What came flooding back to me was seeing a one-woman play a number of years before by a woman named Jackie Thornton. The play was autobiographical and much of it centered around having her hair done when she was young.  I remember hearing about the heat burning her scalp and her hair getting pulled until she was in tears.  It was tied up in so much emotion, including dread and shame.  It was an oft-repeated ritual that affected how she lived in the world and what her relationship with her mother was like.

R- had me terrified.  He described the judgment that I would get from people of color who would be critical of white people raising black children.  N-, who is white, told me about driving R-’s son to camp and getting attitude from other (white) parents.  R- also said that mom is completely responsible for a girl’s hair, there is no way that dad or anyone else will have ultimate responsibility.

I think that my initial reaction to this was one of frustration and hopelessness.  I mean, great…we are trying to do this good thing for ourselves and these kids and feel like we can offer a lot of support for African American kids, but that makes us public enemy #1 to other black folks?!  In addition, mom’s already take more of a brunt of things when kids that have been in the system lash out.  Sometimes a dad was never in the picture; even if they were, it is still mom that ultimately let them down. So what am I signing up for and why?

OK, so past the initial reaction and R-’s reality check, I started getting all kinds of positive feedback and offers of support from the black folks in my life and, of course, it is their opinion that really matters to me.  And, I started seeing all of the people in my daily life that I can reach out to for help.  X has two girls that are just a bit older than the kids we are expecting, they will be a great resource for toys and clothes.  Y has a co-worker in her salon that has taught parents how to care for hair before.  Z are two white women that adopted a girl when she was an infant, maybe I can even sit in on a hair session with them before I get kids so it won’t be completely foreign.

I actually think I am a little jealous of black hair; I know it sounds ridiculous because I always get compliments on my hair, including from black friends, who claim to be envious of it.  But, first of all, I have always wanted braids since I was a little girl.  I’ve always loved the really tiny ones, both straight and when they make patterns on the scalp.  I have even been on vacation a few times when they were offering braids on the beach. I’ve been tempted, but always felt that there was something holding me back. I am not sure how they would look on me, I do need to wash my hair regularly and I do think that part of it is cultural appropriation. I felt like it just wasn’t right to take black hair for myself.  The same feelings applied to dreadlocks when I got older.

Secondly, there is something really nice about all that time and attention that goes into that hair.  Although it can be gory and depressing and there may be ways that the process is supporting beauty standards that are ridiculous, I feel that the culture that I came-of-age doesn’t value putting time into our appearance.   Doing hair can actually be a sacred ritual time where a mom touches her daughter. She is building her child’s esteem and designating personal care time.

My friends that do their daughter’s hair every week watch a movie and get pizza. They assured me, “Hair night is actually really fun.”  Ultimately, I am really looking forward to it as a way to build intimacy with my girls and push myself into new territory. It is not very often that I need to ask for help and having to ask for help will also pave the road to building community around my new family.

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I wonder if people in other states ask people where they are from all the time.  If you live in Illinois or Alabama, is it just assumed that you are from there?  Of course, here in California, most people are NOT from here, so that is a common conversation topic to get to know a new person.  That being said, I am often asked if I am from “here”, I think I must have enough of a California aura that people have a feeling.  I never quite know how to answer, in part because I am not sure exactly what it means to be from anywhere…and what does “here” mean to people?

So generally, I say “basically” then launch in to an explanation of what I mean.   “I was born in Santa Cruz, but mostly grew up in Sacramento.  I came to Berkeley for college in 1991 and have lived in the East Bay ever since.  I’ve lived in my current neighborhood since 1994.  My father and his mother were born in Pacific Grove, CA near Monterey. My father’s father was born in the Fresno area.  My mother was born in San Francisco and grew up on Sunnyvale, CA.”  My explanation is actually just many layers of demonstration that pretty much by anybody’s definition (except for the fact that I wasn’t born in Oakland), yes…I am from here.

I have never really known that much about my family.  We have a lot of fallen out parent-child relationships , bastard children, half-siblings and divorces.  My mother didn’t even know who her father was until a few years ago, shortly after he had died.  My paternal grandparents’ mobile home was destroyed in a flood in Soquel, CA in 1979, just after grandma had finished a family tree.  Family lore said that she had lost everything.

