Flag Waving

With the looming shadow of national adoption week I'm tempted to lock myself into my thought bunker, turn the music up and sit it out. The time for me being invited to flag waving events has passed. I must have mentioned the time I attended a David Bellamy plant a tree for adoption event. Now that was a strange afternoon.  I've lived a marvellous life.

So, this week I've been out and about banging the CPV drum, all good stuff very encouraging and in the midst of it I managed to catch the end of the smallest, quietest, invitation only conference ever.
Birth mothers telling their stories of adoption.

I'm constantly caused to extrapolate the experiences of social carer that adopters tell on social media to the parents of the children that they adopted. The battle between the binary, 'adoption is good' narrative and the analog soup of 'there's more to this than you'd first think'  rages on. I could throw my had in with either position depending on a thousand factors.

I'm off point.

So, I listened to a visibly shaking young woman recount the story of walking out of court having lost her child and was chilled at the abandonment of what was and remains a vulnerable young woman. Her recounting of feeling shame, fear, loss, isolation and abandonment and withdrawal of support were profound, her weakness was her strength.
Of course, the rational and reasoning me has lots of questions and I could give as many ifs and buts as the next person. I can't deny the truth of what I heard and it shook and worried me.

It's been a few days and I remain shaken and as we glide towards adoption week the tension of a weathered old adopter like me is to hold all of that together and position myself just the right side of worried but not too close to the flag wavers.

I've not even mentioned post adoption support.

It's too easy to be cynical.