To say that parenting is a challenge is to state the obvious. But it is also true. Every parent knows the exhaustion, frustration, and occasional despair that parenting can bring. And that is true when the kids are your own, when they have been a part of your family since day one--brought up under your "system" and taught the house rules since before they could walk. Try throwing a newcomer into the mix. Oh, and make him a strong-willed, deeply sensitive, highly opinionated 12-year-old boy who doesn't speak English and is from a different country, different culture, and different religious tradition. Now how is it?
Feleke is an amazing kid. He is very smart and uncannily resourceful. (He showed us how to cook corn in the coals of a campfire, pictured below.) He is devoted to his family, both this African family and his new American family, and to his faith. (An example of the latter is his extreme fastidiousness about keeping the Ethiopian Orthodox dietary restrictions.) He is also capable of heart-breaking acts of kindness and generosity, of the sort you don't often see in most American children his age. In addition, he has a well-developed sense of honor and propriety. (Without any prompting from us, he averts his eyes or changes the channel when anything even remotely inappropriate appears on the television.) And over the past several months, in the many ways that he has confronted his cancer and his epic journey to the United States for treatment, he has shown a level of courage and fortitude that has to be described as awe inspiring.
But he can also be a handful. For example, here are two regular sources of conflict. Every remotely fun-looking activity that any of his American siblings get to do Feleke, understandably, wants to do as well. In that regard, he's like any kids with an older sibling. My children are all the same way. Molly wanted to do what Hannah was doing; Thomas wanted to do what Caroline was doing; and so on through Caroline and Mary Claire, each child longing for the privileges of the closest older sibling. Which, in Feleke's case, in America, would be Caroline, his 13 year old sister. So when she gets to pilot the jet ski at the lake or gets to stay up late and watch a movie with her older sister or whatever, Feleke wants to do the same. Actually, it isn't just that he wants to do the same. It's that our refusal to grant him this privilege, enjoyed by his sister, is an affront to justice. And he can usually back up his position with arguments.
And frankly, sometimes he wins the argument. Sometimes he is just right. Sometimes it just doesn't matter that Caroline is more than one year older than him. And we cave and let him do what he asked. But not every time. Thirteen is different from 12. What's more, there is the problem of maintaining the perception, among my other kids, that we are not unduly favoring the newcomer. So, since Caroline (and all of her older siblings) were required to wait until they were 13 to do whatever it is Feleke now wants to do at 12, to make a special exception for him strikes them as unjust. Even our 10 year old argues on occasion that Feleke should not be allowed a privilege that she has. The argument? She had to wait three years to do X and Feleke has only been wanting for two months. How is that fair? When I reply that the how-long-you-have-consciously-been-pining-to-do-the-thing standard isn't fair either, since until 7 months ago he didn't know that X existed, Mary Claire did not seem to be fully persuaded.
All of this doesn't mean we don't ever make special exceptions for Feleke, just as we have made countless special exceptions to our established rules for the other kids. In fact, my older children swear that we have made some many exceptions over the years, since when they were little, that our household has become almost unrecognizable. (They also speculate that Ruth Ann's and my stricter approach to parenting "back in the day" may be partially responsible for their own superior work ethic, ability to take criticism and instruction, and general awesomeness.)
To which the younger kids respond by saying, yeah, well, things are different now. For one thing, you didn't grow up in a house where you had an older sibling who was getting to do fun stuff that you were not allowed to do--and right in front of you. It was different then. Ipods and cell phones hadn't been invented when you were little. And so on. Anyway, the point is that this issue comes up with our other kids all the time; so we have some experience with how to deal with it. But the level of difficulty is a little higher when the complaining child doesn't speak much English.
Which brings us to the second problem. When Feleke doesn't understand why he is being denied some privilege, he pouts. And I'm not talking about a little frown. I'm talking full-on sulking, with pursed lips, furrowed brow, folded arms, eyes narrowed to slits. Sometimes, if the pouting happens to overlap with a meal, he will up the ante by engaging in a classic "hunger strike." This is the term my family uses when one of the kids, annoyed with the food selection at dinner or generally annoyed about something unrelated to dinner, says "no thank you, I'm not hungry," and just sits there, martyred, at the dinner table. A hunger strike is a transparent ploy to send a message, usually to mom and dad, that there is something displeasing about the current situation. Anyway, Feleke has done this to us more than once, and sometimes at embarrassing moments--such as when we are visiting family or friends. When he first engaged in a hunger strike, he would refuse even to come to the table for dinner, saying he wasn't hungry and would prefer to play outside. Then I explained to him that, although he didn't have to eat with us, he did have to sit at the table with the family, since dinner time was we we all come together every day to talk and visit. He found this baffling. He insisted that, back home, if he wasn't hungry, he didn't have to come to dinner. His parents would just let him continue to play while the rest of the family ate. I expressed skepticism at this notion (that his parents would allow this), but then made the point that I have made countless times now, and that he will probably someday repeat to his therapist: however you did things in Ethiopia, this is how we do things here.
Sometimes Feleke's pouting and refusal to eat gets so bad that we have to impose some discipline. Usually, we just let him live with the consequences, which is hunger, until he agrees to eat. But sometimes that isn't enough. For example, once, when we went out to eat at restaurant, he refused to eat because we hadn't picked his favorite restaurant. Of course, we'd gone to his favorite restaurant the last three times we'd been out to eat, and the place we did go had several items on their menu that were the sort of thing that he normally loved to eat. And it wasn't that he had suddenly lost his appetite; he had just announced that he was very hungry. He was just displeased with the choice. I said, okay, we obviously can't make you eat, but unless and until you eat something, you won't be allowed to go to the party at our friend's house this afternoon--the party where there will be lots of cupcakes and kids playing games and jumping on the trampoline. He thought I was bluffing. To deny him this benefit for such a small violation of the household code would, by his lights, be beyond the pale. In retrospect, maybe he was right. Anyway, he didn't think I was serious, up until the point that Ruth Ann drove away from the house with the other children in the car, headed to the party, leaving Feleke and me at home by ourselves. He retired to his bedroom and was gone for about five minutes before he came back into the dining room where I was working. "Dad, are we going to the party?" No, Feleke. We're going to hang out here. I have work I can do, and you can just chill here with me. Long pause. Back to the bedroom he went. The same thing happened at least once more. He came down. "Are we going." No. Long pause. And then I said: unless, of course, you want to eat some lunch, in which case, after you eat, we can drive over to the party and see what's going on.
He went back to his room, this time for 10 minutes, and then came back down. Stands next to me for maybe 30 seconds, saying nothing, then: "Dad, what do we have for lunch?" Well now, we have sandwiches, fruit, lots of stuff. What would you like? I hopped up and made him some lunch; he ate two sandwiches and some carrots. And we were soon on our way to the party, and he was back to his normal, friendly, accommodating self. Which is always how it ends. Either he comes around on his own, or he eventually accepts our explanation of things. And he's getting better all the time. the confrontations are increasingly rare. The explanations require less time. And we almost never have to call in an Amharic/English interpreter to moderate between us, which we did several times early on. I should also say that there have been more than a few times when we eventually decided, after being forced to explain a particular rule to Feleke, that the rule in question was in fact dumb. At which point we abandon the rule. In those instances, being a beneficiary of Feleke's victory, the other kids are less annoyed by Feleke's general litigiousness.
Here is Feleke cooking corn for us over the open fire. This is how the do it back home in Dafe Jema, he said. He uses the husks to clean the ashes off of the corn. It was delicious.
