Who to turn to?

It’s been a long time since my last blog, but in all honestly things have been all over the place. My master’s course, holiday to Disney Land Paris, and the sickness and subsequently death of my youngest cat Lupin. I was applying for my PhD, but for reasons out of my control that’s now been put back a year- but it gives me a year to develop my academic skills, finish my masters and get to a head space that I feel safe to carry out a 3-year PhD on a very sensitive topic. Through all of this, I had someone and somewhere I could turn to. There were friends, social media, and helplines. But, despite all this, it made me really sit down and think, what support is there for birth mothers, particularly when a change in contact occurs. Now, this is a conversation I had with my Uni supervisors. And unanimously we all came back with “I don’t know”!

In December I wouldn’t say that there was a problem with my post-adoption contact, but something arose through no fault of either party that made me rethink a lot of things. It brought up a whole load of questions and for the first time I felt angry. I was hurt, confused and for a while I blamed myself. Because of this, it negatively reinforced some social stereotypes ideas about birth mothers into my brain- stereotypes that I worked so hard to break.

-          That no matter how hard I had tried to turn my life around, I still wasn’t “good enough” .

-          That I was a bad person

-          And that I had the easy way out of parenthood

I tried so hard to think what I had done wrong, especially as not long before we had all spent such a lovely day together. Had I pushed a boundary, had I said something wrong? In the end, all I could do was respect what was said, and had been asked of me. It didn’t stop the hurt, the tears or the deep heavy feeling I felt in my chest. After a shit October and November, I needed to continue the hard work I had put into keep my mental health stable, I could have so easily gone back to old, self-h**m behaviours but I wasn’t going to give in to those urges. To date, I am 10 months and 8 days free. I did get a nose piercing but that doesn’t count. All I could do, was cry, and I cried a lot and a week later I collapsed into the arms of my PA and finally I was able to vocalise everything that had happened.

My PA gave me the space to vocalise everything, the space to cry it out and get everything out of my head. I was no longer angry, but despite my PA helping me to rationalise everything, there were still some unanswered questions and nowhere to turn to.

Well, me being me I first turned to research, the first thing I put into Google was: Supporrt for birth mothers- limited and for me, useless. The first thing that popped up was directed at social workers, a few lines down and it was all still the same, (how to work with birth mothers, kinship support, PAC-UK and Barnardo’s). So, me being me, GOOGLE Scholar: experiences of mothers where direct contact is reopened sometime after the adoption order UK. Just two articles had been written on this exact subject. Both contained 3 interviews with Birth Mothers whose contact had changed. A 50/50 split over positive vs negative experiences, yet the commonality between all 6 participants was that after the change in contact, when problems came up- they were left without support. Oh, did I mention these TWO studies were conducted in America- shock horror! Now in all fairness, I could have turned to the agency that facilitated my letter box contact, but as I am conducting my masters research within their organisation, I felt that by asking out for help might have jeopardised that, and thus they may have withdrawn- unlikely, but my anxiety was sky high and I know I wouldn’t have handled any further set back that month. I don’t know of any other birth mother personally who has experienced a change in post-adoption contact and could possibly advise.

Everything is fine now, we had a chat and it’s helped me set my own boundaries but also, it lit a fire in me.

*history* For the first two years after J was adopted I had letterbox, and then K opened it up to direct contact in 2020.

I know what I want to do for my PhD, I have spoken to my potential supervisor and with something that the Professor said “…Or the experiences of mothers where direct contact is reopened sometime after the adoption order…”, pair that with December- it led us both to ask the question: What are the experiences? Who can birth mothers turn to? It’s helped shaped and install further the value of birth mothers’ voices, but also providing an academic foundation to help build upon a limited support system.

Despite everything:  I will ALWAYS respect wishes, wants and the needs of all people involved.

I love K and J so much.