When promoting adoption, first, do no harm

Kathleen Waters has been toiling in the fields of child welfare for more than 28 years.  The first thing she told us when we won the contract to create a public adoption promotion campaign for the State of Florida was:  Please don’t create the impression that we have a lot of healthy babies.  If you create an avalanche of interest in children we don’t have, you are doing us more harm than good.

Wow.  That was a sobering admonition.  Public relations practitioner:  First, do no harm.The challenge we faced was putting a face on public adoption that was realistic (read:  teenagers, sibling groups (some as many as eight!), and children with disabilities and medical conditions like Down Syndrome and AIDS) that was nonetheless positive and inspirational in encouraging Floridians to adopt.Tall order.  Then, we started talking with the people who had actually done this.  After the first few, we concluded that we had met the angels among us – the few, rare, superhuman people who surely had a room in heaven reserved just for them.  Then we met more.  And more.  And more.And we realized that the real, powerful benefits of public adoption captivated and transformed many, many Florida families.  Our campaign became clear:  Clearly portray the children available for adoption and powerfully depict the impact they had on the families that adopted them.  There was no need to gloss over the challenges.  Family by family we heard that the benefits far outweighed the challenges, real as they were.  And the greatest benefit by far was this:  The sense that they had done something important with their lives, that they had made a significant difference.Communications at its best as a discipline is not about spin.  It’s not about glossing over the facts and presenting something fake.  It’s about stripping away the layers and presenting the truth as clearly and compellingly as possible.  The truth tells its own story, given the chance.If our "Explore Adoption" campaign is successful, it won’t generate an avalanche of interest in adoption by the bleary-eyed uninformed.  Rather, it will inspire a handful of average Floridians with eyes wide open to become the latest angels among us and devote their lives to making a difference in the lives of one child…or more.

Electronic Suicide

My life sometimes feels like an endless checklist, a powerful trajectory from must do to must do with no breath in between.  My partner-boss jokes that I come to work to rest, and it used to be true.  But now, really, there is no rest anywhere.  Sometimes, I have to remind myself that my Sister Suffragettes fought for my right to be this busy.  Sigh.  Thanks, sistah.  As Mae West once said,  “When given a choice of evils, I usually choose the one I haven’t tried yet.”  I’m ready to try being a kept woman.

Rewind to Saturday before last.  I wake up early, before the kids have staked out their own claims to my taxi service, and go forth with day planner in hand, optimistically filled out with a list of seven objectives that couldn’t be accomplished during the workweek. Packages to be mailed, craft items to be purchased, sexy red shoes to be found for the Addy’s, cat litter to buy, birthday presents to find, clothes to go to Goodwill… After completing the first two items on the list, I skip items three and four, cursing the fact that neither !@#?!!@ store opens til 10 a.m., which won’t allow me enough time to get to my BodyPump class at Women’s World at 10:30 a.m., item seven. I load the cat litter into the back of my ridiculously large but necessary Suburban, and head out for Toys R Us, to cross item six off the list.  In backing up I hear and feel a disturbing sound/sensation, something like cracking plastic, but, looking in the rearview mirror, I see nothing.

Content that I apparently have not run over a shopper in pursuit of my “to do” list, I whip around the corner to Toys R Us, passing on the momentary temptation to park in the “Soon to be Moms-only” spaces.  Rather disturbingly, I allow that I have accomplished enough this morning to permit myself a brief visit to the Toys R Us bathroom to answer the Call of Nature, which I have chosen to ignore to this point.  At that moment, savoring my successes, I reach for my Blackberry, because it would be a shame to answer the Call without multi-tasking.  At that moment, groping the front pocket of my Vera Bradley lime green purse with no Blackberry to be had, I realize what the sick sound/sensation was that I experienced back in front of the pet store.

I weigh the possibility of returning to the scene of the crime immediately, but concluded that it would be more efficient to purchase my daughter’s birthday presents first (after all, they may run out of pink Nintendo DS’s.)  I sprint from the check out line, where I jingle my keys while the cashier asks for my telephone number, to the counter where one picks up electronic toys likely to be stolen if not protected.  I wait while the electronics manager goes to retrieve the coveted DS, shifting from foot to foot, envisioning the further damage my Blackberry may be suffering.

Finally, I run to the car and drive to the pet store parking lot, my eyes focusing on a rectangular black object between the wheels of the mini-van that took my Suburban’s place in the parking lot.  I dash out from my giant white chariot, door flung optimistically open, and pick up the crushed plastic item, which is missing a row of keys and has painful looking skid marks across the plastic face.  With sinking heart that at that moment acknowledges the insanity of trying to do this much, I push the button on the side of the object that allows one to automatically call a frequented number. Miraculously, the machine responds, “Say a command.”  Feeling both vindicated and empowered, I say, “Call Ron Sachs.”  “Which number?” the battered machine asks.  “Home,” I answer.  “Calling,” it assures me. When Ron answers, I confess my transgression like the old Catholic schoolgirl that I am.  After urging me to go to the Sprint store and purchase a replacement, he suggests a possibility that is both stunning and plausible.  His theory:  My Blackberry has attempted suicide, flinging itself beneath the wheels of my sleeping Suburban.   Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

A Message from the Outskirts of Childrearing Excess

I was waiting in front of a car wash today as a bright-faced, teenage boy washed the windshield of the 16-year-old Honda Accord that is to become my daughter’s first car.  It stood a washing, since my son drove it back and forth to crew practices for the past two years, as evidenced by the dust storm kicked up when the car washer beat the floor mats against a post.This is the same car my daughter’s friends intervened on her behalf about, asking, “You aren’t really going to make her drive THAT, are you?”  I pointed out that, until two years ago, it was the same car a vice president in our company drove.  And, it’s a car I have invested thousands of dollars in to make sure it would be roadworthy for the child who will drive two years from now.

We have lots of kids. My car ethic seemed perfectly ordinary to me until another car washer broke my contemplation by yelling, “Nissan” to summon the owner of the red, 350Z sports car that I noticed admiringly as it was being washed.  Certain the Polo-wearing, lawyer-looking man about my age would step up to claim it, I was amazed when, instead, a 16-year-old boy jumped up to take the driver’s seat of the $30,000 beauty.

In the age of childrearing excess that we live in, it’s difficult to raise kids who don’t have inflated expectations. I recently overheard one of my children’s friends say that his parents have agreed to buy him the latest, loaded, state-of-the-art laptop if he brings all his grades up to Cs.  My son, who has earned straight As this year with no sweetener cast me a glance at me to say… what exactly?  “See, I AM being cheated!”  or  “At that scale, you can’t even HOPE to afford MY grades”  or maybe it was just “Is that crazy, or what?”  I’m not sure how he interpreted it, but I’m sure he knew his friend’s largesse didn’t change a thing for him.

Perhaps my children will fill therapists’ offices someday, complaining about everything we didn’t do for them.  God knows, there is plenty to complain about.  First of all, the birthday parties. I remember my children attending birthday parties with multiple courses, like a fine dinner.  The first course (with 12-15 kids) was at the movie theatre.  The second was at the laser tag place.  The third was at the pizza parlor.  Waiting to pick up my child outside the last venue, I would mentally calculate what the whole shebang must have cost. Then there was the crafty mom, who had a party for 20 first graders with five different craft stations.  She also baked an individual birthday cake for each girl at the party, and one of the stations provided them an opportunity to decorate it and take it home! A few years later, that was followed by the elementary school-aged party at the Moon with a live DJ, complete with limo rides from the schools.  How does one compete with that? The worst were the A list and B list parties, where there were, in effect, two parties and some kids were invited to both, while the less fortunate invitees were only invited to the first.  I remember one such party, which staged the first part at a horse ranch in Jefferson County.  The second half was a slumber party to which my daughter was not invited.  When I was late to pick up my daughter (having gotten lost in Jefferson County), the mother complained, “The girls who are spending the night had to wait to leave until you got here!” Another memorable moment involved cheerleading camp, which cost many hundreds of dollars and involved a hotel stay, beachfront, at the finest accommodations Panama City had to offer.  After gulping over the projected price, I sat through a meeting of enthusiastic mothers who passed around an order form that included things like $75 gift baskets with a cheer bear, snacks and an “I miss you” card.  One particularly eager mom suggested that our girls might feel left out if we didn’t all buy an “I miss you” gift. At this point, I became the wet blanket who suggested that maybe the $500 expenditure for four nights in Panama City was gift enough.

Lest I feed the illusion that I have succeeded in raising children free from materialism who gratefully accept their lot and ask for nothing more, let me assure you, alas, it is not so.  Just ask anyone who has suffered through a scene in Target, Toys R Us, Best Buy, Justice for Girls or anywhere else where my children were being told they couldn’t have whatever they couldn’t live without at the moment. It does cause me to wonder and worry:  Who will our children marry some day and what capacity will they have to sacrifice and put the needs of another first?  What debt will they amass as they continue to gratify their every whim?  It’s a dreadful thought. I wonder if it might be possible to stage a summit of parents to stop the insanity.  Perhaps we need to adopt a new bill of rights.  Children get everything they need and a little of what they want.  They get everything they earn and a little of what their parents earn.  It’s not really a parents’ bill of rights I’m envisioning here, but a children’s.   After all, nothing makes a child more miserable than an unchecked, insatiable appetite for their heart’s every desire.  Let’s all just say no.

Fear of Flying

The front porch, with its view of the garden, is my special place, where I can watch the things I’ve planted and nurtured thrive.  Curled up on my porch swing, I watch the sunflowers stretch past the yard’s trellis entrance, marvel that the Spring-blooming delphiniums are still putting out new flowers, and wait for the Asiatic lilies to finally show their colors.  Here, I also watch my children leave and return, climbing onto the school bus, biking to the end of the block or, in the case of the older ones, driving themselves away.

It was here one day a month or so ago that I first saw the bird fly into one of my hanging baskets with bits of twig and Spanish moss in her beak, again and again.  Thrilled she was building a nest so close to our own habitation, I searched the shelves for my Audubon bird identification book, and finally settled on the classification of Carolina wren.  The little brown bird with the white stripes on the side of her face returned relentlessly to weave a home with a circular entrance in middle of my ferns.

Human presence didn’t seem to faze the little bird although once she made a hasty exit when I watered the basket while she was still in it.  That time, I peered into the nest to see two eggs, white with brown speckles.  The next day, I inspected to find two more, and carefully shared the view with my children.

Over the next few weeks, the mother bird became a regular visitor, and her mate also appeared.  One time, he raised a fearsome squawk from a nearby bench to run off the neighbor’s cat, which had settled in to take a nap on the chair beneath the basket nest.

Then, the birds began visiting with insects in their beaks.  After such a visit, I looked inside to see the hungry, open mouths of three tiny, fragile-looking wren babies.

As the temperature climbed into the 90s, I carefully cooled down the nest and kept its plants alive each evening by watering the basket from opposite the nest entrance.  One recent night, as I turned the hose on the basket, three tiny brown birds with stubby wings flew out in a panic, ending their short flights with three awkward landings on the lawn.  I sent out my 7-year-old to keep an eye on them until I could scoop them up and return them to their hanging plant home, where they sat looking out among the fern braches.

Earlier this same day, in ironic, parallel fashion, a policewoman called to say my 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, who had been driving solo for only about a week, landed the car in a ditch while trying to perform a three-point turn.  Though she and the car were both ok, the experience heightened the sense of vulnerability I felt every time I watched her leave.

I sat on my porch swing for awhile, worried the little birds would try to leave again.  Then I saw the mother and father bird return and figured it was safe to leave the babies in their own parents’ care while I went inside to put dinner on the table.

After dinner, I stepped out onto the front porch and froze to see a small brown, tufted shape on the slab.  Sadly inspecting the unmoving form, I saw feathers missing from its neck.  Had the neighbor’s cat gotten to it and shaken its neck broken as it tried to recover from another trial flight?

Over in the trees on the side of the garden, I heard the tweets of multiple birds and went over to see the parent birds and two babies flit from branch to branch.  Did they know one baby was missing?  Did they witness the tragedy?  Out of four eggs, two babies would carry on the wren community – was that a successful outcome by wren standards?

I think about the article my husband emailed to me about summer being the deadliest time of year for teen crashes.  Tomorrow, my daughter will take out the car again to drive herself to her summer job.  I know keeping her indefinitely in the nest is not a possibility.  She will insist on flying, as she should.  But like the baby birds, she doesn’t sense her own vulnerability.

In the novel “Animal Dreams” by Barbara Kingsolver, a father who nearly lost his young daughters in a flash flood darkly muses that it doesn’t make sense for a mortal man to love anything this much.  And yet we do.