Lotte and Stu hear from Niall, a TV producer-turned stay-at-home Dad. He talks about being the Daddy at Mummy’s group, how sometimes kids just need a squidgy hug and who’s called what in their house. Also our hosts discuss the importance of having differently gendered role models for their kids, as they admit their inexperience in matters of the opposite sex.
Full transcription below.
Niall: For us, the adoption was the only, the only means. So we looked into becoming parents and they said, we love the fact that you’ve done all this fun stuff in your life, but now you’re ready to settle down. So actually it was, it helped us being same sex. Any child throws your life upside down and adopted child will literally flip it.
I can’t imagine life without them, and I wouldn’t want life without them. I can’t actually remember life before. So actually there isn’t anything else before this is it. Now this is all I, this is what I have, and this is why I’m really happy with.
Stu: This is some families that LGBTQ parenting podcast, that deep dive into everything from IVF, IUI, adoption, donor conception, unknown donors, unwanted questions. Schooling and so much more hosted by me Stu Oakley.
Lotte: And me Lotte Jeffs. Every family is unique, of course, but queer parenting brings with it an extra big fabulous spooling mess of options, whether you are having those awkward first conversations with your partner about wanting kids knee deep in nappies.
Or trying to navigate those difficult teenage years. Some families will answer questions, break down myths and share funny, emotional and true stories from our community. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about something that one of us and clue is not me. Is it me it’s used to, it’s something that it’s something that you know a lot about, and that is adoption.
So we’re going to hear from a dad, another dad, who’s not only created his family in this way, but also until recently sat on the local adoption panel.
Stu: Interesting.
Lotte: And he’s a father of two, he’s an ex-TV producer, a stay at home dad and his name is Niall.
Niall: Um, so now house, my I’m called dad or daddy because I’m the one who stay at home parent.
Um, and then my husband is deeds or Deedee as he’s now been referred to by our daughter. Um, and that’s because we were playing on the word, daddy, just cause we didn’t, we weren’t really a Papa kind of family for us. Adoption was the only, that only means that we looked into becoming parents where you. Didn’t even actually consider surrogacy.
It didn’t enter into our minds. That that’d be what we would do. I’m not quite sure why. I think we were just in the zone. We kind of quite weirdly, both of us independently had, um, this image of our children being, um, dual heritage or mixed race. We’ve always had this in our head and we didn’t even discuss it.
And then we were going through the whole process of the adoption and we’re sat there. And at one point when we were looking, once we’d been approved, we were looking at. Profiles of children. We were like, Oh, that’s the kind of person I always imagined, just having and is like, Oh yeah, so did I same thing.
And so actually, even in our subconscious, we weren’t thinking about that. We, I adopted our son when he was three and a half. Um, and he’s now eight and then two, no, gosh, three years ago we then got an email. Um, It’s just headlined, um, unborn child. And I ignored it, thinking it was a course. Did you get invited on lots of courses when you’re doing adoption and when you’re post-adoption and then my husband sent me an email saying, you need to read that email.
And it was basically just saying that they had found out that our son’s birth mother was pregnant and did we want it? And obviously our first reaction was yeah, because whatever happens that child is going to be in our lives because that child is a blood relation of our son. Um, and. Then we got an email, literally three days later saying, Oh baby, it’s been born.
Are you still interested? And then we started the process. When our daughter came along, we got her at 14 weeks. Suddenly we had this, this baby, like as all babies are totally dependent on you and our friends are saying, Oh, it’s fine. Second time around, you know, you’re doing, and we’re like, no, we’ve never done this before.
And it’s really strange to be dealing with two children. But the youngest one is the one you’ve never dealt with before. And so poor son kind of got ignored a little bit at the beginning because there was so much that we had to learn on the ground running with this little baby. So when is this drug? So he was five when she came along and.
We were really worried about how it affected the, the positive side of it is that it really helped complete his story. I think there’s an element of him where he felt rejected by his birth mother and suddenly this other baby came along who had also been rejected by her past mother. And I think for him, it was bit like, Oh, okay.
That’s, it’s not just me. There’s someone else in the world. And that’s what we really, really hoped for him was that this, the, the, you know, the introduction of his baby sister, which really help him. Like complete the circle. It kind of make that connection and realize that he’s not on his own in the world.
It’s made it more challenging, but I think has been good for him and it will be good in the future. I think the main thing is you, you start off and you have to make that decision either on your own or with your partner, that you’re going to do it. And then you just reach out to whoever you’re going to reach out to.
