A letter to our son

Darling son,

Though we can't yet be with you physically, in every other way you are a huge part of our lives. We think about you constantly, talk to you a lot of the time, and have begun to see the world through your eyes. How wonderful a ladybird seems, or a butterfly, or the dog chasing her tail! We imagine you laughing when you see that. And we've seen pictures of your laugh, and can feel it expanding all our cells, opening our hearts with joy. Here is the little altar of things we have been gathering and making whilst we wait, somewhere we can focus on as we dream you into our lives. (At the back there is the 'count-down calendar' until we meet you.) We are busy creating a nest of love for you to come in to, and we can't wait to welcome you.

With love, and more anticipation than I can possibly begin to convey,

Your mum and dad xxxx

Every day angels

September, September. I love this time of year, the feeling of potential it engenders. As we move towards Autumn Equinox towards the end of the month, the earth's energies are turning inwards, preparing us for the quiet, reflective and still winter months. But I always feel energised and enlivened at this time of year. Perhaps it's something to do with it being the traditional back-to-school time, but I want to embark on new projects, learn something exciting and actively engage with things again. I woke at about 7am this morning to a world shrouded in mist, with a sun earnestly trying to break through. The garden was covered in cobwebs sparkling with dew, something I hadn't seen in a long time. It took my breath away, the natural world on the cusp of change like this, and I welcomed in a new season, a new chapter.

On my drive up the seemingly deserted road, I spotted a woman who we've met a few times through the workshops we hold. She's always bright and bubbly, and I liked her immediately when we first met. This morning she'd come out to take a few photos of the mist hugging the sea. She asked about the adoption, as she'd followed our journey over the last couple of months through our sporadic chats. I explained where we're at, told her about yesterday's debacle, and ended by saying the stock phrase I expect everyone to say; "we'll get there in the end". So many people have said this to me that I had begun saying it myself. "Yes, you will," she smiled. "But in the meantime, it's really really frustrating for you, isn't it?" I wanted to get out of the car and hug her. Sometimes it means so much just to have your feelings validated, not to have someone brush them under the carpet with cliches like "you'll get there in the end", but to really engage with what it might feel like. As I left her with her camera, I glanced in my rearview mirror and smiled and smiled like a loon at her. Thank you, I hope my smile said. Thank you for really being just who I needed to see this morning.

On the subject of every day angels, I wanted to tell a story about my brother-in-law's mum. A few days after I'd written a post about feeling invisible as an adoptive mum, she came up to me when I was on my own in my sister's kitchen. She put her arms around me. "Congratulations, mum-to-be," she said. And those words meant more to me than I can say.

All those every day angels, thank you. And today you have inspired me to try to be an every day angel too.

Bring in the lions - the hoop-jumping continues...

After a weekend of manically putting up fencing in the garden and guards on just about everything in the house, we had our health and safety assessment this morning. Bearing in mind this was first done many months ago, and we passed at panel on 11th July, it feels uncannily like we're going backwards now.

Everything was poked and prodded. We were advised to box up all the lower shelves of books and put them in the loft: "toddlers like pulling things off shelves". A further fire guard must be purchased - one that sticks out into the room, all windows and the French doors must be covered in a kind of sticky-back plastic "in case he hits a toy hard against the window". The pantry must be gated off, and the cats and dog are now to have their food behind a gate. The fencing we've put up everywhere in the garden must be another foot higher. And most ludicrously of all, the whole patio must be surrounded by a high fence - "advisable until he's at least 8 or 9".

I struggle with this kind of nanny-state-ism. Our parents or grandparents didn't grow up in these cotton wool kind of environments. Children learn through their environment, they have to be able to assess dangers and risks or they grow up fearful, unable to make decisions for their own safety. One of my favourite parenting books is 'The Continuum Concept' in which Liedloff describes how children in indigenous tribes in the jungle allow their children to be active decision makers and part of society. Yes, we must protect our children, but we can't keep them in a padded cell so that they have no experience of real life. If real-life environments were as dangerous as these social workers were making out, the human race would have died out a long long time ago.

It led me to reflect on some of the greatest adventures of my own childhood, free from parental 'guidance', in a lovely garden called The Chase that belonged to family friends. This vast kingdom was the most wonderful playground, filled with hidden dangers, banks to scramble up or down, different levels, little mildewed steps through overhanging trees, rope swings, and - best of all - an old beaten up truck half hidden by vegetation which my friends and I would delight in climbing all over. Think of some of our favourite children's literature - 'Swallows and Amazons', 'The Secret Seven', 'My Family and Other Animals' etc. etc. (there's so very many) - all of which involve adventuring and assessing risk. We are doing our children a disservice by creating safe, sanitised worlds with no opportunity to explore, to engage with the environment, to make choices. I know children who have been brought up in this kind of way and, without exception, they are all terrified of the natural world. They check over their shoulder to get confirmation from their parents before they try anything. They have no faith in themselves, in their own capabilities.

