With the ADN conference less than a month away, I'm getting more excited by the day! We get several inquiries a day, and it thrills me when people are so excited about coming.

One of the presentations I'm looking forward to is the Friday afternoon keynote (and Saturday follow up Q&A session) with Adoption Blog's editor, Nancy Ashe. Nancy is an adult adoptee and, as she explains it, "attachment-affected" individual. She has struggled with many of the issues that our special children stuggle with. Hearing it from her perspective will be invaluable.

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to hearing from Nancy has to do with a phone call I got from my mom this week. My mother is dealing with the recent loss of her mother - my 90-year-old grandmother, who had a less-than-stellar childhood. I've blogged about this before. If my grandmother were a foster or adoptive child today she likely would have been diagnosed with at the least PTSD, and possibly Reactive Attachment Disorder. I didn't know that as a child, but did know that she and my mother had a strange, often explosive, relationship. As I grew, I knew my grandmother loved my mother, but she had an odd way of showing it. She was suspicious of her and never showed the love directly to my mom. No hugs, no verbal affirmations, etc. She did, however, shower us girls (her granddaughters) with gifts and plenty of indulgences. She and my mom had common love interests - us!

My mother is now reflecting on all this for the first time through different eyes. She and I have had long conversations about my grandmother's inability to have close intimate relationships and the role that her childhood experiences played in the rocky road of my grandmother's life. My grandmother was resilient, not totally dyfunctional, and maybe she wouldn't have been diagnosed with RAD, but the potential was there. Having been abandoned at age 8 and "farmed out" in an informal foster arrangement that was more about having a set of hands to work than it was about raising a child, she endured various kinds of abuse that she just didn't talk to us about...only briefly to my mother about as she aged.

When my mother called this week it was because she had discovered very accidently that one of her friends had also had a rough childhood of abuse and was struggling now, decades later, with the impact that has had on her life. It was an interesting conversation and she asked me questions about attachment, trauma, etc. (My mom fancies me an expert in such things!) And it occurred to me that there are lots and lots of hurting adults in this world who are affected by attachment disorder. And lots of them who realize they aren't relating to the world with the same intimacy that others do. There are lots of people carrying childhood trauma battle scars.

So that is my interest in Nancy's talk as an adult adoptee. I want her to set me straight on the hopes and expectations I have, or should have, for LuLu. And maybe I can pass what I learn on to my mother and other adults who have been impacted either as "attachment-affected" adults or as their family members.