Preparation Course / Boot Camp

Following our first home visit we must have waited about ten days before we heard back from Ealing. It was quit a nerve racking wait, given that someone you have never met is taking notes on you and during a three hour visit is making a decision about weather you are fit to parent a child so a lot was resting on this next stage.

When we did hear back we were delighted to be accepted by Ealing Council and put forward for the next stage of the 'competition'... we were off to Boot Camp (or preparation course to those in the business!) The next course was due to start at the end of January 2011 so we had nothing else to do over Christmas except wait. The course would be three full days long, ours was Thursday, Friday and Monday and would cover a wide range of areas in child development, the adoption process in general, dealing with children from difficult backgrounds, attachment theory, the adoption triangle, the effects of drug and alcohol abuse etc. etc. etc.

The course took place at a local cricket club (which could have benefited from some central heating!) and was a really lovely supportive environment to share with other perspective adopters. Everyone felt really relaxed and was able to comfortable ask questions, benefit from other peoples ideas and experience and learn more about the process together. We felt very reassured by the team at Ealing and they had obviously had a great response to their 'Pink Families' Campaign because we were not the only gay couple on the course, in fact the group was made up of three heterosexual couple, three gay couples and a single gay adopter... power to the gays!  

The idea of the course is that everyone can build up a circle of contact and friends who are all going through the process together and share thought and stay in touch beyond the preparation course and this has certainly been the case. We have in fact since the course met up with one couple for lunch since and are planning to meet again along with one of the other couples in a few weeks time.

Towards the end of the three days, still inspired and determined to continue and keen to find out what we had to do next to keep things moving at the surprising speed they had been so far. On the final day we were given another big information pack which contained amongst other notes and handouts the form the needed to fill in in order to continue to the next round. In addition the course leaders from the adoption team would compile their thoughts and decide if they were happy for us to continue. Keen as ever we completed the form the next day and submitted it by email that evening.

It was the following Friday that we found out that they had assigned a social worker to us and our 'home visits' were about to start! Bring on Judges Houses... or judges in our house/s?!

The Application / 1st Audition

November 2010 I would say was the first significant step in our journey. I sent the email to Ealing Council to say that after the two events we had been to we felt ready to start the process and would like to officially apply to become adopters. We waited, and waited and didn't hear anything for a week. Which in hindsight is not long at all when you are dealing with a busy department which is no doubt under staffed and under preassue but when you are sending such a life changing email it's hard to think about anything else. All sorts of things go through your mind (or my own paranoid mind) and you wonder "Is it me?", "Is it because we are gay?"... all sorts of things. So I decided to pick up the phone and check if they had even received my email. The lady I spoke to was very apologetic and assured me that we would get a call and a letter within the next few days to arrange a time for a social worker to make a home visit.

So they had our application and this was it, we were going to formally start the ball rolling with a home visit. This made the whole thing even more real and felt really nice to get getting started. Over the past few weeks, well since May I guess we had discussed parenting a handful of times every week, all the time reinforcing our want to have children now whilst we are both young. We have heard through all of the book that we have read, websites we have trawled and events we had been to just how long the whole process can take so even though we are both relatively young adopter we are of the opinion that if it does take three plus years we definitely want to get the ball rolling now.

We had a date and were so excited in the days before the visit just dying to get started. Not rushing things and expecting too much too soon is one of the biggest expectations that you have to manage with the adoption process, everyone's is always reminding you how long things can take even if you are prepared and have all of your paperwork completed on time you are always waiting for some council office, a social worker or a panel worker to do their bit - but that doesn't really go very far when you are embarking on such an exciting life-changing journey and it's hard not to get a little carried away and swept up in it. In fact it's hard to think about anything else in the run up to each milestone. Anyway, the day before she came we cleaned the house from top to bottom, bought flowers, fresh coffee and croissants which I left in the oven on a tray to heat in advance.

One of the first things the social worker did when she arrived was to go through and fill in a first application form with us. When she got to taking down our date of birth I mentioned about the information evening and feeling that we were the youngest couple there by a good stretch - I asked her if this could be a potential issue in presenting us to the adoption panel and she made a good point which put my mind at rest... the majority of heterosexual couples who adopt come to adoption as a 'Plan B', after trying for many years to get pregnant themselves, where as gay couples, especially gay men come to the conclusion a lot sooner that having a biological child isn't an option for them and so are ready to visit adoption a lot sooner.

The rest of the form consisted of lots of general questions - she wasn't there to probe too deeply, that would come with future home visits if we were accepted by the authority as 'potential adopters'. The purpose of this visit was just to take down the basics that she would then take back to the team before deciding to take our application further. We answered basic questions about our attitude towards parenting, our own childhoods and family structure, what we do for a living, how much we earn, how long we have been together and that kind of thing. I say basic questions, it was still quite a long visit - she arrived at 9am and didn't leave till after 12pm, which was something we have now come to expect with home visits!

We got on really well with this social worker as she was one of those speaking at the 'Pink Families' event we went along to so we were really pleased when she turned up at the door. We were actually hoping that she might be our social worker but that idea was quickly finished when she declared that she was actually leaving after Christmas to move to Thailand! Nevermind.

The other really good thing for us is that she got on really well with Jeffrey and Andrew our little dogs. It's really important for us that the social workers during this process liked the boys (our canine children!) and see how gentle and loving they are and on this visit the both (after the initial barking to welcome visitors) lay down and went to sleep on her! She reassured us again here agreeing that pets can really make a home and it's a nice thing to be able to say to children who you are matched with that there are two little doggies at their new home etc.

It wasn't until we closed the door that I remembered the croissants were still in the oven!!

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.