[I can see that the only way I am going to be able to give this blog its necessary attention is by scheduling a regular time to post. So, beginning on Sunday, March 10 – the sad anniversary of my beloved Chris Huntington’s death (see beginning posts) – I am going to attempt to post every single Sunday.   I will try this till June 30^th and then assess from there to see if it’s working.]

What brought me to that decision was the horrifying news this week out of a California independent living home, about the nurse who refused to do – or get someone else to do – CPR on a woman who’d stopped breathing.  [http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/amid-cpr-controversy-many-unanswered-questions/ ]

Reading about it is one thing, but hearing the 911 tape was simply unmatchable in experiencing cold bureaucratic answering vs. human responding. When told that the woman would die without the CPR, and then asked if there was anyone else available to do it – any passerby even – the nurse’s reply?  The title of this posting: “Um, not at this time.”  The woman died.

This morning I heard some nonsense by one of the WCBS radio commentators (whose comments I usually like and agree with) that the relevant fact here was that the woman was 87 and that death comes to all of us and we must accept that fact.  Or some such ridiculous perspective.  We all know about death and we all know about old age.  No one is arguing that CPR would have saved this woman’s life for sure.  Rather, the argument is that the absolute coldness of that nurse’s answer to the 911 operator was her response to the distress of another human being. Contemptible, frankly.

When I once asked Fr. Huntington how it was that any of us dare spend a dime on anything frivolous when there are people starving in this world, his response got to the heart of it for me, as it has turned out, for the rest of my life (to date, of course). We cannot, he said, respond to everything in the world. Nor are we called to. But we are called to respond to that which comes before us.  It doesn’t come before one more simply than a woman lying on the floor in front of you not breathing, does it?

Why did this story inspire me to get this blog going more regularly?  Because last November, I had the idea of posting about folks who go above and beyond the requirements of their positions and thus witness that we are all, first and foremost, human. That was the result of experiencing some workers who went beyond their jobs with our kids and in doing so, reinforced that the essential relationship among all of us is as one human being to another.  We have roles, and the roles have rules that must be respected. But that does not preclude stepping beyond the roles to keep the essential human relationship.  There is nothing wrong, for instance, with a caseworker calling one of their charges from his/her cell phone after hours to wish the kid a “Happy Birthday.”  There would  be something wrong with not doing it, simply because it was past 5:00.

I suspect this is why there was such a huge reaction to that young cop in NYC who bought that barefoot homeless man a pair of boots this past Christmas season. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/nyregion/photo-of-officer-giving-boots-to-barefoot-man-warms-hearts-online.html]  That the homeless man was later reported to have sold the boots, does not change the nature of the story. The cop transcended his role as a cop and responded as a human being. It was the positive side of this cold nurse story of this week. Both are witnesses, and as such they are very powerful. But they are witnesses to very different perspectives that we must choose between. My vote? We need far more folks like that cop; far less like that nurse.  Human over bureaucrat; response over reaction.  Otherwise, we can be replaced with robots.

We must always respond as human beings to that which is in front of us.  Again, Chris Huntington had it exactly right.

I miss him deeply.

Jack

Yes, yes, yes. I am alive and I am still blogging. And I think I will catch up soon on the blogs that never happened. But I had to get this one done today: for anyone looking for a last minute gift for Christmas and/or for serious folks looking for serious reading, I recommend the new book, which has already made the NY Times best 10 books of 2012, “Far From The Tree” by Andrew Solomon.  Right from page one – page one mind you – where he makes so explicitly clear the profound and difficult truth that “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger…” I was blown away. Adoption does that, we all agree. Solomon goes deeper and beyond anything I have ever read and says that that is what [all] parenthood is, despite our fantasies otherwise.