We discussed further what was going to happen from here. One of the SWs visiting is going to be away on 26th September, so the next matching panel date we might be able to get is 10th October. To be told 12 days before your matching panel date that it is going to be cancelled, and then told it won't be for another month makes the blood boil. Neither R or I want to kick up a stink as we want to keep them on our side but oh! how I wish our SW hadn't had to go on leave. By now we'd have just 11 days until we met our son. Instead, we had his SW telling us today just how much he'd changed - "every time I see him, he's changed so much! He's pushing himself up to crawl and we think he'll probably race through the crawling stage and go right on to walking soon." We want to witness these changes. We just want to bring our son home now or, at the very very least, meet him. Let's hope he gets to come back here before his 1st birthday, they said today. Yes, let's hope, we thought, but hey, the ball's in your court, you've got the power here.

Frustrated. Powerless. And living in a house that vaguely resembles Fort Knox.

Matching panel cancelled...

The big bad SW from last week called up.

Apparently our health and safety check wasn't done properly. I mentioned that she wanted locks on all the windows. Well, she wants a lot more than that.

She insinuated that our beloved SW didn't do the PAR form properly. She wants to re-submit it after we've had a health and safety check by two SWs on Monday. She has cancelled our 12th September matching date. She doesn't know when we'll get to meet LO (and doesn't actually seem to care), but the paperwork will take three weeks to file.

We begged her to be reasonable. The PAR mistakes were theirs, not ours, so why should we and LO be penalised? We promised to get all the things she wants done this weekend but please, please, please don't cancel the matching panel as we already know October is all booked up. But she does it by the book, and won't shift.

This power-crazy lady is messing with my mind. We've cancelled work left, right and centre, we've arranged our lives all ready for our big, big day: the day we meet LO, which was going to be 14th September, 2 weeks today.

She said to R; 'I can't understand what all the rush is with this one, why your SW has been in such a hurry to push it through.' It made us wonder what she meant; that we'd got too cosy with our SW, and they think she's doing a sort of matey job on our case?

Maybe our SW was pushing it through because it makes sense to bring LO home to his family as soon as possible? Maybe she just cared about us and about LO?

I feel strangely afraid of this woman and her power.

Finding inspiration

We have started the countdown! Although the actual date of meeting LO keeps changing, in roughly two weeks tomorrow we will meet him... This fills me with the most delicious anticipation I have ever experienced, each morning waking like a child at Christmas. And, just like a child at Christmas (how long were the days then?!), every day seems 100x longer than it used to. Our lives are about to change. Completely and forever. And we just can't wait.

I have been making the most of the opportunity to read, well aware that this kind of time will be a bit thin on the ground when he comes home. This week I have been reading Alfie Kohn's inspirational book 'Unconditional Parenting' and re-reading an old favourite, Liedloff's 'Continuum Concept', about attachment parenting. I read a lot of books on parenting for my work, but it's exciting to re-read these books now with an idea of how I might actually put them into practice.

I also write a column on our off-grid life for a local paper and recently wrote about my addiction to quotes. A good quote acts as a catalyst to change, to introspection, to inspiration. Now I am - finally - the owner of a posh phone, I have downloaded an app (still can't quite believe techno-phobe me is writing that!) with daily inspirational quotes. Today I received this: 'The greatest prayer is patience.' That's from the big guy, Buddha, who obviously knew what he was talking about (perhaps he even adopted?!).

And another quote I love, and turn to again and again in the preparation to parenthood comes from a beautiful and thought-provoking little book called 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

A shared grief

I mentioned in a previous post that our SW was going through a big personal crisis. Yesterday we found out that she has taken time off because she can't cope with all that's going on, and we have a new social worker taking us to matching panel. This SW is OLD SCHOOL. When she came over yesterday, it made me realise how ridiculously lucky we'd been with our SW; how much we'd laughed together and how we'd even, when she broke down last week, had a group hug and cried together. With this new SW I remembered that SWs aren't paid to be human, they're paid to be PROFESSIONAL. I ballsed it up straight away by not cleaning the house (we quickly realised with our SW that this wasn't a big thing) and then revealing that we were worried about our SW and to send her our love. Ears pricked on the new SW - 'worried about her, why? What did she say?' Help! Cue much guilt for landing our beloved SW in it.

