Introduction

What do these people all have in common?

Journalists: Kate Adie and Helen Rollason

Sports champions: Jamie Baulch, Ashia Hansen, Greg Louganis, Kriss Akabusi, John and Justin Fashanu, and Fatima Whitbread

Actors: Melissa Gilbert, Ray Liotta, Marilyn Monroe, and John Nettles

TV personalities: Jim Bowen and Larry Grayson

Authors: Edward Albee, Jeanette Winterson, James Michener, and Edgar Allan Poe

Politicians: Bill Clinton, Li Peng and Phillip Whitehead MEP

Singers: Debbie Harry, Liz Phair, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Kiri Te Kanawa

Businessmen: Steven Jobs and Ivan Massow

Yes, they were all either adopted or fostered as children. Just a few of the literally millions of people, some famous, some just your next-door neighbours, who didn’t grow up in the families they were born into.

There is hardly anyone in the country who hasn’t been touched by adoption in one way or another: if not one of the 10% directly affected — as an adoptee, adopter, birth relative, partner or child of an adoptee — then as classmate, friend or work mate. In my own family and circle of acquaintances I can count at least 40 adoptees, not including my own four children or the many I know purely through my work as an adoption counsellor.

There is probably no culture in the world or period of history where adoption is unknown. In parts of the Pacific Islands adoption is routine, and according to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, among the Manus people of what is now Papua New Guinea, before World War II, fully 25% of all the children were adoptees. In the mid-17th century in what is now the northeast of the United States, some villages of the Iroquois League were estimated to consist of 65% or more adoptees, following the introduction of European diseases which had up to 50% death rates, and thanks to the practice of “mourning wars” to capture members of other tribes to adopt in place of the deceased . In our culture adoption is common and an open subject, not something secret or shameful, although in some countries the stigma is still so powerful that adoption outside the extended family is very rare or never admitted in public.

You are reading this book because you’re interested in adopting a child. Good! That’s what I want to help you to do. I wouldn’t be writing it if I didn’t think adoption were not just worthwhile, but one of the world’s greatest inventions. But before we talk about the HOW of adoption, we need to really understand the WHAT and even more important, the WHY. Adoption is not something casual. Adoption is, even more than raising your own biological children, an adventure. And like any adventure you need to read the guidebooks and prepare carefully beforehand. There are some badly marked crossroads; there are dangerous rapids in the river and hidden reefs waiting to shipwreck the unwary. But when you reach the end of the journey there is a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction (maybe relief, too, at having got there in one piece), which in some ways makes the view from the mountaintop even more beautiful than if you had travelled the more conventional route. This book aims to help signpost the way and chart the waters, to give you some idea of the rewards of adoption and its pitfalls.

However, I also expect I will put some of you off adoption. Adoption is not for everyone, and if you find after reading this book that it isn’t for you, then you may have saved yourself and a child years of unhappiness. It is not easy to imagine anything worse or more disastrous to all concerned than a failed adoption. That’s why I ask you to do some hard, honest thinking early on. This is not just for you but also for the sake of the child you may adopt. Others of you may find that adoption is not the right way for you to bring children into your lives, and there are other ways to do this which suit you better.

There’s no point pretending that adoption is a stress-free process for those involved. It usually isn’t, even for those adopting for the nth time, who’ve been through it all before. It’s invariably hard for everyone, most especially for the child being adopted, even if he or she is too young to understand what’s going on. Most of the stress is caused by the need to be as sure as possible that the adoption is going to succeed, which entails a lot of intrusive questions, form filling, evening classes, reading and introspection. But some of the stress is caused by human stupidity, spite or sheer bloody-mindedness, or by that most intractable and convenient of scapegoats: bureaucracy. Some adopted children grow into their new families virtually without trouble; others will try to destroy their new families, and some will succeed. Most birth parents are the victims of overwhelming but temporary circumstances which few of us would be able to overcome; some are simply unable to cope with life at all; a very few seemingly make a good case for bringing back hanging. Some adoptions proceed through the courts without a hitch; some take years, cost a small fortune in legal fees and wind up in the House of Lords, due to the incompetence of lawyers or the social services, vindictiveness by birth parents or just Sod’s Law working overtime.