So. We'd moved house, the adoption was progressing, I was starting to hope!! More fool me.
After we'd moved house, a further phone call was booked for mid-January with another social worker and it wasn't good news. Our application is on indefinite hold. Things have changed since the summer and there are fewer children available (which I guess is a good thing) and they already have a lot of prospective adopters on their books who are already approved so are not moving forward with anyone new at the moment. They weren't sure when, or even if, the situation would ever change but we were welcome to get in touch with them every couple of months to ask the question.
Great. More limbo.
So, yet more research was done into other agencies and other charities that offered the same thing. The phone call I mention above took place in January, by February we'd emailed another agency and had been accepted by them so hoped that would progress. It's now been six weeks and they're no longer replying to my emails. I got in touch with our first agency to see if the situation had changed, it hadn't. Suddenly there is a very real possibility that this isn't going to happen for us. There are only so many times we can bang our heads against the wall and hope that wall will come down. It seems that wall is very firmly up, we can't get to the other side, and I'm genuinely not sure how much energy we both have to keep trying. Hubby is 40 this year and I'm a good few years older than him, at some point we need to just realise this is our life now. Just us.
Hubby is suddenly on the same page as me, before Christmas he had started volunteering at a local cubs group to get more childcare experience - as requested by our first adoption charity. He's always been great with kids, and he always comes back from his evenings with them smiling, but he's going to give it up in the summer. If we're not able to adopt then he doesn't 'need' the experience and every evening there just reminds him of what we don't have. It's heartbreaking.
I try and feel positive, I try and look for the good in things. I know I have so much to be thankful and grateful for. But it's difficult, I cannot deny there is a massive chasm in my life - a huge, enormous, all consuming black hole where my children should be, what my life should be. And the pregnancy announcements keep coming, and the moaning from those that have children keeps coming. All the while I'm sat here wondering what the point of my life is. Genuinely, how do I get to the other side of this? How do I feel that my life isn't utterly worthless?
There is now a very real possibility that this isn't going to happen for us. I really didn't think that would happen, I'm sorry if that sounds naïve but I really didn't. I always thought something somehow would work out, even if it wasn't our first choice or how we thought it would look like - I nevertheless always thought that SOMETHING would happen. I genuinely didn't consider that at the end of the road we would actually be childless. And that is now very realistically what it looks like our future will be.
