This section covers families ties: the ways my kids are like each other (for better and worse), and the surprising and often fun ways they’re just like me. Always for better in that case, of course.

Just Like Dad

One of the fun things about adopting older kids is discovering the ways you and they are alike. Since these little people already have distinct personalities, and there’s no shared bloodline, it’s a pleasant surprise when your kid acts a certain way or expresses a certain trait and you think, “Wow. Just like me.” When I was making dinner, it was always a kick when I would ask Mark to get the tablecloth out of the cabinet, and he couldn’t find it. Even though (a) it was bright red, (b) it was the only tablecloth in the cabinet, and (c) it was the only thing in the cabinet. And then to think: “Gee, when I was a kid, I also could never find things that were right in front of my face!” (This is a true, if not especially flattering, example.)

Here are some other ways Mark and I are alike:

* We’re both great rule-followers, mostly because we hate getting in trouble.
* We’re very private. We reveal facets of ourselves to another person only to the extent that that person makes us feel safe to do so. So, for example, when Mark took up violin while at elementary school, he was very careful to tell that fact only to . . .other kids who he knew also played the violin. Self-promotion is not exactly our strong suit.
* Remember how I mentioned that Mark loves predictability and gets anxious around the unknown, when he has to plan a day or an event, when everything isn’t precisely mapped out? Alike.*
* And boy, are we both lazy. This might sound silly, given how busy Mark’s rink-filled days are (as are mine, for that matter). Make no mistake: When there’s something to be done, we get it done. If the day’s to-do list contains ten items, we will go through, and complete, one to ten in order. (This ties in to the rule-following thing.) I’m pretty sure that the main reason both of us overcommit to so many activities is that it’s the only way we get anything done. But when the coast is clear, when there isn’t something we have to do—plop. Inertia as a lifestyle choice.
* We have the same birthday! (Not the same year. That would be weird.)

(*OK, one key difference: Mark hates open-ended school assignments. The whole “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only pick one object to help you get off, what would you pick, and why?” of creative thinking completely freaked him out. He was much more at home with, “There’s a right answer, and you must solve for it.” Whereas my brain immediately went to, “I get to make this up? Sweet!” Never mind that, given my lack of practical skills, I would be so dead on that island within a couple of hours.)

As for overlaps with Daveon:

* We both live ninety percent in our heads. Over the years, I’ve consistently tried to encourage Daveon to breathe, relax, feel what’s going on in his body. These are exactly the words I’ve heard from therapists, friends, and myself (to myself) over even more years. Unfortunately, I’m not sure my efforts to get him into his body have been any more successful than my efforts to do so for me.
* We both feel hyper-responsible for doing things right and have a distrust of authority figures and supposed caretakers. As a result, we struggle to trust others enough to let them take care of us. We take care of you. Both in high school and college, I heard countless stories of the friends Daveon consoled over breakups, breakdowns, and self-harm scares—not to mention his cheerleading support of their successes. Which is a mirror of the role I typically play with people in my own life. On the plus side, we are the best friends you’ll ever have, given how we morph to others’ needs at the expense of our own. On the negative side: Feel lonely, much?
* Daveon and I share the feeling that we are different and will be rejected by others—me for growing up homo in the straightest, most white-bread world imaginable, him for being the (not) proud winner of the “How many homes have you lived in?” award. Consequently, we often get—or at least feel—rejection. The whole “creating your own reality” thing. Case in point: In middle school, Daveon felt very much the outsider. He also chose to wear shorts with mismatched knee socks. Which led the kids to laugh at him, which led him to feel even more the outsider. And so on.
* We smile a lot, more so from a sense that we should always put on a happy face than from actually feeling happy. (See the previous two bullets.)
* We love fantasy—did I mention Harry Potter?—and have escapist fantasies and dreams. When he was younger, Daveon often mentioned that his dream was to be at a massive party, and someone would come onstage to say the DJ was sick, and could anyone take over? The key here is not his fantasy of crowds chanting “D-J! D-J!” at his monster skills. It’s that it was simply going to happen—no work or effort on his part, just being in the right place at the right time. Has Dad had similar dreams about stumbling into Mr. Right? Yes. He has.
* We’re both restlessly creative, and like nothing better than to make up our day, and our stories, as we go along. In fact, Daveon has written some raps and poems that are almost as good as some of Dad’s. Almost.

