The Old Field and the New Ground

Today, in a telephone call, my mother talked to me about the Old Field and the New Ground. She had asked me what I had done over the weekend, I talked about pulling haole koa stumps out of the ground on Sunday, and that led directly to the Old Field and the New Ground.

The usage dates from when her family was living in New Hall, alone on that ridge, some distance from the hamlet.

My mother explained that the Old Field had been sufficient for the needs of my grandparents and the four children then living with them--my mother, my Aunts Opal and June, and my Uncle Bernard--but my grandfather had gotten it in his head that the crops would be better if they cleared some new ground on the top of the ridge.

My Uncle Bernard was not able to dissuade him, and so it fell to him to clear it. This involved digging tree stumps up out of the ground by hand, a Herculean task that took my uncle more than a year. "You should have seen the machine they had," my Mother said, by way of comparing what my Uncle had had to do with what her neighbors had done recently with a machine in their yard.

Yet my Uncle Bernard had done it, at the cost of his studies and other pursuits. He was something of a self-taught scientist, my Uncle Bernard, having made radios for himself out of parts that he bought or scrounged, and having built a violin for himself, too. "Baked it," my mother will say, "in the oven." But all of that came to a halt on account of the New Gound.

"We didn't need it," my Mother said, "and Bernard told him we didn't need it, but Daddy wouldn't listen. Thought the New Grould would be good and fresh." She said this by way of a lamentation for my Uncle Bernard, whose sufferings were still fresh in her mind as she spoke, and causing her no little anguish.

When my Mother talks in this way, it transports me to another time and place with such vividness that the feel of it lingers with me for hours afterwards. "The Old Field," "the New Ground," usages like "light bread" and "fat back" all go to evoke a reality that feels as though I could touch it, if I just reached out to it.

I don't have any pictures for this. Maybe I will someday, if my Mother and Aunt June and Kristina, Maia and I make another road trip to New Hall, War and Welch. I hope so.

John, Monday, August 28, 2006

Pills, a kiss and a hug, and a dream

Pills, a kiss and a hug, and a dream--I've been thinking about these things all day. They're important to me, and they fit together in my mind, though how they fit together keeps changing.

Pills. The pills played a big role in the two mornings before this one.

Three mornings ago, I had made Kristina laugh, and she couldn't stop, even when she had to take her pills. Maybe, most especially then.

It started with strawberry jam and guava jam. Maia asked me if the strawberry jam was my favorite, and I said, "Yes," it was. That it was probably the best strawberry jam I'd ever had.



And Maia said that her favorite was guava jam. And then she said to Kristina, "What's your favorite, Mommy?" And before Kristina could answer, she picked up Kristina's banana, which was half rotten (Kristina never throws anything away), and said, Yuck!, because it felt sort of squishy and slimy in her hand.



And I said, "All Mommy's favorites are yucky," and that started Kristina laughing.

We each have a pile of five vitamin pills that we take every morning, and the laughing carried over to the taking of the vitamins.

Kristina is not a good pill taker. She takes her vitamins one at a time. She throws her head back, squints her eyes, and you imagine she must be trying to force something the size of tennis ball down her throat, only it's just this little pill.



She started to laugh as she took her first pill, and I laughed, and so she laughed harder, throwing her head back, and not getting the pill to go down. She laughed so hard she started to cry and I thought she was going to spit out the water. And somewhere in there, Maia got all upset, and started to cry, sort of, because she thought Kristina was in distress.

"'Top it, Daddy!" she said. She still can't say esses.

"It's okay, Maia, Mommy's okay," I said, laughing.



But she kept making crying sounds until Kristina got the pill to go down.

"Not funny, Daddy!" Maia said.

"No, not funny, Maia," I agreed, "but kind of funny, hunh?"

And after a moment or two she smiled at me, and then she laughed, too.

Yesterday morning, when it came time for the pills, Maia put her hand over my mouth and said, "No laughing! Mommy can't take pills!" But then she laughed, too. Though she was serious about my not laughing.

A kiss and a hug. The kiss and the hug came last night. I was going off to exercise. I was outside by my car, a goodly distance from the front door, when I heard Maia call to me from behind the screen, "Come, Daddy!"



"Maia, I'm going to exercise," I protested.

"Come, Daddy," she insisted.

"Okay." Begrudingly, I went to the front door to see what was up.

"I want to give you a big hug and a kiss," she said. And she said.

The dream. The dream happened last night. We were on a train. I think it was in Kazakhstan. I had been sleeping. I woke up and couldn't find Maia. I looked all over for her. And then I found her by a man and his wife and their family. The man was wiping a tear from her cheek. I didn't know what to do. So I just watched. And then I woke up.

