And go very wrong it did. In the first week in January we got a phone call from our social worker. They had decided to go with the other couple because they lived on a farm and we lived in a terraced house in the middle of a major city. They knew we didn't have a garden and couldn't compete with the space a farm allowed so it really disappointed us that they had allowed us to get our hopes up before dashing them against the wall. On the other hand we were really pleased for Kevin and Lana. They had found their forever family and would hopefully now have a chance for permanence.
That's what the adoption process is like for adopters. Because the overriding aim is to protect the children (quite rightly) they are not informed of an adoption until it is approved. Adopters, however, are asked to imagine their lives with these particular children in it and then have it cruelly ripped away. We were lucky this was happening to us for the first time. We had heard of some couples who got to these meetings and were constantly being turned away for one reason or another (certain parts of the adoption process can be quite cutthroat, especially if you are after the more popular child profiles).
A week passed and we wallowed in self-pity. For the first time we wondered whether we could do this. To go through this every time would just take it out of us too much. We had a chat and decided to sleep on it.
It was a text from my brother which changed my mind. It simply said "Never give in, mate" and so we took a deep breath and decided to get back to it. Never give in. It's become our motto throughout our fight to become parents and my brother summed it up for us. All of the fighting we had done to get to this point, the constant knock-backs, the tears and happiness, all of it would be a waste if we were to give in now.
We didn't take much to get back in the game. The very next day we received a phone call from our social worker. She had some children she had in mind for us. She'd held them in reserve until we found out the decision with Kevin and Lana and she wanted to know if we were ready to get going again. Some couples take a break after getting knocked back, but I thought that if we took a break now we might not get back up again. And so we asked her to send the profile over to us.
Never give in.
If I believed in fate or a higher power I would probably it say that something was guiding us over those days. There were so many reasons to turn back but we kept going and as soon as we read the profile we knew that these were our children. Kevin and Lana had sounded great and would've been a fantastic part of our family, but for these two the words just seemed to jump off the page. The sort of parenting they would need was exactly the sort we wanted to give. The problems they had are ones that we were perfectly suited for dealing with. Their likes and dislikes even seemed to fit with ours.
We told our social worker that we were interested the very same day and asked her to send our profile to the children's social worker. A couple of days later they told us that they were interested too and wanted to arrange a meeting. They also told us that they were not seeing any other couples at this point. They also told us that due to their circumstances and age if we couldn't make a match the children would be considered unadoptable.
We were determined. These were our children. I may not believe in fate but I do believe in love at first sight and I knew that I would love these children as soon as I met them.
We just had to impress the social workers first.
