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What I Wish I’d Known BEFORE I Adopted

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Dear Prospective Adopter

I remember being where you are now – the heady excitement of what is to come, the giddy nerves of the all-important Panel, the heart-melting magic of Matching. It is one fabulous adventure.

When I took my children home I was over the moon and under prepared.  If only I had known then what I know now, those first few weeks would have been easier and more joyful – which is the aim of this blog.

May it help you through the first unsettling months when it’s weird and your life feels unreal and you’re not yourself and keep wondering why won’t they just eat their tea/ sleep/ stop screaming/ love me?

1. GREAT SLEEP IS YOUR TOP TRUMP

The children are important.

But they need a parent who is confident, capable and can access all their brain.  And that only happens if you’ve had enough sleep. A half-asleep, over-caffeinated parent with the emotional stability of dynamite is destined to create a day where you end up blubbing “that could’ve gone better” as you scrape pizza off the ceiling and tears off your chin.

Grab sleep greedily and without apology whenever and wherever you can.

  • Your child is napping?  Nap.
  • Your child is in bed – go to bed early.  7.30pm early if you need to (I did).
  • Your child is watching TV?  Snooze on the sofa.
  • You keep waking up in the night?  Use earplugs if you need to.
  • You can’t get back to sleep once woken?  Put your partner on night-duty.

Get as much sleep as you need to wake happy and raring to go.

Sleep is more important than ironing, hoovering, tidying, watching your favourite TV shows, mowing the lawn, answering emails, cleaning the bath, painting your nails, shaving or going on Facebook to let people know you are still alive.

The best mum or dad you can be is a well slept one.

2.  YOU ARE NOT ALONE

God bless Twitter.

I was a bit “meh” about twitter until I discovered the adoption and fostering twitterati (thanks to @First4Adoption).  If you are struggling with any aspect of parenting, adoption, Panel, Matching, Introductions, food fussiness, sleep or potty training, there is someone who will help on twitter.

Open an account – with some vague name like “adopter73.” No-one will ever know who you are (and your social worker can relax). Then load twitter onto your phone, follow a few people (I’m @emmalgsutton, check out who I follow and follow the ones whose posts you like) and join in.

Just recently a brand new adopter, on day 2 of her forever family asked if it was normal for her children to “feels like little strangers”.

The Twitterati replied that it was normal for them to feel like strangers and that love takes time. Maybe that helped her sleep at night, maybe it just took a worry away, maybe she could then step back and think “that is totally normal, we are going to be fine”.

  • If you want to know what to feed a fussy child – ask twitter
  • If you are having a bad day – tell twitter, we’ll sympathise and send hugs
  • If you want to know if continued contact with foster carers can work – ask twitter
  • If you feel like something is out of kilter  – tell twitter and we’ll share our experiences

Sound off, ask for support when you are feeling low, share your concerns, your worries, your hopes, your dreams and build a community of people who know what you are going through.

I only wish I had found them four years ago when I started my forever family, they would have made my life so much easier.

With Twitter, you don’t have to do this on your own.

3. LOVE IS NOT LIKE MAKING A CUPPA

Loving your child isn’t as quick as making a cup of tea. Your family appears “ready-made” when the children come home for good, yet love takes longer to blossom.

As giddy as I was about dating my husband (way back then), it took months for us to truly fall in love, and it will take time for you to love your child/ren. There’s no timetable. There’s no rush.

My daughter loved my husband and rejected me for a while. Despite my confident assertion at Panel that we would ‘deal with any one-parent attachment issues as they arose’, it still had me crying in the morning when she shouted at me to get out of her bedroom.

  • You might love one of your children first. That’s okay. The love will come.
  • Your partner might fall in love before or after you do.  Still okay.
  • Your children might love one parent before the other.  That’s normal too.
  • With two parents and two children, one day you will all love each other to bits, but it won’t happen on the same day nor overnight.

Let love grow.

4.  WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET

During Introductions, the children played contentedly on their own. They were content, happy and only approached their foster carers Ken and Mary when they needed help or food.  They pottered around the house and we shadowed their move from one area to another. They read, played in the sandpit, chatted to us, not all that bothered whether or not we joined in. They were independent, confident, outgoing.

Yet children we’d seen in their video and at the foster carers’ house were not the children who moved into our house.

They became dependent, cautious and stuck to us like chewing gum to hair. They whined and Nibbles went ballistic when we said No, spinning around on the floor like a Catherine-Wheel whilst Andy and I stared at each other in awe and shock.

The move changed our children.  And we hadn’t expected it.  I naively presumed that we could transfer the children from the video to our home.  But they needed more reassurance, more attention, more of us than they had ever needed during Introductions and that took some getting used to.

It took months before Nibbles and Bubbles were like the children we saw in their video.

5. ONE THING AT A TIME

It is all to easy to try to create a perfect family from the moment they move in. Don’t.

I tried to be the best possible parent I could be – with homemade cakes, delicious and nutritious meals made from fresh ingredients, lots of playing together with stickers and playdough and trips to the library and park, with little TV, no shortcuts, no giving in, clear boundaries, walking places without using the pram, whilst constantly battling the influx of toys into every crevice of my house (and even once in my bra).  All from Day One. I made myself miserable.

Choose happy over everything: laughter over tidiness, bouncing on their bed over fears of them falling off, messy fun over tidy boredom, reading over ironing, cuddles over clean clothes.

  • So what if you feed them spaghetti hoops for every teatime for a week or a month?  In ten year’s time will that have caused any long-term damage?
  • So what if you let them watch TV for an hour every morning so you can shower without an audience?  Yes I know you don’t want to set a precedent (I can’t tell you how many times I worried about that), but is it really setting them up for a life of crime?
  • So what if they don’t have a bath for a week because you don’t have the right bubble bath?They might pong a bit, but baby wipes work wonders and do you really want to fight that battle just before bedtime?

