Saturday, January 13, 2007

Nothing to see...

No bleeding, just a little, not too scary, cramping, but I'm still only a day late. Haven't plucked up courage to tell Mr. Spouse. If I bleed before Monday I'm not sure if I will, or maybe tell him it was late and I thought the test was positive, and that I'm sad but not too sad, which I think I will be. If I don't but the Monday test is negative I think I'll tell him anyway, plus ring the hospital to see what they say. I am of course on full-on knicker watch but managed to sleep quite well last night.

This morning our information pack from Adoption UK arrived, with our first official (not cast-off, out of date) copy of Children Who Wait, arrived. It did make me feel positive about adopting - there were a few children in there I could see parenting, though they wouldn't be for us I don't think, as either they are too old (as in, I could see us parenting children like that who'd been with us for a while) or we wouldn't get chosen for them because of their ethnicity. I always particularly look for children who are half British and half some-East-African-origin, obviously, and there was one in here, but the social worker blurb asked for a family who could "reflect" rather than "reflect or promote" their ethnic origins. Which is fair enough, but some of the cases just show how unrealistic some placing social workers can be; either really complex ethnicities where they will be lucky to find even one family in the UK with that mix, or children who have fathers of different ethnicities and they think they'll find a mixed race family to adopt white children, or children who are mixed race but don't look it, and ditto. Obviously it is not good to pretend that mixed-race children are white, but people tend to assume children have the ethnicity that they appear to have.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I sometimes ask myself what's worse for a child - to be with parents that are of the right ethnicity, or with parents that can give him/her the love and care s/he needs.

Origin and background was one of the reasons we decided against domestic adoption: we are German, we speak German home.