We did the local council owned the adoption services, and then they start sending you the information. And for us, it took about a year. Two approval and then a year to we’re matched with our first child. And so we it’s a long process. It is a long process and they also love to have you during it, but they ask lots of you for a reason, because you’re not just taking on a child who just had like a birth or whatever kind of birth you are taking a child that has been taken away from their parents.
For whatever reason you show your interest. And then they start getting you in. You get assigned a social worker. And then that social worker comes to your house and visit you quite a few times and they ask you so many questions and you fight it and you don’t want to do it. And then you end up resigned to it, you know, to doing it.
And then after that, you then, and in between that you have to loads of courses, there’s all this stuff you’re asked to do. And then you go to panel and you get approved to be an adopter. And then the hard work starts after that. The first bit is kind of the easy bit because you’re answering all the questions you’re being led.
The next bit is when you have to be matched with your child, when that’s, when you have to take control yourself and you have to be really proactive and going to things and you get like, you get sent to catalog, which is heartbreaking, and it’s just, it’s hard. It’s just, it’s heartbreaking, but you get really cold to it.
And the first bit of the stuff, when you’re being interviewed by the social worker, it really trains you for this because it helped me is your mind into what you want. And then you show your interest and you hope you get. matched with them. And then you go through another panel and then you start the next stage.
The fact that we were the same sex actually helped us a lot. It meant you could skip out a whole big stage of the whole process because during the process, a big part of it is grieving for the unborn child. Like a lot of it is people making sure that that heterosexual couples have dealt with the fact that they want to do adoption for a reason.
They want to make sure that, you know, you’ve got over the idea that you’re not going to have a birth child. For us, literally, they were like, Oh fine. Okay. Literally they flipping through the pages. I can even skip that. We can skip that. Skip that. Okay, fine. We’ll get straight back onto this bit now. And I think we were with heart for cheer adoption services and they were so pro everything and they loved us cause we were quite boring.
Like I think, you know, we, weren’t some big jazz hands couple and we’d apologize and say, Oh, it’s so boring. And they said, we love the fact that you’ve done all this fun stuff in your life. But now you’re ready to settle down. So actually it was, it helped us being same-sex. So with the adopting thing in this country, there’s it’s so anti-discrimination against anyone, one for race, gender, sexuality, actually.
You’re not allowed to even consider those options. There’s even a thing. I know when I was on the panel, someone would come in. He was a certain age. I think someone was in their late forties and they wanted up to baby. And my question was, they’re quite old to be adopting a baby. And I got shut down instantly in the meeting because I didn’t know you can’t discriminate against age.
So I think in this country, we are so lucky that there are these rules and regulations in place. That mean that you cannot discriminate against someone for any reason, unless it’s. Safeguarding that child, if the whole process has to be about the child, sometimes I think, I think, you know, in America, the birth parents could contest it at the last minute and this country, they can do that as well.
So there, there are times if you do something called early permanence, which is what we did for our daughter, where you get the child before the adoption order has gone through the parents are still involved. The birth parents are still involved and so they can keep on fighting and contesting it right up to the last minute.
Luckily, it didn’t happen to us. And it doesn’t happen very often because generally there’s a really strong reason why that child’s being taken away from their birth parents. I’ve seen lots of things on Facebook. There’s adoption UK is this brilliant charity. That’s help loads of adopters around the country like pre and post during the process.
And there are posts on Facebook and there’ll be so many people running underneath it. We didn’t get approved. We weren’t allowed to even start. We did this. And then you look at the reasons why they weren’t allowed to start because they haven’t fulfilled criteria. And whether it’s, Oh, you smoke 20 pounds a day.
Why should I not do it? So well, smoking is like a really major factor in adoption. Then you shouldn’t, you’re not allowed to smoke a tool. And so it’s like, you have to want it so much that you won’t buy those cigarettes. You’ll save the money. You’ll get house the room, big enough for your child. You know, you have to want it enough that you’re going to change it.
I’ve pushed it in what that child. If any child throws your life upside down an adopted child will literally flip it all over the place because there’s so much stuff going on. And so you have to really, really want it because it’s going to change your life so
Lotte: much. Stu, when we were listening to that, I was feeling like it was a really familiar story to you.
You’re hearing someone else’s story that is so like your own. I mean, how did you feel.
