Transcript
Speaker: This week, for the first time, I'm going back to my roots to interview our latest guest.
Speaker: We'll be talking about gay adoption from a British perspective, which, prior to me moving to the Netherlands, was the only perspective I knew.
Speaker: My name is Conor James, and you're listening to The Daddy Issue.
Speaker: The Daddy Issue
Speaker: So, when I started this journey I just assumed adoption was the way to go.
Speaker: I'm from the UK, where roughly 6,000 children need to be adopted every single year.
Speaker: And because of this high number, I was no stranger to adverts from the government and adoption agencies encouraging people to become adoptive or even foster parents.
Speaker: In 2005, adoption was opened up to non-married and same-sex couples.
Speaker: In fact, you can even adopt as a single parent in the UK.
Speaker: When I moved to Holland, it was a big shock to find that domestic adoption was in single-digit figures and parents would have to adopt from abroad.
Speaker: I just assumed the numbers would be proportionate to the Dutch population size.
Speaker: But something is different in Holland.
Speaker: Something we'll explore later on in the show.
Speaker: When it came to finding a guest to talk about adoption with, well, I didn't have to look very far.
Speaker: Ben, a friend and ex-colleague of mine, became a parent through adoption last year with his husband.
Speaker: So, today, Ben is going to lift the lid on what it's like to become an adoptive parent in the UK, discussing the processes, terms and realities of adoptive parenthood for queer British residents.
Speaker: So Ben, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Let's just get straight into it.
Speaker: From what age did you want to be a father?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Quite early on.
Speaker: So probably, I'd say mid-twenties, still in my party days, but I've always had a lot of kids around in my family.
Speaker: So there's a big age difference between me and my half-brother.
Speaker: He was a little baby when I was a teenager.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And yeah, my sisters have had kids over the last 10 years onwards.
Speaker: So yeah, I've wanted a part of that action for some time, be a dad myself, whether that was on my own or as part of a couple.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually, you know, one of the first things you told me was that you want to be a father.
Speaker: And I have no idea how we got into that subject because I think we were drinking coffee in our work offices.
Speaker: And I think you were really passionate about it.
Speaker: But when you decided, you know, that you want to be a father, did you decide also then how?
Speaker: Like was adoption already something that was front and center for you?
Speaker: Yeah, I've got a few friends who had adopted.
Speaker: One friend from sixth form, she actually worked within social work.
Speaker: for adoption services locally.
Speaker: So I'd already got a bit of an eye in the back door, as it were, as to what the situation was like for kids, certainly in the area I'm in here in the UK, Stoke-on-Trent.
Speaker: There's a lot of kids in the system sort of waiting, as it were.
Speaker: And because I've got quite a big family with sort of brothers, sisters, half-brothers, I knew that our genes would carry on and there'd be no sort of, I was never precious over
Speaker: having DNA passed down in my case.
Speaker: Yeah, it was always about adoption for me.
Speaker: Yeah, so you're married.
Speaker: Congratulations, by the way.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Not for very long.
Speaker: Young married couple.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But how... I was wondering, like, I found this really difficult to talk about with my boyfriend.
Speaker: And we've been together for a long time.
Speaker: And it was...
Speaker: kind of an awkward thing because you feel like, you know, we have this perfect relationship and am I going to throw this bowl into the china shop, so to speak, that's going to ruin that by asking something which maybe the other person doesn't want.
Speaker: So how did you approach this with your now husband?
Speaker: I'm guessing you maybe talked about this early on.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, like I say, it's a big thing.
Speaker: It's not like this is my favorite meal.
Speaker: Do you like it?
Speaker: Don't you like it?
Speaker: It's a massive impact on any relationship, marriage or otherwise.
Speaker: So I was quite lucky.
Speaker: Jimmy, my husband, we discussed family having kids quite early on because we've both got quite big families.
Speaker: We've both got several siblings that have got kids, nieces and nephews running around all of similar age.
Speaker: So as we were getting to know each other and having those chats around family,
Speaker: I can't remember the specific conversation, but certainly from those first couple of months, we were both very clear that, yeah, we want to be parents ourselves at some point.
Speaker: Obviously, at that point, we weren't sort of saying we're going to be parents together.
Speaker: It was just very much, I would like to be a parent at some point in my life.
Speaker: I'd actually looked into doing adoption solo a couple of years before meeting Jimmy.
Speaker: So I'd already sort of got my plans in motion or getting research into it, definitely.
Speaker: And there had been previous relationships prior to Jimmy that had broken down on the basis that they didn't want to have kids.
Speaker: They were quite happy having that single lifestyle or the extra money and income and ability to just have dogs instead.
Speaker: And I wanted that sort of extra, that extra mile.
Speaker: So yeah, yeah, it is a massive conversation to have with your partner.
Speaker: But I think the more natural you can make it and not make it into like this big sort of let's have a sit down and have a,
Speaker: SEO's conversation, if you can bring it into the chat a bit more organically, it definitely helps to sort of diffuse any tensions, I'd say.
Speaker: That's a tricky thing, right?
Speaker: I feel maybe, I'm not calling you old, by the way.
Speaker: Older?
Speaker: Slightly older.
Speaker: Yeah, you're slightly older than me.
Speaker: So like, yeah, I can say as a young gay guy, this wasn't something on my radar or my boyfriend's radar when we got together.
Speaker: Because on one hand, we're both young and selfish gay people, which is having a good time.
Speaker: But on the other hand, society doesn't even really make this an option for you.
Speaker: Like you don't hear about it.
Speaker: so I can imagine maybe it's a little bit I'm not gonna say easier but I assume for you both as you're both a little bit older and more mature I guess this is something that comes a little bit more naturally into these conversations yeah you're thinking about settling down and stuff like that I think we both me and Jimmy you know in different senses had gotten a lot of our single party lifestyle out of the way you know we weren't going overboard but Jimmy was very much into like traveling America and his his rock and country western sort of bands and
Speaker: tours and gigs and he was very, very much into doing that social aspect of thing with all of his mates.
Speaker: And I was sort of, you know, partying in Europe and up and down the UK, being very much a frivolous.
Speaker: I think, from what you were saying, as queer people, you feel like sometimes you're starting your life perhaps a little bit later than a lot of heteronormative people and couples.
Speaker: So they almost perhaps
Speaker: go through school and college and university and their early 20s, mid-20s, with perhaps a set idea of when they'd like to have a family.
Speaker: For me, when I was in my 20s, early 20s, adoption wasn't even legally an option.
Speaker: So it was never anything that was on the plate.
Speaker: Same for marriage.
Speaker: I never wanted to be married because it was something that I couldn't attain anyway unless I was marrying a woman.