It wasn't a good dream, but it wasn't completely a bad one.



As I thought about it later, I decided that the man was her biological father. I know that the abandonment will leave a mark in her, and that maybe at some point or other, only they will be able to do anything about it. I think that's what the dream was about.

I'm not sure why I put these stories together. I think I want her to know that she loved us, and that we loved her.

Maybe I want her to know that we love her enough that it's okay if someday she needs to find that family. Maybe even that we want her to.

(These are just recent pictures of Kristina and her mom with Maia, and of Maia with me. The last one is of a train station in Kazakhstan. We were on the way back to Shymkent from Almaty. We would adopt Maia that day.)

John, Friday, August 25, 2006

Pooh pics

 
 
 
 

(Blogger still won't let me post pics. But I've discovered that I can still post pics through Picasa. The problem is that I can only post four pics at a time. That means that I'll have to break up any post that has more than four pics and post the segments in reverse order, so that you can read down through them. We'll see how that works. Soon I hope to move this blog out of Blogger.)

The first three pics are from the first conversation that Maia and I had about Pooh. The last is from tonight. I was taking pictures of Maia because she looked so cute in her barettes. She asked me to take a picture of her and Pooh and Bunny, and so I did.

It turns out that the "Pooh is a little bit shy" thing started with Kristina. She made that remark about Pooh as a way of drawing Maia out, and seeing whether shyness was a problem for her.

Smart lady, that Kristina.

John, Sunday, August 20, 2007 

We continue our conversation about Pooh Bear

After dinner tonight, Maia appeared at my desk, where I was working.

She was holding Pooh Bear.

"Pooh Bear not shy now," she said.

"That's great, Pooh Bear," I said, giving him a pat. "And it's okay if you're shy every once in a while. Even Daddy is shy every once in a while."

"And Maia, too," she said.

"Even Mommy," I said. "And you know what, Maia. Even Jessica."

I said this in a whisper because Maia's cousin Jessica holds a special place in Maia's pantheon of Big Girls.

"Even Cara," she said.

"Yes," I said, "even Cara."

I have been trying to absorb the revelation that social situations scare Maia. Maia mentioned the school that she didn't get into to Kristina in that vein. "That time I was scared," Maia said of her interview at that school.

I'm glad she's trying to overcome it. But I don't want her to feel she has to.

She likes people and performing. She likes making us laugh. I'd like her to ride that wave, if she can.

(For some reason, Blogger isn't letting me post pics anymore. Will have to find out why.)

John, Tuesday, August 15, 2006.

"Pooh is a little bit shy."

After dinner tonight, we went outside again to play feed the fishes. Then Maia ducked inside to get Pooh.

"Pooh is a little bit shy," she said. "Pooh is a little bit crying."

"Why is Pooh shy?" I asked.

"Hold her," she said. Pooh is usually a she to Maia.

"It's okay, Pooh," I said. "You're safe. You're with people who love you. And it's okay to be a little shy."

"Pretend I'm the Mommy," Maia said. "Pooh is our baby. 'It's okay, Pooh,'" she continued, "'Daddy will take care of you.' Let me hold her," she said to me.

"Are you a little shy?" I asked Maia.

"Sometimes," she said. Holding Pooh, she snuggled in between my legs. Pooh ended up between us.

"Just like a blanket," she said of how the two of us were cradling Pooh between us. "'It's okay, Pooh," she continued. "'You don't have to be scared.'"

It was a pleasant and very encouraging interlude. Gave me a different way of thinking about her problems with participating and with the aggressiveness that her teacher says she was displaying over the last two days.

When we back inside, we had ice cream. I gave her a bite of mine, and she told on me to Kristina, as she usually does. "Daddy gave me too much ice cream," she said.

"Well, you can share it with me," Kristina said.

"This time I eat it," Maia said. And then when I laughed at her, she said, "Stop it, Daddy."

These pictures are from today--from the park, including her beloved swings, then McDonald's and then outside with Pooh. (Hmmm...I could only get one pic to post--I'll try again, later. (This is later. I never could get the other pics to post and just ended up losing a comment. So it goes...))

John, Sunday, August 13, 2006

A treasure trove

I was going to tell you about the problems Maia has been having at school--aggression, that sort of thing, and how they seem rooted, to me, in a desire to be accepted.

She's different, and she knows it. She doesn't speak as well as her peers, and she can't but have appreciated that. And yet her memory is at least as good as theirs and her facility at thinking is as well. Last night at a family dinner (there were six of us), I asked her how many people would be left at the table if Daddy went. "Five," she said.



