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About four months after she came home to us, S- suddenly got very ill. She ended up in the hospital with a chest infection so bad that, at one point, she stopped breathing.

We thought we knew her quite well by then – after all, we’d been with her day and night for a third of a year. But we didn’t, not really.

She was so strong. Strong and tiny, and angry. I looked at her restless, fighting body, saw all the rage and distress and the fear she was going through, and mixed in with my own fear and helplessness was what I can only think of now as a profound sense of respect for her.

When it got really bad I sat next to her and held her hand like they do in the movies. They were putting a drip into her foot and she was exhausted. Exhausted and at the end of her tether. She had her head turned towards me and she was looking at me. Her eyes were extraordinarily big and blue. I wiped away my own tears and saw the question framed in the big, limpid pools of her eyes: can I trust you?

She was only a year and 1 month old at this point and she had been fighting a battle not only in this alien environment for the last couple of days but in the alien environment we’d taken her to for the last 6 months. Now she was asking me the biggest, most serious thing.

Can I trust you?

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I just sat and held her hand and looked into her eyes.

You can get it if you really want

There are three pieces of advice I would pass on to anyone who’s working through the process of adoption.

I’m talking here specifically about all the stuff you have to do, to complete, to write, to listen to and say yes to so that you can be approved – not the actual bit you’re presumably interested in: being matched with a child and bringing her/him home.

It is good, practical advice I’m passing on [though I say it myself]. But just one thing to note: G- and I- were approved by a local authority and it may be different in some detail for those going through a private agency. However, I’d be surprised if it differed in essentials.

1. Preparatory groups.This is the bit after your application is accepted and before you are approved to be an adopter. G- and I- attended a half-day training session on trauma and loss, and then four days’ worth on adoption practicalities. Bits of it were interesting. Other bits less so. Anyhow, the main thing is you are being watched. Whatever the social workers say to the contrary, they are assessing you, and it pays to be the school swot. Ask lots of questions. Bone up on the theory, the books, so you can impress them with your knowledge. Be keen. Make yourself noticed.
2. Home study. This bit comes after the prepatory groups and is supposed to make you ready for the approval panel. It can last anywhere from 6 months onwards, though in the UK you’re supposed to have it completed within 8 months. Expect to find the questions, the comments, the invasion of your privacy difficult. Expect to be embarassed, upset or annoyed at least sometimes. If you find yourself sailing through it may be worth asking yourself why you think that is. If the social worker is being easy on you she/he is not doing you a favour because if the panel isn’t completely satisfied it has the power to defer your application or even reject it completely. Likewise, the report the social worker writes on you at the end of the home study should challenge you or at the very least surprise you in one or more of its findings. That means the social worker has done his/her job and investigated you, thoroughly.
3. Brochure. This is your task at the end of the home study: producing a colourful, child-friendly, attractive and interesting document on you and your home life that your social worker will use, along with his/her report [see above], to try to get you matched with appropriate children. The brochure is actually a difficult thing to put together [much more difficult than you might think: we had 3 attempts at it] but don’t give up on it. Ask to see other people’s brochures and get your social worker/adoption agency person fully involved. Above all, get used to the idea that you have to ‘sell’ yourself. [Don't fool yourself about this: once approved by the adoption panel you become a commodity - or as they put it, a resource - for your agency, and you need to make yourself as valuable as possible.]

So, those are three of my ‘key points’, though I have written elsewhere about the process of adoption. I’d love to hear what other people’s experiences were/havebeen/are like or if there are any other pieces of advice that may be of use to others.

Bridge over troubled waters

There are certain conversations that adoptive parents can find difficult. One such classic: ‘Oh, she’s going to have her mother’s good looks, isn’t she?’

Does that mean we can’t or shouldn’t have these discussions with our children, albeit using different noun phrases and at a slightly different angle? ‘Yes, X-,’ we might find ourselves saying, for example, ‘You’ve got your birth mother’s eyes/hair/nose’ [circle and/or delete as appropriate].

I am, to use the neologism, ‘conflicted’ when it comes to the issue of ‘contact’ between adopted kids and blood relatives. I’m not sure how it works everywhere – somehow I doubt it happens much in international adoption – but in many instances I know of there is an arrangement/agreement to keep all three arms of the adoption ‘triad’ in dialogue: birth parents, adopters, adoptees.

