I spoke to a room full of foster parents tonight. I spent an obscene amount of time yesterday working on my presentation… rearranging my slides and editing Nancy Ashe’s amazing video from our conference last year. I never could get PowerPoint to play the videos right in the presentation… I finally decided I would just open them separately in Window’s Media Player. I even downloaded a program designed to address that and it didn’t play the clips correctly.


So today I burned a DVD and headed off to speak…. And once again was plagued with major technical difficulties. I love my computers except when I hate them. While I was speaking several of the techno parents took the DVD and set it up on another laptop… and we did manage to show the clips. Some day this week I’ll have to set up my computer and projector and see what went wrong… sigh. I have no time for this…


But I sold at least a half dozen of Deborah Hannah’s books. Not for any profit… Just because I think it is an awesome book. And I think the presentation went well. One poor mom came up afterwards and picked my brain to see if I thought she should be “worried” about her five year old daughter. Based on this mom’s hard-to-pin-down feeling that something was “not quite right” with this child… yeh, probably she should be pretty tuned in to attachment parenting. I told the group I had spoken with a mom last week that was parenting a BABY who came to her a few months old with over a dozen broken ribs and two broken legs. I’m still processing that… but had a dad come up after the presentation and tell me one of his kids has a similar past. Mind boggling… I talked about the origins of RAD, the child’s view of things (reinforced by video clips of Nancy Ashe speaking) and some parenting tips… but we ran out of time way too fast.


True to form, I came on pretty strong, but I came on in support of them. I told them we parents are the constituency… and we not only NEED support and services, we deserve them. We are supposed to be part of an overall solution… not denigrated as the problem. And of course, they were blown away by Nancy Ashe’s poignant words. As am I, each and every time I listen to the DVD.


A reader commented on my previous post that she appreciated how I "told the truth" about adoption. I talked about that tonight, too. I have long since learned that hiding facts and feelings because they are difficult to face does not make them go away. I think my frankness does blow folks away some times... but hopefully it at least motivates them to think about things differently!

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