How many grannies am I allowed to have?

Hedi Argent explores how grandparents and other relatives can play a role in making the newcomer feel part of the family, in BAAF book 'Related by adoption'. Bearing in mind that “Every family tells a story,” Hedi asks: “How will a child enter the family circle and catch up with the stories?

New parents may be too busy with the many aspects of the parenting-by-adoption task to fill the child in with what other children learn from the cradle. They might welcome an offer of help from grandparents or other relatives.

And this is exactly what the grandparent of an adopted ten-year-old white girl did: “I fetched her from school on Thursdays and she came to my place. We made a ritual out of it. First there was milk and a different cake I made for her every week. She liked to know about baking so we wrote the recipes out together and pasted them into a folder that she kept in my kitchen with my cookery books.

Then it was the family albums. She always remembered where we’d left off the last time but more often than not she wanted to go back a bit or start again from the beginning. Sometimes she asked that many questions, it set me off on memory lane, so we only had time to look at a couple of pages before it was time to take her home."

However, “there is yet more to accomplish for the child entering the new family circle,” Hedi reminds us. “Every family has its own lifestyle, its own system, as well as its own stories.”

A prospective adopter of a white six-year-old girl vividly describes how confusing this can be: “Tracy had mostly chips in paper bags with her birth mum. Her foster carer was very strict about eating at regular times, sitting up at the table with the other children. Now she can’t figure out how to handle our more casual style of eating together, on our laps, at different times to suit the working members of the family. She goes frantic if a meal is late; she always wants to know what the rules are, even when there aren’t any.”

Dana, a black girl of 11, says about her new, black adoptive family: “They’re not too bad but they speak posh, they don’t watch Big Brother, they don’t know nothing about football and we’re always having to go to the library. Then they made me save half my pocket money. I don’t know why. But I like them ’cause they’re nice. And there’s all the aunts and uncles and grandma and that – they’re all like that – but they’re nice too.”

These two girls have a past, which is very much part of them and their outlook on life. Hedi is reassuring when she points out that: “We sometimes talk about going back to our roots; plants have roots, people have legs and can move. Children can move to new families without lasting damage but the transition has to be managed without breaking the thread of continuity with the past and the connection to their birth family.”

Here again, relatives can play a crucial role, in this case the grandparent of three adopted siblings: “When it was time for one of those contact meetings, we always made a family occasion of it. We’d plan a picnic or some kind of outing and it would be the children and my daughter and son-inlaw and me; Beryl (birth mother) would bring her mother along and that made it easier for the children; it opened it out more somehow and they could see that we all got on together. Their granny was a nice woman but very shy. The children really liked seeing her but I don’t think she’d have come if I hadn’t been there. The younger one said to us at one contact meeting, How many grannies am I allowed to have?”

Of course, not all grandparents and relatives find it easy to accept the new child, as one grandparent of an adopted teenager explains: “I couldn’t see how they would let my [gay] son adopt. I was worried about the boy turning out gay and social services blaming my son. I was sort of ashamed about being his grandmother and I made him call me by my first name. This went on for a long time, it must have been five years, till the boy himself said to me: ‘I haven’t got a mother but I’d like for you to be my grandmother’. I realised then that I’d been his grandmother in all but name and that he and my son were more clever about it than I was.”

The quotes above give a flavour of this thought-provoking, helpful BAAF booklet 'Related by adoption' (2004). It includes sensitive, informative answers to questions such as:

• Can I be a real grandparent to unrelated children – will I be able to love them?
• Will an older child learn to love their new family?
• What are the obstacles some adopted children face?
• How will the child fit in with existing grandchildren, nephews and nieces?
• What is meant by behaviour problems?
• How will we cope with a disabled child?
• What help is available?
• What happens if an adoption doesn’t work out?
• What do I want to do? What do I think I should do? What can I do?

Finally, Joyce and Eric Stanway (grandparents to the extended Cairns family), remember: “We were also a way for the child to understand more about the family they had joined. We watched them watching us and trying to learn how this family ticked... For these older children, whose own parents were not available, grandparents could be an unthreatening way to finding love and care.”

Written by Leonie Sturge-Moore.

Originally published in the Be My Parent newspaper in March 2004.

This article is published with the kind permission of the people involved. You may download it for your own reference but if you wish to use it for any other purpose, please contact Be My Parent for authorisation: Be My Parent, BAAF, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Telephone: 020 7421 2666/5/4.

Last updated: 14 August 07

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