Live ChatAndy Jenkins and Terry Wilcox were both serving in the Royal Logistic Corps when they met 16 years ago.
The couple have been a civil partnership since 2011 and considered surrogacy before deciding to adopt with SSAFA.
After a heartbreaking setback almost ended their plans for a family, they made one ‘last throw of the dice.’ Today they are happy family with an eight-year-old son, Ollie.
Andy and Terry met while both serving in the Royal Logistic Corps, with the 17 Port and Maritime Regiment in 2005.
“Being openly gay in the Army was only made legal in 2000. It's still relatively young in the Army for that to be normalised,” says Terry. “So, there was still very much a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ attitude culturally.”
“Neither of us was out at the time,” says Andy.
“But we kind of knew there was something there,” says Terry. “We realised that we had feelings for each other,” says Terry. “We spent a Christmas together and then almost fell into a relationship. It wasn't by design.”
Now a Lieutenant-Colonel, Terry is Commanding Officer of 17 Port and Maritime, based at Marchwood, near Southampton. “It’s the unit I've grown up with,” he says.
In 2005, he was a young Troop Commander on Operation Telic 5.
It was my defining moment.
“It was my defining moment,” he says. “My job was to protect logistic convoys moving all over Iraq and resupplying all of our troops,” he says. “It was the first operational tour I did where I was facing a dangerous situation. A deepening insurgency meant dealing with quite a lot of instances of violence against us.
“It was certainly the most testing tour I've done and shaped my outlook as a military officer. That was when I really learned my trade; how to lead people in dangerous situations and make decisions under intense pressure. I reflect on that tour quite a lot, in terms of the leadership lessons I took away from it.”
Like Terry, Andy also served in Afghanistan.
“The first time we went out we were based in Kabul. I was working in force protection and transport, moving high-ranking officials around the Kabul area,” he says. “Then I did a tour based at Camp Bastion. Terry had been out two tours before, doing the same job. It was quite strange because I'd open up documents and keep finding his name on them: 'This again!'
But over two or three years, the demands of military life took their toll.
The relationship fell apart.
“We were barely seeing each other, and the relationship fell apart,” says Terry. “I was deploying out to Afghanistan, coming back and then Andy would be in pre-deployment training and he would be going out to Afghanistan. So, we were barely seeing anything of each other, and the relationship fell apart. But as soon as it did, we realised we actually wanted more than that.”
“That was the thing that made us,” says Andy.
“Yes, that gap made us realise the feelings were real and mutual,” agrees Terry. “So, we made a pact at that point, romantically, in an argument outside ASDA in Southampton!”
“In the rain!” Andy adds.
“We decided to go all or nothing,” Terry recalls. "Then the next thing we were in a civil partnership in 2011, because marriage at the time wasn't legalised.”
Both Andy and Terry came from military families.
“I was actually in the Royal Navy Cadets early on at University and an Army recruiter came around on a student night and asked me to fill in the form,” says Andy. “Over the next couple of years, the Army invited me on a few things, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere, enjoyed being part of a team, and the next thing I knew I’d drifted into the Army and went to Sandhurst in 2004.”
“I worked in an insurance brokerage next to the Armed Forces career centre in Worcester run by a Brigadier. I was friends with his son, and he came around to have a cup of coffee,” recalls Terry. “I don't know what happened, but I ended up going to Sandhurst! But I haven't looked back. I love the Army and really enjoy military life.”
I left to become a primary school teacher.
After 12 years’ service, Andy left the Army as a Major in 2016.
“I left to become a primary school teacher,” says Andy. “It was the worst decision I ever made! We had started to think about adopting and I thought working with kids, it would fit nicely together. But teaching is so all-consuming these days. It was a real shame.
“I did that for five years but now I’m a project manager for the Defence Infrastructure Organisation. It’s better paid, and I can work from home, which is better for looking after Ollie.”
“A good friend of ours who was serving military adopted through SSAFA and she's got a wonderful little boy,” says Terry. “Watching her go through her journey and helping to support her interview process, we were able to see what we needed to do, how successful it could be. We were made godparents to him, and it was then that we realised we could parent too.”
“We looked at surrogacy,” says Andy. “We had lots of friends who offered to do it for us and that was a consideration for a while. But with surrogacy, there's always that risk that the person carrying the child forms an attachment to it. You hear all kind of horror stories related to that.”
“And whose DNA do you use?” says Terry. “Would that then cause an imbalance in our relationship because one would be the paternal father and one would be the kind of quasi father? So, we discounted that relatively quickly and came around to adoption.”
I felt I could love any child as long as it was ours.
“I felt I could love any child as long as it was ours,” explains Andy. “And we knew there are loads of kids out there that need a home.”
“There were two key reasons we wanted to use SSAFA,” says Terry. “The first is absolutely that we were Armed Forces. Local authorities don't really get it. We know people who have gone through the local authority system, and it's been a much harder journey for them.
“Also, SSAFA is national, so we had the choice to look nationally at potential matches. Whereas if you're in a local authority system you have to go through their list first.
“Things like pre-adoption courses, post-adoption support, regular contact points, they were just there. SSAFA just offered so much more, we felt it was the right way to go.”
Adoption is not a straight line.
“Adoption is not a straight line,” says Terry. “You have idea in your mind of a whole set of processes and you expect that’s the way it's going to pan out. But it never does!
“We were just about to finish part one of the adoption process when I went to South Sudan for a year. But year later we still felt the same. That was the affirmation for us because there was no ground rush. So, we did our preparatory course in London with SSAFA in 2020.”
“It's wonderful,” Andy says. “I think SSAFA's one of the few organisations to do the one-week prep course. Local authorities do it over weekends and evenings. We were in a small group, with like-minded people.”
Terry agrees: “They had couples come to us to talk to us about their adoption stories. It was tailored to us, so they had a same-sex couple, a couple about the same age that were looking to adopt slightly older. It was really well-matched.”
“It was quite blunt. It made it clear the difficulties you could face. But it prepared us. And actually, we have seen some of those behaviours and issues since. There are still things today where we refer back to the course: 'Yes, that all makes sense.”
“We always felt that we were in good hands with our social worker Roger,” says Terry. “When we were looking through profiles, we got good counsel from him. He would say, 'Ah, when they say this in that language, what they really mean is this.' So, we had that honest appraisal, like knowing the used car salesman's patter!
You have kids’ lives in your hands, swiping left and right.
“You get the biography, express an interest and then you get the full profile if the child’s social worker thinks there's a match. You're reading these harrowing tales of what's happened, and it's mentally really challenging,” says Terry. “It's an awful system, like a dating app for children. You have kids’ lives in your hands and you're swiping left and right.
“Every child's going to come with needs and when you're being asked questions like ‘what about a deaf child?’ ‘What about a child with only one eye?’ or ‘what about a child who has a deformity?’ You have to ask some really hard questions of yourselves. Because Roger spent so long getting to know us as a couple, he could give some really strong advice.”
“He helped us decide what we can deal with, what we can't, and how we feel about things,” adds Andy.
“Roger is almost part of the extended family now. We still chat to him every so often and that's really cool,” says Terry. “He's extremely well-read and consummately professional, but never judgmental and just offers advice that is impartial and really well-considered. And he just does it so naturally. He just puts you at ease and it's brilliant!”
Roger’s support got the couple through when they nearly gave up on their search for a child.
We thought we had found a perfect match.
“We thought we had found a little boy who was a perfect match for us,” Terry recalls. “We thought, 'This is it, we're there!’ We painted a bedroom blue and stuck rockets on the wall...of course it was a bit premature but that’s what you do.”
“With the best will in the world, you start getting excited,” says Andy, “And you start imagining what’s going to be like to have this little boy in your house.”