In this huge book – I can’t tell how many pages because I am reading it on the Kindle – I am seeing truth after truth after truth. By page 32 (how’d I find that out?), he writes – and he gets it summed up in a nutshell  – what we attempt to train our new adoptive families on, over the course of forty training hours in fourteen weeks:

“….The anger [of the different] is pervasive. ‘Adults responded to my difference by helping me, but some of my schoolmates responded by calling me names,’ wrote Rod Michalko, who is blind. ‘Only much later did I realize that helping and name-calling amounted to the same thing.’ ”

“Arlene Mayerson, an expert in disability rights law,” Solomon continues, “contends that benevolence and good intentions have been among disabled people’s worst enemies throughout history. The able-bodied can be generous narcissists: they eagerly bestow what they feel good about giving without considering how it will be received.”

Generous narcissists?  Without considering how it will be received?  Might that be why the entire child welfare system seems unable to figure out how to really give the most desperate kids what they need to free themselves from the chains of their personal histories? Might it be too much about us – the helpers – feeling good about what we feel, what we believe, what we think, what we do?

I cannot believe what I am reading; I am simply astounded by it.  And it has helped me understand some experiences in my life that I knew were “off” but couldn’t name why. For only one example, I refer all to my posting of July 2, 2012 titled “Can I Help You?”

Merry Christmas to all who will be celebrating on Tuesday.  I hope to be back here in the blogosphere before the new year.

Jack

“I kept thinking how defeated I would feel if I had to take handouts. I couldn’t bring myself to interview the people and ask what it felt like.

I knew what it felt like. Lousy.

There had been TV crews all over town, but I didn’t feel excited. I felt they were gawking at us.

When I approached people, instead of saying, “Can I ask you a few questions,” I’d say, “Can I ask you a few questions or would you rather be left alone.”

“Thank you,” a man said before turning away.”

                                                                      Michael Winerip – NY Times

Thank you, Michael, for understanding – and publishing – the difference.

Jack

http://familyfocusadoption.org/thechocolatemilkclub.html

Clarity, huh?  The math really distorted my point at the end. Alright, that’s what I get for hitting send before triple checking and for even attempting to write a posting till the house is empty…..

But now everyone is gone, so let me try to fix that last sentence with all the percent stuff.  My point was this:  I believe that there were something around 3,000 folks killed at the WTC.  And those 3,000 lived all over the metro area, which has about 16 million folks.  It’s not a wonder that I didn’t directly know anyone therefore.

But these 100,000 homes just on Long Island alone?  Not considering the horror of what’s happened in the rest of the metro area: Connecticut, Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and most especially, Staten Island?  It is not a wonder, not an oddity, that I knew three folks who lost their houses. The oddity with these numbers would be if I didn’t know anyone.

That’s how enormous and widespread the destruction has been in the metro area.

And comprehending numbers that big or so far out of our personal experience requires bringing it down to some perspective that is personal.  (Which, again, is why I do this blog in the first place: to give folks true perspective on what it means to be multiply betrayed.)

Perspective.2

Jack

One of the main purposes of creating this blog was to help folks think about the population of the multiply betrayed kids in a new way. 

I have been amazed over the past few days that I personally know three families on Long Island who have lost their homes completely.  Three. Three!  Three?  Three?????

I haven’t lived on LI for over forty years.  What an oddity I thought.  And, with 90% of the Island still – four days later – without power, phones, and Internet, I may end up knowing more.  Odd.

I measured it by the horror of the World Trade Center.  I personally knew nobody who had been killed there. I knew folks who knew folks, of course. I had relatives of relatives who died. I had neighbors of neighbors who died. But personally? I didn’t know anyone.

Yet now I know three families, living in three separate towns, whose houses are gone. Three separate families who lost everything.  Clothes, mementos, bills, pictures, letters, financial records, computers, tools, furniture, even cars.  The very house itself, for each family, is either gone or will have to be condemned and razed.

Then, this morning, watching on TV the continuing coverage of this storm from hell, I was taken aback by one of those “factoids” rolling on the screen at the bottom.  It said that the Long Island electric company (LIPA) was estimating that 100,000 homes in their catchment area have been destroyed or severely damaged. One hundred thousand?  Not counting the ones in Jersey or the city?  One hundred thousand on Long Island alone?

