After adopting two young sisters, Claire and her husband found themselves thrown into the deep end of parenthood. Shortly after moving in, their eldest was starting school mid-term, while they were still finding their feet as a family. What seemed, on the surface, like a routine first day of school was a moment filled with difficult feelings, attachment struggles, and the challenge of trying to reassure two little girls that this was their forever home.
My husband and I have two girls, who we adopted aged two and four. When we met, we told them we’d treasure them and look after them forever… and then, just a month later when they moved in, we had to take the eldest for her first day at school in the middle of a term, so all the other reception children – and parents – were already settled.
I felt like there was this little lost soul I’d been handed, and I had to dress her up and march her off.
For adoptive families there’s a period of introductions where you meet your children, but I was a week-old parent… but anyone who saw me out with the girls wouldn’t have been able to tell because, of course, the girls were so big.
So, on that very first day of school there was a conflict between how we felt and how we looked from the teacher’s perspective, and they didn’t understand that what we were experiencing was something more than the nervousness and excitement that all parents feel when their children start school.
It was the first time we’d been apart from our little person, which conflicted with all the essential attachment reinforcing we were trying to do to prove to them that they were with us forever.
I felt like we were connected by a single fragile point, like the little paper chains of gingerbread people you make when you’re little.
A difficult start at school
She was just picked up and placed on the carpet in a classroom mid-term without any shorter days, fun reassuring first day activities or patient adjustment time. Bear in mind she had been picked up and placed with our family a few weeks earlier in much the same way.
When you first meet, you are supposed to say to your friends and wider family they’re not allowed to meet the children in the early days while you form your little family unit of four.
It’s understandable, as it has to be just you, and that means you do everything … because what you’re really teaching them is “I am your mummy now and forever, and I will look after you. If you need a drink, nappy change, first aid, toy or cuddle you should come to me first”. For our pre-verbal youngest daughter this was especially important.
This meant that we missed out on any guidance and encouragement from our friends and families when we were brand new parents, so it was a lonely time.
That’s why school was so difficult. It’s pretty much the opposite of all the family introduction preparation we’d done. Taking them to a school and saying, “you’re going off alone with that lady” and trying to explain that the lovely young teacher would keep them safe and spend all day with them, but she wasn’t another new mummy, so don’t get too close!
It was confusing for a four-year-old. I would physically take my daughter’s hand and put it into the teacher’s each morning at the classroom door, as I needed to mentally and physically make that transition for her and for me; as if to say ‘I am temporarily trusting this person to care for you but I will be back!’
I wanted her to feel connected to me through this stranger I was abandoning her with each morning.
Starting school was difficult in many ways, for example, they did a project at school called “all about me” where the children were expected to bring in things like baby booties and scan photos.
I understand that from the school’s perspective they were doing something familiar and easy, but we had to have difficult conversations early on about how we didn’t have these items to take in and show; that they did exist – and were no doubt loved and cherished – but that we didn’t have them. For a while my eldest was convinced she’d never been a baby like all the other girls because she just had no evidence.
Conversations were difficult with the school, which makes sense – we went from no children to two children overnight so were probably a bit over-zealous when handing them our greatest treasures each morning.
I imagined my girls like lost astronauts when we first met - they had been just floating through space waiting for us all this time and it was our job to grab them and anchor them down, finally connecting them to the loving family they’d always deserved.
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