Ten Years Gone

Today marks the tenth anniversary that I became a father for the first time. Of course, my eldest son is older than ten but, as he was adopted, I wasn’t present at the birth. For that matter, I wasn’t even present at the conception. I was recently speaking to a work colleague who adopted children himself and some of his experiences were quite similar whereas others were markedly different. I suppose that, just as no two children are the same, neither are any two adoptions.

In terms of being an adoptive parent I think there are two distinct aspects: the process, both legal and emotional, of adoption and the actual day-to-day activity of being an adoptive family once the social workers and lawyers have faded into the background. Like most people who have adopted our decision was prompted by the fact that we couldn’t have children of our own. After 8 years of marriage and various medical procedures it was becoming increasingly obvious that we were not going to have children ourselves but rather than seeing adoption as a second-best choice I think it is something that we both saw as a positive step. Apart from anything else I think we had both become tired of being the subjects of endless medical tests and procedures. We wanted to have a family – not endless appointments with test-tube wielding doctors and nurses.

The actual process of adoption is very drawn out and often dispiriting. It’s worth it in the end but the initial introductory sessions don’t just point out what might go wrong: they point out everything that can go wrong. From the various literature that I read and from various things that social workers brought up my impression was that we would spend 90% of our time talking with the children about their adoption. In fact it isn’t like that at all and the subject only comes up very occasionally and usually only related to the children’s particular circumstances. I do think that this has helped though as, apart from anything else, it helped to see exactly what kind of things social workers deal with on a daily basis (it also made me realise than some people are not paid anything like as much as they should be).

The approval process for us seemed to go on forever. In fact it was probably only around 10 months in total but after having made a positive choice to go for adoption it seemed a bit galling that we were then questioned about our suitability as parents. I think the most frustrating thing is that it is rather hard to demonstrate one’s parenting skills when the whole reason that we were looking to adopt is that we had failed to become biological parents. The fact is that being a fit and proper parent and having children are two completely different things – if they weren’t there would be very few children who needed adopting in the first place.

Even after we were approved as adopters there was then quite a long time until we were matched with a suitable child. There are thousands of children around the country waiting for adoptive parents and many suitable adopters waiting to be matched but the process doesn’t appear to favour either group – in fact it appears to favour lawyers and various self-interested parties who’s motivations are more aligned to particular ideologies rather than the interests of young and vulnerable people. Maybe that’s unfair of me but it appears to be a feeling felt by many other adopters.

As it was, when we were finally matched it was a chance remark that Nina made to our social worker. Our son’s social worker was, above anything else, a pragmatist and could see far too many children falling into long-term institutional care because of the failings of the system. Even once we were approved I think I had misgivings – largely because of the amount of adoption literature that I’d read. I think what settled my mind was seeing a TV play, Flesh and Blood, staring Christopher Eccleston. He played a man who was investigating his adoptive parents and, whilst his character’s circumstances were not exactly the same as our son’s, I found many of the themes I’d read about reflected in his performance. What made me feel more positive is that he was playing a normal well-adjusted individual who just happened to have been adopted and was having to deal with that. The play wasn’t particularly about adoption as such but I would highly recommend it.

As for adoptive family life? Well, it’s difficult to say but I don’t really regard us as being any different from any other family. We have separately adopted three children and as a family they sometimes get on, whilst at other times they fight like cat and dog. At times they have displayed behaviour that I have wondered whether adoption may be a factor but generally they show the range of behaviour that any other children show. Our oldest boy has now started high school and I do wonder whether any issues will surface there but then I think that period can be problematic for any child. As for me, I don’t regret adoption at all – in fact I think it was one of the best decisions we made.