Hear me roar

Seriously, I did roar today, and I mean really really roar. My mother-in-law called after her visit with the social worker yesterday and our SW had told her that our child would most likely be coming to live with us in OCTOBER. Great, not so far away, very exciting. Except that we'd been told that matching would be very quick after our 11th July panel date, and we could even go to matching panel the following week. So we had kept August and September pretty free (challenging to manage when you're self-employed and work comes up that you have to keep turning down). Then we heard, second hand, that we were looking at October. And I really did have a little showdown, roaring and all! It felt good to get all the frustration and rage out. Just this limbo limbo land drives you bonkers after a while, this state of always being put off, having to hang on a bit longer. It seems cruel to do it to people who have been waiting forever to become parents anyway. I know when we get there, this bit will become irrelevant, be swept away by the extraordinary life changes ahead but ye gads, they keep you on your toes, don't they?!?!

Think I might just go back to bed....

Adoption then and now

Just back from a lovely five days staying with our friend in the countryside. Lots of walks and sitting in the sun and eating and chatting. She's seven months pregnant so beginning to wind things down a bit now. This made me think that I could be the equivalent of seven months pregnant, in that our child will potentially be coming to live with us September time, maybe earlier (eeek! woah! wow!). I have always urged my pregnant clients to wind things down and enjoy the peaceful and reflective time pre-life-change-new-baby, and I thought to myself that I ought to heed my own advice, despite the fact I'll have no bump to lug about as an excuse. So I am planning a little time out, some reflection, maybe a weekend away, maybe a massage or two. We'll see whether I manage to put it into practice.

My friend is adopted herself, now in her thirties, and we talked a lot about adoption then and now. She was surprised at the level of interaction with the birth family these days, but we all talked about why this was a good thing for the child. In her day, it was 'wait until you're 18 and then you can find out more'. She didn't seem to have a problem with this, and actually decided against trying to find her birth mother (for multiple reasons too complex and personal to go into here), but I expressed my concerns that this approach only exacerbates an adoptive child's sense of dislocation and lack of identity - or does it? She didn't feel it did. It was good for us to listen, without judgement, to the real experiences of someone adopted who is now an adult. Interesting to remember that every child is different and what works for one in terms of contact may not work for another. For that we're very blessed to have an excellent, friendly and approachable contact team through our LA, who assess the relevance and enjoyment of contact annually throughout a child's life. If there's ever a time when we think it's too much for our child to manage, they can help us have a rethink. Another one of the benefits of having a great LA where everything is in-house, there's a small team, and you get to know everyone pretty quickly.

It seems another difference of adoption thirty-plus years ago is how important preparation is for adoptive parents now. The idea of a child being given to a childless couple - the parent-centred approach - has now moved much more to the child-centred approach where the wellbeing and happiness of the child is paramount (as it should be). Because of this, of course, potential adoptive parents are recquired to think long and hard about themselves, what they need to grieve before they can effectively parent a grieving child, and the kinds of fears, challenges and difficulties a child might face. In my friend's day, it was more of a case of aiming to forget the past (for both child and parent) by creating a new family. Can this work? In my friend's case, she has a very strong and loving family unit, bonded by deep respect and common interests. There are sadnesses there and unresolved stories but isn't this true of all families?

I'm being careful here because what I would never want to say is that my friend's parents got it wrong. They have brought up a beautiful, heart-centred, generous, funny, wise and compassionate daughter, despite tumultuous teen years. They were also products of their time, adopting a child when it was considered normal to forget the past and move forward. But it also made me feel very grateful to be becoming an adoptive parent when there is so much literature available on supporting adoptive children, when we have the internet at our fingertips, when there are adoption blogs to read, when local authorities provide workshops to enable each adoptive parent to think very deeply about what their role is - not just when their child is a toddler, but when they're a teenager trying to form relationships.

Amidst all this thinking and talking with my friend we watched a TV programme called Long Lost Family which, as the name suggests, sets out to reunite people with lost members of their family. The episode we watched included a woman given up for adoption looking for her birth mum, and an adopted woman looking for her birth sister. It was pretty emotional stuff and my friend and I talked again about her looking for her birth mum. Adoption these days removes the unknown from the equation - the constant nagging wondering of old-school adoption - by keeping a level of contact. I guess in a generation or so's time, there'll be no need for programmes like Long Lost Family. Lots to think about.

