Fiona Barber smiles tearfully as she remembers the day she met her adoptive daughter for the very first time.

Putting on a broad Yorkshire accent, Fiona describes how Vicki* threw open the front door of her Sheffield foster home in 2018 and said sweetly: ‘Hello Mummy and Daddy!’

Londoner Fiona and husband Charlie had been standing on the doorstep, ‘riddled with nerves’ about meeting four-year-old Vicki for the first time.

Growing up in neglect and domestic abuse – one police report stated that officials found her swigging from a bottle of Calpol at the age of two – the little girl and her younger brother had been placed in foster care when her biological mother could no longer look after them. 

Fiona and Charlie were overjoyed to be given the opportunity to bring her up – but nothing could prepare them for the emotional rollercoaster they were about to endure.

Speaking to Metro over Zoom in front of a birthday banner stating: ‘Look at you turning 12 and s***’ (Yungblud and skateboarding-mad Vicki have a wicked sense of humour, Fiona laughs) she remembers the hoops she had to jump through during the gruelling adoption process.

Fiona, had a son Finn, then 18, whose father left when he was a baby. She met Charlie in 2004 and after five years of trying for a baby, the couple decided to adopt in 2016.

They registered with children’s charity Coram which involved months of applications, meetings, interviews, training, and panels until the couple were presented with a dossier of children, from which they chose Vicki on the basis of her ‘little face that was full of character’. 

‘The process was very invasive,’ Fiona says, remembering how social workers interrogated her about a period of depression 15 years before.

‘They look into every part of your life. When Finn was a baby, his father got up and left in the middle of the night and moved to Australia. It was quite dramatic.

‘I was a senior buyer at Laura Ashley at the time. I had a big job where I was traveling a lot and – suddenly I was a single mum, and, naturally, I got quite depressed. But a stranger reaction to that would be to not be depressed!’

Their parents and close friends were interviewed, the couple were grilled on how Finn would take to having a sibling and social workers visited to assess their home.

‘We live in a lovely community next to a great school. But when the social workers arrive, you question everything that’s in your house – you want everything to be perfect, down to what kind of bedroom you’re proposing for the little one.’

It was a stressful and exhausting process – necessarily so, says Fiona – but it brought the couple down. 

‘We weren’t rowing as we wanted the same thing. And we did question the impact it would have on Finn, but he was on his way to adulthood by that point.’ 

‘It is isolating, because friends and family didn’t really understand. You can’t really, unless you go through it. It was exhausting, and draining, but just like with a pregnancy, you have to keep your eyes on the prize’, Fiona says.

‘The process is gruelling, and we talked about it with family, but we had a local friend who had been through the process already, and he was an excellent soundboard.’ 

So while on holiday in Devon, she was over the moon when an email pinged up on her phone 18 months after the process began.

‘When I read that we were going to be Vicki’s new mum and dad, Charlie stopped the car, we got out and I just burst into tears,’ she says, emotionally remembering it now, eight years on.

Vicki was to go through a together-apart adoption, where her brother would be taken in by another family, but they would remain in contact. Fiona doesn’t know why this was – it was a decision made by social workers.

The next day the couple interrupted their break to drive back to London to meet Vicki’s social worker, arrange yet another panel, and then drove back to Devon to resume their holiday.

They were approved by the panel and a few months later, were ready to take the little girl in.

First, the couple spent two weeks in Sheffield, visiting Vicki every day, taking her out to pizza and bringing her back to her foster home to do her bath and bedtime. Then Vicki’s social worker brought her down to a hotel in London, where they facilitated longer and longer days with Vicki and Charlie so she could get used to her new family.

Finally, on 18 November 2018 – a date now proudly tattooed on 26-year-old Finn’s arm – Vicki arrived at their home with a couple of bags of toys, books and clothes, ready to start her new life. It was a happy, terrible day.

‘Vicki loved living where she was living, but she knew she was going to her forever home, and she just wanted to get on with it. She’s a bright little soul and she wanted to start her new life.

‘But when she arrived, and she said goodbye to her foster mum, she was heartbroken. She didn’t understand what was going on. She was only four. We stayed in that day, helping her get settled, and it was very tough.’

The days and weeks that followed were soaked in tears, tantrums and anxiety. There were meltdowns and episodes of screaming over everything – food, clothes, leaving the house and Fiona constantly second guessed herself.

It was lucky that Finn, who had a girlfriend at university in York at the time, was able to get away and have a break from it all, Fiona says. Though he coped with it well. 

‘One second Vicki was super clingy, the next she would push us away, so it was always hard to work out the right thing to do,’ she remembers.

The outbursts were beyond the normal meltdowns you expect with a four-year-old and Fiona questioned whether they had all made a terrible mistake.

‘It is the same as with biological kids. I was just at the end of my tether.

‘She was testing us – she had to make sure that we weren’t going to give up on her. After one particularly difficult day, I had had enough and I ended up on the fetal position on the floor in our bedroom, crying. I was just done.

‘She came over and grabbed me and gave me a great big hug, and that was a breakthrough,’ she remembers.

Over the months they built up trust and confidence, and when Vicki started her new school after Christmas and began making friends and getting into a routine, things started to calm down. Lockdown helped the family bond further and with each new trip, event, holiday and milestone, the four of them adapted to their new shape, filling albums with pictures and tickets from days out and building new traditions around Vicki. 

On birthdays she would come down to a banner and a pile of presents on the kitchen table, and at Christmas they would buy new decorations every year, some with Vicki’s name on it. Rachel remembers one kind friend, who has since passed away, arrived before Christmas with a gift of a specially designed plate for the reindeers’ carrots, which they still use every year. 

Looking back on all the tears and tantrums, Fiona is sharing her story now so that others going through the adoption process know how gruelling it can be, but how immensely worth it it is in the end.

‘Vicki has absolutely completed our family. She has taught me and my husband and Finn a lot about ourselves. She is constantly mimicking my faults and making us all laugh.

‘She does a great impression of me stomping up stairs saying “Up. I. Go. Again” as I hunt for lost PE kits and homework. She and my mum have a really close relationship and as the baby of the family, she has lots of cousins who love her. Our whole family has been enriched by the arrival of this little girl – who will be a teenager before we know it.

‘When she was tiny, and people who didn’t know we were adopting met her in the street, they used to say – oh aren’t you amazing! Isn’t she lucky! But my thought was always – no, we are the lucky ones.’

– Fiona is founder of Their Nibs nightwear, an organisation that donates 20% of the profits from children’s pyjamas to Coram.

*Name has been changed