why couldn't she keep me?

This morning, my little boy turned 9. Birthdays are a traditional moment for parents all over the world to get reflective and nostalgic. You look back and start asking yourself the questions – 'how did he get so big?' and – 'where did the time go?'

I was having one of those mornings today. But the stories I shared with my kids weren’t typical. Because my kids were both adopted.

I have no labor stories to share. I never felt them move for the first time. I never had a craving. I didn’t get to struggle physically to bring them into the world.

But somebody did.

So this morning, when my son asked me to tell him about when he was born, I got to talk to him about his tummy mummy.

My boys have known from day one all about their tummy mummy. They know her name and her face, they visit with her when we can meet up in Colorado. We’ve spent years sending emails and pictures. I keep her updated on Facebook, so she can see how they’re doing, and that they’re happy. We brought her out for my son’s baptism last year when he turned 8. It was one of the sweetest moments of our lives, to have all the parts of my sons’ family together in one place.

So I told Kaalam today, all about the middle of the night trip to the hospital to see him come into the world. I told him about how beautiful he was. I talked about the three days he got to spend at the hospital with his tummy mummy and her family and how much he was loved by everyone. I told Xander about driving out like madmen from California to Colorado on his due date, scared we’d miss his birth. Then how we sat around at Grandma’s house for two weeks waiting for him to finally come. We told him about the parade of visitors who came to the hospital to see him – her family, our family, and so many friends. The nurses weren’t sure what to do with the genial family atmosphere. I suspect it wasn’t entirely typical for adoptions.

But mostly, I got to tell my boys how much they are loved. And they always have been. By us, but first, by their birthmother.

Then Kaalam asked the question I knew for years was eventually going to come- ‘why couldn’t she keep me?’

So before school this morning, we got to talk about Roni. She loved and still loves her children. I see it in the way she looks at them. I saw it in the heartbreak she experienced when she first said goodbye. Giving away a child is not taking the easy way out. It’s the hardest, most loving, and most self-sacrificing thing a young teen mother can do.

So I tried to explain the nine year old version of Roni’s situation to my son this morning, and he seemed to understand. We focused on how much she loves him. The older he gets, the more we’ll be able to discuss, and I hope, the more he’ll be able to understand. And someday, he might take his questions straight to her. I hope that day is a good one.

So today, I’m feeling nostalgic. But I’m also feeling grateful. I didn’t get to feel my baby’s kick. But I got to hold their birthmother’s hand. And I got to know firsthand that my kids are loved, always have been, and always will be.

Happy birthday, Kaalam. Nine is going to be a great year!

Living in a foreign country is weird

Living in a foreign country is weird.

You go about your day. Your house is all set up to look just like it would back home. The compound is filled with the English language and for the most part, everyone wears familiar clothing and has familiar traditions and habits. There’s variance to that of course, but nothing is so unfamiliar as to seem strange.

You take the bus to the mall, and you shop at H&M, The Body Shop, and Victoria’s Secret. All the women at the mall are wearing black, and a good number of them have their faces fully covered, but you get used to that pretty quickly. It stops being something that you notice. You do your grocery shopping at a real grocery store, set up just like one back home, with a deli and bakery and everything.
And with all this, you get used to just going about your day, and you forget to notice that you aren’t from here. 

Then all at once, the world you haven’t been looking at so closely comes into focus. There’s a man squatting on top of a semi-truck in a dust storm, wearing Pakistani clothing. He’s tying down the top of his load with strips of cardboard. There’s a group of men wearing thobes and keffiyeh (head scarves) haggling over the price of oranges and herbs being sold off the back of a pickup truck and you can’t understand a single word. You pull up at a red light next to a bus with a strip of beaded tassels framing the window. The Arabic script on the store fronts comes into focus. You notice the mosque at the entrance to your compound. You see the blue tile work and the rounded steeple and the crescent moon for the first time in days.

And all of it adds to up to the sudden and shocking realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore. It’s a surprise every single time it happens. You live in the Middle East, and you wonder, what am I doing here? This can’t be real. I’m not the sort of person who lives in the Middle East, am I?

The answer is yes. You can see the world around you so clearly for the few minutes that this sensation lasts. You can see every difference, every foreign object, and piece of clothing. And it’s all so real.

You turn to your husband and ask, “Are we really here?”

Then the sensation passes and you go back to the compound and hang out with your English speaking friends and clean your house and grocery shop and visit the mall.

It’s another week or two before you have another moment of really remembering where you are, and it’s a shock all over again.

Every. Single. Time.

Tomorrow is a good day for a new start

Tomorrow is NaNoWriMo. (That's National Novel Writing Month, if you don't happen to already know)

I’m particularly excited about it this year.