The silver lining

Oooo, tenterhooks today. The SW is with my mum and dad right now conducting an interview. Sure all will be well, and sending happy vibes that way, but a certain nervousness about the SW dredging up episodes from my teens that I'm sure my mum and dad want to forget all about! Hey ho, a means to an end. One amazing thing that has come out of becoming parents this way is the sense of connection it has forged with everyone. If we'd got pregnant, there wouldn't have been all this anticipation, the family and friends workshops, the meeting up with family and reflecting on so many aspects of the journey. Plus, the enormous ego massage of seeing what our referees have written about us - we were joking to our friends the other night that we decided on adoption just so we could get our nearest and dearest to write lovely things about us!! But R's mum came over last week and said just how much she'd enjoyed reflecting on grandparenthood - what it means and what she can bring to the table. What an amazing silver lining to what can be a long road.

Yesterday we met up with the friends we made on the adoption prep course for lunch. It was so good to hear others' experiences and talk about the ups and downs. We all had a laugh about how much the social workers know about us now, down to what we were doing every single year of our life to date. It feels extraordinary to give so much about yourselves, your relationship with every person in your life, plus your marriage - even the cats and dog had their own form! - but we all know it will be worth it in the end. We are ahead of the others which was bittersweet - we'd discussed not mentioning our panel date in case it made others feel that they were behind but of course it came up in the end. What made it really lovely was how pleased and supportive the others were about it, and we arranged to catch up again after we've been to panel so we can fill them in on the gory details! Not that nervous about it yet, but maybe that'll come later. Today, the sun is shining and my heart is light. Going to go and get my hands dirty in the garden and plant some of my burgeoning seedlings...

And in other news...

Sometimes this yearning to be a parent lark is all consuming. I mean, first there's all the fertility stuff: the charting, the special diets, the acupuncture, the reading, the therapies and the endless, endless wishing. Following on from that, there's all the adoption stuff: the workshops, the probing into every aspect of your life and whether it's normal that when you were eight you used to nick stuff from your recorder teacher's house (I had a pretty impressive klepto habit in my early years), the finances, the health and safety of a house on a cliff without electricity, all the references, the attachment interviews...on and on. Sometimes, it's good to just do something completely different.

Today, I went with my writing group to a talk by a new novelist who has just been published to rave reviews. She was great, inspirational. I did a reading of some of my work from my Edwardian novel-in-progress which was nerve-wracking but also exciting. Afterwards, I felt compelled to go and give the writer a hug, and then we talked and laughed for ages, and had this wonderful time of connection. The sun came out, I was inspired, I came back and wrote a lot of new stuff. Even driving back from the talk I listened to the radio on full blast, singing along embarrassingly loud. My friends in my writing group asked about the adoption (one of them is writing a novel about adoption) and we chatted about it, but it wasn't all consuming.

You know, I love that when we have our child, after all these years, we'll just be a family doing family things. We won't be the couple everyone smiles sympathetically at when we're playing with children. WE'LL BE A FAMILY!! And I experienced today just the warm, centred feeling of being myself, doing the things I love, not even thinking too much about the adoption. Just being. It felt really really good.

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.

Support

I spoke to one of closest friends this morning, just back from running a hostel in Ethiopia. She's seven months pregnant with her first child. She's also, as I've mentioned in previous posts, adopted herself. The news of her pregnancy broke just as things were really starting to move with our adoption, in one of life's extraordinary synchronicities. We were laughing this morning that we just couldn't have dreamt it up - her pregnancy being something of a surprise. Life is what happens when you're busy looking the other way! It seems that we'll be mothers around the same time. With all my years of supporting pregnant and birthing women, I hope I'll be a source of support to her. With her personal experiences of being adopted, she's already provided me with some real insights into what being adopted means throughout life. As I mentioned before, I got a bit of panic on after I'd expressed my joy and excitement at her pregnancy news back in February, and wondered how it would feel to be going through home study etc. whilst she prepared for her impending arrival. Miraculously, our adoption speeded up around then, and it looks as if our motherhood experiences will run in parallel, though of course our children will be different ages. I have long wanted her to be godmother to our child, because of her understanding of adoption, and I hope our children will be friends for life.

Running alongside our adoption process, there have been many synchronicities like this. I have been supporting an overseas friend via email with her adoptive daughter's transition into teens, discussing and musing with her the meaning of identity and birth family. Her daughter is raging and wild, angry and sad, but there are also moments of connection and beauty in the midst of it all. I have felt honoured to share their experience, and it has been SUCH an eye-opener for me! Talking to my pregnant friend's adoptive mum has also revealed so much, mostly on that count about deep, abiding, maternal love. Both R and I feel blessed to have friends in our lives who really know what adoption means, from both parent and child perspective.