And I thought that now it makes sense; my perspective shifted.  I had assumed, without thinking about it, that the three I knew were maybe three of a few hundred. It was an automatic assumption on my part. So, I had then consciously asked myself: “What are the odds of me knowing so many of these people?

But with 100,000 on Long Island alone, whose houses are gone or might as well be?  I know only three hundred thousandths of the total of those with such losses.  0.00003 percent?  Don’t hold me to the math – just to the enormity of what’s happened in the metro area.

Perspective. That’s the only real way to clarity, and therefore to understanding. 

Perspective.

Jack

With thanks to my nephew, Gregg Willett, for posting this on Facebook. Thank you Gregg, on behalf of Luis, and Justin.

Love, as always, Uncle Jack

====================================================================================

An Open Letter to Ann Coulter

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Tim Shriver

John Franklin Stephens

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.

Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.

Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.

Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.

After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me.  You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.

I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.

Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.

No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.

Come join us someday at Special Olympics.  See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.

A friend you haven’t made yet,
John Franklin Stephens
Global Messenger
Special Olympics Virginia

Using the word “retard” to describe me hurts

On Saturday, my thirty three year old son, Luis, moved downstairs into an apartment that we created for him.  From the inside, it’s a real apartment – kitchen, living room with dining area, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.  But from the outside, it’s not real as it’s part of my house: both his front door and his back door open into my house, not into the street. 

Nonetheless, it is a perfect solution for a very real problem. Luis has a very slow growing brain tumor. He was first operated on when he was eleven – before I met him.  He lost that part of his brain that controls peripheral vision, but gained overall in that all of his long term and very serious seizures dramatically ended.  But they couldn’t get the entire tumor out without risking him losing more function.

When he was twelve, he was referred to my agency, Family Focus Adoption Services, as he needed an adoptive home.  We tried a number of families, but nobody would take him. Perhaps because this cancerous brain tumor was practically guaranteed to kill him by the time he was twenty. Ultimately, I made the decision to adopt him and he moved in twenty years ago last week.

His tumor began to grow again and he had to be operated on again – a fourteen hour surgery – when he was twenty.  But he didn’t die. Soon after that, he graduated from his high school special education placement. He couldn’t easily find a job, so he went to work at McDonald’s on the weekends. Shortly thereafter, he miraculously secured a position as a part time janitor at the local school district.  This was his dream job. As some dream of Harvard, Luis dreamed of this. He is now in his thirteenth year on each job.  In the meantime, he also managed to get himself NYS certified (outside only) as a volunteer firefighter, a huge point of pride – deservedly so – for him.

The purpose of Luis moving into his “own place” is for him to develop even more independence, especially from me. It is the heavy weight of all parents of handicapped kids, to worry about what will happen to their grown kids when we are gone.  Reading about the recent abuse that goes on in these adult NYS group homes terrifies us.  So I want Luis to buy his own food, plan his own meals, cook his own dinners. I want him to walk from room to room without seeing me.  I want him to decide whether he likes living by himself or not. All before I die (nothing planned on that – just covering.)

Luis is incredibly happy; incredibly proud; incredibly excited.  He chose his own paint colors and insisted on doing the actual painting himself (ruining the rugs, of course). I took him food shopping and he liked buying what he wanted and not the things I would buy.  And so on and so forth.

So why do I tell this story here?  Luis was adopted through Family Focus.  When I met him he was living in the locked “ward” of an institution with about 40 other boys.  Twenty of them were profoundly disabled. But the other twenty were Luis’ peers.  I have often wondered, as I have watched Luis blossom over the years, what happened to those boys.

Luis got the life he’s gotten over the past two decades because of the personal approach that Family Focus takes.  When he was visiting those possible homes all those years ago, it wasn’t whatever staff member was on duty who drove him back and forth. We don’t work like that. It was me, the same person every single time.