I’ve landed in Saudi, and I’m finally starting to feel settled. The household has been set up and is starting to flow the way that it should. Brandon’s MBA is done and is no longer swallowing our lives whole like it has for the past two years. In the next week, I’ll be arranging a housekeeper to come in twice a week and do everything for me from scrubbing toilets to washing and folding all of my laundry.

But the very most exciting thing? The boys start school tomorrow.

For the first time in eight years, I will have 7 ½ hours a day to myself without interruption, five days a week.

I will be able to go exercise without arranging a babysitter. I will be able to leave my house without having to hurry anybody up into their shoes or their coat. I will be able to play my guitar without having to fight off little hands. I will be able to make salad for lunch and not hear a single whining complaint from anybody. 

I will be able to think in a straight line, and then go on, and think some more.

I love my kids, but they are a handful. And that’s putting it mildly. They are good boys but socially, they are both extroverts. My oldest especially. He has absolutely no idea what to do with himself in an empty room alone, except to find somebody to be with. It’s painful to him to not spend the day at another person’s side constantly, constantly interacting.

I, however, am quite the opposite of that. I relish solitude. I long for quiet hours and peaceful, silent, unoccupied space. I’ve always been that way.

When I was in elementary school, I used to climb onto the garage roof just to get away from the constant flow and noise of people in my house. I was the second oldest of six children. Five of us were born in five years, one after the other, after the other. There was always a lot of flow and noise. I used to climb on the roof and tell myself stories for hours. It was the ultimate escape up there, with nothing but the clouds and the silence to keep me company.

Tomorrow, I’m going to miss my kids. My little one loves crafts and will sit and color with me all day long. My oldest is funny and has discovered that he’s nearly big enough to wrestle me to the ground. We wrestle a lot.

But having them both in full day school is going to be like getting my garage roof back. I’m going to have hours to myself again to stare at the clouds and dream of hero’s and battles and far off lands, and I’ll have all the time in the world to get it all onto paper. 

I’ve got a Writers of the Future win beneath my belt. I’ve got my kids off to school. I’ve got a housekeeper doing my laundry.

At this point, if I don’t start writing, there aren’t a whole lot of excuses left to hide behind.

Tomorrow I am going to start writing. I’m going to produce novels and short stories, and I’m going to see what I can sell, and learn from what I can’t.

Tomorrow is the day that my career starts.

12 Things I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea

I’ve been debating for a while now, how best to use my blog. My life is fairly unstable at the moment. We’ve moved to the other side of the planet, and my boys still aren't registered in school. So I have two big fiery balls of energy racing, bored through my only writing space for about 12 hours a day. This, while I also attempt to relearn to cook with a range of ingredients I’ve never heard of before. It’s been a long process to figure out what I can find and what has to be made from scratch and what can be learned and what has to be lived without. I also have to learn at least enough of a new language to be able to maneuver my new city. And set up a household, not being able to find half of what I’m used to living with. And all this after probably the most exhausting six-month period of my married life. I feel as though I’m relearning how to live. It’s a good thing I get the occasional adventure on the weekends.

So I haven’t been writing all that much in the past several months, which means that I haven’t felt like I had that much to write about here either. But I have been learning, and note-taking and storing away for later.

I remembered this weekend that the whole reason I agreed to come here was to learn and to write. So that’s what this blog is going to be. It’s going to be a place for sharing the things that I am learning.
With that in mind, here is a list of things that I learned while snorkeling in the Red Sea. Some of these will end up in stories someday. Some of these will not. All of it has been incredible to experience.

1.    The Djinn – you may know them better by the name of Genie.

We had a wonderful Saudi host named Zuhair, who was more than happy to talk to me about legends, stories, belief, and superstitions.

According to Muslim belief, each time a person is born, their very own Djinn is also born. It's your own personal Djinn. Unlike humans, which are temporary, djinn live forever. So the world is positively filled with them. But while you are alive, the two of you are connected. That feeling you get when you suddenly shiver with fear, and you don’t know why? Your Djinn has seen something that you have not, and you can sense it through them. They also are the conduit of bad dreams and dark thoughts. But they are not necessarily evil. They, like humans, are good, bad or neutral. But they do tend to be tricksters.

A person may be born into a certain religion, but your Djinn does not necessarily share your same beliefs. They may have been born Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or any other religion. Mohamed is famous for having converted his Djinn to Islam. Zuhair tells me that it’s a story that’s written in the Koran. It was one of the miracles that Mohamed performed as a prophet. Not having read the Koran, I’m going to take his word for it.

