We adopted Jumoke and Ouseman thru PLAN...Plan Loving Adoptions Now. They have been a wonderful agency to work with.

When we knew that something was desperately wrong...either with us or with Jumoke or both combined...we went back to PLAN to see if they could help us unravel things.

They were right on it.  Don, our PLAN guy, met with us at their office with a child psychologist.  We talked for a very long time.  The child psychologist asked at that time if I thought it might be RAD, and because of the mistake I mentioned in an entry waaaay down there on this blog, I told her no.

After that, Tim called Don often for help.  Don was *always* available to us, even tho he had a full plate of work with adoption in process. His heart and interest was to make sure that these adoptive families worked as well as putting adoptees into homes.

He came to our house...took time out of his busy schedule and traveled 2 hours one way...to visit with us and help us try to figure this stuff out.

If he had not been willing to be involved with us, we would never have been able to figure out this RAD stuff.  Yes, he wrote the letter about community discipline and putting Jumoke in school and all the kids in sports. But it must be remembered that I had uncatagorically stated that Jumoke did not at all match up with the RAD list of symptoms.

It was that letter that Don sent us stating a plan of action that pushed us over the edge from "Something seems wrong here" to "This is a desperate situation because we instinctively know that this stuff will make life here at home a greater hell than it has ever been."

It was from the moment that we recieved that letter that my own heart was revealed to me as a beaten, bloody thing that was no longer mother heart but the heart of a caretaker.  It was the beginning of both Tim and I crying out for help and being willing to look anywhere, do anything, to try to resolve this thing.  It was that letter that made us open to things we would never have been open to before...including the reality (as opposed to just talk) of disrupting this adoption and the reality of RAD being a possibility.

I remember that little part in the homestudy where you check off the things you do not want your child to have?

We only had a couple. RAD was at the top of the list of things that scared the bejeebies out of us.  We would never have been willing to admit what Jumoke was without the desperation that we felt when we saw that Jumoke was not normal enough to handle Don's suggestions.

And, oddly enough, we were encouraged by Don's letter....after some days had passed. We did not think we could deal with RAD on any level. Well, if this is RAD, we did it for four years. And we didn't do it well, but we actually helped Jumoke a little bit, at least kept him from getting worse.

Don's willingness to give of his time and work with us has been a tremendous blessing. His involvement with us led us directly to the place where we could hear and accept what was going on.

Three cheers for Don, I say.