Nervous

Today has been many things, but relaxing isn't one of them. Outside the sun is shining, the sea is blissfully still and azure blue, the crickets are buzzing and dragonflies flit lazily about the garden. But I woke with a sense of foreboding. Today is LO's last contact with his birth mum; am I already so connected with him that I felt his emotions surrounding that? I don't know what time they met, but at about 10am my anxiety reached a peak and I felt jittery and ended up snapping at R. Part of our general nervousness is because another birth family member has reappeared and turned up to the last two contact meetings. Though our LA have been vague about it, I know that adoption service's main aim is to minimise disruption to a child's 'normal' life as much as possible, which is why adoption or kinship care within the family or friendship circle is, in their eyes, the best option. R and I don't have a leg to stand on until matching panel on 12th September and we were acutely aware of that today.

Added to that, our SW is going through an intense personal crisis and she cancelled the meeting we had this afternoon. R received a call telling him this, and asking if we were free to meet with a different SW on Tuesday. Alarm bells started ringing...why do we need to have a meeting? What is it they can't tell us on the phone? It was a senior SW too, so we both went into our private worlds of panic (R was out and relaying messages to me at home). I was suddenly overwhelmed by a certainty that it wasn't going to happen - a dread filled me completely. Sanding down the chest of drawers and changing table, I thought 'we're going to have to put these away in the shed and try and forget this whole chapter in a few days'. I had been planning to paint LO's name on to the changing table but I stopped myself.

Then, the phone call to say that the meeting was just to go through some paperwork for the matching panel. What a relief! Not the news we dreaded at all. So, how come I'm still as jumpy as a March hare? R just called to ask me what I wanted him to pick up in town and I nearly kicked over my chair in my haste to get to the phone. Please let this nervousness be just that, nervousness, and not my crazy intuition on overdrive. Let this be the time my intuition has gone utterly askew, and all will be well.

will he smile?

Long time no write, but for good reason. We've been in a whirlwind getting all the paperwork ready to go out to panel members. Our SW, bless her, is possibly one of the most disorganised people I've come across. This upsets my mother-in-law who thinks she should pull her socks up a bit, but as I said yesterday, I'd prefer our SW to be compassionate, aware, kind and fun than uber organised (though a combination of both would be nice). And that's exactly the kind of person we got. However, the last week has made me reconsider that just slightly, as we got a call on Friday saying she'd forgotten we needed to fill in an eight question C9 form, and she needed it by Monday. This was after many other calls saying did we have this or could we look through our notes for that... The week was spent frantically trying to track things down from relevant authorities. We had a pretty jam-packed weekend lined up, hosting workshops and driving up to Kent. So I spent five hours working on the C9 form on Friday, finally getting it finished by bedtime. The C9 is really an adoptive couple's chance to say who they really are, what makes them tick, why they're suitable parenting material, so it was a pretty big deal. Eleven pages later and I think I got my message across. Then our SW called saying she needed to interview two of our friends before Monday. Bless them, our good friends K and B gave up their Sundays to separately meet with the SW. Talk about eleventh hour stuff! But now the forms are all in, and we haven't had a phone call asking for anything else...yet.

In the midst of all this, we've been getting wildly excited about our little boy. As the days go by, he becomes more and more real to us, the sense of him being part of our life more and more vivid. What I still can't get my head around, no matter how hard I try, is what it will be like to 'meet' our son - not a wide-eyed newborn but a little man with experiences of life already. Mine will not be the first face he gazes at. He will already have faces and voices that mean a great deal to him, and we will be taking him away from those people he has gradually come to love and trust. A more extraordinary set-up for motherhood I cannot think of.

My uncle and his wife adopted a little girl from China and he told me about when they arrived at the orphanage to meet their daughter, alongside many other western couples. The babies were unceremoniously distributed to the waiting couples and most began to cry fiercely. Here they were, separated from the only carers (however limited their care) they had ever known, and handed to a pair of nervous, pale strangers speaking a foreign language. Imagine too the adoptive mothers and fathers, fraught from years of infertility, unsure how to comfort or even hold an infant, paranoid that everyone's watching them fail at this very first step - what a traumatic start to a new life for them all. My uncle's wife recalls breaking down in tears in the airport toilets as they waited for their flight home with their new daughter. Their little girl would not be comforted, was distraught and terrified, and my uncle's wife was trying to change her nappy in a cramped toilet. All the little clothes she had brought to dress her daughter in got soaked in wee and a Chinese woman walking past tutted loudly and began to rebuke this struggling, helpless new mother in Chinese. Ugh, I still shudder when I hear this story, despite the fact that all three are now doing well many years later, and are a happy and flourishing little family.

At least for us, our little boy will be with experienced foster carers who will know to introduce things slowly. I have been lucky enough to care for lots of babies in my life, so the practical stuff won't be too nerve-wracking. What is nerve-wracking though is the moment we meet as a family. What if he cries? What if he is nervous or afraid of us? I know that the foster carers will prepare him as best they can for our first visit and he will have seen the DVD of us that our LA has integrated as part of the process. But you know how you want it all to be perfect? And how everything, just every single thing of the last six years, is hinged on that one moment - the HELLO, the becoming parents moment. So I just don't know quite what I'd do if he burst into tears!
Please, please, powers that be, divine intervention, whatever, if you grant me one wish, let it be that our son looks at us and smiles...