Over hill and dale...

Last week I felt frustrated and low. This week, largely thanks to me reaching out and telling a few folks how I was feeling, I feel more positive and calm. In terms of the process, R and I still cannot make a sense of it. When our SW tried to challenge it, she was told to get back in her place and that LO's social workers and the managers knew what they were doing and 'wanted to make this match work and needed to have time to do that'. (So do we, foolish people! And, surely, the best way to do that is for our son to get to know his parents as soon as possible, ending destructive contact sessions and beginning our lifelong bonding process???? But no, we must wait another few months whilst they 'look at the paperwork'.) But I came to a realisation that I can either rail against the system, feel angry and powerless and sad at all the precious weeks and months we're missing out on, or I can relax and settle back and know that soon we will be a family. 

A friend who has also been through the adoption process sent me a poem. It made me cry, a good healing and ultimately joyful cry, and reconnected me with the vital truth: that we are mothers long before we are able to hold our child physically and that energetically LO is already our son. The poem reminded me of that so eloquently and tenderly. We look at photos of him constantly and laugh aloud at some of his comic little expressions...there is so much joy in the midst of all the bureaucracy, so much laughter, connection, love - overflowing love, and light. Our seaside home is the perfect place to experience all these things - we wake to the sea, the tides, the clouds, the birds laughing and playing on the wind, the eternal cleansing and changing of nature, truly the most healing and restorative way to be in the world. Sea swims wash away the aggravation, windswept walks blow away the 'mind-fussing', clean, fresh invigorating sea air fills us with optimism and warm sun fills us with light. What a wonderful place for LO to arrive into... We are truly blessed! There is a lifetime of 'moments' ahead of us as a family, some wondrous, some challenging, but we have surely had the very best start simply because of this place, this dream-like place.

So I've been on lots of walks this week, through sleepy villages, along the seafront, alongside rivers, through the newly-harvested fields, getting deliciously lost in a forest as the sun went down. We're planning a little wild camping on the edge of the same forest in a few weeks time. R got me some new walking shoes from a charity shop and I tested them out yesterday on a long hike with friends - brilliant! My feet were getting a little blistered in my old running shoes but these are more comfortable and roomier, and mean I will get as much walking in as I can before LO comes. Wild flowers in abundance, sheep and cows grazing, skylarks on the wing, the smell of woodland and warm grass... my sister bought us a fantastic baby carrier - basically a large rucksack with waist support but very ergonomic and beautifully made - so we can take LO out on our walks. I spent a large portion of my baby and toddler-hood on my dad's back exploring the countryside so am excited to share the same delights with LO.

And my best friend had her baby ten days early. I went to visit them with a feeling of love practically exploding my heart all the way on the train! He is breath-takingly perfect, delicate and wise-looking. He has his dad's nose, his mum's elfin facial structure and ears, and thick straight black hair - so much of it! I felt in awe, that wonderful feeling of sheer surprise, as if I had slipped through a portal into Alice's Wonderland, to a place more radiant, colourful, alive, incredible and magical than the humdrum day-to-day. It stayed with me all evening, after I'd left the sleepy new family and was travelling back on the train, buzzing lightly in my chest. Soon, it will be me and R, holding our little one, gazing at him with a feeling of awe and wonder.

Yes, I'm ready for motherhood

Yesterday, after talking about where we were at with the adoption, a friend turned to me and said: 'So you could be a mother in a few months?' to which I replied, yes, that looks like the way things are going. And then he asked me a question that floored me:

'And are you really ready, I mean, ready to be a mother?'

I bluffed my answer, as I always do when put on the spot, mumbling something about workshops and reading and all the cerebral stuff that isn't really parenting at all. And then I went away and thought about it....for a long time.

There's a particularly pernicious assumption that pregnancy is the only initiation to parenthood, that by growing a child within you, you gain access to a secret world of motherhood that outsiders cannot enter. I would have to say I think this is a fallacy. Over the years of supporting pregnant women, I have urged many, many clients to consider more than what colour they are going to paint the nursery or whether their new Bugaboo will fit up the stairs. I have written articles on the spiritual transitions we make in our lives, parenthood being one of the biggest, and how we need time to reflect and rituals that validate these. I have written about keeping a journal, spending time in nature connecting with the elements, creating rituals that both challenge and expand our understanding and consciousness. Over the years, I have been saddened that we live in such a capitalist culture we've lost sight of the sacred, the journeys and paths we forge through life, the challenges we overcome, and the way everything can be magic if we choose to make it so. In fact, one of the reasons I became so jaded in my work with pregnant women was because I just got tired of hearing about the fact the extension wouldn't be finished on the house in time, the nursery a couple wanted to send their unborn child to was already getting booked up, they had to buy a new car/kitchen/bigger pair of jeans...

Conversation with each new couple seemed to be increasingly devoid of the real questions of parenting: will my child be happy? how can I support their spiritual and emotional growth? what challenges will having a child put on our relationship and how can I prepare for that? what are the best foods I can feed my child? what steps can I take to ensure that I get the support I need? who will I want to be a mentor for my child? what values do I want my child to grow up with? how can I make time to adjust to the enormous changes new parenthood brings? what will be the effect on my lifestyle/friendships/daily activities and am I ready to make those changes? will my heart explode with this new capacity for love? will society support me in my new life as a parent? or will I find myself marginalised, suddenly less important than I was as a worker bee? who am I and what kind of a parent will I be?

