This section bumps things up a notch from the previous one. These are some of the challenges that actually felt pretty challenging at the time they occurred. Today they’ve mostly turned into stories that the boys and I laugh about—proof that most of the time, the stuff really is small (fellow parents, take heart). Some of these are general to all families, some specific to transracial/adoptive families—and at least one is uniquely us.

Hernia

When you have kids, you spend a lot of time at the doctor’s. And when you spend a lot of time at the doctor’s, you get very used to hearing doctors say those three little words: “I don’t know.”*

(*I think doctors should give out those punch cards like the kind they have at coffee shops. On the tenth “I don’t know,” the visit is free. (Full disclosure: Thanks to fost-adopt laws, the kids had Medi-Cal up to age eighteen, so their visits were free. But you get the point.))  

Except when they do . . . or think they do.

One day at a track meet, after running the two-mile, Daveon doubled over, fell, and lay on the turf for a solid ten minutes. He had complained about pain from time to time before, but this was the first time I had seen it in action. Immediately, I ran down to the field, and then made an appointment to see the doctor the next day. There was only one slot available, which unfortunately happened to be right when I had an important conference call. The next day, I dropped Daveon at his appointment and took the call at a nearby café. He was sixteen at the time, so this was doable, if not ideal.

The doctor visit was . . . inconclusive. The nurse practitioner referred Daveon to our nearby children’s hospital for X-rays, thinking the cause of pain might be a hernia. So we went and, as these things go, spent the next six or seven hours in the emergency room.

The X-rays were . . . inconclusive. There was something that might be appendicitis, and nothing that looked like a hernia. So, the X-ray people referred Daveon for an ultrasound—nothing like cold jelly on your belly on a Friday night. I told him if he ever gets pregnant, he’ll know what this feels like.

The ultrasound was . . . inconclusive. Again, they found something that might indicate some calcification on his appendix, but he didn’t have any of the classic symptoms of appendicitis, so they couldn’t say for sure. As these things go—again—when the doctor gave Daveon the results, I was in the middle of a twenty-minute break to drive Mark and a friend to a school dance. By the time I got back, Daveon was dressed and ready to go, appendix intact.

I called Daveon’s regular doctor the next Monday. Because we were now officially in Wonderland, the doctor scratched her head as to why they didn’t go ahead take the (unneeded) appendix out just to be on the safe side. She promptly gave us a referral for an appendectomy.

We met with the surgeon in June, and arranged for the appendectomy in August—the earliest time that both patient and practitioner were available, given vacations and camps, etc. During the visit, the surgeon poked and prodded and said he felt some swelling, which he termed a “sports hernia.” This, apparently, isn’t a real hernia, but something athletes get that is currently very trendy and usually prompts them toward surgery they don’t need. When it comes to keeping up with weird trends in the injury department, my kids are right at the forefront.

Because Daveon wasn’t playing for the Miami Heat, the doctor recommended to skip the (non)hernia repair and go on a treatment of eight weeks of mega-doses of ibuprofen—as well as rest (read: abstaining from athletic activity). Given that Daveon was looking forward to a breakout cross-country season in the fall, which included intense summer training, he was not at all happy about this. For my part, I wasn’t happy at the thought of 600 mg of ibuprofen three times a day in his zero-body-fat, ninety-five-pound frame. But hey, anything to help improve his performance and overall health moving forward. We signed on.

For those keeping score at home, we were now at one surgery for appendix, and one nonsurgical medication treatment for non-hernia.

Come August, and it was surgery time. Daveon went in and went under. Partway through the procedure, the surgeon came and found me. And said, “I’m taking out his appendix, and the scope is also showing a hernia. So, I’m going to fix that while I’m in there, OK?”

In other words . . . the hernia he didn’t have? He had one. (A real, nonsports  one.)

The upshot is, Daveon got everything patched up at once, so file this under “blessing in disguise.” He actually did have a great start to his cross-country season, including his first-ever first-place finish. I told him he should recommend joint hernia repairs/appendectomies for all his teammates. If the surgeon had a sharp uptick in business over the next couple of years, he has us to thank.

Food

If you ever become a parent, one day you might wake up and think, “Gee, I spend a lot of time dealing with things that, pre-parenthood, it never crossed my mind would be an issue.”

In our family, the number-one issue in that category was: food.

Fost-adopt families, fair warning: Over the years, I learned from therapists, social workers, et al, that many kids coming out of foster care have issues with food. These issues usually fall into two categories: hoarding and extreme pickiness.

The causes of the hoarding are easy to understand. Many, perhaps most, foster kids experience periods of food scarcity. It’s also common for them to be denied food as a form of discipline. What the kid learns is, when food is available? Hoard away.

The pickiness goes a little deeper. It’s a way for the kid to exert control over one tiny area of his or her otherwise very out-of-control life. “I won’t eat that, and you can’t make me.”

