Mae's Arms and the Unadoptable

Mae's Arms
I've gotten a few questions about Mae's medical condition that qualifies her as a "special needs" adoption.  Frankly, to see the pics I've been posting you wouldn't know anything was wrong.  I'm no doctor so you'll have to give me a little slack on the explanation.

Her diagnosis is Arthrogryposis.  If you google that you'll see that there's a pretty wide spectrum as to how bad it can be.  Hers seems to be limited to her arms and I would say it's pretty mild compared to what it could be.

In more layman terms it feels like she has almost zero muscle in her upper and lower arms.  So her arms just kinda flop around a bit.  She can manipulate her fingers a bit but mostly her arms just hang there and she swings her shoulders to flop them around to where she wants them.  She's quite affective at it.

She doesn't stand on her own but she can support her weight.  When sitting or laying she contorts her lower body anywhere and everywhere to get where she wants to go.  She is very resourceful and persistent.

I don't know what the future holds in terms of surgery or therapy but I think it's reasonable to expect her to become independent as she's gets older.  She'll figure it out.


The Unadoptable
Mae shared a room with 20 other children, all special needs children.  She was the only one that was made available for adoption.  That's right, there are at least 20 children in her orphanage right now that will never be adopted, never.

The ladies at her orphanage explained that those children have severe mental disabilities and nobody would adopt them.  I tried to explain to them that there are people in the world that will adopt mentally disabled children.  If you list them, they might get adopted or might not.  But if you don't list them there is a 0% chance of then ever getting adopted.

The realities are:

• It costs an orphanage a lot of time and money to get a child listed for adoption.
• Orphanages aren't exactly over-staff and over-funded.
• We pay a lot of money to the orphanage as part of the adoption.

You can do the math on your own but all this comes together to form a gut-wrenching story.  There are kids that will never even get the chance to have a family all because someone, somewhere, decided that they weren't worth the investment.  They decided on behalf of all the rest of us, that nobody would want these children.  I don't know how that strikes you, but it punches me right in the gut.