surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

sleepy now

We returned from an epic college road trip up to the delightful greenery of Oregon, and we will be launching J to college up there for the coming year. It's a transitional program, with a couple dozen students, where they take a couple courses to learn How To College, and spend the rest of their time learning the many skills of How To Adult, like interpersonal and life skills stuff. It was amazing to watch J show up as himself, and the program staff really love him for it, and everybody all around settling in to the idea that he will live and thrive there. It was so perfect that we decided that we don't really need to be nearby while he's there, as we've always figured we would: having us available has always been the surest way for him not to need us.

But, we also know that he's capable of amazing things without us around, especially these days, and this place will help him as needed. The student:staff ratio approaches 1:1, and each student has 5 case managers in different areas, meeting with of them through the week. Sending him off on his own feels odd, but the core parenting goal is to raise a functioning adult, so...here we are.

It's a lovely college city, and it's entirely possible J could just continue there, since the university has good programs for what interests him, and he'll have spent a year getting to know the place. Plenty of time before that decision, though.

We brought the dog, because we were driving, and Leela's been getting older (obviously) and a bit more anxious lately, and not really in a good brainspace to be separated from us for 4 days. This was the first time we traveled with her since right after we got her in 2016, and she totally nailed it. We stopped every hour or so, to switch drivers and let her have a sniff and pee on things, and as we got up to the Oregon forests, you could see her tiny, tiny inner wolf perk up at all the new sights and sounds. We stayed in a very comfy 2-bedroom at the Marriott Residence Inn, which loves dogs in addition to having full kitchens.

Happily, we'll be back.

and to all a good night.

We had a very mellow, low-key Christmas here in California. J has been with us 100% since March--without any change to the official court-ordered custody arrangement, which is a thing that can happen--so this is the first Christmas we've had him for the entire day. Historically he's gotten a present on each of the "12 custody days" (our house) leading up to Christmas, so he got up on Christmas Day and asked, "Wait, is it actual Christmas, the day? I have no idea." He's never been a calendar-watcher: the only exception that comes to mind is when he was waiting for me to come back from Chile.

(He asked so often that Anna used an aikido calendar to mark off the days. Not the usual behavior for 5-year olds. Anna just today unearthed and tossed the calendar.)

The gifts this year felt well-chosen, with lots of good surprises coming from knowing each other well. J got some excellent games, and gift certificates to buy more games. I got Anna a scholarly book on RPGs, which hopefully isn't terrible, and a gift card for the art store, where she will have to buy things for herself. Anna got me a basic Swedish textbook, because while Duolingo is entertaining, it's unable to teach the rules for things like making plurals or (much worse) combining plurals and definites:

• en kvinna = "a woman"
• kvinnan = "the woman"
• kvinnor = "women"
• kvinnorna = "the women"

It's funky and different from English, without being excruciatingly difficult, but reverse-engineering it from examples is tiresome.

Anna also got me my own set of metal dice for our family Dungeons & Dragons game, including a bright red one for my character who has some sort of fire elemental in his ancestry, and really enjoys and is quite skilled at setting things on fire. (J created him for me some years back. His name is Sneaky McStabStab, he has a pet rat named Bitey, and he hates seagulls because seagulls killed his parents.) Anna also took pity on my musical obsessions and got me a tenor guitar, an obscure instrument experiencing a bit of a revival.

I can't play that, but I'll eventually be able to play this:

It's a lovely, fun little thing to play.

so that happened.

Despite my lawyerly heritage, I didn't grow up around actual litigation or other court proceedings: more stuff like tax/zoning/real estate law. As a result, like so many Americans, my impression was that of the Law & Order TV series, where you see the lawyers doing motions and depositions and whatever, but of course they don't show the months in between when you're just waiting for the next court date.

There are months in between court dates. But ours finally arrived!

I say "ours" even though I'm not named anywhere, and by the strictest letter of the law, I don't exactly exist. In fact, Angry Biodad (ABD) has always reflexively thought of me as some sort of backup babysitter in J's life, which has often been useful, especially in the times when J was struggling with the tension between his biological parents. I'm an alternate category of parent, called a "Chris": a poorly defined but highly reliable source of unconditional love.

The hearing was a little nerve-wracking, since the judge got progressively (and mostly justifiably) crabbier as it unfolded. I see where they're coming from: they don't know us, they don't know J, they just have the ruling from two years ago, and a new pile of papers with a bunch of contradictory claims in it. This whole motion was J's idea, so the filing had a ton of his statements in it, and he needed to vet it before filing (and in fact had some corrections); buuut, the previous ruling was very clear that no one should show J any court paperwork! (Because ABD had done exactly that, last time.) And Anna had taken faithful dictation for a couple of angry emails J wrote to ABD, because J's had a headache for nine months limiting his screen time, and that also bugged the judge. There wasn't really a better way to do this, though.

The goals were:

1. Let J stay with whoever he wants without hassle, which means ABD stops showing up at school or the house to pick J up as though everything's fine.
2. Get a court-appointed person to talk to J (and his doctors and therapists and whoever) and get his voice into the record.

The judge's summary went something like this:

1. For fuck's sake, none of you people have abided by the previous court orders. You suck.
2. The child is 6'1" and is clearly not going to comply with the existing custody order, and there's no point in my ordering something a 6'1" child isn't going to comply with, so: 
• the original custody order stands, but
• my interim order is that no one will try to force the child to comply with the original custody order.
3. Contact (phone calls, whatever) with the non-resident parent must be initiated by the child.
4. To unravel the parents' clusterfuck of conflicting hearsay and sketchy document serving habits, Family Court Services will interview the child and everybody with "Dr." in front of their name, so I can be sure of what this kid actually wants and if there are good reasons for it.
5. Family therapy with ABD and J continues, with the mom if the therapist wants.
6. None of you will talk to the kid about court stuff.
7. See you in August.
8. Go away.

If you're going to be rebuked by a judge, the best kind of rebuke is certainly the kind where you get the outcome you wanted along with it. Success!

not my first choice. or second, or third.

We're in what I really hope is a peak stress period dealing with Angry Biodad (ABD), but at the same time, J is magnificent. Standing up and telling his story to anyone who will listen, plus ABD, who won't. Growing up with courage and kindness, and adorably confused that I should think that was anything admirable or out of the ordinary.

We've tested the legal system a bit now, with both sympathetic and unsympathetic cops, and verified that while a cop might be really mean-spirited about it, he is not going to drag a kid kicking and screaming to go with a parent he doesn't want to go with. Jerkface Cop charged in with his own emotional baggage, and said all he can do is "enforce" the court order...but that turns out to be toothless, and limited to just being a jerk (to me and to the kid). As J talked and talked about these problems going back to when he was little, and all the ways he's tried to have an honest conversation with ABD, Jerkface Cop got quieter and quieter and seemed to understand that this was a very different situation than the one that caused him so much pain. I hope he takes the lesson from it, but who knows.

I myself am a bit of a mess, self-medicating with a combination of cookies and music. I'm still enjoying the fiddle, but it's also demanding, and I enjoy having the mandolins (3) and guitars (2) as easier outlets.

It's been a pretty shitty month, all things considered. But it could be worse.

the shape of events.

In a new twist, this year I'm talking to people about what's going on in my life. I've always assumed they didn't want to know, or they would somehow feel alienated, but in fact that's how we build relationships. I tweak and frame the stories for each relationship, of course, but besides that, it's important for me to tell the story over and over. As we explain to others, we explain to ourselves, and we internalize the story: pretty important when it's learning to tell the story of your life (and so, yourself) in a different way than you've always known.

In this telling, I need a quick sketch of Angry Biodad's (ABD for short) conduct. He's firing off shotgun shells of bullshit, without regard to any kind of consistency or plausibility, even within a single audience. Denying things which are well-documented, including documents with his signature, or emails he sent a few days previously.

In college, I took a linguistics survey class. The professor was prone to over-sharing about her life in useless (and at least not creepy) ways, but she did say that she enjoyed watching her kids pass through the phases of linguistic and cognitive development. She described one day when she discovered a cookie missing, and confronted the 5-year old.

"Did you eat that cookie?"
[Child pauses to think.]
"You ate it!"

So while dedicated gaslighting is no joke, ABD's level of sophistication is blessedly low. In fact, it looks like this, though unfortunately the movie isn't current enough to use as a reference. Stuff like telling J his fears are irrational, then telling a psychologist he's never told J his fears are irrational.

It is true that men can go far in the world by baldfaced assertion; they can even be elected President instead of the most qualified candidate in history, if that candidate is a woman. It doesn't work nearly as well if you're not rich, though. Lucky for J.

history.

One thing I do like about Facebook is that it reminds me of stuff I said years ago, and very often it's about J. (Not sure if that's because most of my Facebook posts are about J, or if their magical computers pick them more for some reason.) There are many, many Great Moments in Chris-J Conversation™.

March 27, 2014:

"You shouldn't have let me sleep so long, now we're gonna be late for school."
"It'll be fine, Mama will handle it."
"But we're gonna be late!"
"Do you trust Mama?"
"Well, normally I trust Mama, but this time--"
"So, here's the thing about trust. It's really easy when things are going well, and it only becomes really valuable when things are hard."

That was at least sufficiently confusing to stop the complaining for 30 seconds.

March 26, 2011:

Mama goes for a run, and I am quickly informed that I do not have as fun ideas as Mama and am not as good as Mama. Hopefully I can at least boil hot dogs as well as she can.

Last night he had some kind of scary dream or thought--he didn't want to talk about it--and when I laid down next to him, fell asleep about 30 seconds after putting his hand on my arm. (Chrises are very reassuring.)

We're turning out pretty well, I think.

dactyls.

