Fear of falling, p.10
Fear of Falling, page 10
We had also agreed with Janette to use contraception while we were applying to adopt as our adoption would be put on hold if I got pregnant. Sex wasn’t about babies any more. It was about love and passion and each other.
Chapter Eighteen
‘I don’t know how anyone does this full-time,’ Bel said, one Sunday morning, as Mac and I arrived to collect Freya and stop for a coffee. ‘Women do it till the kids start school, or secondary school, even. It’s either killing me with boredom or it’s like being put through a mincer. Chewed up and spat out. How can anything so small be that powerful?’ She nodded at Freya, who was dozing in her car seat. ‘Anyway . . .’ She lit a cigarette and edged the back door open, a token to not smoking in the house any more. Mac and I exchanged a look. The draught only served to blow the smoke back into the room. ‘. . . I go back to work next month.’
‘The Playhouse?’ I said.
‘Yes. But they’ve moved me into an admin job, office hours, so she can go to Carol’s full-time.’ Carol was the childminder.
A handful of times I’d seen Bel being affectionate, kissing Freya when I took her or brought her back, a kiss on either cheek, one, two, three times, talking to the baby in French as she fed her, reminding me that Bel had spent much of her childhood in France. But mostly Bel regarded her as a chore, a burden she wanted to escape from. Would I be the same?
Colin came downstairs then, looking pretty wasted.
‘Good night?’ Mac said.
‘Brutal,’ Colin said. He poured himself a glass of water. ‘What’ve I missed?’
‘I’ve had my medical for the adoption,’ I said. ‘Mac’s got his tomorrow. Next, they want all our bank records, proof of income, that sort of thing.’
‘Bit cheeky, isn’t it?’ Bel said.
‘They want to make sure we can feed and clothe someone. Not up to our necks in debt.’
‘Isn’t everyone drowning in debt, these days?’ Colin said. ‘My credit cards – I daren’t look.’
‘Also . . .’ I said, glancing at Mac, who winked at me, ‘. . . we’re getting married, register office do at the town hall, next Friday.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Bel, whirling round. Her face alive.
‘You kept that quiet,’ Colin said.
‘Marriage of convenience,’ Mac said.
‘We’d like you to be witnesses,’ I said.
‘Can we dress up?’ Bel said.
‘Wear anything you like.’
Bel pumped her fist. ‘Whoo-hoo! Where’s the party?’ Freya started at the shout but slept on.
I thought of all those nights out we’d had in pubs and parks, at clubs and house parties. The anticipation while we were getting ready in my bedroom or at her bedsit. The joy of it. ‘We’re not having a party. Just a meal,’ I said.
‘We can always go on somewhere,’ Bel said, still animated.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Colin said. ‘Someone?’
‘I’ll figure something out. Carol might keep her if I pay her enough. How can you not have a party?’ Bel complained.
My parents had been disappointed, too, that we weren’t doing the whole thing ‘properly’, and that so few people would be there, but my dad had offered to pay for the meal afterwards and eventually we agreed to go halves with them.
Terese had refused point blank to keep it quiet, and nothing Mac or I said persuaded her otherwise, so in the end all Mac’s siblings and partners were coming, as well as Brendan. Which at least meant that our parents would get to meet.
The day went fine: no one got too drunk, though Bel came close; no fights broke out; no feuds erupted. It all felt slightly odd – the combination of people from disparate parts of our lives, the off-the-peg service, the snapshot photos on the town-hall steps taken by Javier and my dad. But that was fine. It was a means to an end, that was all, a possible advantage in our adoption stakes.
The first of our training and preparation days began with coffee and biscuits served by the two social workers running the course: an older woman who told us she was retiring soon and a younger one in training. There were also two adoptive parents who would be contributing.
They’d arranged a dozen chairs in a large circle with tables in the centre, and once we were all seated, we made introductions: we gave our names and occupations, and said what we had hoped to be when we were children. A zoo-keeper was my answer (preceding my vet days).
