Taiwan November 12, 2008

So, just after I posted about wanting somewhere to go on vacation, I got asked today, sort of off-handedly but quite seriously, whether I want to go to Taiwan this summer for two weeks or maybe three.  I’d go with students, so my trip would be free.  Hello?  I said yes on the spot.   I also demanded that I would need accommodations for Jasper and Mavis, though I said I’d be generous enough to pay for their flights.  The person who offered this to me also basically said “When would you want to go?” How amazing is this?

It’s sort of still in the “maybe” mode, but it was discussed in pretty serious ways.  Keep your fingers crossed that this would work out!

Meanwhile, here is my parenting tip of the yea, discovered last night: dry pasta noodles + pipe cleaners + a plastic spoon + 3 various sized plastic bowls + toddler = enough distraction for you to get through the pre-dinner hour in sanity.

What Works April 28, 2008

So far we’ve talked on this blog mostly about adoption and parenting, but the “work” part was a big motivation for this blog, so we should have some discussion on that front too. I’m going to use that fact as a justification for direct solicitation of advice.

I need something low-tech or a combination of low- and medium-tech to organize myself. I should say first that although I’m infinitely drawn to cool organizing office supplies, I am not at all a naturally organized person. I have dreams, though. I have a calendar that I use pretty religiously, out of necessity, to keep track of work-related stuff, but I’m feeling lately like I need a more massive yet portable and easy-to-use organization system. I don’t want to spend a lot of money, and I am okay with a DIY solution. I would like it to move between work (where I have a PC) and home (where I have a Mac) seamlessly, and I would prefer it is portable and at least minimally cute. I guess I’m kind of looking for some Hipster PDA / 43 Folders type solution that would allow me to not just write down dates but incorporate long-term planning kinds of things, because I’ve noticed that although I do a great deal of thinking about the future, I do much less actual planning or accounting for it. And now I have a project at work that is going to take me out at least three years, and I think I really need some way to be better organized about it.

Plus I’d like some place where I can store stuff about home, Mavis, gifts, etc. I’ve tried Cosi Central and Lifeshaker briefly and not found either of them something I can really stick with.

So I’m asking you: what organization systems, big or small, purchased or made, online or off, for one thing or for all your things, do you use to keep yourself organized? Or at least not completely lost? I’m thinking we all might benefit from a general working mother hack discussion, no? I’ll try to think of any tips I have–though they are definitely few–for being organized with work and post them in the comments.

If I Were to Gripe April 2, 2008

I’d point out that in less than 48 hours, I need to read two books, write up a short report on each, plan the budget for a huge multi-year, highly political (in my workplace at least) initiative that I was just asked to do tonight and have had no time to consult with anyone on but must complete by Thursday, advise approximately 20 students on what courses to take in the fall, teach four courses (one of which is 2.5 hours in length), attend a meeting concerning the future of our school, meet with a student to explain why he got a B-, attend another meeting to find faculty to cover some courses because one of my instructors backed out, figure out how to award credit to two students going to Taiwan this summer for study abroad, write up a study guide for another book I didn’t like and thought I didn’t need to write until the summer until I was asked this week to finish it–oh–now, wrap Mavis’ birthday gifts, meet with my grad school advisor, choose some poems to read at a thing I have to go to for work on Friday night, organize Mavis’ birthday party–which includes fielding multiple phone calls from my overexcited mother, grade about 50 short papers, plan a lesson on a fourth book that I lost and can’t wing, figure out a schedule conflict for a student who needs to take both my class and another offered at the same time, and frost and decorate to look like dogs about 18 cupcakes for Mavis’ teachers and class. If I were to gripe, I would add that I have a cold, a sharp pain near one of my ovaries, and insomnia.

Not that I’m griping. But if I were, it would look something like this.

Update: To further prove that I’m using my limited time well (see: this blog post), I decided tonight, on a whim, to apply to a conference being held in Taipei, Taiwan, in November.  How would I pay for this?  Not so clear.  So I pulled together an abstract and sent it out.  Yeah, that was a wise use of my time.

