[blindkid] When your child realizes she's different....

[Debby B]

Sally, you beat me to it. Those of us who have adopted kids are real moms. My younger two are adopted. I don't love them any less than I do my birth kid.  Daniel is bi-racial, Winona is Chinese and totally blind. They've known from day one that they are OURS, that their birthparents made difficult decisions which blessed our lives. And we deal with many differences--skin color, visual acuity, various talents, etc. We talk about the lovely skin tones, especially in summer, these two have compared to the pasty white of the rest of our relatives. We talk about Winona's acute hearing, Daniel's sharp eyes. My dad tells everyone that you can tell these two are the adopted ones because they have all the musical talent. <grin>

We actually deal more with Daniel's differences and it crops up every year when they study slavery, or Black History month. Winona's frustrations with blindness come more with the homework issues. She's a very slow, reluctant reader so everything takes her longer. Of course she blames that on blindness, not on reading ability. We have friends that are sighted and blind, kids and adults. We moved here because we had gotten to know several blind folks. When Winona wants to blame something on blindness we are able to remind her that "Miss Jody does that, or Bri does that...let's call and see how they do that or let's get Miss Jody to show us how to do that."

Having those mentors who are blind helps so much to put things into perspective and to keep us on track. And having those mentors as our friends reminds us that "normal" has many different faces.

 Debby 
bwbddl at yahoo.com
www.nfbflorida.org/parents



----- Original Message ----
From: Andy & Sally Thomas <andysally at comcast.net>
To: "NFBnet Blind Kid Mailing List, (for parents of blind children)" <blindkid at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 3:51:19 PM
Subject: Re: [blindkid] When your child realizes she's different....

As an aside, I'm an adoptive parent and I am my children's real mother.  My kids do have a birth mother and they know that but as the mom who has been with them through thick and thin and will always be there, I have no doubt that I am their real mother.  Birth parents often have a difficult decision to make to place their child for adoption and I'm not denigrating them for that.  I just feel strongly that language is important and I won't take a back seat in the mom category.

Sincerely,

Sally Thomas