Prayers for Our Pets: Prayer to Saint Anthony to Find What is Lost

St. Anthony, Please bring our Beulah back to us. She was lost on Monday November 21, while being walked in Griffith Park- she was last seen crossing Los Feliz BLVD determined to get home- she was hit by a car and rolled hard, but got up and kept running. She is tiny, strong in body and yet extra frail heart.
Please bring her home, please let us find each other- to love and care for each other and make the other always feel safe, loved and belonged to someone good. Beulah needs to help her deaf sister dog who languishes without her being her hearing aid. Our family is lost without her. Our baby needs her.

Making The Brochure of Us.

This is Kathleen’s first draft for our family resume and our 4 page photo-stocked brochure for potential birth mothers. It’s gonna be glossy and foldable. 

The brochure is for birth mothers to get a quick, clean glance at potential parents profiles... they can browse parents from a stack of brochures provided by the adoption agency. I am not kidding. We really do have to make a pamphlet of us.

Cover Page information- include the following basic information.

Age- Kathleen is 49 years YOUNG and has the Botox bruises to prove it! Andrew is her playful cougar pup, still getting hit on while grocery shopping (by men and women!!) at a graying yet purposeful, manfully erect and mature 46.

Ethnicity- Not much! We are what is globally considered Caucasian; both descended from generations of Irish/Scottish/English/German extremely white people. Our ethnicity can be best described as 50 SPF or higher.

Religion- Well thanks for asking, but no. Kathleen was formally educated like Jane Eyre was in a Catholic all girls school for what felt like decades, (she still gets sweaty when she sees nuns) and Andrew was given faith by Unitarian thought-nerds. Bet you can’t guess which one of us was molested at a church camp at the age of twelve!  Guess again!

Education Level- Tons and tons of useless education (Kathleen excels at free floating useless factoids extrapolated from reading magazines at the gym) while Andrew went on to score a Master’s Degree. Don’t ask in what. Just accept that we’re college educated but our degrees are benign footnotes in lives of struggle and hand to mouth existence. But we got lots and lots of creativity to shower our baby with! If you really want to know how educated we are just ask our creatively well-named pets!!  Pop culture references abound in our well appointed home. And books. We read em. Sometimes. We can read baby books to a baby, which is probably more than you can do, dear Birth Mother.

Occupation?! Glad you asked. Are you sitting down, because this might take a while.  We are both gainfully occupied doing a myriad of things for wealthy people while waiting for the above referenced creative college degrees to festoon us with jobs in our chosen crafts. Sure, now you’re going back up to re-read our ages. Yeah, maybe we should have given up years ago and become substitute teachers, but we didn’t.  And we aren’t defensive about this at all!!  We are super proud of all the skills we have and how well we take care of people. In fact, we are already so good at taking care of people for money that we now want to pay you, dear Birth Mother to let us take care of someone who actually NEEDS our help. Isn’t that just a cool awesome irony? But if you need us to nail down an exact occupation for you, fine- but you might want to look at that uncreative rigidity streak in your personality… it’s not very attractive. Kathleen is a writer who assists a successful children’s book author (free kid books!!) and Andrew is a Production Designer who works as a carpenter but can do lots of handyman-like things. And he fixes computers and cars. Just curious, Birth Mother and Birth Father if you know who he is- what’s your occupation? We’re not judging, we really just are curious.

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ABOUT US-  include when you met and married, and how you enjoy spending time together, hiking, biking, road trips, etc…

Dear Birth Mother- Are you still reading our brochure? Wow, you are a daring, adventuresome woman, but that’s what got you into this mess in the first place, isn’t it! I bet by now you’re wondering how we met!! Well, we met on account of our failed occupations- isn’t that super romantic?! He was back in graduate school, sporting a serious mid-life crisis soul patch, and Kathleen was recovering from her 45^th birthday, which also commemorated her five-year anniversary without a relationship. Kathleen was cleaning out a garage for a very successful female architect client and placed a drafting table for sale on Craigslist. Andrew answered the ad! As soon as Kathleen saw Andrew get out of his car (he was over an hour late, which is why we are seeking outside our gene pool for offspring) a voice in Kathleen’s head (another reason we are interested in seeking outside our gene pool!) said to her, “Oh, that’s your husband.”  Kathleen had the good sense to not tell Andrew this inner voice report and a week later they had their first date- and Andrew had the cutest anxiety attack. Flop sweating over smoked salmon. It was adorable. We bonded over panic attacks and good meds. He’s sober, she’s not! Can this marriage be saved!? Just kidding! We’re awesome! Four years later we made it official- with a big ass wedding- but that’s what credit cards are for!! Are you the lucky Birth Mother of our baby??? Play your cards right and call us back, Birth Mother!!