Stu: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, it just feels like he was almost reading our story. Our journey seems like it’s been pretty much the same and it’s just, it’s so nice hearing it as well. And I think that’s why we like this podcast, something so reassuring
Lotte: about other people.
Just
Stu: the same. Yeah. And I was, I was listening and I was like, yep. Yep. Been there, done that. Yep. Yep. That as well, that as well and all these different things, I really liked how he talked a lot about how. You do go here on this thing, like he said about the different stages of grief, but actually the end of it, it’s a very positive experience and you get so much out of it.
Lotte: Clarify something for me that he mentioned, um, in that interview, which was the, in the States and also in this country, birth, parents can contest adoptions. Now, does that mean they can contest. The individuals adopting their birth children or does it mean they can contest the very fact of
Stu: adoption? Glad you brought that up because that I feel that’s one of those myths out there about adoption, especially for LGBTQ couples or single adopters.
That is something that may play on people’s mind. And it’s something that a lot of people have discussed in terms of. Of the fact that you could have the birth parents or the family be like, Oh, I, you know, I don’t want to queer raising my baby or that kind of thing. And I think what Neil is trying to explain here is that.
W when you, so when they adopted their younger daughter, they didn’t actually adopt him straight away. They foster to adopt, um, and there are different terminologies to it, but the essential meaning of foster to adopt is that you are given a child. Straight away without going through the full adoption process, uh, with a view that you will adopt them.
And the reason they’re introducing this within local governments and councils is to reduce the amount of time and care and the different types of homes that children are going through. And it is a risk and it is a big thing for a couple of straight or gay to do, because there is always an element of risk.
I my understanding and what I’d really like to, I suppose, reassure certain people is families can contest the adoption as a whole. And that’s what they’re contesting and they’re contesting and pushing the actually they don’t feel their children should be taken away from them. If there is a valid reason that the children should be taken away from them, which is the whole point of the care proceedings.
It won’t matter whether the, the adoptive parents are gay, straight, queer lesbian, but at the end of the day, if they’re in court to be adopted. The parents would have to provide like extreme cases of why they would need to not be adopted with that couple or be adopted at all. Okay. And in terms of discrimination and in terms of how the court view things, the fact that a couple is gay would not come into the equation at all because they can’t be discriminatory.
Lotte: It’s interesting what Niall said as well. That actually being a same-sex couple in the adoption process can work in your favor, that you can kind of skip a few steps of the whole grieving for your unborn child was really interesting.
Stu: It’s right. And we’ve talked about this in the, as LGBTQ parents and queer parents.
We come to this with a real desire and we know exactly . We know where we’re going and we know what we want from, from our, from our family. Another
Lotte: thing I found really interesting about the interview with Niall was when he was talking about preferences and being put in this sort of impossible situation where you have to tick boxes to say, we want children that are this particular race, this age, this gender, um, this kind of child, this kind of personality, like just wondered what that was like for you.
And whether you worried about feeling. Judged for saying that you wanted a particular
Stu: type of child. I mean, no one judges you just to really, you know, hammer that home to anybody that’s thinking about adoption. You’re not judged by the preferences you make. Uh, but those preferences are really important to help you focus your mind on, on the, on the child and the family that you, you want to become.
And Niall talked about the fact that that then also really helped. Once you go through the approval process, you you’re suddenly inundated with all these profiles. And if you have a very clear distinct. Vision as it were about the type of child or children that you want, it makes that process so much easier for her.
Everybody involved. It must be so overwhelming. I mean, I think things have changed slightly since now and his partner adopted now. It’s very much. Online. Right. And we were signed up to this service, which is like an online dating website where you have all these hundreds of children. The agency sent us, I think about 150 profiles within the space of two weeks to look up.
And it is overwhelming. Um, which is why, when you were very clear about what you want. Mm, it makes that process so much easier so much. Yeah. I didn’t answer to something else you asked. It does raise really interesting conversations with your partner about the type of ch and you, you come to point, it sounds like Neil and his partner very much reached a point where they were mutual and my husband and I did the same, but there, there were certain.
Things that came up, that we, we found out we did disagree on slightly and it opened up conversations, health, especially. And as part of the selection process, as well as, you know, the ethnic background or their gender or their age or their sibling group, it’s also about their health. Like, would you take a child that was HIV positive?
