Do any of you give your children an allowance? Have you cut it since the economic downturn? The Bakersfield Californian would like to interview you. (661) 395-7372.

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The context for this is my 3-year-old son is about 50 percent potty trained. He hasn't had a bowel movement in his diaper for at least six months. All our "accidents" are urine. I use quotes because he knows darn well how to go, but he isn't the least bit bothered by sitting in pee all day and arbitrarily decides sometimes that it's simply not worth the trip. So this morning, when I discovered feces in his diaper, I was REALLY annoyed and made a big production of scolding and fussing after I got him all cleaned up.

ME:  Go stand in a corner!

J.  Why?

ME:  Because you went boo boo in the diaper and you know better.

J. (folding arms)  Hmmmf. I'm mad at you.

ME:  Fine. You still have to stand in the corner.

J. I'm telling Auntie.

ME: You can tell Auntie and Uncle and Granny and anybody else you want. They'll all be really disappointed in you. And Auntie would make you stand in a corner, too. Uncle might even whup you.

J.  (pondering the whupping a moment, then a lightbulb goes off over his head and he points to the clock, which reads 7 a.m.) No call Auntie. Auntie sleep.

Then he dutifully served his sentence in the corner.

A few hours later, he had to go again and this time went to the toilet. I think he must have put half a roll of toilet paper in there along with his personal deposit. The toilet is now stuffed up. It overflowed when he flushed. I poured a bottle of Drano in there and will call a plumber in the morning if it isn't clear by then.

GRRRRRR!!!!!

I thoroughly enjoy my brief window of being all but worshipped by my children. I am all powerful, capable of righting any wrong and healing any wound.

I remember the exact moment I lost this magic sense of wonder about my father. I was maybe 7 or 8, and some small appliance had broken and he couldn't fix it. My dad was pretty handy, and up until that moment I thought he could fix anything. When he threw up his hands on this project, I blinked with disbelief. Could it be he was...gasp!...merely human? Capable of failure?  The revelation was genuinely shocking.

But my 3-year-old still thinks I am so much more than I am.

At lunch the other day, he protested the meal of the day. It was nasty, he declared, and folded his arms over the bowl.

"No it's not," I said. "Eat."

J. shook his head emphatically. "It is," he insisted. "Look."

He proceeded to shovel a bite into his mouth, screwed up his face in disgust, and then looked at me, palms up and shoulders shrugged.  "See?"

"It's fine and I want you to eat your lunch," I said.

J. was incredulous. "No, look!" he said, and took another bite, then shuddered. "See?"

It took me a minute to realize J. was certain he had proved his point because he thought I could taste what he was chewing. Surely if he was grossed out by what was in his mouth, I must somehow have been able to psychicly connect to his tastebuds to feel what he felt and taste what he tasted.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I don't have that particular psychic mom vibe. I do, however, have a soft heart, so I gave him an apple and excused him from the table.

I moved to Bakersfield to live with my mother and take advantage of free child care for a couple years until my 3-year-old is in school. Having mostly lived in big cities, it's been a culture shock. I didn't think things could get any weirder, but they have.

On my way home from K.'s weekly gymnastics class, I passed the Cal State Bakersfield campus and discovered they were hosting this big Relay for Life race and festival to raise money for breast cancer research.

Good cause, and we had nothing better to do, so I stopped. We ate, played carnival games, blah blah blah.

At one booth they were doing face painting for a dollar, a service advertised chiefly by the completely bald man sporting, on the back of his head, a painted pink ribbon over the slogan "Save the ta tas." K. got a butterfly painted on her cheek.

J. desperately needed a nap, so we cut the festivities short about 1 pm.

Two hours later, I woke J. and took the kids out into the backyard, which was a novel experience for them because my mother has a pool with no fence, so the kids are under strict orders to NEVER go back there unless an adult is out there with them.

Usually that's my mother, but I had to go out with them today because my mom works weekends. It was the first time, sadly, I've spent any real time back there.

Not 30 minutes into a makeshift baseball game with the extra thick, kid-sized plastic bat and whiffle ball, I hear rustling in the trees that separate our house from our right-side neighbor. I narrow my eyes and see something black hopping around the branches over the fence, and it's way too big to be a raven or crow. Only when the thing landed beside the pool did I realize it was a chicken.