The model that Family Focus has been working on developing over the past twenty-five years is not the model that other agencies that work with foster children use.  Family Focus is not a business whose particular “widget” is adoptive homes for foster kids.  Rather, we are a community of people – a community of like-minded people – who recognize that the foster kids who cannot go back to their original families, and then are not adopted by their foster parents, are a special group of  extremely betrayed kids.  And the services that they need, above all else, must always contribute to their healing. And that means personal connections of exactly the type we would want for our own kids. That’s what Luis got and that’s why Luis is where he is today: downstairs in his own apartment.

Family Focus has just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Keeping it alive and healthy for the next twenty-five, as the original staff move on into retirement is our primary goal.  And that requires a funding plan.  The traditional funding plan of fee-for-service is never sufficient, but for an agency like ours with creative and inventive services, sometimes decided upon very quickly, it is extraordinarily insufficient.

The alternative of finding permanent sponsors usually means looking to folks with big money.  But that is not only far more difficult than one might imagine, but generally folks with big money live in an entirely different world than do our kids, and the families who adopt them.  It is too often a cultural mismatch, causing difficulties on both ends.

So, what they – we – have decided to do is to look for regular people who “get” our kids and the need for the personal connections. We decided to create a “club” for these folks who will commit to supporting Family Focus to the tune of an automatic $25/month. Monthly, as another of my sons pointed out, it is not enough money to pay any other bill he has, but annually it can add up to enough money to support the agency’s creative work and pass it down to the upcoming generations.

The club is called the “Chocolate Milk Club” in recognition of the power of chocolate milk as an adoption metaphor for our population of kids: a real adoption can no more end than one can remove the chocolate from the milk, once combined.

We are proud of this club and we have high hopes for its long-term success.

I am writing about it on the blog for the obvious reason of looking for new members. But for the less obvious reason of the respect I have for the people who read this blog or even subscribe to it.  There is no reason to read it – and there have been 8,723 “hits” from 32 different countries on the blog from the time it started eighteen months ago until this morning – unless you are one of those who “get” it.  And if you do get it, the Chocolate Milk Club is a very real way for you to join in our work.  I am already writing monthly updates about that work to send to all our members. The links throughout this posting will give you more information. Otherwise, go to www.familyfocusadoption.org,  I will be reminding my readers of this club each posting: it’s that important.

Luis is only one of the four kids whom I have met, and adopted, because of and through Family Focus. Each has his own incredible story. But then doesn’t everybody?  Isn’t that the reason why it must always stay personal?  Doesn’t each one of us know that in our guts?

Please join us.

Jack

It’s only in adoption, I think, where one’s oldest child is not always one’s first. I became an adoptive parent due to my experience with my son Ricky whom I met when he was eleven.  But, although I adopted all his brothers, I never adopted Ricky until he was way into his adulthood. I had helped get him into what I mistakenly thought was a wonderful institution in Miami, when he was about 14 or 15, and he never returned to live in New York. By 21, he was in prison down there and though we wrote and he called, I only saw him about once a year.

Before he went to Florida, he was in a number of institutions up here, including a psychiatric ward and a psychiatric hospital.  None helped him. I remember seeing him in those hospitals all drugged up and out of it. It was how they controlled his behavior.  I visited him wherever he was.  But none of us were giving him what he needed.

When Ricky was dying from AIDS in a prison hospital in Florida, in 1995, I flew down to visit him.  My visit was limited to an hour – maybe two, I can’t remember – on each of the two days I was allowed to see him (bureaucratic prison system). Ricky was in isolation, looking almost as bony as anyone coming out of the concentration camps ever did – he weighed, he told me, under 100 pounds.  He was very sick – they were worried about TB, as I remember – and though neither of us knew how close it was, he would be dead not six weeks later.

During the visit, looking back on his life, Ricky made the observation that I had “always been there” for him.  That was simply not true by any standard of “always been there” that other people, including me, would use.  I wasn’t there when he got out of Montanari’s (the place in Miami); I wasn’t there when he got arrested; I wasn’t there at his trial, etc. I was here – I was raising his brothers – I was working two jobs – I was busy.  I loved him; I’d always loved him; but I wasn’t there as I wished later I had been, or wished, at least, that I could have been.

