Snakes and Ladders Anyone?

So right now my experience of preparing to adopt definitely feels like that moment in a game of Snakes and Ladders just after you have landed on a snake!

In fact – as I reflect back and imagine forward there are parts of the whole process which definitely resonate with the game.

There are those parts that just go steadily onward and upwards. The pace of the progress may vary…

For example…

…there are times when it feels that every dice roll moves you forward only 1 or 2 spaces. Perhaps everything is waiting on someone’s manager to get back from holiday or you finally put a date in the diary for the social worker to meet your children – but the date is in three long weeks’ time…

… and others when the 5s and 6s roll in and you feel like you are really getting somewhere. You attend the three day training course, or you get an acknowledgement of forms being received and you can almost hear the clock ticking down moving things along…

…but basically you are moving forward, counting up the spaces one by one.

Then there are the inevitable snakes along the way: paperwork gets held up significantly, there may need to be a change of Social Worker, a panel may get delayed or be inconclusive.

And thankfully there are those parts of the Assessment process when you finally land at the bottom of a ladder or two: you move on to Stage 2, for example, or you get your date for Panel…there’s still a way to go, but a chunk of progress has been made.

Until eventually you get that approval from Panel and it’s like zooming up that big ladder that most Snakes and Ladders games have – the one that cuts right across the middle of the board and really takes you up to the final stages of the game.

Which brings us to where we are right now. To be fair we’ve been pretty lucky so far -we encountered a few low rolls at times, but pretty much avoided the snakes altogether!

So far that is! Being at the top of a ladder – even the big one that takes you to the top row – doesn’t make you immune a few more low rolls, and there are plenty of snakes still to land on.

Which brings us to my ‘sliding down a snake’ moment this week.

A moment that came about because we started the Matching Stage with our Assessing Social Worker and have only just been formally handed over to our Adoption Support Worker.

Process-wise this delay will not have effected things at all. Process-wise there has been no sliding whatsoever and I have no doubt that we are in just the right pair of hands as we move forward.. BUT emotionally it still felt like landing on one of those dreadful spaces you come across in board games – “Switch Social Worker move back 5 spaces”; or as I have said like sliding down a snake just when you felt you were getting somewhere.

I think what happened was that starting the Matching Stage with our Assessing Social Worker – with whom we had built up quite a close relationship and with whom we had shared the excitement of approval – had given an encouraging sense of momentum to those early weeks after Panel. A momentum that was rather quelled  – however necessarily and understandably – in the formalities of starting over with a new worker, signing yet another agreement and hearing all about the ‘what if’ procedures in the event of remaining unmatched in 12 months’ time…

And so here I am, dusting myself off and picking myself up and pressing on as normal life races on and adoption life waits and prepares as patiently as it can…