Cagsy
Thanks for the book, like tttJay I'm not sure I'd have bought it either. I didn't read about Saira until I'd finished the book and having done so had lots of my questions answered. I did keep wondering; can parents really choose not to love their baby? Does it really get so bad that you would consider walking away? I guess you're planning for your daughter's future, how difficult is the knowledge that at some stage as she grows you won't be able to manage without a lot of help? Do you feel isolated from other parents and 'family life'?
On a practical level I too couldn't understand what you were living on during all this time in France, nor why you'd live in a place infested with rodents with a tiny baby - can you help us understand that?
Many thanks and good luck to you all, may you stay strong enough to face all that life may throw at you.
Cagsy
Yes, it can get that bad Cagsy, I’ve seen it plenty of times. And it may not be PC to say so, but there is a smallish window where you could emotionally choose to pull back from a severely disabled baby. About 16 per cent of newborn profoundly disabled babies are not taken home from hospital by their parents. I would never ever judge these people. They can only cope with what they can cope with. I never seriously thought of leaving Ailsa but when I was utterly exhausted I fleetingly thought of killing myself. When you can’t go on anymore, you simply can’t – and many parents of profoundly disabled children commit suicide, often killing their child at the same time. Personally, I think that in that situation it is much better to walk away, don’t you?
We now get a lot of childcare from the French state (it took two years to arrange even emergency care but now it’s great).
Moving to a wreck of a house with a handicapped baby is a matter of personality. In our case, we moved because stuff like that doesn’t bother us in the slightest. In Anna and Tobias’ case, they did it because their better judgement had been rocked by the shock of what had happened to them.