Diary of an Adoptive Family: Year 2 Part 1: Still waiting for a Match

We had our first ‘solo’ meeting with our new social worker who very kindly moved it forward in response to a wobbly email I had sent with various worries. This was also a chance for her to meet our children. While the news was still ‘no news’ it was a good chance to develop our relationship with her as we talked through my worries.

The beginning of the month saw me attending an excellent training day on Attachment – for more on this do take a look the post I wrote following it.

The end of the month saw the second of our monthly ‘touching base’ meetings with our support worker – with the third one in the diary for September.

So off we went on holiday. Just the five of us.

It was a holiday we had deliberated over booking back in November/ December as Stage 1 ended and we waited for Stage 2 to get underway. At that point it was neither completely fantastical to suppose that we might have gone through panel and have our precious new family member placed with us by the following summer, nor was it unrealistic to imagine that even if all went smoothly with approval we would still be waiting for a match. We decided to book and adapt / cancel as necessary and I am so glad we did. It was really good to get away and while I kept a close eye on my messages and adoption was a big topic of conversation (we were on holiday with two other families) I felt I had a few weeks off from the intensity of waiting and was able to focus on enjoying the now, while anticipating the different dynamics a new little one would bring when we returned in two years’ time (it is a regular destination for us!)

I was so thankful that we had a meeting with our support worker in the diary for early September. As you’ll see from my reflections below, there was quite a lot of emotion swirling around as we started a new school year ‘still waiting’ and it was reassuring that there wasn’t a completely blank page ahead of us.

It was a really encouraging meeting – that sense of being at ease with each other which can develop quite quickly with your assessing social worker was much more obvious on this our 4th meeting together, and there seemed to be a greater sense of movement and expectation in terms of finding a match and a hint of what it would feel like to work together through that stage and on into the adoption itself.

But whilst I am hopeful and excited about what the next couple of months may bring, in the meantime I find myself experiencing a new kind of waiting.

A new season OF waiting

Re-entering ‘real’ life as the season changed and a new term began was quite hard.

To be fair this time of year always requires a bit of readjustment, but I realise now that this year it has involved an added dynamic – the beginning of a new chapter in our adoption story. It has not been an obvious scene change and although I sensed it approaching it has taken me a while to properly identify it. After all, nothing about our status has changed – ‘approved and waiting’ still sums us up nicely. What was so different now? Then it hit me – it is the status of the space in which we are waiting that has shifted.

Let me try to explain…

For the first time I am existing in a season that has never been anticipated without the strong possibility of us being a family of six.

Anticipation, of course, has been a close companion throughout this journey – indeed from the moment we started this process 18 months ago our hope to adopt has influenced the way we have looked ahead. But it is a gradual process and one that doesn’t start with a blank calendar! Instead those precious hopes and plans have been woven into an existing pattern of family life.

Increasingly plans were made with a foot firmly in each camp – ‘with or without’ our new little one. Except it was really ‘without or with’ – because we were still grafting the adoption into an existing pattern; into situations and seasons that were quite capable of standing on their own two feet as ‘without’ scenarios. Conversations looking ahead generally went something like this: “well it probably won’t have happened by then, but if…..then we’ll…..”

And so when the summer holidays hit and it was clear we wouldn’t need those contingency plans, whilst we were disappointed, we were not bereft – we had a clear handle on this version of our time away. In fact as we packed to go away it was relatively easy to temper the disappointment / impatience / worry of ‘no news’ with the obvious practical benefits of a post-summer match and the comforting reality that August isn’t exactly a month that drags its feet.

And indeed it didn’t and here I find myself half way through a September that has never really had an existence separate from our plans to adopt. Whereas plans for the preceding Spring and Summer had been made with hopeful contingency plans for a new arrival; I realise the picture I have been building up of Autumn and Christmas this year has increasingly had a sixth member of the family more present than not. It is a picture still very much covered in lots of ifs, buts and whens of course – but the contingency plans now are more to do with us not having a little one rather than the other way around. If April through to August 2019 was a season of ‘it’s possible, but’, on returning from holiday we had crossed over a mental line into a season of ‘quite possibly’.

I hope that doesn’t sound presumptuous. I certainly don’t feel presumptuous – if anything I feel a bit fearful that after all I’m kidding myself that this could happen…. it is just that as the year rolls on; as the coming months take shape in my mind, my diary and my conversations I sense the absence of our little one more keenly. I have simply left more room for our new arrival in the months that lie ahead than I have done previously.

Up until now this season of ‘probably’ has hidden quietly beyond the peak of the summer months – known simply and vaguely as ‘after the summer’. Now it stretches ahead in plain sight. The days grow shorter and the trees are starting to change. Stealthily, little by little, the shops are smuggling Christmas onto their shelves, and early feelers are being sent out by family members about plans for the festive season.

It is as though a new chunk of time has now ‘gone live’ – a chunk of time that has always held the very real possibility of introducing us to the newest member of our family.

This time last year we were about to set off along a clearly laid out route – and while the inevitable ‘traffic jams’ cropped up there was a sense of knowing where you were.

As this new season unfolds, that part of the journey lies behind us now and we wait in the knowledge that a new one could be just round the corner.