Last week a number of my friends received visits from Social Services. Having begun with a few throat clearing questions, the social worker asked them whether they thought I was a child-abuser.
For those of you recoiling in horror, I should explain that P and I have applied for approval to adopt. The process in the UK is, as you would no doubt expect, bureaucratic and deflating. Social workers (for whom, as a profession, I have the utmost admiration) assume, correctly, that the great majority of prospective adoptive parents have already struggled through the mire of IVF. They also assume, again correctly, that those wannabe parents will be in the grip of at least some degree of desperation. This affects social workers’ behaviour in two ways. The first is that they believe you need careful handling and I describe our experiences below. The second, I will deal with in my next entry.
Social workers go on courses so as better to fathom the mind of those who have been through failed IVF. The perceived need for such courses arises from an apparent assumption that our minds will be as devastated and as difficult to pick through as an earthquake-hit hillside fortress. With the courses comes jargon:
Social worker: “Do you feel you have fully grieved for your dream baby?”
Moobs: “Do I feel I have whatnow?”
SW: “Grieved. For your dream baby”
M: “What dream baby?”
SW (looking sympathetic): “The child you dreamed you and P would have together”
M: “The only time we ever imagined what our own child would be like we concluded that it would be permanently grumpy and have an enormous monobrow. If you have one of those in stock we’re good.”
Since the social worker is taught that you will be damaged you cannot simply reassure them that you aren’t. That would be a sign that you were “in denial”. Nor, of course, can you sob uncontrollably into their lap. That would be a sign that you have not begun your recovery. You have to strike a delicate balance in which you persuade them that you have been very upset and are still upset but are somewhat less upset than you were.
It is also assumed that you will be naive about what adoption involves – that your dream child will have rubbed pixie dust in your eyes before evaporating away leaving a big pile of medical bills. From the outset, therefore, they are at pains to tell you just how harrowing and grinding an adoption can be. In our case, as natural pessimists, we had very little untrammelled optimism to dispel. Even if we had seen ourselves plucking an apple-cheeked babe from a social services mulberry bush and walking off towards the sunset, P’s many months browsing the Adoption UK website had put paid to that. Many of the entries might best be summarised thus: “Deary me, we seem to have adopted Satan”, followed by a slew of comments saying “Hang in there” and “Have you tried pressing a communion wafer onto their forehead?”
After four days of training during which social workers endlessly retiterate that anyone thinking that adoption will be anything other than hellish is not in their right mind, they then say “of course if you have any doubt at all about whether this is the right thing for you to be doing, you shouldn’t do it”.