I’d somehow always thought I’d adopt a child with a physical special need. My husband and I were open to correctable medical conditions. On the photolistings most agencies maintain, we saw the profile of a little girl with congenital cataracts and a cleft palate. I’d seen her pictures before, then she disappeared from the case studies for a while and I assumed she’d been adopted. When she reappeared after our homestudy was complete, it seemed like a sign. The cleft palate was treatable. She would likely see with coke-bottle thick glasses until she was a teenager when she would have new lenses implanted in her eyes, but hey, my glasses are pretty thick too.
I started thinking of ways to combine her Korean name with an American-sounding name. If part of her name was “Hae Rong”, we could name her Veronica and call her Ronnie in honor of my father-in-law Ron, I reasoned.
We forwarded the girl’s medical records to a pediatrician at the Adoption Medicine Clinic at the University of Washington. There was also a summary of a brain scan results which showed some abnormalities. We also sent info to my sister, a graduate student in occupational therapy, and my future brother-in-law, a medical student. They sought information from their professors. (My sister would later end up doing much of her major project on sensory integration disorder and international adoption.)
We also had a video filmed at the Korean adoption agency which showed her sitting on a mat and reacting to various toys. The child seemed quite delayed, and also seemed to be seeing worse than her record indicated.
We eventually learned that the child had unshunted (untreated) hydrocephalus. Although she wasn’t technically classified as mentally retarded, the doctor’s opinion was that she would quite likely plateau and by age seven be far enough behind her age mates to classify as retarded. The doctor didn’t try to influence us one way or the other, but was very matter-of-fact about what types of early intervention would likely be prescribed and how intense they were likely to be, the most common outcomes She did state that no one can predict a child’s progress for sure.
As soon as we hung up the phone, I went to my husband (we had been on extension phones in different rooms). I went straight into his arms and said in a small voice, “We can’t do it, can we?” “No, we can’t” he replied.
Despite that still small voice that I would later recognize as the unpleasant truth, I still anguished. Still I wondered if I was being selfish. I worried that I was being hypocritical saying that we would take a child with special needs, then hedging about what needs those would be. I’d said we wanted a child who really needed adoption. We live in an area with lots of resources available. I was prepared to work with a child intensively. But, I admitted, I dreamed of a daughter who would become a companion, not only to me but to her intellectually capable brother as well.
But meanwhile, what if “Hae Ron” (not her real name) never got adopted?
My sister probably helped me the most. She worked with institutionalized children during her training, and she told me something I had never before considered: that not all children in institutions for the disabled were unhappy. “If she’s in a good place, she might be perfectly happy there,” she said. “You have the opportunity to give a child a lot of enrichment and education. It’s not wrong to want a child who can benefit from that.”
She then added that she would support any decision we made.
Finally we called the adoption agency and told them of our decision. I said I would be returning the medical records by express mail so they could continue looking for a family as soon as possible. I also told them I had bought a small toy that I wanted them to give Hae Ron. I fully realized that it sounded like a very wimpy attempt to make myself feel better, and it was, but it was something I needed to do.
Adoptive parents are sometimes afraid that if they turn down a child referral, the will be denied another child or moved to the bottom of the agency’s list. But it is actually quite common and agency staff assure parents that it does not affect the placement of other children, that they don’t want to place a child into a home that is not the best fit for him/her. About five weeks after we told the caseworker our decision, she called us to say she had three new case studies we might want to look at.
A postscript: a couple of years later I came across a photo of a smiling preschooler taken outdoors. It was Hae Rong. The description said that she had had surgery and would need more in the future, and was developmentally delayed. She looked happy, but I never did tell my husband that she still hadn’t been adopted. The whole what-special-needs-could-we-handle debate had been harder on him than on me.
If we had adopted Hae Ron, we wouldn’t have our current family. I’m not sure I believe in fate, but I certainly can’t imagine having any children other than the ones I have now.
Please see these related blogs:
A Soul-Searching Question: What Special Needs Could We Handle
What An Adoption Doctor Did For Us