The arrangement can be individualised in any number of ways, depending on the circumstances, but essentially it boils down to either regular letters [one- or two- way], face-to-face meetings, a mixture of both, or none. Some expression of intent for how contact should happen is usually set out as part of the legal orders when the formal adoption takes place.

In theory the arrangement is in the adopted child’s best interest because it keeps the lines of communication open and gives both child and adoptive parent a way into talking about the adoption.

Thus those odd, slightly tangential conversations I referred to earlier can take place more successfully, or at least with more information behind them. The child, and the adopters, will have a much clearer idea about, for example, physical characteristics having met or at least corresponded with [and possibly received pictures] from the biological mother and/or father.

And if in fact child X grows up having stayed in touch with birth mum and/or dad then he or she will gradually form their own opinion of them. It will be a realistic opinion, untainted by magical thinking ['I'm really a princess and one day my mummy the Queen will come to rescue me'] and free of any bias, whether intentional or non-intentional, imparted by the adoptive parents. That’s the theory, anyway.

Contact is a difficult area. It’s one that many potential adopters are put off by, and also an issue that many people in the wider population are reluctant to accept, I suspect partly on moral grounds. ['They've (the birth parents) had their chance: it'll only mess things up to go back to them now.']

However, the logic behind it is sound – if you accept the theory that it is in the child’s interests. To extend the analogy of The Primal Wound, it’s better for the child to keep reopening the wound, letting it heal gradually from the bottom up, rather than allowing it to close over and risking the development of an abscess.

The trouble is that contact so often appears to be more in the birth parents’ interest. Contact stories I’ve come across often end with hyped up/hyperanxious, overloaded children, while the adoptive parent rages that the birth family have broken the terms of the agreement, either by being late, or arriving pissed and/or stoned or subverting children through sneaky gifts and suggestions. At different times many people – some adoptive parents and some interested observers such as family friends – have said that contact simply doesn’t work.

There’s huge potential for cock-up, too. Over at the Adoption UK website there’s a thread on the message board about social services mistakenly sending birth parents’ the addresses of their adopted kids’ new homes. That is most definitely not the kind of stress that a family needs to have in their lives!

Yet contact may prove to be of value eventually, despite all the heartache. What about the child adopted young who doesn’t remember his/her birth parents but grows up with regular contact through birth siblings placed with other families, or in different parts of the country? This type of relationship could be of massive help to a young man or woman trying to work through identity issues, especially if his/her adoptive parents never met biological mum and/or dad.

It is a dilemma, and there are no easy answers. Actually, I’m beginning to think that there are no answers, full stop. Perhaps all you can do is make sure that when your child asks about ‘tummy’ mummy or daddy you can look them in the eye and say you did your best and found out as much about them as you could.

In the meantime, there are other conversations about identity that adoptive parents can also have with their kids. Here are two examples: ‘Aren’t you generous, X- – just like daddy?’. And: ‘Yes, you’re a brilliant cook: you love sharing time in the kitchen with mummy, don’t you?’

The times they are a’changin

Spring is unfolding around us. The woods are full of bluebells and anenomes, and people walk around in jumpers and shirtsleeves.

We went to the little play park in the large village near us, and S- swung on the ‘svings’ and climbed the steps to the slide while another little girl played among the celandines.

S- has no qualms about setting off down even very steep slopes, but she keeps planting her feet. Sometimes she stops halfway down a slide so abruptly I feel she’s about to come pinging off, flying head first through the air towards me.

It’s a good day. As we wander around the village centre we meet four different bloke wheeling pushchairs of children of varying ages. Is it a coincidence [ie is it just that all these dads have all taken the day off work today]? I prefer to think that each one is a stay-at-home dad hero.

Wind of change

We were saddened, G- and I, and perhaps S- too, when we stood at the window and watched M- drive away. Our social worker had just paid us a final visit: it was more in the nature of a social call than a statutory meeting.

