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In The Cut

So, been thinking for a while about sharing our story of adoption in the hope that it might help other families and because it is such an incredible journey, it feels somehow important to document. Maybe one day it will also be important for our daughter who shall remain anonymous as this is her story too and she may not want to share it. I’ll call her Angel as we called her our ‘angel child’ for the first six months of her time with us, knowing full well that as soon as she felt safe enough, a more fully rounded two-year old would emerge. She was also referred to as an ‘angel child’ by her birth mum and dad who had lost a previous pregnancy and so were very grateful when they fell pregnant with her.  Angel is 9 and will be 10 in July. Right now we are what I call ‘in the cut’. We have just come out of our longest spell of equilibrium (about 3 months) and I felt a new baseline of her self-worth had been reached. It probably has but when the wound opens up, it’s incredible how deep ...
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Recent posts

The Trial

  Jan 2025 There has been an incident in school. Angel comes home angry and upset. She took someone's lanyard, a game they all seem to play, snapping off each other’s lanyards because the fasteners are fun to pull. But this time, the girl whose lanyard she’d taken came back with a couple of boys, took Angel’s bag, went through it, and stole her chewing gum. Angel is outraged. “I know I took the lanyard, but it’s a different thing going through my bag and taking my gum!” she rants. She withdraws, angry with me too. I lie on her bed, trying to stay close without pushing. We do horse quizzes, watch funny horse videos on YouTube. I think she appreciates me being there, even if it doesn’t shift her mood. Day two, she’s saying she wants to kill the girl.  Day three, we’re back in her room after school. I am asking questions from an ‘All About Me’ book, searching for a way in. She pulls up a chair, puts her feet on the bed where I am sitting and looks at me defiantly. Every answer c...
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New Beginnings

  The thing about new beginnings is that you don’t always know you’re at one until you’ve already begun. You don’t recognize the exact moment the ground shifts, only that one day you find yourself standing somewhere different, looking back at where you were. I could tell you about the school meeting where I sat, my hands clenched in my lap, willing myself not to cry. About the frustration of teachers who couldn’t remember something as simple as not asking Angel direct questions, about broken promises, unanswered emails, the trying to remain polite, Sorry I know how busy you are….’, when I’m tearing my hair out because Angel is melting down. About the decision to pull Angel from school two days a week to keep her from drowning, and how that made her life manageable again. I could tell you about applying for an EHCP (educational healthcare plan), despite the school’s insistence that we didn’t stand a chance, and how exhausting it was to get the required documents from the school, pol...
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Managing school with APD

The report comes in a week after the private APD Assessment. I know Angel has APD without a shadow of doubt and I know, from my research, that APD hardly ever exists in isolation. But still, it’s a blow.  You can be diagnosed with five different difficulties with ADP. Angel has two:  Auditory Temporal Processing Skills - which means she finds it hard to differentiate between sounds and in her case in particular to hear the gaps between words.  Binaural Integration - which means it’s hard to hear things coming in different ears, effectively meaning it's very hard to follow a conversation with more than one person. Background noise also plays a factor with all APD difficulties. The report also said she almost definitely has working memory and other cognitive difficulties that need to be assessed via an Educational Psychologist and Speech and Language Assessment. Somehow knowing it and seeing it in black and white are different things and there is a grieving process of sorts...
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