ever-fixed mark

An Early Intervention coordinator came by yesterday for a pre-visit, prior to Aitch’s developmental assessment. I suppose they send the advance team out to assess which assessments should be done at the assessment. I could not have scheduled it at a worse time. The night before, Aitch, Husband and I were on a 7:30 p.m. flight, returning from a long weekend away. We had chosen the flight based on Aitch’s bedtime, thinking he would be asleep before the landing gear was fully retracted. As it happened, we didn’t leave the tarmac until after 9:00, and Aitch was most definitely not asleep. He remained awake through most of the flight and during the entire ride from the airport, although he did go obligingly to sleep once his head hit his own (figurative) pillow. (Don’t flame me…the kid does not have a pillow in his crib.) Needless to say, the next morning we were all crabcakes with tartar sauce.

I briefed the coordinator on Aitch’s lack of sleep so she wouldn’t take any behavior anomalies amiss (ours or his). Luckily, with the arrival of the guest, Aitch switched from hair-trigger tantrum tired mode to practically delirious tired mode. He ran frequently to Husband (calling, “Mommy!”) and buried his face in the chair, the baby sign for “I actually want to go to bed.”

At one point he slid to the floor and began banging his head rhythmically against the bottom of the chair. I’ve taken enough developmental psych to know that this was classic self-stimulating behavior: sometimes harmless, sometimes indicative of a significant developmental disorder. It was the first time I’d ever seen him do it. He does plenty of other strange stuff, like grabbing the dog’s penis, and thrusting his pelvis back and forth when he’s tired, but he’s never banged his head.

“I swear that’s the first time he’s ever done that,” I said. I’m sure that’s the first time she’s ever heard a mother say that.

“Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh,” Aitch sang out about a half a dozen times. His “uh-oh” has improved tremendously; he used to say “uh-UH? uh-UH?” with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Husband dived under the couch to retrieve whatever Aitch had lost.

“I don’t think he will qualify for services,” the coordinator opined.

Husband arose, covered with dust bunnies. We had forgotten to give the housecleaners a key, so they had missed an appointment while we were away.

Maybe we’ll qualify for housekeeping services.

Other than those contretemps, the visit went pretty well. The coordinator was very straightforward and refreshingly non-crunchy. The only thing that put me off my stride a bit was the fact that Aitch had already been assigned a case number for social services, “so we can track him in the computer.” Now, we’re not exactly living off the grid here. We blog. We also make practically all our purchases online, including groceries, and our lives could be entirely reconstructed from our various hard drives. (But there are six of those; it would take them a long time.) Still, it concerned me a bit that Aitch is in “Mitt’s database,” on the radar. The coordinator assured me that the information was entirely confidential, protected by FERPA, an unfortunate acronym referring to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

I was not reassured. We all know how well HIPAA protects our privacy when the government feels like a waltz through our medical records. Sure enough, FERPA has plenty of holes.

After spending an entire morning putting together an environment for Aitch’s Thomas the Tank Engine and friends to frolic in, I find myself wasting too much damn time speculating about the isle of Sodor.

Where is it?

What are its chief exports?

Does Sodor have a book club, and if so, what are they reading?

Did Sodor send troops to Iraq?

If a reality TV show were set on Sodor, what would the objective be?

Is Sir Topham Hatt a baronet or a knight? If he were married, would his wife be known as Lady Hatt?

Finally, where does it exist on the time-space continuum? I mean, there are steam engines, and Sir Topham Hatt in a morning suit, and “village children,” but there’s also a helicopter. What gives?

After months of adamantly refusing to say “mama,” Aitch suddenly came out with a clear, perfectly articulated “Mommy.” It’s one of his best words, an early breakthrough from infantile babble to true human speech, and he uses it frequently and delightedly.

The trouble is that he calls both of us “Mommy.”

Whom do you think this embarrasses more–me or Husband? Me, already insecure about whether Aitch has accepted me as his “real mom,” or Husband, who has to endure being greeted as “Mommy!” across a crowded playground? We’re not really sure how to handle this turn of events. We’ve tried ignoring it, but the double “mommy” persists. We’ve tried correcting it, admonishing, “Daddy!” when Aitch uses the wrong moniker, but he simply repeats, “Mommy,” as though correcting us. We’ve tried “natural consequences”–I, and only I, respond to calls for Mommy. Finally, we’ve tried “rehearsal”–practicing the difference between “Mommy” and “Daddy” by asking Aitch to pat Mommy, or tickle Daddy, or give the toy to Mommy. Aitch gives every indication of understanding what we mean by Mommy and Daddy, but insists on his own meanings. Perverseness, stupidity, sense of humor? We’re not sure.

