Adoption

My feelings were bittersweet about our move, I was excited to be moving forward with our plans to have a family and I was also devastated to be leaving our beautiful family and friends.

No more all day shopping trips with my Mumma.

No more coffee and cake and lounging around with my besties.

No more Sunday dinners with our favourite King family.

No more weekend visits to the Prem to visit the family.

No more sleepovers for Madi Donnelly, Squibb , Elson

No more hot summer days

I was worried my special connection with my darling niece, Madison and our gorgeous god-daughter, Sian was going to disappear with the distance between us.

Sianny x

Madi xx

We did have a lot to look forward too. We have some very special families and friends in Tassie too.   It turns out our timing was impeccable, Foo’s Dad wasn’t well and would be spending a considerable amount of time travelling back and forth to hospital. Foo was going to be around just when his family needed him the most.

I was most looking forward to Tuesday lunches at Nan and Pops with Aunty Louie.

Anyone lucky enough to come on a Tuesday knows why.

My cousin Jemma and I are one and the same. We arrived Christmas Eve and were lucky enough to spend our first couple of months camped at her house until we got settled.

Love you Jembo xx

I found a wonderful place to work, full of very special ladies and friends I am sure to have for the rest of my life. These friends were going to be the ones to help me through the next part of our journey.

The adoption process begins with seminars designed to scare the bejesus out of you.

Not to be deterred, we moved on from one seminar to the other. In Tassie this process moves pretty quickly, I can’t imagine what it is like in other states when it takes 12 months before you can even attend an information seminar. For anyone considering Adoption as an option, this link may be of some assistance: http://www.adoptionaustralia.com.au/index.html

Some seminars we attended were thought provoking and others were just emotionally shattering. The head of adoptions at the time was a very matronly lady with no compassion for the stories that led people to attend these seminars. She barked orders at us about swapping all our music to Mozart and then followed up by saying the average wait now is 5 years and that if we weren’t prepared to wait that long we should leave now.

They drill in to you that this process is not about you, it is first and foremost about the children, which is exactly how it should be. But it’s not!

I have some pretty strong views on this, so bear with me…..

Local adoption in Australia is almost non-existent, some could argue this is a good thing. Then again, others that read the newspaper and watch the news might agree that the state of our country’s care for neglected and abused children living in dire situations is despicable.

Why are we giving these parents opportunity after opportunity to ruin these children’s lives? How can you say the best place for a child is amongst filth, starvation, sexual and physical abuse as long as they are with their biological parents. Yes, I believe we should all be given a second chance, but not a third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

There are approximately 6 million children across the world at any one time in desperate need of a family to love and care for them. They are sitting in orphanages, on rubbish dumps, in gutters and being taken advantage of.

6 years ago, Australia’s intercountry adoption count was somewhere around 500 children. Just last year these numbers dropped well below 100.

We send our troops in to fight for the rights of people in other countries, but we can’t send delegates to fight for the rights of these children who have potential families waiting to love and nurture them.

Instead we sign with the Hague Convention to protect these children from being adopted?????

Don’t get me wrong, I believe safety of the child is paramount, and the Hague convention is there to protect children from abduction and trafficking. But there has to be a better way than creating so much red tape that these truly orphaned children are left destitute.

There are many families out there that the adoption process has been a very fulfilling one for them. I may think differently if we were one of those families.

So we attended all the seminars, and met with our case worker over several weeks, completed our home study and our Ethiopian application and were approved on the 6^th September, just 6 months after attending our first seminar. All we could do now was wait……and listen to Mozart. This was four years ago.