Coco’s “Only” Thoughts March 13, 2008

I wrote another version of this post, but it was three pages single-spaced (ahem) and I was just getting warmed up, so I am going to try to distill it here in another list.

1.    One has felt pretty much right pretty much all the time I’ve known Mavis because she’s wonderful, not because I was disappointed.
2.    Working makes more than one feel scary anyway, but that’s not the main reason one feels good.
3.    I’m attracted to living smaller: being able to travel more, move out of our house bought just for the good/diverse school district, saving more money, spending more time writing and working on things that matter not only to the immediate context of my family.  One obviously facilitates that.
4.    I know too much about international adoption of healthy infants to believe any longer that it is not a corrupt system in most countries, including China, and it would be very hard to explain to myself, to Mavis, or to another child how I knowingly participated in it under the same circumstances a second time.  This reason is pretty big.  I know a lot of pre-adoptive parents get irritated when people who have their children home already say things about the corrupt system.  I understand that, because I didn’t see it all beforehand either.  But once you have a connection to a particular child and do some searching for information, you have a route to the whole—through one story, at least—that is different than, well, when you don’t.  Unfortunately, we are turning a blind eye to too much.  I did it too.
5.    That being said, I do not have the same thoughts about older child or special needs adoption. Conveniently, older child adoption really appeals to me if we were adopt again.
6.    If we were to adopt an older child, I believe that we would adopt from Ethiopia or foster-adopt African American domestic.  I am also open to adopting a child older than Mavis, as I don’t think birth order issues matter as much when there is just one child who will be losing either her “oldest” or her “baby” status, no matter how you go about it.
7.    Also true is that we no longer qualify for China and that most people Jasper’s age already have kids in high school.
8.    I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume that two Asian kids are going to experience their race, adoption, racism, or anything else the same way.  It kind of drives me crazy when adoptive parents act like they will have the same experience.  I’m not downplaying the importance of race and racism in American culture but rather suggesting we don’t assume we know what that experience is going to mean to various individuals.
9.    The adoption process itself is so damn wrenching and difficult that I still feel very scarred by it.  I don’t think I could will myself through it again any time soon. I just don’t think I could hack it.
10.    Mavis is not only an only child but also an only grandchild; she has no cousins.  If she has any cousins, it won’t be for quite some time, so she will be the oldest by a lot.  The common logic is that an only child ought to have a big family of cousins and so on.  Mavis probably won’t have that.  If she does, she’ll be the oldest, the one that the kids look up to.  I think being the oldest means you get to set a tone, in some ways.  I don’t worry too much about Mavis being the only person of color among her generation in my family. There’s a chance she might be the generation of her family.  Also, one of my brothers is not biologically related to me, my sister, or my mother.  If he has children, they will be white but not bio.  This makes me sad for her as an adult when we are all old and failing, but somehow it doesn’t seem so bad when she’s little.  The adult thing does make me feel a little sad.
11.     If I adopt a black child, I wonder what it would be like for him or her if we went to live in China for some period of time.  If I adopt a child whose birth family’s story I knew (which I would prefer), I wonder what it would be like for Mavis, who will not have that information. I think a lot about “fairness” between the two. When my sister and I were young, we were obsessed with fairness.  I hate the notion of dealing with sibling rivalry over issues big or small.
12.    Mavis has been one of the easiest possible adoption stories you can imagine.  Her adjustment and ours have been far more seamless than we imagined they would be.  She is also verbally and physically advanced for her age; she is kind and loving and fun; and it’s all been much easier than we expected.  I know: it sounds obnoxious.  My mother-in-law constantly says, “You got the best possible child.  Stop while you are ahead.” Of course, my love for Mavis is not based on her intelligence or cuteness or development.  I love her because she is my daughter, and I would love another child on his or her own terms rather than on some list of talents and abilities.  But I do wonder how another child would be compared to her if that child had a harder time adjusting or had some academic delays or whatever.  And when I think of how tiring and sometimes tough the days can be even with our easy, easy kid, I think “could I really handle her plus another one who wouldn’t promise to be so easy?”  It definitely gives me pause.

