Chapter 6

Six weeks since finding out, through being turned down at Panel, that I'll never adopt.


This has been an exhausting week, but also with a small but significant step forward. I realised that to experience great loss and difficulty is to be alive, I've broadened my awareness to incorporate this and to bring my loss into me, and to see it as normal and universal, and something experienced by us all in our lives, whatever that loss, grief or difficulty may be from. A tentative little shoot of healing has started to grow and it feels good.

It happened as I drove to work and passed the day nursery I always pass. I saw a man carry a little girl, who looked as if she was the age I was hoping to adopt, into the nursery, and felt a massive pang, as I have done every day since Panel. But then I realised it was normal, and OK, and to be expected, and I could bear it, and would bear it. It's hard to describe, but it is as if I broadened the space around me to bring these grief pangs in.

And what else has happened in Chapter 6?

The normal work activities, and a very intense one day course on Compassion Focused Therapy, at which I met an old friend and had a very pleasant, unexpected evening of prosecco and paddling in the sea. Collecting heart shaped stones and stones the colour of a stormy sky. Sitting in the rain and watching a rainbow form over the Pier.

Beautiful.