Darren and Rebecca's Story: Adopting a sibling group of three

When we first decided that we wanted to pursue adoption as our first route of starting a family in February 2020, we would never have guessed that 3 years into the future we would have the three most wonderful children filling our house with so much love, fun, and laughter.

Both of us had experienced the love, joy and frustrations of having siblings growing up. Combining this with having worked with many children and young people who had experienced trauma, we wanted to share our home, our love and our family with a sibling group who needed a forever home. The thought that any sibling group could be split up was devastating and so we started our process of adoption with Adoption Central England.

We always joke that 3 children was never on the cards for us. Throughout the process, we thought we knew what we wanted, and our ACE social worker supported us through this. Initially, we were worried about the assessment side of adoption: what if our social worker didn’t like us, didn’t think we would be good parents or thought we were crazy, but we couldn’t have been more wrong! She made the sessions a safe space where we could be open and honest about all parts of our lives and how bringing little ones who had gone through so much may change it. We are so thankful for all the support that we received throughout the process and continue to receive as we know we wouldn’t be the family we are today without it.

During our matching process, a week after assuring our social worker that a sibling group of 3 would be too many, we had to share with her that we had seen a sibling group of 3 that we were interested in pursuing a match with. At the time, they were only known to us by their initials and a little amount of information about them – no photos or names. Despite all the odds, we felt a really strong connection with them and wanted to explore it further.

When we tell people that we adopted 3 at once, the response is often along the lines of ‘you must be mad’. It would have been wrong of us to pursue these children without doing our due diligence, and we can remember sitting down for many hours, discussing the difference between bringing up two and three children, speaking to friends, family and adopters about how to manage little children, especially when they outnumber the grownups. After weighing everything up and speaking to the family finding team and the children’s social worker, we were excited that everyone thought it was a good match for the children.

Fast forward 5 months and there we were waiting to go into a house to meet our children. We have very fond memories of introductions: reading them stories for the first time, being climbed on as a human slide, having water fights, and sitting down for our first mealtimes as a family. We also know we had many struggles and challenges as the children struggled with the earth-shattering change that happened in their life, that everything they knew was about to change once again. Throughout it all, we experienced, firsthand, the benefit of the therapeutic parenting we learnt about in training. Our children quickly started questioning “why do you not leave me when I’m cross,” “why won’t you shout at me?” or “why would you even love me?”. All the training, both from stage one and from the fantastic support through the therapeutic team, about PACE parenting was fast becoming everyday life, and we were seeing that had a massive impact on the way our children were settling into their new home.

Most of all it helped us see past all the big emotions and moments when they were unable to control themselves; to see that behind all the hurting were three children whose lives had been turned upside down, and underneath the trauma were three loving, caring, and amazing little personalities waiting to shine through. Our children amaze us daily at their increasing ability to regulate, their language around their emotions and the empathy they show each other when they are hurting. They often tell each other “It’s okay to be angry. Mummy and Daddy will help you. They will always love you.” This isn’t something that appeared overnight, and we don’t always get it right with them but the difference that therapeutic parenting has made to our children is incredible.

Our children are full of personality; they are funny, caring and very creative. We know their story started before us and this is an important part of their own identity. We often talk with them about where they get their physical characteristics from such as hair colour and eye colour, but also their personalities and skills. We want our children to know that they are loved for who they are, and we want their birth family to know that we will always honour their story. Through letterbox contact, we have built a good relationship with the children’s birth family, and this has been invaluable when sharing with the children their life story and what makes them the little people they are today. Although it is sometimes difficult to answer their questions, we strongly feel they have the right to know their story in an age-appropriate way and we hope that they will always feel that their story is both understood and celebrated.

Trauma is hard and it has left lasting scars on our children, but it has been truly amazing to watch them open up, trust and believe that they are worthy of being loved for who they are more and more each month. Although we have our bumps along the road and hard times, it is such a privilege to be the people they call Mum and Dad, and we will always be grateful for the day they came into our lives. Adopting three children might not have been the easiest path, but we feel immensely privileged that we get to be the people that raise our little children and incredibly proud of who they are. The love and joy that they bring has blessed our family in ways we never thought possible and makes every challenge beyond worth it.