Un petit film

Home sweet home

I started to recognise a theme in a few of my adopter friend’s lives.

They moved away.

I loved our house, it was the best house that I’ve ever seen. It served the nine of us well and we built our family there. But here we are we moved away.

Last summer fter the ‘grounding incident’ Mrs C and I sat down and realised that we had reached a point where the safety that we’d provided was being eroded and undermined by our proximity to other people. Not that other people are inherently dangerous it’s just that’s how they are seen and perceived by my children’s internal working model. As Flossy and Lotty grow older they yearn for independence, like their peers, the sad reality is that for them it comes loaded with anxieties, fears and dangerous potential. Again and again we’ve had freefall dysregulation precipitated by contact with the outside world. They are on the cusp of adolescence and we realise that the next few years are fraught with dangers and snares for us all so we decided to act.

Our second reason is that I don’t have to stand in the garden and stop a dysregulated child from running into a housing estate at night in their pyjamas on winter nights. I don’t want to have to have those fights again. I never want to explain to men walking their dogs that I’m not killing or abusing my child.

So, we’ve stepped off the beaten path.

We’ve moved into the fields, a safe zone, if she runs there’s nowhere to go. Half a mile to tarmac, a mile to a road and a long long way to a streetlight. If she runs, there’s nowhere to go.

Our new house feels safe, it’s not the architectural beauty that we left but already it feels like a home.

The postman popped in yesterday and explained as there is no post box the previous owner used to leave the door unlocked and he’d leave the letters on the kitchen table. We might have to talk about that but already I feel a sense of calm that may just get us through the coming years.

Come that day

I've never felt insecure about my status in my children's lives, I'm not their biological dad but I am their dad.

I'd earned my dues.
Wiped backsides, cleaned up the aftermath of projectile vomit, suffered hours of homework, crap TV & an eternity of parents evenings. Blue light hospital trips, nights on hospital wards, dentist traumas and hours in casualty.

I've had my nose broken, accidentally she claimed, by Sarah.

My leg bitten til it bled, she was a tiger she explained, by Gracie.

Two black eyes simultaneously, I was a duvet monster in his defence, by Ginger

All in the line of dad duties. I admit to not being a Waltons type dad, no sage words whilst sat on the porch, I'm not their 'bestie' and I don't want to be,  but I took the good from my childhood and we did ok.
Then this summer for a fleeting moment all seemed lost.

Birth family stepped out of the words in case notes and became flesh. Sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and dad...........and DAD

What if they make their future exclusively with them?

I thought I was secure, I thought I was progressive, open and forward thinking. I thought all that history counted for something.

It was a like the sensation of being winded and for what seems like an eternity you can't breath. You forget how to, and something that you've done countless times suddenly is forgotten and outside of your control. Straining to draw air, panic rises.

I floundered, what if they were going to leave and put the last 15 years behind them. All my dues counted for nothing, faded away, those experiences did not make me a dad. The years of being there suddenly meaningless.

All that 'stuff' meant nothing because I love them. I couldn't consider them not being part of my life.
For a few hours the threat of loss enveloped me and permeated me,

Then you breathe. You catch air again.
They are not leaving just exploring, broadening, rediscovering.

They are my children and I am their dad.

Curiosity killed the.............

As noted in my recent post we have recently been subject to the increasingly common experience of being contacted by birth family through Facebook.

Reflecting on the incident it would appear to be a little naïve to be surprised or shocked.

We were found through snippets of information, two first names and a town, the trail of breadcrumbs led online, here then there and re appeared in our lives.

This experience mixed with a recent thread on twitter made me reflect on the temptations available to this generation of adopters, adoptees and birth families.

In the majority of current placements the theme running through them is that the children were not relinquished or given freely to adopters. Birth families are left with memories and not much else. The much televised tragic view of the stoic, silent and dignified mother is an endangered relic of a historic model of adoption. Children forcibly removed from parents is a painful majority of contemporary adoption. Freely available to these families is a raft of social networking platforms that potentially offer them a link to their lost children.

For the benign or malevolent alike the hope and thought of discovering information, a picture or celebratory status update or even achieving contact would be almost irresistible.

I have to ask what would I do in the face of such ‘temptation’?  What would you do?

For the adopted child or teenager curious about identity and history, perhaps the temptation is easier to satisfy. With key information often in the much-maligned LifeStory Books then with the minimum of information, full names, towns of birth and images, then contact is literally at their fingertips.

In my children’s shoes what would I do? What would the 15 year old me have done?

For the adopters?  

I’ll come clean, I looked.

Not every month, week or day but I looked, perhaps once or twice a year.

So why did I look?

Of course I have a duty of care, identifying potential harm is my duty.

I check for broken glass in playgrounds. Were they close or far, was there a potential for harm.

But I have to confess that at times my searches were to satisfy my own curiosity and intrigue, what had happened in the intervening years, who was with who and living where. Were they close or far, was there a potential for harm.

Was I right or wrong to look? I don’t know.

My motives were mixed.

It feels like SW, adopters and post adoption support services are lagging, not sure how to react or protect.

If I had the answer I’d be rich and on a book tour. So, what do I do, we talk with each other, we are frank, we dispel myths, we ‘friend’ and ‘follow’, we try and stay one step ahead, we try to be savvy and we pray.

We are ok, our kids are ok. Yes, we had a shock but we’d laid a foundation that caught the fall and gave room for manoeuvre, at least for now.