Over the last few years M- has been an ever present in our lives. She was both mentor and guide to us in a time of rapid and total change, and a faultless advocate and adviser as we navigated our way through the emotional turmoil and legal rigmarole of S-’s adoption. She as much as anyone has helped us get to grips with being parents, too.

When we first met M- she informed us that she would be many things to us but she wouldn’t be one of our friends.

She was almost wrong.

There’s a part of me that wants to send this link to M-, so that she can see how profoundly G- and I appreciate the support and help she gave us. On reflection I know it would be the wrong thing to do.

I’m enough of an amateur psychologist to know that part of my, our, sadness is that we’ve reached the end of a significant chapter in our life. The fact of M-‘s leaving us has made us realise that we’re the authors of our own lives again. Scary stuff!

I know, too, that this is the beginning of the end of adoptivedad. There won’t be many more posts before I stop writing this blog. My regret about this is real, but tempered with anticipation and relief.

We – G-, S- and I – are out on our own now, about to start a new chapter as a family together.

Old friends

One of my good friends suggested on the telephone last night that his experiences of being the only dad at playgroups were much more positive than those I’ve recounted here. Admittedly those particular child rearing days were a few years ago now, and they took place in London – which I guess you might expect, perhaps wrongly, to be more liberal in its attitudes than the semi-rural area I live in.

But I’m glad he bought it up, partly because I have been re-evaluating things a little bit recently and partly [ok, quite a bit] because it’s good to know that people have been looking at this blog.

I conceded some ground, actually. ‘S’pose it can be a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy,’ I said. ‘If you stand around looking glum because no-one’s talking to you then they’re less likely to come over for a chat.’

I’ve alluded to this circle of gloom a couple of times previously – for eg, here and here.

What I wanted to add is perhaps what I’ve been trying to communicate in these posts all along: that the superficial things – the hello’s and goodbye’s, the weekly meetings in neutral venues, the small shopping trips to the local post office where everybody knows you by sight – generally go fine, give or take the occasional cold shoulder.

It’s moving beyond the superficiality to building relationships which is proving more difficult. The ‘quotidian’ stuff – the lonely afternoons with a tired child, the endless journeys in the car, the constant demands for attention even when she’s at her happiest – is actually what gets you down: it’s in dealing with the humdrum that you most need the ‘deeper’ support of a proper peer group.

A formulaic chat with people at a playgroup or activity is frustrating precisely because that is as far as it can go.

Actually this morning I came to the conclusion that I have been feeling a bit down, although not exactly for the reasons mentioned above.

I’ve talked about selflessness before, and I want to say more in a future post. But I guess I’ve been pining for my own personal space a bit. Like most blokes, I like to have a project on the go, and that’s nigh-on impossible with an active, demanding toddler and a fistful of housework in your life.

The odd thing is that I didn’t know I had the blues. Looking back, it was as though something was worrying away at me below the surface, and I just didn’t realise.

We were sitting talking just after her afternoon nap when the light broke through. S- was encouraging me to sing ‘Baa baa black sheep’ over and over, joining in herself at the beginning of each of the first two lines [not quite getting the timing or the vowel sounds right, but probably a little more in tune than I was]. We were having fun: I was absorbed in the moment, forgetting to worry about the jobs that needed doing, the little goals I’d set myself for the day.

‘Ahh, so this is what I’ve been missing,’ I suddenly thought.

Message in a bottle

So I’m 1, 2, 3, 4, 4-and-a-half months in and counting as a stay-at-home dad [though G- and I have been parents by adoption for almost a year now]. What have I learned in that time?

Here are my top tips [in no particular order]:

1. Always have a Plan B. It’s no good turning up at the swimming pool and finding it closed due to the presence of some contagious disease or because the roof has fallen in [yes, this really happened to our local pool], and then just turning back for home. You need to think fast and on your feet. Usually retail therapy is not a good option – unless it’s the Early Learning Centre. Small kids love Early Learning Centres
2. Develop a personality. One that doesn’t frighten people. It may have been ok in an earlier life to stand around in rooms looking like a bored adolescent, and maybe your friends even expect it of you now, but your child needs to see that you can at least pretend to be a normal person. The type of guy who can indulge in pleasant small talk while balancing a plate of half-eaten biscuits in one hand and using the other to prevent his daughter from devouring the contents of a pack of crayons, for example
3. Put your child first in and above all things. This is much, much harder than it sounds. I cannot tell you anything about this: it must be experienced to be properly understood
4. Learn to multitask, as best you can. Granted, it’s not easy for a dad to keep more than one train of thought on the tracks of reality, but if you don’t/can’t/won’t then you’ll need to be prepared for the consequences. These may include potentially expensive and embarrassing pratfalls such as filling your car’s petrol engine with diesel, or walking away from the cashpoint machine without the money that’s just popped out of the slot, because you’re thinking about whether you should have changed that juice-covered top she’s wearing after all
5. Don’t use reins. Not because they’re dangerous, or politically incorrect or any other reason that you might have heard. Because your child will quickly learn that reins give them all sorts of opportunities for spectator sport, like sitting down on the floor in supermarkets and refusing to get up for ages, while a small crowd gathers round to comment on your pathetic efforts to persuade her otherwise
6. Get out of the house for a meal/drink/film/run/shopping expedition/concert/squash game [tick the box that lights, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, your candle,] as often as you can. Definitely more than once a year, anyway

Jealous guy

Just reinserted my link on the blogroll to the Reluctant blogger, a blogstar of the first order who’s had more than her fair share of Internet troubles recently.

To be frank I can’t imagine the sort of insecurity and/or plain nastiness that makes a person threaten the health not only of a kind and gentle person such as RB but also that of her children.

Read the story here. Or visit RB’s site at her main address, as above. I often do.

What’s going on?

For reasons too elaborate to explain I have to lie down on the floor and make like a starfish when I turn the radiator off in S-’s room. I had forgotten this random fact until recently when I noticed S- lying on the floor on her tummy, kicking her legs in the air, as she peered with keen interest under the radiator cover.

I guess sometimes we forget just how much our kids are watching us parents and how much they pick up from their observations.

While we were waiting for S- we did lots of reading about parenting. I remember writing in my notebook: ‘it’s all about language – you’ve got to give your child a language’.

Now I see it slightly differently. Watching S- I’m beginning to think that children have language innately: they would pick up some form of communication whoever they were with.

What we parents give them is the all-important vocabulary and the equally vital mode of expression. In other words, both the way and the manner in which they can transmit their desires, feelings and needs.

9 to 5

The plan was always that I would be the stay-at-home dad and that in our family mother would be the breadwinner. This is what we said when S- was being matched by the adoption panel with us.

However, I think M-, our social worker, was disappointed when all these things came to pass and, after our time off work building the bond with S-, G- put on her suit and got back on the treadmill.

G-, being the steadfast person she is, didn’t rave or moan or whine. She just got on with it: ‘life is how it is and we’ve got to do these things,’ she said.

To her credit M- choked it back, and has been a rock since. At Christmas, she bought S- a book called Owl bables to help S- cope with her mother’s absence during the day. The symbolism of the story may seem overdone to us adults – the owl babies huddle on a branch all night and call for mummy, who turns up at the end of the book – but S- loves it.

‘Mummy,’ she yells 2 or 3 times a day now, racing across the lounge to point at the TV. So on goes the DVD that came with the book, again. Sometimes we even read the story, too, or at least turn the pages.

Much of this blog seems to be about birds, but S- also now has a picture of an owlet on her bedroom wall: a photograph we brought on a recent week away in the Cotswolds and shoved in a clip frame.

When we see G- pull up in her car at the end of the working day S- wriggles and giggles with excitement, but all this energy seems to vanish when G- actually gets into the house. Suddenly there’s a ton of other stuff to be interested in: books, hairbrush, toys… And when it comes to bedtime it’s always ‘dada’, ‘dada’, although we make sure G- tucks her up at least a few times a week.

It’s the same in the morning: S- is getting increasingly reluctant to say bye-bye to her mother, even though I know we’ll later spend quite a bit of the day calling G- up on the toy telephone.

G- won’t thank me for this but I really admire her for the way she copes with S-’s apparent disinterest. I know it would be tearing me up and I wouldn’t be able to help getting depressed about it. Yet G- stays so calm and positive, and interested. And uncomplaining.

But that, as I said, is the sort of person my wife is.