It was a chance meeting that led me to working in adoption support: the initial discovery that there was a service supporting birth mothers after adoption, when I was then working as a music therapist in an NHS learning disabilities team and seeing the lack of careful, specialised support for parents whose children had been taken into care.

I got in touch with Scottish Adoption, wondering whether I might be able to offer music therapy services as part of their then Chance4Change programme.

Being any kind of arts therapist, jobs are not commonplace and implementing new services is constantly part of the work we do, sometimes to a sceptical audience. You have to knock on doors to make things happen. I’d knocked on lots of doors and Scottish Adoption stood out for me. I knew this was a place I wanted to work.

Everything takes time – certainly things that are worth doing take time. I knocked on the door for the first time in 2010. It was 2012 and a few more meetings, a few more knocks on the door, before work began to happen, but I felt welcome here. What stood out to me was a care and attention to detail that is rare to find in services. Therapy work is about the individual, the detail, the idiosyncratic, the uniqueness of each person and the necessity for them to be able to show up and take their place, whatever that looks like. Too often that gets lost when services, due to pressure rather than lack of good will, become like conveyor belts. Coming from NHS services, it was like chalk and cheese. Here at Scottish Adoption was the time and thought and care to individualise the support we offer to each family’s situation. Here was the understanding of the essential factors that go into creating safety, that little things are big.

I still remember the day I asked Maureen Kinnell, the then After Adoption manager, if it might be possible to purchase a large “gathering drum” for sessions. Coming from the NHS, I had learned never to ask for anything (either because there was no money, or you’d have to jump through fifty hoops in order to get it – and if you hadn’t figured that out yet you weren’t a savvy professional). Maureen must have seen the look of surprise on my face when she answered “Oh, yes, of course you must have that!” and followed up with “We have a ‘can do’ attitude here, Kath.” The drum has resided here now for a good ten years, withstood years of beating in time, hammering, sharing, children climbing inside and hiding, use as a den structure, and being lifted with unlikely strength by little people. (It must be said that sometimes the littlest people carry the heaviest loads.) It has been an investment worth making, as working here has been.

Things never work out quite the way we plan… I had imagined offering my service to birth parents, and ended up working with adopted children and their adoptive parents, and staying eleven years to date, being invited to join the team permanently in 2018.

I am really grateful for all the years of conversations, feedback, learning and creativity that went into building the service I now offer, which is highly specialised to the needs of adoptive families. We’ve had time to try things out, make mistakes, learn and do better. It’s rich having dialogues across different professions. I hope we continue to learn. I hope we continue to do better.

Most of all I am delighted when somebody simply shows up for therapy work. It’s a common misconception that music therapy must be “fun”, or “nice”. Sometimes there is fun: there is certainly permission for anything to show up. But therapy is hard work, sometimes terrifying, confusing or painful. There may be demons to be faced down, for child, parent or therapist. We often don’t know what’s happening and have to be patient and courageous to trust while the process unfolds, take yet another risk on being vulnerable in relationship when past ones may have failed us or hurt us. Nobody is untouched by child trauma, and everybody is wounded in some way. Play is a serious business, essential to our wellbeing and to our capacity to be in relationship to ourselves, others and the world around us. Sadly, play is not a given, not only for care-experienced children but for many children and adults in many circumstances. It can take digging deep, often through frightening places, to find it. But it is, without a shadow of a doubt for me, an investment worth making.

As I pause to read what I’ve written here, some phrases jump out that encapsulate my experiences of working at Scottish Adoption:

Let’s continue to take a “can do” attitude…

• Little things are big…
• Things take time, especially when they’re worth doing…
• Things never work out quite the way we plan…
• Unlikely strength by little people…
• Littlest people with the heaviest load…
• Some investments are worth making…
• Everybody is wounded in some way…
• The courage to show up…

And play is a serious business.

My husband and I spoke about having children early on in our relationship and as time went on we knew that adoption was the right choice for us. We reached out to several agencies and felt that Scottish Adoption was the one agency that we felt at home with. We had our initial interview and before we knew it we were invited onto prep group which fuelled our fire to continue our journey.

We went into the adoption process with the mindset of ‘we want one child, as young as possible with no contact with birth family’, prep group really opened our eyes and we came away saying we wanted a sibling group of any age and were keen to have the birth family contact. This was down to learning in prep group just how important each child’s story is to them.

We began our home study with our social worker who gave us the opportunity to learn what type of family we could be and how that would look. The in depth process really helped us personally as it made us look at our strengths and weaknesses as a couple as well as individuals. The home study was also a personal favourite part of mine as I used each visit with our social worker as time to reflect on my own life and experiences. It helped that she made each visit a happy session filled with laughter even though we were discussing some hard life experiences. We then were invited to panel to be approved as adoptive parents which thankfully was a very relaxed meeting and made us feel we were ready for the next steps as the unanimous yes came straight away. The next stage was the one that I genuinely found the hardest, the search for our children. Our search meant receiving different profiles of sibling groups, being invited to exchange days and looking through an online platform of children needing homes around the UK.