But since I had met him twenty three years earlier, I had always been in his life; I had adopted all of his brothers; and when I ultimately woke up – he woke me up –  I adopted him also, although we finalized the adoption only eleven months before he died. He had always been mine, and I had always been his.   In the end that’s what constituted “always being there” to him.  I had hopes for Ricky. I felt his loss very much and I miss him still all these years later.

It all adds up to “family,” doesn’t it?

Last night, almost forty years after I met Ricky, I visited one of my grandkids – I won’t name him – who is himself currently in a psychiatric ward of a hospital.   His parents are nowhere to be found. When I walked into the ward, the staff advised me – in retrospect, it was a warning – that my grandson had just been “injected” due to some violence on his part. They put me in the dining room, where the visit would take place, and they went and got him. He came in with his own personal staff member. They call it one-to-one.  And as my grandson walked through the door, I was brought back in memory to two very sad places. The first was Ricky in the hospitals so medicated that he was out of it and could barely hold his head up, let alone talk. And the second was to the book, the off-Broadway play (that I saw over 20 times), and the movie: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”

They had my grandson on some cocktail of injected drugs, including the infamous Thorazine.  Like Ricky, he couldn’t hold his head up. He could hear me, he could respond to me, but it was like talking to someone who has just come out of a very deep sleep, and was still exhausted. A zombie is not too far off as a description. I wondered if he’d even remember our conversation later.

I knew that I had to do two things that I had not done with Ricky: first, I had to reassure him over and over and over that he belongs to me, and I to him, and that nothing will get between us ever; and second, that what has happened to him in his life, that’s brought him to this point, no matter what he thinks, is not – absolutely not – his fault.  It never was. Those who know me, know that I often bring into my conversation whoever else is around, to make my points. The young guy who was on one-to-one was terrific, just terrific, in going with that flow. He allowed me to talk to him about the issues which allowed my grandson to hear without being obliged to respond. I was very grateful to that aide.

As the decades go by, I still keep thinking: what are we missing?  What are we not getting? What are we not giving these kids, who feel to me so incredibly – and deeply – trapped?  I remember Fr. Huntington telling me so very many years ago, that the older he got, the more he had come to believe that all the psychiatry and psychology in the world amounted to very little.  He told me that it was becoming clearer and clearer to him that it was simply – no matter how difficult – a matter of love.  Certainly, for me looking back, it was his love, and Aunt Rita’s, that saved me. The rest of it amounted to little compared to what they gave me.

Because what they gave me – and what seems to be missing, or more accurately blocked, for our kids – was me.  They gave me, me. 

I think that that is what Ricky was referring to in that prison hospital room.  Not that I had succeeded at it – he was, after all, in prison dying – but that that was what I had always been trying to give him.  Certainly, it’s what I knew I had to give my grandson last night.  What Fr. Huntington taught me in words, and Aunt Rita taught me in actions, is that one has to be given oneself through a person who chooses to love you.

And, I realized earlier this week, that most of choosing to love someone appears to be simply hanging on, no matter where they take you.

The difference between Ricky and me then vs. my grandson and me now?  I guess after all these years I am clearer.

Every person has to do their own work in saving themselves, I know that. But without having the context and the anchor of being loved by someone who is bigger than oneself (read: parent or parent substitute) what chance is there for anyone to do that? 

And, so again, my belief in, and trust of, adoption.  Because it allows for the parent-less to get real parents. I know it’s not enough, but it opens the road to enough.

As I told my grandson, and wished I had been so explicit with Ricky: “Nothing gets between us; no feeling, no behavior, no person. Nothing.”

Jack

During July, someone responded to one of my much earlier posts. However, when one does that, the comment is attached to that posting and so people who read the blog currently do not ever even know that there was a response.  The only way around it, I guess, is to subscribe to the “comments.”  Then any and all comments are emailed to you as they are published.