Much later, my brother-in-law sought to test whether the answer had been correct by chance. So he posed the same question again. She held up five fingers. And then she said, "And if Daddy and Maia left, four. And if Auntie Kalei left, three. And if Mommy left, two." And so on. We were all quite impressed.



How can she not know she's different when she thinks so well and yet cannot speak with the fluidity of her peers?



And the ear plays a role in all of that, of course, and I have no doubt that adoption does as well. I believe word has probably gotten around at her preschool, and though probably none of the children know what "adoption" means, they do know that the word marks her. As different.



But, happily, I got sidetracked.



My Sony laptop died a few days ago, and my service contract finally brought a man around today to fix it. There is a slot in the machine for Sony's memory sticks, which is mainly why I had gotten a Sony laptop--I also have a Sony cam corder and had taken many pics on memory sticks.



Tonight I finally took the stick out of my cam corder and stuck it in the computer. I guess the near loss of my laptop and the possibility of never being able to see what was on the memory stick in my cam corder finally gave me enough motivation to take a look.



And what a shock! The pics reached all the way back to the day after we adopted Maia.



These pics that you are looking at are from our hotel room in Shymkent and also from some shopping we did at a flea market in Shymkint.



That's Aina with Kristina and Maia. Our main interpreter.



She's married now, we understand, and recently gave birth.



This is from our last day in Shymkent. We had found a park, and Maia had found a swing.



This is two days later. We were headed to the park across the street from our hotel in Almaty. Almaty and Shymkent both had many parks and open spaces.



Maia has always liked dogs. She also has always loved steps, like those behind her here.



In Almaty, she went up and down steps, again and again, almost as though she was intentionally trying to build up her muscles.



She also seemed to take great pleasure in sweeping up in the parks. She would look for a branch, like the one she's holding here, and then sweep with it.





The next pictures on the memory stick were from some months later--August 21, 2004.







What a face!

She's put on some baby fat--gotten rid of the parasite she had. And the impishness--that's her.

The last pictures were from this evening (I had left my "real" camera at work). Maia has been wanting to play "feed the fishes" with me and that's what we did after dinner.


We sit on the low stone wall that's behind her there, and tear up leaves and seed pods into little pieces to throw to the fishes.



She insisted that I put my camera down so it was hard to get shots of her.



At one point, she brought out Pooh so I could take a picture of him, too.



She helped me water the plants.



And at the end, just before we went in, she picked some flowers for Kristina.



These are all true things--what happened this evening, that smile of delight from the recent past.

But it isn't all like that. And it isn't just growing up, either, or just the ear. There's an aggressiveness in her, and a kind of resistance to being helped and loved, that comes from her early experience.

I don't know how to wrap myself around that yet. I just know that it's there.

John, Friday, August 11, 2006

"Once upon a time..."

Driving home on Sunday from City Mill (a local home and construction supply store), Maia had asked, "Where is Grandma?"

And so I told her that Grandma was in Washington with Grandpa. And that Washington another place that was on the mainland and that we fly to it (as Maia knows). And that all around us was Hawaii, that all of this place is called Hawaii, and that that's where we are.



And I told her that she used to live in Kazakhstan, that she lived there until she was almost two when Mommy and I went to get her.



"When I was a baby, I spit," she said.

"You spit?"

"I spit."

"Well, okay, sweetie, if you say so."



Today, after dinner, she and I were outside. I went inside for a minute and told her that I would be back.

I found her sitting on the back of our car, watching the light go down.



"I'm watching the sun," she said.

I tried to tell her something about the sun and the earth. Found a little flowerpot and told her to pretend that it was a ball so I could show her where we were and how the earth turns. When I was done, she told me to put the flower pot back.

Then she stood up on the back of the car and told a story.



I can only capture snatches of it--it was sort of a stream of consciousness story.

"Once upon a time," she started, "I was born. And I cried in my stroller. And once upon a time, I went to California. And Daddy was in his office. And I went to Daddy's office, and I saw Auntie Kalei and Uncle David. And someday it will be Daddy's birthday. And I picked a flower for Daddy."

Then she lay back down again on the trunk of the car.

"That was beautiful, Sweetie," I told her.



Tonight, playing cars with Kristina, she was assigning people to cars. She put her Mommy in one and her "other Mommy" in another.

"Where's your other Mommy?" Kristina asked when a space came in Maia's monologue.

"She is far, far away with Grandma and Grandpa, before I was born."

