BABYSITTING

Suzy Stanton - 8 May 15

Becoming a mum through adoption is an exciting, terrifying and utterly amazing experience. The assessment process gave me a new lease of life as I finally let myself believe that at last I was going to become a mum. My rose tinted glasses didn’t let me spend much time thinking about the practicalities and realities of bringing a child into our lives that I didn’t give birth to. I didn’t give birth to my 2 gorgeous nieces, but I loved them from the second I set eyes on them, so why would it be any different with our child?

I assumed that as soon as we found out about little Stanton, I’d fall in love immediately. That didn’t happen though. Not by a long shot.

We had a long 10 month wait for our social worker to find the right child for us. By the time we got “that” email from her, I was beginning to think I wasn’t meant to be a mum. I had probably started to go into self-preservation mode and locked away my dream of loving our very own child.

The details our social worker gave us couldn’t have been more perfect. We had been linked with an adorable sounding 7 month old little girl. However, the fireworks and heart flips that I’d been expecting just didn’t happen. I felt nothing, other than a strong feeling that she was our child. Even when I saw her photograph there were no sparks. It was a gorgeous photo of a very cute little baby, but I didn’t feel anything for her.

As the weeks went by while we anxiously waited to meet her, I was scared to let myself get too excited in case something went wrong. I couldn’t believe that after the years we’d waited, our dream was finally going to come true. While we waited, I’d fallen in love with the idea of becoming a mum. The idea that we would have this amazing little person coming into our lives and every day would be more fabulous than the one before. The idea I’d be head over heels in love from day one and that everything would be exactly how I’d spent so many years dreaming it would be. Clearly I had completely realistic expectations of parenthood from the start.

As we drove to the foster carer’s house to meet our daughter for the first time I was terrified. Terrified I would feel nothing for this baby we were going to be responsible for. Terrified she didn’t like us or more to the point, that she didn’t like me or that I didn’t like her. How was I going to bond and love a child that wasn’t part of me, that hadn’t grown inside me and didn’t look like me or my husband?

I opened the back gate to the foster carer’s house and was greeted by the biggest pair of blue eyes I had ever seen. They were full of mischief. Mine were full of panic as even seeing her in the flesh, I felt nothing.

To those around us, everything was fabulous. I played with our precious little girl and made all the right noises, but inside I panicking. Why didn’t I feel the bolt of lightening I had been expecting?

The week of introductions was the hardest and also the most amazing week of my life. Watching my husband who is not really a baby person at all, become the most amazing father overnight, blew me away.

Seeing how he was with her was utterly amazing, but if I’m honest, it also made me feel incredibly jealous. He’s a very laid back person and doesn’t really do excited. He’d gone into parenthood with no real idea what it was all about and was very pleasantly surprised to find that he fell in love with our daughter the moment he set eyes on her.

I spent the first few weeks she was home feeling like a babysitter and that I was a cleaning up, food making, nappy changing machine for a child I had no connection to. When I looked into her eyes, I didn’t see me or my husband staring back, just a complete stranger. I felt very guilty about the way I felt and couldn’t help thinking that we’d stolen someone else’s child.

A lot of my thoughts in those early weeks were taken up thinking about her birth mum. She was missing out on all of these amazing experiences with the child that had grown inside her for nine months. That she had given birth to. I felt like I had no right to enjoy those experiences because I hadn’t earned the right to have them. I hadn’t experienced pregnancy or childbirth so what right did I have to feel love for this precious little child?

Gradually as the weeks went by the connection with our daughter started to grow and I thought less and less about birth mum. She will always be a silent presence, looking over my shoulder, but I’ve realized that if my daughter and I are to have a healthy, happy bond, I have to stop feeling guilty. We played no part in the decision the court made that it wasn’t safe for our daughter to remain with her birth family. If we hadn’t been matched with her, someone else would.

I’m not quite sure when I fell in love with our daughter and stopped feeling like her babysitter, but I did. It crept up on me when I wasn’t looking. I do still have days where I don’t feel like her mum and that one day someone will come and take her away, but those are less and less. I can’t imagine our lives without her now and I couldn’t love her any more if I had given birth to her. She’s my world. Once the decision was made that her birth family couldn’t look after, she was destined to become our daughter which makes me the luckiest mum in the world.

Suzy Stanton

Suzy works as a legal adviser and tries to fit her passion for words around winging it being mum to a her 2 adopted daughters who are 5 and 1. She self published her first novel "Running Scared" through Amazon and blogs as We Made a Wish, sharing the rollercoaster that is adoption

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