Yes we know about being a mum. You’re on call 24/7, you wipe up dribble, vomit and poo constantly and you don’t get paid for it. It’s so unglamorous.

But you never hear this stuff from people lower down the socio-economic scale. These views tend to emanate from Western Middle-Class mothers, many of whom were in a position to give up careers to have children (a luxury in itself). And now, they seem to feel cheated.

And that is although often the moaning mummies tend to be able to pay for those things they don’t like doing – like cleaning – and afford babysitting or a nanny if they wish. Which makes these posts insulting to a large number of women who cannot afford the leisure and would never have the time to pen a blog about how tough it is.

I find this whole new trend is offensive to those who have lost their kids. Those whose kids are missing. Those who have had to abandon their kids because above the number allowed by their State or religion, or conceived out of wedlock. Those who have tried and failed to have kids naturally. Or have tried and failed to adopt.

It’s offensive to the kids themselves. Would we have wanted to feel that we were a ‘job’ to our mothers? And them reminding us and telling the world about how unrewarding and tiring it was especially it wasn’t even paid for?

And of course these statements are offensive to those who actually do have the hardest jobs in the world. You want to try and tell a miner in China or a sweat factory worker in Bangladesh that you have the hardest job in the world because you have to soothe your child back to sleep at night? Or do you want to ask my cleaner who hasn’t seen her kids for three years whether she’d rather clean the vomit off her own kids. Or mine?

This is offensive because kids are not a job. A job (and I have done a few) is something you do for other people, a place where you navigate the whims of others in order to earn money. With no passion often, certainly no love. Caring for your children, that you chose to have presumably (after all as a modern woman you could have chosen not to) is a privilege, a joy, a time to learn and relearn through their eyes.

This might be a cultural issue. I am Italian after all. A country where ‘I bambini’ are a pleasure to have around, are part of society, they sit with you at dinner table, you take them to restaurants with you (not just to special ones where they are allowed in) and the customer service improves rather than getting worse when the little people arrive. It might be because I am an adoptive mother and I went looking for that job high and low with every bit of me. Yes I did. It might be because I think even your daily ‘job’ needs to feel pleasurable. Or maybe all of the above. But I think being a mum is the highest form of honor I have been offered in life. Being with my children is the most enriching, fun, educational, creative part of my day and night. And it is rewarding, each minute of it is (OK maybe not the cleaning the poo bit). I feel grateful for their presence and the gift of our bond and companionship every single moment I can.

Ultimately the way we live anything from parenting to working to spending time with others or alone is all about attitude. I know I have chosen mine. And instead of spending time concocting a narrative about how hard done by I am, I am forever grateful I even got to choose.

As ever the topic of interracial adoption is a complex one, one that makes the headlines in the New York Times on the same day – link here.

I think the title of the NY Time summarises the whole thing correctly. Yes race (and indeed religion) do matter. They are part of a child’s identity, and it will stay way into adulthood. In an ideal world therefore we would want to match a child with the same ethnicity and why not religion parents. But guess what? We don’t live in that ideal world. We live in one where that choice isn’t always possible and the alternative to that ‘perfect match’ is a life in care shunted around the foster care system with multiple placements (in the majority of cases with temporary carers of a different ethnicity and religion anyway).

After that? The prospects are bleak. Crime, prostitution and homelessness are too often the only future for young adults leaving care as pointed out in our report from last year. 

To say that I found Nick Ferrari obnoxious in the interview would be an underestimation of my actual feelings towards him. Apparently he is amazed that I trust social services to be the ones to be making the right decision in the interest of the child. Who else would be? The birth family who had a total of three children removed from their custody and given for adoption?

In his biased view it should have been taken into account that four sets relatives of the biological mother came forward to adopt, and on top of that they were Muslim. How perfect blood related and same religion.

Should that have been a decisive factor? Being of a specific religion or even ‘blood related’ does not make anyone suitable to adopt.

Worse so Nick and a lot of the press around this specific case were clearly making a point that ‘on top of that’ the white women were lesbians too. So let’s throw everything in the pot why not?

This is going to get really boringly cliché now. What children need is the permanent love of doting parents. When that is provided by biological same ethnicity and religion parents that is great. When that is not possible then the next best available match has to be found to ensure the best interest of the child in paramount. In that case, dare I say like mine with two Mexican children, cultural needs of children can be met by different-race parents who are committed to the best interests of their child.

So that children are not made to pay for having been born in a family which for whatever reason couldn’t provide for them (in this case mental illness) and then for being of the wrong skin colour and or religion.