Speaker: So for me, that was always very much...
Speaker: non-conscious yeah i think i was 18 when gay marriage yeah i was eight yeah maybe even 17 i know i totally agree when i was in university i had straight friends who were technically thinking okay i have a boyfriend we're gonna graduate yeah buy a house gonna get a dog then a baby i was still figuring out what i was yeah i had no i was trying to figure my identity out yeah it's a lot of people you know they can plan ahead and we're not sort of we're not
Speaker: coming to terms with ourselves in a lot of cases, and so it's not with every case, obviously, and as time goes on, thankfully, you see people coming to terms with their identity way, way younger than they ever did.
Speaker: And they've had all these changes come before them.
Speaker: I was very much sort of around as the changing was still forming.
Speaker: And so I didn't start coming into my own until I'm sort of early 20s.
Speaker: Then I had all of my teenage years.
Speaker: during my 20s up to my early 30s, and then it was sort of, right, legally I can have kids now if I wanted to adopt.
Speaker: So I've always enjoyed babysitting or helping friends do sort of childcare, you know, any sort of family gatherings.
Speaker: The kids always seem to sort of gravitate towards Fun Uncle Ben.
Speaker: Yeah, Fun Uncle Ben.
Speaker: Yeah, it always seems like a natural progression to be able to have my own kids and my own family.
Speaker: If we move on to the adoption process then, do you know from your head when it was possible for queer people to adopt?
Speaker: I'm sure it was sort of 2005 in the UK, I think.
Speaker: So it's not long ago.
Speaker: No, so I would still have, you know, post-university for me, but I remember more around things like Section 28 being sort of abolished in the UK.
Speaker: far more than I ever did around sort of gay marriage, gay adoption.
Speaker: So I think for me, it almost became sort of this option that, oh, wouldn't it be nice if I could adopt?
Speaker: Oh, I can actually adopt because I had friends that had done it, you know, some of the first people in the UK to adopt.
Speaker: One of them was my friend Kelly, who works within sort of social services.
Speaker: And seeing her journey very much out of the limelight because she was a friend from school who had
Speaker: Granted, I didn't see very often, but it's not like all that information was available on social media as to where her daughter, you know, their history together or how they went through their adoption journey.
Speaker: It was weird because it was almost like this unspoken secret of, oh, they must have adopted or surrogated or there was no sort of answers.
Speaker: And they're also not the sort of questions you necessarily want to be asking people that you're not too close to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's only sort of been in the last five years when you do start verbalizing yourself, oh, I'd love to become a dad or I can't wait to adopt myself.
Speaker: It's only when you start to sort of verbalize yourself and put it out there that you want to become a parent.
Speaker: That's when you suddenly get this slew of friends, contacts, colleagues, people that you haven't heard from for years that are just on Facebook will message you and say, hey, we adopted.
Speaker: we fostered if you've got any questions let us know because we know that the information isn't necessarily always out there or there's so much information you can get flooded i'm going to step back a second as well you mentioned section 28 i was wondering if you could explain what that is for our listeners who are maybe a little bit too young to know about it or international as well so very very light version of it it was legislations brought into the uk sort of a very very conservative government
Speaker: let's say, around sort of Thatcher's time, whereby the promotion of homosexuality, as they called it, was not allowed in the classroom.
Speaker: So they were not allowed, teachers were not allowed to discuss or mention homosexual relationships, lifestyles, people to kids, which it sounded very much sort of a brainwashing thing, like if you teach kids about homosexuals that are
Speaker: historical Alan Turing, for example, then they will become gay themselves.
Speaker: It was this very sort of backwards mindset of you protect the kids from this information and they won't end up being let down this path.
Speaker: But it also damaged a lot of kids because they didn't have the information to hand when they started to sort of come to terms with their own identity, their own sexuality, feelings.
Speaker: You know, they had the questions themselves.
Speaker: And even if they wanted to ask a teacher in sort of confidence, the teacher couldn't legally sort of discuss or help or offer support.
Speaker: to those sort of questions or answer those sort of questions and it was very damaging and section 28 when that was lifted I can remember being in my teens and it was like a massive sort of a massive win for the UK because they'd sort of abolished this very backwards way of thinking and it wasn't about pushing an agenda or a lifestyle but very much being able to
Speaker: answer those questions and make that information available should it be required.
Speaker: And obviously as time has gone on, they've started to bring in like LGBT history within the classroom in a lot of schools, which is amazing.
Speaker: Is that a subject now in UK schools?
Speaker: A lot of the UK schools, so if they're looking at like Alan Turing when they're sort of discussing World War and code breaking and stuff and Alan Turing, this was his life and this is some of his history, the way that he was prosecuted and
Speaker: chemically castrated and took his own life all because of his identity and his being queer.
Speaker: Yeah, it's mad because I can imagine being in the classroom nowadays, like my nieces and nephews are in these classrooms now and they get to sort of learn about gay history, where pride comes from and things like that, just as part of generic history lessons as they would the Tudors, the Edwardians and
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: All the other useful stuff that you learn about in history.
Speaker: I'm just Googling quickly because I want to say something.
Speaker: I want to make sure I have the date right.
Speaker: Section... Yeah, it was two of them free.
Speaker: It was repealed then.
Speaker: Yeah, I wanted to say, listeners can notice I just cheated and had to Google the date of section 28.
Speaker: I wanted to make sure it answers correctly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I went to school before this was repealed, more than my primary school, but I know that even though this was repealed, my secondary school had a very much don't ask, don't tell policy.
Speaker: I had gay teachers who were quite calm.
Speaker: Yeah, presenting.
Speaker: Yeah, they didn't hide the fact that they were queer, but...
Speaker: If you ask them, there was just instant silence.
Speaker: They wouldn't talk about it.
Speaker: I think they were scared to talk about it because they were scared.
Speaker: Maybe the kids would go home and say, hey, I have a gay teacher.
Speaker: And in our school, we had a very influential board of parents who were pretty good at getting people fired if they weren't doing a good job, like the head teachers and stuff.
Speaker: But it was pretty damaging.
Speaker: Well, you know yourself damaging because I never learned about queer life.
Speaker: We only learned about it in sexual health.
Speaker: And when I say I learned about the sexual health, we learned how to put a condom on a cucumber, which is a vital skill, you know, because every penis is shaped like a cucumber.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: If I've just described your penis, please.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm going to put this in the podcast.
Speaker: Please go see a doctor.
Speaker: but there was no education on this at all so it had a huge impact on you and I think our generation in general we had to figure our identity out when we had the freedom to do that and for me that was university for everybody's different it's weird because like say if I had the opportunity to learn half of what I picked up from when I was late teens Queer as Folk was a new TV series over here on Channel 4 and it was like
Speaker: everyone was talking about it because there's gay people having sex on the television and they're very explicit about it.