This isn’t the first concern we’ve had about Aitch’s language development. It seemed to us early on that he wasn’t as enthusiastic about communicating as we expected him to be. We tried sign language with him, thinking it would help him get across his wants and desires, but the only sign he imitated was “fan.” He did latch on to quite a few onomatopoeic words–animal noises, truck sounds, sniffing for “flower,” etc.–but he uses these steadfastly in lieu of the words they signify. We try to set a good example for him by using words instead of their sounds, but find ourselves inadvertently producing sentences like, “Look at the brrrm-brrrm and the ee-oo-ee-oo!” All in all, when we compared him to our friends’ children, he seemed…not drastically behind, but below average, in terms of the number and complexity of his utterances.

I know, I know–don’t compare, and don’t worry. So we didn’t. We answered our pediatrician’s questions about Aitch’s language; she agreed that there was probably no cause for concern, and gave us the number for Early Intervention. Since there was no cause for concern, we didn’t call. Our social worker, during the home study for our second adoption, asked how Aitch was doing language-wise; she agreed that Aitch would probably catch up eventually, but recommended Early Intervention to help him catch up more quickly. But since by this time his language was improving day by day, we didn’t call.

During our second homestudy meeting, our social worker asked whether we had called Early Intervention for Aitch yet. I was surprised; I thought we had closed the discussion, and instead I felt like a lazy mother who had not followed through on something important for her son. The social worker tried to reassure me about the value and professionalism of Early Intervention, none of which I doubted.

I struggled to explain why I did not want to call. It certainly wasn’t because of any stigma attached to getting early services–I’m hard-pressed to think of a child of my acquaintance who isn’t receiving Early Intervention (or, as one mother calls it, “free babysitting”). It was the stigma attached to the mother who is being too overprotective. I did not want to be that mother, the one who was always running to therapists suspecting autism or attachment disorder or serial killer tendencies or what have you. If I thought something were truly wrong, I would have no compunction about calling in whatever medical professionals were necessary to help my boy. But I did not want to waste state services–taking taxpayer-funded time away from children who really needed it–just to confirm my own suspicion that nothing was, in fact, wrong. I especially did not want to do so for no better reason than my social worker had (politely) bullied me into it.

So, the appointment’s scheduled for Tuesday morning. Yes, I am a hypocrite of the worst stripe. Is the stigma of being a neglectful mom far worse than the stigma of being an overprotective one? Perhaps. I like to think that my pediatrician convinced me, when we discussed it again at a recent appointment, by saying that I would learn a lot by watching the Early Intervention folks perform their assessment. And in talking to other adoptive moms, I’ve come to see the Early Intervention appointment as part of due diligence in adopting a child, much like the pediatrician appointment within 24 hours of arrival–probably not necessary, but certainly not harmful.

So here we go–my first contact with the Massachusetts social services system.

As I cruise the Holt and Bethany South Korea adoption message boards, nothing draws my eye like a post titled “Rude Comment from…”, usually detailing an ignorant, racist, or fertilist remark about adoption. (For example, see this recent thread about unbelievable comments from medical professionals; this Chez Miscarriage blog thread on drive-by mommies, while not related to adoption, had me glued to my computer for hours.) That probably reveals a number of unflattering aspects of my character, but I can’t help it. The faux pas are hilarious, and the comebacks, especially the belated ones, can be pithy and pointed. Occasionally a comment is truly hurtful to its target, but even then it’s not Schadenfreude that pulls me in, but rather the chance to summon a little righteous adoptive-mom indignation on the recipient’s behalf.

Husband and I don’t get too many rude comments about Aitch, our little bundle of joy from South Korea, now 19 months. Before we adopted Aitch, we practiced our parenting skills on Dog, an unusually beautiful specimen of Vizsla, and observations from the public on both dog and baby tend to follow the same line: “He’s so cute! How old is he? What breed/ethnicity is he?” From time to time we’ll bristle at something that seems to be mildly racist (“I hear they’re really smart”), only to realize that the remark concerned the dog, not the baby. For the record, the ratio of favorable dog comments to favorable baby comments is currently running 3 to 1, and no one has ever pulled his car over to exclaim over the baby, whereas that happens for the dog on a monthly basis.

We do get our share of dumb comments: for example, regarding Aitch at five months: “Does he speak Korean?” (“No, nor English. We’re thinking of having him tested.”) But so far, nothing blood-boiling. This is probably because we live in a small, crunchy, liberal, high-property-values-driving-out-all-the-real-people town in the commie, pinko, Godless, gay-marryin’ state of Massachusetts–which our esteemed president, I believe, disowned publicly during the presidential debates. (But before you heap scorn upon us, Fox News viewers, consider that we’re more socially stable and pay more taxes than our red-state brethren).

Said town has a high percentage of families created through adoption, and we CaucAsian families have our own version of the “Jeep wave.” The Jeep wave is a brief, casual, fingers-raised-from-the-steering-wheel wave that one Jeep owner gives another as they pass on the road. The CaucAsian version is a subtle nod that one white parent gives another as they pass with their Asian children. No hooting and hollering; no exchange of adoption stories; just an “I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s get down the block without embarrassing the hell out of our kids, shall we?”

So, hey. [Jeep wave]