Being left behind languishing in a care system waiting endlessly not just for ‘a’ muslim family but ‘the right’ muslim family will never be the right alternative to a permanent loving family. Now.

One of the cosy themes this week has been that many people are under the misapprehension that they are not suitable to adopt. A YouGov survey showed one in four adults think being over the age of 40 would mean inelligiblility for adoption – whilst low incomes and being single were commonly cited as barriers too.

What’s less comfortable is the fact that local authorities have the power to interpret the current ‘guidelines’ however they like, and frequently reject potential adopters for a whole variety of reasons – there are documented examples of people being too wealthy, being the wrong ethnicity, the wrong sexuality or even having too many cats. Boroughs in London less than 5 miles apart have radically different policies leading to huge inconsistencies – there’s an excess of demand for adoption of ethnic children in Brixton, whilst there’s an excess supply of suitable potential adopters in Kensington. The real shock is that under the current system, never the twain shall meet.

Our current minister for Children and Families – Edward Timpson – should be the perfect man for the job, growing up with two natural and two adopted siblings in a household which saw his parents fostering over 90 children. He’s pledged to break down the local barriers and link children across the country more quickly with potential adopters through the Adoption Gateway, which has now gone live. Yet for all the warm words, he has after a year in office still failed to meet and hear the opinions of some forward thinking organisations in the sector, such as Adopt A Better Way.
What’s really needed now is a wholesale structural change to the system and the rules. Responsibility should be transferred to a new central authority, which can apply consistent adoption criteria. Resourcing needs to be hugely improved to stop the senseless delays which damage young children so much. And we need to totally rethink the conflicting legal and social care systems, whose competing agendas force children into a cycle of being returned time and again to unsuitable parents before their situation becomes so dire that they are placed into care, with their young lives already blighted.
Things have at last started to show signs of moving in the right direction, but like the system itself, progress is painfully and damagingly slow. Now is the time for government to commit to Britain’s future by investing properly in our vulnerable children. The argument for the investment in terms of improved life chances, lower crime, better health, improved education and reduction in the numbers needing care – has already been accepted. Let’s act now, otherwise Britain will be picking up the social and economic tab for decades to come.

In Worcester a few days ago a doorbell rang. The occupants of the house opened it to find a newborn baby, wrapped in a hessian bag. The baby, biblically named Joseph, is doing well say the nurses. The mother is nowhere to be seen and her state can only be guessed at. Those who know about this type of thing say it’s possible she was concealing the pregnancy but this is speculation. There is a lot of speculation about babies right now, not all of it joyous.

Two infants, to be born days apart in the uncustomary heat of an English summer. While Kate and William seem delightfully grounded, it can be safely said this baby will have all its needs met and more. Cared for around the clock, doted on, protected, loved and given the best that money and social status can buy, he or she will have every opportunity. This is not carping, it is simply fact. And what of ‘Joseph?’ Though only a few days old, his opportunities in life are already closing. If his mother is found, authorities will have to determine if she can, wants to or is able to look after her baby. If she cannot, then Joseph will go into care. At that moment his life has already diminished. Joseph will join over 60,000 children in the UK in care, many who have and will spend their whole lives there. Local authorities and courts will produce a mass of paperwork and have endless discussions purporting to be about Joseph’s welfare.

The care system as it stands in the UK is unable to care for the kids it is supposed to protect. Born without any knowledge of the world and no cares, just like William and Kate’s baby, Joseph’s life will take a very different trajectory. The inept bureaucracy of the system will ensure that he is shunted between foster families, standing little chance of bonding with anyone. If he does find a foster family who love him, the authorities will probably move him. He may begin to exhibit difficult behaviour as a toddler as he wonders if anyone loves him or cares about. He is likely to be a slower learner (even though he was probably not born that way), potentially disruptive at school and may engage in anti social activities.

His chances of youth crime, drugs and being a runaway are high, far too high. His chances of being adopted by a loving family are low. Not because there are no adoptive parents but because the system makes it very hard for people to adopt. And so while Joseph languishes in care, developing emotional and physical problems, his potential family will attempt to navigate the councils and authorities and probably find it too difficult. If they do manage to adopt they will be given zero support. One day when Kate Middleton is doing her charity work, she might visit him, in prison or if he’s lucky, in care. She’ll tell everyone that she has a little boy or girl too and all children should be loved and looked after. They should. But they aren’t.

