Literary / Arts
Not Exactly as Planned, Adoption, Secrets and Abiding Love by Linda Rosenbaum, Toronto
Volume 29 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 20, 2015
Adoption is a high-stakes game. It is traumatic for everyone personally involved: the birth parent(s), the adopting parents, and the extended family members – everyone in the entire cosmos it seems. If the adopted child is ‘normal’ then the likely outcomes are positive (of course there are always imponderables). However if the adopted child has a disability then the stakes are raised exponentially and the likely fall-out can be challenging.
As an adopting parent I can readily identify with the trauma involved, However, reading Linda’s book held me transfixed throughout the 250 pages. Her account is personal without being maudlin or self-serving. Linda and her husband Robin adopted Michael as an infant, and brought him up in their Toronto Island home.
Adoption is a high-stakes game. It is traumatic for everyone personally involved: the birth parent(s), the adopting parents, and the extended family members – everyone in the entire cosmos it seems. If the adopted child is ‘normal’ then the likely outcomes are positive (of course there are always imponderables). However if the adopted child has a disability then the stakes are raised exponentially and the likely fall-out can be challenging.
As an adopting parent I can readily identify with the trauma involved, However, reading Linda’s book held me transfixed throughout the 250 pages. Her account is personal without being maudlin or self-serving. Linda and her husband Robin adopted Michael as an infant, and brought him up in their Toronto Island home.
Their decision involved close friends and neighbours. Michael was the son of a neighbour’s daughter. This relationship had a major role in subsequent interactions Linda and Robin had with their community. Michael’s early life was difficult with excruciating crying spells and physical agony.
The new parent’s mood alternated between pure joy and delight to hopeless resignation. Everything came into dramatic focus when medical practitioners finally decided that Michael was a fetal alcohol syndrome child (FAS). He was deeply affected and compromised by his birth mother’s binge alcohol drinking, which resulted in severe brain damage to this small innocent life.
Both he and his adopting parents bore the brunt of its damaging effects. I know of no other exposé of FAS’s influence as explicit and revealing. Their experience and life together continue to this day.
Having adopted and welcomed a FAS child into our family and home, I can attest to how excruciating and poignant Linda and Robin’s experience has been, and I am grateful she has had the courage and tenacious spirit to share their story with us. I expect there are many adopting parents who have experienced a FAS child and welcomed him/her into their family constellation. We all would be helped if we read Linda’s book – I’m sure of it.