willynilly

May 20, 2013
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50 cups of tea later…

There is now just over a month to go until we face the panel. And this means means we’re nearing the end of the assessment period. So, no more home visits. The most immediate consequence of this is the house’s transition from show home to dog’s dinner.

Home visits are a strange phenomenon. I was just about starting to get used to them when they stopped. All in all, we’ve had around eight. Each one took an average of three hours. So that’s a whole day and night under the grill – or around 50 cups of tea by my reckoning. You slip into easy routines during this period. For example, everyone sits in their familiar places in the living room – me and Sarah on the sofa facing the social worker, who fired questions at us from the armchair. Each time, it felt kind of like a job interview. And, for the most part, we had no idea how we were shaping up.

For me, that was the hardest thing about the whole process. It wasn’t until the last couple of sessions that we had any idea what she thought about us and whether or not her report would be positive. We literally talked about everything – childhoods, relationships, finances, thoughts about parenting etc. No stone was left unturned. Which is great. But it also left me feeling uncomfortably exposed. Along the way, the social worker spoke to our friends and our family. I know that every person she spoke to went through similar emotions. None of them enjoyed the experience and everyone felt a huge pressure not to let us down.

Of course, the bottom line is, no-one lets anyone down if everyone just tells the truth. And that’s the biggest lesson I’ve got out of all of this. I started out with ideals of “Oh, that’s not relevant,” and, “She doesn’t need to know about that.” Because I’m a private person, I felt like some things are sacred. But the thing is, when you’re subject to that kind of scrutiny, it’s very hard to be anything other than yourself. Yes, it’s very uncomfortable. But you’ve just got to suck it up.

So while I expected the visits to be uncomfortable, they weren’t so bad in the end. However, I didn’t expect to find reading the social worker’s final report so difficult. The PAR or Prospective Adopter’s Report is the written record of all your home visits – among other things. So, it includes our account of ourselves and our histories, the social worker’s account of our interviews and her analysis of everything we told her. I found it incredibly difficult to read all this stuff in black and white. It’s like a weird episode of This Is Your Life where Michael Aspel’s having a particularly insensitive day. It’s one thing to open up about particularly painful or difficult episodes in your life, but it’s altogether another thing to have a relative stranger interpret and analyse these events.

I got over it, of course. It was just a bit of a shock. And then what I found was a true and incredibly detailed reflection of who we are and what we want. I know a lot of people hate the assessment period and find the level of scrutiny unnecessary. But if you go with it, I think what you’ll end up with is a really useful record. It’s a foundation from which to take stock, to look backwards and forwards. Everything falls into place – you can be proud of how far you’ve come and excited about how much there is left to do. For the record, we’re an “emotionally intelligent couple” with a lot to offer an adopted child

In summary, it’s no small inconvenience to welcome a social worker into your life and to allow them to inflict a pretty unnatural process on you. But, looking back, the best advice anyone could have given me would have been to just go with it. Really, it’s not so bad.

And now we’re left in a strange limbo time. Just over a month with not a lot of contact with social services, apart from a ‘second opinion visit’. That’s why I’m writing this blog from a hotel room and on a rare day off work for non-adoption-related reasons. We’ve just ordered room service breakfast, because that’s how we roll. Although, fingers crossed, these days will soon be numbered.

May 11, 2013
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The Preparation Group – Day Three

If I’m honest, Day Three was a bit of an anti-climax. I think it was partly to do with the fact that Day Two had been so good, and partly because the structure of the day was looser. And it was also because the group had, bizarrely, got slightly fractious.

There was lots of valuable stuff, don’t get me wrong. My highlight was hearing from another adopter. She was slightly older, had suffered a lot with failed IVF cycles and had a husband who was slightly reluctant to engage with social services. So, if nothing else, I felt that if they could do it – surely we could? If it was issues top trumps, I reckon the gay thing would be small fry. She was really nice anyway and had fairly recently had a toddler placed with her. She went against everything the social workers had been trying to drill into us by saying that her preparation group had “all got babies” and that no-one she knew did direct contact with birth parents. She was clearly loving the whole experience and you couldn’t help but be so happy for her. Something to aspire to.