At least in this case, the experts nailed it. For most of our years together, hoarding and control-based pickiness made themselves right at home under our roof. This was pretty much all thanks to Daveon.

(For the record, Mark eats just about anything, and plenty of it. His dislikes are limited to various kinds of vegetables—for example, the cucumbers he threw out the window—as well as, oddly enough, pepperoni.)

Daveon’s food trajectory went something like this:

When he moved in, he had food allergies to pretty much everything: beef, dairy, eggs, nuts, and I’m sure many others I am forgetting. He came from a home where he ate lots of stuff out of cans—his passion was Vienna sausages.* As far as his tastes went, the more processed, the better.

(*I’m almost positive those do not technically qualify as food.)

Over the years, as is pretty common with kids, almost every allergy lifted, except for a tiny reaction to peanuts. So “I can’t eat this” got replaced with “I don’t like this.” This list was unpredictable and ever-changing, but always quite long. Candidates included peanuts and peanut butter, regular butter, mayo, all fruit except apples, chocolate milk, most cheese, eggs, yogurt and frozen yogurt, pie of any kind, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, any Asian food except Americanized Chinese, sour cream, guacamole, and the list went on and on. Oh, and any exposed fat or skin on meat or poultry. In one of our wall photo displays, there’s a picture of Daveon buttering a roll. This was a noteworthy day in his eating life.

Whatever food he would eat, he took as tiny a portion as I would let him get away with and call a meal. I’m sure that more than one school lunch ended up mostly (if not entirely) in the trash. This was the control period. It lifted somewhat when he started high school and got more serious about cross-country. He still didn’t go much for quantity—even at twenty-something, his weight hangs right around 100 pounds—but he definitely expanded in terms of variety, so that’s a good sign.

Also over the years, hoarding revealed itself. On the rare times I dared to venture into his room to clean up, I often found packets of spoiled food in dresser drawers, under the bed, etc. Stuff he had socked away and then clearly forgotten about. Baby carrots were a particular specialty—I’m still not sure how he could ignore the smell.

Late in high school, Daveon agreed to see a homeopathic/holistic doctor to help with his nasal allergies. After doing some blood work, the doctor announced that the allergies were not, as we assumed, environmental in nature. According to her, they were instead caused by allergies to—wait for it—dairy, eggs, and gluten. So right at the time the kid started eating a broader-based diet, we had to scale it back again, or at least find substitutions. What we learned was, everything contains wheat, eggs, or both. We did find some acceptable substitutes with gluten-free bread and pasta products; soy, rice, and other grain milks (no nut milks, of course); and even a handful of gluten/dairy-free dessert options he liked. We also learned that a “dairy-free” food can contain eggs, so you need to read labels really carefully. And the food pyramid of my childhood is officially dead.*

(*Also officially dead, since the day Daveon left for college: this attempt at a healthier diet. I’m pretty sure he went back to Vienna sausages on a regular basis.)  

How do you resolve any of this? Beats me. You can say, “I don’t care if you eat the carrots. Just put them back in the fridge” till you’re blue in the face. And there they are in the closet, next to the running cleats, turning into a different (green, funky) species.

Coming from an Italian family, the last thing I ever thought about in relation to kids was food issues. Our biggest “issue” was, “How long till the next meal/snack/treat?” Or maybe, “What do you mean, I can only have four cookies?” Further proof that when you venture into having kids of your own, you never can tell.

Hair

As I mentioned earlier, when you go through fost-adopt training, the instructors warn you about many things you might need to deal with in the years ahead with your kids: attachment issues, identity and esteem challenges, inward and outward expressions of anger and rebellion. But in our case, there’s one key issue they forgot to mention.

Hair.

This may be specific to transracial families, and maybe more specific to nonblack parents who adopt black kids. But . . . oh, brother. Did we ever have some battles around hair.

When the kids were little, I kept the hair situation simple—or at least, I tried to. Every couple of weeks, I got out the clippers and gave them a full buzz—just like Dad’s.

For Daveon, this went easily enough. His hair grows in wonderfully even, regular rows. Running the clippers through them was as easy as running a knife through softened butter. No muss, no fuss.

And then there’s Mark. You know those descriptions in fairy tales and fantasy stories of dark forests, where the ground is covered with thick moss and thorny vines, all tangled and matted, making it almost impossible to hack your way through? Welcome to Mark’s hair. Wiry, stiff, and knotted in about a million directions at once. Trying to clip his hair was like trying to drive a tractor through a field of barbed wire. You get stuck a lot.

Here’s a good term for parents of black kids to know: tender-headed. Tender-headed means, “If you gently dab my scalp with a cotton ball, it will feel like a chainsaw. And then I’ll scream.” There may be nonblack kids who are tender-headed, but I’ve only ever heard it used by black parents to describe their kids.

