Prep Groups

Our lovely voluntary adoption agency has now asked me several times to come along to prep groups to speak to prospective adopters. I like doing it and I went again last week. I have since been reflecting on the role of visiting adopters in prep groups and the things which are said and unsaid.

I think my appearances at such things total 5 or 6 now, over a 3 year period. Each time I’ve been I think I’ve probably told a slightly different story. I haven’t changed any facts but I’ve naturally talked about different things depending on the point we were at in our journey, things that were happening around the time of my visit or how I was feeling on the given day. I’m not quite sure how I managed to speak at them at all, the first time I did it, as it was only a couple of months into our adoption and certainly during the bit I now refer back to as ‘The Bad Bit’. I can see myself in my mind’s eye, sitting in front of those strangers, trying to be strong, for them as well as me, and I’d like to go back and give myself a hug. It was hard to do but I felt it was important.

I don’t find it hard now really. I tend to get emotional when I talk about Little Bear’s progress and how far things have come, rather than when I talk about the hard bits. Because I do talk about the hard bits. I have worried that my Agency will add me to some sort of black list after one of my visits as I’m so graphic with the truth. However, as I’ve got braver and more knowledgeable, I now feel that if a group of prospective adopters can’t handle our story in all its murky glory, they are perhaps not cut out for adoption. Our story is by no means the scariest you will hear but I have certainly seen fear in people’s eyes when I’ve been telling it. Obviously I don’t set out to instil fear; I would never purposefully scare anyone. However, I don’t see my role as treating people with kid-gloves either. Prospective adopters need to know the truth. They need to know what real adoptive families are like and that includes hearing the less palatable details of some of the challenges we face.

I try to give a balanced narrative. After all, I think our adoptive family is pretty awesome and the highs have been more than we could have asked for. In the most part we are very happy. But we have had some really hard times, we have been challenged to our core and felt a desperation you would never associate with parenthood. Prospective adopters need to know that this ain’t no fairy tale. I can’t have them going home thinking you pick the perfect child, they move in, no one looks back and you all skip away into the sunset. That would be doing a great injustice to them and their future children.

I know that listening to one adopter probably won’t make great shifts in a person’s thinking and people will hear what they want to hear to some extent anyway but I hand them my truth, because I think I have a responsibility to do so, and it is up to them how they use it.

There are a few key points that I would want to make to any prospective adopter and I suppose I may not have been consistent in doing so when I’ve popped up at the groups because of how the questioning has gone or what has been on my mind at the time. These are things that are not necessarily covered as a matter of course in the groups but I think are important for people to hear:

Firstly, you might not love your child straight away. I think it can be easy to assume you will, because the stars have brought you together in the matching process and you suspect everything happens for a reason. You may well be meant for each other but, honestly, it can take time to feel that. When you have been through a lengthy matching process and you are nervous and excited about finally meeting your child, not feeling that love can really throw you off course emotionally. Guilt, doubt, it all creeps in. I always try to remember to say to prospective adopters that it doesn’t matter if that love isn’t there at the start, or even after a few days or weeks. I think it took months for us. It is normal not to fall in love with a child you’ve just met. They are a stranger and it is ok if it feels that way for a while. Don’t beat yourselves up about it, love will come.

The second thing I try to tell people is difficult to discuss in a different way. It’s about money. Our experience was that adoption is costly. We were extremely fortunate that it wasn’t a precluding factor but at the time, we kept thinking about people on low-incomes and certainly felt it would have been unaffordable for some. I’m aware that people’s experiences are very different depending on where they adopt or where their children are in foster care and some areas seem more able/ willing to reimburse costs than others. Our experience was of clocking up hundreds of miles in the car driving back and to meetings, panels etc. including crossing a toll bridge. We did get those costs reimbursed in the end but we were out of pocket for a good 6 months. We also paid for our own accommodation as introductions were several hours from home. Whilst away, we obviously had to eat and go on days out etc. to keep two small children busy (all a little more difficult when you don’t have your own home to use) which added up cost-wise. We weren’t offered any sort of living allowance (I know some places do offer it) and we didn’t get a settling-in grant for car seats/ bed/any essential equipment we needed for Little Bear. The total costs were greater than you might anticipate and the LA wouldn’t cover anything more than petrol. There isn’t much that can be done about this (despite the rights or wrongs) but I think prospective adopters should be aware so they can ask the relevant questions and consider the practicalities.

