My 1 Year Blogversary

As with a lot of things I’ve done over the past year I started blogging entirely by accident. I wasn’t particularly active on any social media channels and although I was already an adopter, I had never thought of seeking support online. I had absolutely no idea that there was such an established and friendly community of adopters and fosterers on Twitter. I would probably have thought if I’d have considered it, that it would be difficult to get to know people and it would be full of trolling. I’m suspicious minded like that.

One day, just over a year ago, an e-mail appeared in my inbox offering an opportunity for adopters to become Social Media Champions. You could attend a training session and they would help you to start a blog etc. Having never harboured any desires to blog, the next thing I knew I was replying.

A few days later I got another e-mail saying there had been quite a bit of interest and unfortunately there were not enough spaces for everybody to attend. I had not been successful in getting a place. I was surprisingly disappointed: perhaps I really did want to be a blogger after all?

Not one to take no for an answer I decided to see if I could figure it out for myself. After a few mind-boggling evenings of googling and trying to decipher technical jargon, somehow Adoption: The Bear Facts was born. Since then I have written and posted in my blog every week and I absolutely love it.

One year in I still don’t think I’m a very technologically savvy blogger. My site is fairly basic and I don’t own my own domain. I probably don’t know about half the possible functions of my platform. I have managed to acquire a small group of followers and the lovely people of Twitter are always very kind with their liking and re-tweeting. I have taken some ginger forays into linkys but there is certainly more that I could do to improve my reach.

The thing is that the bit I really love is the writing. I think I’m a little bit addicted to it. Even on the few occasions when I have been organised enough to prepare a couple of posts in advance and I don’t actually need to write anything, I find myself still wanting to. If I can’t fall asleep my brain starts to “write” things. I have mentally written whole posts at 4am before then had to commit them to paper in the morning before I have forgotten them.

I find the writing very therapeutic. I think what it has done for me is allowed me to step outside of our adoption and family life in a virtual way. It helps me to inspect our dynamics and consider any difficulties from afar without actually leaving the house. It has metaphorically turned our lives into a small ball that I can hold out in my hand, in my mind’s eye, and inspect from any angle. When something happens that worries me or needs unpicking in some way, my first reaction now is to write about it. In doing so, I’m usually able to sort out my position and become clear in what should or should not be done.

It also turns out that I’m much better at expressing myself on paper than I am verbally. I am a talker but I feel more comfortable being really honest and talking about my feelings (especially if I’ve been upset) through my writing. I’m probably quite introverted really. I definitely prefer to solve my own problems, rather than letting others help me, which is something our Social Worker highlighted during our assessment. It wasn’t something I knew about myself prior to that as I do like chatting with people and would consider myself quite open. However, she observed that I tend to take more of a listening role and if I have a worry or concern, tend to keep that more to myself. She had some concerns that if I encountered difficulties once we had adopted I might not ask for help: a potential risk factor in any adoption.

Now that I’m aware of it I have to make conscious decisions to draft in a bit of help when I need to. My default is still to have a good analyse by myself though and that is where the blog comes in. I think it has allowed my family and friends a way of knowing how things are going and how we are feeling without me necessarily needing to actually tell them, which is of benefit to all of us. In sharing our ups and downs I often find out that somebody else has been through something similar and that is reassuring too. Many of us adopters are in the same boat.

I have always been a bit of a chronicler: I still have all my cringe-inducing hand-penned teenage diaries; but I’ve never written so others can read it. I like the fact that through my blog I’m building up a huge memory bank of the boy’s childhoods whilst hopefully, at the same time, raising awareness of issues that I consider important. I don’t think there are that many personal accounts of adoption out there, not in book form anyway. There are quite a few of us bloggers about now but as everybody’s experience of adoption is different, the more the merrier. It can only be a good thing to have enough writers out there to build up a really representative range of stories. I try to share ours with a positive voice.

Another issue close to my heart is speech and language difficulties; something that I feel continues to be poorly understood. As a Speech and Language Therapist and Mum to Little Bear who has Developmental Language Disorder, it is something that features quite often in my blog.

Did you know that over 1 million children in the UK meet the criteria for Developmental Language Disorder? Most people haven’t even heard of the diagnosis. In contrast, almost everyone has heard of Autism despite there only being about 700,000 children in the UK who meet that diagnosis. Developmental Language Disorder continues to be poorly understood, missed and misdiagnosed. It is extremely common in children labelled as having “behavioural difficulties” and amongst those who find themselves within the Youth Justice System.

For me, helping Little Bear to navigate school whilst he’s not able to tell me anything about what has happened when things have gone wrong for him, has made the need to raise awareness even more pressing. There have been occasions recently where I have felt he has been wrongly blamed for things because other children are more articulate than he is and he is not able to defend himself verbally. Thankfully his class teacher mostly understands his difficulties but other staff, such as dinner ladies do not and do not take his communication levels into consideration when investigating what has happened.

A well respected Professor in the field of Speech and Language Therapy, Dorothy Bishop (@deevybee) is currently raising funds to make an awareness raising film about Developmental Language Disorder. If you want to contribute or find out more about the project you can follow this link: Raising awareness of DLD

The only down side to blogging is that because I love the writing so much, I can sometimes get a bit lost in it. Sometimes I get my writing done but not my washing! It has also caused me to get ideas about writing becoming more than a hobby… You never know, I’ll have to see what the next year brings.

All that remains is to say a huge thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read or share or comment on any of my posts and especially those of you who read every single week. THANK YOU! I really do appreciate it and it stops me feeling like a little whisper in the wilderness.

 

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