We finally matched with a sibling group made up of two brothers and the rest as they say is history. We were quickly rushed to matching panel and before we knew it the process of meeting our sons became a reality. We sent them photos and videos introducing ourselves before our initial first meeting so they already knew us as dad and daddy. The first day of introductions is one I cannot remember fully as the emotions we felt were something I have never experienced before. Two things I do remember is stepping out of the car and hearing “it’s dad and daddy” being screamed at the top of our younger sons voice and later in that same meeting my younger son climbing into my arms like a baby and asking “am I your baby now?” These are two moments I will cherish for the rest of my life.

The boys returned home to live with us after ten days of introductions and life quickly became normal, that is not to say we didn’t have low points; the boys had bouts of regression where they struggled to live with us and us with them. There were difficult times within the family and ultimately and rightly we had to reach out for support. I felt a lot of shame and guilt having to ask for help, however our social worker worked through everything with us and it made our family even stronger.

One year on and the adoption order was granted and the boys were officially part of our family which helped them settle into life more than we knew possible. They began growing and putting on weight, they had blossoming red cheeks and they told everyone in school they never have to move again!

The days have since turned into years and now seven years on we haven’t regretted a single decision even with a turbulent few days, weeks or months throughout the years. Through it all we are a happy family and I can’t imagine the boys not being in our lives. 

After a few years of the boys being with us my husband and I felt we had to give back to Scottish Adoption so volunteered to speak at information events about our journey, this then lead to me taking up a role as a parent practitioner within the team. This would see me support newly adoptive families in the early days of placement and allow them to have a listening ear through some of the highs and lows of the process. During this time I was asked to train up in Theraplay which is a technique used to help build attachment and engagement with the parents and children, this then saw me applying to become a support worker with Scottish Adoption in the after adoption team. I now get to work more closely with families and children through various groups and one to one sessions. I honestly can say this is one of the best jobs I have ever had as not only am I supported amazingly well by all of the team, we work closely together to ensure the best possible support is available to new and older families throughout the agency and every day I learn something new from the fantastic team.

We have more recently been approved as foster carers and are currently taking in children for short breaks which has been a massively rewarding experience not only for us but our sons as well. The boys are getting to meet children from similar backgrounds and this helps the foster children feel safe and are able to communicate their own stories as they feel secure enough with our boys sharing their own stories of foster care. I never expected life as an adoptive parent and foster carer to be as rewarding and exciting as it has been so far. 

Also a very happy 100th Birthday to Scottish Adoption & Fostering, without you all I wouldn’t be sitting here writing any of this! 

“Pedal, pedal, keep pedalling! You’re doing it! You’re doing it!”

The first time my wee boy rode his bike was something special. Before he came to me, back when my longing for a child was a cold weight in my heart, I had imagined this amongst many other firsts. I had shared great joy in the firsts of the children in my life that I loved, but I ached for these moments with a child of my own. The annual Facebook Firsts of others could sometimes be overwhelming – endless fancy frocks next to Christmas trees, birthday grins and front-door-posed first days of school. Meanwhile, I felt like I had so much love, and nowhere to put it.

When I accepted there would be no baby, I re-imagined my path to becoming a mother. I wanted my child to be able to play with my kind, funny nieces and nephews, and decided adopting an older child was the best path for me. But when you choose to adopt an older child, you need to accept that you have already missed so many firsts – first steps, first words, first day of school.

What I know now is that, often, these traditional firsts are over-rated. Big occasions are frequently fraught. Play-acting picture perfect, balancing the teetering edge between excited and overwhelmed. Juggling everyone’s emotions to avoid the moment when Reality kicks Expectation in the ankles and stomps off in a huff. I think this may be true in all families, not just in adoptive ones. How many of those Facebook grins are forced?

What matters more are the countless small and unexpected firsts. The day I blew his mind by mixing blue and yellow to make green, the day I finally taught him to make a “pop” with a finger in his cheek, the first time he played Minecraft and instantly dug straight down and buried himself alive, the first time water sliding in the back garden, the first time he caught a fish in a bucket, the first time we exploded vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, the first time he wrote a sentence unprompted (“Mum is a poo!”), the first time we drove up into the hills, just to look at stars, in the wintery dark. So many joyful firsts we didn’t plan, so many lovely days we didn’t see coming.

It is also true that some firsts are less meaningful than later moments. I had heard him say a thousand people-pleasing “I love you”s before the first time he said it to me and I knew he really meant it – because he said, “I love you more than dinosaurs”.

Finally, there are the firsts you really earn. The first time he rode a bike was special because we earned it. He was five, and we were still in the first few months of being a family, swinging between him pulling me closer, and pushing me away. We learned a lot in the weeks it took to get to that final moment, and not just about balance and pedals. He learned persistence against his secret fear of failure, learned to trust me enough to let me lead (sometimes). I learned a little of the hardest trick in parenting – when to push, and when to let go.

The day itself. There are tears, rages, frustrated sighs. One final, bitter dispute about why you can’t start with BOTH feet on the pedals. Then suddenly, unbelievably, he is away, bumping down the grassy hill, determined eyes fixed on the distance. And I am running behind him, shouting “Pedal, pedal, keep pedalling! You’re doing it! You’re doing it”.  I am crying and laughing, and watching my brave, beautiful boy fly.

For me – this is adoption. A bumpy, hard-won path to absolute joy.