She then went round the house and started pointing out where we'd have to get locks on the windows and build gates and things. I was pretty close to telling her to f*** off, that we'd been through that part of the process and had passed. But I didn't. I held my breath and said 'if we lived on a busy street, I wouldn't leave the door wide open so that my child could walk into the street. Instead, we live on a cliff and I'll employ the same level of conscientious parenting I would if I lived on a busy road.' She told me it was very unlikely we'd meet LO on 14th September and it would likely be the following week. Crushing, but I'd been expecting it, so it didn't feel as bad as anticipated.

She also gave me all of LO's birth mum's psychological assessment notes. Now, anyone who's read these knows that you have to take it slowly. Make a pot of tea. Break it into manageable chunks. Take breaks. Have a cry. I knew they'd make tough reading, so I was careful with myself and tried to do it in a nurturing kind of way. What I wasn't anticipating was the enormous and overwhelming level of compassion that swept through me. Little things she said, ways in which she behaved with LO. Never missing a contact session and trying, desparately, to assert her maternal love and authority whilst being constantly watched and assessed in a cold office building. She loves her son. She isn't perfect and has made awful mistakes in her life. But it just struck me how incredibly, breath-takingly LUCKY R and I are. That we had parents who, though they made mistakes as all parents do, loved us and provided us with stability. LO's birth mum never had that. She had violence and abuse and hatred. She was never taught how to love. And from the moment she tried to make a normal life for herself, she was watched. Everything she said and did for the last twenty odd years is recorded and picked over. I suddenly felt her loss so acutely, especially when I read the psychologist's final assessment that she wasn't fit to parent: our gain. But - so very, very acutely - her loss.

In the middle of trying to process some of this information, my mum called. My mum has MS and is struggling with day to day things. She was tearful and anxious. We talked for some time. After the phone call, I felt exhausted; exhausted because my mum is going through so much and needs so much love and support. And I had a massive cry. Many years ago, my friend Chas said that she had a big cleansing cry every week, just to shift stuff and even if she didn't really feel like crying. Recently that advice has been pretty useful. Yesterday, I cried for my mum, trying to do simple things and failing, finding photos of herself pre-illness and missing those days. I cried for LO's mum, for all those times she wasn't loved and for the self-hatred and the hatred of others that followed. I cried for LO's dad, for the confusion and heartache and loss. I cried for our SW, who has lost something so special to her. I cried for LO, for his loss of a mum who loves him but doesn't know how to look after him. And, I'll admit, I cried for me and for R, for all that we have been through.

Sometimes, it feels like you lift the lid on the pain of humanity and look in, just for a moment, and it is huge, vast, overwhelming. We can just take a little bit at a time or our hearts would burst. So we mingle our tears with the tears of everyone - our shared pool of grief (was LO's mum crying last night for her son?)- and move on. Because to linger there would be dangerous, and we have to take what we've learnt back out in to the world and try and make a more positive future.

Healing Aloneness

We came back on Monday from a beautiful weekend at possibly the best festival in the country, Off Grid in Somerset. Every year, we go along with my sister and her family to this blissful, heart-centred, small and special festival, and every year it fills me with hope for the future we're creating as a worldwide community. After a few hours of being on the magically decorated site, you begin to feel your edges soften and your heart open. Everyone smiles. People talk to one another. There are loads of crafts activities for adults and kids, amazing talks and learning opportunities on everything from transition towns to building a strawbale house to bees. Home-spun music, loads of dancing, local cider, fires and musicians and gypsy caravans and costumes and a huge - VAST - feeling of belonging. Beautiful, kind-hearted and aware people abound and this weekend we got to hang around with 500 of them, plus some of the leading thinkers who are shaping the world for the better.

On Saturday morning, when the sun made a very welcome appearance, my sister, brother-in-law, R and I were lounging on cushions drinking chai in a gorgeous outdoor cafe. Nearby, my nieces played with friends they'd made and got down to the serious business of trading some of the eclectic wares they'd been making over the summer. The cafe also sold crystals and they were all along the edges, giving the place an ethereal kind of feel. They had shelves of books you could peruse at your leisure. I picked a few, some old favourites I knew would help me shift into that different time and space, and a box of Crystal cards. These beautiflly illustrated cards showed the different crystals and their properties and are used for divination. So, lazily, I spread them out upside down before me and ran my hand over them as I thought of a question to ask....'what support does my son need?'

And the answer?

Anhydrite - Healing Aloneness

When we fear abandonment, Anhydrite reminds us that we are not alone, are connected and embraced in the heart of the divine. (Oh... Wow... Incredible moment.)

For me, and motherhood, I got pink tourmaline - connecting to the heart and nurturing. For R, for fatherhood, he drew lapis lazuli - coming back to centre.

Now to make a little family altar with our sacred crystals.