So, we'd been moved onto stage 2 of the Adoption process, but what does that mean? It meant that we'd passed the initial assessment process and would be moving onto assessment by an adoption panel to be approved by our adoption agency as an approved adopter.
While Stage 1 is intrusive, Stage 2 is gut-wrenching. You are visited by your social worker regularly and talk through all of the things you'd written about yourself during Stage 1. All of the feelings and emotions that were raked over during Stage 1 are dug up again and inspected with a magnifying glass. The reason for this is because our social worker was identifying any weaknesses in our approval and wanted to get them straight in his head so that he could answer any inquiries the panel may have regarding our suitability.
Understanding why he was doing this doesn't make it any easier for someone to list all of the things about our adoption application that he thought wasn't up to scratch. The fact that the Mrs didn't speak to her dad was seen as a weakness and the fact I had been divorced was seen as a weakness. Going through all of this again really and truly hurt.
After a fair few meetings our social worker told us that we were ready and that we had been booked in for panel and it was booked in the head office of our adoption agency, about an hours drive from our house. We decided that rather than travelling over on the day we would book a cheap hotel and stay the night so that we were at least in the city on the morning of panel and didn't have to worry too much about traffic.
I don't think either of us got very much sleep that night, there were far too many thoughts racing around our heads. We had a meal together and a quiet drink in the hotel bar and stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.
We arrived at the adoption agency's office on time and met our social worker there. He told us that he had already spoken to the panel and they had some questions for us. One of them was about our weight. This wasn't the time that we wanted this particular issue raising it's head again. However, we simply said that we understood healthy eating and would promote that with any children that were placed with us.
Our social worker was called into panel and the longest fifteen minutes of my life (until the next panel!) began. The feeling of helplessness was absolute knowing that a room full of strangers were discussing our suitability to be parents without any input from us. I was nearly sick a few times.
Then the door to the panel room opened and the our social worker came into our waiting room with the chairperson of the panel who introduced himself and gave us a couple of questions to answer when we were called into panel. He shook our hands and then left again whilst we discussed our answers.
The first question was easy. What support could we offer a child who was placed with us. We decided to talk about our calmness and our patience and our belief in therapeutic parenting. The second question knocked me for six. As I was going to be the primary carer while the Mrs went back to work they wanted to know how I (as a man) would cope with the children when they were having a bad day! The answer, of course, was exactly the same way the Mrs would cope, which in a roundabout and polite way is what I told them when I got in there.
And so they called us in, 12 people sat around a table, suspiciously like a jury of our peers. They asked their questions and we gave our answers and we were asked to wait again.
After what seemed like an age the panel room door opened and the chairperson was on his way back again with our social worker in tow. Hidden behind the chairperson our social worker gave us a thumbs up.
I still didn't believe it was true until the chairperson said it. And it was unanimous!
We'd been approved as adopters. Now we had to find our family.
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