Alternative Families

The summer came and went and we were both rally busy with work so didn't really have time to re-visit the children thing. My fiancée was enrolling on a part-time MBA course and my business was keeping me incredibly busy and also rather stressed having had to pursue legal action against two clients in the same month. One thing I do remember about last summer was watching a documentary on Channel 4, the latest of their 'shock docs' called My Weird & Wonderful Family. Ten years ago Tony and Barrie Drewitt-Barlow made history by fathering twins via surrogacy and over the years have added to their family in the same way. An option which seemed to work for them.

We heard about the Alternative Families Show which takes place each year in Covent Garden and decided to go along and suss things out. We registered in advance for a couple of the seminars. Being a mixed-race couple we were really interested in international adoption and keen to find out if adopting from India would be a possibility. We also booked for a seminar on surrogacy to find out more about that as a potential avenue.

The event was really great - there were a whole host of local authorities there promoting their adoption services, as well as charities such as Action for Children and Barnardos. Stonewall and BAAF also had a big presence. It was a great chance to ask loads of questions and speak to people already perusing the different options to find out what was best for us.

The seminar on International adoption reinforced a lot of what we had already been reading online in that the red tape many Asian countries has surrounding gay adoption meant that India wouldn't be a viable option for us. My partner as an Indian national would have to adopt as a single parent. Plus with running my business the time we would have to spend out of the country duration the adoption meant this just wasn't a viable option for us.

The other seminar we signed up for was about Surrogacy and guess who the speakers were? The Drewitt-Barlows! Whilst their story is inspiring and their children are adorable it just didn't feel right for us. Surragocy is a very costly road to go down given that its not legal in the UK so will almost certainly involve lots of travel, a fee for the surrogate mother and usually the agency fee, all in all you are looking at the best part of £100k and upwards. Their presentation was followed by a sales pitch from a US agency who just didn't seem right from the start. The CEO was their to speak and sell the benefits of their service which fair enough sounded very organised and well structured to protect the client, cover legal loop holes and audition potential surrogate mothers the whole thing just seems a little cold and business like and not right for us.

We left that in October feeling certain that adoption was the route we wanted to take. Aside from the fact the it wasn't going to cost us £100k we both really like to concept of giving a child who is without parents a home, a stable family life and all of our love and support.

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.