Speaker: It's not so, you know, it's, and it wasn't like it was all there in your face, but you were following the lifestyles.
Speaker: Yes, the sex was part of it, but they were also themselves having kids and, you know, having, talking about their jobs and their geeky obsessions and it was, it was an eye opener and,
Speaker: having to learn about a lot of what I was feeling at the time and not being able to talk to anyone about through a TV show that I had to secretly record at 10 o'clock every evening at my parents' house.
Speaker: And then nightclubs, you know, sneaking out to nightclubs at 17 and finding out a lot of it that way is sort of like, say, it's around sexual identity as opposed to the emotional and the historical side of it all.
Speaker: And that's where I think you start...
Speaker: certainly for my generation, people start to find their footing in their late teens, early 20s, mid-20s in some cases.
Speaker: My husband didn't come out until he was 36 because he lived in a little village here in the UK that not necessarily secular or backwards, but there wasn't the nightlife there, the bars, the accessibility, the social stuff.
Speaker: He would be the only, for want to have a better term, gay in the village.
Speaker: And that was a massive thing for his life.
Speaker: He hasn't had boyfriends.
Speaker: He didn't have ex-boyfriends.
Speaker: He didn't have the opportunities to sort of do the big gay holidays and pride.
Speaker: Like his first pride parade was with me when we were together.
Speaker: So was mine.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: It was through Vodafone was his first pride and his first access into that world.
Speaker: Prior to that, had been very much sort of under the radar.
Speaker: So it's mad to see how that changes generation to generation.
Speaker: And we're not talking like 20 years difference, five years and 10 years differences is like massive changes.
Speaker: Oh, it's crazy.
Speaker: I've been trying to explain this to my Dutch friends and colleagues that when I was growing up, the only reference to gay people I had was literally, you just said the only gay in the village, was Matt Lucas on Little Britain.
Speaker: And I don't even remember Matt Lucas's sexuality ever being discussed openly or publicly at all.
Speaker: So I was terrified because Matt Lucas is a sketch.
Speaker: It's hilarious.
Speaker: You should look on YouTube.
Speaker: It's a very stereotypical presenting gay person in a small village in Wales, which is part of the United Kingdom.
Speaker: But that terrified me because I did not want to be that character.
Speaker: And that's all I knew at that point.
Speaker: So yeah, it's really weird how it's changed.
Speaker: And now my younger sister, she's all like, tells me about being gender fluid and like, you shouldn't assume pronouns.
Speaker: And it's like, it makes me really jealous sometimes that they're so open-minded.
Speaker: Jealous, but proud.
Speaker: Like you feel like, yeah, brilliant.
Speaker: It's so good that they don't have to, you know, my nieces and nephews haven't got to go through that same sort of,
Speaker: finding their way, and not just in terms of queer questions that they may have, but all sorts of identifiable questions that they may have around mental health.
Speaker: That's another brilliant one that's coming to the forefront and being talked about as a more important thing, way more than it ever was when I was in school and a kid.
Speaker: So yeah, it's cool.
Speaker: You feel a little bit like FOMO, like you've missed out.
Speaker: But yeah, chuffed that they haven't got to have the same battle.
Speaker: I think we can say the UK is quite conservative culturally, but when it does move, it drags its heels, but then it jumps, if that makes sense.
Speaker: I remember homophobia was just a daily occurrence when I was a young kid.
Speaker: when I was a late teen.
Speaker: And I think I kissed my boyfriend in the middle of Newcastle city center a few years ago, five or six years ago, I was young.
Speaker: This little lady said, get a room.
Speaker: And I remember said, yeah, we have a travel lodge.
Speaker: And she just burst out laughing.
Speaker: And it was like, it was weird to have that kind of diffusion.
Speaker: Yeah, this interaction with somebody who would probably have been quite homophobic, if I'm being stereotypical, but likely would have been more homophobic.
Speaker: So it's really nice to see, compared to the Dutch attitude, which has been pretty... So that homophobic exists here, but I think it's a little bit more relaxed maybe than the UK, because they did the whole gay marriage thing first.
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Speaker: Now, back to this week's episode.
Speaker: But anyway, I'm sorry for the sidetrack.
Speaker: Let's get back to the adoption before people think, hey, what podcast am I listening to?
Speaker: You are still listening to the daddy issue.
Speaker: But I was wondering, what is the situation in the UK when you come to adoption?
Speaker: Is there a huge need or shortage even of adoptive, prospective adoptive parents?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the UK is quite split up with regards to
Speaker: You don't have sort of a central adoption agency that's very much like you have your local adoption agencies.
Speaker: So we're going through our local council here in Stoke-on-Trent.
Speaker: There are more kids waiting for placement in fostering adoption in Stoke-on-Trent than there are in many other areas of the country.
Speaker: I wouldn't say that we're necessarily the highest, but we're certainly up there with sort of top five off the top of my head, certainly from when we were looking at adopting.
Speaker: So you see billboards around the city, and those billboards aren't just
Speaker: aimed at straight cis couples.
Speaker: They include families that are gay, lesbian, single, older, younger.
Speaker: They're very much sort of open to anyone applying.
Speaker: When I was first looking into adoption, I rent.
Speaker: So I, in my head, had formed this idea that you had to be a homeowner.
Speaker: You had to be married.
Speaker: You had to have, like, say, a certain age, fall into a certain age group.
Speaker: Yeah, or a salary or something.
Speaker: Yeah, and I had this sort of tick, tick,
Speaker: checkbox idea in my head that I had to meet all of these criteria and you don't at all.
Speaker: As long as you can provide a loving, safe environment for your kid, your potential kid, then they will consider you and put you through sort of preparation training.
Speaker: And that training is free, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: We've not had to pay for anything we've had.
Speaker: I mean, besides the fact that we have NHS over here, we still had a medical, a full sort of medical
Speaker: Me and my husband had to sort of do that as part of our checks, but we didn't have to pay anything for it.
Speaker: Like the adoption agency pick up that bill for you.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, it's probably good to say to people who are listening that in the UK, healthcare is free.
Speaker: I miss that a lot.
Speaker: I live in the Netherlands.
Speaker: We have a different healthcare system here.
Speaker: But some stuff, like the medical test that you just mentioned, wouldn't be like a necessary treatment.
Speaker: So you sometimes have to pay anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, and things like dental checks, we didn't have to do on ourselves.
Speaker: But, you know, if we would have had to do like a dentist visit, which...
Speaker: I'm not NHS dentist registered, so I would have had to pay for that.
Speaker: They would have picked that bill up.
Speaker: So, yeah, everything that we've done, and we've done paediatric first aid courses.
