Ghosts: Pt 2

Without warning we received contact from a member of our children's birth family this week.

I guess that this is the nightmare scenario that adopters most fear, unsolicited contact.

We'd always anticipated that we would be in control and allowed to manage the process of re introduction if that was our children's choice. That we could seek professional support and carefully step back into the world that they were taken from 15 years ago.

However, modern technology has circumvented careful and considered steps and we've gone from 15 years of near silence to meeting in 4 days.

We'd prepared. We've been open and honest and painted a fair and realist a picture as we could over the years. There are no secrets in the cupboard to shock or derail.

The children have had different responses according to their own perspectives, experience and wishes. Shock, fear, delight, distress and curiosity all mixing to make a complex emotional whirlpool that we are all trying to make sense of. With the speed of developments professional support has been unfortunately left lagging.

So here we are with a new and developing journey ahead.

As young adults they have to make their own decisions, both individually and as a group, about the road forward. We can advise, support and help but we cannot walk this road. We may not agree with all the choices being made but we love our children and support them none the less.

Being honest it has been a challenge for Mrs C and I. We hurt for our children, we want to protect and guard against potential harm. But we can only walk so far with them and they must make their own decisions and walk their own path.

We all knew this day would come and it nibbles away at insecurities in our lives and casts doubt on our significance as parents and relevance for the future but we hold fast and keep loving.

Adoption Ghosts

Though we've never met our children's parents I often feel they live with us in our day to day lives to varying degrees.

I'm sure that we don't realise how often they continue to exercise influence.

We see their presence in the lives of our children in a physical display, an outburst of emotion, a snarled comment, a look or gesture.

At other times it is more subtle, a hidden worry or quite thought, an emotion or mood, preferences, choices, likes and dislikes. 

We see shadows of the adults that we've read about in forms, seen faded photographs of perhaps even met,

But they linger in our family lives like ghosts in our home, a presence, an influence.

Ghosts come in all kinds of manifestations, frightening, friendly, malevolent or benevolent.

But our ghosts can't be exercised and shouldn't be.

Yes, we want them to behave and play by our rules. We don't want the malicious poltergeists that maintain their control and influence continuing to disrupt from the beyond. But we need to learn to live with them, tame them, they are with us and always will be.

We take control by opening the curtains and letting the light into the darkness.

Not cowering away from the shadows but shining a light into them.

We open the door to the ghosts and engage with them, we write letters and look through the photo books with our children, we tackle them head on.

I'm not frightened of ghosts, I am the here and now.