Morgan and Derry

Morgan and Derry are a married couple who adopted their 5-year-old boy in 2024 with Adoption Matters. From their first date, Morgan and Derry connected about wanting a family. They both considered other options, but adoption really resonated with them both. Their adoption journey took just 9 months from their initial enquiry to their little boy being placed. Here Morgan talks about some of the highs and lows of adoption.

Why did you choose to adopt? 

Adoption was just what my husband and I wanted from the start. When we met, we actually talked about having a family on our first date, and both of us said adoption straight away, it was just something that we both clearly wanted to do. I always knew I wanted a family. There are other avenues but we just related more to adoption, it made more sense to us.

A few words on what adoption means to you and how you’d sum up your adoption journey?

We both have had quite different paths in our lives but we really connected on adoption and the idea of offering a forever home for a child and providing a safe and secure home, that’s why we chose adoption and it made sense to us. There are so many children out there who are waiting, it wasn’t a question for us.

Adoption means a lot, we also get to complete our family, we have always wanted to be parents. As a gay man, I always thought that wouldn’t be an option for me, its only a few years ago we could adopt, only a few years ago we can get married. So, from a very young age, I have been told I wont be able to get married or to have kids, and wouldn’t be able to adopt. So, to find out that we can adopt, for me adoption means so much more, as a human being to be treated the same as everyone else and being able to provide a home to a little one, its just amazing we’ve been able to do that.

Why did you choose Adoption Matters?

One of our friends who had adopted through Adoption Matters recommended them. We wanted to choose a voluntary adoption agency as we knew they specialised in adoption and had the dedicated time for just us.

We did contact other agencies too, but we chose Adoption Matters as from our first point of contact, they were very receptive, everything was put in place to make it easy for us, they were patient and very organised.

What have been the highs and the lows?

The highs

The high of the adoption process, is you learn more about yourself which is very interesting. All the way through the application process you have ask questions about yourself that you would never consider and have conversations with your partner that you may not have or even thought about and I think it made us more stronger. It’s really good to reflect on yourself and your past, you end up learning a lot about yourselves, I enjoyed it!

The main high was of course meeting our little boy. It’s just weird even though he is not our blood, he is just so like us, not physically, but he is a little bit of me and a little bit of my husband and he has just moulded into our life like he’s always been there and that’s been amazing to watch.

Our amazing social worker. ‘L’ was so helpful to us, when you must be with someone for such a long time and who is going to know everything about your life, she just got us, she knew how to work with us, how to make us feel better when something was wrong, she really became a partner in our journey.

‘L’ wasn’t just a ‘social worker’ she worked so closely with us to make sure all our needs were met and to make sure we understood everything. To us that was a real high, to have that extra support.

Another high was the whole experience, you get to meet so many people.

We got to meet our little boys foster Mum, who was amazing and we had a lovely time with.

We met people from our adoption training group that we are still in touch with.

Our social worker put us in touch with other an adoptive family in our area who we became real strong friends with and they have became part of our support system. It’s great once you are part of a wider adoption family, a little adopter community, people who understand each other because they have all been through the same process.

Lows

The standard of Adoption Matters was so high that sometimes we struggled with some aspects of the process outside of our control and we had to speak up for ourselves often. You must be assertive as an adopter and as a parent and that’s fine. Sometimes, feeling out of control with decisions made about our little boy was very difficult, but we had our social worker to support us.

Adoption activity days* were both a low and a high. We attended two activity days, one was great, the other not so. It was overwhelming and emotionally draining as we felt, there were too many children attending. However, we met our son at that day, so that’s why it’s a low and a high. It’s only like this for the adopters attending as the children are completely oblivious as its just a dress up party to them, but it was hard for us.

Our training was really great, but we think more detailed training once the match has happened would be amazing to then tailor for their particular child ie a 5 year old, or a young baby, or siblings, so we have fed that back to Adoption Matters as I’d love to help other families like us.

* Adoption Activity Days are informal fun events held across the country for children delivered by specialist staff that enable adopters to discover whether they feel an emotional connection with a child, rather than simply relying on a written profile, and importantly give the children the same opportunity.

What advice would you give to someone considering adoption?

In the first assessment stages, if you are adopting as a couple use each other strengths. I am the chatty one, so I do a lot of the phone calls, chasing things up, my husband is better at admin, so he did a lot of the paperwork and as I am dyslexic, it worked great.

Don’t dedicate your WHOLE life to adoption during the assessment process. Set some time aside in the week or weekend to look at the forms and do your assessment ‘homework’, or it will consume your life!

Get ready for it! You either suffer through it or you embrace it, so embrace it!  Try to see it as a fun exercise, a chance to learn more about yourselves.

Do all the training and webinars that you can – you can never do too much training!

Go through the process with an open mind. When we started the process we wanted a baby, then we did a training and we were like hmmm, then we did a webinar and we learned about ‘older’ children waiting and then we were like hmmmmmm, then we connected at an activity day with a 5-year-old!

We had the wrong opinion, that adopting a baby would mean there would be less trauma. We soon learned during our training that was not the case. We then learned about how many children aged 4 years plus were waiting. With an ‘older’ child like our boy, you can know so much about them, their history, you can meet their foster parent/s like we did, learn about their routines, they are already a little person with their likes and dislikes.

The more open minded you are, the more you will find the right child. If you close your mind, you may really miss out on the child that is right for you and they may miss out on the right family for them.

Don’t look past ‘older’ children (over the age of 4), siblings, different ethnicities or children with additional needs. We thought wrongly that having a baby would be easier, until we learned through training, that this just isn’t the case

To find out more about adoption, download our adoption guide.