Welcome back to Blogville. Have you ever had multiple hotel room stays in a short time? Let’s pour ourselves a cup of tea and discuss my experience.


Recently I’ve taken a couple of short trips that involved brief hotel stays. One 5 night trip staying at 4 different hotels, and one 3 day trip staying in 2 different hotels. 


I’ll tell you, it’s a lot of work remembering where the elevator is and which way to turn when you exit onto your floor when you change hotels a lot in a short time. Turn left? No, left was yesterday’s hotel, turn right at this one. Oddly, when I got to room 310 my darn key would not work despite 3 or 4 attempts. Before storming down to the front desk to complain and have my ‘key powers’ restored, I checked the paper key holder and sheepishly tip-toed to the nearest stairwell.  After all, I did not want to be standing helplessly in front of the bank of elevators when the (I’m sure irate) guest from room 310 came out into the hallway to see who was trying to get in their room! I made my way quietly up the stairs to the correct floor and down the hallway quickly, but casually, to room 410 where my key card easily unlocked the door.


When I’m finally in the correct room there are so many decisions to make? Decisions like, which side of the bed do I take? If I take the wrong side, I’ll just keep waking up wondering where I am. At home I sleep on the side away from the window. But what if the best side turns out to be the side near the window? By the best side, I mean the side with the most direct path to the bathroom! 


On a side note, pardon the pun, my side of the bed at home has a bedside clock with the illuminated time. What if I take the wrong side of the bed and keep waking up not only wondering where I am, but what time it is? No, no, that cannot happen. It’s bad enough I cannot figure out how to stop the room telephone’s flashing ‘message’ light, I must be able to see the clock.


Move the clock you suggest? Ha! First problem with that is losing the correct time and trying to figure out how to set the time while NOT accidentally setting the alarm for say, 2:00 a.m. Eventually I decide it is worth the risk and unplug the clock. 


Second problem? Unplugging the clock and getting to the other side of the bed only to discover there is NO actual plug-in socket! I mean, it turned out to be some sort of Ethernet port or LAN port or some other computer b.s. that just looked like a plug-in socket. So now the clock is unplugged, repeatedly flashing 12:00, and likely programmed with some random middle of the night alarm setting. Now I’ll never know how much time I have until morning so I don’t miss the check out time! 


Well, I can always keep checking the time on my watch, which is currently laying on the dresser. I mean, as I’m in my sixties, I do get up rather frequently through the night because Mother Nature hates me. Therefore, as I make my way frequently to the bathroom throughout the night, I can simply check my watch to keep an eye on the time. That’s a good alternate plan!


In the first night’s hotel I had to walk to the left to get into the bathroom, my way led by the dim night light. The next night I walked to the left and still have a small bruise where my face hit the wall. Apparently I needed to go to the right in this hotel room to find the bathroom. Once there, I disrupted the carefully triangle-folded toilet paper. 


Do you think there is special toilet paper folding training session for housekeeping staff members? It’s a skill, folding those perfect little triangles, just like making those foil swans fancy restaurants on television use to package up leftovers. 


Another skill they have is being able to work those privacy blinds with beaded chains that I can never open. You know the ones where you end up pulling the side of the blind away from the window frame enough so that you can just manage to see outside and determine what the weather looks like. Then the side of the blind never fits back into the window frame properly.  I’m pretty sure there is a special course for the housekeeping staff on opening and closing those blinds quickly and efficiently. But I digress, let me get back to Mother Nature, night lights, and hotel bathroom challenges.


So, not wanting to go blind using the fluorescent lights, I negotiate my bathroom duties using only the dim glow of the hotel night light. Now, where is the toilet handle? I swipe uselessly down the front of the tank, feeling for the handle where it was on last night’s toilet. It’s GONE, Oh, wait, tonight’s toilet has the dual flush button system on the tank lid. Left or right for low flush? I apologize to the environment, pick one at random and push down to flush. 


Still using only the dim night light, I feel around for the teensy bar of soap that I’m sure I left on the right side of the sink. Oh yeah, I suddenly remember, this bathroom has the pump soap dispenser, so I proceed to pump a spray of foam soap straight onto my left wrist, past my elbow and onto the floor. Now I’m a little upset. There I stand, in the dim night light glow with soap up my arm and also coating the floor like a senior citizen’s booby trap. I reach for the wire towel rack on the wall, but it’s gone. Oh wait, this hotel stores the towels on a shelf under the sink. Without ever having to turn on that bright overhead light, I finally got that mess cleaned up and my hands washed. Back to bed I go. 