Would you take a child that had hepatitis B, would you take a child that. Was blind. Would you take a child that couldn’t walk? So we’ve
Lotte: spoken a lot about the kind of pre amble to adopting. I wonder what Niall’s experience was of actually
Stu: getting the child. Absolutely. I’d love to hear what life has been like since the
Niall: adoption, the switch from doing an actual paid job to doing a much hotter, unpaid job as a stay at home, dad was at the beginning.
It was quite easy. And I think the first year. Was really lovely. Like I was going to play groups and I was doing this stuff and it was tough being the man in the playgroup. But I think after working in TV for 18, 19 years, I was quite used to being the only man in the playgroup. Like it was kind of quite a normal situation for me.
So it didn’t matter when they say, okay, mummy is bring your children forward or do something. Look at me and be like, Oh, Ooh, Oh, and daddies and daddies. And so I went to a phase just saying, just call me mummy. It’s fine. So in playgroups and amongst our friends, I will just let people say, I would say, just call me mum, it’s fine.
Because otherwise there’s so much fuffing and huffing and puffing and people worry too much about it. And I think I want people just to be, be tilled, which very work or anything. I should be fighting my coordinator, but actually. Do you know, if it makes it easier for everyone else, I can get food. This one hour of music box, whatever it is, I’m doing fine.
Call me
Stu: mum. We’ll hear more from now about going from being a jet setting TV producer to a stay at home dad after the break.
Lotte: Stu, what’s it like being a gay dad at mother and baby
Stu: groups, incredibly awkward, credibly. Everything is mother mum, this mum that, and there’s me and my husband’s sitting there going, we have penises,
Lotte: let’s pick up
Niall: where we left off both our children.
We try and make sure that we have female influences in their lives. We want to make sure that both of them. Don’t feel they’re living in just so many male environment. Um, and that’s on both things with our son. When he first came to us, we were very conscious of letting him have that interaction with women.
And there were some women that he would just really latch on to. And I was going to speak to him to one side and say, look, do you mind if we, if you let him Puggy, do you mind if you let him kind of come in and cuddle with you because I think he needs that. Kind of that squidgy kind of mum things, you know what I mean?
Like it’s something I can’t give him. There’s something about her cuddling someone with boobs, like it just is, and I could see him, he wanted it and he needed that squish cause I’m quite boney. And so hugging me probably isn’t the same effect as when we let him do that. And then he kind of moved on and he kind of got over it, but he needed it about two years where he’d be going to women and wanting to hug them and hold their hands.
And. Um, now that we’ve got a daughter, I think we are having to really consider the differences because obviously neither myself or my husband I’ve got, or basically any experience of any of those female anatomy or anything like that. So when she first came to us and that’s changing at that P just be lucky, like, Oh my God, what is this?
I think we’re having to live with it quickly, um, about what we do. And then when it came to potty-training our daughter, the biggest thing that got me, it was just a mess. Like with the boy, it just directs it and it’s fine. And so when we sat there and just getting used to how the bodies work and how the different bodies are, and you know, we also make sure that she is with other women as well.
So, um, well I’m here. My daughter is with a friend of ours. Who’s a childminder and. She will go to the toilet in front of her. So she’ll make sure that our daughter sees her going to the toilet. So she sees her bit, she sees all this stuff and she apparently our daughter just kind of stare like, Oh my God, Oh, what’s that.
And even my mother-in-law took her swimming and apparently she took off her bra, a daughter stared at him, just said, what are those? And so she had to say to them, I do these. These are my, is my big thing. You know, you’ll get so much. He was just like, Oh my goodness. And catch her to touch. And there was never any doubt took about food beans.
She’ll say, grandma. How am I going to do these? I go, yeah, my mustard motors have boobs. There is a conception amongst lots of people that babies need a mum. And I think even my parents, well, my mum thought that that’s what a baby needs. And so when we took my daughter, when she must have been only about three or four months old, and she was really crying and crying and crying, and my mum took her off me.
Like, okay. Give it to me. I can do it. And she kept talking really crying. And then I took her back. And as soon as I took about, she stopped crying and my, I saw my mum had, she just went, Oh, she wanted you. And it’s like, well, yeah, because I’m her parent. I’m the one. And I think that’s the thing, even, I think people have to understand that you don’t, you need to have a mum to Sue baby.
They, they want what they want. They want their regular stuff. There’s ones where my mother-in-law picked up. My, my daughter when she was. Just just babbling away. And she reached up to stroke her face and then pulled her hand away like, Oh, that’s weird. And my mother was quite excited was saying, I think it’s cause I didn’t have stubble.
