pregnancy | and then there were four

In the year or so that the children had been living with us, we had taken lots of opportunities to talk about being adopted, what being fostered meant and where they came from – what is known as “lifestory” work.

An Organic Process

It turns out that there are lots of times when you can chat through what is happening and use it to reiterate and help embed their understanding of their lifestory. Without making a massive song and dance about it.

It’s Bubbles’ birthday. How old are you now? How many birthday’s have you had now then? Can you remember what you did last year and who you were with?
Christmas. It snowed last year, when you were with Ken and Mary – do you remember building a snowman? What presents did you get? Shall we see if we can find any photos of Christmases you have had in the past?

Whenever they expressed an interest in their lifestory books, or the ones we gave them to introduce ourselves (post matching and before introductions), or the ones that Mary made about their time with their foster family we would go through them and look at the photos and answer any questions they had.

When I asked Bubbles about her lifestory, she replied confidently that she used to live with [BM and BD], then with Ken and Mary, now she lives with us. I would feel glad that she understood what is a complex sequence when you are just a young child and by asking an open question, I could correct any errors that had crept in.

Sometimes, she would ask me questions about her birth family and foster family, and I would answer as best I knew. We started simple and built up depth as she got older.

But Just Because Bubbles Understood…

I imagined that because Bubbles was clued up on her lifestory, that somehow Nibbles would be too. He seemed to understand the various characters involved and even if he had no real memory of Ken and Mary, the way Bubbles did.

I presumed, naively as it turned out, that he was similarly well versed in his lifestory. Then one day, we are walking to pre-school to collect Bubbles and he blurts out something that bursts my bubble.

“I came out of your mouth, mummy”

I stop in my tracks. A smile spreads across my face as I imagine a very wide mouth and then I shudder a bit at the thought of the aftertaste.

“No you didn’t sweetheart” I reply. Then I wonder which bit of ignorance to tackle first.

“Babies don’t come out of ladies’ mouths, Nibbles, they come out from their tummies” I say, without explaining the exact exit route in much detail as I segue straight onto point two. “And you didn’t grow in my tummy, you grew in [BM’s] tummy.”

And of course, there followed an organic lifestory lesson, where I clarified just how all these names and people fitted into his short lifespan and how they would fit in his future.

It’s Not Just About The Books

Many adopters are given lifestory books by their social workers, and they can be useful in those early days, when adopters are finding their feet as parents, as a prompt. I have sat down with my children and read these lifestory books through with them, and they like them mostly because the books are about them.

But for me, the best lifestory opportunities arise in everyday conversation. When we are going to visit Grandma and Bubbles adds “she’s your mummy, mummy” and then we have a quick chat about the mummies in their life.

When you first adopt children, getting lifestory work right can feel like a big deal. How do you broach the subject? What do you say? What do you hold back until they are older? How often do you read their books? I remember feeling afraid of getting the lifestory bit wrong and affecting our relationship further down the line. But I needn’t have worried.

Lifestory work happens all the time (not every single day, but frequently). And the more we, as adopters, can relax about their history, the more our children can relax about it too and see it as no biggie.

When we make it just part of their story, it’s just history. Like where you lived when you were one, or the houses you have lived in. It becomes a part of who they are and where they have come from. It isn’t a big deal, it isn’t something to be afraid of, it is just pieces of a jigsaw.

And I guess it is working. Because last year, Bubbles asked to take a photo of Ken and Mary into school for Show and Tell, and talk about who they are and being adopted.

I couldn’t have been prouder.

How do you use every day prompts to remind your children of their lifestory?

It never really occurred to me that we might have difficulty conceiving a child. In my twenties, the fear of finding myself pregnant had felt very real – as if I was just one forgotten pill or one split condom away from a life-changing child and a difficult conversation with my mum. Even in my late thirties, I still believed that the only thing standing between me and a blue line on a pregnancy test was the rigorous use of contraception.

The Baby Button

I naively imagined that the minute we pressed GO on the “having a baby” button, and threw both caution and contraception to the wind (not literally, that would be littering) that I would get pregnant. I was surprised when we weren’t pregnant the first month after our honeymoon – with a frowny “but we pressed GO” reaction. As if the universe hadn’t realised that we wanted a baby. That surprise turned slowly to sour disappointment when it dragged into a year of being annoyingly on-time with my period.

We tried to boost our chances – using a fertility thermometer, then pee sticks and then various smartphone apps to help us predict the best days to bonk. None of which seemed to have any impact at all – for after nearly two years of trying..

We Were Stubbornly NOT Pregnant

Not to worry, I thought. Time to call in the specialists. I held medical science to an unattainably high standard, after all if they can transplant organs, 3D print new body parts, see into our brains – surely getting a woman pregnant is no biggie? I dreamed of machines that go ping and a raft of X rays that would magically explain the problem and give us the simple answer to sort it out and give us the much-yearned after child. Yet after relatively few tests (not the barrage I hoped for) we were given our official diagnosis:

We Don’t Know

But not in so many words. The official phrase was “unexplained infertility.” They had done some tests and everything seemed in order, so they had no idea why we couldn’t have children. And therein lay the problem – for if they don’t know what is wrong, there is nothing they can do to fix it.

One in Six

It’s a lonely business being infertile. There’s nothing anyone can do to help, and people don’t know what to say or how to talk about it – there’s a lot of staring at the ground as people trip over possible ways to revive the conversation. Yet one in six couples experience problems. Where are they all, and why wasn’t there a place to go and talk with people who understood what I was going through?

They Offered Us Leaflets

We were given a leaflet about counselling and the doctors strongly urged us to consider IVF. Yet, when we discovered the statistics published online, there were no clinics within hundreds of miles who had successfully created a baby from a woman of my age. I was 41 years old and on the IVF scrapheap.

We went away, cried, hugged and I licked my wounded pride. I would never feel a baby grow inside my body, never have stories of cravings, or stretch marks, or a tiny bladder to share. I would never experience a child kicking or being born from my body. And that was no easy dream to give up on.

But We Could Still Have A Family

When Andy and I first started talking about having a family, we would say that we wanted children “if not ours, then someone else’s.” Yet neither of us really thought that we would need to fall back on that option.

And here it was, staring us in the face, the only route left open: adoption.

and then there were four

tales from the land of adoption

Tag Archives: pregnancy

I Came Out Of Your Mouth Mummy

One in Six