Then the senior social worker asked us to help ourselves to a piece of flip-chart paper from the sheets on the table. ‘I want you to think about your life when you were three years old. Use the big felt-tip markers and draw yourself, aged three, at the centre of the page. Stick figures are fine.’ People made jokes about not being able to draw or wanting wax crayons and glitter glue but the room gradually quietened.
‘Next put around you the people you live with. Then add grandparents and other relatives, neighbours, family friends. Write the name beside each person. Draw any pets.’
I had the sensation of being back at school as I drew my father and mother, my grandparents – the ones who lived in Scotland and my grandma who lived in Bradford – Steven as a baby, Pixie, the cat we’d had before Harvey.
Beside me I saw Mac sketching a large dog, then he scrawled lots of horns and wrote ‘cows’.
‘Cheat,’ I whispered. He could have drawn a herd of cows in his sleep, he was a wonderful artist, but this probably wasn’t the time or the place. Someone complained they were running out of space.
‘No worries. Here’s more paper.’
When we’d finished, the workshop leader, her colleague and the two adoptive parents collected up our papers. There was a collective gasp as they slashed through the sheets with large scissors, cutting them to shreds. I felt insulted, stung, watching them crumple the paper into balls and drop them on the floor.
They handed us back just the figure of ourselves from the centre, a little scrap of paper daubed with colour.
‘Think about what you’re feeling now. Any responses?’
She wrote our replies on a whiteboard. Angry. Sad. Cross. Upset. Pissed off. Lost. Violated. Abandoned.
‘Now imagine what a child in care feels when it loses its family and everything familiar.’
I smoothed the fragment of paper in my hand, the stick figure in her red skirt and green top, hair in bunches. All alone.
The social worker pointed to the board. ‘Lost. Let’s think about being lost. Did you ever get lost as a child?’
The memory rushed over me, like a freak wave, knocking me down, chilling my skin. I’d been five, a hot day, the beach crowded with families. I’d padded out across the hard sand, where the waves had left ridges that hurt my feet, in search of mussel shells. Near the water’s edge I found a starfish. When I touched it, it felt crunchy, stiff and muscular. Eager to show my parents I ran back up the beach with it.
All the people shimmered in the heat haze. I couldn’t see them, Mummy and Daddy. Panic ripped through me and I dropped the starfish. I ran on, crying, my heart banging. Then I saw her! She was towelling herself dry, her back to me. I ran to her. ‘Mummy!’
She turned. It was a stranger. ‘Are you all right?’ the woman said.
I cried louder. Barely able to speak I sobbed that I’d lost my mummy and she asked me lots of questions. But I didn’t know where we had been sitting, what colour our towels were, how far we’d walked. She took my hand and together we combed the sands. What if we never found them? There was a hole inside me, a pit of terror and desolation. Then I heard my name and my father was calling and I was found.
‘Think about what that felt like,’ the social worker said. ‘Think about how it might be if you’d never been safely reunited with your family. A child removed from its birth-family carries that sense of abandonment, of loss and anxiety. It’s important to recognise that and not pretend that everything is perfectly fine. All of you will have experienced some loss, the loss of bereavement, the loss of not having the children you wanted, the loss of infertility and miscarriage. Adoption is your chance to create a family but it will not be the same as having a birth-child, just as for the children themselves, having you as parents will not be the same as having their birthparents. Every adopted child has four parents. Embracing that is the best possible approach.’
‘You’re saying we have to be willing for contact?’ one of the other prospective adopters asked.
‘Not necessarily. Contact will vary depending on what’s judged to be in the best interests of the child. In most cases there will be letterbox contact with letters exchanged through us between the birthand adoptive-parents, once or twice a year. But whether contact remains or not you can’t take a child’s identity away.’
I looked at Mac’s drawing of himself, only a few marks on paper but it was unmistakably Mac. I imagined him on the farm, in that big, boisterous family.
