Our goodbye present.
We would not be able to have him.
We would not be his new Mummy and Daddy.
That’s what they had told us, the people at social services.
“Thank you for your interest, but the process for assessing potential adoptive parents is very long. You can’t just jump the queue and he needs to find new parents quickly”
The fact that he was being fostered by Lucy’s parents and that we had bonded with him so strongly was not taken into consideration. There was a process. A system.
THERE WAS A WAY OF DOING THINGS THAT MUST BE FOLLOWED AT ALL TIMES.
The child’s best interests? A beautiful, creative and happenchance solution? Well, yes they were all very well and good, but they needed to fit within the system too.
Get in line.
We raged against the machine.
~
And so it was that we found ourselves trailing around Toys R Us in Farnborough, Hampshire looking for a goodbye gift. We eventually settled upon a battery powered quad bike. It was a little bit extravagant and perhaps we thought that it would be something he would remember us by, when he went to his new home and rode it around their garden.
We packed it up in the car and took it to Lucy’s parents’ house.
He was excited.
I unpacked it and got it set up for him to ride around the patio next to the garden. Lucy and I tried not to show our emotions in order not to confuse him. But as he rode the shiny new plastic quad bike round and round, his watchful brown eyes glancing over at us as he smiled grimly for our approval, we wondered what might have been.
This everyday experience that was not going to be part of our lives because other people in faded offices, with rules to follow, would not consider our heartfelt application (which was in fact more of an impassioned plea) to become his parents.
As he circled the patio in tight loops, we thought back to the many hours we had already spent together, playing games in the garden, hunting imaginary pirates, having tickle fights and giving piggy backs before tucking him in with bedtime stories about Wild Things and poems featuring Quick Digesting Ginks.
We thought about how, against all the sensible advice of our friends and family, we had fallen for him and allowed ourselves to hope.
We had known from the outset that, despite a seemingly natural solution that stared everyone in the face, the system was highly unlikely to grant us this most precious privilege.
To become his parents.
We had allowed our imaginations to run away with us. And now, as we watched him ride his new quad bike, that we hoped would be a lasting memory of us, he seemed to ride away from us and out of our lives, taking our hopes and dreams with him.
~
But life has a mysterious way of finding order.
It turns out that the quad bike was not needed to provide a lasting memory of us, and now, fifteen years later, it languishes at the bottom of our garden, gathering mold and cluttered with dead leaves.
In fact, I don’t think Aaron ever looks at it, at least he never mentions it, although he can clearly see it out of his bedroom window.
It was OK for us to hope after all.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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Photo credit: iStock.com