Ultimately, I guess it will just be easier for us to have only one.  It’s an attractive lifestyle to me—the notion of having a child we love deeply and enjoy thoroughly while not turning our entire lives over to the demands of the munchkins.  I worry about Mavis not having an ally in her family but probably not a whole lot more than I worry about her not having enough children of color in her school and community.  To be honest, I suspect that being an only child of color in a family with white siblings would be harder than being an only child of color, period.  I don’t know that for a fact, of course, but it seems right.

Only two things really hold me back from saying we’ll definitely just have one. The first that I really do like kids an awful lot.  They are funny and interesting.  Mavis is still little now, and I might begin to get all achy with desire for another one later (though I really don’t envision adopting another baby.  I really do think we’d go older a second time.).  Whenever I think positively of two, I have this image of four of us on a road trip with the gigglers in the back seat.  Of course, they’re just as likely to be fighting over who’s touching one another, so I can quickly banish that little daydream.  The other reason I hesitate is that it has only really been since met Mavis that I’ve thought I just want one.  It’s kind of new and still feels novel.

But for now one really does feel right.  And I have to say that it’s really nice not to feel in a rush to decide.

Why I Work: Fifi’s Thoughts February 13, 2008

This topic? Throwing for me a HUGE loop. There is much to say about the topics of working outside of the home, and I am hardly the most qualified person to offer additional opinions. So, I can only speak for me, and that is my preface to this post…these are just my thoughts, and they may be jumbled.

If my income was not essential for our family, I would probably work part-time. I know that I would not stay in a full time position…or at least not the one that I am currently in. And that is part of the problem…are my thoughts on this topic colored by what is (currently) a very stressful and non-supportive working enviroment. I dunno.  I can tell you what the list that I jotted off in preparation for this post said:

Pro’s (in working outside the home):

-Guaranteed non-kid time…including lunches out (without cutting someone elses’ food up, cleaning up spilled drinks, and eating my own food while it is still warm)

-Disposable income

-Security in that if (for any reason) I am in a situation where I am without my partner, I can maintain my daughter’s lifestyle and still plan for our future.

-A sense of accomplishment and satisfaction outside of my home (and my roles as a mother and a wife)

Con’s (in working outside of the home)”

-A huge block of time every day that is taken from my own interests

-Stress that is sometimes hard to dump once I get home

-A feeling of missing out on Sadie day to day…and I do feel that, often. My mom, my husband, and her caregivers get more time each day than I do. I never expected for that to bother me, but it does.

-Constant nagging feeling of being behind on EVERYTHING…home, work, personal, public obligations.

Like Coco and Lulu have already written (beautifully, of course)…I do derive a solid sense of self from achieving and promoting professionally. I was always tagged as the “smart girl”, too, both within my family and in school. It was never a question of if I would go to college, but instead it was when and where. I was the first in my immediate family to complete college, and I did it largely on scholarships and grants (but with a healthy amount of loans…got to love private Catholic college tuition!).  When I entered the workforce, it was jarring to be just one of many, but I began to find ways to distinguish myself. As a result I have promoted and am the primary breadwinner in my marriage. For many years I carried our health benefits, and if I am being honest I fed into this role…I was carrying a burden, but it was MY burden, it was a great way to highlight my role as caregiver, as the responsible one.

When we decided to adopt, it was after years of infertility. I had never questioned whether I would work after we became parents..it was a given in our situation. So I was surprised and dismayed (yes, I was..) with my own reactions after Sadie came home. I was angry that I had to go back, that I didn’t have a choice. I mourned the days that I would be missing before I even went back, and it was a huge part of my depression issues. I remember crying on and off (in the bathroom, of course…why do we always find ourselves sobbing in the bathroom when things get crazy?) the whole first day I was back in the office. I was rabid to get home to Sadie, and when I got there?

