Dead Babies and Seaside Towns by Alice Jolly

Author:Alice Jolly [Jolly, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, Adoption & Fostering, Fertility & Infertility, Literary Figures, Health & Fitness, Autobiography
ISBN: 9781783521609
Google: Rb7vCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Published: 2015-07-02T23:29:52.532800+00:00

* * *

I contact an organisation which specialises in advising on overseas adoption and we sign up for another seminar. It takes place in Barnet in North London in rooms over a shop. Again about twenty couples attend. We are made to play a bizarre board game. Adoption Monopoly? Or is it Snakes and Ladders but without any Ladders? Each couple has a marker to move around the board. Cards are drawn from a pack. They say – Your paperwork has been lost, go back three months. Or – The country you have chosen is now closed for adoption, go back to square one.

It comes to our turn. So Stephen and Alice, where are you up to now?

Well, I’ve just retired, Stephen says, pretending to read the card.

No one dares laugh or it’ll be back to the beginning for them.

After that they show us a film about overseas adoption. Images appear of an orphanage in India – row upon row of tiny, shrunken babies lie in cots which look more like cages, and their thin little voices wail. Panic starts in my toes and rises swiftly through my body, bringing with it breathlessness and nausea. I’m up and out of the room, standing out in a grey carpeted corridor, my head pressed against a frosted glass window. Why do those orphanages exist when a whole room full of couples here would be happy to give those babies a home? I try to remind myself that it isn’t as simple as that.

We break for a coffee and chat to the lady running the seminar. We ask her if it is possible for us to begin to try to adopt in the UK and, if that proves impossible, move on to the overseas option. No, that isn’t possible. The two processes are entirely different and if you want to move from one to the other then you have to start again. And, in fact, if you are given permission to adopt from overseas then that permission relates to one country only. So if you try to adopt from China and that fails and you decide to try Russia instead, then once again you go back to the beginning of the process.

We nod and smile, move on and speak to some of the other couples, hoping to find just a word or two of encouragement. One couple can’t currently be considered for adoption because, although they are homeowners and employed, they have £5,000 of credit card debt. Another couple used to live in Bedfordshire, and they got two years into the adoption process, but then they moved to Berkshire so they had to begin again.

After coffee the discussion focuses on the difficulties experienced by adopted children. Two men interrupt – one is black, the other of Asian origin. Both of them were themselves adopted. The lady running the seminar is clearly uncomfortable with real-life multicultural adoption stories. But she presses them to express the anger they must surely feel towards their adoptive parents.

Anger?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.