All families have different grown-ups
This week is LGBT adoption and fostering week. I am an adopter. I am also LGBT.
If you read my blog regularly, you’ve probably worked out that I’m parenting as part of a female same-sex couple. It’s not something I’ve explicitly written about in any level of detail though. Not because I’m particularly trying to hide it, but more because I feel that as a parent, the adopter part of my identity is much more significant than the LGBT part, in the sense that if I were to separate the two, I can usually find a lot more common ground with other adopters (be they gay, straight, single, coupled) than I can with lesbian parents who have chosen other ways to build a family.
Would I have become an adopter if I weren’t LGBT? I can’t honestly answer that, because I don’t know. I’ve never tried to have a birth child or felt a need to try so I don’t know if it would have been an option for me under different circumstances. My wife and I knew early on in our relationship that we wanted children; we considered all of the options, and adoption was the path we chose. I’ve read a fair bit in the online adoption community about the language of commodity with regards to children and that played a lot into my thinking about how to build our family. To put it crudely, as two women, we were going to need outside intervention from somewhere and for me, personally, I was much more comfortable with the idea of telling a child that we became their parents because their birth parents could no longer look after them, than that we became parents by obtaining sperm. That’s not to criticise anyone who chose a different way. You’ve got to do what’s right for your family, and this was what was right for us.
But what about the children? After all, adoption is first and foremost about the needs of the child. Does our little LGBT adoptive family meet our children’s needs? I think it does, at the moment anyway.
I will admit, when first reading their paperwork, to being slightly unconvinced by the reasons they were taken into care, but the more I discovered, and the fuller picture I built, the more I was satisfied that all other options had been tried and exhausted. At the end of the day, I think adoption was their best option. Would they have been happy (happier?) in another adoptive family. Quite possibly, hard as that is to imagine, but we’ll never know. We just need to trust in the social workers’ and matching panel’s decision making process on that one, as there’s the potential to overanalyse that for the rest of our lives.
And what do they think of their LGBT family? I think to a certain extent, it’s just become their new normal. Certainly Little was so well prepared by her social worker and foster carers that she came to us thinking that it was her idea all along to have two mummies. She’s confident in her story and I remember being amazed the first time another child innocently asked her why she didn’t have a daddy, listening to her explain that she had a first mummy and daddy but they couldn’t look after her, so she went to live with X and Y [foster carers] and then Z [social worker] found mummy and mama. What the other child made of all that I don’t know! There was a niggling doubt in my mind before we were linked about the fact that Tiny seemed particularly drawn to the men around him, and it’s definitely true that he adores his grandads, uncles and our close male friends and is always excited to see them. So far though, not having a male caregiver has not seemed to present issues for either them, and if a day comes where it does, we’ll deal with it then.
When I asked them what they thought about our family setup this evening, Little said it was ‘great because we do lots of fun things’. And is it strange having two mummies when lots of her friends have a mum and a dad? ‘it’s a bit strange, not bad, not good, just different. Because all families have different grown-ups’
If you read my blog regularly, you’ve probably worked out that I’m parenting as part of a female same-sex couple. It’s not something I’ve explicitly written about in any level of detail though. Not because I’m particularly trying to hide it, but more because I feel that as a parent, the adopter part of my identity is much more significant than the LGBT part, in the sense that if I were to separate the two, I can usually find a lot more common ground with other adopters (be they gay, straight, single, coupled) than I can with lesbian parents who have chosen other ways to build a family.
Would I have become an adopter if I weren’t LGBT? I can’t honestly answer that, because I don’t know. I’ve never tried to have a birth child or felt a need to try so I don’t know if it would have been an option for me under different circumstances. My wife and I knew early on in our relationship that we wanted children; we considered all of the options, and adoption was the path we chose. I’ve read a fair bit in the online adoption community about the language of commodity with regards to children and that played a lot into my thinking about how to build our family. To put it crudely, as two women, we were going to need outside intervention from somewhere and for me, personally, I was much more comfortable with the idea of telling a child that we became their parents because their birth parents could no longer look after them, than that we became parents by obtaining sperm. That’s not to criticise anyone who chose a different way. You’ve got to do what’s right for your family, and this was what was right for us.
But what about the children? After all, adoption is first and foremost about the needs of the child. Does our little LGBT adoptive family meet our children’s needs? I think it does, at the moment anyway.
I will admit, when first reading their paperwork, to being slightly unconvinced by the reasons they were taken into care, but the more I discovered, and the fuller picture I built, the more I was satisfied that all other options had been tried and exhausted. At the end of the day, I think adoption was their best option. Would they have been happy (happier?) in another adoptive family. Quite possibly, hard as that is to imagine, but we’ll never know. We just need to trust in the social workers’ and matching panel’s decision making process on that one, as there’s the potential to overanalyse that for the rest of our lives.
And what do they think of their LGBT family? I think to a certain extent, it’s just become their new normal. Certainly Little was so well prepared by her social worker and foster carers that she came to us thinking that it was her idea all along to have two mummies. She’s confident in her story and I remember being amazed the first time another child innocently asked her why she didn’t have a daddy, listening to her explain that she had a first mummy and daddy but they couldn’t look after her, so she went to live with X and Y [foster carers] and then Z [social worker] found mummy and mama. What the other child made of all that I don’t know! There was a niggling doubt in my mind before we were linked about the fact that Tiny seemed particularly drawn to the men around him, and it’s definitely true that he adores his grandads, uncles and our close male friends and is always excited to see them. So far though, not having a male caregiver has not seemed to present issues for either them, and if a day comes where it does, we’ll deal with it then.
When I asked them what they thought about our family setup this evening, Little said it was ‘great because we do lots of fun things’. And is it strange having two mummies when lots of her friends have a mum and a dad? ‘it’s a bit strange, not bad, not good, just different. Because all families have different grown-ups’
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