Honestly, It’s A Perfectly Understandable Question

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 6 Comments

On Monday when I picked Zoë up from the babysitter’s, K (the babysitter) told me Zoë had asked all the other 3 kids “why are you white like your mom?”  K told me they talked about how people are different colors and sometimes they are the same as their moms and/or dads and sometimes they aren’t.  They also talked a little about adoption.  I told her thanks.

When we got to the car, I asked Zoë about it.  She then said, “I want to be white.”  We want through this with Noah when he was about that age, but it lasted about a day and we talked about his color is a gift from his Ethiopian mom and that all Ethiopians are brown and it was a way for him to always remember his Ethiopian mom and dad.  We have never shied away from talking about race/skin color and even how my skin color is different from my mom and brother who are more olive and me and my other brother are more pink like my dad.  So, I figured this conversation would go about the same way.

Not with Zoë.  When I asked her why?  She said, “I want to be a grown up and grown ups are white.”  Well shit.  Then I started thinking, all of the adults that are constants in her life are white.  We live in a pretty diverse city and we see African Americans nearly everywhere we go, but on an average day, all the adults she has interactions with are white.  We talked about how your skin color doesn’t change as you get older and those who are born with brown skin stay brown.  We then talked about how her Ethiopian mother was brown and she seemed to understand that, but still wants to be “white when I’m a grown up.”

Oh boy.  I have some work to do.  Advice?

In Which They Hold My Future In Their Hands

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

The end is near.  Well not really the end.  That just sounds both ominous and optimistic.  I am at the end of my PhD program, but just embarking on my dissertation.  So, end of phase 1.  Starting phase 2.  I want to do research in the urban school district of the city I live in.  In order to do research there, I have to ask permission and go through a whole process.  In the process of writing this post, while multi-tasking, the district has gotten back to me with their research application and I have to admit, I am surprised by the quickness to which they responded.  I have the forms and one line stands out to me:

“Ideas, operating procedures, records, and publications developed in or by the school system shall be made available to outside non-profit or profit organizations for use or distribution when such use will reflect favorably upon the school system and the community.”

I added the bold.  Now, I am not going into this research to expose this district for not being able to effectively education its children.  But I am going into this research to see the impact of pre-made, canned curriculum on instructional choices and the impacts those instructional choices have on students abilities.  I now have to make sure I word my research in a way that the benefit to the district is clear.  I want to make a change and sometimes everything isn’t rosy.  If it was all fine and dandy, then the students would be doing well and not as poorly as they are doing now.  Shouldn’t they want those answers?

I don’t exactly know how I am going to do this.  Let the wordsmithing begin.

Oh How Parenting Has Changed

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

This weekend we celebrated one of my grandma’s 84th birthday.  We all got together at her house for dinner and desert.  This us to be something we did nearly every week when I was growing up and all of us kids were small.  Now many of us kids have our own kids and busy lives.  Which means we don’t get to see each other very often.  My kids got to play with their cousin (first cousin once removed to be technical) and had a blast.  They played with their great aunt and uncles and laughed.  It was nice to see energy and life in my grams house that hasn’t been there is so long.

We got to telling the stories we remembered from our own parents childhoods.  The ones that get told over and over again by us kids about our parents, aunts and uncles.  Like the time my uncle stuck his tongue to a metal pole and then had it ripped off.  Or the time my other uncle feel down in the sewer.  Or the time my dad and some buddies accidentally started a bulldozer and ran.  Or the time my aunt fell out of a car.  Good stories.  Well, this weekend I was reminded about how much parenting has changed.

My dad told a story that had me laughing hysterically.  He was about 7 and the street was being repaved/tarred and he and his buddies were playing in it and he came home covered in tar.  My grandpa who was a hard man.  He is a bit rough and old world didn’t hit my dad or loose his temper, he simply handed my dad a rag and a can of gasoline, stood him in the backyard and told him to clean up.  “But don’t rub to hard or you’ll set yourself on fire,” he said as he walked away.  My dad said he cried hysterically the whole time he rubbed it off his harms seriously thinking he might actually catch on fire.  We all laughed hysterically.  My dad said he certainly never played in tar again.

I can’t imagine telling something like that to my kids by in the 50’s parenting was very different.  But I’ll never get that image out of my head and every time I think about it I laugh just a little.

Thanks for the laugh gramps.  Miss you.

A Room Of Ones Own

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I have an office. This isn’t new really, but the fact that it is now functional is. I’m a pack rat. I don’t throw things away. I should. I have been wanting to get my office in shape, as I have this little thing called a dissertation to write. And well, I needed a space to do it. So, I took advantage of a Sunday am without the kids and had the hubs move shelves from one room to my office-all part of our use what you have commitment. Then I got luck and had two snow days. The kids cooperated and now I have an office, that was once the nursery, but it is perfect.

Facing The Firing Squad

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 2 Comments

Life sucks sometimes.  Especially when you aren’t fully prepared for its suckiness.  I have never really hidden the fact that money is and has been a bit of a struggle.  Partly because I didn’t work for 4 years, to stay home with the kids, and because we are both spenders.  Which is not a good combination.  Ideally a couple should be a balance of a spender and a saver or even better, two savers.  I have never been good with money.  Well, I take that back. I have always been really good at spending money and I have learned over the years, that I use spending like I do food as a comfort for some deeper issue.  I’m working on it slowly and I think that I am beginning to break through.  We’ll see.

So, money is always an issue, especially since we have committed to stop using our credit cards–which was a our go to for so many things that we didn’t need and shouldn’t have bought.  But, I can’t go back, I can only go forward.  And we have created budgets and are working on a cash-only basis and seeing how that works.  It will be a long road until we are debt-free (can only dream of the day the student loans are paid off–in 2040).  We are tackling our credit cards at this point and it would certainly be easier and quicker if we weren’t sending our kids to private school.  We toss the idea around, but I cannot and will not sacrifice their education.  I will sacrifice vacations and other spending before I decide that we can’t afford to send the kids to private school.  We make enough to still be able to get out of debt in about two years with the kids in private school, if we really lock down our spending.

We had a plan and we were feeling optimistic.  Then, I filed our taxes.  This was the first year we didn’t have an adoption tax credit to use and oh yeah–I went back to work and that pushed us up a tax bracket.  We got hit with a huge tax bill, penalties for not paying enough, AMT for making too much but not enough money.  I was floored because we couldn’t come close to paying the tax bill.  I know we are grown up and I’ll be 40 this year and it is depressing to think that we didn’t have enough saved in any capacity to pay for this tax bill.  But we don’t.  We should.  We don’t.  And it makes me depressed, angry, sad, and foolish.

I had to call my mom and tell her what we owed and that we needed the money.  I am lucky to have someone to help bail me out at my age.  It sucks like you can’t even imagine.  It made me feel like a teenager again asking for extra money to go out because I spent all of mine.  She was understanding but also had some words to say that I needed to hear.  We spend our money on things that are silly and that we don’t need.  We spend too much money on the kids and buying stuff for them and we live beyond our means.  This is true and not.  We live within our means if we didn’t have debt, but we do and that just screws it all up.  We think about how much money we can spend as opposed to how much money we could save, etc.  We need a new outlook and to make a severe money mindset change.  Hubs and I make too much money for this to be the case and it is time that I start to respect myself more to realize that money can’t buy me anything that I feel my life is missing and that just because I want something doesn’t mean I get to buy it.

I am trying to teach that to my kids, but how can I expect them to learn it, if I haven’t?  Life sucks sometimes.  But, I’m an adult who is a year away from finishing her PhD.  It’s time I got my shit together and started behaving like it and not like a spoiled little child.