Archive
Friday Fun! (What’s Important to Me)
Hello my lovely readers! I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking the last few months about what really matters to me. I guess you’d say what values I hold dear. I didn’t just stick with the ones I was raised with. I’ve done a lot of research and soul-searching to figure out what’s important to me. That’s what makes me stick so strongly to my guns on things I truly believe in. The more time that has passed since I’ve gotten back on my feet from the awfulness that was winter, the more I realize that what it all boils down to, for me, is that I haven’t lost hope in the world. I have hope that we can change the world. I have hope we can make it a better place. I have hope we can fix the trajectories of previous generations’ bad decisions. I have hope that the cycles of violence, grief, and pain can stop. We only have to want it. I firmly believe that Gandhi was right when he said “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” That is at the core of my belief system. I don’t have faith in a god or spirits to fix things. I don’t have faith in government to fix things. But I do have faith in myself. I have faith that I can change for the better. The cycles of violence and pain stop with me. That basic philosophy extends out into everything else I do, from my firm belief in vegetarianism (that is gradually moving toward veganism) to my commitment to someday adopt at least one child. And I just can’t be around negative people anymore. I can’t be close to people who are willing to just give up. Humanity didn’t struggle and evolve so much to just quit evolving. It’s just that maybe the next step of evolution has more to do with our minds and our behaviors than how our bodies work.
Namaste, yo.
Adoptionversary!
One year ago today, I picked up my kitty, Ayla, from the MSPCA. Two days earlier, we chose each other. I was looking around, trying to decide on an adult cat. Ayla was cute and timid. She seemed sweet, but a bit overwhelmed. I was trying to decide between her and another cat. I opened her cage, and she timidly stuck her head forward and licked my hand. My heart melted. She’d chosen me. Who could refuse that?
When I first brought her home. She was so tiny!
Although the first couple of days were interesting getting to know each other, she’s quickly become my furry best friend. Ayla keeps me company at night. She meows excitedly at the door when she hears me getting home. She plays with me. When I got the stomach flu, she put her paws up on the edge of the toilet and licked me while I was puking. She snuggles me and purrs. She’s the perfect, sweet, snuggly kitty-cat match for me, and I’m so glad we found each other.
Ayla now. She loves to steal my boxes.
Movie Review: Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy (2010)
Summary:
This documentary follows the adoption of Fang Sui Yong, an 8 year old Chinese girl, by the Sadowsky’s, a Jewish family from Long Island. The filmmaker seeks to highlight the particular issues faced when adopting older children internationally.
Review:
This is one of those films that shows how difficult life can be, and that sometimes there is no good choice. There’s only the iffy choice that’s a bit better than the alternative. Sui Yong (who now goes by “Faith,” so I”ll call her that for the rest of the review) didn’t want to leave China. She was quite happy living with her foster family, and had never seen a white person before. This is all the film tells us at first, so you immediately wonder, why can’t Faith stay with the foster family? It turns out that foster families can’t adopt the children they’re caring for in China, and it is unlikely Faith would have stayed with them for her whole childhood. Additionally, Faith is special needs with a club foot and dropped wrists. Her foster parents state that she would face great difficulty in China, being treated as an outcast. Her foster parents want her to be adopted. They see that her future in China is very bleak.
That doesn’t mean that her transition to the US went perfectly, of course. The culture shock Faith faces is severe, even if just looking at going from hearing Mandarin and Cantonese to hearing English all the time. Donna Sadowsky is obviously a tough love type mom, believing that being firm will be the fastest way to help Faith acclimate. Personally I believe she was a bit too tough. Some of the learning could have been made into a bit more of a game. More understanding could have been shown for her special needs. But I only saw a brief film of two years of the time they spent together. It’s almost impossible to tell Faith’s personality from that much film. Maybe they tried taking it a bit easier on her, and she slacked off too much. Maybe the doctors told them Faith could do certain things that it turned out she couldn’t. It’s hard to tell.
An interesting element of the film is the fact that the filmmaker, a one-woman team, speaks Mandarin, and so translates sometimes for the family. This of course means that she has a direct impact on the story she’s documenting. It’s quite interesting to watch and to consider how much documenting a story impacts it.
Overall, this is a very interesting documentary. Many people are hesitant to adopt older children. This film shows that it can be done, as well as the great need for families for older and special needs children internationally. It brings up interesting questions regarding international and transracial adoption, as well as demonstrating how quickly the American consumer culture impacts children. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in international adoption or the issues related to it.
4 out of 5 stars
Source: PBS website
Book Review: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford
Summary:
In the early days of Hollywood, Joan Crawford became one of the first celebrities to adopt children. From the outside, it looked like her children had it all–presents, inherent fame, an apparently adoring mother. However, in Christina’s tell-all memoir, she reveals the truth behind the image. A mother obsessed with cleanliness and rigid rules. A mother who demanded her children worship her like her fans did in order to receive her love. A mother so desperate to cling to her days of fame that she attempted to beat down any glimmer of success in her children. A mother who Christina still desperately loved to the bitter end.
Review:
This memoir is a must read for anyone who thinks that having money and being a celebrity automatically makes for a good parent. Joan Crawford expected her four adopted children to be exactly what she wanted them to be instead of loving them for their uniqueness and human imperfections. Christina’s situation gradually worsens as she becomes older and starts to show glimmers of being her own person. The scenes of abuse in Christina’s childhood are the best written in the book. It is clear that she remembers them vividly and can still identify with the emotions that went through her as a child and young teenager.
*spoiler warning*
That said, Christina never manages to disentangle herself from her mother. In spite of everything her mother has done, Christina still attempts anything and everything to reconcile with her, apparently ignoring or forgetting the fact that she never did anything wrong to cause her mother’s behavior in the first place. Joan Crawford is a cruel, spiteful, evil person, and Christina naively continues to seek her love even in her 30s. This makes it more sad than most memoirs about abuse as it seems that Christina never truly overcame her abuser.
*end spoiler*
The writing, beyond the scenes of abuse, is sub-par. Christina has a tendency to ramble a bit in an uninteresting way. She also seems to not understand which parts of her life to skim over a bit. I mean, did we really need to know exactly when in a funeral her husband hands her a paper cup of water? No. Additionally, she obviously had a bad editor, as there are quite a few spelling and grammar mistakes, which is odd for a mass market paperback.
Overall, it’s worth a read if you’re into memoirs or the inside Hollywood scoop. All others should probably give it a pass though.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Swaptree
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 