So according to Cameron and the invisible and highly reticent Edward Timpson (Minister for Children apparently though you would not think so) the reason why many potential parents don’t adopt is because adoption gets bad press. Not for a moment have they considered that the bad press is warranted. It is not a case of people being fed lies; mostly it is that those who might know anything about adoption, know that there is no support for families once you have adopted. The subset of the population who might consider adopting are generally a well-informed lot: they know that once you take on the responsibility of a child who has been in the care system you get a sack load of trauma and neglect but not tools to help you deal with it. Kids in care suffer twice (at least), first from biological parents who can’t look after them or don’t want them. They’re already messed up but the care system then shunts them around and makes sure they’re well and truly feeling the pain of neglect.
Love is not enough for these kids. For someone adopted as a baby it may be ok but the reality is that most kids will be toddlers at least, before they are adopted. They will have felt abuse, emotional and physical pain and much more besides. They will need specialist care to either prevent them developing a form of mental illness or to treat it . But they won’t get it. Almost to the day that parents and children come together to form a family, they will be left alone. Local authorities and councils, happy to pass the parcel, will cross them off their list.

This example  is typical of how well-meaning people end up exhausted after fighting for years to get post-adoption support for their kids. Most never secure funding for the therapy that’s needed and it is not uncommon for them to return the child to care because they are unable to cope.

“Our son, who we’ve had since he was two, at age nine became incredibly aggressive and clearly has behavioural problems. “Now he’s a nearly 16-year-old who’s over 20 stone, and I’ve been pinned against the wall and my head smashed in. I regularly would get hit,and his mouth is like a sewer. I love him to bits, but I wouldn’t say I’m very proud of him. We’ve been close many times to picking up the phone and saying ‘we can’t do this’.”

While social workers may reassure parents during the adoption process that they have the right to an assessment of a child’s needs, they may not explicitly communicate that there is no duty on a local authority to provide the services to meet any needs that are identified. And because no statutory agency has any obligation to stump up, all too often, they don’t.

And so we come back again to one of the central platforms for Adopt a Better Way: the lack of a central regulating body. Without it we have no exact data as to how many children are returned to care as a result of lack of support. how many children develop mental illness during their first years in care and what is needed to minimise this awful chain of events. initiatives such as the ill-thought out adoption passport do not attempt to address key issues including how to monitor the performance of councils or how to move towards a structure that supports children and parents so they can come together and stay together. But with such a reductive government in power, one who talks a great deal about families but whose policies are almost resolutely anti-family, it is hard to see how this will happen.

How is this possible? When we’d just adopted our first child, Gaia, the question was “Do you know anything about her ‘real mum’?” Now we have Luca as well, the question has shifted: ‘Are they ‘real siblings’? What makes ‘real’ siblings? Blood? Is it blood and genetics that are at fault when siblings don’t talk to each other, hardly bond and live like strangers? And should we thank DNA when the opposite happens?

Last year Luca suddenly went cross-eyed overnight. Immediately we knew it wasn’t just an eyesight issue. At the time his co-ordination completely deserted him, he went floppy to the extent that he forgot how to even walk. A horrible month in hospital ensued while we waited to hear what this thing was. A virus? Brain damage? Meningitis? Nothing conclusive. Now we know what it isn’t but not what it is.

In the medical profession everyone is ‘confused’ but actually we are not because we knew we had adopted a child who had been physically and emotionally damaged before even being born. In recent months, it’s become obvious that he has multiple problems but we don’t quite know how deep it goes. His brain is affected. For a child approaching three he cannot really understand or communicate concepts. There are a few words he says but I don’t think he always knows why he’s saying them. He can’t tell me if he had a happy day at nursery or even answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because he doesn’t really know what I’m talking about when I ask him. He just looks at me with impossibly big, lost eyes and just repeats what I say. Currently he is seeing a speech therapist, physiotherapist, developmental pediatrician, feeding specialist and undergoing genetic testing. He wears glasses and a patch and is a fairly regular visitor to our GP for recurrent infections and other issues.

Watching him go through test after test, being prodded, poked and shipped from hospital to hospital, hurts, right to the core of my shattered soul. Just like a real mum. I feel all sorts of things. Mostly I am sad because I think it’s unfair that he should go through this. I know he is the product of a ‘real’ mother who abused alcohol and possibly drugs for the entire duration of her pregnancy. He was that unwanted. I was talking to someone whose (biological) child has disabilities and she summarised it beautifully, she said “It’s not painful because we wanted the perfect child, but because we want our child to have a perfect life, and we know he simply will not”.

