This is me and my husband Andy (he’s the tall bald one, just in case you are wondering).

In 2013, we adopted two children, a sibling pair, who turned our lives upsidedown and insideout and we had to learn very quickly how to parent two toddlers.

Andy works in IT and I was a self-employed consultant, before I became a full-time adoptive mum and realised that I couldn’t cram my business into nap-times and once the kids were in bed (because I was in bed too, seconds after I’d glugged down a glass of wine).

Two years ago, in an attempt to capture some of the stories that led us to and through the adoption process that were escaping, I started to write a book “and then there were four” to share my experience of becoming a mum, through infertility and then adoption.  It became something I had to do.  Then I stopped, as if I had said enough.  But on our 3rd anniversary as a family in 2016, I posted a taster of the book and the comments I got gave me fresh impetus to finish the book.  So I wrote, edited, hired an editor, read, wrote, edited again.  This blog arose from that book, from deleted chapters (I cut out about 70,000 words from the book because it was starting to look like a meaty Harry Potter tome), from words that never made the book and from the experiences I am going through now, four years on.

If Not Ours…

Andy and I had always wanted to have children and we used to blithely say “If not ours, then someone else’s” without ever imagining that fate would call our bluff.  We met in our thirties, and didn’t get married until we were 38 a piece, so whilst the odds were never in our favour we never expected that we wouldn’t be able to conceive.  Some poking and prodding by doctors from the fertility clinic didn’t solve anything – they diagnosed “unexplained infertility” and suggested we start on IVF straight away.  But we never really warmed to the idea, and when we researched the odds, we knew it wasn’t going to be our path.

So we ended up with the ‘someone else’s’ route and adopted a beautiful sibling pair.

THE END

We thought that the day we bought our beautiful, mischievous, energetic, loving children home would be the end of the story.  That we would immediately be able to write “and they all lived happily ever after” but becoming parents overnight to two children was harder than we imagined and it took us a while to find our feet.

So here I am, a 47 year old mum of two young children, wishing I was ten years younger (and three stone lighter), working out how I fit into the world, speaking up for adoption as an incredible process and creator of families, writing my truth, with as much honesty and emotion as I can, so that more people understand adoption, infertility, parenting, fostering and more.

What’s your story?

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