We then spent quite a bit of time going over attachment. Again. They really are rather keen on it. And then a few people in the group seemed to take issue with some fairly innocuous but certainly social-workey comments. They were like dogs with bones – they just would not let it drop. The whole atmosphere was kind of argumentative and confrontational. Sarah and I exchanged a couple of raised eyebrows but other than that the only thing to do was sit there until they had worked it all through. Weird.

This was a day for note-taking. As our Preparation Group drew to a close with me not feeling anywhere near prepared, I started to scribble down a million book recommendations that I won’t possibly have time to read. After a round-up and a few motivational speeches, we were out on our ear. And then came the awkwardness of swapping numbers. If you think about it, the prep group is kind of like your ante-natal class. These people could be a valuable support in the coming months and even, years. So we tentatively started to approach people we’d got on well with before one very organised attendee took it upon herself to get everyone’s details and email around a spread sheet. A true mum-in-the-making. There’s always one – and they’re always indispensable.

So that’s it. We’re ‘prepared’. Well, actually, we’re not. But we’ve got the compulsory training under our belt. And, as our social worker’s more frequent calls keep reminding us, the panel is creeping ever closer.

April 28, 2013
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The Preparation Group – Day Two

I’m a cynic, there’s no getting away from it. I approach any kind of training with caution, predicting it’ll be 50% common sense, 35% stating the obvious and 15% learning something new. I went on a compulsory wellbeing course at work the other day and sat through it in a permanent state of mental scoff. In all honesty, with the prep group, I fully expected to be going through the motions in order to tick a necessary box. I was happy to do so in the name of the game. But I was wrong. I’m actually really enjoying the group. And I have to admit, I’m learning lots too.

The second session was pretty hardcore. The assembled social workers threw us in at the deep end with a morning on Loss. They got everyone to close their eyes and think about a loss they’ve suffered in their life. As I sat there squinting to make sure it wasn’t just me who’d complied with the eyes shut thing, they started asking questions: “Think about how it made you feel,” “How did it make you behave,” “How did you cope with it” etc. They idea was that we’d put ourselves in the position of adopted children, who have all suffered a loss – a loss of a birth parent and, most likely, a foster carer too. I played it safe and thought about when I’d moved house – I’m going to be the last person on earth to commit to real emotion in a group environment. But some people clearly didn’t – some started crying and some left the room. I’d usually dismiss it as melodrama but in this case, it felt genuine and it came from people who immediately empathised with how their future child was feeling.

After Loss came Resilience. We talked about lots of ways to build up resilience in our future children. One such way is Contact. And by Contact, they mean contact with a birth family. Some children have letterbox contact – exchanging letters and photos facilitated by the adopted families and social services. I can see the point of that; when children see a birth parent aging in photos it stops them fantasising in tough times about the perfect parent that you stole them from. This kind of contact is aimed at making sure children form a solid personal identity. As is direct sibling contact, since many adopted children come from large families. I understand this, too – a shared early experience is something that can never be replicated, no matter how hard we try. But then there’s direct contact with a birth parent, something my jury is out on. I’m just not convinced that it’s good for anyone – although that’s not the tagline the social workers are going with.

Just before lunch, we were visited by a parent who’d adopted two siblings. She came to talk to us ten years on. It was brilliant to hear her talk about her adoption journey in a real and un-social-workey way. She had helped facilitate direct contact with siblings but wasn’t in favour of direct contact with birth parents. It’s not always a choice though, thanks to the rise of social media. Her story showed that, whether you ‘Like’ it or not, Facebook is a reality that makes it fairly easy for birth parents to track their children, and vice versa. It’s therefore more important than ever to be completely upfront with your kids and encourage them to talk to you from the very start.