She was as cool as a cucumber. As the days and weeks went by, she positively thrived in the extra time with her daddy, with her grandma, and eventually with her teachers at pre-school. I realized that the time that we spent together also enhanced, as I was focused and we really rocked out the time that we were together. My longevity with my employer was a bonus, too, as I have a large block of vacation and personal time to utilize when I do want to take time to be at home. All in all? It has turned out really well.

So, back to the first paragraph. I believe firmly that working does make me a better mom…but I don’t necessarily think that full time is the best thing for me as a woman. There is much that I want to pursue creatively that I just do not have the time for, and I do wish that I had the choice and the options to explore those paths. For now, I am making the best of it, and really? It is going much better than I could have hoped for.

This balancing act is one of the hardest things that I have ever done. A lot of the worry has fallen away, but has been replaced by its cousin fatigue. Some days are good, some not so good. But the important stuff gets done, and I am healthy and able enough to get up and do it all again.

Looking forward to more discussion on this.

Why I Work: Lulu’s Ramblings February 12, 2008

There’s a Jackie Kennedy quote that I have been thinking about lately, perhaps a little too much: “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

While I have to remind myself that this is the same woman who said, “I don’t think there are any men who are faithful to their wives,” there is a lot of truth to the first quote. (I hope I don’t have to say that the second quote is complete crap.) 

I take our/my job of raising Elsie very seriously.  So, why do I work?  Why is raising my child not my full-time job, and so, why am I not a stay at home mother?

I have had people express their views about this topic to me as we came close to getting our referral.  Some were understandable since they came from people like my 80-year-old uncle who could not imagine that we would “ship our child off to have other people raise them.”  Because, um, that’s what daycare is, right? Anyway, other comments came from more credible sources, like my cousin (the gay Republican, how does that happen?). He expressed himself well, and his statement was “You want this child so much and you’ve waited so long to get her, I’m just surprised you aren’t planning to stay home with her.”

There’s something to that statement, yes, and I think even my own mother was a little surprised I didn’t take more than 12 weeks off from working.  So, back to the question, why am I still working?

It’s a little more complicated for me than it might be for some families.  The biggest technical reason that I cannot stay home is that I make more money than my husband. He is self-employed and his income is quite variable, but even so, I outearn him by enough to make me the primary wage earner (unlike Coco, my job is well-compensated, but short on meaning/impact in the bigger picture). An adjunct reason is that my husband is self-employed, and I am therefore the link to benefits. Story over, right?  In fact, before we brought Elsie home, there was a part of me that resented the fact that I had no option to stay home, even if I wanted to.

But really, after 12 weeks of leave, I knew I didn’t want to stay home.  I knew that I would not be happy staying at home. And in some ways, it was nice to not even have the option.

I don’t think I am less of a good mother because I don’t want to stay home.  Like Coco, I was a strong student, and I went back to school in my late 20s to get a graduate degree. I have had a successful career, with growing responsiblities, and I enjoy corporate life (it feeds my need for achievement and an overall competitive nature).  I was raised being told that I could do/be whatever I wanted to.  It never occurred to me that it might mean “oh yeah, until you have kids, then you need to stay home and be a full-time mom.”

As Coco wisely states, no one asks this question of men. And it’s not 1950 anymore. So why do I get defensive when I discuss this topic?

I have a few friends who have decided to stay home until their kids are in kindergarten. But I’ve had other moms say that they found that their kids needed them MORE as they got older. Being home after school when kids were pre-teens and teens was equally if not more crucial than being home when their kids were toddlers. So is that it? Is the only good choice to give up your career for 18-20 years to be at home with your kids?