I feel pride at the way he smiles at life, is always up for a cuddle and finds even the hospital a familiar cosy place. At the way he holds my hand when I sleep with him and get overwhelmed with fear and upset almost as if he is the one comforting me. I am inspired by him, his resilience and unconditional love. And then I feel gratitude. A lot of people tell me “You are so good for what you have done, you know he would be in an orphanage if it wasn’t for you, he might be dead now” but I am the one who is grateful, for what he means to me and everyone around him.

Which leads me to the ‘real siblings’.
Gaia has every reason to be jealous. She was 2.5 when we went to meet him, a difficult age to accept a new brother. A difficult age to understand that we were flying to Mexico, where we adopted her, to now ‘meet him’ and bring him back forever, with all the implications that the whole thing brought. She was and still can be insecure with new people and obsessive with her attachment to me. When people tried to shake my hands she would stand between us and say “This is MY MAMMA!” especially if it was kids doing it. It was impossible to have playdates at home without it turning into a mini drama where she would push anyone who came close to me away. Everyone swore it would be a disaster to add another child to the family at that time. I am not going to deny it took serious adjustment.

But right now this is what I know. Just as we read our kids, Gaia and Luca understand each other.
Luca’s first word was “Gaia’. She is the only one he really recognises and always has done, at both a rational and emotional level. Whenever he is at the doctors and won’t sit still we mention the magic word “Gaia’ and he stops and smiles. I cannot take him to the school gates for drop-off because he has a melt-down at the thought of leaving her (he does not and never has done that about me!).

Gaia has demanded to sleep in the same room as him. She says ‘sharing is caring’ so I want to share everything with Luca, even my room’. In the morning she gets him out of the cot (she is barely five) and gets him ready. If I am unwell she even makes him breakfast. She sits on the floor with the patience of a saint, teaching him colours and numbers that she knows he will not remember. Despite us never ever mentioning the fact that he has issues (amongst other reasons because we don’t even know what the issue IS) a week ago she told us at dinner that when she grows up she ‘wants to be a teacher of children like Luca’. When I asked her if she meant a nursery teacher, she replied ‘no a teacher of children who take a long time to learn’. She encourages him to push forward even when I give up trying. She tells me not be ‘discouraging’ of him as ‘he will get there’. And I sit there and watch this miracle unfold in front of my eyes. Are they real siblings? I have never witnessed anything more real than the bond between my children.

And today if there is only one thing Luca knows is that he’s wanted. By me, his father and his sister Gaia. We are all real, like the bond that gets us out of bed in the morning and the love we have for each other. And we support each other, especially our dear little soul who often has no idea where he is or who to hug. The most important thing is that we are there to hug him. You can’t get more real than that.

Type the search term, ‘adoption in the Queen’s Speech.’ It is Not Found. No surprise there. We’re used to promises and talk but not much action. What we’re really disturbed about though is that the most repeated words in the document are ‘Cuts’ and “Councils’. Together. So how are we going to look after these vulnerable young people already suffering because of Osborne and Cameron’s austerity package? In our report last year, we noted that many young people in care will have experienced traumatic, dysfunctional childhoods. Sadly children are not given away because their parents adore them. They are usually taken away when they have been abused or neglected.

As it was clear in our report from last year. Many young people in care will have experienced difficult and often traumatic childhoods and many of them will have been abused or neglected.When they leave the system after a life in care, their outlook is bleak. Cameron and his government seem to want to make it even worse. How bad does it have to get?
Seven organisations – Barnardo’s, The Care Leavers Association, Catch22, the Fostering Network, TACT, Voice and The Who Cares? Trust – are calling on the Government to reform the system in a new briefing, “Still Our Children”, published today.
The number of young people aged 16 and over leaving care has risen each year from 8,170 in 2007 to 10,000 in 2012. This is the result of the State as corporate parent. Changes are needed to improve comparatively low outcomes for care leavers:

• 23 per cent of the adult prison population has spent some time in care
• Around a quarter of those living on the street have a background in care
• Care leavers more than four times more likely to commit suicide in adulthood
• In 2011 just 12.8 per cent of children who had been in care for a minimum of one year obtained five good grade GCSEs, including English and maths; for other children the figure was 57.9 per cent
• The number of 19-year-olds who were looked after when aged 16 years and who are now NEET is 36 per cent, double the number of their non-care contemporaries.

