Horror stories and inspiration
So having decided
that adoption was something which we were now seriously looking into
there remained the question of... how? And who? And what? And
where...? A couple of evenings’ Googling led us to the Children’s
Services page of our local authority’s website. And here began
something which we came to see as a repeating theme over the
following few years. There was certainly lots of info on the website
although none of it seemed geared towards answering the basic
questions of a keen young couple keen to follow the adoption route.
What there was seemed to be, at best, tangential to our basic
questions and, at worst, downright misleading and contradictory.
Over some time
we’ve spoken to couples who have gone through (or are going
through) the adoption process within our own area, through local
authorities in other parts of the country and with national agencies.
One theme seems to recur far too often. That for most of the process
they’ve got little idea what’s going on, that when they DO think
they know what’s going on their understanding is subtly (or indeed,
wildly) wrong and that the social workers and support staff they talk
to have no more of a definitive view of the process...
OK, I should step
back and caveat that dismissive statement... All that being true, we
do hold our own authority in the highest regard and applaud the
difficult and complex job that they do with increasingly limited
resources. The social workers themselves are unsung heroes and we
wouldn’t have swapped “Denise”, our social worker, for all the
world.
It’s just that
there didn’t seem to be any consistency in the process or its
application. What were described to us as hard-and-fast rules seemed
to be flouted in the case of other couples. What was described by one
social worker as an absolutely necessary part of the process was
skipped over in practice. In the end it all worked out and muddled
through but the inefficiencies in the system were constantly
frustrating – particularly for two people for whom efficient
management was part of the fabric of their working lives. Still, we
got there in the end.
After much
increasingly tortuous web-surfing we decided it would simply be
better just to ring up our local authority and hang onto the phone
until we got hold of a real person who could answer our basic
questions... like how do we actually apply to adopt.
And then came the
first of a number of frustrating waiting periods. It turned out that
we’d just missed the most recent “adoption open evening” -
information evenings for prospective adopters just starting out on
the journey. Not to worry, there’d be another one in two or three
months. Great. Still, our names were on the list and we had finally
placed our feet on the first rung of the ladder.
When the open
evening finally came around we sat in a hall with about a hundred or
so other prospective adopters. All fresh faced and hopeful. And then
the horror stories started... To say that the content of the evening
could be described to have been a bit on the dour side would be an
understatement.
First we heard how
difficult the journey into adoption can be. We were warned about the
terrible problems that many looked-after kids carry from their birth
families into their adopted ones. We were given an insight into the
lives of the birth parents whose children are taken into care. We
were told that the process of being approved would be long, hard and
invasive. As the evening progressed those brightly scrubbed faced
around the room started to become paler and paler.
Of course, there
was talk about how rewarding it is giving a child from a difficult
background a new start but somehow it all seemed rather overshadowed.
An open or shut case...
For me,
personally, the most enlightening element of the evening was the
description of the “open adoption” process – the fact that
parents are encouraged to be open with their adopted children about
the realities of their history; to integrate this into the child’s
personal history and their understanding of their own identity. For
us this was a relief as it seemed to answer the concerns seeded in
our minds by the difficult adoptions which we had come across in the
past. Where crises had arisen it had been an artefact of the old,
closed style of adoption – a sudden realisation in mid teens that
many of the givens within the child’s life had been either subtly
massaged or were founded on, well let’s call a spade a spade, a
lie. Emotional meltdowns and general family trauma then ensued... We had both seen that happen on one occasion - in a truly Eastenders Christmas Episode manner. Yikes!
On the other hand,
the “open adoption” route seemed positively enlightened to us.
Clearly not to all. As the idea of life-story work, regular contact
with birth parents, siblings and other birth family members was
outlined the last remaining vestiges of colour drained from several
faces around the room...
But not from ours.
Chatting straight afterwards we both realised that we had shared the
same feeling all the way through evening. An inner dialogue which
said, “Yes, I can do this.” “Yes, I can buy into this.” “It’s
not gonna be easy but... Yes, this is right for me.” While others
sloped off, tails visibly between their legs (presumably straight to
the nearest hostelry for a stiff recuperative), we took the
opportunity to chat to the social workers, pick up literature and
find out how we could apply for the next stage of the process.