For kids who don’t share your DNA, I think it’s important to look for and comment upon ways that you are alike. It reinforces the truth that connectedness and belonging transcend genetics, and for me at least, it helps me get my kids at a deeper level when I can draw these kinds of connections. For example, I’m much more patient with Mark about the invisible tablecloth than my father was with me. Although maybe not so much with the laziness.

You can even make a game of emphasizing similarities with other family members, genetic or not. One sister and I used to share stories of how Mark and her daughter competed against each other in the quest for the (lovingly bestowed, of course) title of Family Airhead. Meanwhile, Daveon showed his family loyalty by carrying on a longstanding tradition of getting diagnosed with scoliosis and needing to wear a brace for a few years.* Apparently, carrying on the tradition of serving lasagna at every family gathering was too much work.

(*His spine is in the clear now, thanks.)

And even if drawing these kinds of comparisons isn’t important in the end, it’s certainly a lot of fun.

Accomplishment

While I love thinking about the ways my kids and I are alike, I think it’s also important for adoptive families to celebrate the ways their kids are very like each other, even when those shared traits have nothing to do with—are, in fact, the exact opposite of—Mom or Dad. While I think the basic message for nonbiological families absolutely needs to be “Genetics don’t define a family. We’re as real a family as anybody!”, I also think there is a risk in adoptive families to downplay the importance, or even existence, of genetics in contributing to personality, likes, and dislikes. It’s a leap of faith—although an important one—for me to be able to say to Daveon, “Your bio mom was also very small-framed” and not feel that this fact is any threat to the truth of our family-ness.

The similarities say, “You don’t need bloodline to share habits and traits. That’s part of being a real family!” And the differences say, “We don’t need to be exactly alike! Celebrating our differences is part of being a real family!”

Plus, given the many ways my kids are different from me (examples: their crazy good looks, their hair, certainly their athletic ability), it gives us a lot more to talk about.

So here and in the next few sections, I present ways in which my kids are almost identically alike—and not like Dad at all. I’ll start with a big one: their drive to accomplishment.

Given that I’m not Protestant, it’s probably not surprising that I don’t have a Protestant work ethic. I don’t think there’s a Catholic work ethic—but if there is, I don’t have that, either. Were my father alive to read this, he would probably argue that I don’t have any work ethic at all.

My theory—I’m very good at theories—is this: I was one of those kids who got straight As without even trying. That was pretty much my claim to fame all through elementary and high school. But I can’t say I ever saw any connection between accomplishment and happiness. If anything, they were opposite: The more I accomplished, the more I was teased and isolated. A great report card can’t compete with daily taunts of “nerd” and “teacher’s pet.” Shoot: I didn’t even like most of my teachers.

Result: Being able to accomplish has never held much value to me. So, it’s been kind of strange to raise two little people who are—I’m pretty sure this is the technical term—“accomplishment lunatics.” They want to do everything—and more to the point, they want to excel at everything they do. In one of those weird ways your kids provide a mirror image of your reality: For his first two years of high school, Daveon (who didn’t, at the time, know about his father’s effortless academic success) consistently declared to anyone who would listen that he needed to get a 4.0 GPA and was going to take a range of honors and AP classes to boot.

Daveon has many wonderful qualities. Being a 4.0 AP class-type student is not one of them.

Daveon also held on to the idea of becoming a major league baseball player long after his peers had let go of little kid fantasies. Never mind that he was an average player at best. Also, never mind that he never picked up a bat or ball outside of his team’s scheduled practices and games. Not once. I believe he subscribed to the Harry Potter school of magical accomplishment without effort. Maybe that’s why he liked the books so much.

Mark, meanwhile, went a different route. For him, accomplishment equaled stacking as many activities as possible on top of one another. It seemed like any time he saw, or heard about, or possibly even dreamed about, someone doing something, it became the next thing he had to try: skating, and ultimate Frisbee, and basketball, and violin, and knitting, and capoeira, and . . . .*

(*Given the number of hours I spent in the car getting him from activity A to activity B, I’m sure I blocked out the rest. Trust me when I say the actual list is easily twice this long.)