An actual, live chicken.

Now, I spent the first half of my childhood in Chicago, and even as a teenager in Albuquerque we were in a very urban area, so my experience with chickens is pretty much limited to zoos and school field trips to farms. I have never, in my 41 years on this earth, had a chicken casually plop into my yard.

I stood there, dumbfounded, while the children shrieked with delight. It occurred to me that my mother had mentioned something about one of her neighbors having chickens. They are evidently very polite creatures. I've been here over a month and hadn't ever seen or heard one.

The chicken was quite comfortable around people. The sight of my children jumping up and down screaming and pointing didn't alarm her one bit. She just toured the edges of the yard, scratching for...food?  What do chickens eat, anyway?

She didn't so much as glance at the rotting lemons that had fallen from my mother's lemon trees, so I guess they're not big fruit fans.

But that got me thinking that we really ought to either eat the lemons or pitch them, since rotting lemons don't look so hot after a while. So I grabbed a garbage bag and started collecting lemons in various stages of decay off the ground. That's when I spotted the other chicken.

The dead one.

Apparently the poor slob had been there a while. It was pretty much just a mound of feathers with some claws sticking out. It took me a minute to figure out what it was. At first I thought it was a pile of rags.

Dead chickens, I would think, are even more of a health hazard than rotting lemons. But I was not about to touch the thing with my bare hand. CNN sound bites about avian flu, West Nile virus and other diseases flashed through my mind.

For a fraction of a second I considered leaving it there. After all, it had been resting peacefully for at least a month or two, from the look of it. It wasn't MY chicken. It wasn't even my yard, technically. But then I decided that if one is to live off of one's mother without paying rent, removing a dead chicken now and then is the least one can do. So I donned rubber dishwashing gloves and grabbed a dustpan from the garage and deposited the thing in the garbage bag with the lemons.

The bag now sits on the side of the house awaiting trash day, which is three days from now.

The kids have been down for the night for over an hour and there is still clucking in the backyard as I write this. I wish our uninvited guest a long, healthy life, and strong wings with which to find her way over the fence again, cuz I've met my monthly quota for carrying chickens.

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My daughter finally lost her baby teeth today. First time. Two came out the same day.

This would have been an event even if a small crisis had not made this particular rite of passage critical. K. is my oldest, so it's my first time ever doing the whole tooth fairy thing. I've got a little treasure box for the one tooth K.'s kindergarten teacher was thoughtful enough to save for me. The other one is, presumably, somewhere out on the playground.

But what made this even more special was...well...check out the picture.

As you can see, for the last month or so, my daughter has had TWO rows of bottom front teeth. The baby teeth weren't budging and the adult teeth were ready to come up, so they just poked through where they could.

Remember the movie "Alien," when the drooling space monster hovers over Sigourney Weaver, opening his mouth to reveal another mouth inside?

That was my K.

I totally freaked out when I first noticed this, but the dentist assured me this happens all the time, and the permanent teeth eventually would manauver themselves into the proper place once the baby teeth were out of the way. No braces necessary.

For now, though, K.'s got a pretty weird smile. Two gaping, bloody holes in front of two displaced, oversized adult teeth.

How weird is that?

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Reprinted from my journal, Wednesday, September 13, 2006:

I have a son.

My 19-month-old foster son's parents showed up to court two hours late yesterday. It was a hearing on terminating parental rights. Their public defenders advised them that they had a weak case and would probably lose. If that happened, the judge would surely order a closed adoption. If they signed over their son voluntarily, though, there was a chance to continue contact, because I had previously said I was OK with that, under certain conditions. So, reluctantly, they signed.

I've been through this once before, with my 4-year-old daughter. My elation at impending motherhood is always tempered on such occasions. Unlike the biological mother who can jump for joy upon seeing that plus sign on the pregnancy test, the foster-to-adopt mother knows that at the end of the day, her gain is someone else's horribly tragic loss. My foster son is only mine because two drug addicts tried their hardest to get their lives together, but couldn't manage to stay clean, employed and in stable housing.

When my adoption is finalized some time later this year, I will have two children whose parents are lost to addiction. There are countless more "drug orphans" in the world who will never find permanent, reliable families.

