Why I adopted on my own at the age of 47
Margaret Reynolds reflects on the battles she faced on her path to midlife motherhood
My daughter and I wrote The Wild Track together: the story of my attempts at motherhood was hers too, after all. But when lockdown happened, it added another dimension to the relationship of adoptive mother and child, so we agreed to create an Epilogue in a shared voice, a “we” that spoke for us both. Lucy, just turned 18, wrote: “In our lives and in the world, there is no perfect. We know that. But we don’t need perfect to make this work”. In lockdown, as in our 12 years together, that has been the case.
Some time since, I decided that I wanted a child. I was single and past childbearing years, but I had a teaching job that I loved, a career as a broadcaster and a staunch group of friends. The answer was adoption – an arduous path – and in my case it was to take seven years.
What was it that I was pursuing? Love, purpose, joy. I was determined to love someone I did not know, and who, to begin with at least, most certainly would not love me. But my need to find a place for that love persisted and grew across that time.
By the time I first told those closest to me that I wanted to adopt, I was 45, living in the country and working as an academic: they were supportive (“When you have that kind of love in you, you have to put it somewhere”), enthusiastic even (“Let’s go for it!”). They believed in my then only fantasised incarnation as a mother.
At no stage did I give up, though there were many false starts – partly because I began with intercountry adoption (which is especially difficult), and for which I was, strictly, not qualified – but also because of the intense scrutiny that must be undergone by any adoptive parent. Over and again, I had to present and persuade and convince the authorities.
But is this not the essence? That love never gives up, no matter how fierce the trial.
I think now that my persistence then helped me to work out how it is that love works. I know – I still know – that it requires grit. As Lucy also wrote of lockdown: “Sometimes difficult, but often valuable for our relationship”.
After nearly seven years, I found a sixth adoption agency who finally approved me as a prospective adopter. The social worker assigned to my case showed me a photocopied picture of a little girl with a sweet face and very long hair. I pinned it to my bedroom door. I looked at her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The family finders agreed I was the best match for her. I met her. Four weeks later, she came to live with me.
This was what I had wanted, but there was nothing natural about it. We were strangers to each other, and had to negotiate patterns and routines, seeking out connection. Eventually, it clicked. By Christmas, I was “Mum”. When the snow came, she fell asleep saying: “I’ve just had the best day in my whole wide life.” She was six and a half.
I was lucky to have friends who were adoptive parents – I needed them, because, as a single person, I had no one to help, no one to whom I could turn to ask “Am I doing this right?” or “What do you suppose that means?”
On the other hand, as I was to find out, being a single mother also has its pleasures: you make the decisions. But being an older mother has downsides too: I used to kid myself that having a small child in tow at the age of 47 made me look younger. Of course it didn’t, but it did, oddly, make me feel younger, and it still does as I watch this new adventure into life unfurl, unfold, fulfil.
But the most important thing I learned is that this process of becoming a mother was not, in fact, about me at all. I said that I “wanted a child”. Like other adoptive parents I did this for my own purposes, out of a desire for something missing in my life.
But adoption is really about the child. They are the ones who need this thing, not just because something is missing in their lives, but because they have suffered a radical loss, for whatever reason, quite likely including many different homes, much stress and trauma. Experience is not destiny, but the effects do have to be acknowledged.
From the ages of seven to 11, my daughter campaigned for a dog. Friendly voices urged me not to do it: “You will end up doing all the work”. I listened to them, and said “no” to her. Then, one day, after yet another passionate plea, resisted once again with a “no” from me, I turned out of the room and thought: “What am I doing, limiting the child, saying she can’t do it, that she won’t achieve?” So, I turned on my heel, walked straight back into the room, and – much to Lucy’s astonishment – said: “You can have a dog.” Have I ever regretted it? Not for a moment: she trained the dog beautifully, and Faith is a doll.
My daughter is not me. Nor is she “mine”. She is her own. And we have learned to recognise the difference. I express love through words and gestures. My daughter expresses love through words and thoughtfulness. Once we understood that about each other, we could begin to understand what each was saying.
I am, I confess, a devotee of Anne of Green Gables, so that translated into both of us attending the biennial LM Montgomery conference at the University of Prince Edward Island and visiting every LMM shrine we could find. When she was younger, my daughter was a fan of Caroline Lawrence’s series The Roman Mysteries, which meant that we had to take ourselves on the overnight sleeper to Rome to see the Colosseum and trawl around the streets of Ostia.
Travelling is very much our thing. Perhaps because it is all new for both of us at the same time. We discover together, voyaging to the interior of ourselves while looking outward to the world.
When she was little my daughter often worried about me dying (mainly, “Because I don’t have any money and I don’t know your PIN number”). Now, I am the one who thinks about death. I find that this teaches me a love that is practical. I want to get things in order. Because I want her to go on into her becoming, unhindered, untrammelled, free. Just over a year ago, my daughter and I were returning from a few days in Paris. Waiting in the queue to board the Eurostar, I noticed a woman ahead of me with two teenage girls who bickered amiably about who would carry what and swapped text messages from their friends. As my own teenager wrestled with the massive Christmas wreath we had been charged to take home, this woman looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back. And in that silent exchange of understanding were all the vistas of joy and purpose that I had ever hoped for – but richer and more precious than I could have imagined.
‘I used to kid myself having a child in tow made me look younger’