We ended the day by labelling paper dolls of ourselves with characteristics about us. I was a Partner, Friend, Family-Focused, Creative, British person. We were asked to cut off all the limbs and head and donate a body part to the person next to us. We then had to take one from the person on the other side of us. If I’m completely honest, I’m not sure what this exercise was trying to prove. Something about, isn’t-it-difficult-when-you-lose-something-that-defines-you. A little clunky? Perhaps, but it was good fun playing cut-out and making up weird bodies.

All in all, it was a full-on and extremely useful day. I’ll even be sad to see the back of the prep group next week. There, I said it. Also I feel like our group is bonding a bit. We might even keep in touch with some of them. Which is nice.

April 21, 2013
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The Preparation Group – Day One

Our prep group work book. I have the urge to cover it in a poster of my fave pin-up.

We went to our first preparation group on Wednesday. We’re going to our next one this Wednesday. And we’re finishing it the Wednesday after that. On that Wednesday, you can consider us fully prepared. I’d been ridiculously nervous about the prep group and I wasn’t really sure why. I’d even planned an outfit which, incidentally, was completely unsuitable since it turned out to be a freak sunny day. The best laid plans and all that…

I think the prep group is daunting because it involves meeting lots of other prospective parents just like you. The glass half full says these people are your support network. The glass half empty says they’re your competition. It’s also one of those group things that involve icebreakers and small talk. Worse still, we are being judged on how we interact and what we say. Of course, there are biscuits – but, you know, they’re just not enough of a draw on their own…

The reality is, the prep group was fine. Useful even. We’re kind of going about it backwards as we’re the only people in our group to have started the home visits. I think it’s because the earlier group was full, but whatever, we’re ahead of the game a bit. And that was nice, because nothing was news to us and it always helps to feel a bit smug. We talked through the different kinds of abuse, neglect and trauma that adopted kids are likely to suffer. My mum, on hearing me recount this, got straight to the point: “Can’t you just get a normal child?” The fact is, at the very least, pretty much every kid in care today has been removed from their birth family. That’s never going to be a happy experience for anyone and the result is going to be that this sense of loss is going to live on in some form or another.

We talked a lot about attachment too. Adopted children are likely to have attachment issues to varying extents. There are lots of different attachment disorders but, basically, it means that somewhere along the line, the child had basic needs that were not met. And this means that their development has been affected, interrupted or damaged. There are lots of things we can do to encourage positive attachment with us and, in time, will help the child to come to terms with what it experienced in its early life. Play is important. Confident parenting is important (even if you’re crying on the inside). Affection is important. Everything you’d expect really.

We did an exercise where everyone got a bit of paper with a parenting technique written on it. We all had to place our bit of paper along a line where one end was ‘good parenting’ and one end was ‘unacceptable parenting’. I got ‘making fun of the child’ – that was fairly straightforward. Yes, mock the adopted child, that’s what I do, right? Sarah got ‘sending a child to their room as punishment.’ She thought it might be a useful technique in terms of having a time out or removing the child from an environment that was winding them up. But, oh no. Someone else piped up,”what if they’d been sexually abused?” Hadn’t she just single-handedly brought all the bad memories flooding back? Context is key, of course. You would have thought that would have been blindingly obvious but apparently not.

Anyway, just as Sarah was beginning to feel like she’d dropped a clanger, another guy piped up: “Ok, I’m going to be controversial here – I’ve smacked my child and am in favour of smacking as a punishment.” Ouch. He was firmly advised that he would never be allowed to smack an adopted child. I imagined somebody somewhere reaching for their red pen and drawing a line through his name. Someone else thought that taking away a child’s favourite pastime would never be an acceptable punishment. What if their favourite pastime was the one thing they were good at? Another guy countered (with a glint in his eye) – “What if their favourite pastime is torturing the family dog?” Brilliant – comment of the day in my book. Context. Context. Context.

A couple of observations I made during the day. One – we’re fairly young compared to most people adopting. Two – for most people, adoption isn’t their first choice – which also makes us different. Three – a surprisingly high number of people in our group were coming into adoption with a birth child already. I haven’t got much to say about this – it’s just a few more cogs turning.