"And how many Daddies do you have, Maia?"

"One Daddy. He is in the office."



Don't know what all of this means. I think sometimes that listening to her talk is like listening to a dream. It doesn't make sense, and isn't supposed to. Can't, really. It's like having a window on the bits and pieces of fantasy that Maia's mind plays through as she processes all of this stuff into what will become the kind of thinking that we all recognize.

I wonder what she's learning--language, culture or life? Probably all three at the same time.



These photos--all except for the last one--are from when Maia was playing cars with Kristina tonight (and then using me as a road). Kristina said that when she picked up Maia at the preschool, the children were playing house, and Maia was one of the Mommies. The reference to multiple Mommies probably comes from that.

The last out of focus picture is from the day we adopted her--May 7, 2004.

John, Monday, August 7, 2006

Three weekends

Two weekends ago, I was as discouraged as I've ever been. We had been invited to a birthday party for a friend of Maia's from hula. It was at Hanai a Bear, the local take on Adopt a Bear ("hanai" means "to adopt" (sort of) in Hawaiian).

Maia refused to participate. There was a group of half a dozen or so girls (and eventually one boy) around a table, and she refused to join. Here she is, sitting on the lap of the mother of another friend from hula, in the bottom right portion of the picture.



It was strange and uncomfortable for us, for the children and other parents, and for the mother holding the party.

Throughout the process of making bears, Maia just sort of hung around, watching, and continuing to refuse whenever anyone sought to entice her to participate. At the end, when the children reassembled at the table to make necklaces for their bears and to give them hearts, Maia finally joined the group at the table but refused to make a necklace. Even though I know for a certainty that she wanted a necklace. Here's a picture of the scene at the table:



It was very, very discouraging.

Here we are at the lunch after Hanai a Bear. Maia is the only one with no hat (the other girl hadn't put hers on yet). At one point, Maia stuck her finger in the cake.



It would be different if this were an isolated event. But it feels like part of a pattern. It links up in my mind with her resistance to being taught (like hula, for example), to being interviewed, to performing, and, in general, to participating in a constructive way in what is going on around her. She was to learn to participate--it's fundamental to everything else.

Later I told Kristina that sometimes it feels as though Maia is headed towards a train wreck, and all we can do is be there with her when it happens.

Last weekend was a different story.



A picnic for Kazakh adoptees was organized by our adoption agency in a park called Magic Island. It's on a little point at the beginning of Waikiki that was created when the Ala Wai Canal was dug to drain Waikiki and what is now Ala Moana Shopping Center.

The agency had rented a jumping chamber for the gathering. I liked the symbolism of the Nemo figure on top. Maia went there immediately and had fun with the children inside. Kids like Maia because she's fun.



She was fine with us, too. Cooperative and helpful. Here she is feeding Kristina a grape.



It's almost as though she's fine with adults and she's fine with children but she's not fine when those two crowds are mixed and the children are under the control of an adult. Then she resists--passively, by doing nothing, or actively, by doing her Maia-gone-wild thing. She just really seems to dislike being under the direction of an adult while she's in the company of peers.

At one point, I took her into the water. There's a lagoon there, that's very gentle, and Maia likes the water. She made friends with a little Samoan girl, and they had fun playing together, taking turns pretending to be in extreme jeopardy and rescuing each other.

There's something about Polynesian culture that suits Maia. Different generations tend to operate as separate cohorts in Polynesian social life. Maybe she'll always be more comfortable with that.

On the way to the lagoon, I told Maia that I loved her, and she said, "I love you, too, Daddy." I don't know why it always surprises and pleases me when she expresses her thoughts, but it does.

I explained to her that the people at the picnic that day were all people who had adopted children from Kazakhstan like we had adopted her, and that that was why we were there. I expected this to lead to questions--she's very inquisitive and wants to understand things. But it didn't. I let the topic go.

This weekend has been pleasant and easy. Maia helped me work in the yard yesterday, and then I took her to the park and to McDonald's--her fave.



She counted her last French fries for me as she ate them, and then did a substraction problem. She had been eating the fries by twos. When she got done to five and took the next two, I covered up the remaining ones and asked her how many were left. She wanted me to move my hand so she could count them, but I told her to do it in her head.

"Three," she said. We had done this same exercise about a year ago with the number 1. This was the first time we had subtracted 2. She really is good with numbers.

Here she is, just before we left, pretending that the ketchup on her fingers is nail polish.



Such an engaging, cute and fun little creature. How do I get her to participate?

Two steps forward, one step back.

John, Sunday, August 6, 2006