Naturally as I make my way back to bed, I bang my hip on the edge of the dresser making the television wobble precariously. I steady it quickly and avoid catastrophe while immediately stubbing my toe on the office chair to my left. That was unexpected, given that in last night’s room, the office chair was located to my right. Oh and can anyone tell me why coffee tables in hotels always seem to match the colour of the flooring underneath them? I call them camouflage tables because though my eyes don’t see them my shins always seem to find them!


All these bathroom excursion challenges have created a thirst so I try to grab a bottle of water from the tiny fridge, but the door will not open. ‘Do fridges lock?’ I ask myself. Did you know the little in-room fridges open left handed or right handed depending on the hotel you stay at? Sigh. I mean, all hotels should have to purchase fridges that open consistently either on the left or the right, or with handles on the front of the doors, so one can easily find them in the dark. Finally back in the bed I realized I forgot to check the time on my watch on the dresser. Call me a risk taker, I rolled over and went to sleep without knowing the time.


Finally, at one of my last hotel stays, (there were too many to be specific about) I had figured out how to work both the blinds and the clock and was awake in plenty of time to get ready. I quickly hopped in the shower so I would have plenty of time to get dressed and pop by the breakfast room to grab a bite before checking out. Pleased with my brilliant idea, I was just towelling off when I heard a knock at the door, and the dreaded word, “Housekeeping”! Oh no, it was the voice of the only person other than me with a key to my room. My heart started to pound and I yelled “I haven’t checked out yet!!” just as the door started to open. To my relief, as quickly as it began to open, it slammed shut. Apparently at this hotel, checkout was an hour earlier than at the last one. Sigh . . .


Happy travels to you!

As ever, I welcome your comments here or via email at ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.

Welcome back to Blogville friends. This is a chamomile tea blog for sure. Maybe make a pot, it’s a long one. 

In the old days, movies used show young parents looking proudly through a window, admiring their newborn infant lying in their bassinet in the hospital nursery. My movie version is more like a Director yelling “Cut!” and telling someone to come and get me as they needed my bassinet for other unwanted babies. Not the Hollywood adoption script anyone would want to produce, or that an audience would want to see. There is no Disney version of my beginnings except maybe Bambi; but in my version no one died, everyone simply left and Thumper was my overworked social worker. 

Early in my life I was like a costume piece; left in the dressing room for a couple of months, then tried on by two families but returned to the dressing room. My third family healed my physical wounds that had been created by the neglect from those first two families. In the healing family script, the main characters fell in love with me but, sadly, their train had to leave the station before I could get a ticket. 

Thanks to Thumper’s persistence, another family was willing to give me an audition. I got the part of their beloved daughter, a sister for my co-star, their son. 

I believe that all those moves and the neglect in my first nine months of life left a scar, eventually covered over with make up, but still part of my character development. 

You know how toddlers are able to shift from snuggly, loving, amazing little beings to writhing, scowling, crying little beings in a matter of seconds? These sudden shifts are often precipitated by simple words like, “no”, “not now”, “let go of that” and so on. You know what I mean. We’ve all seen it. 
​
Even more concerning at times is the toddler that does not react as expected in those scenarios. Be wary of the toddler who does not express emotion when expected, they may need attention even more than the toddler whose tantrum behaviour commands it.

I find that, even being in my 60s, I am still capable of reacting to situations like a toddler. I can relate when experts talk about trauma in adoption, explaining it to parents and professionals. 

If you have adopted or are thinking about adopting, there are wonderful courses on trauma and attachment. Take them! Learn all you can about trauma, attachment and abandonment issues as they are at the root of many presenting problems of children and youth experiencing adoption. 

Experts can, and do, explain why trauma informed behaviour happens, and they can help adoptive parents learn how to manage it. You will need many tools to help you manage, cope with, and support your child or youth.

One can never stop learning about the impact of trauma and attachment. I am 64 years old and I’m still impacted. When I feel abandoned I still have thoughts like:
“If her pregnancy for me was unplanned, does that mean I was never meant to exist?” 
Or
“It was very presumptuous of me to think I ever mattered really, I was never supposed to exist, was I?”
Or
“What rights do I have as a refugee in my own life?”

There are many coping mechanisms people who were adopted will use. For example, I will often withdraw from interacting with family members or friends. Or, as a coping mechanism, I will use humour. Sometimes I wonder if I use humour because I feel I must choose between a clown suit and an invisibility cloak.