We’ve just done our homework for the next session. We had to choose two children from a selection of case studies and then write up how we would parent them. We chose a six-month-old reaching its developmental milestones but with two schizophrenic parents, and a six-year-old with anxiety and confidence issues. Apparently these write-ups will form part of our assessment. It was a really interesting exercise actually and was just one of the ways in which it’s all becoming so incredibly real.

We saw a couple of people from our prep group in Homebase today. Sarah made me dodge them because she hadn’t done her hair. To be fair, it was a bit on the large side. But the perfect parent facade won’t hold up for long – and that’s something we can’t dodge. The main message I got from the prep group – mainly from the adoptive parent who helped run the session – was that we will make mistakes. We will look back and cringe at them. But we’ll keep learning on the job – and that’s ok.*

*Unless you are smacking them. And that’s really not ok, stupid.

April 14, 2013
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With a little help from our friends.

There’s so much about the adoption process that is daunting. It’s not something you go into light-heartedly. Or at least, if you do, you won’t stay light-of-heart for long. There are many forms. There is huge scrutiny. And there is the constant fear that you will be judged not-good-enough. I knew all this before I started. So I certainly didn’t see the good bits coming.

When you sign up to adopt, you need to provide character references. In the case of our local authority, we provided three each. We both nominated our sisters and chose two friends. Reference forms were also sent to our bosses and the managers of the nurseries where we’ve been volunteering. In fact, anyone who’s anyone got a form. This exclusive club is expected to fill out pages of complex and, at times, intimate questions about us.

On the day the forms hit, we were both inundated with texts and calls from our references – each one anxious to do a good job and play their own part in our adoption story. Some asked to know what we wanted them to say. We were both really keen that the references should reflect exactly what our referees thought so declined to put words into their mouths. The questions were fairly intense – how would the applicants meet the needs of an adopted child? Do you know of any social or sexual reasons why they shouldn’t adopt? What would they find most difficult? How would their neighbours react? I’m not entirely sure how I would answer some of these questions myself (I don’t even know my neighbours), so it was a tough ask for our friends – let alone our bosses.

Nevertheless, they all filled in their forms. At the top of this post is a photo of the last man standing filling in his – while we were visiting incidentally. It was a bit odd to see him filling it out – an hour of deep concentration helping to determine our fate. These forms are confidential but, inevitably, once the references are in the post, people were eager to tell us what they put. Some told us they said we were a brilliant team. Some said we had the patience and understanding necessary to help an adopted child reach it’s potential. Some said we were ‘special’. It felt like a bad case of fishing for compliments.

Our social worker has also started the process of talking to our families and referees. She’s even spoken to our nieces. Apparently, the five-year-old got bored and started singing batman. The eight-year-old described me as “Kind and funny”, Sarah as “Kind and clever” and said that she likes staying with us because we make her feel “Cosy”. We’ll take that. Another friend said how she told the social worker that her 12-year-old daughter described us as an “inspiration” which we both take as a compliment of the highest order. So far, so gushing.

Now I don’t want to blow our own trumpets. Far from it. In fact I’ve always struggled to take a compliment without a ridiculous amount of squirming. I’m just trying to illustrate one of the good bits of this long-winded process. As soon as the forms hit, we felt incredibly supported. We always knew this network existed, of course – we’d signposted the social worker to it ourselves. But we perhaps never acknowledged it as such – as an entity we could trust and as people we can call on through thick and thin.

Imagine the process as an intimidating army major. It’s yelling at the troops to “FALL IN!” Well, our troops certainly did, all around us. And together, we closed ranks.

April 1, 2013
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Under the grill

Our home visits have now started and it all seems to be going incredibly quickly. In fact, adoption seems to have become a full-time job – before the real work has even begun! We met our social worker who, fortunately, seems really nice. I was quite nervous about meeting her as I know that so much hinges on that relationship. After all, by the end of the process, she’ll probably know more about me and us than anyone else is ever likely to.

