A journey to parenthood
Reviews

Parenthood for most couples unfolds along a natural and usually effortless path. For others, it can be a torturous journey that spans many years and becomes all-consuming as they look to the next fertility drug or most recent technology to help them realise their dream. Our path was a series of disappointments and tragedies until we turned our focus to adoption. In a little under two years, our dream to have children was realised.

The challenges we faced with the children were numerous and diverse. The violent tantrums were a challenge far beyond any we had imagined, and our lives were regularly disrupted by medical issues, the impact of racial difference, recurring memories and the unique difficulties associated with language and learning.

For the children, learning English was much more complicated than we expected and it impacted every aspect of their lives and continually undermined their education. Filling gaps left from a deprived early childhood wasn’t straightforward, and for many years they functioned through a fog of confusion and misunderstanding. The clues to the complexity of the problem were there early on; we just didn’t understand them.

There are a lot of books about adoption that all tell quite different stories, from heart-warming successes to heart-wrenching disasters. I thought it was worth adding our story to the record because it’s different. We adopted older children, which brings a particular set of challenges, and adopting siblings magnifies all of them.

Our adoption adventure has been everything we hoped for, but the journey was rarely what we expected.