And Zen What

The only place I've ever really learned anything useful about child-rearing is on Yahoo lists.

That is not to say that everything said on Yahoo lists is interesting. Some lists are not, finally, very interactive. Or they get taken over by bullies, or rule-happy moderators, or lock-step thinkers. I've been on lists that have imploded for no very apparent reason, on lists where fast friendships in real life ("meat space") have been born, on lists where re-enactments of the basic plot of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" have taken place.

A lot can go wrong on the internet. But for sheer usefulness, you cannot beat the BTDT (been there, done that) crowd, or the BTHTDTM (been there had that done to me) crowd if it's a question of trying to compel the health care industry to provide "health" and "care," for instance, or of trying to negotiate the insanely complex process of squeezing the IEP your child has a right to out of your local public school system.

Yeah, sure, I keep up with the latest greatest adoptive transracial transcultural childrearing expert scene. But I've noticed that most of it is given to sweeping pronouncements:

"All adopted children must be made to love their birth cultures, RIGHT NOW."

"Every child who is adopted must be put in touch with their feelings [that is, the feelings they are supposed to have according to the self-appointed expert of the moment] THIS MINUTE AND EVERY MINUTE and only with the intervention of experts."

"Every transracially adopted child must be immersed in the culture of their genetic origin."

"Attachment must be accomplished THIS MINUTE."

This last one has a particularly lunatic corollary: "No one but the parents must touch/feed/hold the newly-adopted child for _____ months/years in order to facilitate attachment."

Oh yeah, if it doesn't happen in 13.8 weeks, you are a goner. Never mind that your child's grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, potential-babysitting cousins are insulted, put off, and propelled into permanent eye-rolling mode. Never mind that other people are actually going to be in this kid's life too, and that attachment is a process that continues all our lives (yup, ours too).

Do I sound a wee bit bitter? That could be because they got me with this one, my first adoption, and I'm still feeling stupid about it. I was so anxious to get it right, so determined that this incredible gift, my wonderful daughter, was going to get the best danged mother that the experts could make me into, that I pretty much believed everything I read between 2 covers. All in the service of being perfect, of not making all the terrible mistakes that were clearly lurking around every parental corner.

I'm not suggesting that mistakes in parenting are a good thing; they aren't, whether our children are birth, adopted, or cyborgian. But I am suggesting that in my experience, parenting is kind of a chain of mistakes, an inevitable series of "well that could have gone better" moments. It's the only job you cannot not mess up. And trying to convince us that it's our fault, rather than just part of the deal, is how a lot of people are making their livings.

And one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to believe them.

Because any Ideal or Principle or Child-Rearing Expert can only generalize. Sometimes that's a good thing. The generalization, for example, that people should be weaned before they go to college---that's useful (though I bet there are exceptions). But the insistence that all children must be weaned by their 10th (6th, 4th) month of life is just plain silly.

Of course, my parenting book shelf groans under the weight of such silliness. Talking a good game here doesn't mean I'm immune to the lure of the Book That Will Help Me Give My Child a Perfect Mother (because that is what these books are essentially about, and that's why we, which is to say I, buy them).

But after you buy 'em, and read 'em, go talk to the real experts. The ones who can tell you that yeah, sure, their adopted Chinese kids went through a few years of hating China. Or that, yeah, you are not alone, their kid who was adopted as an "older" child worried them half to death too by sucking his fingers while falling asleep until he was 15, but now he's a well-adjusted nuclear physicist. Or that, no worries, your most recent episode of non-perfect mothering will not make your child into a psycho-killer, not this time anyway, and that their little Pookie, now a successful neurosurgeon, still laughs about the time that mom let out a screech and hid in the bathroom after one too many fake fart noises at the dinner table.

Find a Yahoo group. Save a tree. That's all I'm sayin'.