On the day we brought our daughter home, she was two. We went to her foster mother’s house, spent a little while there and then left to get the train home with her in her pram. She barely blinked taking everything in; there was a real sense that she knew something was changing forever. Though, in the end, she took it in her stride. On our way home, we stopped for a coffee, all a little shell shocked. An older man sitting nearby came over. He was American, gravelly, charismatic, and he handed us a couple of sweets for her. “I have grandchildren myself,” he told us. “They learn more before they’re five than they will in the whole rest of their lives.”
The adoption process had taken three years, from the day we first called the agency. We had been through assessments, training, panel meetings, endless forms, more meetings and assessments, and months and months of waiting. When the news finally came we could bring her home, it felt like we were stumbling over the finish line after a marathon.
Our daughter was eighteen months old when we first learned about her, when our social worker emailed to say that we had a potential match. It then took a few hearings – and a few delayed hearings – to make it official.
