Before we adopted any children with special needs, I used to wonder what made families who did adopt them tick. I imagined they simply had bigger hearts than I did and were better people, or they were ignorant or even just gluttons for punishment. I’d read and hear people talk about the blessings of rearing children with disabilities but chalked it up to something people just “say,” because really, what else could they say? They had to try to put a positive spin on it, right?

I just didn’t get it.

Looking back, our hesitation about adopting a child with special needs boiled down to one word: fear. We were afraid. Afraid of the medical costs, the delays, the teasing, the limitations, the missed opportunities. We imagined a grown child with special needs would never marry, would live with us forever, and then end up institutionalized after our deaths. That was all we could conceptualize. As my dad would say, we were great at “borrowing trouble,” and we allowed our fear to completely eclipse any positives that might otherwise have shined through.

I suppose it was when we were looking for the child who would become our Sofie that I first began to entertain the idea of some special needs. Slowly, as I looked at pictures of waiting children, I’d find myself thinking, “Well, I could probably handle something like that, but I still avoided really considering any child that didn’t fall into my rather limited scope of “doable.” But as many adoptive parents know, a picture is sometimes all it takes. That face, THE face, and we’re hooked – no matter what.

It was when we fell in love with a little girl with a very serious heart condition – Tetralogy of Fallot – that we began to experience our first growth spurt in the special needs adoption department. We were taken in by her sweet face and the personality that seemed to jump right out of her photos and the social history information, and we only later learned from a pediatric cardiologist we consulted with that her life expectancy would be shorter, that she would likely have some chronic health considerations, and that she would need at least a couple more open heart surgeries in her life. Somehow, even though all that scared us, we made the decision to forge ahead into unfamiliar waters and agreed we wanted to adopt her. Sadly, because the agency would have had to request a family size waiver for us and already had a second interested family who needed no such waiver, we were “bumped” and not allowed to bring this sweet little girl into our family. It was hard at the time, but looking back, I can clearly see how, ever so gently, Heavenly Father opened the door of special needs adoption to us. We ultimately found our Sofie, heart defect and all, and she joined our family in March of 2005.

Once we had Sofie home, it somehow seemed easier to begin to entertain other types of special needs. I still had my mental “list” of what I felt was doable, but it was a growing list. Albinism wasn’t on it, but it would be, and in a big way! For more about Cora’s adoption, please see this entry.

Part two: Knowledge Trumps Fear