OUR HOME- physical description of your home, include number of bedrooms, describe the backyard, community, schools, near beach or parks…

We live in a charming 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom Craftsman cottage in Los Feliz, where the aging hipsters moisturize their fading, regrettable tattoos and baby slings are all the rage.  We are one block from Griffith Park, where we hike and play with our dogs everyday. We love being so close to nature- we haven’t had one coyote attack! Sure that one guy got bit that one time, but the park rangers killed like 9 coyotes, so that’ll teach those mangy bastards!! We only saw four rattlesnakes this summer!! Only one person has died in the park since we moved into our house, but she was Quentin Tarantino’s editor, which is very cool.  We have a lemon tree that makes great garnishes for cocktails. The dogs love pooping around our lemon tree. It’s good for the grass! We have a hot tub, which I know is much better for bathing newborns then the kitchen sink!  Our adorable Maine Coon cat Louise (stage 4 lymphoma) uses the dog door Andrew installed and does her kitty litter business outside, which we love! No more cleaning out kitty litter boxes!! Our wee dog Beulah has a strange predilection for cat poop, so we don’t even have to clean the cat poop! It’s the circle of life!  As for your back yard, Andrew’s car is not up on blocks presently, and we’ve gotten rid of almost all the unwanted furniture! Our kitchen is truly the heart of our home. Folks come over whether we invite them or not and we eat and drink and smoke things and talk all night and listen to music. We binge on gingerbread at 2am and then we get up and take the dogs to the park and swear we will never do that again! We live close to the dog park and the Silver Lake reservoir where more disciplined,annoying and anorexic people run barefoot. Don’t worry, Birth Mother, we don’t approve of barefoot running. We don’t approve of exercise at all.  We approve of sleep. So, keep the baby until he or she is sleeping at least 8 hours a night. Deal?

Adopting Parent Descriptions-  Have your spouse describe your personality characteristics, hobbies, strengths. Or describe yourself in your section. Use a heading that introduces each person, such as “Meet Lisa” or Introducing Lisa”. Be creative.

Be creative?  That’s easy for us! We breathe creativity!!! We shed creativity!  We’re still paying our creativity off, that’s how CREATIVE we are!! Since Andrew’s busy designing the look of our brochure, Kathleen’ll do the writing for the both of us!

“Inside Andrew”- Andrew is a full-blooded M-A-L-E!  He is a Pisces, which means it takes a lot to push his buttons, but Kathleen still pokes away! Speaking of poking, he’s quite the adventurer in bed, but Kathleen is a hypochondriac, so many nights find Andrew alone with the Suicide Girls website. Andrew is very sensitive, which Kathleen ascribes to him being a premature baby. Oh, and he was born prematurely, on top of everything else! He loves fixing things, when he can find them… and his favorite hobby is talking to Kathleen when he is in another room, which makes Kathleen think she’s going deaf! It’s so cute. And he’s sober! Andrew gave up drinking at the tender age of 21, when Kathleen was just ramping up!  He’s a handsome man, and children love him. Gay men love his ass. It’s furry!

“Inside Kathleen”- Kathleen is a generous to a fault, giving, loving, beautiful woman who pretty much stops traffic every time she crosses the street. Men weep at her face and women gnash their teeth in envy of her endless legs. Kathleen has more shoes than you and everyone in your family, Dear Birth Mother.  Kathleen pretends she’s a vegetarian and likes to think of herself as extremely fit, despite the sizing conspiracies that about in fashion. Kathleen talks just enough and never interrupts anyone. She is really successful inside her head and thinks she has a great singing voice. And she hates compliments.