Speaker: We've done psychological training, you know, a lot of stuff around behavioral techniques and management.
Speaker: So it's been intense.
Speaker: Like, I felt like I've gone back to full-time education.
Speaker: It was like daddy boot camp, basically.
Speaker: Yeah, we did sort of January through to September for us.
Speaker: We started our adoption prep training sort of as lockdown was starting, or certainly as coronavirus was starting to rear its head.
Speaker: So prep is split into three groups.
Speaker: You've got initial prep, which is sort of your, this is what adoption is.
Speaker: Do you think you can cope?
Speaker: Your second part is, right, this is how you would manage
Speaker: certain things that may come up from your child once they are placed with you, whether it's behavioural or medical.
Speaker: And also the history around adoption, what's expected of you.
Speaker: And then part three is your panel, which is where you sit in front of the professionals and put your case forward to say that we are, or I am, fit to adopt.
Speaker: That sounds intense.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: I mean, it's
Speaker: It sounds a lot.
Speaker: It's a lot of information to take in.
Speaker: And sometimes there are evenings when you're sort of doing your night case studies and stuff.
Speaker: And you think, oh, I'm just tired now.
Speaker: Which, looking back, is nowhere near as tired as I am nowadays.
Speaker: But it's good because, on the flip side, a lot of people who are having kids, you know, their own kids, through sort of natural conception, I want to say, or normal conception,
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: Well, they didn't get this.
Speaker: I can imagine that there's people listening who may be heterosexual.
Speaker: I think I would have loved to have this training.
Speaker: I'm not going to say super parent, but it covers a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, they were like, if we had half of this information when I had my first kid, second kid, amazing.
Speaker: There was couples in our course who had children previously, wanted to adopt further children.
Speaker: And within our friends network, we have friends who adopted 10 years ago.
Speaker: And they said if they knew half of the stuff that they had on prep training for the kids that they conceived naturally, then they would have been way more prepared to some of the curveballs you get being a parent.
Speaker: Well, basic stuff, child reanimation, reanimating a child who maybe isn't breathing.
Speaker: That is stuff of my mother's nightmares.
Speaker: She was so paranoid about this choking and stuff.
Speaker: Why aren't we told this anyway?
Speaker: Most couples who are having kids will have
Speaker: in the UK, very sort of minimal pre and postnatal appointments and you are very much put out there and made to sort of find out for yourself and make it up as you go along, which granted we've been doing that for generations, thousands of years, but having these extra skills definitely help and it helps to sort of reaffirm that yes, you are doing the right thing and you are ready to do this and the panel, although it sounds like a really intense job interview, in our case we had
Speaker: 10 questions given to us the day before as to what would be asked on the day.
Speaker: And those varied from what would you do in X situation to Ben, you don't drive at the moment.
Speaker: Do you think that could become an issue?
Speaker: I answered that with them going through driving lessons.
Speaker: So you have the opportunity to almost sort of rehearse
Speaker: what those questions and answers are going to be, they're not there to sort of try and catch you out.
Speaker: They're there just to officially assess and say, yes, you are good to go.
Speaker: You are good to adopt.
Speaker: So that's why you got your driving license.
Speaker: I now know.
Speaker: Still waiting.
Speaker: I'm still waiting.
Speaker: Still learning because lockdown, Miss Rona reared her head and stopped me from getting in that car.
Speaker: Oh, you're not missing out on much.
Speaker: Parallel turns are not nice.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I'm relying on the husband to do all the driving for now.
Speaker: I just entertain by mirrors the kids in the back.
Speaker: But it sounds like a pretty well-fought process.
Speaker: I'm a little bit jealous.
Speaker: We have similar stuff in the Netherlands.
Speaker: I can't tell you much because I haven't looked into it very much.
Speaker: But for some of our adoption agencies, you have to pay for this.
Speaker: It's quite a lot of money.
Speaker: You're talking maybe €3,000 because of adoption, how it works in the Netherlands.
Speaker: It's mostly overseas.
Speaker: But if we think about then, you've gone through all this, and I'm assuming you got approved for adoption after this bootcamp period.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So we started...
Speaker: We initially approached them July 2019.
Speaker: And in the UK, what they try to do is say, wait six months after any big ticket items.
Speaker: So anything like marriage, a divorce, a big house move, a big death in the family, or in our case, it was honeymoon.
Speaker: We were going on our honeymoon in January 2020.
Speaker: So they said, basically, come back after your honeymoon and we'll go straight into prep training, which is what we did.
Speaker: And end of January.
Speaker: We came back fully recharged and sort of set to go after having our spoiling in the sun.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: I think we can say it was the best planned honeymoon ever, like January 2020, the before time.
Speaker: Exactly, the before end times when sun was an option for us in the UK.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so then you approved.
Speaker: And I was wondering if you can walk me through then step by step the adoption process.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So after our panel, so your panel is basically made up of up to 12 people.
Speaker: And if you're from teachers, doctors, social workers, and child psychologists, professionals,
Speaker: they get an opportunity to ask you the questions and you sort of answer them.
Speaker: In our case, it was done digitally because we were in lockdown.
Speaker: You'd usually be sat in person in front of a literal panel.
Speaker: And for us, we passed panel there and then.
Speaker: They sort of reconvene, said, we'll reconvene and let you know when we're ready to give you an answer later on today.
Speaker: And within five minutes, they're like, right, get back on.
Speaker: We're ready for you.
Speaker: So we were very lucky in that it was like a given.
Speaker: We'd passed with flying colors.
Speaker: Step one, complete.
Speaker: That was done, yeah, tick.
Speaker: As it so happened, we had already been considered for a match prior to panel, which happens quite a lot.
Speaker: So sometimes because obviously your social work is going through building up your case, your story, as it were, over a period of like nine months, they may see a case come forward, children or a family come forward, and they think,
Speaker: We'll earmark those for Ben when they pass panel.
Speaker: But we literally came out of that panel call, got a call from our social worker, and they said, right, we've actually had a match for you for the last couple of months.
Speaker: And they gave us a profile for two children who initially...
Speaker: looked like a great match but then you start getting sort of background on the actual case itself and we found unfortunately for our first match that wasn't actually a true match there were a couple of medical things that were quite prohibitive to what me and Jimmy could physically be able to sort of manage as time went on because as you say we are a slightly older couple
Speaker: off approaching 40.
Speaker: But by the time that these medical issues came forward, we would be, I'd be in my 50s, Jimmy would be in his 60s.
Speaker: And it's prohibitive as to what we could and couldn't do.
Speaker: And it's not fair on children, first and foremost.
Speaker: Sounds reasonable.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And also wasn't something that we'd be able to manage ourselves.
