My Defective Gene

Being adopted hits me in peculiar ways sometimes. Unexpectedly.

There’s the occasional question I get from strangers or acquaintances sometimes. Usually after noticing my unique shade of hair, people ask me if either of my parents had red hair or if my siblings are redheads too. Interestingly enough, Mama did have red hair, although she didn’t give birth to me. But none of my five siblings--whom she did give birth to--have red hair, nor any of their children. I’ve always thought of red hair as that special link between me and my mama, to make me her daughter in spite of the fact that I never swam in her birth waters.

I always feel a little strange at doctor’s appointments when they start asking me the list of questions they always ask about family history. Heart disease? Diabetes? Epilepsy? Schizophrenia? They ask these things even if you’re just seeing the doctor about your bunyons. So I know it must be pretty important, medically, to know your family’s history of disease. I usually just dismiss those questions by saying "I’m adopted" and watching the mild frown of disappointment on the face of the medical professional. It must be frustrating to have to leave all those important lines blank.

Although I know and love my birth mother, I never bother to try and pick through the geneology of murky parentage that shrouds my ancestry. It’s not really clear who begat whom, so it’s of dubious benefit to try and keep track of their diseases.

Today I confirmed after suspecting for some time that my youngest son is color-blind. His older brother, my middle son, who has a different father, is also color-blind. So it struck me that I am obviously a carrier of the color blindness gene.

I did some research. Color-blindness is caused by certain cones in the eyes that don’t register certain lightwaves at the proper intensity. So two colors that look very different to me, look identical to my sons.

I first noticed in both boys at about the same age, when they had mastered the names of all the colors. They would state, with equal confidence, "red" when pointing at the red crayon, "yellow" when pointing at the yellow crayon and "pink" when pointing at the blue crayon (or "orange" when pointing at the green) or vice versa. I found some online color-blindness tests and confirmed it--they have defective cones.

Color-blindness is rare, but the particular kind of color blindness that they have is even more rare, affecting only about 1 in 100 people. Color-blindness in general occurs in 8-15% of males and 0.05% of females. This is because the CB trait lives on the X chromosome and is recessive.

This means that a girl would have to inherit two defective X’s, one from each parent; while a boy need only inherit one from either parent.

My birth mother, Sue, had two boys who are not color-blind so she is most likely not the source of my defective gene. That means daddy did it, which means he himself was color-blind. Whoever he was.

And that brings me back around to the beginning of my blog and how being adopted strikes me in odd ways sometimes when I least expect it. The only thing I know about the man who co-produced me is that he can’t tell the difference between orange and green. Weird, huh?

Why I May Never Bathe my Son Again (at least not for a very long time)

Tonight I took my six-year-old son to the Rec Center to sign up for soccer league and he wanted to play basketball. So I cozied up on the bleacher with Les Mis and peeked through my eyelashes to see if anyone interesting was among the full-grown men romping around and grunting on the court.

Indeed, I spotted him immediately. We exchanged glances as he wiped the sweat off his brow in a massively sexy way. His hair was dark and longish. Tousled and just beginning to be sweaty. Chiseled features, nice bod. He played with an aggressive style I admired, though he was not the best player on the court. I caught him peeking at me to see if I'd noticed every time he made a basket or performed some devilishly clever maneuver.

I just happened to be reading the part of the novel where the love between Marius and Cosette blooms on the fertile ground of their first passionate glances toward one another. Their eyes had not met, but they shared a complex and intimate dance of noticing and noticing and pretending to not notice one another. I imagined something similar happening to me just then, subtle glances followed by lowered eyelids and quickly turned heads. Twice he walked near me to get a drink from his water bottle and adjust his keys and cell phone where they rested on the bleachers two rows down.

My son, perhaps aware that my attention had shifted to the adult side of the court, wandered over and managed to place himself in a spot where my new Tease would plow him down had he not the presence of mind to stop himself in the nick of time and simply crash into him instead.

How peculiar the sensation of having someone you're closely associated with, such as your son, come in physical contact with someone you are noticing quite intensely and whose physical contact you are beginning to desire, more and more. My son had touched him. My son had received the warmth of his regard for a moment, his attention, his direct gaze. He knew my son existed, yet I had no concrete evidence that he knew I existed at all.

Then it occurred to me that my son now had the man's sweat on his person. The sweat I could see now, soaking his soft gray tee shirt in a triangular pattern down his back and dripping from his forehead and forming sexy curly ringlets of his hair. My son. Had that sweat. On him.

I called my son over to me and said it's time to go. I wanted to sniff him like a hound dog. And with one final gaze of longing at the Tease, I turned and left the building. Such chance encounters often lead to nothing. But I may have been clumsy enough to drop my business card, which I was using as a bookmark, and leave it lying on the bleacher where anyone could find it. If they were looking.

Because I said so, that's why!

I had a conversation with an associate the other day about my son and his worsening behavior problems. This person, a man in his forties, has no children, never married. As such, he is an expert on parenting and did not hesitate to fill me in on what sort of discipline and structure my son needs.

I also had a chat recently with a close friend about discipline. She actually is a parent and is experiencing some behavior problems herself. (Not herself, I mean her kids.) She says that successful parenting means instilling enough fear and respect into the children when they are young so that they develop the lifelong habit of obeying you.

The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that fear and respect are two different things. It’s possible for a child to feel both toward a parent, but one does not necessarily imply the other. A child will obey out of fear--until he matures enough to recognize his own power and then the fear is diminished. If the respect hasn’t been established as well, he will not obey a parent he no longer fears. In fact, he will probably resent that parent for making him afraid all those years and will rebel all the more.

My dad was the disciplinarian in our home. He did spank me, with a belt, and I feared him. Unfortunately he died before I developed any respect for him. The lessons I learned about respect came from my mother, who rarely disciplined me at all. I found that disappointing her made me so miserable with guilt and shame that I almost always obeyed her. On the oher hand, making her proud was a very good feeling, so my choices often reflected that.

Here in the south, we like to teach our kids to say "sir" and "ma'am" and call ladies "Miss." Is that respect? Or just good manners?

In my desperation, I’m trying to find a successful formula for my son. People keep warning me that I must get a handle on it now or I will be in for a horrifying decade when he hits puberty. I’m trying to find the perfect mixture of structure and discipline (which is difficult because it’s not in my nature to be structured or strict) with flexibility and communication that fosters the respect and compassion I learned with my mom. I would rather my children obey because they feel rotten when they disappoint me than because they fear the punishment I might dish out if they don’t.

For childless people, parenting is a "simple" matter of structure and consistency. For a single parent without the support of family, friends or neighbors, what seems simple is in reality an impossibility. All we can do is give it our best effort and ignore the criticisms and judgments from those who know all the answers.