PAGE 4- OUR FAMILY- describe your family values, how you spend family time, holidays, if you go to church, cultural traditions-

Kathleen and Andrew are chock-a-block full of family values! Our dog is deaf and that rocks because we can call her a crazy bitch and she can’t hear us and get hurt feelings.  Our values include staying in for days at a time, nothing that includes church, not wearing make up if we can help it, and lots of pagan celebrating!! Andrew’s part Canadian and we celebrate bleeding Canada of its eligible man populations.  We spend family time trying to remember what we did last night and looking for things in Andrew’s man cave.  On weekends we chase after our deaf dog because she loves stealing our clothes and leaving them all over the yard. Cultural traditions include interpretative dances based the Blue Book, the bible of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Kathleen has been kicked out of four book clubs and started her own club, for writers oozing success and talent and creativity, which Kathleen then tries to destroy. We do go to our local church when they have the rummage sale, but we wait until late on the second day when the prices are SLASHED.

OUR THOUGHTS ON PARENTING - include your outlook on parenting and your experience with children either as an aunt or uncle, mentor, parent, coach, volunteer…

Kathleen and Andrew love kids, especially expensive ones!  We are looking for a unique hybrid, multiethnic baby that will make us the envy of all the other adoptive parents in LA. We want to give our child every advantage in life, and Los Angeles is a very competitive town… so we really want that elusive edge- a deaf, blue eyed Mongolian baby that comes with its own yak herd and can sign in Mongolian and English would be awesome. We’d even adapt a nomadic lifestyle and make our own yurt- eco-consciously, of course!! Everyone else in LA would be so jealous. We would even be willing to learn the cultural aspects of our/your baby- so if you are white and from Alabama, we’ll join the Klan!  If you are black and from Alabama, we’ll learn how to cook pig feet!  We love kids and we really love the idea of raising someone else’s kid and seeing how much of our neurosis we can pass on just through endless contact and relentless rearing. We rock. Pick us, Birth Mother, you won’t be sorry. Until we raise the next Steve Jobs, then you’ll be very, very sorry… but we’ll change our numbers as soon as we get your kid. So there!

Kiss My Ass, Workshops.

If they gave out As for Aggravation level, I'd be getting an Asian A, which is to say the highest A available on the American Grading Chart- which I just made up to sound like something official. 

My ginger freckled Irish fury has been unmatched- not even Colleen Dewhurst or Elaine Stritch or Shirley MacClaine could do indignant, wordy rage better than me, ever since the first adoption check cleared. 

Oh, I've smiled through it all, I nodded, I asked semi-pertinent questions, I even shared deep thoughts and memories I was completely making up- I was an utter trooper- so good at all the SEMINARS, WORKSHOPS and CLASSES that adoption agencies make you do. Transracial Parenting. Parenting workshop. Adoption and You. Seven hours at a stretch in an airless, flourescent-lit room in Culver City. And we have to pay for the priviledge of well meaning social workers to rip the heart out of our precious Saturdays. 9am class in Culver City? All day Saturday? To explore transracial adoption? Smile and nod and go and crack jokes, make small talk and be as bitter as you want on the inside. That's how I roll.

But workshop. I want workshop to be killed as a word unless one is actually describing a shop filled with tools and the smell of wood chips. If there are no half made puppets or unstrung guitars hanging from the ceiling and goggles lying about-- it's not a workshop. It's an airless room with florescent lighting and styrofoam cups.


Since we went through the MAPP training of three months of weekly classes (also in Culver City, which is convenient to NOWHERE unless you call Mar Vista home. And we don't.) when we entered the Foster-To-Adopt scene back in 2010 I immediately believe we should be allowed to skip any and all classes resembling a do-over. We did it. We got the three sets of fingerprints, the TB tests, the CPR and First Aid training so we don't have to do any of that again, right? Wrong.


Of course the morning of the first class I wake up feeling very unwell. I always get sick when I don't want to do something. I refused the bagels they set out to make us all feel taken care of, because I wanted to feel really put out. The other couples all broke my heart- I really related to everyone else's grief at not being able to become parents for free. And there was a Hispanic couple, and a Middle Eastern looking woman and a seemingly white man who was half Mexican so we all shared hilarious and not so hilarious stories about being racially profiled.