So she reached up, didn’t feel stuck on my face and didn’t like it and pulled away. Cause she likes stroking my face and stroking the stubble, I think before becoming a parent, I think. I wish I’d known how strongly you have to be as an individual. I think that, I think when I stopped work and became a stay at home parent, I thought it’d be kind of quite an easy ride.
I’d be able to, you know, go for coffee, drop the kids off at school and be fine when actually you have to be so strong, stronger than you are in your own life, because you’re not fighting just for yourself. You’re fighting for your children. It is the best thing we’ve ever done. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.
I know I do want to be making other adopted children are harder work than birth children, but our experience has been that it’s bloody hard work. It’s bloody hard work and it. It’s very personal, hard work as well. But I think you also, when you see the changes, it is satisfying. My daughter will say, I love you daddy, and give you a cuddle and a kiss.
And that’s when you’re like, Oh my gosh, this is so, it’s so amazing. And it’s so worth, and I’ve picked her up from, um, preschool and she’ll just shout daddy and just run across the room. If you’re a big hug and she’d say, I missed you. And that’s really like, Oh my gosh, it just gets you in a way that nothing else gets you and children just get used to what they get used to.
No, they don’t come into the world. If we conceptions, they didn’t come into the world with an idea of what a family should be. They come into the boat and they accept the love that they’re given.
Stu: Oh, my God. We love Niall
Lotte: kind of wish he was my dad. Oh,
Stu: I know. I know. He’s lovely. Very nice man, and very interesting as well. And I think for me, I think we’re on the flip side sometimes with what he was saying, we’ve been experienced that with, um, with our too, in the sense of the gender and how you feel that.
That you want to have that equal representation in their lives. We’ve had that with our daughter and we try to surround ourselves with lots of female influences and she does have a lot of female influence in her life. But have you ever felt that with you and your wife and your daughter in the sense of the, the male representation?
Lotte: Yeah. It’s definitely something we’re super conscious of and she. Is lucky to have, um, a lot of men around her. I think it’s just like, you know, people worry about, Oh, gay parents. Like they’re not going to have the other gender influence, but come on. It’s really not hard. And if you’re an intelligent, emotionally intelligent person, as I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast in the first place is you’re going to be really conscious of that.
And you’re going to think, how can I, yeah. You know, involve these other gender people in my life. How can I have it, but with gender changing as well, it’s not just like gender, it’s just like, I want my daughters to have a diversity of people around her. Um, and different kinds of voices and experiences and people that look different.
And I think that that’s quite, it’s almost, uh, quite an old fashioned worry. Now it’s something I can imagine. Sort of people of my mum’s generation being more concerned about.
Stu: Well, I think with Niall talking about his mum and. The way she just assumed because she was a mother and she was that female . I love that.
And I think, I think that does go to the fact that it’s about attachment to a person it’s not about gender it’s about yeah. Who that baby or that child comes, you know, comes into the life with and exactly, and then learns with and attaches to and develops with. It’s not about whether they’re a male or a female.
It’s about the comfort and the love that they have
Lotte: life. Right. And actually I’m a woman and I’m a mother, but I’m quite bony and flat-chested, and I don’t think my daughter was getting much of snuggling into me. So, you know, all of those ideas like that changing. Yeah. And it’s great that they’re changing, but I do think it’s funny what he was saying about, um, kind of coming to terms with his daughter’s anatomy, because personally I’ve not ever seen a penis and I hadn’t seen a joiner for,
Stu: I mean, I never normally say it.
It’s it’s hitting a knee.
Lotte: You can have to change that.
Stu: It’s a new terminology, but we’re going to talk a lot more about adoption as well. And if you, you have any questions and you, you are thinking about adoption, then we want to know like, what is concerning you? What are the myths that you’re really worried about?
Is there anything we can do to try and answer those? And if we can’t. Yeah. Then find someone else will bring them in and we’ll have a nice little chit chat about it and have a cup of tea or a glass of wine or gin. So tonight has been various bottles. I mean, as we’ve had some families drink red, some families drink wine and if you’re an expecting family, then you’ve got a lot of drink to come.
Lotte: It’s been great. Thank you for listening. We hope you’ve learned something, found something interesting. Um, and please do get in touch with us. If you have anything to say, good or bad. Um, all of the details are in the show notes. Um, bye bye. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye.