Author: wildblueangel47

It’s hard to believe our little guy is almost 4 months old. I cannot recommend enough being on a social media restriction AND in a global pandemic for facilitating mindfulness and being in the present moment! (Haha. ha. ha.)

Really, I used to have this anxiety about wanting to document everything in my life, because what if I forget it? What if I lose these moments? What if I want to write a book about it someday and I haven’t written it down? (This last one is a narcissistic fantasy.)

Two (three?) things happened that were life-changing:

1. Because our son’s adoption isn’t finalized yet, we aren’t really allowed to post things about him on social media.
2. I got a new phone, and for whatever reason, it has refused to download Facebook (it’s been “loading” for weeks now). Through halloween, the election, and now going into Thanksgiving, I didn’t have easy access to social media. Trust me, I don’t have any self-congratulatory things to say about this. I’m not doing a “social media cleanse” or anything like that. It just happened one day, and here we are.

With all of this, I really haven’t posted ANYTHING about baby boy. I did at one month, and then, I just….forgot. I guess that’s parenting?? But it has been extra, unintentionally special to just not worry about the rest of the world. He is our everything and I can’t remember life before he existed.

But… just to indulge myself, here are his current stats:

Weight: 12-ish pounds

New Skills: serious judgmental side-eye

Loves: sitting in his “throne” and commenting on politics, baths, being included in all things all the time

Hates: sleep, being excluded.

Our son is 3 weeks old today. 🙂 We brought him home a week ago. It has been the scariest and most amazing week of my life. In our state, we have pretty complex adoption laws, so the adoption will not be final for 6 months. In the meantime, we cannot post photos or identifying information about him.

I can say, however, that we’ve never been so in love. ❤

Second only to falling in love with this amazing boy is falling in love with my wife all over again, as I watch her become a mother. She never imagined herself having kids, and was deeply skeptical even up until we got him. Seeing how naturally she took to parenting has been one of the greatest joys of my life. It’s been so amazing, even I’m speechless. ❤

More to come…

Today, we will book our plane tickets out west. We are officially awaiting the arrival of our baby boy, in 7 weeks, give or take. Of course, nothing is final until it’s final, but we feel as settled about it as we are going to be.

As scary and difficult as the adoption journey has been, right now, our hearts are full. We have so much love for our little guy and his mama.

We can’t wait to meet you, little one. ❤ ❤

Everything is crazy and we feel hopeful again. After our first adoption match and disintegration, we’ve been pretty quiet about our process. The first time, we told everyone. There were announcements, and plans, and baby gifts. And then, there was an adoption “miscarriage” of sorts. Too early on to be a real tragedy, yet laden with a complexity of feelings even we didn’t understand. The kind of thing where no one knows what to say. The kind of thing where people say “I’m sorry” and cast their eyes down, and I brush it off dismissively, because I don’t want them to feel bad and I don’t want me to feel bad.

But here we are again. Another match, another maybe-baby out there. I’m starting to get my hopes up. I don’t know why; I can’t help it. This is the fourth time we’ve been here, a possible match. So I should know better.

We’ve been so pragmatic. I was literally just telling a friend 3 days ago that Wife and I are at peace about whatever happens, that a year into our two year contract with the agency we’ve already decided not to renew it if we don’t match. And it’s true, a weird calm has settled over us, such that we have contingency plans B, C, D, E, F, and so on. I don’t think most people are this methodical… maybe it’s just selection bias and the people who are open about this sort of thing are willing to be more… vulnerable.

I’ve been surprised I don’t see myself in their stories at all. I thought I would. I haven’t (yet) experienced the longing, desperation, and devastation that seems so prominent in people trying to “make a family”. I’ve never felt the heart-wrenching desperation and agony of losing a maybe-baby, or realizing I might not be able to make a family in the way I’d hoped.

Does that make me a bad person? Or a bad parent? Is it possible to want a child and at the same time not be desperate? To go into it thinking of all the ideal plans and not feel completely heartbroken when they don’t come to pass?

Last week I saw a “pregnancy announcement” on facebook from a couple who is “pregnant on paper” because they got approved by an adoption agency. I won’t lie, I felt bitter about it. It didn’t have anything to do with adopting a child, or jealousy of their already healthy baby/potential older sibling. I just couldn’t really believe or imagine the certainty that someone must feel to post something like that on social media. Maybe as a straight, white, god fearing couple, they know something I don’t. Maybe they’re naive. Or maybe I am.

Secondarily, at the back of my mind, I thought “Hahaha. haha. ha. ha. (insert sardonic laugh here). You are SO early into your journey. We aren’t even that far in, and that feels like ages ago, to me.

But now there’s this new mom, and this new baby.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited, hopeful, terrified. We have officially “matched” with her and are moving forward. We haven’t told anyone beyond immediate family, because we learned our lesson last time.

But the thing that gets me more than anything is that we talked about a name with the expectant mom. And we decided on a name, like a family. And now he is a “he” and he has a name.

I know now the thing I never knew before– that no matter what happens, even if we don’t end up adopting him, that will be his name. No other child of ours could ever have that name, because it is his. No matter what happens, we will always love him. We will always want what’s best for him, even if it is not us.

And wherever he goes in this world, that will be his name.

Where I live, we have been on “lockdown” for four weeks. It’s gonna be a lot longer. We are all very tired.

In my old life, I was a child psychologist. I specialized in diagnostic assessment and therapy for kids with anxiety, autism, ADHD, behavior problems, learning disabilities, you name it. I liked working with the under 10 set; the younger the better.