Anyway, her point was that no one should be judged for giving up a child that they adopted unless one had walked in their shoes. Yes, that’s right.  I wrote to that person (“Mom” – 3.11.2011 posting) at the email address the site had but it bounced back to me. So I responded online to her comment – something I never do – and asked her to get in touch with me, but she hasn’t as of yet.  Maybe she will if and when she reads this posting.

Our stance at Family Focus fits right into the mainstream of the adoption world (for decades now) and it is pretty simple: every child is entitled to a permanent, loving, committed family.  There is no child, our common wisdom claims, who is “unadoptable.”  Yes.  But there are children who – for extreme behavioral reasons – cannot live in the community, either temporarily or permanently.  To expect adoptive parents to be running residential treatment centers, residential treatment facilities, jails, group homes, physical hospitals, or mental hospitals in their homes and communities is ridiculous.  It is unfair. And it is counterproductive.  Children who belong in those places do not belong living at home. What does that have to do with having families?  Theoretically, nothing. But in real life, the bureaucracy often insists that the adoptive parents of these children must hold onto them, and give them no options – certainly no easy ones – for placement outside the family home.  That puts tremendous – and immoral – pressure on the families often putting them into Catch-22 situations.  In order to get the help that their children need, – and that’s only a maybe – they are forced to re-surrender their children to the system – ending their legal relationship and, most of the time, ending any contact. By the time it gets to that point, parents have long had it and have given up hope. And that is what “Mom” was talking about.  She’s right. As far as she goes.

That road that she apparently went down is one that must be avoided. The system must take these kids who don’t belong living in the community back into their care.   And they need to do it earlier and without all the blame that is so easily flung around. Let’s change the laws; let’s change the financial incentives or penalties to allow it.  But whether the system does it or doesn’t do it, adults have a responsibility to protect their own.  Their own families, their own feelings.  That’s what I was getting at all those many months ago; that’s what adoptive parents need to hear; and that, in no small measure, is why I write this blog in the first place.  

It is conceptually pretty simple: behavior in the community has nothing to do with whether or not a child is entitled to a family. Behavior in the community has to do only with whether or not a child should be allowed to live in the community.  Sometimes the very act of adoption triggers incredible depths of pain, loss, and traumatic feelings and memories within a child that were repressed while in foster care.  The vulnerability within the family relationship brings them back to their original vulnerabilities. And that, in turn, triggers extremes of behavior that no family – do you hear me “Mom”? – should be asked, let alone required, to tolerate. Until we figure out how to help these kids therapeutically they need to be removed from the community.  And if the local DSS won’t help and forces parents to surrender their children to get those kids out of the community, then so be it: surrender them guilt free.

But no legal surrender also demands an internal surrender. Those also are two very different things.  The legal relationship that is created by adoption, is nothing compared to the personal relationship that adoption creates -and always between two people of unequal power.  And since it is the adult who has the power always, it is the adult who must protect their internal relationship with the child, no matter what the child or the system says, implies, believes, or does.  Adults adopt; children are adopted.

That “Mom” was not given the help that her family was entitled to is simple inexcusable. But what she needed more was a perspective of hope that it is the job of the adoption community to give her. Hope that her child will one day straighten out?  The child might, so I guess so. I’ve had my kids go both ways.  But no, the hope is that her commitment to be her child’s parent need not be a victim of either her child’s behavior or of her particular (apparently useless) DSS.  The commitment lies inside her where no one else can ever touch it, without her permission. That is theory. And that is personal experience.  And that is what the adoptive parents of “Ted” (see old posts) took away from him. We gave them the perspective I offer here, but they refused it. Walking away from his behavior was fine; walking away from him was not.  Too little, too late?  This boy, this human being, was their son. One takes whatever little wisp of hope one can, and wherever one can find it.  One then builds that hope up over time.  But to internally walk away from one’s child?  No. Unacceptable. And, as I said then, phoney-baloney.  Without that stance that adoption is irrevocable, unconditional, and forever final, then adoption becomes make-believe. And make-believe is the last thing that multiply betrayed people – especially our young and vulnerable children –  need.

