Inarticulate

Tonight, a worker from Family Builders came to our apartment for a few hours just to meet and visit with us. She asked us a few questions about ourselves and adopting a child through them. I let Emily do most of the talking. Whenever I tried to answer questions I didn't have much to say. I have a habit of being to the point and it often doesn't leave a ton of room for discussion (I blame my Danish heritage entirely). I'll tell my stellar question-answer in a minute, but for now I feel like pontificating, so allow me a few moments.

if you've read many of my posts, be prepared. If you're like most of my readers, keep going, I know you just skim over everything else i write

With most people, conversation dies if I do much talking. Most of the time the other person or people just nod in agreement and give mmm-hmms and say, "yeah, that's right/so true/I never thought of that." It's pretty boring. When I teach Sunday School, I hate talking. I like axing questions and having other people do all of it and steering it by appropriate questions. When I feel like interjecting my thoughts into the lesson, the class stares at me with the look like I just killed an interesting debate and the show is now over, leaving me floundering over something to get them talking again.

I think if I ever wrote a book, it would take me a few decades to write. It'd start out concise enough to fit onto a few pages and I'd have to BS and fill out the rest just to make it interesting.

this would be most of my story

If you know me, personally, you'll know I enjoy a good discussion. Either the mutual working together to solve a problem through conversation, the sharing of new ideas and information that enlightens the participants and/or listeners, the fair and open-minded sharing of opposing ideas to reach a middle ground, or to present an accurate picture of everything that is in play in a sticky situation. I will love you if you disagree with me on the condition that you can back up your disagreement. If I disagree with you, it means I really like you. I never debate with strangers. You could be telling me the earth is flat, but if I don't care about you, I'll keep my mouth shut. If I'm trying to get you to like me, I'll ask questions that make you back up your position and prove your point or make a joke out of the tense situation. If I really like you, I'll share my thoughts as nicely as possible, but bring out the big guns if the situation desperately needs it.

it's sort of complicated, really

I'm not one to get emotional during a debate, but it happens. It's natural. Some have a lower threshold for emotional control than others, that's fine, but I will encourage you to slow down and discuss the topic rationally. I appreciate passion and emotion. It means there's something the brain has worked out that's important to our identity/survival/safety/self-interest even if we can't consciously articulate it. I like helping people figure that out and pull that jumbled massive cloud of firing neurons into an organized, step-wise sentence coming out of the mouth. That's essentially what an emotion is: a brain-wide response to a stimulus of some kind. A smell of a rose can trigger a bajillion memories in the cortex, sending off huge waves of visual, tactile, verbal, auditory sensations linked by other neurons and portions of the brain to huge chunks of life that have promoted our well-being (or injury and hinderment to some) and create an emotional response that result in our hearts fluttering, our skin flushing, and pull grandiose words out of the language center of our brain.

this is what happens when i'm on my bike and a driver doesn't use their blinker to cut me off suddenly

If you asked me why I like my favorite smell, I might just say, "It smells good." But there would be so much going on that formed that opinion. As Emily and I read these adoption books, they strongly emphasize the power of associations and warn of possible negative associations abused and hurt children may have with even simple things. The smell of cookie dough might trigger memories of anger and pain if associated with something traumatic that happened while freshly-baked cookies were in the house and once the reaction is discovered, it would be wise to act appropriately in the future to help resolve or avoid (if necessary) the situation.

cookie dough seems innocent, but it has a dark side no one wants to talk about

I find that these adoption books really contain amazing advice for dealing with everyone, not just hurt-children, and push me into being a better parent to my biological children. I also see a lot of it in the people I talk with at school, my patients, classmates, etc.

yes, i am judging you, don't be surprised. and don't deny you're doing it, too

It's impossible to fight emotion with emotion. Even well-articulated truth gets lost in the angry sea of anothers temper or sadness. Progress is made (ie, people are brought closer together) when both sides act rationally to some degree, and made closer the more rational they become. When emotions can be focused and organized, then the engine of our life can be useful, not just exploding vapors of combustible fuel. If our emotions are the engine, the steering wheel is our rationality. Both are required to move forward in consciously-decided directions.

'nuff said

So, as we get ready for the in-depth and very personal questions that'll be put to us by this worker over the next few homestudy appointments I'll have to prepare myself to answer well and not emotionally. The other day, I responded to someone's comment about a topic by talking about some triggered memory that probably seemed random to them at the time and cause them to think about me "What is WITH this guy?"

Tonight, when she asked us why we want to adopt a foster child, I said, "Because I think it's a great thing to do for someone." A few cricket chirps later, I tried to fill out that answer with some reason that didn't come out coherently, abandoned it, and restated, "It just seems like it's something great we can do for someone else," and deflected the question over to Emily with a panicked look on my face.

After thinking about it some more, I still can't come up with a better reason or answer, but it's not very exciting, is it?

the teacher finished 15 minutes ago. the girl at bottom right just has nothing else to do

Sorry if you came by earlier and the interwebs warned you my opining might be bad for your computer. Not sure what that was about, but I borrowed a picture off of Google Images and it got all jumpity on me.