It’s easy to say of course not, but it is a little less obvious than that for me. If one parent is not going to stay home, what are the “must dos” to make sure you’re not selling your kids short?  It’s different for every family, but here are ours:

1.  Find great daycare. Easy to say, very hard to do. We lost a slot at a great, small center, but were fortunate enough to find a wonderful, nurturing in-home situation near our house. The hours are not convenient, but we will move mountains to make it work since Elsie adores it there and clearly looks forward to it every day.

2.  Try to be flexible at work. Again, easier said than done. I work in an office where many people are here by 7 a.m. and stay until 6 p.m. or later. I can’t and won’t do that. And I don’t think it has to limit my career.  I am always available if someone needs me, and I squeeze in additional work before Els is up and after she is in bed.  Even better, I work from home every other Friday when we don’t have daycare.  That’s mom and Elsie time, and we make the most of it.

3.  Share the load. Unfortunately, I don’t have the advantage of Coco’s husband who seems to really share household duties equally. My husband is not particularly organized or able to multi-task productively, and he doesn’t always seem to know what to do to help without my asking. But he is always willing to do what he can, so I make sure I ask often.  For single mothers or those with partners who are busier than they are, there are other solutions too.  I have started leaning on take-and-bake dinners, and they aren’t bad (and I don’t make them myself, I have them do it for me).  We have people who come clean our house every other week. And I’ve simply let go some of my standards (probably a bad choice of words since I’m not a huge neatnik anyway) in terms of having a tidy house.  It will get better as Elsie gets older, right?!

4.  Have a backup plan. This is the hardest, and one where we don’t feel 100% certain that we have it in place at our house. There are some children who, for whatever reason, need more than a daycare situation. They need more parental care. It might be a special needs situation, or an attachment concern, or an extended illness. You need to know what you are going to do in that situation. When I went back to work after 12 weeks of leave, my husband took 12 weeks off to stay home with Elsie. So, we didn’t do daycare for six months, and even then, we transitioned her really gradually.  And it paid off.  It was a significant financial sacrifice for us to do this, and we will be paying that debt for a while. And we had decided that if Elsie had attachment issues and wasn’t ready for daycare, my husband would have stayed home with her. But could we/would we really have done that if push came to shove?  I don’t know, but it felt good to at least talk about a plan.

We have neighbors who have five children (she had two kids from a previous marriage, and they have since had three more), and they are constant reminders of how I do not want to parent. They both have highly demanding jobs, and you almost never see them with their kids. They have a nanny, and relatives who help out as well, but those kids always seem a little sad, a little less adjusted, and a lot more needy. In warm weather, the other parents in the neighborhood (including us now) are out in our front yards after dinner, watching our kids play together.  But we never see those parents. The kids are out, running around and playing, and if one gets hurt, an older child will run home to get the nanny or someone to help.

At our block party this summer, the father of this family said to my husband that he loves having kids, and he’d love to have more, but his wife has said that five is enough. Loves having kids?  From my outsider’s view, it seems like “having kids” means spending an hour a day with them and passing them off to other’s to raise. Unfortunately, most people know a family like this, and I think it is this type of situation that gives working moms a bad name.

We are all guilty of judging other working parents at some point.  The Sr. VP of my area at work was here at headquarters on Halloween.  Someone commented that her kids must be sad that she won’t be trick-or-treating with them, and she said “no, I haven’t been home for trick or treating in at least three years, so they won’t miss me.”  Of course, her husband was there, so why did I suddenly think a little less of her?

I think that’s why I get defensive on this topic — I do judge others in terms of their commitment to parenting. How do we reconcile our vision of good parenting vs. others’ expectations vs. reality?

For me, as in almost all things, it is about finding balance. Am I going to have the career I would have had if we hadn’t adopted Elsie?  No, certainly not, but should we assume that people cannot have amazing/demanding jobs and parent successfully? If Michele Obama was running for President (my dream, FYI), would we judge her ability to parent and be president as well? At what point are we sacrificing our careers, and at what point are we sacrificing our kids?