Do I blame “Mom” for what she apparently did?  No. Choosing among terrible options, one does the best one can. But not blaming her doesn’t mean that I agree that her decision was correct.  Adoption is a forever claim of the head and the heart. By an adult.  And no one has the power to drop that claim, but the adult.

No one.

Jack

Aside from the forty five or so subscribers to this blog, there have been close to 7,500 hits on it from other people since it began, about sixteen months ago.  Astonishingly to me, although maybe not to younger people who get – and live – all this social media stuff, is that I have no idea who all those hits came from.  I know they came from people in twenty four different countries – and that alone blows me away – so there are at least twenty four people reading it, aside from the subscribers.  I’m sure some large group of them must be people who come back and then get counted again.  And, I do know that a good number of them come through the link that is posted on the web site of my agency, http://www.familyfocusadoption.org.  Beyond all that, unless they post comments,  I have no idea who the readers are or why they come.  As one who constantly tells people that I can neither speak nor write publicly unless I know who my audience is, I find all this discombobulating.

And there is more. In just the first six months – and I know I have slowed down since then – the blog’s word count was over 22,000. To my mind, that is a heck of a lot of writing – far beyond anything I’d ever dreamed of doing here.  The consequence of that – beyond the memory issues of an old guy – is that I cannot possibly remember all that I have written – or even most of it. And the consequence of that is that either I figure out some way of tracking what I say and being able to search it prior to writing (which can’t be done at the blog site); or I say the heck with it, go with what I want to write, and if I repeat myself – or at least repeat myself too often – accept that people are going to stop reading the blog.  Is there a natural life span to a blog?  I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, let me repeat myself….maybe:

What brought this all up today is that I have been thinking recently about what it means to help somebody.  Years, actually decades, ago – and I suspect this is a story already posted in the blog – I came upon a cartoon in the paper, that remains for me the best one I have ever read.  I carried it in my wallet for years and it became more and more frayed as the years went by and now I can’t even find it. I searched the internet for it also, but it’s nowhere to be found.

A man and a woman walk into a used car lot.  A salesman comes over to greet them and asks, “Can I help you?” And the husband replies, “No, thank you. We’d rather be treated decently.”  I nearly fell out of my seat when I first read it:  helping someone was seen as the opposite of being treated decently?  I cut it out and carried it because I knew there was a profound – if exaggerated – truth there.

Some time after that I learned of a priest who ran a Christmas giveaway in poor neighborhoods in the city. He would bring food – turkeys, canned hams, etc – and gifts and distribute them to very poor people in their homes.  I thought that was terrific.  Seeing to it that kids had something to open on Christmas day and that their parents had holiday food to cook.  And delivering it, yet? How more personal could it be?

But one day, another man of the cloth, whom I respected very much, told me how terrible this was, what this priest was doing.  Terrible?  How could this incredible annual and personal act of generosity and kindness be terrible?  And when I questioned him, he told me that it stole people’s dignity. I was blown away by that. Because as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. What, I asked him, would be the alternative? Should we ignore the need? I questioned him, but I had seen he was right.

He said that what he did in his small circle, was to collect presents and lay them out in a big room of some kind.  And then he invited individual families in to go “Christmas shopping” for their kids.  To this day, I am blown away by that simple act of respect. He let the parents preserve their dignity in front of their kids, and themselves, by giving  them the opportunity to go out shopping for their kids as all other parents did at Christmas.

What he did was to see to it that the family’s material need was not used against them.  He removed power – his – from the equation.  He treated these parents as his equals, despite their poverty. He treated them with respect.  The world knew what the priest was doing; but no one knew what this man was doing.

It was a lesson that I’ve never forgotten; and one that has served me well all my life: help is not measured by the needs, wishes, desires, feelings, ideas, or beliefs of the helper.

Help is measured by the one who receives it.  And so no one ever says to an offer of real help, “no, thank you, we’d rather be treated decently.”

I recognized immediately the second guy’s gift to these folks:

It was help.  It was being treated decently. It was beautiful.

Real help always is.

Jack