And now, a pop quiz: Guess which one of my kids is tender-headed? Could it be Mr. “Smooth as Silk” hair, so that the irritation would be minimal? Of course not. If anyone was ever going to call Child Protective Services on me during those early years, it would be when I was trying to clip Mark’s hair. The kid started screaming bloody murder before I actually touched his head, and wouldn’t stop until I finally brushed him off. This process took an extremely long time, as I had to keep stopping to let him regroup and catch his breath.*

(*Six-year-olds aren’t big on the concept that if something is unpleasant, the smartest thing is to get it over with as quickly as possible.)

Mark gets bonus points for the time I was cutting his hair out in front of our house, and he was actually pretty calm about it—over the years, I learned how to lighten my touch pretty well. And then Aunt Leigh pulled up and got out of her car, and we were back in the House of Horrors, complete with the bloody murder screams. Who says the kid can’t act?

After those first couple of years, I gave up. We moved on to paid haircuts, and I let the boys wear their hair however they liked. This led to the unkempt-Afro phase. They looked great coming out of the barber’s, and then promptly forgot about the invention of the comb. Nothing like sending your kid to the five-figure-tuition private school looking like they spent the weekend on a bender.

The kids also subjected their hair to a variety of experiments. At one point, they both tried braids. Daveon’s wouldn’t stay in because— surprise—he didn’t take proper care of them. Mark “Mr. Tender-head” couldn’t even get through the process, and poor Aunt Steph—who had valiantly offered to do the honors on him, as she does for her girls— gave up halfway through. She and I realized that we could make a fortune if we could invent a scalp-numb product for just such occasions.

As the boys got older, the hair issues settled down. Daveon usually sticks with a mini-fro that he’s pretty good at keeping in shape. A recent attempt at blond from a spray bottle left said ’fro an interesting shade of orange. Mark has been more experimental, variously trying out a flat-top and a Gumby, both of which I must say he pulled off pretty well.

And my clippers are slowly recovering from the PTSD of their adventures in Mark’s forest.

Transitions

For the most part, I consider myself a pretty smart person. I like to think I have some accomplishments to back that up. On the other hand, sometimes I’m not so quick on the uptake. For example: Over the years, as if on schedule, my kids would regularly get into some kind of trouble at these times:

• The beginning of the school year
• Winter break
• Spring break
• The end of the school year

It only took five or six years of them losing outings and other privileges at these times, before it finally dawned on me: There’s a pattern here! And the pattern was, all of these times are periods of transition. And (thought bubble showing the word “DUH” with a lightbulb): Transitions are hard on my kids!

I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure this out. However, when that lightbulb finally went off, it wasn’t hard to understand why the statement was true. Start with the fact that most of us don’t do well with transitions (show of hands—mine’s up). Then add this: Your foundational years often consisted of a (not at all fun) game of “Now You Live Here, Now You Don’t” (and its spin-off, “Who’s Your Momma/Daddy? Not Me Anymore”). Growing up with this, it might make perfect sense that any shift in context, however slight, would bring up deep wells of anxiety. And, as with most of us, our expressions of anxiety aren’t always the most constructive or useful.

I think the depth of my kids’ anxiety became clear to me when I realized that the acting up happened even during a supposedly positive transition. I could understand the boys getting out of hand when school started—that’s no fun for anyone, guaranteed to bring about low moods and rebellion. But why would you mess up the beginning of summer vacation? Or even, as on their second visit here, why would you act so nuts on New Year’s Eve that you get sent to bed early and miss the party?

Lesson learned: Anxiety has no value judgments. It doesn’t discern between good and bad situations. There are only scary situations, however benign they might appear on the surface.

So, after those half-dozen years, I was finally able to start taking a step back when one or (usually) both kids started going to their crazy-acting zone. I was finally able to remember to look at where we were not only in terms of personal circumstances, but also on the calendar. It made a world of difference to be able to say, “OK, school starts next week and you’re acting like a nut. My guess is that the change is making you anxious, even if you feel like it’s not.* Let’s assume that’s true and see what we can do about it, before you get yourself into any trouble.”

(*Other lesson learned: Kids aren’t always so good at self-evaluating anxiety. Shocking, I know.)      

When I remembered to take it, this approach generally proved to keep things much calmer, and allowed for a better conversation around limits: “Here are some acceptable ways of working out your stress during this transition period, and here’s what crosses the line.” Hitting pillow, fine. Hitting brother, not fine.

I found that my kids responded well when we laid out the acceptable behavior paths and the consequences for straying from those paths. It helped minimize the straying in the first place, and kept things under control if a consequence needed to be delivered somewhere along the way. It also, I think, helped bring down the anxiety itself somewhat by setting clear, understandable boundaries.

The beautiful thing about transitions is, they end. What was the scary new thing soon became just the thing, and we got back into our groove—at least until the next transition presented itself.

Next Chapter: (Actual) Big Stuff