Transracial Parenting Class started out pretty dull, earnest and obvious. My resentment glowed like a deep sunburn, especially as I believe I am the embodiment of racial understanding.  I never see skin color, except for the inadequacies of my own rashy rice paper skin as compared to the gorgeous skin of basically everyone else in Los Angeles. Andrew and I are as white as whites can be without being albinos but we are secure in our transracialness. At least we were until the film strip started. 


The film was a documentary interviewing a smattering of multi-ethnic adopted children of white parents. They ranged in ethnicity from Native American, to Vietnamese, to African American and they all had stories of the moment they realized they were different from their super white parents and other siblings. In almost every instance, the white parents kinda blew it. One African American man was fairly blithe and casual about having white parents and for liking Pearl Jam. But he wasn't in the documentary that much. 

Much, much more film was burned on two particular adults who were articulate and so fucking fury-filled in their articulation about how baffled they were to find themselves the one black child in an all white Swedish town in Minnesota, for example. This very dark skinned girl, who spoke about growing up knowing more about lutefisk and Swedish words for snow then anything about her clearly obvious cultural identity said that adoptive parents should ask themselves, "Why are you adopting outside your race? Are you trying to save someone or make some sort of color-blind statement?" In most cases the children grew up to escape their adopted families and dive into their cultures of birth, preferring their own race to that of their 'parents'.

I was shell shocked. I didn't have an answer as to why I was open to transracial parenting, other than wanting to adopt anyone who needs a home. Hell, I have two adopted siblings, an adopted step-sibling and an adopted cousin- and as far as I knew everyone was fine. But then I had to admit I never even thought to ask my cousin or my step sister how they felt being Korean and adopted into white families. I just assumed they were fine and that I wasn't a racist because I never looked at them as different from me.

When I dug deeper as to why I was open (even excited) to a mixed race baby, it was more than for a baby with much more useful skin and hair than mine. It's more than just looking forward to saving money on sunblock.  And I'm not afraid of us being different, we'd just be a family with a story. And we live in Los Angeles. How hard could it be to be a culturally diverse family here?! In Los Feliz we'd be downright popular with our transracial family.  

But what happens when you travel with an other-race baby? Road trips? Questions and stares will abound. I remained undeterred in my thinking but learned how much being the color of the until-now dominant race has made my life easier in ways I will never truly fathom.  So how hard would I ever know it could be for my own child? I could only imagine what must have felt like a parental smack in the face by the African American child who was pissed at me for 'rescuing' her from her own people.


The social worker leading the group then showed us the rest of the documentary, where they re-visited the adopted mixed race kids ten years later. The articulate African American guy was there and so was the angry African American woman with the lutefisk exposure. They had definitely simmered down in the ensuing years. They had made peace with their parents and were grateful for the lives and the educations they had received.  What stuck with me was when he said, "As soon as you adopt a mixed race baby, you are no longer a white family. You are a mixed race family." I was down with that, and appreciated learning it.  My sore throat throbbed with knowledge.


Then there was a game. Games led by Social Workers during workshops are not fun games. Don't let them lull you into a false sense of gaming security. We each got a clear plastic cup and a box of beads- each color of bead was assigned a race- African American, Native American, Asian, White and Hispanic. We were read a series of questions and had to place a correspondingly colored bead in the cup. What is the color of the people you work with? What is the color of your boss? Who are your favorite authors? What color are your neighbors? What color is your dentist? What color is your hairdresser? What color is your best friend? What color are the stars of your favorite TV shows? What color is your favorite movie star? What color is your favorite musician? The point was made. My cup was like tapioca pudding with one yellow, one black and 2 brown raisins in it. Shameful. Harrowing. Gut churning. Depressing. True.


Then we had to talk about how we'd incorporate the race of our child into our lives. Shopping in markets that cater to their culture, going to barber shops for their kind of hair, their culture's language, churches, festivals, restaurants- my betrothed Canada brightened at the idea of learning new foods to cook, or places to explore. We all shared our stories and laughed and none of us made dates to get together, which I was particularly thankful for.


At the very end of class we were all given papers to sign (or not) which would let the Adoption Agency and lawyer know that we had changed our minds about transracial adoption. 


We looked at each other- deep, well-meaning white folk looks- and we didn't sign. We vowed to make more friends of other ethnicities and then we drove to San Fransisco to go to a concert where only white people sang. Except for Carlos Santana. He was the one brown bead in our all-white cup. We're not going to workshop that.