My mum and dad and R's mum both attended a friends and family day, organised by our Local Authority. I felt nervous about them coming all this way, and how they might feel about it all. But it proved to be an amazing opportunity for them, to meet other adoptive grandparents, to ask questions, to really think through what it might mean to be adopted. I feel so lucky to have an LA that puts a focus on this, the support aspect, of adoption. We went for lunch at R's mum's last Sunday, and my mum and dad came too. All were delighted and excited about this next chapter, and I feel that's thanks to the workshop.

Making sense of it all

Feeling much better these last two days. Had a really good chat with my friend's adoptive mum - she used to sit on panel and said that it really was important for couples to be clear about what they wanted. I guess I'm just surprised by how much I want a child under two, it hadn't really seemed like a major thing before (and a part of me is disappointed in myself for being so predictable). The last eight years I've been supporting pregnant women and new mums, so I suppose some of that had filtered in, and I realised the other day just what it was I'd be missing out on. We're still not actually decided, and we have the details of the gorgeous little 15month year old - B I'll call him - by our bed. We look at him often and talk about what life might be like with him, and I feel who knows what the future holds. I am becoming aware of this stage of the process throwing up a lot more than any other part has done so far - now it's all becoming real, we're confronting new and different parts of ourselves, our needs, our dreams. And, I now see, parts of us that aren't 'perfect', parts of us that don't just say 'yes, we'll definitely take that child because they need a home'. That frightens me, but also makes a kind of sense. Anyone who has been through infertility will know how ludicrous it feels to be offered a child, any child, and have to think twice. Sometimes I think we're being ridiculous, petty, selfish. Other times I think I want this to be right for all of us.

Our social worker is coming on Friday to talk through things further with us, and show us some of the profiles of the many children under one they have on their books. If B doesn't come to live us, she assures us that there are other potential adopters who they're looking at as matches for him, which helps. I don't have to beat myself every night with the thought that if we don't adopt him, he'll spend his life in care, though that is the truth for something like 1 in 4 children currently in care. What a strange rollercoaster this part is. I'm tightening up my seatbelt a bit these last few days, taking a few very very deep breaths. We'll get there.

Guilty

Oh shit. Just had to hide in the loo to have a cry. I'm not a crying kind of person really. But I suddenly feel so gut-wrenchingly, sick-makingly, horribly, hatefully guilty about my ambivalent feelings. What a terrible process this 'choosing' is, I'd never really considered that it might be like this. I thought it would all happen perfectly, that the right child would just be there, like that. And maybe this little boy is the right child, and I'll have it on my conscience for the rest of our life together that I initially felt ambivalent. R came home and was delighted and happy, and I just felt such a gloom merchant expressing my concerns, which is why I slipped away for a cry.

Because I wasn't really expecting to be like this, to be the one who researched on the computer and worried about health issues, who got the baby books out and mourned for the things we might miss adopting an older child, who just generally didn't leap up and shout from the rooftops how excited I was. The thing is, everyone else is excited and keeps asking us how we feel and I keep saying 'excited' because I was and am, but now I also just feel horrible and nasty and guilty. Who knew it would be this complicated? Who knew that after all these years of wanting so desperately to be a mother, of wanting it with every cell of my being, I would get so muddled at this stage. I don't want to have to 'choose' my child.

Our child?

A mixed bag of feelings today. Our social worker and her colleague came over to do my 'Adult Attachment Interview' - basically a set of questions which assesses how I 'attach' to other people based on my early experiences. I had a sense I was being sacharrine sweet, but there really was nothing bad I could say about my early years. I was lucky enough to be born into a loving family and felt fully supported and loved by my mum, dad, sister and, later, brother. It's a good thing really, I wouldn't want them to go away thinking 'lord, we've got a right one here'. And R and I learnt early on not to treat any line of questioning as a kind of therapy, because it all comes back and nips you on the bum. Not least because a lot of what we've said in all our meetings has been recorded on a dictaphone and will, as our social worker told us, be repeated back to us verbatim at panel. Later on, in my teens, things got a little more complex but they've already covered that in great detail (trying to come up with reasons why you behaved a certain way or did a certain thing in your teens feels nigh-on impossible - as our friend going through the same process said, does 'I was young and stupid' count?).

The real news is that our social worker brought a photo and some information about the little boy they have in mind for us. It's amazing that it's suddenly real. I looked at his face and was surprised that I didn't immediately go 'that's my son', but I suppose I shouldn't have expected that. I just keep picking up the picture - and now I have it beside me at the computer - and saying 'hello', trying to get a feel for him. My heart is gradually coming round to the fact he might be our little boy. It's an old photo, he's about 15 months now, and he's smiling, cheeky chappy. There's signs of foetal alcohol syndrome, which we knew about, although so far he's developing well and the paedetrician is pleased with his progress. I guess I expected to know instantly or something. But I've read elsewhere that it's a slow burn, a slow learn and growth, this way of becoming parents. R is on his way home now and I can't wait to share it all with him, to sit here and talk about how it all feels. Here he is now...

