Matching panel in October?! No, please, no!!!

Trying, and failing, to concentrate on anything other than adoption. I can't stop thinking about our little boy, about what he's doing now, about everything that has happened to him so far. At home today with deadlines pressing down on me from all sides but unable to stop myself from opening my emails and looking at the photos of him...again...and again...and again. Each time makes my heart do a little flutter. It is still all so unreal whilst simultaneously being the most exciting time ever. I can't quite believe it's all happening and I'm sure that's a feeling I'll carry with me right up until he is here, at home, with us. SWs, both his and ours, are off on holidays during July and August so I'm trying not to think too much about those delays. Our SW told us yesterday that the only matching panel date she could get was October. Our hearts literally sank but she's said she will do all she can to find a window, a cancellation. Because if we have to wait until October I think I will just gnaw off my hand or something. Again, the waiting game.

The adoption triangle

Okay, I said I didn't want to look at any more photos of children waiting for adoption. I said that photos made me confused and unable to think straight, they made me wobbly at the knees and tearful and muddled. But today we looked at pictures of 'our little boy'. Still not quite able to type that without putting it in quotation marks. Still not quite able to leap into that amazing world of whole-hearted, total and utter trust. But he's cleared for adoption so there's no muddling at that stage. Potentially, after our panel on 11th July, things could move quite fast. Our SW came round today with all his paperwork. We read about his birth family - things that made our hearts ache and things that made us shudder - and how generations of people can be tangled and destroyed and messed up in ways that seem inconceivable to us in our safe little worlds. We read about the things he liked, how he has gradually, gradually learnt to trust his foster carers and warmed to them (so we're aware of just how disruptive another move will be, new attachments to form - no illusions there), how he burbles and chatters, how he sucks his thumb. All these things make him real, almost tangible. If I sit very still and listen, I can almost hear him and feel him beside me. Soon he will be here.

Reading Stix's account of her fear of bumping into birth family reminds me how entangled and enmeshed we are with the family of our children as adoptive parents. Reading through all 'our son's' birth mum's story made me reflect on what I was doing in my own life when she was caught up in another terrible drama in her life - she exists out there now, maybe pining for her child, maybe angry and lost. Her son - our son - exists out there too. All of us in the triangle of adoption exist in parallel, each is going to change the other's life, but none of us have met yet. Strange, and ultimately - if thought about for too long - mind-boggling.

Have been trying to explain to friends the complexity of where we're at at the moment - how we don't know where we'll be or what we'll be doing over the coming months. That we're going to have to disappear for about a month during introductions and for the first weeks as a family. People keep throwing invites at us to festivals and the like and when we say we're in the middle of adopting they say 'oh, bring the little one along too'. Difficult to explain it's not really like that, that our little boy can't just be carted from one event to another, that he will need time - perhaps a lot of it and perhaps a lifetime of it - to be settled with us, and to attach properly to us. Nigh on impossible to explain that though, people look at us blankly like we're being histrionic and over-protective. Seems the hiding away bit will be good for all of us.

Right now, though, I'm just dreaming. Full of hope and excitement and, I'll admit it, an edge of fear. Hard to believe that after all these years I'm actually going to be a mother.

The possibility of fostering

So, our SW came round this lunchtime to talk to us about the kind of children we'd like to adopt. She brought round some more profiles, not of children we could adopt as they'd already been placed, but to give us an idea of the kinds of children they have on the waiting list. I asked for no photos any more else it feels like some kind of dating site, and horrible and weird. She agreed, and had decided no photos anyway. I always feel that I look completely utterly different in photos to how I really am, and photos pack so much punch, so I'd prefer to get to know our child through who they are, rather than what they look like. We discussed the possibility of adopting a child around 6-12 months, as our LA has a lot of children this age to place. We thought this was interesting when we first started with them, as we had imagined we'd adopt an older child. But it seems that information has filtered in, and here we are hoping that's the match we'll get. Our SW talked about 'concurrency' - when a baby is fostered with us from birth with a view to future adoption. It sounded good until we got to the reality that the baby would need to be seeing their birth mum and/or dad regularly - up to 7 times a week - to build an attachment. And that it might turn out that their birth mum gets to keep them, so after 6-12 months of loving and nurturing a child, we'd lose them. Our SW pointed out that often foster carers lose them with the knowledge that they might well be going somewhere that's not entirely safe and quite probably not emotionally stable. Oh lordy, that was too much to contemplate, and the fact we'd have to live with that unknown for the first year of our child's life seemed slightly too terrifying to process. But we haven't ruled it out.

Our SW also asked us 'where we were on not having a birth child'. I guess I'd put the heebie-jeebies up them by talking about babies. It's a difficult one to answer. Where are you ever on the reality of not carrying your own child? It doesn't just go away, and I'm not under any illusions that I'll just wake up one day and feel hunky dorey about it. I understand that they want to know that you have processed at least some of the emotions around it though, to be in a secure place to be able to bring up a child with their own losses to cope with. So I answered honestly and said I just wanted to be a mother and wasn't too hung up now on how that happened. I also have seen so many mothers struggling with newborns - exhausted physically and emotionally and their lives turned upside down - to not have too much of a rosy picture of the perfect newborn. What I hoped I conveyed in my rambling is that R and I have visions of a child still partially in arms, not quite a toddler, so that we have a little bit of that baby time. It has, as I've mentioned, fully surprised me how strong this feeling is for me. And, I noted, for R too, who spoke of carrying our child in a papoose. All these years of researching and writing about attachment parenting make me yearn for some of the key experiences of it: babywearing, bed-sharing, child-led weaning etc.

And then...back full circle to the feeling that we should let expectations go and leap into it with open arms. I lay in bed this morning and silently communicated with our future child...come to us, make yourself known in any way so we can sense that you are coming. I've even wished these last few days that someone - some Divine intervention - would come along and remove all decision making. Like in the old days when you might open your front door and find a baby on the doorstep... There's so much to think about, so much to take into consideration. I honestly, and perhaps stupidly, hadn't predicted this stage at all. But our LA has so many children to place, they want to get the match exactly right, so it makes sense I suppose.

A misty, cold day here today. The horizon is blurred with mist from the sea. We have so many jobs to do around the house before our child moves in, perhaps a wait whilst our SW searches is a good thing.