Are we all destined for the mommy track?  How have other people tackled this issue?  I’d love to hear about it!

Why I Work: Coco’s Meanderings February 12, 2008

Lulu suggested that we start by writing about why we work. Well, let’s be honest. First of all, there are many days that I don’t know why I work and many days when I wish I didn’t work. I work in academia, in an unglamorous position with a lot of responsibility but little in the way of compensation (and I count time as a major form of compensation). I’m often bitter about the fact that my job duties keep expanding and that my compensation does not. My job is prestigious in that I can say I’m a college professor, but my salary is modest and hours extensive, the work too often surprisingly repetitive and/or drudgy. Also, my students can be incredible bores, or worse.

At other times, though, I get all misty about my job. I like most students–especially the handful of students that I most closely advise/teach in a program that I created. My students are mostly first-generation or working-class students, and I like serving this population. I can’t think of any other job that I’d be good at and also really have an opportunity to improve the world (especially when I teach courses that touch on social justice issues). I have interesting colleagues. I get paid to think.  My work is sometimes very creative. My job is different semester to semester. I only have to go into the office three days a week (though I do an awful lot of work at home, in coffee shops, at night, on the weekends), and I get to (for the most part) choose which days I go in for each semester. I can teach at night if necessary. It’s cool that I get to read things and think about them and call that my job (sometimes). If I get sick, I don’t go to work, and no one asks me where I was. My job is basically recession-proof. And I’m pretty good at my job, so I feel competent, which is a nice way to feel, I suppose.

My job is meaningful even if it is not always pleasurable, and that’s a big part of happiness.

But there are other reasons more practical and fundamental. I work because we need the money to support certain choices we’ve made (such as where we are sending Mavis to school—just a decent public school system with strong diversity, nothing fancy). But also because, for instance, I’m not comfortable with depending on my husband’s money or with withering my professional credentials, even though our finances are intertwined and my safety nets intact.

I work because I grew up as a “smart girl,” defining myself as a good student. When I stopped being a good student, I became a good teacher. It’s pretty close to how I conceive of who I am, for better or worse. I’m also recovering, still in some ways, from a serious workaholism that really did go overboard in my first few years out of (my first round of) graduate school. From 2000 until about 2003, I worked nearly every single moment. My first year out of graduate school, I was working 40 hours a week at a cubicle job and then teaching three college classes as an adjunct instructor in the evenings. I became a full-time instructor the next year but took on mounds of freelancing work. I was always afraid I wouldn’t have money around the corner. I also believed that working hard and well was what I was about.  In those last two sentences, you see the influence of my (long divorced) mother and father, respectively, who have wildly different views on and experiences with money, both of which have been oppressive to me at different points in time and for different reasons.

I think I’ve mostly gotten over that, but it hasn’t made me want to work less.  Since we adopted Mavis, I’ve actually found that I cared more rather than less about my work.

In the summer when I was home with her all day, I was often intensely bored. I was simply not as good a mother to Mavis when I was home with her all day as when I spent quality time with her. We both seemed to need some stimulation outside of the house–stimulation that taking her to a Gymboree or Kindermusik class really wasn’t going to achieve on my end.

I realize now that I work because it makes me a better mother both in the short- and long-term. I hope that as Mavis grows up and sees my work she will learn the value of her own brains and service to the community. I hope she will see that my voice is important to other people besides her dad and herself. I hope she will believe that her intellect, her service, and her voice matter. I’m not saying that I couldn’t teach her those things without working, but I think working helps.

Frankly, I also think it matters that women are equally represented (in terms of numbers and influence) in work, and we can’t do this if we all stay at home. I notice that my husband, Jasper, has no pressure on him to explain why he works, no need to rationalize his not staying home with Mavis. And that just isn’t fair. I work in part so that if when Mavis gets older and has her own child and keeps soldiering on at whatever it is she becomes (I’m predicting now some sort of singing veterinarian / talk show host), she won’t have to bother to explain why.  I work so that if I someday have a son or a nephew, he can stay home if he wants to without it reflecting on him or his partner one way or the other.

