixed. Interracial. I’ll also accept multiracial because, duh, that’s what it is – more than one race. However, a leading adoption publication, Adoptive Families, refers to it much of the time, if not all the time, as “trans-racial.” How can a family be trans-racial? First of all, using the prefix “trans” seems to imply that we are somehow crossing over race, which doesn’t actually work for me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I suppose it does, technically, work in our situation. But then I started looking up the terms and I found that most of the time (in the world according to Google) when people are referring to “transracial” they mean adoption, when they say “multiracial” they mean individual people who consider themselves to be of more than one race and when people say “interracial” they are talking about couples of more than one race.

Crap. Now I have to figure out whether I am going to change the way I describe our family or if I want to walk around worrying I am offending people if I continue to refer to us as interracial. Why didn’t someone give me a book on this, for crying out loud? There’s no manual, no answer key – I’m out here winging it. I even took a race class at night to try to get some answers. Unfortunately, it just opened up even more questions. Is ethnicity the same as race? What defines a race? What defines an ethnicity? What about people who have mixed heritage? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck had a black mother and a Spanish father?

I know that this isn’t necessarily the school’s fault – they have to answer to the state and federal governments with the answers to how many black children are in the school and how many white children, etc. And I know that the government is reflecting the general American attitude that things must be one or the other, black or white, on or off, right or wrong. American’s, for whatever reason, hate to recognize anything that might be a shade of gray. It’s everywhere – look around if you don’t believe me.

When a politician fails to adhere strictly to his party’s policies and occasionally votes with the opposition party, what do they call him? He gets labeled a fence rider or middle of the road. And it ain’t no compliment. Never mind the fact that it probably means he actually thinks about each issue individually instead of toes some ridiculous party line that he doesn’t happen to agree with. We like our politicians to be easily categorized – liberal or conservative.

And we like our people to be either black, white, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. Choose only one. Don’t choose two, because it’s absolutely ridiculous that someone is going to claim to be black and Hispanic. Or Hispanic and white. That’s just crazy.

I decide that I am taking this race question way too seriously and I just pencil in what they call themselves: brown. Which is entirely more accurate than any choices already on the form.

The rest of the forms are fairly standard – stupid questions that have absolutely no basis in reality. For instance, they want my health insurance policy number and our pediatrician’s name, address and phone number. Which makes no sense.

First of all, this information is perfectly useless in an emergency. If my child has such an emergency that he has to be rushed to the ER and neither my wife or myself are available, it’s not as if the school is going to fill out the insurance forms for me – those will be waiting when I get there. Nor are they going to call the pediatrician for any reason at all – what are they going to do, make an appointment for a physical for the kid? Medical emergencies are going to require one of two courses of action for the school officials: 1) call me or Stacy and have us come and get the kid or 2) take the kid to the ER because it is a genuine emergency and Stacy and I can’t be reached. Neither scenario requires a pediatrician’s phone number and address nor the insurance info.

I grudgingly filled it out. Three times. For each child.

Then I came to the section where I am supposed to list who to contact in case of emergency – they demanded three local names and numbers (“you must provide three names” or something like that). Hell, I didn’t know three people I wanted to list there – I didn’t even know one person I wanted to list there. I had only moved there the year before and, quite frankly, we haven’t made a lot of friends I would trust with that kind of responsibility. So, I left it blank. Screw those bastards for rubbing it in my face that I don’t have any friends.

Next was the Scary Section: Is there anyone your child is NOT to be released to?

Um, yeah – everyone who is not me or my wife. Is that specific enough? But, in reality, I had to list the children’s birth mother – not that I was all the worried about her getting motivated enough to come and get them. After all, she couldn’t be bothered to look after them when they were living in the same house and she couldn’t be bothered to visit when they were in foster care with her cousin in the same area of town. Hell, the odds of her actually getting on a bus, researching and tracking us down would be almost a million to one. Still, I wanted to be sure that school never even considered letting them go with her, so I put her name and all her aliases on the list and then wrote “DO NOT RELEASE TO BIRTH MOTHER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

Then I felt kind of bad for Mab and Achilles because they didn’t have anyone in their “Do not release to” sections, so I wrote in, “George Bush, Dick Cheney and Carl Rove.” It made me feel a little safer to know that even though I hadn’t listed all the bad guys in the country, some of the most unsavory were eliminated.