Speaking solely as an person who was adopted, a lived expert if you will, I think I swallowed my trauma. I can feel it sitting there in my belly causing butterflies, or creating cold prickles of fear. I believe that swallowing my trauma stunted my emotional development. It left me reacting to life events like a toddler: fine one minute; floundering the next minute, more often than not, unable to regulate my emotions. My trauma was filling my belly so full that there may have been little room left for the nutrients of love and acceptance.

All my life, the rejections (real or perceived), the failures, the hurt I have always immediately felt when friends made plans without me, the insecurity I felt over job offers that never came, I was, and am, somehow able to blame on being freed for adoption. 

I further punished myself with thoughts of, ‘well if the person who was supposed to love me the most did not, why should my friends?’ I felt so tied to that one decision, made by one person, that I was blinded to the rewards for me of her decision. 

What I failed to do my friends, was credit any of my successes to my being adopted and I have discovered that I am who I am because of a combination of rejection and acceptance. 

In order to have been loved and cherished by my parents, encouraged to try new things, supported and applauded, I first had to be available for them to parent me. I first had to be rejected in order to be free to be accepted. 

Love and acceptance, let’s be realistic, every child needs that! My birth mother clearly did not feel capable of giving it to me herself, so she let me go in the hopes I would find it elsewhere, and I did.

Being adopted by my parents pushed most of my trauma to the side. Their love, persistence and consistency made room in my belly full of trauma as they gave me the tools to learn to control my emotions, to self-regulate, and to meet challenges with confidence. Their love enabled me to change my thinking from, ‘I was never even meant to be born’ to ‘I was meant to be born, just not meant to be raised by my birth parents.’ 

One could argue that if I never had that trauma I would not have needed the support and encouragement of my parents. Yet, one could also argue that my birth parents gave me the genetic gifts that my adoptive parents recognized and cultivated. I think all that made me kind of a team project. 

Remember assigned group projects when you were in school? Remember how you groaned at being partnered with someone you didn’t even know? Yet, you managed to work together and get an A on your project? All four of my parents contributed something to the group project that is me. The outcome? I am my parents’ A. 

My point is that I have never given enough credit to having been adopted as a positive contribution toward who I have become. My genetics, combined with my life experiences, gave me the support and strength to become a Thumper for many people in need. Hearing the many nice things spoken during my retirement speech, I think I did a pretty good job. 

Without my mitigated trauma, and without having been adopted, I would be a different person, and I kind of like who I am. My Bambi legs get stronger each day as I continue living my own version of  Happily Ever After. 

As ever, your comments are welcome here, or via my email ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com Thanks for  reading.

Welcome back to Blogville friend!
 (Trigger alert if you are grieving.)
Here it is, as promised, my submission to the CBC short story competition that in my heart I know was 28th place out of a possible 27 long-list places. What do you think . . .

Ten Days

On October 22, 2022 my grandson was born. He was just hours old when I held him in my arms and welcomed this new little life into our family. On October 31, 2022 my mother died. She was 97 years old when I held her in my arms, wished her a safe journey to whatever is next, and thanked her for mothering our family. 

How does one work through the conflicting emotions of an elated grandmother and a grieving daughter in the span of ten short days? If that is the million dollar question, how much does the answer cost? Family members and friends shifted from offering joyful congratulations to  offering their condolences. I was experiencing life’s gains and losses, a dream to a nightmare in what felt like seconds but was actually ten days.

I will never forget my son’s excited “it’s a boy” announcement in the wee hours of the morning of October 22nd. I could feel his grateful relief that his wife was doing well, and that they were now parents to a healthy baby boy. The joy in my son’s voice was palpable. I will also never forget the second phone call startling me awake in the wee hours of the morning a mere five days later, from 640 kilometres away, telling me that our mother had only hours to live. The terror in my brother’s voice was palpable. 

I remember worrying that my new little grand baby may never meet his great-grandmother. He may never be held in her arms and snuggled for a photo like his five cousins before him had. He may miss out on visits to her giant yard where so many children before him had played badminton, thrown a ball, laughed as they chased each other in a game of tag, or splashed in a tiny inflatable plastic pool to escape the summer’s heat. It saddened me to think that he may never help pile wood in the woodshed, learning a forgotten skill. I worried that he may never know the fun of racing to be the first of his cousins to find the coloured eggs hidden in that huge old two storey home; searching the extra kitchen and woodshed that offered even more hiding spots for the Easter Bunny’s use. 

