The Love

There’s a wonderful piece of advice about adoption floating around on the internet. I don’t think it’s something that is discussed enough by the professionals during adoption prep – it certainly seems to be a bit of a secret. The motto is this – and I am aware it is borrowed from elsewhere – Fake it til you make it. Most of us are not blessed with love at first sight, and without the hormone rush associated with birth, the genetic connection, the 9 months of fantasy about a particular little person, you’re not necessarily going to fall in love with your adopted little one straight away.

For us, it was almost necessary that we didn’t – we were “only” fostering her to start with anyway, so you’re told you need to hold back, just in case. Because Baby Side Mullet was so young we didn’t worry about calling each other “mummy” in front of her, but maybe if she was older we would have had to hold back on that too, to really make the distance clear. I think that would have been really hard.

I’m not really someone who holds back their emotions. I cry a lot. I love a lot, and the idea of keeping a bit of love in reserve wasn’t something I could really imagine. Having said that, as much as I wanted to let it all loose from the moment we met baby, it wasn’t really like that. My brain kept some shutters down all of its own accord. At every stage there was something that could go wrong and take her back from us, and as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t let go of the fear. Even now, when we are days away from applying for the adoption order, I’m pretty sure there’s one more shutter still down. Just in case.

The shutters come up at unpredictable times. I think I said before – after the placement order, there was no rush of emotion, more a slow burn. In the early days me and the wife would compare notes in the evening and try to be brutally honest with each other. How close to total love are you? I’m a 7/10. I’m a 9. The numbers have ticked upwards at strange times. Just walking down the corridor to sit her in her high chair, it’s like a hand reaches down from the sky and touches you, and suddenly you have to gulp back a big bit of love that might smother you. And after that it doesn’t go away. I know that lots of people have the feeling in the early days of being an “unpaid babysitter” and I can totally empathise! Especially when you don’t know all the tips and tricks and things that make your baby tick yet. Some of the early nights I cried and cried because I knew the foster carer could have settled her much more easily than I could at that stage. But you just have to put your big girl pants on and keep moving forwards. At first, you feel affection, you feel a compassion, you feel an obligation to look after and protect this little person. And it’s important not to feel guilty for not being totally in love with them from day one. You don’t even know them yet! As someone wise on mumsnet said, the kill-a-bear love comes later. And it really does come. You don’t have to work on it or worry about it. I can’t wait to see how I feel this time next year. I can’t imagine how amazing it will be once we have the adoption order in our sweaty hands.

 

*disclaimer – all these feelings are mine and opinions are mine and mumsnet’s! your experience may and probably will be different. please write about it.

The Timeline

One of the things I could never get enough of pre-approval was other people’s experience of the adoption timeline. Of course, they are all different, and subject to the whims of the authorities (damn it, 5 month DBS check!) but it does help to see that people come out the other end of the process at some point.

In the spirit of joining in, here’s ours.

August 2014 – Having been together a few years and just been married, our talk about children starts to crystallise. We embark on a series of debates over what the path we will choose should be.

January 2015 – We settle on adoption, quite firmly. I was in the bath when wife walked in and said she was sure, was I?

March 2015 – I make a call to a VA* that I have rather arbitrarily decided is the one for us. A dragon lady answers and has a fit about how many stairs are in our house. Of all the things to focus on, she’s really fixed on the three flights of stairs and how they may not be compatible with children. Ever.

Later March 2015 – I go bonkers researching other people’s experiences, buy all the books, realise that even if they’re only 3 years old they are hopelessly out of date (Re. B & Re. BS was very fresh and the number of children coming up for adoption had plummeted). Spend a lot of time on forums online and suddenly have an epiphany that an LA* would be a much better bet for us. Ring one about an hour away who seem to have things a lot more together than our most local council. Repeatedly check whether my 31 stairs will be an issue. They will not.

April 2015 – We attend an information evening in a dingy room in a scary part of town. Despite this, there is a quiver of excitement in the air and we request an initial home visit from a social worker.

May 2015 – Initial visit. Lots of paperwork. It’s like being in school again. I love it. The wife lets me do all of it. She seems pleased about it. I imagine if we had been at school together she would have copied my homework.

June 2015 – Attend the one day initial training course. It’s quite boring as I have already studied the shit out of this phase. But it’s nice to see some other people at the same stage as us – and to realise that even though we are “the lesbians” we are definitely not the weirdest people in the room.

July 2015 ish – Start stage two of the approval process; the “home study” part. It’s not official Stage two because our DBS checks, submitted early April, are still not back, but our social worker is aware she has a time limit – not just because of the legal guidelines, but because she’s pregnant and off on leave from the end of October! – so she is determined to get all the work done we can.

September 2015 – Attend the three day training course. Feels like a million years since the last one, but this one has a lot more going on. There are only five couples there though and it can feel quite sparse at times when we are playing the inevitable team games. Our DBS checks came through shortly after this – there was a query about whether we would be allowed to attend without them, but it seems there’s no hard and fast rule. Anyway, we were all clear!