Speaker: So it was something we had to make a very difficult decision over because we had like four days of
Speaker: We found out on the Friday, which is when we'd finished panel, got matched.
Speaker: We had four days and found out on the Tuesday this sort of medical stuff that had come forward.
Speaker: And our social worker backed our decision of, well, we can't go ahead with this much because of the medical history there.
Speaker: And it obviously worked out because then come November,
Speaker: We had our match for the family we do have now.
Speaker: So that would never have happened if we'd have gone for the initial one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So step two, tick, you got matched.
Speaker: Step two, tick.
Speaker: So yeah, in the November, we got a visit from our social worker and they sat us down.
Speaker: And one of the options that me and Jimmy had put ourselves forward for was siblings.
Speaker: We said that we're very much up for siblings.
Speaker: The other thing that me and Jimmy had done is go through fostering training as well because we wanted to do the foster for adopt routes.
Speaker: What's the difference between a normal adoption route and the foster for adoption route?
Speaker: So in the UK, an adoption order can't be placed on a child until they've been born and the adoption order has gone through the courts.
Speaker: So timeline-wise, child is born.
Speaker: And if it is deemed that that child needs to go into care or is being put up for relinquishment, they will initially go to a foster placement.
Speaker: So there are hundreds of thousands of amazing foster families up and down the UK that will take in these cases on like sometimes within hours notice basis.
Speaker: and they will look after those children until they're placed for adoption, whether that be a matter of weeks, months, years.
Speaker: That being said, because of the way that the courts have to go through everything and all these processes very officially, it can be months and months and months and months before an adoption order is given.
Speaker: More often than not, it can be sort of nine to 18 months because if parents don't want their children taken from their care,
Speaker: They can fight it and go through all sorts of psychological profiling and checks and what have you.
Speaker: So it delays, unfortunately, for the children.
Speaker: I mean, they're in foster placement.
Speaker: Sometimes they're in more than one foster placement, so they may actually travel between foster families.
Speaker: Moving homes.
Speaker: Yeah, which can create attachment issues and developmental issues.
Speaker: Me and Jimmy had always stated from the start that we wanted a newborn or as young children
Speaker: as possible for our family so that we'd get to have the experience of all those firsts and be able to sort of share the history with children as they grow up.
Speaker: And also perhaps a little selfishly so that we had less chance of these sort of detachment issues and emotional hurdles that a lot of kids that go through foster care sometimes can have.
Speaker: So we were matched with our little boy who at that point was eight months old in the November, end of November.
Speaker: And normally you'd be given sort of an introduction period of two weeks where you go and live with them at their foster families and sort of gently get introduced into their routine.
Speaker: So you'll observe for the first few days and then you'll start helping with changing nappies, doing the feeds, putting them down for bed, waking them up in the morning and what have you.
Speaker: Because we were quite close to Christmas and also because our little boy had a sister on the way in January, they wanted to speed that introduction period up for us.
Speaker: So we had five days.
Speaker: where we went to sort of help with foster mom, where our little boy had been since birth.
Speaker: So he's only ever had one foster family.
Speaker: We're very lucky in that sense.
Speaker: Amazing foster family as well.
Speaker: So we had five days of going around, helping out with feeds, helping out with getting to know him.
Speaker: getting him familiar with us because obviously lockdown, he's not used to having strange faces around him, social groups and clubs and activities.
Speaker: And then he came home to live with us just before Christmas.
Speaker: It was a pretty good Christmas then, right?
Speaker: It was amazing because obviously we usually have quite big family Christmases and lockdown was making that impossible for us this year.
Speaker: And so we weren't sure really what to expect for Christmas anyway.
Speaker: We'd already had the failed match in September.
Speaker: So it was like, oh, what on earth are we going to have happen on the 25th?
Speaker: And as luck would have it, the little guy was home, I think it was around about 7th of December, he came home to us.
Speaker: So we got to put up the first tree with him and put all the presents under there.
Speaker: And he was quite an early walker, so he was already toddling around and very much into everything.
Speaker: It was nice.
Speaker: I was going to say, he is a very early walker.
Speaker: He is stomping around the house and switching on your washing machine.
Speaker: I've seen constantly keeping me on my toes.
Speaker: Yeah, constantly, which has been amazing.
Speaker: Like he came to us and was sort of holding onto furniture.
Speaker: And within two weeks, he was walking and running around with these little grippy socks that we got him for the laminate flooring.
Speaker: So yeah, amazing stuff.
Speaker: But we had a good sort of five weeks or so where it was just the three of us over Christmas and New Year.
Speaker: And then his little sister, fraternal sister, so same birth parents, she was born beginning of January and came home from hospital two days old into our care.
Speaker: Straight to your home, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That in itself was a whole different experience because as any parent will tell you, no child comes with instruction, but our son did.
Speaker: He came with a routine.
Speaker: He came with
Speaker: This is what Tommy's bedtime is.
Speaker: This is when he'll have his lunch.
Speaker: This is when he'll have his midday nap.
Speaker: This is what he does eat.
Speaker: This is what he doesn't eat.
Speaker: This is his character.
Speaker: So you almost have like a ready-made child, so to speak, a ready-made personality.
Speaker: And then to go from that to here's this tiny little China doll.
Speaker: And the first time you meet them, you, you,
Speaker: basically have them in a bassinet and you've got to put them in the car seat.
Speaker: That's the first time you're holding them is put them in the car seat.
Speaker: That sounds terrifying.
Speaker: It's terrifying because you're at the front of the maternity ward and it's very limited.
Speaker: You can only be there for two minutes and everyone's around, social workers are watching.
Speaker: It was mad.
Speaker: Her big brother was in the next car seat sort of, what on earth's going on?
Speaker: Like sort of thing looking at you.
Speaker: It was a very panicky initial meeting.
Speaker: but then we got home and it was four of us and it was it's just been amazing amazing so that's step number four and christmas uh complete uh in very quick succession yeah and step one two three and four for baby number two kind of yeah so she she was sort of our newborn um and we just had the benefit of of having her big brother with us first and like say it was
Speaker: It was very much expedited because we had a short introduction period, but he settled in so well, so quickly.
Speaker: And a lot of that was down to the work that his foster family had done with him.
Speaker: But yeah, it was a mad six weeks, put it that way.
Speaker: It was really crazy watching you and your husband go from being a single couple to a one-child family to a two-child family in the space of months.
Speaker: Is it common things go so quickly or is this a really rare edge case for you guys?
Speaker: No, it does tend to because as I say, as everything's going on with your prep training, they will try and start to line up a lot of those next steps because what they don't want is food.
Speaker: You feel like prep training takes forever.
