Mums who've lost their children to adoption

THE place where Norma meets her group seems oddly poignant. She's come to Sure Start, in Newton Aycliffe, to hold her usual parents' meeting, and neither she, nor those attending, appear to view the choice as strange. Yet to an unfamiliar guest, the venue has to seem ironic. With all its parenting advice, it's meant to nurture mums and dads, yet these have gone beyond all help. They've lost their children to adoption and may not see them ever again.

The group is led and overseen by project manager Norma Holmes. She was appointed to the role by national charity After Adoption, which has a base in the North-East. She has a quite specific remit. "Transforming Lives is a threeyear project funded by the Camelot Foundation,"

she explains. "It started in 2004 and it finishes this year - around September 2007 - and the aim of the project is specifically to work with birth parents who are, or have been, users of the addictive services and have lost children to adoption. It's people who are really, really disadvantaged and the project covers the Teesside area and Durham."

A broad-based charity, what After Adoption seeks to do is help all parties - as well as serving adoptees, it also caters for adopters along with those who've lost their children. It's only relatively lately that the Government has caught up.

"Prior to this project starting up, there wasn't a lot of support for birth parents after they had lost their children," says Norma. "But the new 2002 Adoption Act grants independent support for them and After Adoption is an intermediary service, so basically we have aimed to network with the addictive services, health and housing projects and centres for working girls to reach them in places where they already go."

WHAT'S been a sticking point, however, is that a lot of the referrals have been passed on by social services. As they are frequently the ones to bring about a child's removal, this only serves to breed suspicion. "When you mention social services there's a massive issue of trust," says Norma. "Really, what we needed was to raise the profile of the project and the support that birth parents can receive after adoption takes place, and hopefully we've done that."

While dads are welcome to take part, it's mainly mothers who come forward.

They've all faced painful separations, quite often losing several children, yet Norma doesn't seek to judge them. "A lot of these girls have had really very bad, disadvantaged lives and have had to cope from very early ages with real problematic childhoods," she says. "When they've gone on to have children themselves, how can we expect them to be decent parents?"

The first step is to win their trust, which Norma says can be quite hard.

Though mums are usually allowed to have some contact with their children, the system doesn't always work - which is when Norma intervenes. "Contact is a major, major issue," she says. "It's usually indirect contact via the post box service operated by social services - when a child is adopted, social services will set up what is called a post box service for birth parents to maintain indirect contact with their child. That is usually a letter once a year, sometimes a photograph, sometimes not, sometimes cards, sometimes not, it tends to vary.

"But it comes at a time when the birth parent has come through the most traumatic time of their life and they sometimes don't take it in, so by the time they are referred to me they have lost all prior knowledge about what they have been given or told about contact. One of the first things they say is that they need help with the contact."

When parents first encounter Norma, they've often come to the conclusion that they've truly been cut off. This can affect them very deeply, as she is only too aware.

"By the time some girls decide to engage with us they haven't heard from their children for two or three years," she says. "We have a good example of a girl who hadn't heard anything about her children from the day they were taken for adoption, so she worried about them all the time, and when we managed to get the post box re-established and she knew that the children were being cared for and were happy, she settled down. She's now gone on to do voluntary work and she's signed up to do a university course in September.

She's also come off drugs completely since she started working with us."

And it's not just a simple case of re-establishing connections. The parents Norma has on board are writing histories for their children. "I also help them to create a life history book which lets the children know basically who they are and where they come from, but more to the point, the birth mother is given a chance to explain her story in her words," she says. "It's quite a therapeutic process for them because it allows them to offload, and it helps them to come to terms with the loss of their children."

What Norma is anxious to convey is that the children's needs come first - she sees the mums as a resource' to help them make their way through life. She will take any parent on and says that most do show commitment. "We would be prepared to support anyone who is committed to want to maintain contact with their children," she says. "Some don't want to engage, some will engage very briefly and go off again, but the people who do engage usually go on to show a good commitment to being a resource and moving their lives on."

One mum who's proving this is true is Kimberly Wallace, from Bishop Auckland.

She's lost three children to adoption because she couldn't keep them safe - she had a partner who was violent - and though she'll never win them back, she hopes that when they turn 18, they'll choose to seek her out as adults. She says the help she has received has more than likely saved her life.

"I'll be honest, it's stopped me doing something really, really stupid," admits the 30-year-old. "I think I'd have ended my life."

Her case resembles the experience of another of the mums. When Rachel Foster lost her children her whole world was torn apart. Again, she had a violent partner, so her home was deemed unsafe.

"When my oldest daughter was five weeks old, my husband at the time fractured her collar bone, tried to drown her, bruised all of her legs, scalded her foot and she had bruises to the backs of her eyes - he basically beat the hell out of her," explains the 30-year-old, who lives in Chilton. "I went through years of domestic violence with him. He'd knock me unconscious and then he'd start on the kids."

She now has five who've been adopted, which she finds painful every day - she also says she thought of suicide. Yet thanks to Norma and the project, she does at least have grounds for hope.

"It's made me realise that my kids still need me," says Rachel. "At the end of the day, I'm still their mum, and no matter where they are or what they're doing, they've still got a part of me with them.

One of these days they will come back and my life will be complete."

* After Adoption, Unit 112, The Design Works, William Street, Felling, Gateshead NE10 OJP, 0191-438-7980, or email northeast@afteradoption.org.uk.

There is also an Actionline, 0800-0568- 578, and a website,