I. What is Adoption?, Page 2

A century ago the back streets of our cities and towns were full of runaways and vagrant children: orphaned without anyone to take them in, refugees from abusive families, or left to fend for themselves by poverty-stricken or alcoholic parents, runaways from the workhouse. The “orphanages” weren’t much better. Charles Dickens’ novels are fiction but their portrayal of the underbelly of British society of his day and of the condition in it of parentless children was closely based on reality. Since those days, since the Adoption Act 1926, which for the first time regulated adoptions through the courts, and especially since the Children Act 1989, which established that the interests of the child are paramount in adoption, things have changed, and very definitely for the better.

Adoption is for life. No one should enter into this most serious relationship without the iron-clad determination to see it through, no matter what. There is no equivalent to divorce in adoption in this country, although if things don’t work out a child may go back into care and even be adopted again by a new family. Adoption is even more serious than marriage in some respects, because often one of the partners has no effective voice in the matter, so the responsibility is more one-sided. We the parents must be committed to the relationship; we must learn to love and respect our child. There is no corresponding obligation on the child’s part to love or respect us or to be committed to the relationship, although we (and the child) naturally hope this will happen.

Things can get very, very fraught in an adoption, because of all the people involved, some of them unseen; maybe because of the emotional strain infertility causes us and our partners; because of the natural drive of adopters to be better parents than normal, to live up to what we think society expects of us; and because of the emotional baggage, much of it not very happy, which our children bring with them to the relationship.

And we have to work harder at our marriages than other people, too. In some cases because of the extra strain difficult adoptive children will put on it, but even more in order to avoid further pain for the child if our marriage broke up. Sometimes it may be only our blind determination to keep slogging on which keeps the family together through a particularly hard patch. And then you turn the corner and it’s all worth it.

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