Amanda Millard

Tag: love

  • Wormhole

    This week I got an unfortunate email from my kids’ school letting me know that there was an outbreak of pinworms and that I needed to check my own children for them.  And so began the most disgusting research I’ve had to do thus far in my parenting journey.

    As I dug into a weird corner of the Internet, I learned some interesting things about pinworms, which, unlike some other worms, reproduce sexually (requiring both a male and female worm to create babies).  Daddy goes out in a blaze of violent sexual glory after forcing himself on the female in what is called “traumatic insemination,” which leaves the mother injured and pregnant, a bazillion times over.

    This leaves poor Mama Pinworm with a challenging responsibility, since her babies cannot live their lives in the base of the human gut, where everything is moving the wrong way.  No, they need to get back to the start, our mouths, to get their chance at living their lives to the fullest, riding the coaster that is our digestive tract.

    And so, this bad-ass single mom has to rely on the only tool at her disposal – her smarts.  Over millions of years of delicate co-evolution, female pinworms have really cracked the code of their human hosts.  They hang out near the exit door and wait patiently. They sense when we are sleeping, and they take the opportunity to wiggle their way out, making their human host itch in a most unfortunate spot.  As humans do, we scratch, and the microscopic eggs get stuck to our hands.  Since we’re at least half-asleep, we don’t wash our hands again before, some time later, they find their way to our mouths.  And presto!  Mama pinworm has done her duty: her babies have made their way back to the start.  She has given them their chance at a full, disgusting life.

    My own job as a mama seems nearly as gross – apparently, I’m supposed to sneak into my kids’ beds at night, point a flashlight at their naked ass holes, and wait for something to wiggle out.  Seriously.  That’s the method for diagnosing pinworms. 

    Let’s just say that I’m gonna let Mama Pinworm win this one.  She just wants it way more than I do. 

  • The Waiting Room

    I waited two and a half years to become a mother. My husband and I waited through hours of adoption trainings and invasive social worker interviews. We waited through a devastating failed adoption.  And then finally (miraculously) a beautiful young mother gave us the honor of raising her equally beautiful son. The moment she placed him my arms, he looked at me and smiled, and I knew that the wait had been worth it. 

    But in the next moment, his huge, dark eyes rolled back in his head, as his heart beat erratically. My own heart stopped as I waited for him to breathe again…waited…waited…until he gasped like a fish out of water. 

    We soon learned that this was a normal breathing pattern for a baby born in heart failure. And while I got used to his gasping and panting, I never got used to the blinding terror of it. It burned my insides like dry ice and tasted like metal.

    Nine years later, I am awaiting for my son again, as I look out over the vast steely-blue of the St. John’s River. The hospital’s architects gave this room floor-to-ceiling windows, the gorgeous view surely meant to distract parents while they wait for updates on their sick children. But the view stopped impressing me long ago. I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent in this room, staring at that endless water, waiting.

    Today is my son’s third heart surgery to correct the heart defects he was born with. Since then, we have adopted three more children, and their various special needs have led me back into this room over and over, for countless scans and tests.  And this is only one of many similar rooms I wait in. I wait for psychologists, nutritionists, therapists. I wait while hearing aids are fitted. I wait for special education programs to open space for us. I wait for my youngest son’s full-time therapist to arrive so that I can try to squeeze in a quick shower — before I have to rush another kid off to another appointment.

    Because this is the reality of adoption when women have little or no prenatal care. Or when babies are born prematurely due to drug exposure. Or when a mother is homeless. Or when she tries to induce an abortion on her own, only to find out weeks later that it didn’t work.

    The reality of adoption is that it was the right choice for me, and I hope it was the right choice for my (loved, adored, wanted) children and their amazing birth mothers. But when anti-abortion activists think of adoption as some magic cure-all, I want to show them my reality. They talk about how many hopeful adoptive parents are waiting right now — but the majority are not waiting for this. They are waiting for healthy, white newborns and birth families who won’t complicate their lives. If adoption was all they wanted, then they would adopt one of the 117,000 waiting children in the US foster care system who are legally available for adoption right now.

