Off to TRA camp!

I never thought in my entire life that I would be saying those words. I’m off to TRA camp – in the Santa Cruz mountains. A week of spending time with little tiny and not so tiny mini-me’s! oh.. AND their parents … aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!

🙂 I’m completely open with no expectations about what this should be. I’m doing a poetry workshop and performing the show. It should be a trip to perform it for this audience and Im totally thankful to PACT for giving me the opportunity to share this piece in front of the people, in many ways, who this is for. I hope they’ll let me come back next year when the piece is totally done.

 The camp is about 50% African American kids. I wonder how many counselors are black? I’ll find out. It should be interesting becuase it seems like since the National Black Social Workers in the 70’s did their thing, denouncing Black TRA’s, people moved internationally so many, many of adults are Korean, Chinese etc… but now days its much more common to adopt black (american/ african/ or caribbean..etc) children.

anyhow- I’m looking forward to meeting fellow TRA warrior Ji-in – yay!

 see you all next week with lots of stories… ha!

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Visiting the Fam

Im back in WA for a visit with moms and dad for a few days.

Aunt Jemima says hi.  (if you dont understand that.. come see my show)

She’s still hangin out in the kitchen and was watchin me today, not so subtlety as I was vacuuming the kitchen, cleaning off the picnic tables and chairs getting ready for the 30 people my parents are having over for their annual 4th of July party. next year for sure im going to bring a huge posse of my friends. I can freak out all my parents church friends and my mom’s side of the family by having a huge multicultural mess of folks over. They wont be able to make one racist joke from confusion.

I just sat down after doing the vacuuming, and after spending about an hour helping my mom shovel up the dog ‘dumps’ as she calls them from the front yard where 4 dogs have made their comfort zone across the 2 acres. Last time I came home I was actually shoveling horse manure on the 1st day helping moms fertilize the yard.

Its nice to be home.

On a side note for ‘the search update’ – I finally got my non-ID papers from Olympia that I ordered last December or whenever that was. All I know is that it was an 8 month wait and that during those 8 months the other search techniques I was using came through instead. I haven’t done anything with making contact again for a while. It really was a good thing to do. So now I have the non-ID papers from both the county I was adopted in and the state. It was a good batch of information and actually filled in some of the questions I still had even after talking to G*****. If you remember, we did about 3 intense phone calls, and then I had to take a few steps back. She mentioned taking a blood test, but after getting this last batch of papers, I don’t see the point. I’m not in denial about who she is to me. Doing a blood test aint gonna change the fact that – I have her middle name. She never told me that in the times we talked and she knew my middle name is Marie. How do I feel about having her middle name? Its kinda cool, but is also kind of freakin me out. Like I dont belong to me anymore. I dont know how to explain that, maybe in a few days.

If you remember she was really resistent to letting the family know that i have ‘resurfaced’. What she has done however (after a looong while) is hook me up with my half-sister. yay! I got pictures of her and we have emailed each other back and forth for a bit. She’s 18 yrs old. We have the same smile.

but more importantly – I’m ready now I think, after it being about 5 months from the first contact with G**** to go ahead and start making contact with her again, see where she is in her head space and to start looking for the birth father. It’s been a really strange thing to need so much time and space to re-center myself. But hell.. Im not gonna act like I wasn’t thrown off kilter emotionally.