COPING WITH CONTACT

Contact – always a huge issue with adopters. Firstly I want to explain some of my history as it has a bearing on my attitude to contact. My parents divorced when I was 12 and when I was 14 my dad went to live in Canada. This separation had a profound effect on me, effectively interrupting my relationship with my father from developing properly (it took me another 33 years to realise that!). My first marriage ended in divorce, but my ex husband and myself managed to stay friendly and to remodel our relationship into a friendship over several years, with the support of our new spouses. We have an extended family situation that works for us and enables siblings and half siblings to interact. Part of our success arose from the recognition on both our parts that it would be damaging to our children for either of us to be derogatory about the other, especially to the children.

When I met my adopted daughter I was initially her childminder, working as a preferred provider with social services. Therefore I had close contact with her mum on a regular basis and was expected to support her. Whilst going through the adoption process, I was also providing respite care for my daughter’s foster mum, and this entailed delivering and collecting her to and from contact with her birth mum, so I was very closely involved in the adoption triangle and all of the emotional issues arising – except it was more like an adoption square with myself, my daughter, her birth mum, and her foster mum.. I always felt I would want to retain contact with my daughter’s birth mum – I knew her, after all; we had built up a relationship over the months, I knew a lot about her personal circumstances and history and was sympathetic to her. I also wanted to remain in contact with my daughter’s Foster Mum. I felt in this way I might be able to reduce the impact of the losses my daughter was about to sustain. Why am I telling you this? Well there are three reasons, really. Firstly and importantly I well remember the pain of separation from a parent. Secondly I had built an empathic relationship with my daughter’s birth mum before the subject of adoption was ever an issue – and I may say this caused me some anxieties and gave me plenty of cause for reflection when adoption did become an issue! Thirdly, I felt that through the process of my divorce, I had a model for helping to integrate separated families. (Of course this was simplistic, but you must remember, this was before the impact of the harsh realities of adoption had hit home!)

When my daughter was adopted by us, direct contact was not recommended; our Social Worker felt for various reasons that direct contact should not happen in this case. However, I always felt this was the ideal way to go – after all, I knew her mum, and had been witness to the relationship between them. Therefore I ended up advocating for my daughter’s right to see her mum, and this is why:-

My daughter did not have a “goodbye visit to her birth mum who was ill with shingles at the time that might have been arranged. She came to live with us the day after my father in law was admitted to hospital with a suspected nervous breakdown. It transpired that his symptoms were actually due to a brain tumour, which proved inoperable. He died 6 weeks later, just into the new year. A couple of months later our old dog (19 years old) developed heart failure and had to be euthanised. Not long after this early (very early!!) one Sunday morning, my daughter said to me “ Grandpa T had died and gone to heaven?

“ “Yes” I replied. And Biggles died and the ladies took him away?” “Yes” I again replied. “and where is Mummy J?” Well, this took my breath away as you can imagine. Poor little thing, I thought, she thinks her mum is dead! So at this point I began the process to request a direct contact. To cut a story short, this was agreed, as there had been no closure for my daughter previously. We met at a local park, had a walk, a chat and cup of tea. My daughter was reassured. Since then, we have met around once a year.

The visits have been instigated by my daughter, but controlled by her mother. I say this because I would make a request as a result of feedback from my daughter, and then we would wait until her mum was able to comply. This has usually involved missing several firm appointments with late cancellations before the birth mum felt able to see my daughter. This went seriously wrong this year, when my daughter was able to compute the time it took for her request to be met (several months) and also realised in that time that her birthday had not been recognised. She experienced this as a rather prolonged rejection, and it served only to reinforce her low self esteem. This also made me very angry, because I felt I was seeing a pattern I had noticed throughout the foster period that my daughter was never prioritised by her mum – almost anything took precedence over a scheduled contact. The true picture, of course, is much more complicated and is more a reflection of the birth mum’s own unresolved issues and mental health. At this point, (we were still waiting a firm appointment date) I contacted adoption support and explained that I was not prepared to wait longer. I was setting some boundaries. Much to my daughter’s dismay, I set out some “rules”. Contact was to be arranged and not broken once a year. Therefore, if my daughter was cancelled for any reason except a real emergency, they would both have to wait till next year. I explained to my daughter that rules help people to know what is expected and help them feel safe. I felt in doing this that I took the angst out, because there was no more waiting – if the appointment was not kept, then forget it till next year. No-one was hanging on any more.