Finally, the forms ended with a riddle and three more math questions, all of which I ignored. By this time the sun was ready to rise again and the second day of school was about to begin. It was comforting to know that I had completed these forms and wouldn’t need to fill them out again for another year.

That comfort, of course, lasted approximately six hours as each child returned home that evening with the dreaded fundraiser information. Fundraisers – a subject we’ll get into as soon as I catch up on some sleep.



Fundraisers, or, One More Reason Coworkers Hate Parents

I don’t blame co-workers for haring parents. If there is anything less interesting than hearing about someone else’s dreams, it’s hearing a story about their darling, precious children. And I tell these stories all day. I am a sad, sad man.

Off the top of my head, let me give you all the fundraisers I was either involved with or ignored last year – the PTO fall fundraiser (wrapping paper), the PTO spring fund raiser (candles), Pop Warner (a combination of begging on the street as well as selling something which escapes my memory), Little League (raffle tickets), Boy Scouts (crappy popcorn related items), and Girl Scouts (cookies). There were probably half a dozen more, but this is the list I came up with without thinking real hard (something I try to avoid). Keep in mind that as always, everything is times four. So, not only do my wife and I need to sell overpriced wrapping paper to my unsuspecting co-workers, we have to sell enough to cover four kids.

I have to get sneakier every year – once fall rolls around, people I know start avoiding me like I’m that little monkey from the movie “Outbreak.” I have to wear camouflage and sneak into their offices before work so I can hide behind the water cooler – then when they stand around the water cooler to discuss last night’s episode of The Surreal World and what that crazy Flava Flav is up to, I jump out and yell, “CAN I INTEREST YOU IN SOME SHITTY WRAPPING PAPER TO BENEFIT MY KIDS’ SCHOOL?”

Sure, they try to run, but as an experienced parent, I have anticipated this move and laid traps with poison darts at all the exits. “I have the antidote for anyone who has been ‘accidentally’ stuck with a poison dart – I’d be willing to part with individual doses for the modest price of, say, a dozen rolls of holiday wrap.” And, of course it’s “holiday wrap” because just mentioning a catalog of “Christmas wrap” into the school would cause the building to spontaneously combust. I’m not complaining, mind you – just pointing out.

Note: Did you ever notice that when someone says, “I’m not complaining,” it almost always comes right after or before something that sounds a whole lot like complaining? “What a fucking idiot my boss is – I’m not complaining, though.”

As I see it, there are two main problems associated with fundraisers. Two problems, I mean, apart from the fact that it makes everyone I know despise me, but that’s nothing new. I have five kids and no life outside my home which means I am compelled by forces well beyond my control – nature, God, zombie trance, whatever you want to call it – to talk about my kids non-stop and like they are the smartest, best looking kids in the world; therefore, my coworkers have learned to hate me long before I ever showed up selling tins of caramel popcorn.

The first major problem of fundraising is that, for whatever reason, the fundraising activity/product is never anything useful. Does anyone I know really need an oversized container of Gummy Worms? Probably not. Does anyone I know really want a pack of 10 year old cheerleaders to wash their car with sponges that have been dropped on the ground so many times they now bear less resemblance to sponges than to 100 grit sandpaper? I’m going to say, “no.”

The only two fundraisers which come even close to being exceptions to this rule come from Pop Warner football and Girl Scouts. Pop Warner doesn’t go with the pretense of selling you something you really don’t need. They have chosen a more honest and direct approach – out and out begging. Which is a fabulous idea because the only thing each kid needs is an old can to hold while they stand outside some unsuspecting business and shake down all the customers for loose change. Not only does this separate people from their money without requiring a follow up visit to deliver a product, but it is fantastic training for anyone on the football team who may decide later in life that “wino” is the career path for him. Except, we didn’t spend the money on wine. Not much of it, anyway.

And, obviously, Girl Scout cookies are a staple of every American diet. I can safely bring the GS order form into the office and not have anyone take a swing at me because people actually like GS cookies. See, the Girl Scouts have found something that works for them and they have decided to stick with it – a solid business practice that has resulted in my never having to pay for any trip or activity the girls participate in (well, except selling the cookies, which takes nearly as much of my life each year as I spend watching Monster Garage – let me tell you, that’s no five minute commitment).