So I am both happy and sad today. Happy that I can share my home and my heart with two delightful children who mean the world to me. Sad, as a black woman, to see still more impoverished African-Americans join the nameless, faceless ranks of the doomed. Unlike many adoptive parents who worry about their children searching for birth families as adults, I can rest easy. My children's respective parents will probably be dead before my kids are old enough to look.

I've been fostering now for five years, and I'm sometimes struck by how "normal" the birth parents look in cases where the kids were removed because of drugs. It would be so comforting if they were all toothless, dirty and ignorant, which they are, occasionally. In those instances, I can delude myself briefly that we educated, middle class folks are immune. But for every one of those, there are some who defy stereotypes. Bright people with so much potential, if only they could break free. All races, ages and incomes. They're our friends. Our neighbors. Our relatives.

So there will be no jumping up and down, pumping my fist in the air or other overt celebration in the first few days of my little family's expansion. Just somber reflection.

Last night when my 4-year-old and I said our prayers at bed time, I told her to ask G-d to bless her "tummy mommy," and her brother's parents, as well.

She obediently asked G-d to bless them all, and I truly hope S/He will.

_______

Reprinted from my journal, Saturday, June 09, 2007

Mine, mine all mine!!!

My 2-year-old foster son's adoption will finalize on Thursday. I can't wait.

I know my adoption isn't in jeopardy anymore, but it will be a huge relief to have the burden of knowing a caseworker could snatch him at any moment off my shoulders. I really don't trust the system at all anymore. I just want him to be mine forever. Period.

Sometimes when I'm watching J. play, my heart swells with so much love that it feels like it will burst, and I just have to pick him up and squeeze him. I like to lean in close and whisper, "Mama loves you," in his ear. Every time I do it, he giggles because it tickles, then offers me the other ear. It's a precious little moment. One day he'll be an aloof teenager, far less affectionate, but as a toddler he hugs  and kisses with so much unabashed adoration, and each hug is priceless.

I've been taking a lot of objective looks at J. this week, as if seeing him for the first time. He's truly a toddler now. Not the infant who came to me a year and a half ago. His nose isn't as flat. His face is thinning out. He's, if not tall, at least taller. And his speech, at last, has come. It's still not where it needs to be, but we can have actual conversations now. He says two- and three-word phrases, and I almost never have to guess why he's crying. He can tell me.

I got J. a haircut today. My daughter had a birthday party to go to, so we had two whole hours to ourselves. I'm supposed to be cutting back on expenses as I prepare for my foster parent subsidy to go away. A haircut was a real indulgence, not really justifiable in the single mom budget. I own clippers and could have cut it, myself. But on the day J. goes to court to become my son legally, I wanted him to have a professional haircut. It looks so much better when a pro does it.  I always cut it uneven, and I can't do that straight buzz to shape the hairline like they do.

I told the hair stylist why we were there, and she asked me J.'s name so she could keep him in her prayers. Then she offered that she loves children, but would never be able to adopt. She said she "got in trouble, once," which I assume meant she's got an arrest record. They check for that as part of the home study.  A felon  wouldn't be approved.

Being a foster parent has really opened my eyes. I truly have led a sheltered life. I grew up poor and knew a few kids who got in minor scrapes with the law here and there, but my parents were careful to keep my sister and I away from serious, hard core thugs. And yet, as a middle-aged, white collar professional, I seem to encounter ex-cons all the time. Each time it happens, I'm a little startled.

I don't know what that hair stylist's story was, but I guess she's landed on her feet. She's got a job, after all. A job that requires a degree from a beauty school. And I suppose I can deduce she's got G-d in her life, since she offered to pray for my son.  There are still happy endings.

It was thoughtful of that lady to say she'd keep my son in her prayers. I'll keep her in mine, too.

"My son."  I sure like the way that sounds.


 

At a minor league baseball game recently, I was trying to explain the basics of the game to my 5-year-old daughter.

See those guys in the blue? They're the visiting team.  The ones in the white, that's the home team. We're rooting for them.

My daughter surveyed the multiracial players warming up on the field and scrunched up her little brown face in confusion.

"We're rooting for the white people?"