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.

Our gurgling, smiling, laughing boy

Wow wow wow, what a week! Yesterday we had my niece's 'Coming of Age' 13th birthday celebration - all her family gathered in her garden in a circle to give her their wishes for the future and to guide her under a human arch and through a beautiful arbour her dad had made - the first steps to womanhood. This was incredibly emotional, I can still remember lying my head on my sister's bump 13 years ago and talking to my niece in utero. Now she is this incredibly funny, bright, witty, wise and articulate beauty, and she literally makes my heart surge with love. What an honour it is to witness children growing up. Yesterday felt special because my sister took time to create a ceremony to mark this transition and it gave all of us the chance to stop and reflect and honour this beautiful being.

Today, we met our little boy's social worker for the first time. We'd got up at six am to blitz the house (it was a crazy mess as we'd both made gifts for my niece - R a table and a candleholder and me some knitted wrist warmers and an embroidered shawl - and there was literally stuff EVERYWHERE!) and she arrived with our SW at 9am. She was warm and friendly from the off, and we liked her immediately. We further warmed to her when she made a big fuss of our dog. She seemed to 'get' us, our lifestyle choices, why we have created such a simple life so we can pursue our creative interests. She also understood our choices about living in nature and getting outside every day, and not having TV or other distractions to our time together. We have frequently met with questioning and incredulity about our lifestyle, and it felt so affirming for someone to just understand us in this really compassionate way without us having to explain ourselves 100 times. She understood that we chose this way of life because of how we wanted to bring up our children, and how important it was to us that they had a really hands-on, playful, nurturing, outdoorsy, warm kind of childhood with both of us sharing parenting and plenty of time for reading by the fire, cooking together, growing veg together, going on walks, playing endless games, rockpooling, camping...all the fun things we share with our nieces and have envisaged for our own children. So - WOOO HOOOO - she understands us! Which made us feel buzzy and happy.

Then we watched a video of the little guy. I can't really explain what this felt like. Those of you who've been there will know the enormous and overwhelming rush of love, the tears, the laughter, the urge to reach into the computer screen and just touch - to draw your future child to you. It's an extraordinary experience, like being Tiny Tim and looking in at cosy windows, but with the knowledge that soon this will be the face you wake up to, this will be the gurgling laughter that will light up your lives, this will be the little body you dress and hold close, this little person will grow up with you as mum and dad. I'm still emotional when I think about it. Just seeing him laugh when he's tickled, and playing thoughtfully with his toys and gazing at the camera and pulling at his toes - it made it all so amazingly, mind-blowingly real. His SW let us watch the video several times as she needed to take it away after, but we will get a copy hopefully this week. I can tell we will watch it permanently!

Off to panel on Wednesday...then meeting his foster carers on Friday.

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.