A few weeks ago, my husband Robert and I paid a visit to our adopted daughter, Louise. Now 36 and in a home of her own, she looked well, confident and content. We stood for a few moments, looking at the door in shared silence. Then, suddenly, I broke down in sobs that shocked even me.
Yes, Louise is doing well — better than she ever has — but at heart, she remains the same: severely autistic and, without medication, highly likely to suffer a relapse of the psychosis that has plagued her, and us, since it was diagnosed in adolescence.
Meg and Robert Henderson adopted their daughter Louise pictured aged 3 at the age of two-and-a-half. Louise will never run her own house: home for her is a sheltered community which she will never be able to leave to live independently.
She will never be part of ordinary society. For all the hard years, the life-changing sacrifices we all had to make because of Louise, not much has actually been achieved. Robert and I, and our two other children, have suffered a great deal with and for Louise, to get her to this point.
The raw, difficult truth is that had we known what life with Louise would be like, we would not have adopted her. Oh, how I recognised this story. Yet she quickly discovered that his problems were a lot more serious, and after suffering 36 seizures in a single day, the child was belatedly diagnosed with brain damage.
