Epic Fail - Fawlty Dad Strikes Back

I've a flair for self righteous indignation. With that in mind I took a grip of myself and thought through the facts. In reality adoptees are a tiny minority of the school population and it's ridiculous to expect teachers to have a nuanced and detailed understanding of the adoption process let alone the issues that they often grapple with in relation to identity. I was using these kind of thoughts to dampen the crusade that I'd put myself on. After all, I am blogger of the year, I am an adoption 'champion'*, I am a member of the of the DfE Expert Advisory Group on Adoption Support. On and on my thoughts rambled.

It had all started this week when Peanut had brandished a piece of homework from the bottom of her bag. With a wry smile I looked at the 'all about me' booklet with questions about birth weight, first word and first steps. Classic error I thought, this is 'Blogging gold'! 

To be honest I'm not even slightly cross and Peanut could care less. She lives in a family where five of six children have such gaps, so actually knowing this stuff seems totally irrelevant to her. Never the less I feel duty bound, in line with my standing, to show the teacher the error of her ways for future adoptees. Like I said self righteous indignation.

I dig deep and seek out my social work intervention skill, I'll be sensitive and not embarrass the poor teacher, as I said why should she know this stuff. I approach the teacher in the morning as I drop Peanut off. 

'Oh hi, just a quick word' I say using my best social worker voice as Peanut runs into class. 

'She's been asked to do this homework, and well you do know that she's adopted and we don't have any of the information that.......................' I trail off, derailed by the expression on the teachers face. 

It's a look of pity, not for Peanut, but for me a man who has dug a trap for someone then fallen into it as he admired it.

'Oh Mr Coates, we gave her that to do in September, it was all sorted out, last September'

I realise what this means. This means that I've not found this for three terms. THREE TERMS! It's sat in her bag for threeeeeeeee terms for heavens sake!
The normal physics of time and space do not apply to the bottom of children's school bags and I'm sure I've looked a hundred times but I've just shown myself to be an incompetent arse.  

Time stands still.

I consider the options to get out of this: 

Fake faint, push through and keep lecturing her or mutter something intelligible and run away. 

Fawlty Dad strikes back and I opt for the latter. I get to the car and gently place my head on the steering wheel. 

I told MrsC, she's still laughing.





*I'm no Champion it's what @GayAdoptionDad calls me to wind me up

Clichés & Hope

Some days it feels like I’m living a collection of clichés that are straight from the section at the back of the Big Book of Adoption. The section called 'At the end of a great day we have a bad night'.

Oh boy, what a bad night. I mean how many blog posts, book chapters, support group discussions, social work hours have been consumed with that topic.

'We had such a lovely day at the beach and it came as such a shock when they bit the wing mirror off the car when we got home and ate the cat'

I'm almost embarrassed to say how surprised I was that after a lovely day out with laughing, smiling, conversation and fun we ended in a full on ding dong with all that means. Not nice, but not a unique experience in any way. Once again, my head drops and I'm cast into the shadows.

You'd have thought that by now I'd be wary, guarded and wise to such shenanigans. It seems like so much of my life is a well worn path, with patterns that return and return, the stories that I read in blog posts and twitter threads all ring true and resonate. Perhaps that's why the fellowship we get from twitter is such a tonic. A cohort that gets it, truly gets it, and understands the metaphoric and very real slap that some of our daily experiences represent to our bodies and soul.

I chatted to a very wise friend and as we considered the future. All we could have hope for was the days ahead. I believe that I can do the days ahead.
Sometime my hope stretches to months and years ahead, sometimes it constricts to minutes and hours ahead. Funny thing hope, like mist, hard to grasp but certainly there.

I'm not sure how I ended on hope, so a little blog from clichés to hope.

Just say No

With the nonchalance of tone and certainty of it happening Peanut asked:

'You know when we adopt again, well could we.............'

With the tone of a man who really knows what that means, a broken man no less,  I interrupted sharply:

'Nope, no, never, never, never.......................just no,  I mean it, really stop that before you even start. We are not, I repeat, not adopting more children'

Flossy and Peanut who were feigning disinterest up til that point then joined in.

'It would be cute to have a baby though wouldn't it?'

Realising that this needed to be well and truly stamped out I unleashed the full Fawlty Dad, the whole nine yards, descriptions of how in no uncertain terms I was not going to be the father of another child, how by the time Peanut is 18 I will have been a parent with a child under 18 for 34, yes THIRTY, flaming, FOUR years, how the teachers of my children weren't even born when I started taking my children to parent's evenings, on and on and on I went, a man on the edge.

Flossy and Peanut no longer feigned disinterest, they were genuinely disinterested and Peanut had wandered off bored.

I felt quite traumatised.

What a peculiar paradigm we appear to have created. I couldn't stop thinking about what a strange world Peanut inhabits, quite an interesting model of family we've got going on round here. Aunts that aren't and sisters that are and aren't. Some who can live with us and some who can't. It's her version of normal.

