Agreeing to meet our children’s birth mum and grandma was the most nerve-wracking experience we had during the adoption process but probably the most important.
We had agreed early on that if a meeting was offered with members of the birth family, we would take the opportunity. We wanted to be able to tell our boys about them from a personal perspective, not just what we had read about them in the notes (which frankly, wasn’t a particularly rosy picture).
It was one of the most difficult conversations to start – how do you talk to two people who are having their children taken away from their family and given to us? They both cried quite a lot but they really opened up when we started asking them questions about the boys. What were they like as babies? Had our youngest always had his cheeky laugh? Have they always been so obsessed with dressing up? Their faces genuinely lit up when they talked about the boys and we even shared some laughter.
We reassured them that we weren’t there to judge them as people. We put aside the facts that we knew about them from the reports. The legal processes that had taken place had nothing to do with us; the decision to remove the children was taken long before we were on the scene. We saw them as human beings and in their own ways, victims of less than ideal upbringings and circumstances. All we were there to do was to provide a loving home for a two and three-year-old.
They only had one request of us – please love them and give them the opportunities that they couldn’t.
We came away from the meeting having gained some insight into where our boys came from and with things that we can share and have already shared with our boys about their “old family”.
We took a picture of the four of us together before we concluded the meeting. I would strongly encourage anyone who gets the option to meet members of the birth family to take the opportunity to do so.