Apparently not all was lost. A few weeks ago, my brothers and I went down to Watsonville to go through the possessions that my father left behind.  There were a number of old photos and newspaper articles that we had no idea were in the family. Those remnants, along with all of the current technology has made reconstructing the tree my new obsession.  Some of the family lines are easy to follow, especially the paternal lines where there aren’t a lot of name changes.  In several places, I have been able to trace ancestors back to their arrival on the East Cost in the 1700’s.  This is helped by the fact that other people have done family trees on ancestry.com that I can glean information from.  Other lines, I am stuck at just a few generations back due to recent immigration or the presence of spotty records and multiple names.

Google has also supported my quest to get more information about my family, which is where I found the most exciting surprises. My great-grandfather (by birth, which is not my namesake), Andrew “Burt” Cudney had lived about 6 miles (as the crow flies) from where I live today.  I knew that he had been a ferry operator based on his clothing in a photo that I have of him. With a few google searches with variations of his name, I got several hits that panned out.

One was a San Francisco Call article where he is begging for a divorce from my great-grandmother, who was apparently crazy, like most women in my family.  He argued that she threw things at him and had cost him several jobs.  I found a patent for an automatic flash lamp attachment (he was a photographer) based in San Francisco in 1918.   Finally, I found a number of photos that he had taken that are now owned by the Oakland Museum.

I think I am drawn towards knowing more about him because he lived so close, although he is certainly the most controversial figure in that side of our family, which is intriguing, as well.  I have found nothing to sustain this, but rumor has it that Cudney died as a result of injuries sustained when taking a photo of one of the first cross-country flights landing.  Yes, he was hit by the plane.

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When writing the homestudy, the social worker asked what kinds of difficulty in children did we feel that we had the capacity to handle.  I felt like we were shooting in the dark on this one a bit.  If looking at a spectrum, we may as well have closed our eyes and randomly put our finger down, aiming towards the middle. Sure, we prefer no to hardly any behavior problems, and yes, we can probably handle moderate behavior problems and of course, we are scared of major behavior problem.

What I feel like we really needed was a professional to examine us and tell us what they felt our capacity is…then match us to the appropriate child.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that this kind of assessment exists within this system. It is really no wonder that so many foster homes don’t work out. While our agency spent about 6 months with our intake and screening, the county is so desperate to find housing for their children, they will place children that they may not know much about quite quickly with people who may or may not be qualified to know what they can handle.  If it is not a good match, the kids will probably end up moving. The more times they move, their behavior often becomes worse and they certainly become less trustworthy and have more attachment issues.

From the very beginning, we have been very attached to the idea of getting a sibling set.  There are some sibling sets of 5 or greater. We have heard stories about mothers who have their children taken away that out of sadness of losing their children want more.  Sometimes the children are split, if it is in the best interest of a child and a placement is available, they will be kept together.  We decided that we could take a sibling set of 2 with the idea that we might be open to taking another one of their siblings in the future (if the mother had another baby, for example).

The one time I strayed from this is when I saw a 3-year-old amputee boy.  He was totally adorable and it was one of the few physically disabled children that I felt our home could accomodate.  Since I have many friends that are disabled and once considered myself a part of a greater community of disabled folks, I thought this may be a good match. He is the only individual child that we have pursued thus far.

Other than just taking the middle road on anything, we decided that we had to rule out any kid with a history of animal cruelty.  Our dogs are not mean dogs and we do not want them to be injured or turn into mean dogs.  I also ruled out any child with a history of running away.  Missing my kid in Oakland did not seem cool.

And the good news is that we have found a number of siblings that meet our criteria.  More on that to come…

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rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow, this book was great. As I am preparing to be a parent, it is so nice to have some concrete examples of how to handle communication with kids to the methods that my parents used.



This book basis it’s ideas around encouraging autonomy in kids. It encourages kids to have their own feelings, mistakes and creativity by encouraging parents to back off when appropriate. In addition to having examples, there are a number of pages that are done workbook-style. I think these will really come in handy when I have a kid and am frustrated with my interactions with them and need to seek some guidance.



