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.

Alone again or

Am I allowed to say I’ve just deleted two links from my blogroll? Well, I’m going to anyway.

Oh, you know how it it is: these were not relationships that were going to go anywhere! It was always take take take, as far as I could see.

One guy couldn’t even raise himself to despam me, so everytime I tried to post a comment on his site it just bounced back. The other seems to have run out of ideas, and anyway didn’t even have the courtesy to read what I sent him properly.

I’m probably flouting every known rule of international, not to say personal relations, but stuff ‘em.

This isn’t special pleading but everytime I look around I realise that I am in a unique situation: a stay-at-home dad and a parent by adoption. So I’m always on the look out for friends.

I have actually been on a play date where I met a bloke in a similar situation – but I don’t know what happened. He never writes, he never calls!

Joking aside, it would be good to know if there’s anybody else like me out there in the blogosphere.

Stormy weather

S- had her first real tantrum yesterday. It started around lunchtime when we got back from the shops. Actually the warning signs had been there for a while – check out repeatedly lying down on the floor in the supermarket for a good example – but I hadn’t read them correctly.

When we got home and I lifted her out of the car seat she first resisted and then tried to get back in to the car. At which point, loaded down with shopping and simmering with exasperation, I had to pick her up and carry her into the house.

In the kitchen I needed to put her down again to deal with the stuff I’d bought as well as some housework. I also had to make lunch.

As soon as her feet touched the floor she went apeshit, running from one side of the room to the other, banging on the walls and wailing. Then she tried to open the doors to the cupboard where the knives are kept.

Needless to say this was a little alarming.

When I got her away from the cupboards, she threw herself down on the floor and held her arms up, her sign that she wanted to be picked up. But to be honest I didn’t respond straight away: perhaps wrongly a) I reasoned that she needed to calm herself and b) my hands were full.

She was pretty soon in torrents of tears and it took ages for her to finally choke them back. I suppose it started to get back to normal only when I put her in her high chair and moved it so that we sat side by side, rather than at our normal right angles, to have lunch.

I remembered Penelope Leach’s books and her assertion that toddlers constantly see-saw between their overwhelming desire for independence and the fear that their emotions will drive their parents away.

One of the lessons we picked up from our adoption classes is that adopted kids have that extra terror of abandonment. Yet they spend much of their young lives trying to get you to turn your backs on them, trying to test you out. This is why adoptive parents can’t always react in ways that birth parents might [they shouldn't, for example, use the Naughty Step with their kids]: because it’s important not to reinforce the child’s inner belief that they’re not wanted and are unreformedly bad.

It seems to me that children, adopted or otherwise, need to be as close as possible to their parents [though maybe not always in their arms] when they’re having these emotional meltdowns. It’s not just about physical safety but also about psychological support: ‘I still love you,’ you’re telling them, ‘and it’s ok to feel like you do’.

‘Though possibly not to throw your yoghurt in my face!’

Crossroads blues

This blog and I have had a bit of a distant relationship lately. The family has been away a lot, first with friends and then with my parents. Sometimes writing needs to take second place to life!

I’ve also reached a point where it’s difficult to decide what to do next. The blog has grown beyond what it was originally meant to be – the simple diary of a [simple] stay-at-home dad – to cover a lot of other subjects. Now there are almost too many ways to go, eg:

• More cute stories about S- [the straight ahead road]
• More about adoption and perhaps even on the potential relationship G-, I and S- herself may have with S-’s birth parents [the torturous route]
• Something more serious, eg on child development or adoption politics [the right fork], or more comedic [the left-hand turn]

For the straight ahead road I think most people already get the picture: how many more times can you say something before it becomes a turn off?

For the torturous route I’m not sure I have the right to talk about people I don’t know and whom S- is likely to come to have strong feelings about. And anyway mining recent history is hardly going to be of interest to anyone other than G- and I – and possibly S- in the future.

The other options seem to require a significant change to my approach and committment – a re-think, if you like, of my on-line identity.

Hmmm.

Actually I’ve also been getting through quite a few books recently. I’ve just finished reading Born on a blue day, the memoir of a guy growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a fascinating book and I found it personally relevant in a number of interesting and surprising ways [no, I'm not claiming to have an An extraordinary mind!].

Now I’m just about to start re-reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, a book I first read in my early teens.

When I picked up Zen in the bookshop last week I got the strong sense that here was a book with a function. There was something within the pages that demanded to be said, and for reasons other than simple authorial cartharsis.

Mirror man

On the way back from S-’s foster parents I pulled over and stopped the car outside a service station. It was nearly lunchtime and S- was getting crochety, and to be frank I needed to spend a bit of time with my daughter.

