Memory lane down the adoption race

At the weekend I was going through some of the adoption paperwork and I found a letter from PACT (Parents and Children Together), whom we first contacted when we thought it might be possible to go down the inter-country adoption route (before we found out how expensive it is and how many countries don’t allow adoption by gay men). The letter was dated June 2005. It brought me back to the time we approached our local council in 2003 and were advised to wait until the Children and Adoption Act came in, and even before that, to the time in 2001 when we decided we would probably want to adopt but a bit later on. It made me realise just how long we’ve been thinking about it and even doing something about the adoption. And now we’re 4 days away from finding out whether we’ll be approved.

I find that one way to explain this process to people who aren’t familiar with it is to compare it to a race. First you need to decide that running is for you and you want to do it. Then you have to get accepted to a training programme and you do your training, which would be the equivalent to doing the home study. Panel is the qualifier, where you find out whether you’ll be running the race at all. And from then on you’re running a race where you don’t know how long the distance is or whether you’ll even make it to the end, which would be actually adopting. Of course, anyone who has children (adopted or not) will tell you that the race really starts once the children arrive, not before, and that the real challenge starts then. I would have to agree, so that’ll be the marathon, in for the long run. But if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the whole thing it’s easier to see each part of the process separately, so I’m sticking to my metaphor.

So anyway, I’ve written the entire preceding paragraph just so that it makes sense when I say that we feel we’ve done all the necessary training and we’re ready to run. The day approaches and I’m getting a bit nervous. Glen is fantastically calm, but that may be because he went to the dentist today and had to have his gums opened, so he’s practically sedated with all the painkillers he’s taking!