Here I AM!

How did I get here? When did I lose my waistline and where should I look for it? One morning I woke up and I realized I had thinning hair, dry crepe paper skin and gallon sized bags under my eyes. My ankles are hiding some where in there and recently I lost the battle with my right big toenail. The podiatrist said lose it or suffer the consequences of a plague-like staff infection. There’s a hot, sexy vixen flowing through my veins, but no one could possibly know it to look at the strange body I now seem to occupy. Perhaps one day I’ll remove all the mirrors from my home to reduce the chance of catching my reflection unaware.

My dogs and I have a lot in common, I visited the people vet this last year and got permanently fixed. I read somewhere that spaying increases the lifespan of female dogs, I hope I get the same consideration for all the discomfort I went through. It has crossed my mind that I might be able to sue my gynecologist for misrepresentation. When I asked if I’d feel different afterwards, could my womanliness be jeopardized and would I be the same person, he smiled confidently and spoke in a gentle voice when he reassured me I would soon be back to my old self. Ha! I woke up and thought I’d been put back in the wrong body after they finished carving out what used to be pretty lousy reproductive organs. At least I had used to have a few drops of oil on the surface of my body and my skin had a smattering of elasticity. I look in the mirror and search everywhere for the person that used to be me and it is nowhere to be found. Somewhere out there is a woman with my sorry body thrilled to have the little blessings that are foreign to me now. It worries me that losing all those hormones might make people think of me with that term for female dogs that starts with the second letter of the alphabet and rhymes with twitch.

To be perfectly fair, the surgery was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Five years of taking the drug I like to refer to as Tommyhawksifen really got the ball rolling at lightening speed. For those of you who aren’t familiar with drugs that suppress your production of vital female hormones, it’s menopause in a bottle. I shouldn’t complain, it served a worthy purpose as a deterrent to the return of estrogen sensitive breast cancers. I stayed safe during the five years it was sanctioned for protection and am thankful for its existence. Someday I’ll let myself reminisce about that period of my life, it did put a few things in focus.

The world is whirling around me as I sit in a vortex of colliding emotional storms and teenage hormone surges. There’s not a drug out there that can be as unpredictable as male and female hormones and now I believe that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were real-life characters that a clever author passed off as bravissimo inventions of a brilliant imagination. He took poetic license, though, and added a few years to the character’s age to conceal the identity of his obnoxious teenage cousin. I imagine the delight he must have felt to recreate his irritating younger relative for generations to view with horror and disgust. Somewhere out there is a first edition of the book with a personal note written to the poor kid thanking him for his inspiration.

Lately my fading intellect has been obsessed and entangled with the incredible drama being unveiled by my teenage and early twenty’s children. I thought that once they finally got to eighteen or nineteen I would start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t ever, ever, ever think it’s almost over. To have sweated out the high school years so far without an arrest, death, crippling injury, addiction or pregnancy (motherhood or father hood) made me relax my tense vigil so that I could go through a period of physical impairment. It was a huge mistake. I think there is a terrible virus that has possibly mutated at my house and infected some of my children. Actually, I think it might be the world’s first look at a heinous new affliction, a hideous mating of demonic possession and brain altering viruses. Ask anyone who knows them, they’ll back me up despite fearing public scorn. How did it begin? Where did it come from? More importantly, where is the cure?

You laugh and say I’m not the first mother to go through the hell years of puberty and pre-adulthood. No, I’m not, but it’s my first time around and maybe eventually it will become clearer to you what I‘m talking about. You see, it’s been a long journey to get them this far, a long hard journey. Don’t misunderstand, I love my children deeply, but I swear they put the skunk stripes on either temple.

Once upon a time there was a man and a woman who married and waited for nature to take its course and toss a couple of progeny their way. The woman had lousy ovaries that sputtered and stopped only to surge and sputter again. Doctors call it something like polycystic disease of the ovaries, I called it a true curse of womanhood. It was either feast or famine and the poor eggs never could figure out when a good time to wander down the fallopian tube was occurring. Most of them clung to their home base, refused to completely grow up and mutated into another form to hide from Mother Nature. Only once did a brave little volunteer make it to the promised land, but as luck would have it, only lasted a little less than three months. The years went by and after fourteen years of marriage, it didn’t take a genius and too many doctor’s to tell us that it had about as much chance of happening successfully as I would have of becoming a world class, Olympic athlete.

It was time to decide whether to continue on as a pair or to go forth and find our own children. Looking around, reading the news, it was obvious that there were a lot of children in the world who needed parents and we thought it might be a good idea if a couple of them could meet up with us and we could solve each other’s problems. It sounds simple, the round peg goes into the round hole, the square peg goes into the square hole. It should be simple, but as usual, law and good intentions butt heads with old wives’ tails and ignorance and thousands of children of all ages sat unqualified for adoption.

The story of how we became a family of ten is unusual even to me, but one I would not have wanted to miss. To summarize, we adopted a baby boy from out of state in a private adoption and nine years later adopted a family of seven fully related siblings through the state system. We were thirty-six and thirty-seven when our oldest literally flew into our lives in a spinning day of rushing about, signing papers and putting the birth mother and birth grandmother back on a plane. We’d barely had a chance to hold him much less do the traditional ritual of undressing and counting fingers and toes as we realized we had the most fantastic baby in the world. My parents, sister, aunt and niece got that privilege while we did the legal thing.

The televised families with six babies don’t have anything over our story. We suddenly had seven new children from the ages of two to eight in our house. We had to find furniture, clothing toys, toiletries and everything a child needs to feel they are moving into a home that is ready and waiting for them. There was only a couple of weeks before they came for their first visit. We were determined to have rooms ready for all of them, completely stocked. They needed to feel wanted and special. It would be easy to let myself drift back in time and tell the dramatic stories of how we got our children, I’ll save it for later. Six weeks after meeting four boys and three girls, they were officially our foster children on a track for adoption.

Adoption is close to my heart and you can count on my viewpoints cropping up at any time. We’ve had a private out of state adoption of an infant and a state controlled adoption of older children. We’ve had a lot of people approach us to ask about adopting and I’m always ready to answer any questions they have to ask, assuming I can answer their particular question. Each adoption is unique and laws vary geographically. If you want to know, we are the unofficial poster family for adoption and have never been anything but open about how we became a family. I usually tell people I have eight adopted children, not because I feel they are not equal to birth children, but to advertise the option. We feel that adopted children are very special. It is damn hard to get them and you have to literally go through FBI investigation, state investigation and interviews to qualify. Just think, we each had to practically write a book answering very personal questions about ourselves concerning personal beliefs, philosophy of life, a detailed family history and even intimacies of our sexual relationship. That was a hard one, should you play it down, spice it up? I finally decided to answer truthfully but tastefully. (I did wish I could compare my answers to some of the other prospective parents just to see if I came close to the norm. I think most people have wondered about that in their lifetimes). We always told our kids that being adopted made you very special, that adoptive parents had to want you awfully much. After all, some birth children are not planned, but adopted children are hard to come by and very treasured. A few parents told me that their kids wanted to know why they were not adopted, they wanted to be special too. I knew then that the kids didn’t mind being adopted, they were proud of it.

All that happened twenty-four and almost fifteen years ago. How could it have been that long? I need more time! There is so much that I want them to learn before they all leave the nest.