    And even if they did want to adopt a special-needs child, that doesn’t mean that they have the support to raise one well. It doesn’t mean that they’re willing to love or honor birth families. It doesn’t mean that they can help to reverse the long history of shame and exploitation surrounding adoption.  It doesn’t mean that they can deal with trauma (which can occur even from birth).  It doesn’t mean that they are capable of endless parental training or advocacy. It doesn’t mean that they can give up their careers, their savings, or their other commitments. 

    And even if they are blessed to be able to make these sacrifices (as I have been so blessed), they just might not want to. And that’s absolutely valid. Because I consider myself to be the world’s luckiest mother, and yet, I wonder daily if I’m up to the task, if I’m the parent my children need, if I’m failing.  The days I’ve spent in this waiting room have been my greatest tests, and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always passed. I look out over that dark river, and I feel like I’m drowning in it. And part of me wants to be dragged under, because at least then the brackish water would mute that metallic terror.

    From my vantage point, it certainly doesn’t look like anti-abortion advocates really want to save anyone at all. Because there are already so many foster parents, social workers, teachers, mothers, and children begging for help. They need more. Hell, even I need more. But help just never seems to come, no matter how long we wait.

  • Olive’s Fire

    A year after adopting my baby daughter, Olive, I took her to visit my hometown and the many relatives eager to meet her. Amid the chaos, I wanted just one thing: a photo of my daughter and her mother, with my mother and her mother. But I knew that creating this heirloom would mean wrangling two of the most willful women in my life: my resistant, camera-averse grandmother and my equally resistant, squirmy daughter.

    Olive and her great-grandmother are not biologically related, and they have very different ethnic backgrounds and features. But when I first saw the photo, I was struck by their sameness—by the way their ferocity seemed to light them both from within. This makes them stunning in a fearsome way, and it can make loving them a fretful, exhausting job.

    Yet they are biologically related, as we all are. We are all descended from a single woman, often known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived relatively recently in human history. We can all be traced, through this unbroken mother-daughter chain, right back to her. In her day, there would have been nothing remarkable about her. But she had the luck, or perhaps the grit, or maybe the smarts, to survive in a very grim world. And she raised daughters who could survive in it, who raised more survivor-daughters.

    I cannot help but imagine Eve as my grandmother, standing at that desperate moment in human history—bitching her way right through that volcanic eruption or plague or asteroid, not really caring if she ticked off the cavemen. Because that same inner fire that makes her tough to love also makes her tough.

    Though Grandma has not faced near-extinction, she has faced a life that many people would not have survived. The poverty and abuse that characterized her early life have made her who she is. She has weathered adversity and raised her two daughters through it.

    Science tells us that adversity changes not just our minds, but our very DNA. Our experiences express our genes, and we pass on this epigenetic legacy to the next generation. Women are particularly vulnerable when it comes to inheriting big challenges—depression, anxiety, and related health problems. But I also think we are the carriers of the fire that keeps people surviving through dark feelings and the world’s darkest days.

    Olive’s fiery will may seem too large for her tiny self or for the little life she has lived thus far. But not when I consider the countless generations of struggle and hurt that have been passed on to her, flowing from mother to daughter, crashing down on her. To raise her, I can offer the burdens and joys of my own family’s legacy: my great-great-grandmother’s endless grief for the baby who died crossing to the New World, the instinctive midwifery skills my great-grandmother used to deliver my aunt unexpectedly, my grandmother’s rape, my years-long search for a daughter to call my own, that first failed adoption of a daughter I mothered only in my heart.

    To that, we must add a whole birth family’s history—the parts we know and the bigger part that Olive’s birth mother will share with her only when they’re both old enough.

    Finally, there is her own adversity. On her first day in this world, Olive said goodbye to her first mother and was given to a new stranger-mother. No one asked her permission. She was the most important member of this delicate, monumental family merger, and she never got a vote.

    But Olive, like the women before her, is a survivor. Whether from her genes or from her family, she has inherited an old, deep power. I fear what our turbulent modern world holds for her and for all of us. It would be easy to allow this fear to consume me. But standing at this desperate moment in human history, Olive’s fire gives me hope and makes me strong.