Summer, Highland Falls

As of today, we have officially survived our first 100 days of parenthood. We’re still standing, no bones are broken and nobody’s been expelled from school, all major victories. I feel like I need to do a special flashback recap. It’s the hundredth episode of Cheers. It’s a very special Blossom.

Billy Joel has a song called “Summer, Highland Falls,” where he wisely says, “we are always what our situations hand us; it’s either sadness or euphoria,” and I think in many ways, that’s what our first summer with the kids was like.

Summer is a difficult climate in Las Vegas. Our average temperature in June, when we got the kids, was a hundred degrees.  In July, it was 106. That’s a whopping 41°C, for our friends overseas. August? 103. In other words, smoking hot, debilitatingly hot. The kind of hot where you stand in the road and see wavy mirage lines wiggling up from the asphalt. It’s not easy to add two new extremely active life forms to your world when the summer’s that brutal. The hottest spot on the U.S. map is Death Valley, California, and that’s just two hours from our house.

In September, thank God, the temperature cools down to 95. You know you live in a really hot climate when you say the words “cools down to 95” with a straight face. After summer in Las Vegas, 95 is the welcoming breath of autumn personified. At 95, we feel frost on the pumpkins.

We’ve had some incredibly good days this summer and some incredibly bad days, too. On the very worst days, you’d be surprised how many times I blame it on the heat. The human excuse mechanism kicks in and I actually say out loud to Adam, “You know, we’d be having a much easier time with the kids if we got them in March instead of in June.” Summer here makes people cranky. No kid likes to be hauled around for three days of therapy in a car that hits 135° every time he opens the door. And certainly, no two dads want to be inside said dune buggy when the cargo in the back seat are fighting and whining and slapping the shit out of each other.

In the fantasy my mind creates, we’d be the perfect parents by now and the kids would be perfectly adjusted if DFS would have just done their climate-controlled homework and matched us in the springtime instead of the summer. Oh, there still would have been blood, sweat and tears, but the sweat component would have been 20 degrees easier. I blush when I think of the number of times I’ve equated adoption success with temperature relief. The silly old saying is easy to fall back on. When in doubt, blame the weather. Easier than blaming my own lack of success, that’s for sure.

Looking back on our first summer with the kids, I reread these journal entries, and I smile. There’s Justin, standing in his “panties” at the top of the stairs, yelling at me. There’s Justuce, dancing in the kitchen as I sing Elvis Presley.

A lot of them make me cry. There she is, sobbing her heart out in the middle of the night because her moms are gone. And there I am, holding her and rocking her and crying right along with her. There he is, screaming out in his sleep, and stumbling to get up after he fell off his chair again. It’s all as vivid as video, and Billy Joel was right. It’s either sadness or euphoria.

I started this journal in August, and since then, 1,700 mouse clicks have come our way. Wow. Why people would click over 300 times to watch Justin call me a fucker and get his mouth washed out with soap is beyond me, but I’m glad you tune in. It makes Adam and I feel like we’re not so impossibly alone in all of this. I tell people all the time this blog is my best therapy. Just by coming here and reading and telling me you did, you’ve all become my greatest instant support network. In the past three months, I’m surprised how important the simple act of being heard has become to me.

Curious stats pop up. There’s a little geographical location tracker among my behind-the-scenes dashboard doodads so I know where you come from. People in Russia read this blog. I don’t have a clue where they found me. London friends I can account for. Danish cousins, friends and family in Israel, Ireland and Australia, all present and accounted for. But Russia? Beats me. We don’t know a soul there, but it’s flattering they walked in and found a seat. So, hello, Russia. Spasibo. Spasibo very much.

As we survived our first hot summer as stumbling, bumbling instant dads, your comments here and on Facebook lifted our spirits more than you know. When somebody stops me at services on a Friday night because something I wrote the night before made them cry, or because they laughed five minutes because Justin socked me in the nuts, it’s so incredibly healing to be told. It’s like a hug that never stops. And comments from strangers take our breath away. We don’t even know you, but there you are anyway.

From “What Must People Think?”

I am a friend of your cousin’s and an autism therapist. I mostly work with kids who are nonverbal and highly aggressive, but I also have experience with children who have sensory issues, including proprioception delays. I think most people are just very ignorant about the nature and expression of sensory issues and often believe they are behavioral. I have a shirt I put on one little guy when we go out to practice his skills...it says, "I have autism. What's your excuse?" It shuts them up and lessens the glares. I will be reading your blog with great interest and lots of compassion.

