Pink Families

Our adoption journey began in April 2010. My fiancée and and I had been together four and a half years and over the course of our relationship had always discussed that we both wanted to have children at some point in the future - I guess we both kind of assumed that this would be in the distant future, at least towards the end of our thirties and really thought no more about it.

I remember coming home from work one day and he told me that he had seen an advert in Attitude Magazine from Ealing Council promoting a 'Pink Families' campaign to encourage potential LGBT foster carers and adopters to come forward with the support of a new 'forward thinking' open minded local authority to help combat any red tape misconceptions that may have previously been associated with same-sex parenting and help sell the benefits that we have to offer as parents. Anyway, he had called the number on the ad and registered our interest - at this stage we both agreed we just wanted to go along and find out more.

It was the end of May when we went along to the town hall one evening after work. After signing in, recieveing our complementary pink bags, mugs and pens we made a b-line for the coffee and nibbles - we had come straight from work and were starving so we certainly got our council tax worth! The evening was fantastic. After a short introduction from some of the team at Ealing and then the obligatory slide-show they had lined up a great selection of speakers, all with really inspiring stories to tell. Some were foster carers, some were in the middle of the adoption process, some had recently had children placed with them and others had adopted a few years ago and now had older children.

I just remember sitting there and thinking "this can actually happen for us". Until that night the prospect of actually becoming parents was only a distant wish for the future and I don't think either of us had given much thought to how we would make it happen. I was struck by the fact that we seemed the youngest couple at the event by far, I was 25 at the time and my finacee 29, compared to the other couples who seemed late 30's. We are keen to parent children whilst we are young still, we want our time with them to be full of energy and we also want to keep up with them! Also, my own mother was just a couple of years younger than me when I was born and we are now able to share a real friendship and the age gap isn't as large as that between a lot of my firneds and their parents and indeed my partner and his parents who are now in their 70's. We left the town hall (with another Voulevant in hand) and made for the car. We were both so inspired by the evening we knew that having children was now definitely something we both really wanted. We just needed to decide when and how... we still hadn't ruled out surragacy. This was something we needed to investigate.