The Moving Train
November 2025
The train is moving.
I know I booked and boarded it, but somehow now I’m here, it feels a little overwhelming.
Am I ready? Is Angel ready? Is hubby ready?
Angel’s birth mum has agreed to meet. There have been a lot of stop-starts. She wanted to, Angel wasn't ready. Angel wanted to, she wasn’t in a good place, but now the stars have aligned.
The postbox team (the people who look over and send our correspondence on to each other) have been to visit birth mum, and she is keen to proceed.
Last year we talked about it, but she said she wasn’t sure if she could handle the rejection if Angel pulled away. I knew that meant she wasn’t ready. To be ready, I felt she needed to be able to put Angel's feelings front and centre, rather than hers.
She sent me such a beautiful letter this year, apologising for not being ready last year, telling me I was “an absolute warrior!” for fighting and getting Angel into the new specialist school.
She also said:
“There are so many times where I feel I could learn so much more from you and each year I feel I have. I feel you have given me strength through each and every letter you have sent to me. It has always given me that extra push, as well as making me realise I am enough, and I am doing all that I can.”
She ended the letter by saying:
“Absolutely love the pictures, and the one of all of you I have put in my room with my other children's pictures. They are the first and last faces I see every day.”
This blows me away, that she can face her loss every day in this way.
Then I read the letter she sent Angel. I had asked if she could send a short letter for her this year, as sometimes she has just written to me and not all of those letters are appropriate for Angel.
We have this amazing bond forged in mutual heartbreak (see earlier blog on meeting birth mum) and often send each other five-page letters. Angel doesn't want a five-page letter all about what's happening in the lives of her mum and sisters. She wants a letter about her, and this year mum absolutely nailed it.
I had sent pictures of Angel at various times throughout the year and told her what she had been up to, and she responded to this in her letter — making jokes about the size of her paddleboard and saying how much she used to love horses too. She then wrote:
“Angel, I know it can be hard for you at times, but please don’t think that what happened in the past was your fault. I loved you from the moment I found out I was pregnant, and that has never changed. I have always loved you and I will continue to love you for the rest of my life. I should have done better for you, and I will always have to live with that, knowing I should have done more, I should have done better for you. Angel, there isn't a day that goes by where I don’t think of you. I miss you every single day, and I love you with all my heart.
I have pictures of you around my house and update them every year when your mum sends me new ones. You keep smiling and being your happy, amazing self, and hope to speak to you soon.
All my love forever and always,
Tummy Mummy xxxxxxxxx”
Still makes me cry now.
It resonated with a quote I came across recently:
“When I first stepped into adoption, I thought I was opening my heart to give a child a safe place to belong. I knew their story would be layered with loss and complexity. What I didn’t expect was how deeply their story would reach into mine and begin rewriting it.
Parenting an adoptee doesn’t just shape them. It shapes us.
All of a sudden, the ground you used to stand on feels different…
It can be disorienting… Yet, in the middle of that disorientation, something amazing happens. Parenting a child whose beginning includes loss reshapes the way you see the world. You start noticing grief in places you once overlooked. You grow softer toward pain, because you’ve seen it so closely. You grow braver in standing up for truth, because you’ve had to. You learn to hold two realities at once: joy and sorrow, love and grief, hope and heartbreak.
This kind of growth is slow. It doesn’t happen in one moment, or even in one year. It’s a lifetime of becoming. Some days it feels exhausting, like your heart can’t stretch one more inch. Other days, you realize you’ve been given a capacity to love that you didn’t even know was possible.
If you’ve ever felt undone by this journey, you are not failing. You are being remade. Their story is shaping yours, weaving you into something you never would have written for yourself…
The hidden gift of adoption is the way it changes us as parents. While it may not look like the picture we first imagined, it is real, and deeply meaningful.
With love & hope,
Anna Bernacki, Director of Community, Parenting Different”
I haven’t written much in this blog about my own story pre-Angel, but that quote sums up my experience.
Being a parent to Angel has profoundly changed me, and I recognise that her losses echo my own. My father abandoned me, and I didn't see him for 20 years and actually little at all. I moved around a lot (17 times before I was 11) and suffered trauma. This has shaped who I am but also allowed me to understand Angel.
When I read what her mum said about my letters making her ‘feel enough’ and that she was ‘doing all that I can’, I was stunned.
I thought, how did I do that through a letter?
What was it that I was able to offer, in way of support, just by sharing our story?
I also realised that much of the time I still don’t feel enough or that I have done enough, due to my early life experiences. Because of this, I have worked hard to try and fill the void that I know Angel feels.
Part of this has just been willing to see it, which is painful. I had to fully accept that I did not give birth to her, that she has another mum and family that matter a lot too.
I knew that to fully embrace Angel, I had to fully embrace her birth mother. I guess that is what was expressed in those letters, in all the messy, complicated, painful, beautiful reality of being a parent to an adopted child.
When I read the letter that birth mum wrote to Angel, I realised instantly that this was the letter I wish I had received from my dad:
“I love you. I should have done better by you.”
Unequivocal. No excuses.
There is healing in that for me, even if I never get that letter.
And even though I cried, there was happiness too; that I had elicited this for Angel, that she did get that letter.
That evening, I told Angel a beautiful letter had arrived, that her mum was ready to meet, that we were working out details and it still may take some time, but that she told her she loved her.
She looked happy.
I asked if she wanted to see the letter — ‘Not tonight.’
I asked her a few more times that week, and she kept saying, ‘Not yet.’ She didn’t even want to see the pictures.
I loved her for knowing herself well enough to be able to say, ‘Not now.’
My brave, beautiful girl, I thought, some people never know themselves as well as you do now, at 14!
A week later, on a long car journey to see a friend outside London, I ask again, and this time she says yes.
She reads it herself, very slowly.
Afterwards, I ask, How does it make you feel?
‘Sad,’ she says, with tears in her eyes.
‘Yeah, me too,’ I say. ‘It is really sad, the whole thing. That she wasn't able to keep you, that things went so wrong for her. It is absolutely appropriate to feel sad.’
I tell her about meeting her birth mum in the week we were doing introductions with her.
How birth mum ran back and hugged me and whispered, ‘Love her,’ and I whispered back, ‘I already do,’ even though I had only met Angel twice; but it was true, I already did.
How I had felt so much empathy and respect for her and how I had whispered back, ‘Get your life together, sort yourself out, don't let them take away any more kids.’
And she had! She went on to have two more children that she kept and completed a degree.
‘What about my dad?’ Angel asks. ‘I want to meet him too.’
‘That’s a bit more complicated, as we haven't had so much contact with him.’
I explain how originally we wrote every year but only ever got one letter back.
‘Maybe one birth parent at a time. Let's meet mum first and then figure out if we can track down dad.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘Mum is most important.’
I tell her there is a ‘later in life letter’ that explains more about what happened with her parents and why she was taken away.
I remind her we had read some bits when she was younger, when she had been asking questions, but that she hadn't wanted to hear much. She had said, ‘It’s too sad.’
I say it might be too much to take in with everything else, but I wanted to remind her the letter was there and she could read it any time.
She nods.
I ask how she feels about meeting her now.
‘Yeah, calm,’ she says, teen-cool, recomposed.
She turns the music up.
It’s a lot for us all to process.
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