TO mark the recent National Adoption Week Colchester adoptive parent Claire shares her experiences...

Like most women I had always taken my fertility for granted.

I assumed the minute I tried to be pregnant, it would happen so I was surprised when this was not the case.

I am lucky, I was eventually blessed with a birthchild who is the apple of mine and my husband’s eye but I had never intended to have an only child and there was an aching hole in our lives.

Months and years went by, I approached my mid-thirties and it became clear something was wrong.

Eventually a very matter-offact consultant told me I was having an early menopause and my two options were IVF via egg donation or adoption.

We were devastated, but we started to seriously think about expanding our family through adoption.

We contacted our local authority and went to an open evening.

From that point on we felt swept along with the feeling that this was the right thing to do.

There were workshops, training courses, and hours spent with our social worker finding out everything about us.

We had to have advanced CRB checks, to prove we had no criminal records, and health checks carried out by our GP.

Once we had been accepted to the second phase, we told our daughter.

We got plenty of advice and support and so did she. The information on the courses was brutal at times.

They didn’t ever mince their words or try and dress things up. I broke down in tears when we first looked through the book of children we could potentially be matched with.

It felt like browsing through a catalogue.

Like every other potential adopter, I wanted to gather them all up and take them home.

Within months, we were ready to go before the adoption panel. They were all strangers to us, but they pretty much had read every detail of our lives together in the report our social worker had spent all those hours with us to prepare.

She had become like a close friend. She knew things we hadn’t even told some of our family members.

Once we were approved thoughts turned to finding a match.

I think I expected to wait for ages, but within weeks our son had been linked to us and just a few months later we met him for the first time.

I worried about bonding with him and about feeling differently towards him and my birth child, but It didn’t take long to fall in love with him and as far as we are concerned he is our child.

That’s the end of it.

Within six months the adoption had been formalised and he was ours forever.

The only difficulty is that I want to shout it from the rooftops, put every picture on Facebook and Twitter and tell everyone about this amazing little person that has completed our family. But we can’t because of, understandable identity protection issues.

But I think I can live with that.