2.    It turns out I’m not afraid to swim in water that I can see through, even deep water.
I’ve had a lifelong fear of deep water, so I was nervous about this whole snorkeling thing. I’ve even had swimming pools freak me out if I couldn’t touch the bottom. But the waters of the Red Sea are extremely salty, so first off I was ridiculously buoyant. The boys didn’t need lifejackets. If they got tired, they just lay back and rested. They couldn’t sink if they tried. And they did try.

But I was still pretty nervous getting in. We started in an area about 3 meters deep. It wasn’t that deep really, but there are sharks in the Red Sea, and I couldn’t touch the bottom. I started hyperventilating the moment Kaalam shoved me off the side of the boat and into the water. (Yeah, he’s that kid!)

Brandon saw me starting to panic and told me just to stick my face in, look around. I wasn’t convinced, but I obeyed, and the world that opened up was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The coral was brilliant red and purple and yellow, and there were schools of tiny, colorful fish everywhere. There are some sights in the world that are just too beautiful to be afraid of. I spent hours in the water and never wanted to go home. We’ll be starting scuba certification soon. I can’t wait!

3.    I desperately need a GoPro camera.

4.    Zuhair fished for most of the trip. He’s an avid fisherman and shared several fishing tips with us as well. I know nothing about fishing, so I have no way of dissecting truth from lore, but I love the thought process that surrounds it all.

Never expose caught fish to the moonlight. They will go bad immediately. If you go fishing at night, choose only the darkest nights. When the moon is shining the fish see it and swim deep to get away from the light, so you won’t catch anything. But if there is any moonlight in the sky, you have to cover the fish with a blanket or your catch won’t make it home.

He says his blanket has wrapped up his family and his fish, and it all smells the same. It’s the best blanket he’s ever owned.

Fish should always die out of the water, never in.

The Red Sea fish all look like something that belongs in an aquarium. But they’re yummy anyway.
 

5.    At 3 meters deep, a teapot looks an awful lot like a sea turtle until the boat comes to a stop and the waves settle down. But it still makes an amazing treasure for an 8-year-old boy.

6.    Flat fish are a result of the parting of the Red Sea.

There is a kind of flat fish, with both its eyes on the same side of its head. They were in the way when Moses parted the Red Sea and the weird, flat shape of them is the result.

7.    Kites will fly really well off a boat. Right up until they invert and end up in the water. Once wet, they will not fly.

8.    It’s possible to play with a whale shark.

The Red Sea has whale sharks. They’ll come up alongside your boat at night if they see the boat lights. Zuhair says the best way to get rid of them is to lay a plumb line weight on top of their head. They’ll swim down 30 meters to the end of the plumb line when the weight finally comes free. If you’re serious about catching fish, you should turn your lights off and let the whale shark bother some other ship. But if you’ve caught enough for the night, you can do it again and again, until the whale shark grows bored and swims away.

9.    There is an ancient way of rigging up your bait for deep sea fishing that lets you wedge the bait between 2 stones. This protects the bait until it gets to the depth you’re looking to fish and pulls the bait deep without the use of another weight. When it gets to the end of the line, you pull a trigger line, and the stones fall away. Then you can fish for the big fish. Zuhair still does this occasionally. He likes not having to haul the extra weight up along with the fish.

10.    Saudi has a dessert made out of shredded wheat that is to die for.

The shredded wheat is coated in honey and wound into the shape of a tiny little nest. Three shelled pistachios nuts are nestled into the center. Whatever else is in it, I need to learn to make it because it’s amazing!

11.    There are jungles in Saudi. Sadly, I’ll probably never get to see them. They’re in the mountains by the border of Yemen. As adventurous as I’d like to think I am, I’m not going near a war zone. This makes me sad.

12.    Mada'in saleh cannot be camped at.

The Nabateans, the ancient civilization that built the Treasury at Petra, built clear down into Saudi. There are great big structures carved directly into the stone. According to the stories, Mohamed traveled past the ruins with several of his followers. His followers wanted to stop for the night, but Mohamed told them no. The ruins were of a different time, belonging to a different people. Zuhair may have briefly inferred that the ruins were haunted, but I’m still working on fully understanding the accent.

Either way, to this day, the Saudi’s do not spend the night there. No surrounding city has ever been built.

Zuhair really likes us. He’s offered to drive us up, and tour guide the ruins for us. He’s also offered to take us out on the boat again. Once in the afternoon for more snorkeling, and once at night, to do some fishing.

This is going to be the most amazing experience of my life. I can’t wait to start getting it all into a story.

Day One of Writers of the Future

Day one of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. Well, technically day one is today I guess, so I should say that Day Zero of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. When I call it day zero it makes me think that there's going to be something uber-exciting like a typhoid Mary or a zombie apocalypse.  But mostly, all the winners arrived and we had our orientation.

