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 ...
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...