However you become a parent, the first few months of being responsible for keeping a little human alive can be terrifying. Becoming a parent via adoption brings with it a different level of stress, anxiety and scrutiny that just isn’t there if you give birth to your child.
It’s therefore really important to have plans in place that help you get through those first few months so that you’re able to start to thrive and not just survive.
This article shares my experiences of the first few months after placement, and advice from other adopters about things that helped them in the early days.
My experience of the first few months after placement
I’m extremely lucky to be mum to two beautiful sisters. They’re full siblings and I will be forever grateful that they were able to be placed together with us. They had two very different journeys to us and the early months of placement were like chalk and cheese, but not in the way I’d expected.
Our eldest was placed with us when she was nine months old. We’d known snippets of information about her since she was three months old, although we weren’t linked until three months later.
During our journey to parenthood via infertility, I’d built up an image in my head of how utterly amazing being a mum would be. By the time our eldest daughter came home, I’d built motherhood up to be a rose-tinted dream full of laughter and sparkles.
The early days
Some parts were like that during the early days, but there were some tough times too. It took a long time for me to fall in love with my daughter. Not because of anything to do with her. But because I felt so much guilt that I got to be her mum when the one who carried her in her tummy for nine months, couldn’t.
And I knew that until we had the adoption order, there was always the chance, however remote, that the local authority would decide that we weren’t the right parents for her. My professional career at that time was as a legal adviser in Magistrates’ Courts. I managed care cases where placement and adoption were the plans for the child so I knew exactly what the process was and what could happen at each stage.
But over time, I gradually learned to let go of the guilt and despite it taking a while to fall in love with our daughter, I loved learning how to be her mum and getting to know her. I love looking at photos of her during the early days as they bring back lots of memories. There were still lots of hard times but the overwhelming feeling is happiness.
The early days with our youngest daughter
Things felt very different with our youngest daughter. When our social worker contacted us to say that birth mum was pregnant again, we were happy being a family of three.
Birth mum had been pregnant a year after our eldest came home and after a lot of soul searching, we decided it wasn’t the right thing for us to be assessed to adopt him.
Things were different with youngest. Everything felt right at the time we found out about her so we said we’d like to be assessed to adopt her. However, it turned into one of the hardest years of our lives due to the death of a beloved member of the family, and the stress of caring for an elderly relative who needed to be moved up to the North East so that we could care for her properly.
On top of all of that, we were allocated an agency social worker to do our assessment who had never done an adoption assessment before. It felt like we were guiding her through the process rather than the other way around.
Our DBS checks weren’t sent off until very late in the assessment, and there was a huge delay in them coming back. This meant we missed the date for approval panel and had to do both panels on the same day.
So, by the time our youngest daughter came home, I was exhausted, both physically and mentally.
Post-adoption depression
I loved her from the moment I saw her, but I have very few memories of the early days with her. I experienced post-adoption depression which I didn’t know existed until I started to Google it.
Those first few months were tough and I felt totally lost. My eldest was starting school, youngest was six months old and I felt that my life consisted of school runs, weaning and trying to get the baby into a good sleep routine. She had a short nap in the morning and then a longer one in the afternoon, but the timings meant we only had about an hour in the morning to get out and about in between school runs.
Not being able to go out whenever I wanted was really hard. I felt chained to routine, but terrified of changing things because she was settling in well.
Keeping it to myself
I didn’t talk to many people about how I was feeling as I didn’t know how to explain it and thought they’d think I had no right to complain because I had two beautiful, healthy children which is what I’d dreamed of. How could I complain about how I was feeling when their birth mum would’ve given anything to be able to spend the day with them?
Our social work visits were carried out by a manager because the agency worker was only there to do the assessment. We hardly knew the manager and I didn’t feel I could talk to her about how I was feeling. I was terrified if I did she’d say I wasn’t coping and take both kids away.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. If I could go back and have a conversation with myself then, knowing what I know now, I’d say to talk to a professional about how I felt. I gradually started to feel that I could do things that made me feel better like going for a walk by myself when my husband came home from work, having a bath, or sitting somewhere with my headphones in, listening to my favourite songs.
But I’m pretty sure I would’ve felt better a lot sooner if I’d talked more about how I was feeling.
Keep talking
I know now that how I was feeling is common in new mums. But at the time, it wasn’t talked about, particularly amongst adoptive mums. I felt so alone and like I was the only person in the world feeling the way I did.
That’s why I’ve written this post. So that anyone experiencing baby blues, post-adoption depression, or feeling low and not themselves in the early days after placement knows that they’re not alone. And that there are things they can try that may help them to feel less overwhelmed and alone.
Tips from other adopters
As well as sharing my experience, I wanted to get some tips from other adopters about navigating those early days of placement. So, I asked the #ukadoptioncommunity over on Instagram for their tips and this is their advice:
- Let others take care of you so that you can take care of your kids
- Don’t try and do too much. Be kind to yourself and try and make life as easy as possible.
- If you’re adopting with a partner, tag team everything. This gives you both the opportunity to have a break and for one-to-one time with each parent for the child.
- Don’t be discouraged if it takes a while to get into the family rhythm. It’s new to everyone, but it is worth it when things start to fall into place.
- Sleep when you can and have breaks away when you can. There is no shame in asking for help.
- Patience, patience, patience! Don’t look too far ahead, one day at a time
- Be kind to yourself and ALWAYS reach out for help if needed. Asking for help isn’t failing.
- It’s natural to think “What have I done”. It’s really hard but it does get easier.
- Prioritise self-care.
- Talk to someone you know won’t judge and will listen without trying to fix everything.
If you’d like to share your experience of the early days after placement, get in touch. The post can be annoymous, it’s the experience I want to share rather than names and details.
