Amongst the sentences I never expected to dream up: I can’t wait for the street to be torn up. Right now, our water problem has a temporary fix of a jerry-rigged septic—um, hole—in our front yard. Obviously, this inelegant—not to mention hazardous in due time—solution isn’t an actual solution, but of the band-aid—big machine-driven, deep hole dug, band-aid—variety. Turns out the problem of the nonfunctional pipe, some-teen feet under the street, is the city’s to solve and turns out the solution involves hiring a subcontractor and securing an allocation from emergency portion of the DPW budget. Put another way we happened to wind up in a big pile of it (I’ve refrained up until now, but I couldn’t help it).
If ever I hear someone complaining about a tax on water, I so plan to set him or her straight. Water, in our lives, comes through pipes and those require maintenance. If I ever hear someone complaining about a tax on the war in Afghanistan, I will so agree, for the record.
**
The really harrowing day in this whole we-don’t-have-water ordeal was Monday when there almost appeared to be a standoff in the making and it didn’t seem the orange truck driving folks—or their supervisor—were exactly offering to help. There almost seemed to be a little magical thinking or fingers in ears and la-la-la I can’t hear you going on, as if, somehow, we could take care of the problem under the street by having our pipes snaked once more (that did not work and was expensive). We were on one side of a divide and it seemed impossible to enlist the necessary help, help we—as city residents—were entitled to obtain.
Throughout Monday and into Tuesday, I kept thinking about how many people struggling with unemployment issues and health care coverage and any number of truly bedrock needs that involve a complicated, not always user friendly, gigantic bureaucracy simply cannot get the help they are due.
Wake-up call.
**
Meantime, this week, in the adoption blogosphere—and more so, real life—there’s been a theme emerging (well, from the pieces I’ve read) about how this decision or entity of adoption places mothers—birth and adoptive—on opposite sides of a divide. While the child is the unifying factor, the mothers’ experiences of adoption are so vastly different as to be mind-boggling. It’s as if, by being born, the same child brings this kind of incredible everything into adoptive parents’ lives and incredible loss into first parents’ lives (sometimes, parents, sometimes mothers only, depending on the situation).
But don’t think in monotones; adoption is bad for one and good for another. It’s not necessarily that. Bringing a person into the world, being in awe of that person and that accomplishment, that’s part of the experience as well. With open adoption, becoming part of a messy family—all families are messy, sure, but this particular stripe of unwieldiness—is part of the experience, too. This brings possibility and connections and questions that evolve over time and remain hanging in midair. Ultimately, so much of this is unanswered and unanswerable because when the child in question is small no one knows how she or he will feel, eventually—and that child’s wellbeing matters so much when we all collectively consider what adoption is or means or how to quantify “success.”
Except, that child’s feelings are honestly only part of the equation.
I don’t have articulate or sage words on this subject. I do carry a sense of gratitude—I’m part of the incredible everything side—and a sense of responsibility—to my daughter and her mama—and a sense of curiosity, for lack of a better word—about whether there’s a way to make this all meaningful in ways that help us and help others navigate deep losses and deep love and messiness such that the beauty of what we create as a more love is more love family is able to glimmer through.