In my new life, I work/earn about 30% of what I was doing before, spend all day trying to do therapy over videoconferencing, finally getting around to listening to Harry Potter while doing housework, and spending a hell of a lot of “thoughts and prayers” hoping that my wife (who is “essential” and is still leaving the house every day) does not get sick.

Another thing I do is sarcastically mutter “What a time to be alive” about 234980934587923 times per day.

For those of you who do therapy, or are in therapy (and yay!!! for you; that is awesome 🙂 ), you’ve likely discovered that “telehealth” is a little weird and awkward. You may even hate it. But as you can also probably imagine, “doing telehealth” with the 8 and under crowd is pretty much impossible. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I do my best to try to emulate the “YouTubers” that my clients all love, and come up with creative ways to “play” via videochat. (Spoiler alert: I am not good at this.)

Despite my best efforts, I often feel useless.

It rarely feels like I’m helping much these days. (It’s a nice throwback to grad school when I felt incompetent about 85% of the time.) It feels like I just woke up and there are four moons and the sky is on fire and I just learned that I am a talking pineapple but I just keep trying to do therapy like everything is normal.

I will be honest, one of my therapeutic strengths is being a “fixer”. I know therapists are not supposed to do that. Or so the experts say (what do they know). But I work in a specialized subset of child psychology, with a very clear science-based approach to therapy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m empathetic, friendly, personable, and playful. I couldn’t do what I do without human connection, compassion, and a heavy dose of creativity. But what I *do* is solve problems. I take decades and decades of research and other science-y stuff, and I use it to fix things. I solve problems and I answer questions. (“That’s what I do. I drink and I know things.”)

….so this is a hard time for me.

Here are the sum total of questions I can answer right now:

1. your insurance will cover telehealth.
2. school will not be back in session until next year.
3. here is a list of the places in town which are well-stocked in wine and relatively free from crowds.

Questions I cannot answer:

1. Everything else.

Outside of the obvious (disease ecology, epidemiology, politics, economics) which everyone and their mom seems to have an opinion about now, I also cannot answer the questions I’m used to being able to answer:

• What is the likely outcome of this stressful situation?
• How will this impact my child’s learning? Their social development? Emotional development?
• How should I parent them best right now?
• Will my child be okay? Will we be okay?
• What do I do now?

Bypassing the fact that no one can ever really have the answers to these questions (existential life stuff, human existence, blah, blah blah), we are living in a time of no answers.

This is a real bummer for someone who is a fixer.

We are living in a broken time with no answers. And we are being asked to act as if life is normal, like some sort of macabre HBO drama (I’m talking the newer ones with dystopian or supernatural element).

But I know this is an act of denial. I hear the strain in the families I work with; I hear the strain my own voice.

Three weeks ago, I listened to Brene Brown’s new podcast Unlocking Us about “FFTs” (or “fucking first times”) and how horrible they are for all of us. On that day, I was at the end of my first “work from home” week. I was walking through the woods with my dog, feeling kinda peaceful about it in spite of everything. It felt like if we could just get through this FFT, things would be normal again.

Last week, I noticed people starting to drop the phrase “when we go back to normal” from their sentences.

There will be no “normal” again.

Three weeks ago, when I started “doing telehealth”, I believed what I told people– This is temporary. This is a band aid. (And because I’m a narcissist, I reminded myself that I’ve done telehealth before and I’m excellently talented, so I jumped into it with no anxiety whatsoever, aka: denial.)

Four weeks in, and it has been some of the hardest four weeks of my career. I had brutalizing weeks of predoctoral internship, exams that I failed and retook, a board exam that I took the week that my grandfather died when I felt like a zombie. I humblebrag about times I worked internationally and scooped up 3-inch long cockroaches with my bare hands, rode crammed in a shit-sack of a truck that kept breaking down for 37 hours to get to a place where I hoped I could help, held a woman’s hand as she let her 9th child die rather than have another C-section.

But this– this is hard.

It’s hard because when I sit in my blissfully climate-controlled and infection-free (knock on wood) home office talking to people on video all day, I’m looking at myself. My face looms large in the video screen. And outside of wondering why Zoom makes me look like I have so many chins, I look into the face of someone who can’t fix anything. Who has no answers.

I’m suddenly a fixer who can’t fix.

I want to say, oh, this is a lesson because all of those other times, I wasn’t really able to “fix” anything either. But it’s not really true. Yeah, it’s about gaining perspective, and realizing that all those times I was using my fancy tools and techniques to help people, I didn’t really need them. I was just helping by being human.

In all honesty, that’s bullshit.

Not that being human isn’t important. In fact, I think it is the single most important thing we can do in this life. But let’s face it, if all you needed was to talk to a good, kind, present human to fix your problems, your BFF should work just fine.

So now I’m left feeling helpless and unhelpful a lot of the time, without an anchor or a compass. But it occurs to me that for those of us in the helping profession, the most important thing we can do is just hold space. That’s what I do these days. I hold space and I provide some consistency for kids and I provide some sense of normalcy. And maybe 5 minutes of stress-free work time for their parents. And I have to believe that’s something. That it’s more than just playing hangman on Zoom for an hour. I have to believe that it helps, even if just a little bit.

That when a 13-year-old spends a full hour staring at me without saying much, but types

“i miss you”

in the chat box before we sign off, that’s something.

So whether you’re a parent or a therapist or a human of any kind, I have sad news: you can’t fix it. And you probably feel terrible about that. Which is okay. All we can do is be present, and hold space.

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and Terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” -Rainer Maria Rilke