DADOPTION

One thing the adoption process really allows you to do is plan your 'parental style'. Both because the process is pretty darned long and your mind wanders, but also because every now and again they do actually recommend some good reading. I've learnt about Therapeutic Parenting and attachment issues amongst many other things.  You're also encouraged to compare your own experience of being parented with your expectations. This is less straightforward, as there are unsurprisingly many mixed feelings this throws up. There is much I can say about my childhood. My basic needs were met and it was clear my parents loved me. However like most 80s children I was pushed to succeed from an early age.  What this created was a cycle of always trying hard no matter the endeavour, with any positives of success being overshadowed by a crippling fear of failure - of not doing (and therefore by childish association being ) enough. It's a loop that has followed me into adulthood. When

 It was wonderful to learn we could adopt our kids following last week's Matching Panel. As noted , we drank a bit too much bubbly, texted til our thumbs fell off and went into town for burgers and toy shopping.  What has followed has been rather frustrating. On Thursday, a few days after panel, we were informed placement would not occur start of next year as discussed. Then came the Planning Meeting with no plan earlier today. You read that right - the milestone in the process where we were to learn the whens and hows of our future parenthood left us with nothing.  They turned up with no plan. Not part of a plan. Not a sketch on a fag packet. Nada. And they managed to string out their lack of a plan for 90 minutes. Telling us why there was no plan but never at any point taking responsibility. Worse, they asked us to be flexible and noted they could tell us nothing with any certainty. It's funny, cos there was the opposite of certainty. There was nothing. No skeleton framework.

There's a bit of a lull in proceedings for a week, between Monday's big Panel decision and a Planning Session next Tuesday. The latter will decide exactly what form the various introductions will take with our two new kids, and I'm keen to share all that when it comes.  In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful to tackle some of the bigger standalone questions. And what is bigger than examining the very reason why I'm at this fork in the road? So here goes.  Let me take you back to January 2019. It's a cold night outside but I'm in a bright English themed bar on the Champs Elysees drinking Leffe Brune and having a rather nice burger. My phone lights up with a call I'd been waiting for from my lovely wife (the now wonderfully entitled Mrs Dadoption). I step out of the bar onto the cold street, eager to talk to her somewhere quiet and with better signal.  She's sad. Her new job is awful, and she leads with that for a little while. It's not the mai

 One key role in being a new father, as we all know, is putting together the ultimate dad playlist. I mean. It's not. But that did not seem to stop the generation before us. I seem to have been raised on stories of bands who'd stopped producing music before I was born, who wore weird outfits and did not have a single rap interlude. This Bob Dylan chap seemed nice but I was neither sure what he was saying, nor exactly what he was rebelling against.  It is against this backdrop that I turn to creating my own dad playlist. A list of tracks I love which evoke special turn of the century vibes but that will engender groans and shrugs when it is selected on a long car journey. A list which speaks of a simpler time, with only four TV channels and dial up internet. Of Look In! magazine and overt sexism barely raising an eyebrow.  Thankfully I have some legendary assistance on this quest in the form of two chaps from church. Both are the same age as me, but one is father of three. The o

 There were many people to tell concerning yesterday's news, so Mrs Dadoption and I did the sensible thing and downed two glasses of bubbly each before getting on the mobile phones and sending variations of the following -  "Hey there! We're so excited to share we've been matched with two girls! We're going to be parents in the new year!!"  What followed was a stream of excitement. People were genuinely lovely and asked some amazing questions. But one does not remember those. Not two glasses down and with an anxiety hangover from the anticlimax of a 25-minute meeting where most people said nice things about you.  As such here are my favourite things that people really said to me in the 24 hours post getting the news. Genuinely.  1. The hard work starts now  Seriously. Said to us within a few minutes of the call. As if the whole adoption process had been a walk in the park. As if we'd not worked hard in other areas of our lives previously.  Frankly it's

 Well, that was quite the day! As you can guess from my previous entry, I got little sleep last night. As such I was very jittery this morning. Breakfast was a pretty standard affair, and then we went for a walk for about 30 minutes or so.  Despite the nature of the day, our conversation was pretty superficial. After all, it was the day of Matching Panel! What else could be said after a year of probing questions, parting with reams of documentation and reading many 80 page password secured Micrsoft Word files? It was finally here - we would finally be finding out whether we could adopt the two sisters we'd showed interest in at the meeting in September.  For me, it had a wider significance. Finding out I was infertile in January 2021 had really rocked my sense of worth. I felt broken. Unworthy. Being allowed the honour of being father to two girls who really needed safety and security would feel like the state saying I was worthy, in spite of my own biological limitations.   I had