What if they don’t like me?

We’re sat in the parked car, fidgeting, having arrived ridiculously early for this Important Day. It’s 915 a.m. and we have a vast expanse of forty-five minutes to kill. So. Much. Time. Today we get to meet our children for the first time. And I’m bricking it.

My stomach can’t decide if the sharks or the butterflies are winning. I can’t sit here fidgeting for that long, but what else can we do? Why not go for a drive? I suggest What if we get lost? And my brain decides to catastrophise — what if we drive off the edge of the known universe into a not-on-the-map black hole from which even a GPS signal and Google Maps cannot rescue us?

What if we’re late?

We drive just a few streets away. We sit. And fidget. And check our phones. And post on social media. And wait. Out of sight. We get out of the car and go for one of the most bland, pointless walks ever. Well, not entirely pointless, because there are now ten fewer minutes to burn.

Today we will meet our children

Our children. They don’t feel like our children at all. They aren’t really our children, except they are, but then they’re wards of the adoption agency, so they’re not, but we’ll be looking after them, so they are, and it’s all quite confusing.

I can’t stop thinking about the moment we’ll see them for the first time.

• What if all my dreams and hopes come crashing down around me and I think, ‘I can’t do this?’
• What if they’re crying and whining and awful?
• What if they ignore us?
• What if they don’t like us?
• What if they run and scream and hide and refuse to come out?
• What if they hate us?
• Worse still, what if they like him and not me?

I have no idea what to expect

It’s now 10 a.m. (turns out you can kill time — just worry incessantly) and we drive up to the house. Their foster carer Ken opens the door and welcomes us in with a twinkling smile.

‘Take a seat in the lounge. I think they’ve something planned,’ he says.

That sounds promising or ominous or something (the sharks and butterflies cannot agree). My heart is pounding, my mouth is dry. I perch nervously on the edge of the sofa, waiting for I don’t know what; I’m a child waiting outside the headmaster’s door.

The lounge door opens and in tumbles a huge bunch of flowers — a pink riot of colour and petals and leaves that’s moving all of its own accord. Then I spy her. Beneath this colossal display, wobbling in her efforts to hold it, is a tiny girl with cascades of curls. The flowers drown her, yet she bravely carries them straight to me. She shyly hands them over and in her sing-song voice says four incredible words that I will never forget:

‘Flowers for my mummy’

She looks at me, and I break out a smile before my hand flies to my mouth in shock and surprise. A lifetime of tears well up in my eyes, and despite my promise that I would not cry, tears pour silently down my cheeks. It’s far from the first impression I wanted to make.

Happy tears

• A tear for all the times that I went to bed despondent.
• A tear for all the times that my period came and I lost faith I’d ever be a mummy.
• A tear for all the times I wondered why I couldn’t grow a child.
• A tear for a child who never made it past the few cells.
• And a tear of utter relief that a child has finally said that word to me.

The word I have wanted to hear and thought I might never hear. The word I do not own despite all the preparation.

Mummy

The most amazing word in the whole dictionary. I thought it would take weeks or months for them to utter it, and it was the fourth word she said. Even better, she used ‘my’ before it, binding me to her in a relationship. I feel complete in a whole new way. I stutter a broken ‘thank you’, but she’s already gone.

She and her brother follow Ken back to the kitchen, where he’s making tea.

Andy sits on the floor, and when they return, these two tiny children are crawling all over him, hugging him and talking to him, tugging at his shirt, smearing dirty fingerprints over his glasses, asking questions but not waiting for the answers, bringing him books to read and toys to play with. I sit back, dabbing my tears and drinking everything in. They take to Andy like pandas to bamboo, and I feel that his idea of sitting on the floor was far better than my bursting into tears.

I dry my face and take a deep breath: we have fifty-seven minutes left to start getting to know these miniature people who are our little boy and little girl.

Our children.

I still can’t believe it

This is an extract from the book “and then there were four” available via Amazon in ebook (Kindle) and paperback versions. It’s an unputdownable, unforgettable rollercoaster through infertility, adoption and parenting.

What happened the day you met you children?  Share your experiences below.