We Are Family was founded in 2013 to provide peer support and community to adopters and prospective adopters. Since then, we’ve grown, changed and developed and we need a look…
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We are Family is growing. Alongside our local and online support groups for parents, we run regular webinars, thematic groups and are developing a podcast among other projects to offer…
For all my working life, I have proudly felt associated with a profession that offers support to families in their time of need. I qualified as a social worker in…
It’s National Adoption Week (12th-18th 2020) and we are here to support you.
Someone posted a question the other day, on how other adoptive parents were doing when it came to talking to their children about racism in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter events. The post came on a morning when I (white adoptive mum) had kept my son aged 5 (black) off school, on and off the toilet trying to do a poo disimpaction regime resulting from all the lockdown carbs. I swept up another lump of poo, wiped his feet where he had trodden in it and thought, “We could do this topic today while he is off school, but you know, what with lockdown and now bowels and all the adoption stuff, it feels like our diary is full.”
I hope that some of the steps forward we’ve seen are permanent ones, for all of our sakes. We all get to the point when we have had enough of certain behaviours and battles, don’t we?
At first we were all chatting, sending funny memes and dark-tinted jokes. Then we started to count our blessings and revel in our new-found freedom. We quizzed, we zoomed, we house-partied. Then there was the dread of returning to a difficult normality, and the challenges of transitioning. And now, it is so quiet.
Here’s where I am today, without any BS: I’m a rubbish mother, a rubbish teacher, a rubbish cleaner, a rubbish washerwoman, a rubbish therapist, a rubbish cook and a rubbish shopper. My ideas are rubbish, I look rubbish, I’m a rubbish partner and a rubbish human.
As we progress through the stages of lockdown, our boys have now reached karate.
So, is this enforced isolation/ lock down or is it enforced bonding? I have been reflecting on the last few weeks, reminding myself of those 6-8 weeks four years ago when munchkin first came to live with me.