This had been our first visit back to D- and D-’s since we’d taken S- away, almost a year previously.

But if I had been worried about how it might affect her I needn’t have bothered. S- seemed if not perfectly at home at least safe and confident, and it was great to see her going to foster mum D- for a cuddle and to look out of the window for birds just like she used to, before we first met her.

Still a large part of me wanted to claim her back, to let her know that she belongs with G- and me. That we’re her family now.

So we had a small picnic, squashed on the back seat of the car where we shared bits of a chicken sandwich and a blueberry muffin. Then we got out of the car and walked a few paces over the small patch of greenery that you often get at these places. S- chased a bumble bee and I watched a long-tailed tit flit through the branches of a sycamore.

Later I found myself in a brown study as I sat in her room and watched her playing with her books and jigsaws.

There are times when I realise, as if with a start, that S-and I look very dissimilar. It’s a recognition that does not affect in any way how I feel about her, but there’s a peculiar, disjunctive quality to the experience that I find hard to describe.

In his book Blue-eyed son the British TV presenter Nicky Campbell describes meeting his birth mother for the first time and the existential puzzlement that overwelms him when he catches sight of himself in the mirror afterwards.

Is that what S- will have to learn to cope with as she grows older: this occasional dissociation between how she feels and what she sees?

You can see her own sense of identity forming every day. The other night, before bed, she initiated the faces game where she touches my ears, mouth, eyes and nose [actually she often doesn't just the touch the latter: she gives it a skillful, subtle twist, which can be quite painful, thanks] and then the corresponding parts of her own cranial anatomy.

And she’s fascinated with her own image, running into our bedroom at every opportunity to stand in front of the glass and stare at herself, giggling.

All we can do is our best to make sure S- knows her lineage, her history, and that she’s proud of it.

[Picture nicked from http://www.digiscoped.com/]

For tomorrow

Writing a blog can sometimes be a bit like having a fight with yourself. Often it seems easier to just skim over the surface of things, to take life as it is.

Last week I was listening to the featured ‘Book of the week’ on BBC Radio 4: Waiting for Daisy: the true story of one couple’s quest to have a baby, by Peggy Orenstein. The title’s pretty self-explanatory, I guess.

The book made me think about how fertility can become the central drama of a married couple’s life and how, by extension, infertility can turn that drama into tragedy. That’s pretty obvious too, I suppose.

When you go through the adoption education one thing they’re eager on is getting you to abandon what they call the imaginary [or ideal] child. The theory is that the child you always pictured yourself having can only get in the way of your attachment to the child you adopt. A ritual in which you say goodbye to your ideal formally, eg lighting a candle in church, is especially good, apparently.

I didn’t so much have an imaginary child in my mind, more a bundle of characteristics: a boy [only if pushed], good at sports, better at music, intelligent … the usual things. And I never really made a big deal about saying goodbye.

But I do remember standing late one afternoon in the autumn sunshine by the canal near where we live. I was looking at an old oak tree and, more particularly, at the long-tailed tits which were piping and flitting around its gnarled old branches. It really was the most beautiful scene and I smiled to myself to see it. But I felt incredibly sad for a moment, too.

Perhaps this was around the time G- and I- were being asked to discuss imaginary children, but now I always relate this in some complicated way to the child we didn’t have.

Why I’m writing this is not especially clear to me. Perhaps there’s a part of me that wants to save it and keep it for S-. Perhaps I hope that sometime in the future she’ll read it and understand a little bit.

One thing I do know, though, is that I wouldn’t change a single thing about her. If I had to create a child out of my imagination and put her there in front of me she would be exactly as she is now.

I guess that’s the kind of mushy stuff that us parents say, write and think all the time, but don’t expect me to apologise for it.

Shout!

Where it came from I wouldn’t like to say. I was tired and I’d been unwell for a few days, but my reaction was, in retrospect, a little over the top.

It didn’t seem to worry S- though. At least not too much. She looked at me wonderingly with those blue eyes as I stood over her and gave her all six barrels.

‘No,’ I said, the decibels rising with every syllable. ‘No, no, no, S-. Don’t do that. DON’T do that. NO!’

What was it that had set me off? Something major, obviously. Something earthshattering. Something that threated to tear the fabric of our family apart.

Well, actually it was that she’d just spilt her drink all over the kitchen table.

For the third time, admittedly. And deliberately, yes. Challengingly, for sure. But for the Lord’s sake it was just a few drops of juice. A miniscule amount of housework. And I’d absolutely blown a gasket.

When I look back I think she was trying to reassure me because when I picked her up from her high chair she clung to me and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Aaahh,’ she said. ‘Aaah’. [Her version of 'all better' or 'come on, old chap, it's not as bad as all that', I think.]

