I’ve always wanted to be a mum. When I was younger, I didn’t know infertility existed; I just assumed when the time was right, I’d get pregnant. As easy as that.
Except for my husband and me, it wasn’t as easy as that. When things didn’t happen for us naturally, we decided adoption was the way we wanted to create our family.
It’s something I knew a lot about professionally. I’m a legal adviser in magistrates’ courts in the North East and for many years, my job involved dealing with adoption applications.
Unlike the uncertainty, anxiety and pain brought by infertility, starting the adoption process felt like a breath of fresh air. But that doesn’t mean it was a breeze. Becoming a parent via adoption is very different from becoming a parent any other way.
When you become a birth parent, you don’t have to go through endless assessments, or go into great detail about every aspect of your life with someone you hardly know. You don’t have to provide details of your income and outgoings, or wrap up your hopes and dreams about becoming a parent and give them to a panel of people you’ve never met, trusting they’ll be able to tell from a report written about you that you’ll make a good parent.
But that’s the point. You’re not becoming a birth parent. You’re being assessed to see if you can parent a child who’s experienced early life trauma. Any child who can’t live with their birth family has experienced trauma. So it has to be an intrusive and challenging process.
The assessment process went smoothly for us. Parts of it were like therapy, talking through times in our lives that weren’t so great, sharing how we coped and how they’d shaped us into the people we’ve become. It was lovely to talk about things like our childhoods in a level of detail we’d never done with each other before.
Once the assessment was complete and we were approved, I thought we’d be matched with a child straight away. We weren’t and the 10 months it took was by far the hardest part for me.
Whichever road you decide to take to become a parent, it’s rarely straightforward. One of the things that gets most of us through those difficult times is the love and support of family and friends.
We didn’t know anyone who’d adopted, so it was a steep learning curve for us all. I’m very lucky to have a small group of amazing friends, who lived the process with me – it was the same with our immediate families. It made no difference to them how we became parents; they were just as excited to welcome our new addition as they were when my sister was pregnant with my nieces.
That isn’t always the case though. Because adoption isn’t talked about in the way having birth children is, it can be hard to know what to say and how to support your loved one.
So, how do you support a friend or relative who’s adopting? As with most things, communication is key. Talk to them. Ask about the process. What training or books would they recommend? Follow adoption accounts on social media and learn as much as you can.
The adoption process is full of delays and waiting. Check in with them as you normally would and ask how things are going. But particularly during matching, don’t keep asking if there’s any news. They’ll be bursting to tell you when there is. I struggled with the waiting; being constantly asked if there was any news would have made it harder.
Think about the language you use. Comments like “they’ll be damaged goods” and “will they be normal?” were said to me out of ignorance (I hope). But they stayed with me. I can’t imagine how my child would have felt if they had overheard those words.
If your friend shares details of their child’s history with you, they’re trusting you to keep that information safe. Don’t share it, or try and suggest it’s the same as something your birth child has experienced. It can never be the same unless they’ve walked the same path.
The best part of supporting a friend is to be excited with them. Becoming a parent, however it happens, is huge. Help them celebrate and prepare for the biggest challenge of their lives. I’ll never forget how excited my friends were when I told them about our daughter. It was such a special moment.
When we first found out about our eldest daughter, she was six months old. I was 42 and couldn’t believe I was going to be a mother to such a young child. We still had another three months to wait before we met her for the first time so she was almost nine months old when we finally brought her home.
During that time, we met her foster carers, social worker and the local authority’s medical officer. They brought her profile alive and told us all about her. We also had to wait for the match to be approved by the adoption panel. The process took about two years from our first enquiry to the day we met our daughter.