Epilogue

This morning I woke at 4am in a cold sweat.
I'd dreamt that we'd been asked to adopt a sibling group of six, lovely children no bother at all. In the dream I'd thought about saying 'yes' and woke myself up in terror because I'd not said 'no''

Managing

Managing

Verb: to succeed in doing or dealing with something, especially something difficult.

What does 'managing' mean? It's no indication of how difficult things are or how we are dealing with it. It's subjective. What is the value of saying we're managing?

We manage because we can't think what else to do, but what do I do to manage, what is the cost, am I really managing?

Every day I meet people who are managing. Some are managing well, others not so.

Some people manage, but they're on anti depressants, they drink a little more than they should, their relationships with partners and friends are in tatters.
They manage but can't sleep at night, they have to give up their jobs, they don't see their friends and they're frightened of their children.
They manage by locking themselves in their room or calling the police.
They manage but they're isolated, aren't able to go to church or to friend's houses.
From the outside looking in I think 'are you really managing?'.
I think, 'yes you're managing but at what cost?'.

I know more families than I care to count who manage way beyond what they ever expected because they love their children and have no other choice.

There have only been a few moments in our family lives where I've thought that I wasn't managing, fleeting moments where I considered the alternative. But the alternative was too much to bear, a choice that was more painful than the 'managing'.

Stepping back, I wonder are we managing or just not giving up.






Please note: this post is not a criticism of the survey that used the word 'managing' in it's reporting more a reflection on my thoughts and ponderings that popped out after I read it.

Fawlty Dad Lives

In my head I'm one of those hip parents that let embrace alternative paradigms about children. I try to talk to them like they're human beings and put big thoughts into their heads, and teach them stuff that floats round my mind, useful and useless stuff. Of course, that's only when we're not trying to avoid some sort of supernannyesque apocalypse.

There have been a few successes, Graham, being the most notable.

You see Graham's Number is an unimaginably large number . It's very, very, very big and strangely ends in a 7, Google it. I taught my children about big numbers and how they don't really exist etc etc. Part of it is the hope that the teacher will ask them for a big number one day and they'll say Graham, the teacher will look quizzically and they can say 'google it'. What a wag I am.

Anyway, this is how the conversations go round here.

Me: I love you

Peanut: I love you too

Me: I love you three

Peanut: I love you Graham

I feel warm and fluffy and we cuddle.......isn't that sweet.

Today I bought a new tool and Peanut was asking me what it was,  so in the interests of education and being no respecter of gender stereotypes I told her.

Every 5 year old girl should know the name of basic tools, she looked at me and I instantly realised that again I'd made a cataclysmic parenting mistake.

Carefully and thoughtfully she mouthed the words into a question, 'A bastard file daddy?'

As my blood ran cold I could feel Fawlty dad rise again.

How not to talk to your children about adoption.

So, imagine the scene. Four of the massive and me in the car on a sunny morning on an unusually calm day. Ginger, Flossy, Lotty and Peanut, 18, 11, 10 and 4 years old respectively, all on our standard trip to school. Unusually this morning it does not resemble an out take of the chariot scene from Ben Hur, something more sinister is afoot.

Me: Hey guys, you know Eva?

Flossy: Yes

Me: You know how she's been waiting for children, well she's been matched and they're coming in a few weeks.

Ginger, Lotty, Peanut: (Silence)

Flossy: That's good. Can she not have babies?

Me: (knowing she knows) Well, yes but she's decided to adopt to make a family. Like your mam and me.

Flossy: Why?

Me: (Thinks) Erm, I guess, like us, that she felt that it's something that she wanted to do, a positive choice.

Ginger & Peanut: (Silence)

Flossy & Lotty: What's a 'positive choice'?

Me: Erm (Thinks) Erm (Thinks..............inspired by a sports analogy) You know when you pick players for football and some people are always the last to get picked?

Flossy: Yes

(In this moments pause I've had the opportunity to think through this analogy and realised that I've just given the worst and psychologically damaging analogy ever spoken to a child. So faced with the choice of driving the car into a ditch as the ultimate distraction or ploughing on with this stupid analogy I choose to plough on)

Me: Well, a positive choice would be to pick them first..................................

Ginger, Flossy, Lotty, Peanut: (Silence)

Lotty: So, it's like picking someone who's rubbish?

Time Stops. I appear to have undermined every positive thing that I have ever said to them up to this point.

Out of my mouth comes a series of words and phrases, back peddling and squirming. I desperately try to turn what is a doomed analogy around. I'm failing I talk about liking the rubbish players (!!!!!) I'm drowning.
Blessedly, we pull up at school and I mutter something to Ginger about bad analogies. He appears to be throughly disinterested almost pitying my stupidity, he may not have even heard any of it. Peanut is oblivious, Flossy runs ahead to see friends and Lotty is throughly convinced that she's marvellous so is impervious to my deeply harmful analogy. 

I walk Peanut into school, return to the car and gently place my head on the steering wheel.
Every day I'm becoming more and more like adoption's answer to Basil Fawlty.