A Meditation on Special Needs

Today I've been giving more thought to the "special needs" part of special needs adoption. The most common relatively easy ones seem to be cleft lip/cleft palate and heart defects, of the easily repaired and already repaired variety or sometimes of the needing more surgery variety, especially for younger babies. Then we have premature birth, spina bifida, varying degrees of developmental problems and so-called limb differences--oh, and "ambiguous genitalia". Bringing up the rear in terms of things I can remember at the moment is albinism--oh, and other skin issues, which I assume to include birthmarks--and burn scars.

That's quite the list. It all reminds me a little of that popular parlor game, "Which Disability Would You Rather Have"--which usually starts with drunken questions like "Would you rather be blind or deaf?" and "Would you rather lose an arm or a leg?" and generally goes on from there, only with two especially bleak additions: the disabilty, if that's what it is (I know some of those needs aren't disabilities) goes to your child, and the children alredy exist. You've got skin in the game, as it were.

So our list of things we can cope with probably tends towards the usual, with an emphasis on short term and resolvable issues, and maybe a slight extra willingness with respect to things that are going to require additional medical care, like heart defects--but only the ones that are considered fixable, and I can't say I've thought too much about the fact that that's really not a 100% guarantee. Certainly I should. And I will. I don't want my zeal to be a good AP, one who genuinely wants to adopt a child who needs us and, in some sense, not take the opportunity to adopt a child away from someone childless--to haul us blindly into something that will clearly be too much for us to handle and continue giving the BGB three what they need.

So I got to thinking today about ambiguous genitalia and about "limb differences". To address the second first, I had included on my prelimary form to the agency limb differences not affecting mobility--and I think I/we should rethink that. (In all honesty I filled out the form myself, after discussion but not enough of it.) So, follwing a great add for cars, of all things, that's been running in all kinds of magazines and features a beautiful fit young woman with an artificial leg, and thinking again about all the opportunities here for a child with only one leg to get that kind of treatment, and also to learn to ski and play and generally just get on with life, I had to wonder--maybe we could do that. I have to look into it.

I'm iffy on the one arm (as I've said before, you don't really know yourself until you think about this stuff) because that's less easy to--not hide, but tuck away--and also I think might actually impact your life more, and I'm not sure that I can either deal with that myself, as a parent, or help a child learn to deal with it. And I'm not saying one should hide one's disabilities, but that it's nice to be able to choose not to reveal them constantly, especially if you are a child whose status as an adoptee is going to be nearly always on view.

As for ambiguous genitalia, I don't have time to meditate fully now, but I read
this piece in the New York Times magazine and it made me think.