Now, I could be wrong, but most people I know who come to adoption do so after trying for their own biological children. (This assumption was, however, challenged in our adoption workshops when 4 of the 8 couples already had birth children and wanted to adopt for altruistic reasons, but on the whole, I think this situation is rarer than the former.) With any number of medical interventions now being touted as a miraculous way of cheating nature - from IVF to surrogacy - these years of fertility treatment can stretch endlessly. During this time, couples are faced with some of the biggest challenges of their lives. Unable to fulfil their most basic, primal need - to procreate - they battle with an increasing sense of their own failure. This either brings couples together or it pushes them apart. Those that make it through this first set of lion’s jaws, and come out battered, bruised but still clutching each other’s hands, are ready for the next set.
In between this, there is the endless barrage of (sometime well-meaning but sometimes not) conversations, everywhere from the dinner party to the water cooler:

“When are you two going to hurry up and have children?”
“God, you’re sensible putting it off, things are just so stressful with kids.”
“I guess you’re putting your career first.” (Thanks Daily Mail)
“I know a couple who tried for years and then got pregnant when they went on holiday/relaxed/started the adoption process/gave up work/moved house/took up swimming/ate more nuts…” (you know the bag - delete as appropriate)

Couples that survive this tend to get tougher skins, are more able to laugh at themselves and learn, over time, to let the little things go. They become resilient, amazingly so, and ready to face the next challenge.
Then the adoption process starts, and they are subjected to a level of intrusion no ordinary parent would expect to undergo. Are we suitable parents? Why? In what ways? Doesn’t this, that or the other from our past stand against us? No? Prove it. On and on, the searching, scraping, digging away at our pasts and what has brought us to where we are today. Not for the faint-hearted but certainly something that helps us grow in other ways than just a pregnant belly. How do we parent a child with unique needs, with a chequered past? What might those needs be? What skills will we bring to the table? How do we cope with the fact our child will not be our biological child, but a unique individual with a unique identity?

We explore, we excavate, we reflect, we question. We wonder at the parenting we received. We wonder who we are, why we are the way we are. We dig to the very depths of our souls. And we come out of it with a stronger sense of self. Maybe a little battered and bruised in places but with a better understanding of how to deal with batterings and bruisings.

There are the practical sides of parenting: the feeding, routines, nappy-changes, night-time disturbances and soothing, that most of us will have to learn and make up as we go along, but what parent doesn’t?  There’s no rule book for that stuff and an adoptive parent, like a biological one, will have to rely heavily on instinct.

So, in answer to the question (and I know this is a long answer!), I would say: YES. A resounding YES. I would even go so far as to say that as an adoptive mother, I am even better equipped to parent than my biological neighbour.

For all adoptive parents out there, don’t forget that you have the skills, the knowledge, the intuition and the incredible capacity for love that are requisites for parenting, however convoluted your journey is to get there.
Thank you for reading. Now I can step down off my soap-box ;)

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.

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.

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.

We had our first adoption workshops last week, on Monday and Tuesday. Alongside eight other couples, we learnt about the kind of kids that need adopting, listened to some shocking case studies and found out ways in which we can parent children who have been through more in their short time here than most of us will go through in a lifetime. It was certainly food for thought.

Interestingly, half the couples already had children and two of those had chosen adoption for truly altruistic reasons. The rest of us had tried, and failed, to make biological families and were trying our luck with a different approach. There were some interesting people there - some I know will remain firm friends as our children grow, and some I felt we were singing from different parenting songsheets. My parenting choices and interest has always been in attachment parenting and I have reams of literature on the subject and have written about it for years. It's a whole new thing thinking about the different challenges adopted children face - the level of loss and trauma they have experienced - and how to parent them with love and consciousness through that. Sometimes it feels like it'll be a superhuman achievement and sometimes I think that staying present, staying aware and loving will guide us all along. A social worker said somewhere near the beginning of our process 'choose your battles wisely' and it seems to ring so true. When I imagine the scenarios we might be faced with as parents, I keep thinking of not sweating the small stuff and finding ways for our future kids to express the big stuff.

Both R and I had been slightly dreading the workshops. We'd been told that they would be hard work and harrowing, and whilst they certainly didn't hold back any punches in terms of the realities of these children's lives, both days left us feeling inspired and uplifted. It further cemented that this is something we want to do, even need to do. We've discussed several times what would happen if I got pregnant suddenly now. We'd be overjoyed, yes, but part of me feels we've embarked on this for a reason. Another part of me already feels like I'd be letting down a child whose life we have the opportunity to change. I keep thinking of 'parenting the child who hurts' as they call it, and my heart bursts with love...I feel overwhelmed with how much I want to hold this child who might already be in existance somewhere. It's almost impossible to explain, so I'll leave it at that.

It seems it might all happen much sooner than the doom merchants have lead us to believe (everyone, from co-workers to friends - even if they know nothing about adoption whatsoever - has felt the need to say to us 'well, it'll be a long, hard haul. It'll take ages' when we've told them of our adoption plan). The social worker believes we might go to panel by the summer holidays. This is crazily, almost unbelievably exciting...we might be parents at Christmas.

Yesterday, I learnt that one of my closest friends is pregnant, a complete surprise. I was bowled over when I read her email (she's overseas at the moment), crying tears of joy and shock and delight. She will be the best mother in the world, I genuinely don't know anyone who operates so fully from the heart. I felt almost as if I was pregnant, that's how close we are, and I know we will share the journey together. After I'd emailed her my happy response, I had some time to reflect last night. Will it be strange her going through pregnancy and me going through home study simultaneously? Will I find it difficult to cope emotionally? I'd offered my support and love to her wholeheartedly - and at the time I truly felt I was able to give that - but last night I retreated back into my snail shell a little and wondered about how it might all feel. Well, I guess we will find out! And there's no escaping the reality of it, so I will have to take great care to listen to my heart and allow myself time out if it becomes too much. Noone deserves the joy of parenthood more than my friend does, and there's a joy in the fact that we'll be parenting alongside one another - different situations, but ultimately the same goal, to mother with love and conscience.