Meeting Birth Family...

Recently we had a chance to meet boy-o's birth mother and her new partner. It was something that I really wanted to do and something that I dreaded at the same time. Am I glad we did it? Yes. Was it as awful as I thought it might be? Yes.

Boy-o has a complicated family history, which I'm not happy going into on here. Enough to say that birth father was considerable older than birth mother. I can't remember if I said, but his birth father died shortly after boy-o was born, he was however in his sixties and had smoked for a long time, and had heart problems because of the smoking. All boy-o's birth family's grandparents are now dead.

I felt sorry for birth mum before we went to the meeting, knowing her history, and I felt even more sorrow for her at the end of the meeting. She has learning difficulties, and therefore it was difficult to think about how the conversation would go.

We did find out some lovely information for boy-o. Things like that his (eldest) brother and sisters love swimming like boy-o does. That brother likes playing football - boy-o loves kicking and throwing balls around.

She didn't choose his name for any other reason than she liked it. That when she first saw him walking at contact, boy-o was running (nothing changes!)

She said that she'd like him to go to Church - we were able to say, that already happens. She'd also like him to learn to swim properly, have opportunities to play football and to go to Scouts. She wants boy-o to know that she's always loved him and always will.

We talked about what she would like to hear about in letters - she said as much as possible. How he is, what he's doing. She asked how she should refer to herself in her letters - our social worker suggested birth mum X.... she wants to make sure she can still call herself mum - which is find, because she is, but at the same time I am his mum. I'm the one he runs to when he doesn't feel secure. She wants to send and receive birthday and Christmas cards - which is fine by me.

She broke down into tears - this is was a big thing for her. She hasn't meet the couple who adopted the twins. She found it as difficult as we did. And I just felt sorry for her.

There was a little more discussed but we didn't really learn anything new, except we have a photo to show that we met. I'm so, so glad that we've met her - and hope that in the future boy-o will want to meet her and try to understand why things happened the way they did. She isn't bad and I can't portray her as such - she's just a desperate women who's had a really awful life.