Well, the meeting went ahead as scheduled, and we had a good couple of hours. We took instant cameras so that my daughter and her mum both had a record of the day. My daughter was delighted to get her photos back, and we put them into a little photo album for her. Now we come to the pros and cons –

For me, there is conflict in all of this. I am anxious for my daughter and to an extent for myself. I battle every time with my resentment and the fear that I am actually second best, whilst still dealing with all the anxiety, resentment and fear manifested as anger that my daughter feels towards her birth mother and projects on to me. In fact, if we unpick this we can see that there is anxiety at each point of the triangle. For my daughter’s birth mum that is manifested as a reluctance to make the appointment, for me – I feel anxious and tense, plus I have to deal with my daughter’s reactive behaviour. For my daughter all sorts of issues are brought up both before and afterwards – beforehand her anxiety was high both on her own account and, I am sure, because of my tension, so she was insecure and panicy. This shows itself as testing behaviour – aggressive, hyperactive. The actual meeting was good, but brought up different problems – her birth mum was fine, kind, brought a present, smiled. This raised other conflicts – if Mummy J was nice and “better” to use my daughter’s terminology, that must that mean everything that happened

was my daughter’s fault after all – she was a horrid baby, and now she was still horrid and going to prove it! She was violent aggressive and dangerous. Really scared, pushing all the boundaries. This was a really stressful difficult time for both of us and the rest of the family. In order to deal with it we had to call upon all our powers of empathising and reassuring, calming the panic, explaining to our daughter that her mum was only “better” because she trusted me to look after our daughter properly, so was not anxious and withdrawn. In fact, there proved to be a hidden benefit for us on reflection, because we had extremely reactive behaviour immediately after the contact, and this coupled with my own knowledge enabled us to make a connection that we had not made before. When I first knew my daughter and her birth mum she used to run at her mum, kicking, biting, shouting – anything to attract attention. With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight and some extrapolation I realised that the contact had brought that baby J to the surface, so she was re-living that part of her history – that in any case is my belief, and I think it is borne out by the fact that our resultant strategy of reassurance and reminding her that such behaviour was not necessary to get our attention, that we are different than her birth mum, and showing her the ways she is looked after and her needs are met worked. In addition, we refuse to comply with aggressive requests. We point out what she can do to help herself, reassure her and stay with her while she works it out, but we don’t comply. (I am not suggesting this as a blanket strategy of course, just trying to give a clear view of our experience).

During this period a lot of people advised us to drop contact, or asked me why I did it when all it does is “stir things up”. Our answer is simply that firstly, contact does not create these problems, it brings them to the surface, where they can be explored, and hopefully eventually resolved. It would not protect my daughter to avoid these issues, it is my opinion that you cannot protect a child from something that has already happened, they need to make sense of it so that they can move on. In this way they build up a coherent autobiography that helps them know who they are. As I hope I have shown in my example, this can result in a deeper understanding of the child and their issues.

Additionally, it is important to remember that hard for us though it is, our children relate to their birth parents no matter what their experience. For this reason, it is important that we do not disparage the birth parents, and couch their behaviour in terms that are not derogatory no matter how we feel – and we do feel angry, vengeful and desperately sad at our children’s early experience

This then has been our experience of contact from my point of view. For us it has been a hugely challenging but ultimately I hope useful and rewarding experience. As for the future, well, watch this space…