St Francis

Our SW rang today to say that as part of her research for Blessings Life Story Book she had met up with Blessings birth parents. She had gone with the Birthlink worker from St F’s who supports birth parents when they have lost a child to adoption.

Our SW spent time trying to find out more information about the birth parents past and their plans for the future to add to the LS book. This will help Blessing know what they are like and perhaps piece together her birth roots. It was a difficult meeting as both parents have learning difficulties and they found it hard to think of the past and the future. They both said they loved Blessing and birth mum had happy memories of pushing her around in a buggy and her smiling at her.

Birth Mum also said she’d like to meet us! This happens quite often and is helpful to some children in giving them permission to be loved and cared for by their adoptive family.

There was a plan for us to meet the BP last year but the placing authority struggled to arrange it with them because of their learning difficulties and their families were not very responsive. A time by which it should have been done passed, we adopted Blessing and so things moved on.

It’s a tricky thing to think about nearly a year after Blessing has come to us. We also have to consider that the BP live only a few miles from Hubby’s family and it has been less stressful when we visit the family knowing the birth family don’t know what we look like.

The Birthlink worker is going to try and visit the BP and support them and depending on how it goes we will assess with our SW whether there would be any value in trying for a meeting. The BP because of their difficulties and their mistrust of social workers often don’t turn up for meetings and even struggled to maintain going to contacts with Blessing when she was in foster care. So watch this space!

On another subject… I had to laugh today when my hubby read the blog from the other day and said “Oh Blessing has her new inserts then!”. I did tell him but maybe I should just send him my blog to read on his iphone so he can keep up with what’s happening! Men often relate better when it’s written down on a computer of some sort!!