Mavis puts a pressure on me. Her presence means that if I am actually going to live up to my hopes for myself, I have to set the time aside. There’s an urgency now. I have to find the space to be those things I could easily put off for “someday. Mavis is a gentle–okay, not so gentle–nudge to put up or shut up.

I can’t put up all the time, and I should probably shut up more than I do (all my work colleagues are intimately familiar with my meaningful sighs).  But I am making headway, I believe, toward something that matters. There are many ways to matter in the world, of course, and many ways to raise a strong daughter at home in her own voice.  But working is the way I think I can be most effective to her and to the world, as a mother and as an individual.  So, I guess, that’s why I work.  And it’s why, to be honest, I don’t feel so guilty about that choice.

Why Octomama: Coco’s Version February 7, 2008

Well, I guess I wanted an Octomama because I think this motherhood thing is a little different for me–for Lulu, for other people like us in various ways–than it is for most (though even as I type that I realize that many mother probably feel that way, for all kinds of reasons). Over coffee with a friend with two children about Mavis’ age the other day, we discussed a local program in which we are both enrolled: the organization sends a parent educator out to talk to us about our children’s development and to make suggestions about how to enrich their play and promote their health. It’s a nice program, low-stress, free, and so on. My friend confesses to me that sometimes she wants to show that her daughter is really smarter, more advanced than the parent educator has seen. She knows she shouldn’t, that it isn’t necessary, but what mother wouldn’t feel that way?

And I know what she means, really. But I find myself talking, before I realize that I shouldn’t, about how our visits with the parent educator give me a different kind of worry. Mavis seems to be developmentally advanced in several areas. Along with her faster tooth growth, high weight and height percentiles for her ethnic background, and some other things, I have started to fear that maybe she is older than I think she is. Every time my parent educator makes an encouraging comment on her development, I fret over whether I really know how old my daughter is. I go back and look at pictures of her, the youngest we have, to reassure myself that she really was as young as we think she was when we met her. And my friend’s face, I can see, registers a kind of–what?–nonresponse, I guess, because what can she say? She can’t imagine not knowing her daughter’s birthdate, her age. I’ve given her no segue, no way to relate. I feel separate.

Since Lulu and I shared our long wait for our daughters together–online, always–she and I have never, I think, had a moment like that. So part of my rationale for this blog is that camaraderie. We don’t know one well another in person; we don’t get to have coffee together or even manage to talk often on the phone. But we seem to get one another. So we can share this space and think things over. We hope to expand it to other voices, too, who might be thinking about some of these same issues.

Another reason to sort these issues out online is, for me at least, that I have few friends with children at all and really only one in “real life” who has a similar story to mine. During the long wait, I earned a lot from parenting blogs, especially China adoption blogs. They gave me a template for thinking about the questions I’d face, sometimes providing me with inspiration and other times with a sense of what I would not–or did not want to–be as a parent. But it has always seemed that, more often than not, the bloggers I read were stay-at-home mothers. Although I reject the idea that stay-at-home mothers and working mothers inhabit entirely different spheres or are necessarily on the opposite sides of the “mommy wars” (ugh), I do find that some of the most pressing issues that I face as a person who is also a mother are intimately intertwined with my professional and creative lives.

So, why Octomama? Because I want to talk, to think aloud about how to juggle work and baby, relationship and baby, adoption and culture. I want to hear from Lulu and from you, to develop some discussions. But mostly? I just want to be able to get from the front door of my house to the driver’s seat of my car each morning–while I dangle from my person at least a laptop, a bag of books, lunches and jackets for me and Mavis, a can of Diet Coke, and oh yeah, Mavis herself–with some modicum of grace. Most days, I could use a few extra arms.