Have you considered adoption?

Yes. Have you? No? Of course, you didn’t need a ‘plan B’ for making a family.

Since assimilating a throwaway comment from a gynaecologist, “you might have trouble conceiving”, into my subconscious at the age of 20, I always knew that adoption might be my only path to motherhood. That didn’t stop my husband and me from trying to conceive through IVF first. We wanted our own biological children. I’d always had the idea that I might need to adopt in the back of my mind, but he’d never even thought about it. It would work out. We'd conceive naturally. Right, yeah, pull the other one.

To adopt in the UK you have to be at least a year post your last failed IVF. That was a convenient excuse to tell my family, who were so desperate to ‘fix’ me that a week after our last treatment, I was receiving well meaning articles on international adoption. Did you know that in Russia your combined age must be less than 90 if you want to adopt? That was us out of the running before we even started! I was 40 and my husband 54.

Fast forward two years and I finally felt far enough from the grief of the failed IVF to consider applying to adopt. I’d already sent an enquiry a year earlier but it got lost in the post – maybe that was a sign that we needed to be patient. This might be the right time. I was full of hope. We were allocated a social worker. She came round and scared my husband to death.

The social worker didn’t seem to like me. I was very open with her. This was the only way I could become a mother. She said, you know adopting is nothing like having your own baby? And there in lies the crunch. Unless you’ve been there and got the T-shirt, it’s hard to get your head around what adoption means these days. You can’t just go and pick a baby off a shelf. No mother willingly gives up her child for adoption any more. Children who are adopted have been through a harrowing court process which forcibly removes them from their birth family. This often takes years, during which time the child has been subject to abuse in many forms. Some people believe that love can heal the scars of abuse, but I’m not so naïve.

The younger a child is when they are adopted, the better they seem to fare. We asked for a child under two, and the social worker’s face fell. Unfortunately our ages meant that the chance of us being approved to adopt a child under two was vanishingly small. We were undeterred. Please, pretty please? We don’t smoke, we’re not obese, we are solvent and we’d make wonderful parents! Sorry, they prioritise by age. There are almost no children under two up for adoption and those that are go to younger parents.

Barrier after barrier was put in our way. I had to request a criminal record check from France, where I’d spent a year as a student nearly 20 years ago. They needed to interview my husband’s ex-wife, his daughter and my abusive ex-husband. They needed a letter of recommendation from my psychiatrist, who had discharged me back to my GP several years ago. I have a recurrent depressive disorder, but had been well for many years. Funnily enough, relapses are brought on by stress.

Day 1 of the preparation course arrived. My husband had hardly slept, and I felt nervous. There was another couple there of a similar age to us. She was infertile like me. There was a lady whose friend had adopted a 7 year old who was now 12, extremely violent and vicious to his adoptive mum. He kept assaulting her and shouting at her that she didn’t love him, and that he hated her.

I could see my husband’s face get more and more grave as we discussed sexual abuse (estimated at least 50% of adoptees), neglect, violence and their consequences. The most damaging is neglect. An adoptive mother came to talk to us about her experience of adopting a sibling pair. She spoke about the honeymoon period, then about how they had had to approach child mental health services because they needed help. She tried to put a positive spin on it but I could see the look of dread on my husband’s face, and almost feel his heart start to race.

The mood was sober when we left to go home. I was worried I’d been too negative in the group as I was the only one who had expressed my fears that I might not be able to meet the needs of an adoptee. Everyone else was so positive, so full of hope, so willing to take a deep breath and jump right in.

I think we barely said a word to each other that night. My husband didn’t sleep a wink. When I saw him in the morning he looked destroyed. He felt sick and couldn’t eat. He couldn’t explain to me what it was. But I knew. I knew that he knew that we couldn’t go through with it. We were just not strong enough.

We arrived early at the course and went to speak to the social worker. She was lovely. She said she had been worried about us and she thought we were making the right decision. That hurt to be told that. As if we were not good enough to take on the challenge. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. All the grief which I had put on hold, in the hope of a happy ending after failed IVF, bubbled to the surface and overtook me in a great big tidal wave.

At the end of the day, what I came to realise is that adopting is not about becoming a parent. It’s not a substitute for not being able to conceive. It’s about the child. It’s all about the child. It’s not about my need to be a mother, my overwhelming desire to give my unending love to a child. I felt that to adopt would require me to be entirely selfless. I don’t have that in me. I’m not strong enough to love a child who hates me, who breaks my heart over and over again. Maybe I could bear it if it were my own child. But not someone else’s.

Marisa Wray

Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash