[GCFL-discuss] Fixing Children

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

On second reading Jeanene, your experience rings a chord. A couple of
friends (more precisely, a married couple, one half of whom I have known
since high school, the other half I met maybe nine years ago when they
had been married twenty years or so), adopted a baby whose mother was
fifteen, at the heartfelt request of the baby's grandmother. There was
some back and forth on the part of the mother, and by the time they had
him, he had attachment disorders too. He simply did not know, in the ways
babies are supposed to know, who he belonged to or with, or whether
anyone cared about him. Liz spent hours a day just holding him and
looking into his eyes until he got a sense she was truly attached to him.
He remained emotionally fragile about being apart from his adoptive
parents for the rest of his life. He reached the age of nine without ever
accepting toilet training -- Liz suspects that during the few months
before they got him, he had been molested, which apparently results in
such resistance. He passed away in his sleep this past year, beloved by
all the children in the neighborhood, something of an expert angler, and
with darn little prospects for making his future way in the world. When I
visited them, I sometimes had a set of juggling balls. On a later visit,
he wasn't sure who I was, but after an hour, he ran up to me with three
tangerines he wanted juggled.

Siarlys