I guess the third thing I try to get across is that in adoption, nothing is solved quickly. I am a great believer that children can and do recover from trauma but that recovery doesn’t happen the moment a child steps over the threshold. It doesn’t happen if you deny the trauma exists or if you attempt to forget the past. Helping a child to recover from trauma is a lengthy, challenging process, which requires a high level of perseverance. It takes years, not days or weeks. Adoption is a long game and you need to go into it prepared to work really, really hard.

If I haven’t made people run screaming from the room with all that, plus tales of violence and developmental delay, I feel they deserve the reward of hearing some positivity. That’s the point at which I get a bit choked up and oogey-gooey. I know that one of these times, the dam will break and I will weep in a room full of increasingly terrified people but none of us wants that.

My final point is around questions. When I’ve finished talking in a slightly uncomfortable monologue, people really need to ask some questions. Not just because it’s pretty awkward for me if I bare my soul and the entire group reacts with silence but because if you are going through adoption assessment, you should have at least one question. In my opinion, you should have a gazillion and one questions. Adoption is a huge, life-altering decision. I have no idea how you could be faced with all that reality and not be able to form one question. When I go along to the groups, it is with the intention of answering any question as honestly as I can. I don’t mind at all if people ask me so many questions I have to stay longer than planned. Questions are good. Some people may never have met another adopter before; they should bleed me dry of information. They should ask any obscure or difficult or mundane questions they might have. I honestly think that any adopter who has agreed to go along to prep groups would be ok with being asked all the questions.

Last week was a brilliant group. They were really engaged and asked many, many questions and it felt like it boded well for their future. Once, a while ago, I finished my awkward monologue and nobody spoke. Not one person. I invited questions, made a joke of the silence but not. One. Person. Spoke. The Social Workers did, obviously, but none of the prospective adopters. I thought it was me and my story and to be honest, I didn’t agree to do prep groups again for a while after that. There was no satisfaction in it at all and I went home feeling worse than when I’d gone, which is not something you hope for in a voluntary role. So, please, if you are a prospective adopter and an experienced adopter comes to speak to you at prep groups, please speak with them. Drum up at least one question. Do it out of courtesy for them but do it for yourself too. Prep groups are part of the assessment process and the Social Workers will be observing. Plus, surely there is just loads of stuff you want to know?

The funny thing is, is that despite all my honesty and re-living all our dramas for the prospective adopters, I still get really excited for them too. All the hopes and dreams of their future lives with their future children are infectious. I remember it so well and despite everything, I’d do it all again to get my Little Bear.

 

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Pressure to Know

Right from the start of the adoption process I have been aware of the need to get knowledgeable. I mean, adopting is a massive life-changing decision and you should certainly go into it with your eyes wide open. I think my quest for knowledge started even before the process itself. I sought out adopters with zeal and bombarded them with a gazillion questions. I googled different agencies and scoured their websites. I kept meerkat-alert for anything adoption or fostering related on TV or in magazines.

Once the process-proper began the reading came thick and fast. Our Social Worker would give us relevant articles to read or suggested You Tube clips to watch. Prep groups were fairly intense and threw up several new issues we would need to research, even though the safeguarding side of things was already familiar to me through my work in the NHS. Reading lists were given; book suggestions made.

I think at that point my focus in reading was attachment theory (Vera Fahlberg, Kim Golding) and real accounts of adoption or fostering (Sally Donovan, Casey Watson, Cathy Glass).

I suppose as we came to the end of the process and towards meeting Little Bear I probably thought I was fairly well prepared; that I at least had a good grounding in relevant theory.

Then we met Little Bear and it is quite hard to describe what happened. Knowing the theory we had gleaned so far was helpful and we probably did apply it. Well, I think we did. I don’t really know because that period is a bit of a blur to me. I suspect we used the theory in a subconscious, surviving minute to minute kind of a way. I do remember routinely ‘meeting’ with Grizzly of an evening to dissect the day’s events and to analyse why things had gone wrong, what might be behind Little Bear’s behaviour and what we might be able to do about it.

We were certainly reflecting (wracking our souls) even if we did not turn to literature for solace. I think I may have dipped into the books I already had a couple of times but they didn’t have chapters called “what to do when you don’t love your child straight away” or “when your child says ‘go away stupid’ at 3am and throws things at you” or “ways of staying calm when you are fully losing your shit” so I’m not sure they were doing what I needed them to.

I hadn’t yet discovered adoption Twitter which may well have plugged that gap for me had I have known about it. Discovering it and the world of blogging was something of a watershed moment when it did happen in January 2016 (about 5 months in). It is hard to quantify what I have learned from online adoption resources but I guess one of the crucial things has been an adoption reality check. I am now much more aware of the variation in children’s needs; the variation in support; the whole spectrum of issues faced by adopters as well as the campaigning that goes on to improve things. Prior to that watershed moment I was quite naively unaware of the struggle that many face in attempting to traverse their adoption journey.

