I can remember the day clearly when we decided that we would like to adopt.
We had had a fairly archetypal journey to get to this point. Years of trying naturally, a heart-breaking end to a short pregnancy and then an extremely emotional year of failed IVF treatments.
Perhaps this was to be it. Maybe it was meant to be just me and Janet. Our friends kept telling us that we would make great parents and that we should adopt. However, we wanted our own, birth children or none at all.
Still, our thoughts would often return to what might have been and the small pangs of jealousy and envy when we would see families together with small children and the looks of joy and happiness on their faces. How we still longed for children.
Don’t get me wrong, we were still happy as a couple, with the money and freedom to do as we pleased. Some of our friends (with children) would say that they envied us and our way of life. But oh, how we envied them.
So, that brings us to that fateful day. A year or so has passed since our last try at IVF, and the decision had been made to move on and accept our situation.
There I was, washing up in the kitchen, while gazing out at our lovely long garden; a great garden for playing in. I should know, as this was the same garden that I grew up in as a child. I was lucky enough to buy the house as an adult and therefore be living in my old family home. My thoughts started to drift back in time, and I could clearly picture myself and my two brothers, playing together as children in the garden. What fun we had, in those long hot summers. I could almost hear our laughter and smell the freshly cut grass.
It really was one of those moments that will stay me for the rest of my life.
I looked out on to the garden, I realised that this garden needed young children. We needed children!!!
I turned around to my wife Janet, who happened to be sitting at the kitchen table, working on a laptop. “We need children in that garden” I said, rather forcefully.
“I agree”, replied Janet straight away. “I have been thinking about that for some time”.
And so, our Adoption journey really began, we straight away googled “adoption” and we ended up at the Adoption Focus website. We filled out a form, sat back and breathed a sigh of relief.
I think we received a call back the following day, from a social worker, who put us at ease straight away. We were still obviously very nervous, but confident that we had made the right decision. After some further discussions with Adoption Focus, we registered to apply with them and were invited to a preparation group that was due to start a few weeks later.