November 2015 – Approval panel and saying goodbye to our social worker! She handed over to another SW who had just arrived back from maternity leave. All these babies..! We respected and trusted both SW though so actually it didn’t feel scary. New SW made an immediate effort to get to know us and what we were looking for, and we never felt abandoned.

Dec 2015 – Silence

Jan 2016 – Silence

Feb 2016 – Silence

March 2016 – Silence. We went on holiday, to try and tempt fate. No luck.

April 2016 – Silence

May 2016 – Silence. Another mini holiday. It rained.

June 2016 – I cave and summon our SW to visit us. We think it must be us. We think we must have been rejected a million times by children’s SWs. She smiles a smile that says she’s done this a million times before, and tells us that there really is just nothing going on. They have a grand total of five children looking for homes and all of them are outside our criteria. We sigh and smile and decide to knuckle down for another six months.

Late June 2016 – We’ve knuckled down for all of two weeks when we get an EMAIL about a potential FtA match. An EMAIL! If I wasn’t so obsessive about checking them it could have sat there for ages! We have a read of it (one A4 page, with a total of 3 lines dedicated to Baby Side-Mullet, the rest concerning her birth parents), and decide that there’s not one reason to say no.

Very Early July 2016 – Intros are scheduled, my boss gets a bit of a shock (not that much, I did warn him, but he’d started to think it was never going to happen) and we meet baby for the first time as we meet the foster carer to discuss her schedule and what we will need to buy. Then we wait a week, meet baby again, and bring her home four days later.

August 2016 – Court hearing for placement order goes sour. Terror.

September 2016 – Court hearing part two goes without a hitch. Terror was for nothing.

October 2016 – Here we are, having just been given a date for the placement to become an adoptive one. It’s very soon.

Nov 2016  – Estimated date of application for adoption order. Woohoo!

 

 

*LA = Local Authority, so your local council, or a neighbouring one. Often have very little advertising and terribly overworked staff, but are on the frontline of children’s social care and are the ones who “have” the children to be placed for adoption.

VA = voluntary agency, like Barnados. Often large, well run, shiny, BUT they tend to place the children the LA have been unable to place.

The Matching Panel

Yesterday was our matching panel- finally! I’d read a lot about what happens at panel, and gobbled up other people’s stories about what questions they were asked, and how nervous they were.. But again, for us, like the placement order, it was almost anti climactic. (Is that a word?) We have baby side-mullet living with us already. We are used to her presence and everything revolves around her. Everything you’re taught, everything you read on mumsnet, tells you that attachment is king, and that funneling is the way to go. Our own experience and our gut tells us the same. So baby hasn’t been left alone with anyone yet, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. My dad has taken her for a walk in her buggy once or twice, but always from a base where we are, and within easy dashing distance of us. He’s the only person she won’t weep at the sight of (that’s another story).
So the obvious answer for an important meeting like this, where we are both obliged to attend, is to bring babysitting grandad with us and have him sit outside the room with the baby.
I am prepared for the general populice to raise their eyebrows at this kind of “coddling”. I am prepared for my family to tentatively suggest we might be overprotective and that we could leave her at my parents’ house for the few hours we would be at panel, an hour’s drive away. What I was not prepared for was our social workers being so confused about us bringing her with us. They had the good sense not to comment directly but you could feel the unspoken surprise. Guys. You’re the ones who programme us toward attachment parenting, who ask us to do the research. We’re the ones with the clingy baby that we are besotted with. Do the maths.
Once we were in the inner sanctum at the LA offices, it was fine, baby had her lunch and everyone was charmed by her. Panel even asked to see her, after they had approved us, which was nice. I suppose it really is, as one of them said, the “cream” of the job. This is the good part. There must be so many bad parts, I suppose it’s nice to physically see a happy squidgy baby that you’ve played a part in giving a home.
Panel itself was not frightening. Subconsciously we knew we had leverage. We know this baby better than anyone else, and we know she’s in the best place. She doesn’t need to move again and there was no reason for them to say no. What did happen, though, was that panel asked us questions that they actually WANTED to know the answers to. It felt like a proper conversation, not a perfunctory interview. They haven’t done many FtA placements before – maybe 2, I think? – and it had been very evident to us throughout. They wanted to know how to make it better, what they had missed, what we felt had been inconvenient or incorrect. Before baby side mullet, I would have been quite polite. This time, I didn’t hold back. Neither did the wife – although she was never inclined to polite demurral anyway. We really want to help them help other people who are going to go through this. It doesn’t have to be all arse-about-tit. They could rearrange their contact system, their medical appointment system, and still operate within the legal guidelines. They got quite excited about us volunteering information about our experience – and we are supposed to be speaking at a FtA event for them soon. It’s already been cancelled once due to lack of interest which I find terrible. Even with the messy bits, this is absolutely the best thing for the child, and from a selfish point of view, for us too. If we’d gone through the normal system, we wouldn’t even have met baby yet! And she’s what it’s all about.