Generations of cousins had laughed together in that house, built by his great-great-grandfather in the mid 1930s. Would his cousins be the last to have done so? Butterflies raced around my stomach, lacing it with fear, just as my husband interrupted my thoughts to tell me we’d better get packed and go get gas for the truck.

In stunned silence, my husband and I rounded up the clothing that we literally had just unpacked after visiting Southern Ontario to spend Thanksgiving visiting with mom and awaiting the well overdue birth of our grandchild. Emptied from our visit with mom and meeting our grandson, we hauled those same suitcases back out and started repacking them.  Without the previous joyful anticipation, this time we packed with a sense of dread and an urgency to get on the road. 

Holding my breath, I packed some slightly dressy outfits and my husband’s suit, hopefully unnecessarily, but just in case. My mother would want us to look our best in the unlikely, or likely, event we might need to. A practical woman, and with a nod to the future inevitability, my mother’s final outfit option had been selected since 2018, and hung insidiously in her closet. I remember fantasizing that those hangers would never be emptied.

During the endless drive, I tried distracting myself by repeatedly looking at recent photos of my newborn grandson, focusing on similarities to what his father, my son, had looked like as a baby. I thought about those first glances at my own babies and let myself snuggle back to those days. My thoughts suddenly drifted to what my mother must have felt when she had her first look at the nine month old baby I was when placed with my parents for adoption. I warmly recalled my mother’s stories of joy at meeting me and gathering me into her arms to welcome me into my new home and family. When she recounted the stories of our adoptions, our mom always identified my brother and I as the best gifts she had ever received. However, in my narrative, she and my father actually gave my brother and I the greatest gift; a loving family. Fully aware that I had often told her that before, I was suddenly so overcome with emotion that my sense of urgency to get to my mother increased a hundred fold; so I could tell her again how much I loved her, and so I could thank her for her and dad’s gift of love. I needed her to know, and felt desperate to get there to tell her.

I read, reread, and responded to text messages from the new parents, enamoured with the joyful elation of parenthood while at the same time I was despairing at my task of composing text messages informing family members and close friends of mom’s sudden hospitalization. In spite of all these distractions, I could feel my heart race as every kilometre of the highway flung it’s black ribbon of asphalt in front of us, apparently in slow motion. I don’t know how, but each minute still managed to tick by, sixty seconds at a time. Dread churned my stomach despite my husband’s insistence that my mom was still alive, so confident that I would somehow innately know if she had passed. Despite my husband’s reassurances, I felt such terror every time I heard the distinctive alert tone of my brother’s incoming text messages. Would this be it? Would this be the dreaded message?

Returning to the beautiful pictures from the few hours we had spent with our grandson I wondered, was it really barely a week ago? Only hours had passed between his birth and the moment I first held him. I remembered how I had put a tiny clean blanket between my sweater and my newborn grandson to protect him when I held him for the first time; this tiny being who, until that day , did not exist in my world. When we finally arrived and I ran into the hospital to see my mother, I was reminded of that tiny clean blanket as the nurses stopped to help me into a gown, mask, and gloves before I could enter her room. Instead of me keeping my grandson safe while I held him, this personal protective equipment was needed to keep me safe while I held my mother. Five short days had passed between holding a new person coming into my world, and holding an elderly person who may soon be leaving it. Overwhelmed does not begin to describe the emotions accompanying that realization. 

We were given the gift of hope when my mother suddenly rallied, to my great relief. I brought in the hearing aids and teeth for her that had been left behind in the rushed ambulance ride. There was talk of discharge with simply the need to increase her current home support. Instead of the confused and unwell person awaiting me upon my arrival, there was a mostly cognizant person making plans to go home. We were able to play some simple card games and she was able to eat some of the food I spooned into her mouth. When she wasn’t sleeping, she and I loved looking at the updated photos of her newest great-grandson. In fact, his parents envied the amount of sleep my mother was getting compared to them. We joked about that. 

You know how sometimes when you are changing or playing with a baby they will sometimes stop suddenly and stare intently over your shoulder? An ‘old wives tale’ about that says they see a spirit at that moment, or some say they see a guardian angel. Whatever it is, one sure feels the cold fingers of fear running up your spine as you work up the courage to look behind you.  Well, on two occasions, just hours apart, my mother sat bolt upright and began speaking Polish to someone only she could see. You can imagine that suddenly sitting bolt upright was no small feat for a 97 year old hospitalized woman but she did it, twice! I have no idea what, or who, my mother saw in her mind’s eye but she did say, “I know. I will.” clearly and with purpose. Cold fingers of fear were nothing compared to the punch in the gut feeling that gave me. 

