What a Beautiful Story

Adopting Disabled Child Brings Callous Reaction: 'Why?'
"Why would anyone adopt a badly abused, autistic 6-year-old from foster
care?"

     By Ralph James Savarese. http://tinyurl.com/34xtn7

     So my wife and I were asked at the outset of our
adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. It was a reasonable question in this
age of narrow self-concern - far more reasonable, or at least more
reasonably put, than many of the other questions we fielded.
     For example, "Why don't you have your own children?" a wealthy
relative inquired, as if natural family-making were a kind of gated
community it was best never to abandon. "You two have such good genes. Why
waste them?"
     A colleague at work confronted me in the mailroom with this memorable
gem: "Have you tried in vitro?" She feared that we hadn't availed ourselves
of the many wondrous technologies that rescue infertile couples. "Wouldn't
that be better than adopting a child with a disability?"
     "We're not infertile," I barked. "We have a relationship with the
boy."
     My wife, an autism expert, had offered his mother services, but as the
woman found it increasingly difficult to care for her son and then dropped
out of the picture altogether, we had started spending time with him. His
first communicative act with language, at age 3 - the sign for "more" - we
had taught him while tickling his belly.
     He later made that sign in the emergency room of a hospital where he
was brought after being beaten in foster care. Upon seeing us - we had been
called in to try to calm him - he stopped in his tracks, paused and demanded
obsessively to be tickled. I remember searching on his chest for unbruised
patches among the purple, blue and black. He was that frantic in his quest
for the familiar and, dare I say, for love.
     To this day, I can't believe how callous people were - the strange
anxiety that adopting a child with a disability provoked. And the anxiety
just kept coming. "Healthy white infants must be tough to get," a neighbor
commented. We were appalled by the idea that we'd do anything to avoid
adopting, say, a black child or a Latino one.
     As offensive was the assumption that we must be devout Christians:
hyperbolic, designated do-gooders with a joint eye firmly on some final
prize. "God's reserving a special place for you," we heard on more than one
occasion. Adam Pertman, in his otherwise excellent book, Adoption Nation,
reproduces this logic exactly when he speaks of "children so challenging
that only the most saintly among us would think of tackling their behavioral
and physical problems."
     Despite the stigma attached to "special-needs children," people do
adopt these kids. And yet, many more Americans spend gobs of money on
fertility treatments or travel to foreign countries to find their perfect
little bundles.
     I'm haunted by something my son wrote after we taught him how to read
and type on a computer: "I want you to be proud of me. I dream of that
because in foster care I had no one." How many kids lie in bed at night and
think something similar?
     The physical and behavioral problems have been significant, at times
even crushing. The last eight years have been devoted almost exclusively to
my son's welfare: literacy training, occupational therapy,
relationship-building, counseling for post-traumatic stress. But what
strides he has made.
     The boy who was still in diapers and said to be retarded when he came
to live with us is now a straight-A student at our local middle school. He
is rewriting the common scripts of autism and "attachment disorder." These
are hopeless scripts, unforgiving scripts in which the child can't give
back.
     My son does, and others can as well. Recently, in response to my hip
replacement, he typed on his computer, "I'm nervous because Dad has not
brought me braces" - his word for crutches. I was just home from the
hospital - wobbly, a bit depressed, in pain. To my question, "Why do you
need crutches?" he responded endearingly, "You know how I like to be just
like you." My son was trying to make me feel better, taking on my
impairment, limping with me.
     Ralph James Savarese is the author of the new book "Reasonable People:
A Memoir of Autism & Adoption."


--
~Nate.