At one point in about fifth grade, Mark’s schoolwork was getting kind of iffy, and his behavior was even worse. I told him that he had too much going on and needed to cut back. He could pick one sport and one musical/artistic activity. He burst into tears and was inconsolable, moaning, “I never thought I’d have to make such a hard decision!”

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of watching a Mark meltdown . . . let’s just say, if the skating thing doesn’t work out, he has a bright future in telenovelas.

I’ve never been really sure what to make of my kids’ feeling that they need to do it all, conquer it all. Maybe it’s a self-esteem thing? Delusions of grandeur? A little bit of both? Or maybe there’s a genetic component, which is interesting to me.

Fortunately—at least from my perspective—both kids eased up somewhat on the must-do, must-win viewpoint. Daveon took a few years off from baseball, and when he joined his college club team his freshman year, he made it clear that it was just for the love of the game, whatever the results. What’s more, he actually snapped at me around that time when he thought I was pushing him to get better grades. This, I guess, is some kind of victory. On the other hand, given his first-term college report card, it’s fair to say that maybe he got a little too comfortable with letting go of those 4.0 dreams.

Meanwhile, in high school, Mark settled into a routine of school/ skating/work/lather/rinse/repeat ad infinitum that he plugged away at week by week, term by term. Based on how often he complained about not having any free time, I think we safely passed the activity-stacking phase.

I’m not sure what it says about me as a parent that I consider it a success that my kids are happier doing less. I’m sure my father is rolling his eyes from the great beyond.

Competition

Being sort of a lefty hippie peacenik, I think it’s fair to say that I don’t have a competitive bone in my body. On the rare occasions where I do something competitive, I might go all out to win, but it’s based on challenging myself—not about beating anyone else. When I bowl—one sport I actually enjoy participating in, as opposed to just watching— all I’m looking at is the distance between my score and 300. (For the record, this distance is usually a substantially large number.) I probably wouldn’t even notice my opponents’ numbers if modern alleys didn’t flash them Vegas-style on big screens. I am ridiculously gracious in defeat and even more ridiculously consoling in victory. I never want anyone’s feelings to be hurt. (Cross-reference: ways Daveon and I are alike.)

If you’ve ever seen my kids participating in athletics out in the world, you might be under the false impression that they are just like me. At both baseball games and cross-country meets, Daveon spent more time wishing kids on the other team good luck than he did warming up. I’m sure this had nothing to do with his lack of spectacular success. And in the supposedly prima donna world of figure skating, Mark considers his closest competitors good friends, to the point where his coaches have often had to remind him to try to limit his socializing until after his events were over.

But against each other? There is some serious Jekyll-and-Hyde action going on, folks. By which I mean, both public Dr. Hydes suddenly discover their inner beasts. Square them off together, and it’s “Just Win, Baby”—at all costs. (Yes, we root for the Raiders, as painful as that usually is.)

Over the years, they tried to top each other at everything. The usual suspects: mini golf, video games, races to the corner. This led, as you might imagine, to an iron-clad commitment to cheating. It also led to charming exchanges like:

Kid 1: What page are you on?

Kid 2: What page are you on?

K1: I asked you first.

K2: Well I asked you second, and two is higher than one.

And so on, until one of them (you can probably guess who) inevitably got tired and tossed out: “Page eighty-three.”

Wouldn’t you know it—his brother always managed to be on page eighty-five.

When they used to cook together—I’ll get to that in a bit—it was a competition to see who could make the most dumplings. If I ever needed anything to get done quickly, the easiest way was to ask: “Who can get their room cleaned up first?” I should have bought a supply of plastic trophies.

It’s not just the obvious stuff—there were more subtle forms as well. If one kid did well at an event or on a test, the other one chimed in with how he would have done just as well, or probably better. A variation was, “Oh yeah, when I did [some version of whatever you just mentioned], I got an A/gold medal/letter of commendation from the President.” Given that none of these stated achievements took place in the years we were together, it’s fair to say that my kids accomplished more by ages four and six than most of us could ever hope to tackle in a lifetime. They are the world’s greatest self-invented prodigies.

