Monday 21 May 2012

They're moving in!


On one of our frequent visits to our local park recently I saw a friend with her newly adopted two-year-old little boy. He had been living with her for just 9 days when I saw them and I recognised the look on her face all too well. That, ‘oh my goodness, what have I done and how do I handle this?’ kind of look. One that I pulled off everyday for about 4 months when our children moved in.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely brilliant, but it just such a shock. Friends that have had birth babies go into a similar shock where they can’t leave the house or see anyone for the first few weeks because they can’t believe what they’ve got in their hands and how dependent it is upon them. It’s the same when you adopt, only for many of us they are walking, talking little things that you’re just not used to having around.

The first couple of weeks when our two moved in my partner and I used to argue over who would go to the shop to get milk just so we could have 15 minutes to ourselves and not have any responsibility for that short, sweet walk to the Co-op. I even remember sitting in a Frankie and Benny’s (somewhere we would never have gone B.C. – Before Children) and looking over at a couple of teenagers on a date envying their freedom to please themselves. We literally walked around in the hazy smog of shock for weeks. It lifted slightly when they started school but came back around 3.15 every day.

Nothing can prepare you for the day your children move in. Nothing. It’s exciting, it’s frightening, it’s exhausting and it’s forever. The first night ours spent here in their new home after we put them to bed we went to watch the new series of The Apprentice. It was a Wednesday night. We laughed at the bunch of buffoons on the show and tried to guess who would win and it felt like any other normal night until we stared at each other and burst out laughing because we remembered we had two little children asleep upstairs. We crept up to take a look at them while they were sleeping and it was just like a John Lewis advert, if the bedrooms in John Lewis ads had toys all over the floor.

The next morning there was a tap on the bedroom door just before 6am. Our son was up and he wanted to chat and play. And so it began. And so it goes on to this day. The shock has gone. The arguments about who gets out of the house are long gone and the envy of the carefree teenagers has never reared its spotty head again. We’re okay now, well, more than okay actually but it does take time to adjust. I often tell new adoptive parents at matching panel about how it might feel when they move in, but I know they’re not really listening. Their eyes are glistening and they just want their family to hurry up and come together. I was the same. See, it’s impossible to prepare because you just want your children to be under your roof, and quite right too. It’s all part of the wonderfully bumpy ride that is modern adoption and there’s no use telling them. They’ll soon find out for themselves. 

4 comments:

  1. Brilliant blog thank you for sharing: I do finally feel like we are coming out of this shocked phase (9 weeks in). Relaxing a bit more into the role of parents, just a little anyway!

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  2. LOL this is very true. I think it took me about a year to really come back down to earth and realise that I had adapted to the change in our lives. It took me longer than I had anticipated to get used to being a stay at home mum. My was a bundle of nervous energy for such a long time after Katie moved in with us. I'm not sure who I was really! Great post!

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