Speaker: At the time, it's nine months, but it feels like all you're doing is waiting for the next appointment, the next update, the next meeting, the next interview.
Speaker: And when it does happen, it just snowballs so fast.
Speaker: It makes your head spin.
Speaker: When I think back to the prep training now, that wasn't forever at all.
Speaker: But now we're currently sort of waiting for court dates so that we can move from being a foster placement to the adoptive parents.
Speaker: So we're sort of sat in this little limbo bit at the moment, waiting for court dates in June.
Speaker: Because right now you're the foster parents, and then hopefully at some point in the next, I don't know, 12 months or so, you'll move on to them being the adoptive parents of the children, right?
Speaker: So yeah, typically with foster for adopt, you are classed as foster parents for about three months, because they are usually placed with you at birth.
Speaker: As our little lad had, we are that foster family.
Speaker: for our little girl until their adoption order is placed.
Speaker: We're technically the little boy's second foster family, but the idea has been all along we will sort of be the parents at the end of this.
Speaker: We're just sort of in this transitional period, and this prevents them going to more foster families and sort of being in the system longer.
Speaker: They're now sort of with their forever home.
Speaker: And what you tend to get as well, something I should mention with foster for adopt placements is these are the cases that are, other than on paper, all pretty much guaranteed to be the children that are placed with you for life.
Speaker: They tend to sort of put children for foster for adopt if they know that there are other family members that are going to come forward to sort of look after the children on the birth side of things or if this is sort of the first child.
Speaker: that's sort of being placed from birth family.
Speaker: They are sort of the ones where historically this has happened before.
Speaker: So our two children actually have three older siblings, all of which were sort of removed at various points of their life from the birth family.
Speaker: So they know that this is sort of a pattern that's going to sort of continue.
Speaker: I think the latest studies show there's between a 4% and 10% chance that they go back to birth families.
Speaker: but only in very rare cases.
Speaker: So we spoke to one couple who they had foster for adopt placement with their little boy for about six months.
Speaker: And just before they got their adoption order and match, a birth grandmother came forward from Australia who didn't know anything about these children.
Speaker: And she stepped forward and said, I'd like to take care of my grandson.
Speaker: And they had to rehabilitate back.
Speaker: So you have to take that risk into account when you do foster for adopt.
Speaker: It's not sort of a,
Speaker: oh, we want a younger kid and all the caveats that come with it, there is a risk involved in that if something does happen, we'll be tied, you have to be able to facilitate them going back into their birth family and to sort of almost play the role that our little boys' foster parents did and, you know, welcoming them into their home and sort of this is their, acclimatising them into their routines and
Speaker: getting them used to who they're going to go on to live with.
Speaker: I guess this is all part of the child coming first and if the social services feel like the child would be better suited to be in an environment with a biological grandparent for example in this case I guess that's
Speaker: that's what happens, I suppose.
Speaker: But it does sound like a really hefty event.
Speaker: But I guess this is why you have all this training folk and the support from the social workers.
Speaker: Yeah, and they will constantly sort of, you know, reinforce the fact that you are intended to be there forever home.
Speaker: But that you must sort of bear in mind that there's always this very slight risk that an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent, or even a sibling, an older sibling can come forward and say that they'd like to
Speaker: to be granted the custody instead.
Speaker: What are the common reasons that the child in the UK is put up for adoption?
Speaker: Most common, unfortunately, is sort of abuse of alcohol and drugs.
Speaker: So a lot of the time, it's parents that aren't capable of looking after their children, whether that's emotionally capable, mentally capable, physically capable.
Speaker: And we're not sort of talking
Speaker: It's a difficult one.
Speaker: A lot of people and a lot of our training was around dealing with children that are withdrawing.
Speaker: So babies that have come from birth parents who have been using heroin, for example.
Speaker: So much of your training is around sort of, you know, withdrawal symptoms and how to sort of care for newborns.
Speaker: that may be going through that.
Speaker: And also like say alcohol, so little alcohol syndrome, there's loads and loads and loads of cases where you are having to almost rehabilitate a child before you get to sort of have the typical, atypical sort of parenting experience.
Speaker: We, again, we're very lucky in that neither parents, neither birth parents for our kids were using.
Speaker: So a lot of the time it can also be around sort of emotional
Speaker: capabilities.
Speaker: So, you know, are they emotionally able to raise a child?
Speaker: You don't tend to get many relinquished babies in the UK.
Speaker: So the ultimate sort of unicorn of adoptive cases are that you get a child that's been relinquished because a parent has carried them, but they have no intention of keeping them or have no ability to sort of keep them.
Speaker: And that happens very, very rarely.
Speaker: compared to a lot of these other sort of cases where where abuse has been involved.
Speaker: What you're describing here this unicorn is probably the case of adoption which people listening are most familiar with because this is the adoption we see in soap operas and movies and dramas.
Speaker: Yeah, this is the whole sort of like say sort of fantasy around adoption is that you are you're taking these children from somebody who has willingly handed them over and
Speaker: a lot of your training is having to sort of deal with the fact that birth parents are not the bad guys.
Speaker: In more cases, birth parents don't want their children to be taken away, but it's happening because they aren't responsible or able to be responsible for their children or be able to put their children's needs first and foremost, which is the big one for us.
Speaker: So a lot of...
Speaker: a lot of sort of historical adoption, you know, again, looking at sort of media and entertainment is that people find out miraculously that they were adopted in their 40s and 50s.
Speaker: That doesn't really happen anymore because adoption is celebrated and recognized.
Speaker: And, you know, you're taught to bring your children up to know that they are adopted and to know why they were adopted and to have a working history of their birth family.
Speaker: And it's not sort of hidden from them.
Speaker: in any way whatsoever.
Speaker: And even within the last 10 years, the sort of approach and attitude to adoption and how you raise your kids that are adopted has completely changed.
Speaker: Straight cis couples, obviously, it's way easier to sort of perhaps pass that one off.
Speaker: In the case of me and Jimmy, Jimmy looks terrible in a skirt, so I don't think he'd be able to get away with being the mommy for too long.
Speaker: You go through a lot of the prep training helps you to come around to this idea as to why it's important.
Speaker: Children know about their birth background and their
Speaker: their story it's their story at the end of the day it is their story they own it yeah and um you don't like as the adoptive parents or the birth parents um you don't have a right to deny a child access to their story i suppose is what i'm trying to say exactly and like i say a lot of it is around it sounds cliche but celebrating that so we we've got countless scrapbooks that we're putting together with like
Speaker: photos and information and anecdotes so that when they get to an age that they want to ask the questions or look at it themselves, we've got that available and it's not this sort of, I don't know, that happened when you were with your foster mum.
