Re: You're adopting who?

May 21, 2007

Holy Crap. What an incredible story. These parents are amazing. I can’t believe the reaction from neighbors & friends.

Straight A student-wow! I guess we never know what our kids are capable of.

On 5/21/07 8:54 AM, " andrea52521991 " <mkeller@...> wrote:

http://tinyurl.com/36czfc

You're adopting who?

A couple's decision to take in an autistic child draws callous

reactions.

By Ralph Savarese, RALPH JAMES SAVARESE is the author

of " Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism & Adoption, " which will be

published Tuesday by Other Press.

May 21, 2007

'WHY WOULD anyone adopt a badly abused, autistic 6-year-old from

foster care? "

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, " she added. " 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? " she asked, drawing out the word " disability. " " God knows

what that kid's parents were doing when they conceived him. "

" 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'd started spending

time with him. His first communicative act with language, at age 3 ˜

the sign for " more " ˜ we'd 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'd

been called in to try to calm him ˜ he stopped in his tracks, paused

(as if to allow some associative chain to complete itself) 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. No paragons of racial sensitivity, we

were nevertheless 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, as if our son deserved pity and we were

allowed neither our flaws nor a different understanding of social

commitment. The journalist 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 [my italics] 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 ˜

the list goes on and on. 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's literally rewriting the common scripts of autism

and " attachment disorder " (the broad diagnosis for the problems of

abandoned and traumatized kids). 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.

May 21, 2007