MY FLESH AND BLOOD

Attention-deficit disorder. Cystic fibrosis. Degenerative genetic disease. Birth defects. Cancer. Just one of these scourges would weigh heavily on any given set of parents. But Susan Tom, of Fairfield, California, has adopted 13 foster children, many with behavioral and health abnormalities. “I have no income…I have no retirement plan. I have no Social Security. I have no savings. I am their mom, and that's plenty,” she tells the verit? lens, in between marathon phone calls to social workers, doctors and therapists, and mediating hellacious domestic fights. Who is Susan Tom? A heroine of America's Adoption Assistance Program, yes, but in many ways an ordinary mortal, a tragedy-touched, divorced single mother, frequently lonely but ferociously devoted to her household of special-needs children – the maimed, the malformed and the simply unwanted. Front and center is hyperactive Joe, discarded son of a drug addict, whose multiple afflictions cost him more than one previous foster family. Over the course of one very dramatic year Joe becomes sexually-precocious (the other children are overwhelmingly female) and ever harder to manage. Meanwhile Susan's surviving biological daughter, adolescent Margaret, begins to implode from the pressure. You will leave MY FLESH AND BLOOD emotionally drained and yet fortified by Jonathan Karsh's portrait in parental courage and Susan Tom's credo: “Children are a gift. Even at their most difficult you've got to admire something about them.”