Daniel - Part 2

Overseas adoption isn’t easy.  Well of course, it isn’t meant to be. Firstly, everything has to be translated into the language of the child’s birth country, and stamped by a notary.  And if your child lives in a country that doesn’t have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK, you actually have to adopt him or her twice – once abroad, in a bewilderingly strange court where you understand nothing of what’s going on, then again when you get the child home.  And they may be more enlightened now, but 20 years ago Social Services were against overseas adoption in principle.  They banged on about ‘depriving a child of their culture’.  I mean…???  What culture are you going to experience living in an institution, abandoned by society, unwanted and unloved?  And that’s if you survive long enough to know what the word ‘culture’ means.

So, before we could adopt Daniel there was miles of red tape to be got through.  Which meant – heartbreakingly - we had to leave him in the orphanage and return to the UK.  One of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  We left him some toys, and some friends who were going out a couple of weeks later promised to look in on him.

It took an agonising 4 months to complete all the paperwork, so it was the end of April before we were able to return to Romania.  We were shocked when we saw Daniel again.  He was now nearly a year old, but apart from being slightly bigger he hadn’t changed noticeably since January.  He couldn’t sit up, wouldn’t make eye contact, and formed no recognisable words (even in Romanian).  He was also quite floppy when I held him. To all intents and purposes he was a rather big newborn.  Naively we assumed his delayed development to be due to the deprivations in the orphanage, and that with a bit of love and attention he would soon catch up.  And when we brought him home – after a far from straightforward Romanian adoption process that would take about another 6 blogs to describe – I took him along to our GP who said more or less the same thing.

However, Daniel’s development progressed slowly, and at the age of 3 he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome – a term we’d never heard of, but is now quite widely known as a high functioning form of autism.  We will never know for certain how much of this was due to lack of stimulation in the first year of his life.  He has been seen by one of the top experts in the country – possibly the world – and he doesn’t know either.

People often say to us what a marvellous job we’ve done with Daniel; what a credit he is to us.  But let’s get one thing straight – neither of us would have chosen to adopt a child with a disability.  We aren’t that altruistic.  Having said that – would I do the same again?  In a heartbeat – the alternatives for Daniel just don’t bear thinking about.  He will be 21 in May, and he’s halfway through his first year at Uni – a situation we couldn’t have imagined even as recently as 2 years ago.  He’s gifted musically, has a steel trap memory for facts and figures, and knows more about computers than I ever will.  But he is socially awkward, preferring his own company to other people’s.  And yet, everyone who meets him, once they get used to his idiosynchracies, finds him very likeable, loveable even.  And he has quite a sense of humour too!