So, been thinking for a while about sharing our story of adoption in the hope that it might help other families and because it is such an incredible journey, it feels somehow important to document. Maybe one day it will also be important for our daughter who shall remain anonymous as this is her story too and she may not want to share it. I’ll call her Angel as we called her our ‘angel child’ for the first six months of her time with us, knowing full well that as soon as she felt safe enough, a more fully rounded two-year old would emerge. She was also referred to as an ‘angel child’ by her birth mum and dad who had lost a previous pregnancy and so were very grateful when they fell pregnant with her. Angel is 9 and will be 10 in July. Right now we are what I call ‘in the cut’. We have just come out of our longest spell of equilibrium (about 3 months) and I felt a new baseline of her self-worth had been reached. It probably has but when the wound opens up, it’s incredible how deep it g
Hope - just writing the word makes me cry. I am emerging, somewhat still shell shocked, back into the world I had known. As a facilitator for an adoption support group, I hear people's stories a lot and so many are much worse than ours. For some, there is little or no respite from the difficult times. We are lucky. For us it has always been cyclical. Longest good spell was six months but generally it’s only three and, as like this year, sometimes the hard times are much longer. So where are we? Angel has been sleeping with me, hubby in the spare room, for the last eight weeks and understandably, hubby was getting fed up. It felt a bit like Oedipus backwards and Angel had ousted dad rather than mum. Dad had been sleeping in the double bed in the spare room so we said Angel could sleep there and me and hubby would take it in turns to sleep with her for a bit before she returns to sleeping on her own. We have also gone back to alternating bedtime rather than me doing it 90% of the t