Three years ago, a miracle came to live with us. Two years old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, charming and cheeky, she was naughtier than a bag of monkeys. Looking like an exact mixture of my husband and me, it seemed she was meant to be ours. “She’s perfect for you,” you told us, and you were right. Our daughter has grown into a beautiful girl, with an adorable and loving nature, now naughtier than two bags of monkeys. You brought us together, and for that we can never repay you.
The adoption process took two years: a frustrating, invasive, degrading experience, but with the most sublime outcome. Much like pregnancy, I think, we forgot about the pain and started the application for our second child.
It was easier this time: you already knew everything about our family background, schooling, past relationships, physical ailments, sex life, troubles in our relationships with our parents, friends and each other. “The process is much faster now,” you told us. “It will only take six months.” That was 21 months ago.
You couldn’t know what was about to happen. You couldn’t foresee that the adoption process would freeze as a result of comments from one judge. You couldn’t control the actions of your council, like all councils, to interpret those comments to mean “adoption is the last resort”. Even after that judge made a clarifying statement to try to get the process moving again, you couldn’t know that, in nine months of looking, you could offer us only one child, who had severe physical disabilities that we couldn’t manage.
We know you feel like we do. None of us wants children removed from birth parents unnecessarily, or languishing in environments that are not, and never will be, good enough. But most of all we do not want this pendulum of knee-jerk reaction resulting in social workers rushing to remove children from families in the light of the Baby P case, only to desperately shun that course in the light of another judge’s comments. Surely the policy on permanently removing a child from its birth family must be immutable. It cannot change according to the prevailing mood of the judiciary, the government or the media.
I asked you whether, in today’s adoption environment, our daughter would have been given to us. Her birth father has a reading age of nine, her birth mother a reading age of seven. The last form the birth mother completed was written by her social worker as she cannot write. It said her aspirations for our daughter were for her to be happy and “to get a job some day”. You answered “of course”, but how can we be sure?
You told us not to give up hope. But we know there are childless couples being approved as adopters every day who are more attractive prospects than us. And even though we are competing with them, we would give up our place in line: everyone deserves to have the unbelievable joy that we have been blessed with in our daughter. But there is no line and no place to give up. There is just a jumbled mess of sad, confused would-be parents with their lives on hold. Just like us.
I catch myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be funny if while I was writing this we received an email from you”, and my heart blooms momentarily for no reason. I have to squash it. I can’t spend the next nine months like the last nine; checking my emails a hundred times a day waiting for a message saying our dream has come true. You never tell us that. You can’t.
I can’t spend any more time having imaginary conversations telling you how frustrated and miserable I am. This really has to be our last one-sided conversation. Can you please just be honest with us and tell us to give up hope? Because that would be the kindest thing you could do.
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