Evil Mommy

There’s nothing happening here at Chez Evil that I can write about (and not possibly risk arrest), so I thought I’d fill the dead air around here with something…pretty. Enjoy.

From Boing Boing.

Heather at Production, Not Reproduction posted the second topic for the Open Adoption Roundtable. This is a big one, but appropriate considering the date in the US:

Write about the father(s) in your family’s open adoption(s). Our experiences are too varied to narrow it down to one specific question to answer. But every adoption involves at least one father. Write about his presence or his absence, record a memory or write him a letter. Tell us about the dads and the adoption-related choices they’ve made.

As School Girl would tell you, she has two dads. She has two mums, too, and isn’t afraid to say so with people she knows well, but that’s not the subject of this post.

Her first dad, S, has had a troubled past, to put it politely. His own relationships with both his biological father and stepfather have had a huge impact on him. We’ve met him twice; once when we met School Girl for the first time, and once when we were officially placed with her. Both times he struck me as a heartbroken boy trying desperately to be a “tough-guy” grownup. Originally, he had wanted an open relationship with all of us, as did M – complete with visits, letters and pictures for the foreseeable future. As time went on, it became too much for him; and now unfortunately, visits aren’t possible at all at this time.

But he did give School Girl part of her genetic background, so he is her father.

Evil Dad fell in love with School Girl from the first time he met her. She’s always been a “daddy’s girl”; Daddy has been the one who’s made her feel safe, he’s the one that she begs to hang out with on the weekends – “just the two of us, Daddy.” He reads with her and tucks her into bed at night. This Father’s Day, she’ll be giving him a card she’s made. He would (and has already) move the heavens and earth for her.

He gave School Girl his heart and some of his interests, so he is her father. When she speaks about “Daddy”, for right or wrong, that’s the person she sees in her mind.

S has chosen to allow someone else to raise his child, and not to be an active part of her life at this time. Evil Dad has chosen to raise “somebody else’s child” (yes, from someone we never expected, and I’m still pissed off about it) and is an active, interested, doting father. Those are the choices they’ve made, at least in terms of our adoption.

On Father’s Day, we think and talk about both of them with love and affection. We hope that you have a happy Father’s Day too.

When the pioneers traveled across the country to steal land from some of my ancestorsexplore and settle in the West, one of the things they brought with them from back East were roses. Real, old-fashioned roses. The kind with an actual scent (unlike the vast majority of hybrid tea roses).

One of the many places these roses wound up was the local cemetery. In fact, at least two cemeteries within easy driving distance (which I’ve visited and written about before) have some incredible roses. The one that has the most, and best tended, wild rose bushes is Fairmount Cemetery, with its spiffy new website.

With School Girl in tow, I took a couple of pictures.

I think that one might be “Banshee”, one particular variety I’d like to try growing in our own backyard, but I’m not certain.

These were on either side of the Ivy Chapel:

This time, we drove to the back of the cemetery to find the mausoleum. It’s really something, and still in use today:

Unfortunately, we had to miss this year’s Rose Festival/cutting sale. Maybe next year. Here’s a link to Fairmount’s rose page, with the secret of how the white settlers got the rose cuttings from their homes in the East to Colorado.

I put up some more pictures from that day on my Flickr page, but I think I’ll save the stones we saw and photographed for another day.

Father’s Day is late this year, coinciding with the summer solstice. School Girl and I made Evil Dad and my dad barbecue aprons (shhh…), and we might go out to dinner that evening. I’ll put up an actual post about Father’s Day a little later. So…

Home – Depeche Mode
Good Fortune – PJ Harvey
Sister Ray – Joy Division
Punk Rock Girl – The Dead Milkmen
Gong – Sigur Ros
Demon Seed – Nine Inch Nails
Like Someone in Love – Bjork
Underground World Strike – Gogol Bordello
Since I Fell for You – Dinah Washington
Saeglopur – Sigur Ros
Bonus: Criminal Minds Production Diary – from the book Sunken Treasure, written and read by Wil Wheaton. You can buy the entire book, either as a real live physical book or a .pdf file (which I did); or you can buy this excerpt, done as an audio piece. He adds a lot of asides and annotations to it while he’s reading – it’s really terrific. Plus it’s $5 USD.

Yesterday morning, I called the house where School Girl was having her sleepover. We hadn’t heard from her all night, it was roughly 9AM and we still hadn’t heard from anybody, so I was a little bit anxious.

I talked to Best Friend Bear’s mum.

“Does your child…you know…speak? At all?”

Alarm bells going off. Hell yes she speaks – speaks until her vocal chords are in danger of falling off. “Um, yeah. What happened? Was there a problem last night?”

“No. She was fine. Except I think she might be afraid of (Best Friend Bear’s dad) and me – because she wound up whispering to (Best Friend Bear) whenever she needed something.”

Oookay. She is quite shy around adults, and some adults are more intimidating to a shy child than others. Especially when you go from a house with 3 people living there to a house with 8 people living there. So that made more sense. Plus they were getting ready for a camping trip, so things were extrasupercrazy.

So I went over, visited with everybody for a little bit, and we went home. In the car, I asked her how things went.

It was okay. She mostly had fun, except that there were an awful lot of people (none of whom are strangers to her, I might add), and she missed Mum and Dad. A lot. Yes, she knew she could have called, “but I didn’t want to wake you up.” Not that the ringing phone wouldn’t have woken me out of a coma (there were 3, right next to my ear), but hey.

This was supposed to have been a practice run for a big birthday party/sleepover for Best Friend Bear this fall, but now she’s not sure she wants to go to that one. We talked some more, and she’s at least willing to give it another try. She also wants to have Best Friend Bear over for a sleepover too. Our house might be a little quiet for her…