The first visit was a getting-to-know-you session. She took a tour of the house and showed us the (endless) forms that will ultimately make up her adoption report. And then she set us some homework – which is to become a theme of these visits I think. We were asked to complete our personal histories. It sounds easier than it is because, by the end of the week, we’d essentially written a couple of dissertations. And not because we’re narcissists – because we’d been asked to write it in accordance with a million prompts. Describe five characteristics of your mum. Describe five characteristics of your dad. What’s their relationship like? How did they parent you? What did you admire? What wouldn’t you repeat? How did they discipline you? Describe your school years. Describe your teenage years. What’s your biggest disappointment? What’s your biggest achievement? What are your happiest times? It went on – and when you times that by two, it’s a mammoth task and a half.

Not altogether pointless though. I mean, I know it’s useful for the adoption people. But it’s also been useful for me, too. What I have now, is a carefully considered personal history. A surprising sense of clarity about who I am today. I might talk tentatively to Sarah about stuff that’s happened in my life but she’d never dream of grilling me on it. I’m not a huge sharer by nature so it’s always on my terms. The social worker’s job however, is to grill you on it. So it’s not a case of “this happened, the end.” It’s: “And why was that? And how did you feel about that? Are you sure?” etc. My nightmare, in fact. But actually, it was ok. Next stop, our family trees and an ecomap. Whatever an ecomap is.

As I go through the adoption process with Sarah, my thinking on the subject is evolving. I’ve lost count of the amount of times someone has said to us: “God, if you were having kids naturally you wouldn’t have to think about any of this stuff!” Well, no, but we’re not. And how about: “So many people just have kids and they’re not ready for it – they just pop them out.” Well, yeah, but is that a good thing? I thought I’d be thinking along these lines too. I thought the whole, long-winded process would frustrate the hell out of me. But the more I learn, the more I think that these children deserve the absolute best second chance they can get. So bring it on.

March 1, 2013
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Application…success!

So it’s been a good month since we sent off our adoption application form. We thought we’d hear back pretty quickly so we’ve been getting a bit despondent. We filled in our form as soon as we got it, spending a fair amount of time agonising over our personal statement. It’s difficult to sum up your life history on a side of A4, even if it’s been largely uneventful. We chose our references – another agonising process. Who to choose? We’re lucky to be in a situation where we’re spoilt for choice. In the end, we opted for a good balance: 2 sisters, 2 boys (one gay, one straight), 2 girls (both with kids). It seemed like a good balance, providing none of them come down with an unfortunate case of tourettes. Anyway, we got it all sorted and then…radio silence.

Until last week, when we got a reassuring email citing “administrative issues.” Fair enough. Then yesterday, we got email invites to create a profile for a secure encryption system. Surely they wouldn’t make us create laborious online profiles just to unlock an email bearing bad news? No. I mean, they might, but it wasn’t bad news in this case. Honestly, the weeks leading up to the email have largely been spent lurching between thinking the worst and sweeping the worst under the carpet. So when I opened that email, my first feeling was genuine elation. It was the first hurdle, hurdled.

Then I felt like someone was sitting on my chest – it’s really happening! The most scary thing of all was that they seem to be rushing the application through. Apparently, they are going to start the assessment prior to our April preparation group. We were told it wouldn’t start until afterwards, giving us a panel date of October. Panel is now July! I have to decorate the new house! The garden is a building site! The new allotment is unprepared! I’m training for an endurance event! We haven’t saved as much money as we wanted! Hence the chest.

My mum told me it would always feel like that. That you’re never ready. That you never get everything done. Spoken by one true control freak to another, I begrudgingly admit she might be right.

The only real fly in the ointment is that the new timings also mean that I had to choose between endangering the application and a once-in-a-lifetime trip with work. With a heavy heart, I pulled out of the trip. It’s the first of many responsible compromises, no doubt. For a child I don’t even know yet. But, child I don’t even know yet, I will choose you every time.