I'm still reading The Iliad to the boy at bedtime, a few dozen lines per night. I'm still nerding out about Homer and Bronze Age Europe. Because I need slow-moving things to read before bed, I actually read the Introduction to my version of The Iliad--I doubt any author of an Introduction really expects anyone to read it, but whoever Bernard Knox is, he may have written the most engaging essay for the lay reader that can still contain a paragraph like this:

The Homeric epithets were created to meet the demands of the meter of Greek heroic poetry, the dactylic hexameter. They offer the improvising bard different ways of fitting the name of his god, hero or object into whatever section of the line is left after he has, so to speak, filled up the first half (that too, quite possibly, with another formulaic phrase). The Achaeans, for example—one of the names used for the Greeks, Achaioi—are often “strong-greaved”: ěūknēmīděs Ăchāiδi a line ending. “Stay your ground, all of you strong-greaved Achaeans,” says the prophet Calchas, encouraging the troops: āll’ ăgě, mīmnět pāntěs, ěū- knēmīděs Ăchāiδi. A few lines earlier, however, he has asked them, “Why have you fallen silent?”: tīpt’ ăněō ěgěnēsthě ... How will the bard finish this line? Ĕūknēmīděs Ăchāiδi will fit the meter, for the two opening phrases are of the same metrical length. But it will produce a junction of two short open vowels: ěgěnēsthě ěūknēmīděs Ăchāiδi, and this usually results in elision, the suppression of one of the two short vowels—ēgēnēsth’ ěūknēmīděs—an unacceptable metrical combination. The solution is simple. The Achaeans cease to be “strong-greaved” and become “long-haired”—a formula starting with a consonant, which avoids the hiatus: tīpt’ ănēō ěgěnēsthě, kărē kŏmŏōntěs Ăchāiδi. The bard may also need to fit the Achaeans into a different part of the line and in a different grammatical case. In Book 7, for example, the gods watch the Greeks toil and suffer in the battle. “So they toiled . . .”—hŏs hōi mēn pŏněōntŏ—“the long-haired Achaeans”—kărē kŏmŏōntěs Ăchāiδi (not “strong-greaved” —that would have produced elision: pŏněōnt‘ ěūknēmīděs). Two lines later, however, “the gods, seated by Zeus of the lightning bolt, watched the great labor”—měgā ērgŏn—“of the Achaeans”:Ăchāiōn—genitive case. To fill the rest of this line the bard needs an epithet of the form - - - - -. The Achaeans can’t be “strong-greaved” or “long-haired,” then; they have to be “bronze-cloaked”: chālkŏchĭtōnōn. The choice of the epithet is dictated by the meter. Agamemnon is “shepherd of the people,” “lord of men,” “son of Atreus,” “wide-ruling” or “brilliant” according to his grammatical case and his position in the line. So for Achilles and Zeus, Hera and Hector. As for ships, their position in the line and case determines whether they are “black,” “round,” “seagoing” or “well-benched.”

I did skim those bits, since I am not really a Poetry Person™, and poetic features escape me even in English. I'm also reading Jonathan Burgess's Homer entry in the "Understanding Classics" series--no others are available as library e-books, though given the topics, I don't think I care--and Burgess steps up the game:

The venerable resonance of epic diction would have been appreciated by ancient Greeks. But the mix of forms is not just poetic colouring; it results from the requirements of metre. Metre is the ‘measure’ of verse, the system of how syllables are organized. In English poetry, this involves (or once did) the placement of accent-stressed syllables, perhaps with rhyme. In Greek verse rhyme is not sought, and syllables are not marked by stress (words have accents, but this involves pitch and is not relevant to metre). It is the length of time required for vocalizing each syllable that is important. Ones that take longer to pronounce are arranged with ones that take less time. Certain arrangements form a metrical unit (a ‘foot’), and several such units formed a line of verse (where a sentence need not end; grammatical units often spilt over to the next line).

The metre of epic requires six units (or feet) in a line. Each foot could either have an initial long syllable followed by two short ones, or two short ones. The first lines of the Iliad and Odyssey (transliterated into the Latin alphabet) could be represented metrically this way:

Each line has six feet. The three-syllable foot is more common, and so the rhythm tends to be one of tripping momentum. There are exceptions to the rules on what constitutes a long and short syllable; for example, because of pausing at the end of the line, even a final long-short sequence (as in the examples) in effect equals the length of time of two longs.

Got that?

I'm also listening to the fabulous Literature & History podcast, which has 3 episodes on The Iliad, telling me that I'll be doing some on-the-fly editing of my own, since, improbably enough, the back half of the book is even bloodier than the front (the podcaster's favorite example is the guy(s) who die of a very graphic spear to the face).

There's a lot of amazing archeology going on around Troy this past couple decades, and the best thing I've seen or read so far is this German geologist (huge swaths of archeology and linguistics are built by Germans) talking about the Luwian (pronounced "Luvian," because Germans) civilization, with sooooo much context.




The whole thing is amazing, but my favorite single factoid is the explanation for how these enormous mounds (tells) grow to hundreds of feet high over millennia of human habitation: they build houses out of mud bricks, that lasts for a couple generations, then it falls down, and you flatten the surface and build the new house on top of it. I've read lots of books, and nothing anywhere has ever explained that.