Don’t let reporters in the Daily Mail stoke your guilt about feeding them fish fingers and drinking wine of an evening. Do what needs to be done and leave the rest until you have got this bit sussed.

Build your family one solid foundation at a time, and start with love and laughter.

Go for happy.  And that includes YOU.

YOU MATTER

It’s easy to focus on the children when they turn up in your family.  How can you not, when you’ve waited this long to become a mum or a dad?  Yet when we forget about ourselves, when we let our own needs slide, then we are doing our family a disservice.

Sleep, food, laughter and love. Those things matter far more than how much you spend on a pram, or how tidy your house is, or if your ironing gets done.

Make your life simple.  Make it easy to be happy.  Make your kids and yourself smile, as often as you can.

What do you wish you’d known before you adopted?  Comment below and they might make it into “what I wish I’d known… part two”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shrunk In A Hot Wash

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I am imprisoned.  Trapped in a tiny triangle of land, no more than a mile on the longest side.  The corners are my house, school/ nursery and the supermarket.

My Life Has Shrunk

My days involve walking from home to school/ nursery, and back again.  Twice a week, I go beyond that short line with a trip to the supermarket for more cucumber and washing powder, then it’s back to school again.  Five days a week, three times a day, I walk along the same route, and it’s a miracle there isn’t a dip in the pavement where I’ve worn it thin.

Whilst the journey rarely varies, every day it’s different, due to the inventive minds of my children. Yesterday we all rode invisible unicorns to school until mine became lame and couldn’t gallop any more (I was too tired to keep up the pace).

I Have Shrunk

But this house-school-supermarket-arrest preys on my mind – I fear I’ll be infected with village mentality, because this patch of land is an island of little significance in the ‘grand scheme of things’ whose centre (in the UK) is the chaotic metropolis of London.

This tract of land is both nothing (a teeny dot on a map) and everything (my entire universe) and my mind struggles with that paradox.

Every so often I strap the kids into the car and make it all the way across town, celebrating that I have escaped the well-worn rut that is my life. Over the invisible fence by – another mile.  Woo hoo!  I feel like a different woman to the chemical engineer who delivered complex training to big name companies in places like Oslo, Lisbon, Kalamazoo and Dublin.

A New Richness

It’s over a decade since Andy and I moved into this street.  Ten years of nodding or saying hello and that was the sum of our acquaintance with the people in this street.

Yet this repetition creates a richness, a new depth to my experience.  My neighbourhood has come alive again.  I notice the subtle changes from month to month: where the snowdrops grow, the slipperiest corner to avoid if the ground is icy, where the cat with no tail lives and which gates hide barking dogs.

Memories Ingrained in the Pavement

“That’s a fire station” declared Nibbles confidently one morning.  As I look to where he’s pointing, I admit that the red double garage looks a bit like a fire station.  Now I can’t walk past without smiling at the memory.  Over there’s a hole where  Nibbles and Bubbles stuffed all the twigs they could find until it was fit to bursting and I had to convince them to find another.  Here’s the spot they lay down protesting they couldn’t walk another step.

But it’s more than just familiarity and memories.  There are new faces, new names, new connections.  Its the people who bring it this triangle to life.

People Make a Neighbourhood

There’s grandma Dee in her downstairs flat.  We wave to Dee, and talk to her if the window is open, or mime shivering when the weather is cold.  Sometimes we see her at the bus stop on her way to the shops, or sneak a peek at the new wallpaper in her lounge once she has her flat redecorated.  Once she invited me in and we talked about our families.

There’s a couple who sit on their front step with steaming cups of tea and cigarettes.  One day, when we saw them both on the way to nursery and on the way back, Nibbles stated with wide-eyed astonishment “they’re still there!” I laughed and suggested that they had maybe gone inside in the interim.

Karl tells us about his model airplanes, sharing tales of broken wings or tail pieces and things I know nothing about, with his friendly wagging dog who is stocky and almost never jumps up. When the kids aren’t with me, we talk about his legs and the son he hasn’t heard from in over a decade.

Lydia once shouted at Nibbles for treading on the pebbles on her drive (and I frowned with a harrumph and a ‘what’s her problem?’).  But since her initial outburst, she softened.  Now she waves, remarks how well behaved the children are, as she tends the flowers in her pots and dusts her china.

New Roots

For years I just lived here.  My house is here.  That was about it.  I introduced myself to my neighbours when I moved in, or they did, then promptly forgot their names.

But the children kept asking “what he called?” about the man next door, until I gave in and asked (on their behalf). He’s Charlie, but the children call him “Mr Charlie” which gives a sense of grandeur and respect I really like. Until they shout and scream “Mr Charlie” incessantly through the window at him as he’s leaving his house, which I like a lot less.

And in peopling the walk, I have found new roots, a new sense of belonging, a new sense of camaraderie with the streets in which I live and walk.

Get To Know Your Neighbours

Try it.  Walk to the shop every day to get a paper or a pint of milk, and you’ll discover a whole new world, right on your doorstep.  Full of stories, people, smiles, friendships and community.  Stop once in a while and say more than just “hello” and you can unearth stories that will stay with you for a lifetime.

I am so glad I have my children, because through them, I have found a new me.  A connected me.  A me with roots.  Something I haven’t felt since I was a child myself, falling into the pond at Mr Moon’s house and playing with the Blocks next door.

In shrinking the fibres of my life in a hot wash, I have found a new warmth, a new hygge that was here all along.  A felted mesh of memories, imbued with cosy familiarity, inhabited by people I know.  Who knew that shrinking could be so enriching?

 

 

 

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