I’d missed some of what was being said and tuned back in. ‘. . . even though they will be living with a new mum and dad. Tom or Ayesha comes from that birth-family, from that mother and that father. That is part of who they are, of their life-story. It always will be. It’s not helpful or healthy to ignore that, or deny it. Honesty, openness, the truth appropriate to the age and understanding of the child is the best approach.’
I tried to imagine talking to a child about the parents who had given them up or, more likely, the parents who could not be trusted. It made me uneasy. What if the parents had been cruel or abused them? Wouldn’t I want to forget about them? Wouldn’t the children?
Next we had to pair up with someone we didn’t know and talk about our earliest memories and how they made us feel. I spoke to a woman called Erica, whose memory was more traumatic than mine. About a dog barking and knocking her down. She’d been frightened of dogs for years but her partner had had one when she’d met him and gradually she had overcome that fear.
By comparison my earliest memories were bathed in warm affection. I was sledging in the snow with my dad. Sensations of speed and being jolted and bumped. My fingers burning with cold. I think I was about two.
There was another, falling and skinning my chin and hands, sitting on my mum’s knee. Her singing to me. The smell of pink ointment.
‘I felt safe,’ I said, suddenly realising it. ‘Even though I’d fallen and got hurt, on my mum’s knee I was OK. And on the sledge, it was fast, a bit scary, but I knew I could trust my dad.’
Over a lunch of sandwiches and cakes we were able to chat. Mac and I spent most of the time talking to a lesbian woman, who had been adopted. ‘Very different back then,’ she said. ‘My birth-mother wasn’t married, so having me adopted was her only option. But I was never neglected or anything.’
‘Have you met her?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, and her eyes fell, ‘a couple of times, but she can’t really cope with it. She never told her husband. He’s ill now and she doesn’t want to bring it up. I’ve two half-brothers who don’t know I exist.’
‘That must be hard. What did your adoptive-parents think about your meeting?’ I said.
‘They were great. They’re amazing.’
Would someone say that about us one day? That we were amazing parents?
In the afternoon we looked at case studies of children placed for adoption, their early lives and how that might affect their development. One baby had been removed from a drug-addicted mother who had already lost two children. Three siblings had experienced neglect. A child with learning disabilities was relinquished by a mother who couldn’t cope. A boy had been treated with cruelty and physically abused by his stepfather. And two sisters had been sexually abused by their father.
In most cases the parents had been subject to poor parenting themselves and had deep-seated problems of their own. One surprise to me was how frequently some children were moved, staying with a number of temporary foster-carers, every move a reminder of that break with their family. A freshly opened wound.
‘How might these children behave after trauma like that?’ the senior social worker said.
We filled another large sheet of paper with suggestions: anger, hoarding food, acting out, disobedience, bedwetting, soiling, stealing, withdrawal, aggression, psychological problems, destructive tendencies, trouble bonding, crying, clinging, biting, anxiety, selfharm, sexualised behaviour.
Some of the examples seemed so extreme, they repulsed me. How would we ever cope with that? We weren’t trained or qualified to deal with that sort of damage. What if we responded the wrong way, made things worse?
‘Anyone feel like leaving now?’ The social worker’s joke punctured the atmosphere. ‘It’s a daunting list but we know that providing children with love, stability and routine gives them the best chance to overcome these problems.’
The adoptive-parents each gave a potted history of their experience. The man had adopted siblings aged three and four, now teenagers, and the woman had adopted a five-year-old Down’s syndrome boy three years ago. Both of them said the same thing: adoption had been hard and there had been times when they’d found themselves close to breaking point, but it was the best thing they’d ever done.
We were invited to ask questions.
‘Did you love them straight away?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘I didn’t expect to – you don’t really know what to expect. But our first meeting, the pair of them were giddy, clambering all over the place, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. It was really hard to leave after an hour. We just couldn’t wait to bring them home. We were euphoric.’