Speaker: I can't tell you anything that happened before you were nine months old, which day-to-day, I very rarely ask my mum, what was I doing at five months?
Speaker: But you tend to find adoptive and foster children
Speaker: have these questions because they want to have that sense of identity.
Speaker: They want to know who they are, where they come from.
Speaker: Yeah, they're going to explore identity in a much more intimate and complex way than people who live with their birth parents, I can imagine.
Speaker: I think it's important they have access to this information, and especially from our British society, which is quite stiff upper lip.
Speaker: We don't talk about the boo stuff.
Speaker: We just ignore the elephant in the room.
Speaker: That's just how things are.
Speaker: It sounds like quite a big cultural shift as well.
Speaker: It's an eye-opener, like I said, going through the training.
Speaker: It's not like
Speaker: school where you're sort of sat there going when's this session over you are actively engaged because you want to go and be the best parent possible anyway you want to pass panel, you want to sort of prove yourself worthy but it's also an eye opener in that you do have a preconceived sort of attitude or idea certainly as to what adoption is and what adoptive families look like prior to going on the training yourself and you're actually an adoptive parent so if anyone needs to know this information it's you
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: Okay, so you're integrated now as a family.
Speaker: I'm wondering, like, let's go through people who you come to contact with.
Speaker: And I think the most important people is your family.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How did your family respond to you becoming a father?
Speaker: It's all been positive.
Speaker: I mean, again, you know, they've been there since I was babysitting, looking at helping with childcare within my own family anyway, with sort of brothers, nieces, nephews.
Speaker: So they've always seen that natural sort of paternal ability there, I suppose.
Speaker: Everyone knew it was coming.
Speaker: Everyone knew it was something I wanted to do and I'd sort of pined for over pretty much 10 years.
Speaker: So I think they were just really glad, A, that it happened, B, that I'd actually found somebody who wanted the exact same thing in Jimmy.
Speaker: I mean, my family absolutely loves and adore my husband, so very lucky again in that sense.
Speaker: And likewise, his family, you know, were really, really made up that sort of the youngest Webster son, as he is, is also having kids now.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's been amazing.
Speaker: phenomenally supportive all around on both sides.
Speaker: And when it comes to work, you're incredibly lucky.
Speaker: You work for a company which offers like a really, really generous amount of leave, right?
Speaker: For adoption.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, so I work for Vodafone UK and parental leave across the board, certainly from March this year, again, has been very generous.
Speaker: As an adoptive parent, I get 12 months leave and any sort of, you know,
Speaker: In the UK, birth mums tend to have like 12 months off themselves for maternity cover.
Speaker: As of March, Vodafone have also adopted that birth dads as well can have up to 16 weeks off paid maternity leave.
Speaker: And when I go back to work, I can also go back on reduced hours.
Speaker: I've paid 100% of my wage, but only do 80% of my hours.
Speaker: So I can work that around childcare.
Speaker: That's really great, yeah.
Speaker: So I've been very, very lucky.
Speaker: Will you know what an office looks like by the end of this?
Speaker: I was home working sort of March to November anyway.
Speaker: So I'm hoping I'm back, given the nature of my work is sort of covering events and running around with a camera.
Speaker: I'm hoping I've got something a bit more exciting to go back to once COVID-19 shifts.
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: So shout out to Vodafone.
Speaker: Maybe I need to go back to my old employer if I ever decide to have children to get that inclusive leave policy.
Speaker: This message was not sponsored by my employees.
Speaker: I think it's just something that is obviously, it does vary, not only country to country, but also business to business.
Speaker: And not everybody is afforded the same amount of leave.
Speaker: I've got self-employed friends who have children and are back to work two weeks later after giving birth themselves.
Speaker: So
Speaker: massive hats off to them.
Speaker: Hats off to anyone who actually gives birth to a child and goes back to work because I've not had to carry and birth a child.
Speaker: And I think I've had to do that on top of everything we're doing already.
Speaker: I'd have gone a bit too lally by now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, something that you guys do, which completely caught me off guard because I didn't even know this happened in adoption, again, because we only know about these unicorn cases, stereotypically, is the rights of the birth parents to see their children during the foster process, right?
Speaker: Maybe it has a better name than what I've just given.
Speaker: Yeah, so court mandates what's called contact for birth parents and their children.
Speaker: As long as it's deemed safe for the child,
Speaker: then they will have monitored contact with their birth parents, which usually typically takes place at sort of a children's centre.
Speaker: And that only happens up until they are adopted.
Speaker: So yeah, the birth parents have a court mandated right to see their children under supervised visits at the children's centre.
Speaker: And that happens up until they are adopted.
Speaker: So because we are, as I say, still in this fostering placement, we have to facilitate those visits.
Speaker: Now, during lockdown,
Speaker: Whilst birth mum was still pregnant with our daughter, we facilitated that by doing WhatsApp video calls, which isn't something that typically is done because normally the foster to adopt parents are usually granted some form of anonymity from birth parents because they come from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Speaker: There can be all sorts of risk factors involved.
Speaker: Because of our case, we deemed that it would be OK for us to host these video WhatsApp calls, and it meant that they still got to see our little boy on video once a week.
Speaker: Once a little girl was born, both parents were comfortable attending the contact center.
Speaker: So initially, the idea was to drop them off and then pick them up an hour and a half later.
Speaker: after they've had this contact and the social worker sits in and records and notes everything, all the interactions that go on.
Speaker: So it's all very sort of monitored and very safe.
Speaker: You have to almost accept and deal with the fact that, you know, one day these are going to be your kids.
Speaker: They already feel like your kids anyway as soon as they've come home to you because you are setting yourselves up to be their parents.
Speaker: Even though we're sort of labeled as a foster parent right now, we are going to be their adoptive parents.
Speaker: we don't sort of switch from foster mode to adoption mode.
Speaker: And you have to sort of drop them off with this knowledge that they're going to be spending time with their birth family.
Speaker: And you've got to sort of turn yourself off emotionally from worrying and thinking, what's happened?
Speaker: What's going to happen?
Speaker: Are they okay?
Speaker: It's hard.
Speaker: It's certainly from talking to other adoptive families, the hardest thing
Speaker: part for a lot of people as being contacts because it's just something you've got to do tough because it's in the child's best interest.
Speaker: If we are of that sort of four to 10% where children have to go back to their birth families, they need to sort of have a working relationship with their birth parents.
Speaker: So that's what the form of, you know, one of the main sort of aims of contact is to maintain that relationship.
Speaker: In our case, because our little boy is so young, because he'd gone through lockdown not actually meeting them in person, he got very upset, a little bit emotional.
Speaker: So I actually volunteered to sit in on the contact sessions.
