I have been a bad adoptive parent. I'm beginning to get the idea that parenthood is really one long negotiation involving equal parts frustration (because they never do what you want them to do) and guilt (because you never wind up doing what you should be doing). One of the things I feel like I should be doing - one of the Big Important Things for internationally adopted kids - is signing Daughter up for Mandarin lessons.

She's four, she's brilliant, and she's taking ballet.

She likes ballet. She does well at it. But when she's 24, I wonder if she'll have built up a tremendous reservoir of resentment over not having any real mastery over the language of the country of her birth.

I know that it matters to some people who were adopted across language lines. Like Jane Jeong Trenka, who recently did a radio diary focusing on the hard work of learning Korean, her birth language - and not one she ever heard growing up in Minnesota, but one she's gradually mastering now that she's moved back to Korea. People need these connections. People like the ones our children are becoming. Of course, she's a writer, so language is singularly important.

Then again, I'm a writer, too. (Or so my editors tell me.)

For now, I'm keeping the worst of the guilt at bay by keeping some kind of Mandarin activity (translating the Tao Te Ching character by character on zhongwen.com, or just listening to Chinese new wave music) in rotation on my list of things to do.

That's why I'm interested in something I've just heard about called Livemocha.com It's another one of those playing-to-the-strengths-of-the-internet sites, linking people who speak one language and want to learn another with people in the opposite boat - so I could do a little English teaching and Mandarin learning at the same time. At least that's what it looks like to me... I haven't actually signed up and started doing any networking yet.

One more thing to feel the guilt over, I suppose.

Anyway, I'll be looking through their lesson plans as soon as I get a moment to spare. Maybe they'll even have something suitable for a 4-year-old's learning level - if we do it together.