The best fundraisers I have ever been a part of, though, were both when I was a kid. The first was when I was in sixth grade and we were raising money for a week long camping trip to a national park. Someone had the genius to sell light bulbs. Hear me out, now, because this was genius. Why? First, because the way the fundraiser worked was that each kid was given a big box containing perhaps 100 light bulbs packaged in pairs. Because they were light bulbs, the box was light enough to be carried by a sixth grader. The idea was that we would go door to door and sell the lightbulbs for, I can’t remember, but let’s say $10,000 a package. We got paid on the spot and the customer got their light bulbs on the spot.

What made this such a great idea is everybody needs light bulbs – they are one of those items that you usually forget until it becomes absolutely necessary to go to the store and purchase a box. And when is it absolutely necessary? When you no longer have any lamps left in the house to steal bulbs from to put into the overhead fixture in the kitchen. Admit it, you’re reading this right now by the light from a bulb you transplanted from a lamp in the living room and you haven’t been the basement in a year because that was the first place you stole bulbs. All that remains is your one bulb you keep taking from room to room. The problem is, when you do remember to buy the bulbs at the store, you buy, what, eight of them? And when you get home and start screwing them into the empty sockets, you find that you don’t have any left over at all, do you?

So, if some kid came to your door right now and offered to sell you a few boxes of bulbs, that would be pretty useful, right?

The other fundraiser we did was more along the Pop Warner begging vein, but a little more work for us. The soccer team did a “bottle drive” which was where we went around door to door asking people to donate any deposit cans and bottles to the team – at the end of the day we took all our bottles to the redemption center and turned them in for the nickel apiece. This was nice because it was a bit of the begging – Can we please have something of yours that is actually worth money? – and a bit of doing something for you – You know you were eventually just going to throw them away because there is no way you’ll ever get motivated enough to bring them to the redemption center.

For whatever reason, though, fundraisers today seem intent on selling things that nobody needs or selling things for prices no sane people would pay for them or the dreaded combination “Overpriced Crap You Don’t Want Or Need.”

The second major problem with the fundraisers is that it is no longer the kids’ job to go out and raise funds. It’s the parents’ job. Why? Because sometime before today but after 1982 when I sold light bulbs door to door like a miniature Willy Loman, parents decided that perhaps it is not the wisest thing in the world to send a 12 year old to random houses without supervision.

All of which means parents are forced to bring fundraising order forms to work and annoy as many people in their captive audience as possible. Last spring, though, was different. Fed up with the concept of selling things to coworkers (also I didn’t, technically, have any coworkers apart from Lady McBeth, the cat and the dog), so I decided that the Girl Scouts, Mab and the Duchess, would go door to door selling cookies – I would walk with them while they went up to each door and made their pitch. Clearly, I had been inside long enough all winter that my brain had ceased all cognitive function and was running on animal instinct, which, for some reason, was telling me that this door to door thing was a fantastic idea.

And it was, for about thirty minutes. Then I realized it was taking about ten minutes per house for the girls to make their pitch, get the order, then write it down. The writing part was what was killing our production time, so I soon decided that I would help with just the writing part while the girls still made the sales pitch. However, after a few more houses, I realized the girls were still pretty shy which was causing them to have to repeat a lot of things louder – you know, stuff like that which was still bogging us down. So I decided I’d just help them out with a few of the key points – you know, how much each box cost, how long until the order would come in, etc.

Twenty minutes later I’m ringing the doorbells, making the pitch by myself and writing the orders down. At one point the girls went back to the house to go pee, but I kept on working. Which turned out to be a mistake.

“Honey, call the police – there’s man on the porch claiming to be a girl scout! Pervert!”

When the orders came in, I had to write a check to cover every box myself, which meant that anyone we couldn’t get in touch with that had ordered cookies was going to cost me money. Logically, this meant I was the only one motivated to actually distribute these cookies, so every night I was the one on the phone, I was the one who had to go back door to door when it was convenient for the customer – it was a nightmare and we won’t be doing that again.

Lest you think I am just a big Complainy McWhinypants who has only criticism and no solutions, let me offer you my alternatives for these useless fundraisers:

For schools, wouldn’t it just be easier to fund them properly in the first place? Wow – was easier to come up with than I though it would be.

For all extra curricular activities, set up a concession booth at every event that sells hot dogs, chips and drinks – parents are always trying to fit dinner in before a scout meeting or right after soccer practice, etc – this kills two birds with one stone. And if you really wanted to put your organization over the top, financially speaking, sell draft beer at $4 a cup. I guarantee sales beyond your wildest expectations.