Thank you for that. You have no idea how that comforted me.

And from “Good Luck, Charlie,” from an anonymous reader:

Sounds as if you landed on your feet when the carpet of "the perfect life with the perfect child" was jerked out from under you. I have walked the miles in your shoes that you have yet to face and will just say that of all the things I have done raising the imperfect, yet amazing child is truly my greatest accomplishment. No one gets a guide book or instructions you just do what feels right and move on to the next phase.

Amen to that.

I was reading a manuscript by the kids’ grandmother last night. She finished her memoirs just recently and was kind enough to send me an advance reading copy before it goes to press. In it, she talks about living with her disability, M.S.

She says, “If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them.” And even more resounding to my ears right now, “If I am less concerned with inability, I am more able to do that which propels my life into being the kind of life worth living. If I stay stuck in my nagging ailments, I have that much less energy to catapult my world into joy.”

Rereading a summer’s worth of journal entries, I fear that’s what I’m doing here sometimes; keeping myself stuck in “poor me” mode, revisiting any and all nagging ailments about how hard this is, and not focusing more on how beautiful it could be. It bothers me that anybody might come here and think, “what a whiner, can’t he see the gift?” Because I do, every day, all the time. In practice, though, it’s just hard. Sometimes I actually tick off a topic count in my mind when I come here to write. “Let’s see, I wrote a sad one yesterday, so I better write a funny one today,” as if you might be keeping score, and might all bail on me if I’m all worries, all the time.

What’s that old song? Accentuate the positive? Eliminate the negative? That’s right on the nose for me. I really am one of those hopeless optimists who believe you have to fake it until you make it. Some days I want to hit the delete button on all of these entries, thinking the longer I focus on the problems we’re having adjusting as a new family, the less energy I’ll have to catapult us into joy.

But I can’t turn off the laptop. First, this is the only baby book I’ll be able to give to my children. Their babyhood was robbed from them, and their recorded memories start here. I want the amazing grown-ups they’ll become to look back and know how much Adam and I loved them from the very beginning, how proud we were of them, and how we wanted to tell the world everything about them. How they filled us with such incomprehensible joy, even amidst our failures, frustrations, and utter confusion.

I want them to know we were real and we weren’t perfect. Some days, we didn’t have a clue. But we loved them so much and we were so stunningly proud of how they conducted themselves in these early days, working through the staggering emotional minefield of finding a new life and a new home in a form they never anticipated. At 6 and 7, they were able to do that. And without a doubt, that makes them our heroes.

Until they grow up and understand all that, there’s no other audience who will keep me inspired enough to think it’s worth doing, or urge me enough to keep it going. Just you. And I thank you for that.

It’s also just expediency in busy times. Adam and I hit the ground running. Immeasurably big things are happening to us this year and they’re all coming at us lightning fast. There’s no easier way to tell all the people I love all at once. There’s no time left for email and phone calls, so this is where it lands now, plop, by default. I may be whinier sometimes than the angels of my better nature intend, but there’s no better place to unload it all at once. It’s my clearing house for the masses and my cathartic, comfortable release.

Real life is in the minutia, so this is where it goes. The good and the bad. The ridiculous and the inspiring. The sad ones and the funny ones. The ones where we’re amazingly good at this new role and the ones where we’re horrifically bad. And some day, our kids will grow up and the adults they’ll become will get to go back in this time machine and laugh and cry with us too.

Hello future grown-up babies. Here you were, only 100 days old with us, and Daddy and I already loved you so much, it took our breath away. You had too much heaviness in your hearts and minds to notice we were giving it back then, but here it is now, so you can keep it forever. Come back in time with us and capture it up. We put it here and kept it safe so it would be ready when you are.

They say that these are not the best of times,
But they're the only times I've ever known.
And I believe there is a time for meditation
In cathedrals of our own.
Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyes,
And I can only stand apart and sympathize.
For we are always what our situations hand us,
It's either sadness or euphoria.

Three and a half months. Our first hundred days.

Thanks for reading, everybody.  To be continued.

“Summer, Highland Falls” from the Billy Joel album “Turnstiles,” ©1976 Columbia Records.