My online life has also brought issues to my attention that I likely wouldn’t otherwise encounter or consider such as the fact that some people view adoption as a scandalous and incredibly negative act; that adoptees struggle to have their own voice; that contact with birth relatives is not black and white and cut and dried. That some adopters have exceeded their contact agreements and have met, befriended and even invited members of their child’s birth family into their homes was shockingly revelatory.

Throughout the months and years since, my thirst for knowledge has not been quenched. I continue to scan the landscape meerkat-like for any adoption-related information, stories or articles. There have been further watershed moments along the way. One was reading an article by Beacon House (The Repair of Early Trauma A “Bottom Up” Approach) which caused the penny to finally drop that Little Bear has experienced trauma. Looking back I feel pretty stupid that I didn’t know that before (more of this in a minute). I suppose that my reading about attachment only ever told me part of the story.

Discovering Beacon House altogether was brilliant and I have since read many more of their articles and infographics as well as plundering their online downloadable resources which I like to tell others about too.

Reading that article led me to other books. Controversially I had never read any Dan Hughes (though I had obviously heard of him) and now felt it was time to welcome him and Bruce Perry into my life. Although the principles of therapeutic parenting seemed fairly instinctive to me, I had somehow never actually read about them.

At some point I also attended a Nurtured Heart course and became a fully paid up member of Adoption UK, opening up their magazine to me (another great source of information).

The problem, because there is one, with all of this is that the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know. Ignorance is pretty blissful. I still have the same desire and the same drive to be knowledgeable but the further into that quest I get, the harder it seems to achieve. The end goal of knowing everything there is to know about adoption seems to move ever further from me as I realise exactly what that entails. It initially seemed like a narrow field that I would absorb quickly but as I wade in a little further, I can see the field widening out and including all these things that I never thought it would.

I can remember being 12 and being quite sure that I knew as much as grown-ups. I was convinced I had this whole knowing about life thing sewn up. I have a sneaking feeling I continued with that level of quiet confidence throughout my teens and twenties (obviously with moments of deep angst thrown in for good measure). As I reach the latter end of my thirties I fear I was incredibly vain in my youth as it is becoming increasingly apparent that there were many things I really didn’t know or understand about life in general.

As I’m getting older, I’m clearly not getting wiser and unfortunately it feels the same way about adoption. The more I find out, the more I realise I didn’t know before. Having the watershed moments I’ve described, and others like them, can actually be pretty painful. You realise you were merrily trotting along being ignorant about certain things and that realisation can be unbearably cringe-inducing. I seem to be a bit prone to self-doubt since entering parenthood and sometimes gaining knowledge only serves to undermine my confidence in the whole thing.

Being a parent and specifically an adopter seems to invite a high degree of self-critique. Are we really doing everything we can to meet our child’s needs? Do we have all the right knowledge and information behind us?

I often look to more experienced adopters and am in awe of their expertise. I know that their savoir-faire has been borne from necessity and often being the only person who is fully-versed in their child’s needs, which is a great sadness, but it has essentially led to them becoming extremely knowledgeable.

I’m lucky in that, so far, I have always had access to professionals who understand attachment, trauma etc. and I have not had to be a lone voice, cramming knowledge in order to fight for my child. I have encountered people who know little but have always had the back-up of people who know lots.

I am also lucky that I work with some of the most knowledgeable and experienced social workers that there are (I’m not exaggerating). This is a double-edged sword that offers me a huge, unparalleled resource but, at times, another reason to doubt the depth of my own knowledge.

Whilst I can’t help doubting myself (it creeps in without my permission), the sensible bit of me tells me I mustn’t allow it to cloud my decisions and approaches. Parenting is much better carried out naturally and without a negative voice over your shoulder. Theory is essential and knowledge is power but I need to remember that whatever I do or don’t know I am walking the walk. This parenting lark is happening. It is not waiting about for me to read another book. I am doing it. I have been doing it for some time.

I know what I know. I probably need to work a bit harder to accept that what I know is not everything there is to know. I may never know that. I need to accept that as I gain in knowledge it will expose gaps in what I knew before. That is inevitable. It is probably an essence of being human and one of those things that I thought I knew about when I was 12 but actually didn’t.

Becoming an adopter has involved a steep learning curve and is most likely going to continue to for a long time yet. I shall endeavour to scale the curve, absorb the knowledge and try not to undermine myself as I go.