An Adopter’s Open Letter to Birth Mum
Dear Mum,
I first met your children when they came to me as a foster carer. They were very young, and both needed a great deal of care and comfort. I bathed them, tried to settle them and did my best to help them feel safe.
Over the following months, I saw you regularly. I knew you didn’t like me: why would you? From your point of view, I was the person caring for your children when you couldn’t, and I imagine that was incredibly difficult.
But you weren’t a monster, despite how easy it can be to see birth parents that way when their children are removed from their care.
As time passed, I learned more about your own childhood and the things you had experienced. I began to understand that you had been hurt too, and that the difficulties in your life had not started when you became a mum.
I found myself thinking about how much of your own childhood you had carried into adulthood, and how little support you had received to make sense of it all.
I didn’t know everything about your life, and I couldn’t change what had happened to you. But I began to see you differently.
Over time, our relationship became easier. We were able to talk more openly, and there were moments when I felt we had found some common ground. We were very different women, brought together by children who needed both of us in different ways.
I remember the time you told me that if you couldn’t have your children back, you wished that I would adopt them, and wished I had been your mum. That stayed with me. I was so much older than you, and there was something very sad about those words, a glimpse of the little girl you had once been and the things you had needed yourself.
As time went on, you had more children. Your family continued to grow, and the relationships between the children became increasingly complicated. There were older siblings, younger siblings and children in between, all connected by their history, but not all growing up together.
I tried to help maintain those connections. I arranged contact, encouraged relationships and did what I could to give the children opportunities to spend time together. I wanted them to know their family and to have a sense of where they belonged.
But maintaining relationships was not always straightforward. Over the years, there were repeated losses, changes and disappointments. Relationships that mattered to the children were difficult to sustain, and the impact of those losses seemed to follow the family. The older children had their own experiences and struggles, the younger ones had theirs, and those in the middle were left trying to make sense of their place in it all.
Over the next 3 years, their behaviour was becoming more difficult to manage. I loved them dearly, but I was beginning to realise that caring for them was going to be much harder than I had imagined.
Eventually, I was asked to make a permanent commitment to them. I was very concerned about what the future might hold, but I was also frightened of losing them. I wanted to give them a family, and I wanted to believe that we would find the support we needed along the way.
So I adopted them. By then they were aged 5 and 6.
I tried so hard to give them a stable home with love and boundaries, in the hope they could enjoy their childhoods. I knew they had experienced difficulties before they came to me, but I don’t think I understood just how much those early experiences would continue to affect them.
I had honestly thought that I would be able to get the support and services we needed but after years of begging for help year after year, the situation was becoming impossible to manage. I was trying to care for children whose needs were difficult to understand, while also trying to keep our family together and navigate the complexities of their wider family relationships.
Eventually, things became too difficult for the children to continue living with me. We were all put through psychological assessments, and the clinical psychologist concluded that the children had a poor relationship and should not live together. One after the other, in their teenage years, they moved into the care of others because of the difficulties we were facing at home.
I never imagined this would be how our story would unfold.
I had made a lifelong commitment to them. I had imagined watching them grow up, being there for them and helping them find their place in the world. I never thought I would find myself in a position where I could no longer care for them at home.
I don’t know what you think about any of this. I don’t know whether you feel sadness, relief, anger or something else entirely. Perhaps you have your own feelings about how things have turned out.
I know that I have had to live with the grief of losing the children I love deeply about the way things unfolded. I question myself, wonder what I could have done differently and struggle with the fact that loving my children wasn’t enough to keep us together.
I am not writing this to blame you, or to suggest that either of us had all the answers. We were two women whose lives became connected through children who had already experienced so much. We each had our own histories, our own struggles and our own understanding of what had happened.
I just wish things had been different.
For you, for me, for the relationships that were lost along the way, and most of all, for the children. They will always be a part of my life and I hope they find peace.