So in June this year I met A’s birth mum.

It was a one-off meeting, organised through social services, in a structured meeting in a neutral place, facilitated by social workers. It’s a meeting I have been asking for and trying to organise for almost 4 years (since A first came home to me).

Why do it?

Lots of reasons. For birth parents it can bring closure and reassurance that they can feel they know the person who will be raising their child. It can give them an opportunity to share some of their history and past, or details about the pregnancy and birth of the child, and to present themselves as a complex human being rather than being seen as a series of unfortunate events/failures written up in social services reports.

For me, it was an opportunity to find out more about A’s birth father, as there was almost nothing at all in the reports to go on. It was a chance to ask about family medical history, any heriditary diseases or issues I might need to know about.

But most importantly, it was an opportunity for me to get to know A’s birth mum as a person.

I have an enormous amount of empathy for C. She had an incredibly hard childhood herself and now that I know even more about her own situation growing up, my heart breaks for her. She has struggled with addiction her entire life, and it’s not a surprise given her start in life. It is easy to demonise birth parents, especially where abuse or neglect of a child is involved, but nothing is ever so simple. C is a kind, thoughtful person with serious addiction issues, and no-one is simply black and white, good or bad. We are all complex individuals with our own flaws and challenges.

I know that all adopted children grow up wondering who they are, about their heritage and identity and have questions about where they came from. In A’s case, we have almost no information to go on, and very few other relatives apart from her birth mum that we could explore. I know that A will want to meet her when she is 18 (she’s not allowed to meet her before that as per standard adoption rules in the UK unless a contact order is given in court). And I would support A completely in exploring her background and meeting her birth mum when she is older. However knowing that C has struggled with addiction her entire life, there is a very real possibility she may not still be around by the time A is 18. It’s sad, and I hope it doesn’t happen, but this kind of thing happens quite frequently for adopted kids where drugs and alcohol are involved. I personally know several adopters who have had to break the news to their kids that a birth parent has died, and it would be so hard for A if she never got to meet her birth family or find out anything else beyond what we have in social services reports.

So I wanted to meet her birth mum so that I could learn as much as I could about her, and what she is like, to pass on to A when she is older and tell her all the little things that make her birth mum who she is.

The meeting was really emotional and wonderful and intense. I learned a lot about C and she told some quite harrowing stories about her childhood. She talked about her pregnancy with A and the birth, and a little more about A’s birth father (though we still don’t have much to go on). I showed her some videos of A which was really emotional as she had never heard A’s voice before. We talked about A and I told her more about how she is doing.

She was really sweet and kind and lovely, and I am so glad I got to meet her. She’s tiny, (barely 5 foot tall) so I towered over her, and my social worker took detailed notes for me as it was all very intense and hard to remember everything while it was happening! They also took a couple of pictures of us together, as this is likely to be a one-off meeting (at least until A is 18). They do this typically to have a record that the meeting really did take place (lots of adopted kids don’t really believe that their birth mum and adopted mum have ever met) and it’s a nice memento for a child to have a picture of BOTH mums together in one place.

I am glad that I managed to arrange this meeting, it gave me so much insight into who she is as a person and gave me lots of bits of information I can share with A when she is older and wants to know more about where she comes from. I haven’t told either of my girls about this meeting yet, and probably won’t for a few years. A is still too little to understand why I got to meet her birth mum and she didn’t, and S will be terribly jealous that I only met A’s mum and not hers.

I don’t currently have plans to meet my other daughter’s birth parents. S’s mum has not engaged with us at all so far, and I was advised not to initiate any contact with her birth father. But we are in touch with her brother and her aunt and uncle so she has more regular contact with some members of her birth family and she has lots of people she can talk to about who she is and where she comes from. We will keep trying to send letters to her birth mum but are unsure if she will ever engage with us or not. For S at least there are other birth relatives in her life that we can safely create relationships with and see regularly. We try to see her older brother every 2-3 months if we can so that they can bond and connect with each other, and we also have seen her aunt and uncle and some cousins a couple of times in the last year. Her aunt, uncle and brother all have memories of what happened and can help S to fill in the blanks as she gets older and more curious about her life.