“But then it turned out that all along, the foster carers had decided that they were adopting,” says Terry. “We didn't know that could happen and we were upset, because you get your hopes up and then suddenly it doesn't happen. It broke us a bit.
“We felt really bruised by it and relied on Roger to guide us through. We told him, 'Look, we know we've only got one more throw of the dice on this. We can't put our whole lives on hold indefinitely.”
This cheeky little boy with a massive grin.
Luckily, they soon found their perfect match in Ollie; a bright, energetic six-year-old who had been in care since the age of four.
“We were flicking through and saw this picture of this cheeky little boy with a massive grin on his face,” says Terry. “I've still got the photo. It absolutely represents him. He's bubbly, and bouncy, and very enthusiastic!”
“And there was a video of him dancing in the kitchen, just this happy little boy,” Andy remembers. “We expressed the interest and his social worker agreed. It happened really quickly.
“Ollie had two or three families interested,” says Terry. “And again, Roger gave an honest evaluation: 'Yes, I think you'll be able to meet Ollie's needs, and so it's a green light from me.'”
“Ollie’s carers were amazing people,” says Terry. “They were open, very engaging and they'd done a fantastic job. They created a narrative with Ollie that they were keeping him safe whilst his forever family were looking for him. We keep in contact, and we saw them at Christmas.”
“We were really excited that Ollie was coming to live with us but it’s quite a sad process as well in some ways," says Andy. “Ollie was taken away from his parents and had been with his foster carers for two years and formed a really close relationship with them. So, I was conscious that we were taking him away from people that he'd started to fall in love with.”
Ollie fitted so quickly into our family.
“Ollie came to live with us in August 2020 and fitted so quickly into our family,” says Andy. “We were lucky he came to us over the summer holidays, in the run up to school. We were able to go to the beach and did lots of days out and it helped cement us as a family.
“We're all really outdoorsy. Ollie loves paddle boarding. We often take the dogs on a walk in the local woods, and he'll come along on his bike.
“We went skiing in the French Alps to celebrate his adoption coming through. It was brilliant; genuinely one of the best things that we've done. It really helped us to bond as a family and it was great for Ollie’s resilience. At the start of the week when he couldn't ski at all and by the end of the week, he was snow ploughing all the way down the mountain!”
“We’ve done two SSAFA weekends in Wales. Forces families, so similar families, all getting together and doing an adventure training package: caving and climbing and all that sort of stuff. Ollie loves it because he can just be himself.
“Is life plain sailing and easy?” says Terry, “I don't think any parent could ever say that! And every day is a new day. Ollie has mainly good days but when he decides that he's not, then we all know about it! But again, pretty much every parent would testify to that.
“There is still trauma in Ollie's life that we're managing through. SSAFA is instrumental in providing that post-adoption support to us and signposting where we can get additional help. And we’ve great benefited from the opportunity to meet other service families going through the same things,” says Terry.
“We've got a WhatsApp group for people we did the course with, and there's always somebody in the community that's been through whatever it is we're currently going through. So, you don't feel alone.”
We’re still getting support...It just feels good.
“We would wholeheartedly recommend SSAFA to anybody thinking of going on the journey,” says Andy. “I don't think anybody else offers the through life support that SSAFA does. It's been really reassuring the fact that, although Ollie is now ours, that we're still getting support, we're still talking to people that are going through a similar journey. The SSAFA team themselves are so friendly and approachable. It just feels good.”
Terry agrees: “If you're serving in the Armed Forces and you're looking at local authority adoption then you need to have one foot on the ground.
“But with SSAFA, wherever you are – whether you're deployed, or posted abroad – the support follows you. It's unequivocal and you can tap into the Armed Forces community that SSAFA's developed for SSAFA families, or you can choose not to. It's not intrusive, but the support is there on hand whenever you need it. That’s the beauty of using SSAFA.”
