Weekly Blog Two

The Significant Birthday

A significant birthday is always a cause for celebration - This year is R__’s significant birthday and he’s always wanted to go to Bali. Why not? It’s cheap enough as a present for this particularly birthday and the travel experience will be a great learning for the girls and set them up for future travel opportunities. Of course the Pink Peril will need passports.

An enquiry is made of DFAT. What’s the process. A female answers the phone. I ask her about applying for children’s passports. We’ll need the purple application form, available at Post Offices. Great, simple. Luckily; I think to ask – is the process different for children born via surrogacy overseas. Sound of tapping on the keyboard. Is the mother’s name on the birth certificate? No. You’ll need a B8 form as well, simply cross out mother and put father where appropriate. Wonderful. More paperwork and it doesn’t sound straight forward. Still if it gets the job done, what’s an hour out of my life.

I head to the post office, with hope in my heart and a pen in my hand. No B8’s available at the stand. I enquire. They’ll need to print one. Again the tick off of questions. Is the mother’s name on the birth certificate? I say I don’t think so, a few more questions. Surrogacy? I’m told perhaps I need the B9. Can I take both so that I don’t need to return? Yes that can be done. I look at my watch, my lunch hour is dwindling away. They’ve all been so kind and helpful but oddly I feel bludgeoned already.

Lunch hour done and I’m about to turn my attention to work, I take a quick look at the forms. B9 seems pretty straight forward but perhaps deceptively so, B8 seems more fraught but perhaps in the end is less messy. I decide to call DFAT again, just to reconfirm. This time I speak to a friendly, competent young fellow. It’s definitely a B9, oh and you’d better throw a B11 in to be sure. B11? Yes to take into account any extraneous circumstances. I haven’t yet even put pen to paper and I already feel like I’ve been minced up and spat out by the system. So just out of interest what B form would anyone else have to fill out. Oh they wouldn’t. They’d simply have to fill out the purple form and get it counter signed by the other parent.

Well why can’t I do that, I still live with my partner? We haven’t split up or anything (and after 23 years, we’re hardly likely to now) Yes but you see neither of you are the legal parent.

Well I hope you’ll explain that to my pink peril when they’re old enough to renew their next passport because I’m going to have a hard time, working out how to tell them their primary care giver, funder, protector and closest genetic link in this country - is just a figment of their overactive childhood imaginations.

If this is the process of just getting the right forms, what will filling them out and submitting them be like?

Terry