I think this book is a great resource for any parent or anyone that has relationships with kids.


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Once we have matched with children, there are approximately 1 month of visits, with increasing amounts of intimacy with the kids.   Many people have asked if this is a trial period, which is a really logical question, but it is not.  The social workers ask that we be pretty sure that we can commit to the children once we get to the point of meeting them, since it would be no good for them to be rejected.  The visits actually provide the healthiest emotional situation for the children to begin properly detaching from their current care situation and begin their attachment to our family.  While these children may have been rashly pulled from place to place previously, for this placement, they try to be as careful as possible.

Our friends that have gone through the adoption process, describe it as a leap of faith. No one can ever be 100% sure that they are making the “right” decision. That concept is even a bit irrelevant, just as one will never know whether they’ve birthed the “right” kid.  Of course, we go into this knowing that we will be dealing with the emotional fallout of their difficult pasts from the very beginning and we do need to assess the level of behavioral issues that we are able to handle.  I suppose that most parents are able to handle this more organically and slowly as the child develops.  But, within establishing this criteria, we are just going to trust in the fact that we will be able to work it out.

As my nieces and nephews get older and I see the relationship with their parents change, I see that blood is thick, but not always thick enough.  Kids are often not going to choose to be close to their parents, but the reverse is also true, a parent may not like some of the choices their kid is making as they grow and become independent.

If it weren’t for the support of the people that are closest to us, I don’t think I could enter this process at all. My biggest fear is having a migraine, which basically incapacitate me, and having full responsibility of my kids.  Luckily, I do have many friends and neighbhors that I can call.  Of course, this is really no different than if we were to birth our own child.

We were first required to have a respite parent, who is a secondary emergency contact to us. That is the only person that the children will legally be able to spend the night with while they are our foster children.  N- had his background checked, was fingerprinted and took CPR.  It wasn’t a great leap from there to figure than N- and his partner would also be great godparents, since they will be two of the primary caretakers in these kids lives with us.

We picked them as godparents for a number of reasons.  They live near us, we trust their judgment and they are two of our best friends. R- has a teenage son that we adore and we are looking forward to him being a part of the kids lives, too.

They also have some qualities that are different than us, which we hope will help enrich and balance our children’s lives.  N- is a Christian, which many children in the foster system are.  We plan to support our children in any interests that they want to pursue, but if Christianity is one of them, it will be much easier with N- involved.

Finally, they are a trans-racial couple.  It is very possible that our children will be of a different race than us. We feel so lucky that we have people of many colors in our primary support network and we decided that this was an ideal quality in our godparents, as well.

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The inspection doesn’t actually happen until the household is matched with kids.  Different ages may have different requirements.  The height of the kids may affect what is out of reach for them. The gender and age of kids may affect whether they can share a room or whether they can have bunk beds.  The class is there to give you a general idea of the things that will need to get done and some of the things may happen last minute.  A few people have recommended that the child’s bedding is bought together, as a family during one of the visits with them, for another example.

By the time that expecting parents make it to this class, they are all the way through the agency’s process or very near the end.  Everyone was really excited and eager.  We had jumped through the hoops and earned our place in that room.  All of us had a nervous anticipation.  Those of us that were still working through the process had typically spent between 6 months and a year getting to that place, patiently waiting for each step.  In this boat, we all felt like giving our social workers a nudge to finish that home study already!

Those that were done with the process knew that kids were so close, they could almost taste it (so to speak).  A woman in this situation summed it up well by saying that she was constantly putting up shelves, it was her way of dealing with her nervous energy.  She couldn’t believe how many places that there were to put up shelves!  Closets, hallways, near other shelves…

For the last few weeks, I have been obsessing about painting. It started gradually, by just thinking about it.  We gave our tenant notice for July 1st. It was J-’s birthday right after and I was working a lot. He spent most of a week, using his elbow grease to get the place clean. We hosted the party and collapsed in a exhaustion for a little while.  Once we got our energy back, my work slowed down.  I started finishing painting projects in my massage studio that weren’t quite done. I started going to paint stores and looking at pictures online of kids rooms.  I became fixated on creating a giant chalkboard for teh kids to write on.  Actually, I wanted 2 walls.  After a few days, I started waking up from painting dreams and not being able to sleep.  At this point, I realized that painting was my version of putting up shelves, it was where I was storing my nervous energy.  It was my way of nesting and incorporating our new space into our home.

