My mum put me into care, then rejected me years later

DEAR BEL

WHEN I was six I was taken out of school by two ladies who said I was going on holiday. One of my teachers was crying.

I was taken into care. I missed my mum, older sister and grandparents (who we lived with — my father was dead), but was told Mum had decided I should stay where I was. I spent the next ten years in different children’s homes and schools.

I was never kissed or hugged again. At 16, ‘they’ decided my education was over. I was found a bedsit, taken for an interview for a crumby job and that was that. Social workers visited occasionally until I was 18 and then I was on my own. In my early 20s I studied at night school and became a planning engineer.

I was solitary — you don’t form relationships in care because you know you’ll be moved on. Still, I got married when I was 26; we bought a nice house and had three girls I love more than my own life.

But I never forgot my family. I never ceased to wonder why Mum had given me up. I’d made four attempts to contact her but failed.

I was 30 when I received a short letter from my mother through social services. She wanted us to meet in her home town. Bursting with excitement, I travelled there but she didn’t show up.

A few months later I received a note containing arrangements for another meeting.

In the cafe I recognised her and my sister straight away and thought my heart would burst. But they were very aloof. Mother said my grandparents had made her give me up, because there wasn’t room for all of us in the house.

Emotionless, she told me she had two boys, two and four years younger than me. She had remarried months after I was put into care.

Knives twisted in my stomach. I learned my mother was divorced, moderately wealthy, and that my sister and the two other children had been to uni- versity. I thought: ‘Why didn’t you give me those chances?’

They had no interest in my life or family. We arranged to meet a week later, but only my sister showed. She said my mother had decided against any relationship with me.

That was 25 years ago and it’s gnawed at me ever since. Nine months ago, I got a terse letter from a solicitor acting for my sister and her brothers. It told me of my mother’s death and said any claims I might make against her estate would be contested, as she acknowledged no emotional bonds with me. I was dumbfounded.

This was the last stab at my heart. I cried buckets. Why did they do that?

AIDAN

YOU wrote a detailed email (three times as long as I have room for) which left me feeling desperately sad, yet full of admiration, too. And honoured that you wrote.

There’s a quiet strength in the telling of your story that belies the emotional weakness you describe.

Truly, it’s quite impossible for me to make sense of the way your mother treated you, or why the sister (ten when you were sent away) should have no vestigial feeling at all for the six-year-old boy doomed to feeling abandoned for the rest of his life. How can that ever be understood?

Sometimes, seeking reasons condones wicked behaviour. You didn’t actually ask me for help, even though the act of writing reveals how you still feel excluded from your own life — yes, in spite of a happy marriage and beloved (now married) daughters.

Your sincere intention is to warn others who grew up in care: ‘Just because you desperately miss your family, don’t be too sure that they miss you. Be very wary before you make contact, because you might just be giving them the opportunity to reject you all over again.’

Wise advice springing from the deep wound. I knew someone who found his birth mother again after being (happily) adopted and found the experience sad and disappointing.

The phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ is relevant here, isn’t it? I hope readers will think about that and realise how your counsel is relevant to all those wistful for a fantasy, alternative life.

But let us contemplate your life now. The unnecessary cruelty of that solicitor’s letter, arriving after 25 years, has set you on the old rack once again. But you will survive this as you did all the rest. You are the same amazing, strong person who survived rejection, instability, loneliness.

You studied hard with no help, gaining a good job; you overcame self-protective wariness to fall in love and marry; you had three lovely daughters and created a happy, successful life.

Once you were rejected, yes, but I am asking you finally to allow your blessings to outweigh the pain. Add it up: two women, mother and sister, were loveless, hard, cold, cruel. But four women (your wife and daughters) are brimful of love for you.

Those first two show as nothing on the scale. The second four (and their husbands, and — hopefully — children) represent riches piled at your door. Embrace all that, Aidan — and be proud.

Do you ever wake in the morning and ask yourself if you’ve lived the best life you could have lived? Not morally. Or not only morally. Just squeezed the most out of your opportunities? FROM THE FINKLER QUESTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON (2010)