I loved reading aloud to my children when they were young, and now love reading to my grandchildren. I so enjoy the looks on their faces and their physical anticipation when I change my voice or my volume as dictated by what is going on in the book. As anyone who has spent great chunks of time in a hospital knows, time moves slowly. I mean it actually ticks sixty seconds per minute but it does not feel that way. Since mom slept a lot while I and my PPE were restricted to her tiny room, I wondered how to pass the time. So the next time the nurses threw me out to go take a break and eat, I went to mom’s and picked out a couple of books she liked. Back in her hospital room I began to read aloud to her, holding her hand while she slept. A nurse came in to mom’s room to complete one of the million tasks that needed doing and she smiled stating, “That’s wonderful, keep reading, they say the hearing is the last to go.” I looked at her, smiled back, and thought, ‘I wonder if that still applies to someone who is stone deaf to begin with?”

On October 31 my cell phone began filling with pictures of my grandchildren’s costumes; their painted faces grinning with anticipation of the candy they were off to collect. Even my newborn grandson was dressed for his first Halloween. When she was awake, mom loved looking at the pictures. In return, I sent a picture of myself in full PPE and told my grandchildren it was my costume. As the day progressed, seeing her decline, I would tell mom that if she was going to ‘go’ she should wait for All Saint’s Day the next day, or wait until All Soul’s Day that was coming up in two days; ironically the day they initially planned for her discharge. I also said, more than once, “For God’s sake mom, please don’t die on Halloween.” I even warned her that if she gave up and died that day I would arrange for a Jack ‘O Lantern to be carved in the O of October on her headstone! She actually smiled in her sleep when I said that! 

Most children love to be all tucked in with their favourite toy, or ‘stuffy’ as they call them now, to fall asleep. My grandchildren are no exception. When they have sleepovers we perform their usual bedtime routines so they can relax and sleep comfortably. Mom had been so restless  earlier that I brought in one of the two little pillows that she always slept with at home. Rather than the sterile smell of hospital linens she seemed to revel in the smell of home and cuddled that wee pillow up to her nose as she was curled up in sleep. That is how I see her in my mind’s eye when I left her, sound asleep and cuddling her little pillow from home, on October 31, 2022, and before I got that dreaded final call. 

So, with a nod to our family’s sense of humour, if you ever visit the cemetery where mom’s body rests, look closely in the O of October. We hope it makes you smile.

As ever, your comments are most welcome here or via my email address ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com

​Hi everyone! Welcome back to Blogville. Today it’s a strong black tea for me as I write this blog about the impact of information errors on adopted people and their families. This blog may be of particular interest to children and youth in care workers, foster parents and adoption workers; or anyone whose role it is to gather information for children and youth moving on to adoption.

Some of the stuff I’m going to talk about, you have already read in previous blogs. This blog’s intent is to bring focus to the impact on people of not getting the details right when completing documents and/or when verbally sharing the child or youth’s historical information. 

When a social worker is completing case notes or a Social and Medical History, or when a foster parent is working on a life book, take my word that details matter.

As you know, my parents were told that my birth mother had given birth to a baby boy about three years before me who was kept by the birth family, but they wanted an adoption plan for me. To the best of my knowledge, my parents were never given anything in writing; instead, they were expected to remember details shared verbally with them during an extremely emotional event. In fact, I am not even sure if my father would have been present for those information-sharing phone calls.

In my first non-identifying information report, it indicated “Own Child: Born prior to (my birth name removed/vetted) -was also placed on adoption”. Own child referred to a child born before me, to our birth mother. Following that file note was a list of my birth mother’s siblings, their  gender, their ages, and their health. At the time of my birth there were 5 boys aged between 11 and 23 years of age, then two girls, aged 10 and 7. Finally, a boy aged 3 years. That assumably, was my birth brother, who had been adopted/kept by the birth family.

When I wrote in my previous blog (What If It Had Been Open Part 3) that my birth mother and her mother were pregnant at the same time, my maternal birth relatives stepped up to make a correction. Note that I have had two disclosure reports and received my full vetted file. Every one of those documents indicated that this boy was 3 years old at the time of my birth.

I was 64 years old when I found out that this was an error. The boy in the report was actually 4 years old, while my birth sister was 3 years old at the time of my birth. 

