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.

These days, I find I’m getting rather used to the reversal of roles in our family. So I’m quite happy to do some of the creative thinking around how we bring up our daughter, about S-’s routines, welfare and happiness.

I’m still pretty rubbish at shopping, but I am getting used to the more spontaneous things about parenting: like snatching sleep where and when you can and having to think on your feet when you’ve nothing in the fridge for lunch.

One thing I found very difficult at first is the strange language of parenthood. And it has taken me a little while, but I’m now scarily fluent in Motherese, that strange tongue where you have conversations with people in your immediate vicinity – whom you may or may not know – though to all intents and purposes you’re actually talking to your child.

Search me out on a typical day and you’ll find me on the edge of groups of women speaking in a bizarre, descriptive language that requires a loud voice and an irritating over-reliance on the third person:

‘Yes, S-, the boy is climbing on the table. Yes, he’s very clever, but I hope he doesn’t fall off. Can his mummy see him? Oh no. Ouch… It’s ok. It’s ok, look, there’s the boy’s mummy, running over.’

In the evenings I relax by practicing grown up conversations with my wife. Luckily, she often tolerates my stumbling and sometimes rather juvenile efforts.

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/]

In the evening, after the housework is done, we put on our coats and go outside to look at the stars. S- is thrilled by the sound of the thrush singing from the top of the pine tree in our neighbour’s garden.

When I was a child my family emigrated to an African country where we lived for six years. My memories of life back then are fragmented, but very early one morning my dad woke me up and took me out for a walk and to see the dawn. I often think back now to the sandy grey of the track we walked along and the blood orange of the sun rising on the horizon. It’s an adventure I think I’ll remember until I die: a moment, if you like, of brilliance in my life.

‘Look, look. There’s the moon, and the twinkle twinkle stars,’ I say. ‘Can you hear the birds singing?’

‘Moo, moo.’

‘Yes, that is the moon, up in the sky. It’s a long long way away, thousands of miles, but we can see it shining on us.’

‘Up,’ she says, totally entranced, pointing and craning to see. ‘Up upp uppp!’

‘Yes, it’s very high,’ I say, hugging her tight, knowing that this is another of those moments in my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fascinatingly reactionary – and rather self-pitying – article on the family, stay-at-home dads and childcare here. Apparently, dads have got more sense than to want to look after their kids, and women have no choice – after all, they’re overwhelmed by biology!

I guess we should expect nothing more from The Times [of London], but I couldn’t resist submitting a riposte. Which hasn’t been posted. 

‘Adoption must be easier when you know you’re definitely infertile,’ said Aunty L- recently.

‘In a way, yes. The main thing I think is that by the time you’ve explored and exhausted all the infertility treatment options you’re a bit older. If you know there’s no point it saves all that time,’ I said.

We were at a family gathering and I didn’t want to be a total misery. So I didn’t add that, in some cases, the effort you put into conceiving exhausts you, too. Both emotionally and mentally. You can sometimes read it in people’s eyes: the distance they’ve travelled to overcome their grief and pain.