The long wait...

Yesterday was a long day. Our SW had called on Friday night about a potential match, and she assured us she would be in touch further to arrange a meeting this week after the longest bank holiday ever! By yesterday morning we were desperate to hear more, trying, and failing, to keep a lid on our excitement. Luckily we had a fashion shoot here at the cottage, with a team of New Yorkers descending with a gold mercedes and a mind-boggling collection of clothes and shoes (have an amusing picture of the dog asleep on a Louis Vuitton clutch surrounded by Jimmy Choos), so that kept us distracted. Nevertheless, between feeding fourteen hungry fashion folks and helping them set up in the rain, we kept the phone near. When the shoot had packed up and gone, it was getting dark. 8pm and still no word from our SW. R had left a message for her, and I'd sent a couple of texts earlier in the day. She'd said she was in a meeting and would call us later. We'd seen her at a local procession over the jubilee weekend and were reminded that for her, we are work, but for us, she holds the key to our future. What a strange balance we have to strike! So I didn't ask her any questions when we bumped in to her as I thought it was important that she has time-off for her family etc.

At 9.30pm we got a text apologising for not being in touch and assuring us she'd call tomorrow. I dropped a couple of stitches in my knitting (making a cardigan for our little one) because I was trying to knit by candlelight and was feeling on tenterhooks! This morning she called. She hasn't been able to get hold of the child's SW yet, so no more news than that she's given us already. She is going to try again today. So again, we are waiting by the phone for news, trying to get a handle on the excitement. No fashion shoot to distract today either! We don't know at the moment if other couples are interested or in line, so we could be getting our hopes up unneccessarily. We're veering between a ridiculously whoop-whoop kind of delight and a nervous kind of fear.

She told us his birth date today and it was a weird thing. In my family we have a long lineage of palendromic birthdays e.g. the fifth day of the fifth month. My grandmother, mother and I all have them. R and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary of meeting on 10/10/10. Our wedding day was 5/5 and two of my bridesmaids have palendromic birthdays. So, when I discovered he too had a palendromic birthday, the same as my late grandmother's, my heart gave a little flutter. I always light a candle on this day to celebrate my grandmother's special day, so unknowingly I was welcoming in a new life too last year. Trying not to be too superstitious about it, but hey, it still feels magic.

News

News, my dears, news. Spoke to our lovely SW today and she revealed that she has a child in mind for us. A little boy, under one. Some other info too and we were so excited we didn't know what to with ourselves. Thinking back to what happened last time, and how attached we got to a name, before we came to realise that we weren't the right family for each other, we tried to keep our excitement in check. But I was beside myself and couldn't think of anything else. So I got my trusty Goddess cards out and pitched a question as I shuffled the cards. 'I'm so excited I don't know what to do with myself, but I'm aware of what happened last time and....I guess I just want some kind of sign, some idea what to do next.'

And the card I pulled? Isis, Goddess of Mothering.
The words? 'Isis comes in to your life to show you it is time for mothering.'
I cried. A lot, leaving drippy stains all down my dress.
SW coming next week to talk further.
Truly, this could be our son.

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.