Brandon, Scott Parkin and I were the first to arrive. I'd been warned ahead of time by a previous year's winner to expect cameras. Holy cow, they weren't lying! They filmed us driving up in the car. They filmed my feet as I walked into the hotel. They snapped pictures as we checked in and said our first hello's to the other winners. It felt a little like I'd stepped onto the set of a reality show. Only without having to vote anybody off the island by the end of the week. Which is good. Because I really like everyone I've met. :)

We spent the entire day hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, so we could say hello to everyone as they arrived. At about 7 last night, we were taken upstairs for a run down of the week by Dave Wolverton and Tim Powers. They'll be the main two instructors through the first part of the week. It was really intimidating to be told that we'll be expected to write a completed short story in just 24 hours. Dave is an excellent teacher, I've taken a workshop from him before. Tim seems like he's also going to be a great teacher, and they actually managed to present the idea in a way that took the edge off the fear.

I hope I can hold onto that in the coming days.

We were also handed a beautiful hard cover book about L Ron Hubbard's writing career and his thoughts on how to be a professional writer (our text book for the week), and a magnetic name badge that has our name, the year we won, and the name of our winning story engraved on it.

I have to say, seeing the name of my story, engraved in gold, and absolutely real, actually made me want to cry a little bit. Even though I've been through this process, and I've seen the galleys and I've known for awhile that this was coming, seeing my name and the title of my story actually written down like that, made it all suddenly become very real. That surprised me.

It felt pretty awesome.

Nothing stands still for very long and big adventures are on their way.

Change is hard.

Especially when it’s constant.

I love adventure. I love exploring, and experiencing new things. But I’ve realized in the past few years that I haven’t had a real good adventure in quite a while. I used to go hiking. I used to drive out into the middle of nowhere just to see what I could find. Much to the dismay of my mother, I used to camp all by myself and stay up all night just to watch the stars.

Then I had children and it all stopped. My hobbies faded away and got replaced by ‘mommy-crafts’ and kid science. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t what I’d have picked for myself without the kids to consider. I haven’t played the guitar for years, even though I was starting to get pretty good at it. I haven’t been on a solitary hike in so long it’s been hard to remind myself that I can, when the kids are school.

Now that they are older, I find myself longing to find my adventure again.

My husband and I are in the middle of some very big choices right now, and it’s been hard. Fantastic opportunities are opening up that are going to allow me to find my adventure all over again. But they are so incredibly different. And they are both filled with so much adventure.

I wouldn’t have thought that having to pick just one of the two things you’ve wanted for as long as you could remember could be so difficult.

Either direction we go will be wonderful. My youngest will start full time school soon and I’ll have time to pick up the guitar again, do some yoga without turning into a jungle gym, make a salad for lunch without being whined at because it wasn’t a cheese tortilla. I’ll be able to actually sit down and read a book in silence, instead of squeezing in a chapter or two of audio book while I juggle playdates, laundry and quick trips to Walmart.

It’s all so close I can taste it. And it’s all going to happen soon.

Only it hasn’t happened yet. And I’m currently stuck in a holding pattern of ‘wait, it’s on its way’… Only I suck at waiting and everything in my life has slowed itself to a stand-still. Largely because our choices keep changing. New opportunities keep being introduced. Every time I think we get things settled and I know what to expect next, I get a text from my husband asking, “So what about this…?’’

And the choices keep getting better but I feel right now like my life is balanced on shifting sand and it’s all I can do to keep upright as my world slides around beneath me.

I just want to pick one, so I can be done. So I can know what’s coming next.

It’s the not knowing what’s coming next that’s driving me nuts.

Only I keep saying that I want my adventure back, and change is the only way it’s going to happen.

But man, change is really, really hard.

How to watch Writers of the Future from the comfort of your own home.

One week from today, I head out to Writers of the Future.

I am excited. I am nervous. I'm still in a bit of denial. I still haven't given any thought to what I'm going to say onstage. So I can't promise what I say will be witty, coherent or in any way representative of actual human speech. I have some limited experience of speaking in front of crowds, but never to an audience so large. And never as a guest of honor. I may get to the front and hyperventilate myself into incoherence. I may say something so unforgivably stupid that I'm thrown out of the contest and stricken from the records. But if any of you would like to see me try not to embarrass myself too badly, you can watch the awards ceremony online, Sunday night at http://www.writersofthefuture.com/.

I really do recommend you tune in! I watched last year's ceremony and  I really enjoyed many of the speakers. And if you happen to be entering the contest yourself, watching the ceremony is an excellent chance to dream big. Imagine yourself up on that stage! Write out your own acceptance speech. It's OK to admit that you've written at least one at some point in your life.

Or maybe that's just me. :)