Yes we agree that young adults should benefit from more support when they leave care. We absolutely do. However might it not be better to address the problem at its roots. An adoption system that actually works for the participants and placed children with families in a timely manner would be a huge start. And it would lessen the care burden. The foster care system currently costs the state £2bn per year. If we add the costs of prison, homelessness, and drug problems, the overall cost to society is a big one. Meanwhile, the foster care system is imploding and there continues to be a major shortage of foster carers. If there was less need for foster carers, the current ones could foster for longer and the children would have some stability. Astonishingly the government appears not to have made these connections and they are the only ones who cannot see that without an holistic approach to the welfare of children in our society they are doomed to perpetuate this chain of neglect and incompetence.

A crisis situation like the one affecting about 70,000 children in this country necessitates way more than a guideline here and a passport there. It requires a serious overhaul of a system that is inefficient, out of date and fundamentally not developed with the child’s interest in mind. The whole process needs confidence in it and around it and right now, a flimsy passport isn’t going to do this.

Children’s Minister Edward Timpson said: “For too long children have been left waiting – in many cases over two years – for the stable, loving homes whilst prospective adopters have been dissuaded from offering those children the security they need.” The issue is, Mr Timpson, the passport does not even attempt to address the fact that children wait too long. To do so would require tackling the enormous weight of overly bureaucratic processes, the inefficiencies of the Family Courts and the lack of consistency between them and social services.
Most importantly, the Government has completely ignored the need for a regulator which would ensure a smoother process for children who languish in care for years. Until the Government does not seriously take responsibility to address this, we will not see the step change we have been promised for years now. Meanwhile we continue wasting time and lives. But then again Mr Timpson hasn’t even got time to meet with me, so what do I expect.

When I read things like this I totally understand why some people find the idea of adoption a step too far. It is a fact that when you adopt you have to pay money – to your council, your government, various lawyers and that’s even before you factor in the kind of expenses you incur travelling to find your child and taking time off work in order to be able to do so.

By its nature, adoption discriminates against those potential loving parents who do not earn high salaries, favouring the well-off middle classes. People who come to adoption also may come to it after spending thousands of dollars on other methods of having a family, like IVF. I have personally seen couples shut out of adoption for purely financial reasons.

So yes, the process itself is not ideal. But this article hints at something more insidious: the worth of a child. In a world where multiple third world deaths are lucky to make page five while a handful of deaths in Europe or the US invite front page news, this should not be surprising. But there is something patently shocking about putting a price on a child and suggesting that a white child is more valuable than a black child. There are various explanations in this article that attempt to rationalize this in pure economic terms but they fail miserably: A life is a life. A child is a child whether it is black, white or yellow. The fact that a child cannot, for a long time, understand monetary concepts, makes this even more poignant.

Placing monetary value on a child, commoditising it like everything else in our society is not a modern function of a market economy but an immoral practice that harks back to slavery. As Cindy Friedmutter points out, the argument that charging higher fees for healthy white babies due to supposed demand can help subsidise black babies who are not in such demand is fatuous.  She also makes a very good point about the expectation created. Parents who spend more money on an adoption may well think this is a guarantee.

“The thing that is scary to me is that children aren’t perfect. People who are willing to pay high fees for healthy kids don’t always get perfect children. If you pay $50,000, it doesn’t mean that child is going to be healthy, gorgeous and smart.”

I’m with her when she says charging people according to what they can afford is a way for agencies to make adoption a viable choice for more families, and still let them balance the books. There is nothing simple or even fair about adoption. That children should be unloved is itself immoral. Putting a price on ethnicity, gender or physical state is getting close to something too terrible to contemplate. That is not what adoption is about.

You probably know what’s coming next: what they uncover is heartbreaking and frustrating as they experience what many adoptive and would be adoptive parents have found – a system that works against the interests of the children. Apparently Sir Elton John and David have provided a great deal of input into the feature, so my delight at being contacted was pretty much off the scale. They sent a film crew from the States to record my experiences of adopting from Mexico. I had to keep pinching myself to believe  it was true!

It’s gratifying that my campaign group, Adoption With Humanity, has been recognised amongst global adoption campaigning groups  for its emphasis on the plight of the thousands of children in the UK forgotten in care. Though I’m no less frustrated at the situation we’re in with adoption, it’s very encouraging to know that many of you share our views and understand the need to make the adoption process leaner and more child-centric.

Launched in the US this coming September, the film will be shown here in the UK just before National Adoption Week. I have huge hopes about its potential as a catalyst for change. Filming with Olga and dealing with her and her colleague Mike Dudko was an amazing experience and their commitment to giving children a voice is real and will hopefully go a long way. I felt like I had known them both for ages. We share the same views and dreams. Dreams it is worth waking up to every day for.