Perhaps it’s the re-emergence of X- and Y- that’s making me question things a little more than usual. Out at a restaurant last night S- and two girls of around 4 and 5 years had a riot, running around a table, shrieking and laughing and hugging each other while we waited for our banoffee pie.
Was it my imagination or could I see the question in the girls’ parents’ eyes? Were they looking at S- and comparing her big blue eyes and light features with my own green eyes and G-’s brown hair?
To be different in some way is to feel exposed, at least sometimes. It’s how you deal with it that’s important. When S- evaded the excited 5-year-old’s grip and hightailed it for the open front door, I was up and out of my seat and legging it after her as quick as any biological dad.
I am her dad, and G- is her mother. This may sound obvious but sometimes obvious facts need repeating.
An article in a recent issue of Eve magazine explained how a mum by adoption did not and could not love her child for a year after bringing her home. It’s a decent, honest article – though it rather skips over the difficulties of the adoption process and the emotional problems that can occur soon after you adopt a child. I guess it was commissioned to tie in with the recent mini-controversy over claims that adoptive and biological parents love their children differently.
Reading between the lines of the article it seems to me that the woman in question did love her new child, but she couldn’t feel the bond. The trauma of IVF and the loss of fertility instill a certain numbness – at least, that’s my perspective. And there’s a natural tendency to protect yourself against being hurt.
It takes some time for an attachment to become secure. It took the best part of a year before S- was completely secure with G- and I, and therefore I guess G- and I with S-. During that time some things that social workers suggested might take some getting used to happened, and some didn’t. For a while I found myself worrying away at the feeling that S-’s smell was wierd, among other slightly incongruent .. not exactly events but ‘happenings’.
This doesn’t mean that we didn’t love S-. We loved her more than anything – we still love her more than anything. It’s just that the bond between us was formed slightly differently than the attachment that usually occurs between biological parents and their children.
Whatever that means. All I can say is we have never tried to protect ourselves from loving S-.
So anyway – getting back to the here and now – X- and Y- are on the scene again and seem to have a degree of willingness to engage with us. We’ve arranged to meet with them in early July. G- and I are both apprehensive about this – of course we are. But we’re not doing it for ourselves. (We’re certainly not doing it for X- and Y-.) We doing it for S-: in the long term so that we can tell her a little about the man and woman who conceived her, and in the short term so we can decide whether we think S- should meet them.
That’s the most important thing. Forget the fact that the social workers are telling us that we should meet with X- and Y-. Forget the fact that S-’s adoption order suggests that we should consider contact with X- and Y-. We need to look X- and Y- in the eye and think about it and then do what’s best for S-.
Because that’s what parents do.
June 17, 2008 at 11:28 am
I read this a couple of times yesterday but somehow couldn’t find any words to write a comment (not like me, I know!)
I suppose my over-riding feeling was one of sadness. I cannot help feeling that this is “meddling” for politically correct reasons. Maybe it will be good for S to know that you have met her birth parents, maybe there is some mileage in her having contact with them – but I cannot help thinking that it is just unsettling for everyone involved, when really you all need to be getting on with being settled. I find it hard to believe that there will be real benefits for anyone. I would find it very very difficult to handle.
As for the appearance thing, I must say that, having an interest in genetics, I do always look at people’s children and wonder how they inherited this characteristic or that. But I doubt that most people do. I know many children who look very unlike their parents. One of my own sons is a real throw back to a great aunt of mine and looks nothing like either myself or Al – he is almost Mediterranean looking.
There were a couple of things I thought about the way you wrote that post – which was short but powerful. The first was the use of “x and y” as the names for the birth parents makes them seem (to me) very unreal, sort of scientific abstract figures. Maybe that is why I find it hard to believe that there is any value in them reappearing on the scene – because they don’t seem human, just the mechnanics behind why S is here at all. The other was that you called yourself “dad” but referred to G as S’s “mother” rather than “mum”. I do wonder if it is easier somehow for men to form a quicker bond with a non-biological child, than it is for a woman but that when the bond is formed between the mother and the non-biological child it is actually stronger. But I don’t know – I am probably talking out of my bottom!!
This was a piece that left me feeling very thoughtful. Actually most of your pieces do that.