But I was still steaming. A few minutes later, changing her nappy [diaper] ready for her afternoon sleep, I almost boiled over.

Instead I stood up and walked out of the room [shutting the child safety gate behind me, obviously]. I went down the hall and into the kitchen, where I bellowed out my frustration for a good couple of minutes – luckily our neighbours all work during the day, so no one could hear my rather unbecoming vocalisations. Then I went back in and finished her nappy and put her down in the cot.

Later, when I was supposed to be washing the dishes, I stood and stared out of the window, feeling very ashamed of myself.

There’s a school of thought that says adoption gives you the chance to be better parents because you can put theory into practice. You can be more considered. You can apply what the social workers teach you to call a therapeutic approach to your parenting.

I knew that the next time she knocked over her drink [and there would be a next time, of course] I’d have to come up with something slightly less apoplectic. Something that an impartial observer might consider more suited to the occasion. Something – actually almost anything would be better, come to think of it.

One of the hardest things seems to be learning, as the cliche puts it, how to lose a battle so as to win the war.

Memories are made of this

Just uploaded a new page [see it here], something I’ve been thinking about for a while: a roadmap of our adoption journey.

We’re here together under one roof now, a family, but it’s sometimes instructive to remember what we went through on the way.

You’ve got a friend

Not that I’m ever one to blow my own trumpet [yeah right, G-], but there’s some nice comments about me here. Apologies for the puff, but I need all the friends I can get!

Seriously, aside from the obvious attractions of a positive review of this blog, the author talks about the struggle to have her own family through adoption with humor, passion and honesty. Take a look.

Book of love

G- and I are both bookworms, and so I thought it might be useful/interesting/not completely dull to list some of our recommended books on parenting.

Then I remembered that one of the things we had to do way back when we went to our adoption panel to be approved for a child was to provide a reading list.

Don’t ask me why [perhaps it was just to show what swots we are]. The panel certainly didn’t – ask us about our reading, I mean. [Perhaps they could tell - that we were swots, I mean.]

So was it a complete waste of time? Well, almost but not quite, because I can now save myself a bit of effort and cut and paste the list.

• Archer C. First steps in parenting the child who hurts. Jessica Kingsley Publishers 1999.
• Campbell N. Blue-eyed son. Pan 2005.
• Cleese J, Skynner R. Families and how to survive them. Vermillion 1993
• Fahlberg V. A child’s journey through placement. BAAF 1994
• Ford G. The contented toddler years. Vermillion 2006
• Faber A, Mazlish E. How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. Piccadilly Press, 2001
• Gerhardt S. Why love matters. Routledge, 2004.
• Hirst M. Loving and living with traumatised children. Reflections by adoptive parents. BAAF 2006
• Layard R. Happiness. Allen Lane 2006.
• The adopter’s handbook. BAAF 2006
• Stoppard M. Complete baby and childcare. Dorland Kindersley 2006
• Verrier N. The primal wound. Gateway 1999.

The one that our social workers were keen on was The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. This helped introduce us to social work thinking on adoption and to theories on the damaging effects of childhood trauma, abandonment and loss. But it is a bit of a slog, and any reader should bear in mind that it’s based almost exclusively on research with adopted adults who were relinquished as babies. Here in the UK at least, that’s an increasingly rare phenomenon, and there was always a question in my mind as to how up-to-date the book is.

So which ones did we really like? Well, Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters, which does a fantastic job of explaining early child development, and the one with a long title about talking by Faber and Mazlish. This one’s brilliant at encouraging a healthy relationship with your kids.

Nicky Campbell, who’s a TV presenter in the UK, was adopted and his book is an interesting insight into how it feels to have both birth and adoptive parents [as well as a large extended family]. He’s particularly eloquent on the subject of identity and how adoption affects the jigsaw of your personality.

Richard Layard’s Happiness is nothing less than a prescription for a healthier society and a better environment for us to bring our kids up in. That to me is worth at least a look – which you can do from here.

The other author I should mention is Gina Ford. We found that S- really benefited from routine and stability, especially in the early days and some of Ford’s ideas were helpful. The single most useful advice we had on daytime sleep came from The Contented Baby, and this was to manage things in terms not so much of how long your children stay down but how long they are awake before their naps. That to me was a revelation.

Oh, just one more – ok, two. Murkoff, Eisenberg and Hathaway’s What to expect books are useful aide memoires, and surprisingly amusing, too. But we wouldn’t be without Penelope Leach. Baby and Child [Penguin 1989] might be a bit old now, but to me Leach is the guru. I hang on her every word.