Sometimes, I felt this tremendous pressure about Leslie and Adrian as if I was going to blow up. Right now, I thought, Adrian is struggling with contradictions that on the one the hand, she gets everything she wants when she's with Leslie, but she doesn't get her needs met. On the other hand, she gets her needs met when she's with Rahne and I, but she doesn't get everything she wants.
I found the same contradiction everywhere in my life. On the one hand, I had enormous pain about sharing a child with Leslie. But on the other hand, I would never give up having Adrian just to not have to deal with Leslie. On the other hand (how many do we have here?), I would never have had a kid with anyone but Leslie, and the only reason I knew that was because of the tremendous emotional work I’d done. But I wouldn't have done the emotional work without having a kid, and I couldn't choose a better coparent until I'd done the emotional work. I knew thoughts ran around like that with no end short of a firm, "Enough!"
"Is anybody listening out there? How can this make sense?"
It was something I noticed about life a lot lately. It was this incessant need for contradictions. Apparently contradictions and contrasts were actually the very fabric of life. It was clear to me now why people who liked things cut and dried tend to be crazy. Mental health was not cut and dried. I figured that was one of the things that made it so damn hard to pin down.
* * * * * * *
I called my brother. I’d been dreading it. I had just a small matter of a bill that needed to be paid. He was ok with that but then decided to ask me a question. "Remember I signed a piece of paper awhile back about an adoption?"
"Yes," I answered cautiously.
"Well, I woke up the other morning wondering if it went through.”
"Yes, it went through quite a while ago. I have the new birth certificate.”
"Well," he continued, "I thought I should find out because it would be bad if I had left her without a parent.”
[Please, everyone in the audience roll your eyes for me.]
"It went through, no problem, and besides they wouldn't have removed you as the parent unless they replaced you with me.” I added, “It’s all taken care of.”
I rang off and marveled. It was probably a year to the day that he signed the adoption consent papers. In another year or so, he might ask when it became effective…or not.
* * * * * * *
On a completely nearly unrelated front, Barbara called me to share that the powers that be (I think we're mostly talking China here) have extended the separation of her and her infant child for another two to three months. Making an additional year of the time her daughter had to live in an orphanage before she got to be with a mother who wanted her. I wished I could say this had never happened before. I wished I could say it would never happen again. I wished I could say it’s over now for everyone. But I knew that just wasn’t the way the world worked.
(Oh, I suppose I'll run out of things to say here now. But stay tuned, I'll be back.)