the eelfang chronicles

Quick – write your auto-biography in only 6 words.

That’s the central concept behind a new book, “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure”. It’s an interesting test to try to summarize your existence in only six words. What is most important about who you are? How would you describe yourself to a stranger? What seems important to you today that wouldn’t fit in those six words?

Betsy and I had a full 5 pages to work with when we wrote our auto-biographies, and I’m still not sure if that made it easier or harder than having a mere 6 words. On one hand, there’s obviously much more detail that can be put in and you feel less compressed – on the other hand, it can quickly become an issue of putting in too many trees and therefore making it hard for your forest to be visible. My issue was that I tried too hard to make my biography into a story, and lost focus of the actual life I was trying to describe.

When I first started writing, I found myself focusing on trying to find a theme and a tight linear plot line to my life. I had to establish the main character in the first couple pages, introduce some supporting characters, and then quickly start bringing in some struggles, peak out with a major conflict, and then bring it back for a quick denouement to wrap everything up. Just talking about who I am as a person and what my life was like growing up – yawn. We need some explosions, or, barring those, at least some existential crises.

The only problem was that my life has been pretty darn good so far. As a normal human being, I’ve definitely had my share of bad days, or even bad months, but there really hasn’t been anything like a major disaster that caused me to take restock of my entire existence. So I exaggerated. I focused in on my senior year in college, which was a pretty stressful time in my life (trying to find a new job, losing control of my finances, confusing dating life, no involvement in church, death of a close relative), and stretched it out into a 4 page long odyssey through the darkest regions of the soul. A couple pages on the front end to talk about childhood and family, and throw in a couple paragraphs about Betsy at the end, and I had a short story, that, while certainly nothing remarkable, was at least tightly paced and capable of sustaining the reader’s interest.

I sent off the draft to our caseworker, and she let me down easy. “This is good,” she said, “but this doesn’t really seem to match up with what we’ve talked about in our sessions. Maybe I missed something, but this doesn’t reflect the Todd that I’ve gotten to know.” I was initially a bit stung, but then I went back and re-read what I had written. And she was absolutely right – it didn’t reflect the Todd that I’d gotten to know either.

I sat down, and re-wrote it. I was already 2 pages past the maximum length, and I wrote another 1 1/2 pages about my life with Betsy in the revision process, so I was forced to be brutal with the editing on the college-years section. I cut that section down from 4 pages to about 3 paragraphs, and now that I’ve done it, it was absolutely the right thing to do as far as painting an accurate picture of who I am. The most important thing in that process for me was to look at what I had written and compare it against who I was today (and what kind of father I’ll be in the future), and adjust the levels accordingly – turn up the knob on family, crank the “Betsy” knob, fade back the tough times, and blend everything together into a nice Todd mix.

The second revision is now in to our caseworker, and we’ll probably have to go back and forth on a few more edits before we’re done. But I’m feeling much more confident now that my 5 page biography will tell my real life story – “Lucky dork loves, eats and plays.”

Quick status update, in between more topic-specific posts:

Our checklist to get into the pool looks like this:

• Betsy and Todd each write auto-biographies, 3-5 pages. We’ve both completed these, and sent them off to our caseworker to be reviewed. We each got some feedback on our initial draft, revised it, and sent it back in. We haven’t yet heard back from our caseworker – in Todd’s case, it’s been over 3 weeks since he sent it in. We’re a little discouraged about that, but she is such a fantastically nice person that we’re giving her full benefit of the doubt that something major came up on one of her other cases. We’re going to start pushing more heavily for a response, though, se we can get the ball rolling.
• Write a one-page (including photo) “Dear Birthmother” letter. We’ve completed our first draft on this, and we’re pretty happy with it. We had our photo taken by our friend Mandy, and we’re trying to find a time to meet up with her to get a copy of it so we can integrate it into our letter and play around with the formatting. We’ll probably have to go back and forth a bit with our caseworker on drafts of this, too, but we haven’t sent in our first draft yet (giving her one thing at a time to handle).
• Compile a photo collage. We’ve identified all of the pictures we want to use, and we have the majority of them compiled. Todd is working on putting them together as an actual collage. We’ll show you a copy of the finished version when it’s done. If you happen to have a picture of Betsy and/or Todd hanging out with you or your family, we’d appreciate it if you sent a copy our way – while we’re in pretty good shape for pictures, having extras is always great. (Note: Heather’s flickr and Doug and Naomi’s website have been pretty thoroughly scoured, so no need to send any more pictures from those places.)

Once we get all of those things completed and have the drafts approved by our caseworker, we’ll be ready to go. Things are going a little slower than originally expected, but we’re hoping to be in the pool by Easter.

I’m planning on writing a longer post on each of these topics (an auto-biography post will be coming in the next 36 hours), but I figured a quick update might be nice.

When we started the adoption process, one of the questions that naturally popped up (along with closed vs open, domestic vs international, etc) was if we were open and ready to adopt transracially. And my considered-for-a-whole-20-seconds answer was, duh! of course we’re ready! Well, in the admirable and amazing way our agency has of doing everything, they make folks really consider what they think and put it to paper. One is encouraged to read specific books on transracial adoption and raising multiracial children, and talk to other parents who have adopted transracially.

Amidst all this reserach, I was driving home from work and listening to NPR. February 1st was the anniversary of the Woolworth’s Sit-In, so they asked one of the four men who participated to relate his experience. I was brought near tears by how scary that must have been, and how brave they were for doing it anyway. And I thought about how I’ve maybe been judged for having pink hair or wearing black, brown and navy blue in the same outfit, but never discriminated against in the way people of color were or are.

While race may not matter inside the four walls of your own house, it sadly does outside in the real world. The “ready to adopt transracially?” is really a number of questions rolled into one:

- are we as parents ready for the comments and assumptions people will make when we’re out with our child who may be of a different ethnicity than us? that we’re not their parents or that they’re not our child?

- are we prepared for dealing with the comments that people make to our child? will we be able to prepare our child with a healthy self-esteem to deal with and deflect such comments?

- can we step outside of our comfort zone to find resources for our child to grow into their ethnic identity?

- are we ready to deal with not only a) parenting, b) adoption, c) open adoption, d) open adoption of a child who may be of a different ethnicity, but e) all of the above?

It may be really challenging, scary, awkward, and life-stretching, but after much percolation (which I won’t go into at this time, but we’re happy to discuss), we think we’re ready for it. Carefully considered this time, the answer is still, “Yes. We’ll do our best.”