Excited and suddenly nervous

Our social worker was talking to us about the different ages of kids we might like to adopt. For a long time we said we didn't mind, we just wanted kids, but they urged us to narrow it down, so now we've said under 2. She was talking to us yesterday about a one year old she had in mind. My heart skipped a beat. Suddenly things seem real, tangible. I went for a walk with the dog and ended up talking to our future child (the couple coming the other way on the footpath looked at me like I had lost my marbles), imagining what it would be like to be with them. So close...they already exist. Then, last night, I suddenly felt nervous. R is away in France and I'm here alone this week. The pure isolation and solitude of the place naturally lends itself to musing. And muse I did.

I realised I know nothing about what one year old children are like. Yes, we have lots of godchildren, I've been there the whole time as my nieces have grown up, and I've watched my friends' children grow from babies to teens...and yet, call me a dunce but it just dawned on me last night that I'm not really sure what one year olds can do...can they walk? Talk? I even found myself late-night Googling what a one year old looks like. It seems I've spent so much of the last eight years looking after pregnant women and their tiny newborns, I hadn't really given much thought to post 12 months. And here I am about to become (possibly) a mother to one. And, having found out the kind of things a child that age might be doing, it also dawned on me that we won't hear our child's first word, or see them start to crawl or even begin to totter about. I felt like a fool that I hadn't even really properly thought about that. I mean, I'd thought about that, but not quite let it slip under my skin, if you know what I mean...

My sister, always one to calm my nerves and uplift me, sent me off from hers today with a pile of baby books up to toddler and aged three. I'd scanned my bookshelves last night and found about 50 books on natural pregnancy and birth, but none on child development. Yesterday I felt a bit wobbly. I feel calmer today. R is back tomorrow and we will start reading up on what it's like to parent a one or two year old.

It's good, it's exciting. it's becoming real. I knitted a pair of booties in blue wool yesterday. I might knit some in pink tomorrow.

Adoption panel date booked for the summer

Suddenly seized with an overpowering urge to BLOG! Now that's a new one. I've spent the day 'writing' (read 'procrastinating') and trying to cajole myself into switching off the pesky internet. It wastes more of my time than I can say. Today I have been researching Edwardian living for a novel I'm working on, so it has actually proved useful. No, seriously, watching someone recreate an Edwardian hair-do on Youtube is research. R is in France with work so I am home alone with the kitties and the dog and just about to jump into bed with a big pile of books.

I just wanted to update where we're at with the adoption. We have the most incredible team, and they have whistled us - in a most light-hearted and joyful way - through the process. Our social worker is fun and kind, and the three of us are often in fits of giggles about one thing or another. This was a surprise - all the literature prepared us for some painful knuckling down with the sense that it-would-be-worth-it-in-the-end. But our experience hasn't been like that. Okay, it wasn't always easy to rehash our pasts and pick apart the reasons we behaved certain ways, and both of us found the medical checks intrusive but that's because neither of us have been to a doctor in nearly a decade and felt pretty poked around and patronised (I was told I had a heart murmur - three months of stress later, after a meeting with a very kind cardiologist, I'm told there was a mistake and I'm actually A.O.K. That was after they got my notes mixed up with someone who was on serious prescription drugs. It wasn't the best part of the process.).

But the adoption team themselves have been helpful and interested and kind, and just generally very keen for us to become parents. After much deliberation (we still haven't officially decided) we're thinking of adopting just one child, rather than siblings. Our social worker has some children in mind, and as soon as we come out of panel she will give us their paperwork. That's in July. So we could be mama and papa by autumn time, or maybe even earlier. This gives my whole life a certain dream-like quality. It's like being pregnant without the actual pregnancy, without any idea when the due date will be, what age our child will be (under 2 though).... If I were pregnant, I would be winding things up at work by summer time, but we're working right up until the wire because we don't actually know where the wire is! It's extraordinary and strange and sometimes I wake up and think it's all a dream. The idea that by some miraculous intervention, after all this time, I will hold a child in my arms and say 'Mummy loves you' just strikes me as truly remarkable and not quite, well, real...

Here's something I read the other day that made my heart soar. I felt it was somehow written for R and I. My sister wrote this out in her best script for my mum and I remember it in our childhood kitchen. It's from Kahlil Gibran's 'The Prophet' - On Children:

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.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might

that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

so He loves also the bow that is stable.