Speaker: It is very unorthodox, but I sort of said, you know, I wasn't going to involve myself or intrude.
Speaker: It was just to help reassure him and let him know that he was okay and
Speaker: I was there still.
Speaker: And to make it a better experience, not only for him, but also for birth parents, because, you know, in all intents and purposes, in our case, they wanted to keep their children and they don't want to have an hour and a half of them just sort of crying and being upset.
Speaker: So you have to sort of think selflessly and be there for your kid, regardless of how emotionally difficult it is for you to watch them interact and play with their birth parents, knowing that you are sort of setting yourself up almost to sort of be looking after them instead.
Speaker: So we're doing that at the moment for an hour a week at the contact center.
Speaker: They've now got to a point where he's happy to be in their company without me being there.
Speaker: So I've now been able to sort of step back and just do the drop off.
Speaker: Yeah, which is, you know, you still have that what's going on, but we get to see the notes after each visit anyway.
Speaker: We get details as to, you know, what they did, what they played with, what sort of interactions they had.
Speaker: And that's generally been positive.
Speaker: And
Speaker: In future, we're going to be able to talk to them about these sort of things, both of them, because they're both going to contact.
Speaker: We can sort of say, you know, you spent time with your birth parents once a week and you played with them and there's opportunity for there to be photos as well.
Speaker: And when the adoption order, once we're granted an adoption order, they'll have sort of a goodbye contact and that's when a lot of photos and stuff will be able to sort of be taken so they can put them into their memory books and we can share that information with them.
Speaker: After they're adopted, we run what's called postbox in the UK.
Speaker: So at least once a year, you write a letter that will just cover the very basics, just to sort of get in touch with parents and possibly grandparents and siblings, just to say, you know, this is their favorite food.
Speaker: This is their favorite subject at school.
Speaker: They're doing really well in certain things.
Speaker: They love football.
Speaker: They hate spinach.
Speaker: Just very sort of non-identifiable things.
Speaker: And if the little child wants to sort of draw a picture for their birth parent, they can do.
Speaker: The main aim is not to sort of hide the fact that they're adopted and that these people are out there.
Speaker: It's to sort of show that you are working on maintaining that relationship.
Speaker: And sometimes birth parents don't reciprocate.
Speaker: You know, ideal world birth parents would write letters back and there'd be this
Speaker: correspondence that then when they reach 18 they can sort of look at these letters to and forth.
Speaker: In a lot of cases unfortunately it's very one-sided so when they get to 18 if they can see that their adoptive parents, their forever family have been writing these letters to try and maintain that contact even if they've not had anything come back in you can see that at least we're not trying to sort of withhold them from that relationship.
Speaker: You're not trying to cover or break that bond.
Speaker: Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, you're trying to facilitate it.
Speaker: It's a hard pill to swallow because you have to sort of change your mind from thinking about these birth parents as the bad guys, regardless of what each individual case is, because it can be all sorts of different things that have caused the children to end up going into fostering or adoption.
Speaker: And you have to sort of almost think,
Speaker: from the child's point of view, what will they want to know when they get to an age of 18 or before that about their identity and any questions they may have about their birth family?
Speaker: Because the more you hide or lie about that, the more they'll sort of make up their own mind as to what that might look like.
Speaker: Before we wrap up, do you have any advice for people like myself, people listening when it comes to adoption or looking into the options for parenthood?
Speaker: Be receptive to all the information, advice, any sort of information and education you can around adoption.
Speaker: It's something that's constantly evolving.
Speaker: So things that happened 20, 10, five years ago don't necessarily always relate to what's happening now.
Speaker: But the most important thing we've been able to tap into is the experience of a lot of our friends, family, and sort of contacts that have gone through
Speaker: adoption processes themselves either as parents or children and again once you start to sort of put out there that you are looking to adopt you get so many people come forward to say i was adopted actually or we've adopted and this this is our story listen to those stories get as many of those different stories as you can because they vary so much and you learn from every single one of them
Speaker: So what's next for your family then?
Speaker: So we have court dates pending for final hearing on the adoption order on both of our kids at some point after 1st of June.
Speaker: So 1st of June is actually mine and my husband's second wedding anniversary.
Speaker: So we'll probably be putting celebrations aside for court dates.
Speaker: But once the adoption order is granted, we'll be celebrating with an adoption day, making up for a lot of
Speaker: lockdown restrictions that 2020 and 2021 started off with and having a massive blowout to make up for all the birthdays and anniversaries and goodness knows what we've missed just to sort of welcome two new children officially and legally into the family.
Speaker: That sounds great.
Speaker: Ben, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker: And I wish you all the best for the adoption process.
Speaker: I'm sure you'll keep me updated on how that goes.
Speaker: But just, yeah, all the best with that for yourself.
Speaker: And your husband, Jimmy, and of course, your two beautiful children.
Speaker: Thank you so much for your time.
Speaker: No, thank you for having me.
Speaker: It's been absolutely awesome.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Talking to Ben kinda felt like a full circle moment.
Speaker: I have known Ben for more than 5 years now, and he's the first queer person I met who wanted to become a parent and actually became one.
Speaker: And I'm so happy it worked out for him.
Speaker: In a way, Ben and Jimmy represent the life I expected I could have in the Netherlands.
Speaker: If I chose to become a father, the more I learnt from him, the more confusing the Dutch system seemed to be.
Speaker: I can't help but wonder why the Netherlands has such a low adoption rate.
Speaker: What's so different here?
Speaker: What is it that the Netherlands does right that the UK does wrong?
Speaker: Or what is it that the UK does right that the Netherlands does wrong?
Speaker: Or are these questions even sufficient enough to explain the difference between these two countries?
Speaker: While I don't have the answers right now, we'll be exploring adoption a lot more on the show in the future, in the hopes of getting more answers on how adoption works around the world.
Speaker: This is the last queer parenting story of the season.
Speaker: And it feels really weird saying that nine months on from when I first started producing the show.
Speaker: However, we're not completely done yet.
Speaker: Next week, I'll be sitting back down with my partner, Kevin, to discuss all we've learned and wrap up season one.
Speaker: Until then, my name is Conor James, and you've been listening to The Daddy Issue.
Speaker: The Daddy Issue is an independent podcast, produced and presented by me, Connor James.
Speaker: Music by Willem de Boij.
Speaker: Fact-checking and editorial support from Emma Vogt.
Speaker: Our original artwork is by the incredible K-Toys.
Speaker: And a special thanks this week goes to Ben for his time, and his husband Jimmy, for keeping the kids busy while I interviewed him.
Speaker: We're available on Instagram at thedaddyissuepod, Twitter at daddyissuepod, and you can find us on Facebook too by searching for The Daddy Issue.
Speaker: Thank you.
