Letting go

I know how I would feel if S- was to suddenly disappear from my life, but I’m not sure I could explain it here. Our children are more important than words.

This last sentence explains I think why I’m happy that S-’s birth parents, X- and Y-, have recently contacted social services and seem to be keen to start making contact with us, with an eventual view to seeing S- in the flesh.

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.

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/]

My favourite things

S- is an enthusiastic and determined child with a wide range of interests, some of which her parents enjoy too.

Here’re a few of them:

• Hats – but only inside the house
• Shoes – taking on and off. Endlessly
• Socks – ditto
• Cheerios [a type of breakfast cereal] – prodding them into the bottom of a cup, preferably one filled with juice
  [Stay-at-home dad: 'Are you trying to wind me up S-?'
  Beautiful daughter: 'Ah yeye']
• Prunes – is there any accounting for taste?
• Bubbles – they must be pointed out and acknowledged wherever and whenever they occur: in her drink, the bath, in puddles, in the air, on TV, etc
• Makka pakka – Agga pang!
• Everything [anything] her parents have got
• Walking [wo-wo] – especially when it involves pushing Cupcake, a particularly bland and featureless doll, and her toy buggy to the corner shop. It’s a journey of oh, about 30 yards … and at least half an hour’s duration
• Swimming – especially if involving bubbles [op cit.]

Freebird

A flock of woodpigeons swoop over the bank buildings on the high street, their pale underparts glimmering in the winter sunshine.

S-’s face widens into a huge smile. She’s always loved birds. When we first met her, at her foster parents, she used to respond to bird song by holding her hand up, pinching her index finger and thumb together in the rough shape of a beak. Now she fairly vibrates with excitement in my arms, pointing to the sky, her eyes big and round and brimming.

‘Br, br, br,’ she shrieks, right into my ear drum. ‘BR.’

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.

So macho

No, this isn’t some crazed love letter or invitation to an Internet forum, but sometimes the titles of these blog posts just jump out at you.

When I got to the playgroup the other day the organiser greeted me with some excitement. ‘You’re not the only dad today!’

I looked around while I was taking S-’s coat off and nodded to a large bloke in jeans and a sweatshirt, talking into a mobile phone. Pulling the drawers out of a toy kitchen just by his feet was a girl of about 3 or 4 years, obviously his daughter.

I thought we might have a manly catch up during the morning’s activities. This is a playgroup specifically for adoptive parents, so we could grab the opportunity to natter about being in the same boat [you don't see many of us stay-at home adoptive dads about, you know!].

But there was little opportunity for any sort of conversation, nevermind the mutually supportive, caring-sharing discussion I had envisaged. He wandered around the room following his daughter, playing desultorily with some of the toys and resolutely refusing to talk with anybody. I tried to catch his eye a couple of times but soon gave up. His face grew longer and darker with each passing minute. For a while he sat at the activities table poking glitter onto a cardboard star with magnificently bemused contempt.

It must have been a depressing morning both for him and for his daughter, and it wasn’t long before her slightly manic attempts to play with everything in the room flagged. As soon as it was clear that she was running out of ideas, he asked whether she was ready to leave.

Perhaps she was ready to go, and perhaps I’m being unfair, but he wasn’t really giving her a choice. Of course she agreed with him! She wanted to keep him happy.

It can be bloody difficult standing in a playgroup for the first time, especially if you’re not used to kids. So I had a small amount of sympathy for him on that score.

But come on man, you’ve got to make an effort and at least look as if you wouldn’t rather be thousands of miles away, for your child’s sake if nothing else.

So anyway I guess we’ll have that chat next time. Or perhaps not!