Stresses and Annoyances

Some days I give up trying to justify why I might be a little bit more stressed about a situation than A. N. Other parent would be. Sometimes I get fed up with being told that it is “normal behaviour”, that it is “what I signed up for”, that “all children are like that”. It’s a situation which I’m sure many adopters are faced with. I sometimes feel like I’m getting my excuses in before people start saying those expressions. Then I’m usually greeted with a screwed up face which just says to me “I don’t understand what you mean,

Overtired Parents

I’m fairly sure that all parents suffer from overtiredness at some point, some may even live in this state constantly. As we adopted our children when they were both over the age of 1, we didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to feed them. That doesn’t mean we didn’t wake up and irrationally wonder if they were still breathing because we hadn’t heard from them in ages. Of course they always have been breathing, they were just, you know, asleep – like I should have been! We all have our signs that we pick up

How I Have Changed

Today marks the 3rd anniversary of my first ever blog post. Three years ago I never really considered how my blog would evolve into what it is now. My family and friends still read it, which was one of the reasons I started writing it, but now I have other readers too, up to 100 that seem to keep coming back (on a good day) with my current most popular post getting over 300 views in a week (which is fairly unprecedented for this little blog). It’s not just my blog that has changed in that time; I have too.

What Drew You To The Children?

That was the question we were asked at the ill-fated meeting I have written about in previous blog posts: Under Repair and When Things Go Wrong It was a weird question for us to be asked because of how we had come to be provisionally linked to the children. Even stranger was that the person asking us was the person who approached us about the children before we were even approved to adopt. It was a question that we floundered on, that we failed to answer or even give a half-hearted response to. Many prospective adopters who have been linked to

Hidden Trauma

I had a conversation recently with someone about how an adopted child could seem very settled and content with their life only for it to go horribly wrong when the teenage years hit. My point was that the trauma they suffered in their early lives can come back and hit them when they reach that age. The teenage years are when we discover a lot about ourselves and the type of person we want to be, and our past can play a huge role in that.

A Letter To My Son

Dear Son, As I write this we have just become your longest ever home and I look back to see how far you have come, how much you have changed since that day when we first met you. Not only you though, as I have changed too. The day that I was first called ‘Dad’ will forever be stuck in my mind, how a nervous man walked into a stranger’s home and had his life changed forever. Walking tentatively through the door, we could hear your social worker chatting with your foster carer. You were still eating your lunch, which

Pretending

Another break from my normal post. I’m sure many parents feel like they are pretending when they first get the role, whether they are biological children or adopted children. For adopters you have a difficult first few months where you have many professionals questioning many of the things you do. You are not the sole parents of your children as the local authority still has parental rights over them until the adoption order goes through. You can’t do many things without their permission, so it does sort of feel like you aren’t real parents.