"My Flesh and Blood"

We watched a movie last night called "My Flesh and Blood", about a woman in Fairfield (so just a few towns down the freeway from us) who adopted 10 children (in addition to her 3 biological children), all of whom had special needs. She says once you have 6 kids, it's not such a big leap to add more. Well, maybe, I guess, if you got to 6 in the first place. I'll take her word for it. The neat thing about it to me seemed to be that these kids then don't have to feel different at home, because everybody is different. It also put in perspective for me that some genetic conditions are painful and eventually fatal, and just more disabling as far as the effect on one's everyday life. She's got a couple of girls without legs, and those girls barely seemed to have a disability at all in comparison with the young man who does not make collagen (which keeps your skin on-- let me tell you, I didn't realize the important role collagen plays, but we really need to make that stuff). She also had a son with not only cystic fibrosis but also ADHD, and it seemed to me attachment issues and oppositional defiant disorder issues. He reminded me of kids I used to work with in the children's mental health field, but with the addition of a chronic and life-threatening genetic condition. So, a lot of work. It's amazing that Susan Tom took all of this on. There were problems, certainly, and I do think that a kid like Joe (the guy with cystic fibrosis and etc) would probably do better in terms of his mental health issues in an environment where he could have more individual attention. It seemed overall to be a good thing for these kids to have each other, though. And it made me think that raising one kid with Down Syndrome is really just no big deal!