(I am eternally grateful that they never ended up competing against each other in the same organized sport. If they were both ice skaters, every day would be another Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan episode.)

As with many things related to the boys, as they got older, this intense beat-your-brother-at-all-costs attitude lessened. A little.

I’d like to think that this decrease is a sign that each kid can defer to the other more gracefully. But I think the truth is that their lives became so separate and individual—after a certain point, they didn’t even cook together anymore—that there weren’t really any overlapping areas within which to compete. For my fiftieth birthday, I should have asked each kid to come up with something nice to do for me. If the competitive fire kicked in, I could have made out pretty well.

Caught

Growing up, my sisters and I were neither good nor bad at getting caught. This was directly tied to the fact that we almost never did anything wrong (seriously). This, in turn, was directly tied to the fact that my parents always used highly cutting-edge, progressive, forward-thinking discipline methods. One went with what is known in child development circles as “rage.” The other employed what the literature refers to as “guilt.” Having been lucky enough to produce highly sensitive offspring, my parents ended up with some really, really well-behaved (terrified, on-edge) kids.

Believe it or not, I do not recommend this as a child-rearing approach.

Meanwhile, back to my kids. Unlike me, they shared an extraordinary capability for getting caught when they messed up in some way. Depending on how you look at it, this made my life substantially easier, or harder, than if they were a little smoother as criminals:

Easier, because I really didn’t have to do much detective work to find out when they did something screwy.

Harder, because I ended up feeling obligated to address many situations that I would have happily ignored—if only I didn’t know about them.

One day my then-neighbor Ted saw me out in front of the house. He came over and said, “You know, Mark has been throwing food out his bedroom window.” If you stand looking at our house, Mark’s bedroom is in the back corner on the left, while Ted and his family lived to our right, with no view to that corner. I was, understandably, curious how Ted could have possibly known what Mark was up to. It turns out that the neighbor behind us—who has a clear view of Mark’s window—saw Mark tossing cucumber slices out the window into his (the neighbor’s) yard. Said neighbor just happened to be home, and happened to be out in his yard, at the time.

Because Mark is black and Ted is black, said neighbor incorrectly put two and two together, came around the corner, went to Ted, and complained to him about the cucumber dump. Ted, rightfully remembering that his own teenage son (a) didn’t have a window that opened onto said neighbor’s yard and (b) didn’t eat cucumbers, put two and two together (correctly in his case). And promptly came and told me.

So only because my back neighbor was in the yard while the crime was being committed, and knew Ted, and found Ted at home when he came over—and only because Ted knew us, and made the connection that the guy was referring to one of my kids . . . did Mark get found out.* 

(*Now that we are years past the incident, I feel safe to point out that had Mark simply flushed the offending cukes down the toilet, none of this would have happened. Also, I might as well throw in that he asked me to buy cucumbers for him. Just to make the whole episode completely ridiculous.)

But that’s nothing compared to his brother’s bad luck. One week end Mark and I were out of town for a skating event (whenever Mark and I were out of town, you can pretty safely assume it was for a skating event). We left early on a Friday, when Daveon was still asleep. The plan was for Daveon—who was in a bit of trouble at the time, and on consequences—to get up whenever, call his uncle Ray (who was working at home), and then head over to Cedric and Ray’s apartment for the remainder of the day and an overnight. What he did instead was, get up almost as soon as Mark and I were out the door around 6 a.m., chat with friends online, ride around on BART, and then skateboard home from North Berkeley. He finally called Ray around 1 p.m., and didn’t head over to the apartment until about 3.

How did I find out about any of this? When Cedric went to work, a coworker said, “I saw your nephew on the BART train.” This coworker had met Daveon once at Cedric’s office a few years back. When Cedric met up with Daveon after work, he asked about it, and the whole story came out—not willingly, from all reports. So Daveon got busted because his uncle’s coworker happened to be on the same BART train as him, happened to see and recognize him, and happened to mention this to his uncle.

These are just two examples, but honestly? This kind of thing happened all the time. On the one hand, I’m glad my kids felt safe enough here to mess up. On the other . . . you know how they say that when someone tries to get caught, it’s a cry for attention or help? Sometimes I wish maybe the boys didn’t cry quite so loudly.

Next Chapter: Activities