Sunday 10 August 2014

Boom

How can you prepare for adoption, for a stranger, or three, to enter your life.

We were diligent on our prep course, answered the questions and entered the discussions.

We were open and honest in our home study.

We read the books and did the homework.

We sought advice and talked to those who'd walked the same path.

We discussed what we would do when this or that happened.

We jumped through all the hoops, danced to the right tune, and towed the line.

Then rather than being a good idea and a hope for the future they became names and ages, rather than what ifs and maybes.

Words on paper, descriptions from Social Workers and anecdotes and routines from foster carers.

Blurred images from a camcorder.

We studied the words, video and pictures.
Then we studied them some more and we talked and talked and talked.

Still, they existed out there, abstract and untouchable, real but not real and not the here and now.

Then they became flesh.













Exploding into our lives.

Strangers in the home, personalities and opinions, likes and dislikes, feelings and thoughts.

We were not ready.




8 comments:

  1. Boom indeed. Not entirely sure that any other word describes it so accurately. We weren't ready either, but I'm not sure how we could have prepared ourselves any differently...

    Thanks for linking to #WASO x

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    1. Like you I can't imagine anything that I could have done to prepare us for those first days and weeks.
      Thanks for the #WASO

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  2. How could we be? But we do our best.

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  3. I've struggled for so long to find that word. And there it is BOOM! Four years on, most days are BOOM days :)

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  4. Like you say, every day there seems to be a "boom".

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  5. You know, I didn't do most of the things on that list, didn't read a single book, twitched through prep course longing to get it over with, had discussions with virtually nobody . . . woefully unprepared by most adopters' standards (and believe me, the fostering approval was no preparation for anything either). Friends of mine recently became bio parents - within days she was round at my house saying "I don't know how you do it!" - prior to that, she had been pretty certain that she'd take it all in her stride. I've seen this so often. There is no being prepared. There's only what's in front of you and what you're going to do about it!

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  6. I guess the key things are resilience, flexibility, endurance and enthusiasm. I look back now and see this 27 year old naive enthusiastic fool, who blagged through the whole lot!
    Still blagging, now there's an idea for a blog.

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