‘Not for me,’ the adoptive-mother said. ‘I liked Ben. He made me smile and he was really sweet, but loving him came gradually as we got to know each other. He was always pleased to see me, even if I’d just been in the other room, and hearing him call me “Mummy” – that was amazing. The bond just got stronger over a few months and now I can’t imagine life without him. He’s my boy, my son. I’d do anything for him. I love him completely.’
I swallowed, moved by her testimony. But what if we didn’t like the child, couldn’t love it? Surely there were some people who adopted and never found the love. Maybe biological parents asked themselves the same thing, but wouldn’t there be some instinctive recognition with a biological child, a bond based on genetic factors, a pull hardwired into us? Then I thought of Bel and Freya, Bel’s ambivalence about being a mother.
Coming away I felt shattered, as if I’d been travelling overnight or survived some accident. We heated up pizza for tea and opened some wine.
‘That was pretty full on,’ I said.
‘Has it put you off?’ Mac said.
‘I don’t know. It’s daunting but I don’t think so. You?’
‘No.’
I put down my glass. ‘Something shifted. Today. For the first time it wasn’t about us, was it? It was all about the kids. Those stories . . .’ I shook my head. I imagined a little boy, sometimes a girl but mostly a boy, afraid and lonely and hurt, and him coming to us, and soon his laughter ringing round the house, his hand plump in mine, his arms about my neck. Happy and safe.
Chapter Nineteen
Bel’s parents were coming to visit before the Christmas break, and Bel asked Mac and me to join them for Sunday lunch at a restaurant in town. We were due to see Terese and family but Bel pleaded with me. ‘They’re here for a week. I’ll end up sticking a fork into one of them. Or worse.’
‘They can’t be that bad.’
‘Not with other people around.’ She grabbed my hand and squeezed. ‘You could bring Terese and her lot. That’d be fine.’
‘We were going to them in York,’ I said, ‘but I’ll see if we can swap dates.’
On the surface the meal was entirely pleasant but I could feel the tension that crackled between Bel and her father. I knew he worked for a bank at a pretty high level and had lived abroad, but he affected a sort of bluff, blustery style, a mix of bonhomie and crabbiness, like the stereotype of a blunt-speaking Yorkshireman. I pictured him kitted out like John Bull, roaring for his pipe and ale, beating his horse.
A jovial smile on his face, he referred to Bel as ‘the thorn in our side’ and ‘determined to swim upstream’, adding ‘she was born awkward.’ The fact that Bel had struggled on becoming a mother was never acknowledged.
Bel’s smile was too bright, and when she glanced my way I saw her eyes were lanced with anger. We talked about safe subjects, new films we’d seen, like The Pianist, the vagaries of home internet access, the success of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester earlier in the year.
Bel’s mother said little. She had stick-like wrists and a scrawny neck but an incongruous pot-belly. Her hair was brittle, sprayed in place. She wore heavy eye make-up that reminded me of Tim Burton animations. She drank steadily and her movements were slow and studied, as if she were having to be extra careful. I remembered Bel’s description of her as a heavy drinker.
Freya, in her car seat by our table, woke partway through the meal when her grandfather insisted on holding her.
‘No gadding about the globe now,’ he said to Bel. ‘Not with little missy here. Have to knuckle down. Start acting like a grown-up.’
Bel got up so abruptly she almost knocked over her chair. I left it a minute, then followed her into the toilets. She came out of the stall sniffing. Was she crying? Then I saw the dusting of white under her nose.
I pointed at my own nose. ‘Christ, Bel. Here? Couldn’t you wait?’
She threw back her head, eyes closed, and groaned aloud as she wiped her nose.
‘Mother’s little helper,’ she said. ‘No . . .’ She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘Daughter’s little helper. I’d like to tell them to fuck off but they’re giving me a deposit for a house here. They’ve been trying to talk me into going over there. Can you imagine it? Being stuck with Fuck-face and Gin-tits.’