My maternal birth relatives not only provided me with a copy of his birth certificate, but they also included a photograph of my birth grandmother in a hospital bed.  Her daughter, my birth mother, was sitting at her mother’s bedside while a nurse held up my birth uncle for the photographer. 

I cannot even begin to describe what finding out that part of my adoption story had been a lie for my whole life felt like. An unintended lie, but a lie all the same. It would be more than a year after this hospital photograph was taken before our birth mother would give birth to my half-sister and make an adoption plan for her.

I had spent my whole life wrongfully believing boys were better than girls, because all evidence to date indicated that my birth mother’s family had kept the boy she gave birth to, but let me go. If it had not been for that blog, I may never have realized that.

From an attachment and trauma perspective, my parents should have been given more adequate information about my early months. They were never told that I was abandoned by my agency as well as my birth mother at a hospital in another community. I was born on the 22nd of September and my birth mother was discharged and left the community on September 29th while I waited for a social worker to come and get me. 

Following an unexplained delay and a rather curt letter to my agency dated October 14th authored by the head nurse strongly indicating they needed the bassinet for “other unwanted children”, I was finally collected by a worker on October 19th. I had been unparented for almost a month at this point. After a delay due to weather, at which point I remained with the worker, presumably in a hotel, we finally returned to my birth mother’s community.  

I was then placed in an emergency foster home on October 21st and remained in that home until October 30th when I was moved to a new foster home. On November 14th, without explanation in my file, I was moved to another foster home. It was noted upon my arrival in that home that I had sores on my head and a rash from my belly down to my knees. Within this final foster home, I received the love and care of my foster parents until my placement on adoption probation about 7 months later.

My parents were never informed of the month I spent unparented in hospital, nor were they told that I had lived in three foster homes in about 6 weeks, and that there were signs of neglect before I was placed with the last foster family. They were not told how much my last foster family loved me and that they wanted to keep me. 

Until I received my second non-identifying disclosure report when I was 35 years old, my parents and I believed I had left hospital and was placed in a foster home and then left that foster home when I went to live with my parents. A comprehensive social and medical history would have prepared them for potential attachment concerns and the impact on me given my early lack of parenting.

None of this was done with malice or poor intent. Social workers are guided by what is known at the time they are educated and working in the field. We have learned so much since my adoption placement in 1959 but we still make mistakes. So, I put forward to you some ways to at least mitigate any harm.

First, to social workers that are working with the children and families long before there is any adoption planning. Write down the details, please share as much information as you know because you cannot really know what may be critical to that child in their future. You are even provided the tool, often at the intake level. In Ontario it is known as the child/family Social and Medical History. This tool is intended to gather family medical history, and information (likes/dislikes/personality traits) about birth relatives, especially the birth parents. This tool is like a written baby book, genealogy chart, medical records, school records, parenting questionnaires, and a historical essay all in one. You may not be the author of the whole document, but accuracy in your chapter is important to the child or youth!

Second, to kinship families and their workers. Do not assume that because they are related to each other that the social and medical history information is automatically known to the kinship provider. Do you know everything there is to know about your cousin’s family, or your aunt’s family? Oh, and make sure that as long as you are involved with the kinship family, you keep updating that Social and Medical history! Without a crystal ball, you can not know how long this placement will last or if the child or youth will maintain a connection if this placement disrupts.

Thirdly, to prospective adoptive parents. Ask, ask, ask, and ask your questions. Your prospective child or youth’s records will be sealed once the adoption is finalized and there is no going back into them until your child is an adult. Read the social and medical history thoroughly. Ask for copies of reports, ask about current behaviour and concerns, because you are not yet the expert on your child, but once placed with you, society will expect that you are. Be as prepared as you can be. I cannot reinforce to you enough that you are not doing the agency a ‘favour’ by being short listed, nor should you be feeling ‘honoured’ at being considered. This is a commitment you are making; hopefully for the rest of your life. Do not feel intimidated, this is about your potential child. Even more importantly, an informed decision may well prevent the trauma of an adoption disruption!

I had a good adoption, in a good family, with its own problems and experiences. My parents had no idea of the trauma I had been through and what it might have meant to my attachment. They were unable to mitigate what they did not even know about.  As I combed through my vetted files, I learned more about why I had, and still have, attachment concerns and perhaps even why, to this day, I still have feelings of abandonment and insecurity. 
If we had only known.

Thanks for reading, I’m glad you stopped by. As usual, your comments and questions are welcomed, both here or via my email, ldeiulisauthor@gmail.com