Baljeet and Nisha

Baljeet and Nisha adopted their little girl not long after her first birthday. After unsuccessful fertility treatments, adoption gave them the chance to have a family.

Baljeet shared their story with us.

“Not long after we got married, my wife Nisha and I started trying for a family. We ended up being referred for IVF and we had some glimmers of hope but ultimately it was unsuccessful. It also made Nisha really unwell. She was hospitalised with complications which at one point looked like they might have a lifelong impact and it felt like we were living a nightmare. In the end we had to draw a line underneath it and realised it wouldn’t be our route to having a family.

We’d actually contacted Adoption Counts about three years earlier while we were going through IVF. At the time they had advised to get back in touch six months after any IVF was over. So, once we reached this stage, we reached out to them again.

Learning about adoption

We started our training and I remember being a few sessions in and saying to our social worker, don’t you have any good news?! It was a bit of a shock to the system spending our evenings learning about trauma and the difficulties that children and birth families faced. It felt full-on and intense but what we learnt was very interesting.

In stage 2 of the process our social worker asked us lots of questions about our relationships with parents and family. She was really good at getting us to open up. I remember Nisha and I being impressed with what she managed to get out of us and then capture from our conversations.

“Adoption gave us everything we had longed for as prospective parents.”

– Baljeet and Nisha

Family finding

We worked closely with our social worker to carefully consider the needs a child we might adopt could have. We were certain we wanted a younger child and one who shared our cultural and religious background. Because of having quite narrow matching criteria we didn’t receive many potential matches.

After nearly a year without finding a suitable match, I remember turning to Nisha and saying I felt like I was ready to leave the process.

We had already endured years of unsuccessful IVF - through which I remained hopelessly optimistic, believing it would work each time, only for it not to - while Nisha’s health suffered. Then, after going through the entire adoption process, including all the learning, courses and panel review, we still felt no closer to becoming a family.

But Nisha reminded me of everything we had already overcome and encouraged us to hold on just a little longer. Thankfully, we did—because just a few months later, our social worker called with news of a potential match.

Being matched with Zahra

We were only given a little bit of information about the girl who was to become our daughter, Zahra, at first - things like she liked blueberries and nursery rhymes - but we said we were interested. We got some more information and the social workers told us to take the weekend to think properly about what we wanted to do. I remember going to bed that night and Nisha asking me, what do you think? And I was just jumping around the bedroom saying that there was nothing to think about! The more we had learnt about Zahra the more perfect she sounded.

Nothing prepared me though for what it would be like meeting Zahra: for me it was absolutely love at first sight. She came into a café with her foster carer and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Over the next ten day transition period we gradually spent more time with her but it all felt a bit surreal. We had spent lots of time with nieces and nephews so knew what to do with babies but it definitely felt a bit strange, thinking that someone had given us this child to look after and they’d trusted us to do this. But once she was home with us we bonded so quickly with Zahra and within a month it felt like she’d always been with us.

Life with Zahra

Zahra is now three and a half and we love her more than ever. I can bore my friends silly with how besotted I am with her. She’s the friendliest, happiest, most sociable little thing. She is endlessly making new friends and gives out high fives at the supermarket checkouts. She has some slight language delay but we’re not too worried as we know that every child develops differently.

Zahra’s birth mum was from the same ethnic background as ours and, in her final statement to the court, she said she wanted Zahra to be raised in a Muslim household, so we’re pleased we’re able to do that. We know that her birth father was a different ethnicity to ours and so, as she gets older, we want to make sure she understands that because it’s part of her identity.

We feel incredibly lucky to have Zahra in our lives. After the heartbreak of IVF and learning about the challenges and trauma that adopted children can face, we were naturally apprehensive. But the moment Zahra looked at us with her big, beautiful eyes, we couldn’t help but fall in love with her. She gave us everything we had longed for as prospective parents. Our love for Zahra feels like the most intense, perfect relationship you're ever going to have.