Finally, I had collected enough pictures that I showed them to J- and we were able to narrow it down.  We had chosen our colors, and I started mulling over where they would be applied.  J- dropped me of at the eco paint store and I spent about 20 minutes looking through their colors until I had made my choices. With one small adjustment from J-, we made the purchase.  That night, I did have a dream that I had made one wrong choice, but in the end, I am perfectly happy.

There were a few things that I didn’t realize until after we had started the painting and gotten several of the colors up.  The colors that we had chosen happened to be very similar to the colors in the rest of the house, just brighter, more playful versions of them…appropriately so, since it is giant kid romper room that we are painting.  Secondly, the colors match (not exactly, but well enough) the kids furniture that I grew up with that we now have.

Ultimately, putting up shelves, painting…are all just ways for us to have tangible milestones that our lives are changing.  To bring the reality of children in our home one step closer.

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The initial interviews in June went well. We had two visits from a social worker who interviewed Jeff and I together and each of us separately.  Our tenant was scheduled to move out July 1st, and we we had been telling our friends that we expected to begin the matching process sometime in July. Our hopes were still high as everyone was telling us that writing the home study would not take long.

After the interviews, G- had written the first draft of the homestudy fairly quickly.  The most frustrating thing about the process has been that during our initial interviews, I wasn’t careful about some things that I said and they are still coming back to haunt me.  See my previous blog entry about this.

The last phase of the process is making edits to the first draft.  This is what has taken much longer than we expected.  There were several rounds of questions going from the director to the social worker to us. It seems as though every time we talk to someone at our agency, they are expecting it to be just a few days until the next step of our home study happens.

The real problem is that we had to call them each time there was a delay after a few times, our confidence has begun to wane that we made the right choice to go with this agency.  We realize that if we had gone directly through Alameda County we could have had kids in the home by now. On the other hand, we realize that the deliberateness of our process will more likely lead to a better match.  It turns out there was some staff turnover, which led to the delays and the poor communication.

The good news is that we are the last eyes that may edit the homestudy and it is in the mail today.  So hopefully, this anxious time is coming to a close and we WILL begin matching soon.

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rating: 5 of 5 stars
I certainly haven’t tried every recipe in this book, but I have tried enough to know that it is spot on for what it is offering, which is a variety of grubbing, basic vegetarian recipes that provide some quantity. You won’t feed hundreds with these recipes, but you will feed 10.

I don’t use cookbooks very often. When I do, I am looking for inspiration for something new to try or I am looking for a basis on which to apply my own creative process upon. Even when I do use a cookbook, I rarely prepare the recipe exactly as directed.

There are a number of things that are especially cool about Punk Cookery.

First is Ian’s commentary. Although we are from different ends of the country, we are from the same scene. Like Ian, these recipes have history, which he shares with the user.

Second is that these recipes are good for a beginner or an experienced cook. I admit that a lot of times I pull out Betty Crocker when I am baking and modify these old school recipes to be vegan. But how do you do that for Lentil Loaf or Chocolate Tofu Pie? Well, you don’t…but this book has these recipes that can be followed to the T by a beginner or modified by an experienced cook.

Finally, there are simply some really cool and unusual recipes in here. My favorite section is the salads, which includes recipes for Sweet Pea Guacamole, Wild Rice & Artichoke, Greek Potatoes and more. I think there are probably recipes from about 8 different cultures. I also have Ian’s Ethiopian-Inspired Cooking, which I have been wanting to try.

ooh…I gotta go wisk my herbed polenta before it burns…


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I loved this book because of a few key points that I learned a lot from and will use in my parenting, regardless of whether I am using the 1-2-3 Magic method.

• It seperates “stop” and “start” behaviors, pointing out that how you get kids to do these different categories of behavior is going to be different.
• It seperates the “heat of the moment” of conflict from the lesson of the conflict.  It doesn’t try to get communication going when tempers are flared.
• It focuses on giving kids individual attention rather than trying to do things in larger groups when jealousies may be triggered and when sometimes noone gets their needs met.
• It gives clear examples of how to set up systems of punishment and reward that gets the whole family in a habit of understanding what is expected.

Basically, the premise is that behaviors can be stopped by simply getting the kids used to counting up to a time-out.  It gives them 2 chances within a short period of time to alter their behavior, then leads them to a punishment. The book also offers 7 suggestions for starting behaviors, including punishments and reward systems.

After reading the reviews, I have noted several problems with the book that others have mentioned.  First is that counting to get desired behavior can be obnoxious sometimes.  On the other hand, I see it as a last resort.  The whole point is that talking to your kids isn’t working, it can escalate into an argument and your kid still isn’t getting the desired behavior.  I actually think that this book is oriented towards people that have anger-management issues because at the beginning it speaks of avoiding hitting your kids.  Not that the book won’t work for anyone, it can.

Secondly, it has a bias about kids that not everyone will agree with.  It is premised on the fact that children are not rational small people, but selfish and greedy by nature.  They suggest that teaching kids from a young age is more similar to animal training than to working with other adults.  This leads to a pretty formulaic approach to time-out based punishment.  I agree with the criticisms that there is more to teaching kids than this.  Again, the whole point of the book is that during the heat of the battle of wills is probably not the right time to have that conversation for most families. The kid is upset, maybe the parent is, too.  Everyone needs a time-out before the lesson can really be considered.  Of course, this may not be true for all families, but many of the negatively portrayed scenarios described in this book sure remind me of my family.

So, I think that rather than dissing this book, it needs to be considered that it is actually not meant to be the only resource that parents will be using.  It is simply a discipline system that is a tool among other resources that one is using to teach.  Now I am reading How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so that Kids Will Talk, which I hope will be a good companion to it.

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I have not done much to confront these issues other than come to terms with myself, my desires and how my choices reflect these.  I haven’t ever felt like demonizing my parents for the situation that I grew up in; it is easy for me to see that they did a much better job raising their children than their parents did raising them. With one exception (where someone that I was working on a project with had a highly charged tantrum that brought back all of the fear that I experienced when my dad “went off”), I have been able to push the abuse to the back of my mind and simply make choices that are different than my parents so that the issue doesn’t permeate my life any longer.  Until now.

It is easy to be critical of my parents and the choices that they made around my growth. It is easy to say that I will never be like them and that I will do as good of a job or better without resorting to corporal punishment or threats.  Based on conversations with our adoption agency and with J-, I realized that some of the bigger holes in my ideas about child raising are around discipline.  It actually isn’t enough to not believe in hitting kids.  I have been told that without actively understanding and practicing the alternatives, it will be second nature for me to revert into the sorts of punishment that I was raised with.

I had trouble believing this was true.  I mean, I have steered my life so far away from the life that my parents had. I am a lot like my mom in some ways, but I married a man so different than my dad.   But recently, I have been noticing behaviors of my mother showing up in me around J-, when I am tired or grumpy and in a zone where I am saying things without really thinking about them first.  I am proud of myself that I notice, and sometimes I even catch myself before I speak.  I am confident that I will not just “slip into” physically punishing my kids, but the emotional control is much trickier.  Both of my parents had a temper had a very emotional relationship to our discipline.

The one easy answer that I have had to how I will deal with disciplining our kids is humor.  I think that humor can be very effective for changing the dynamics of  a situation and getting the kids out of immediately critical situations, but something more is needed.  Breaking the children’s habit of getting themselves into trouble and helping them understand the consequences of their actions are important, as well. 

So, I have been hitting the books. I have been paying attention to how other parents interact with their kids.  I have a network of friends that I will be able to contact when I can’t figure out the right thing to do.  We also expect to be in a lot of therapy.

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