Permutations

Thank goodness for the medical profession. In the whole adoption process doctors are the only one's who seem to understand things from both the parents perspective and the child's needs. Walking today in the park with an international adoption doctor the 'hot' topic of social workers telling potential parents that they need to use contracteptives during the adoption process. This is a discussion that has been going on in the international adoption community and there have been emotive and rational arguments going back and forward. The doctor without a shadow of a doubt said 'surely that contravenes every single human moral and written right?' You cannot tell someone to do something you can only advise them.'
The discussion did not go much further - we both understood the implications.
The rights and needs of the parents are very much looked over in the international adoption process. The UK's focus is solely on the rights and needs of the child or should that be a child as the children they are protecting are unknown? I feel that the parents and the children are equally important.
It is of no benefit to any child to have overwrought, stressed and exhusted parents just at the time when they need calm, thoughtful, attentive and kind care. That time of transition from the orphange/foster home into the family is so vital for the long term mental health of the child. But no, just when have the first flutterings of parent hood you are yanked back into the bureaucratic nightmare. Discovering changes in process that your local authorites who you have spent the last 2 years with, and a huge chunk of your child's education fund with, have failed to notify you about.
Back in Moscow my friend's return has been delayed...she still can't bring her son home to settle him in his new environment...and she has had to spend more of his eduction fund on buying another air ticket.....why? Because when she went to the British Embassy to get the UK entry visa for her son - she found out that the whole process for acquiring a visa for an adopted child has changed.
More letters, documents, downloads, photographs, payments have to be acquired, flights have to be rearraged, pick ups altered, cats back home be fed, timely bills to be paid. Imagine doing this in freezing conditions, in an unknown city, with a foreign language and script that you cannot even discipher, on your own, from a hotel room with a toddler in toe. Not only a toddler - but your child who you have only just met and don't know and who you have waited for for so long and all the personal emotions going through you that I expressed in yesterdays blog...I don't think you could have any idea.
But surely the social workers who have worked so closely with you for the past couple of years could anticipate and prepare you for and perhaps dare I suggest it - help you?
How different would it be if the 'professionals' did their job.
One can only imagine a world where the social worker calls up and says "The immigration/visa laws have changed - I am sending you an e-mail with all the details, the forms you need, where you can get them, how much it costs and what you need to do. If you have any problems or questions please do not hesitate to call."
Would that not be honouring the parent and thus respecting the needs of the child? Would that not make those first all important few days of bonding, so paramount for the child, easier? Would that not reduce the child's trauma and thus their issues of attachment and their long term mental health?
Of course it would. I understand this and you understand this. How then is it possible that the adoption authority do not?

Reflection

One of the members of our Russian UK Adoption (RUKA) group has just become a Mama. She is in Moscow at the moment and has taken custody of her son for three days now. She is loving it and talking to her bought back all the memories of when I became a mother. It is the most exhilarating of experiences, but at the same time tinged with exhaustion, stress, incredibility, panic, contentment, excitement, relief and then ultimate 'Oh my God' experience.
My little boy was sick when I picked him up - he had the most terrible cold and cough and kept on waking up all night. Strange bed, strange smells, strange sounds and me! I of course could not sleep - I was too excited and wired. My days were still filled with gathering the last documents to secure that this dream was actually mine. I could not believe that this little soul had been given to me to care for and to nuture - it was such a Blessing. But I could not rest until I had every last bit of paper and was on that aeroplane heading home. And yet my whole body resonated with joy. I could not stop looking at my son, and saying those words over and over. Was it really true. It had taken me just short of three years to get to this point. In that time one of my friends had met her husband, married and had a 18month old child... and now it was my turn to be Mama.
And he knew that I was his Mama. His smile, his look, his touch.
I remember his smell, how it gradually changed from that of the orphange to his own. And his weight. I still love that feeling of his weight on my lap - a little heavier now but no less pleasurable.
I trust my friend in Moscow is enjoying the same beautiful experiences and her son enjoying for the first time loving arms around him.