Letterbox contact: Why is it so hard?

Letterbox is a part of most people’s adoption story. It’s the system which facilitates an exchange of letters and other things like drawings, photos and cards, between adopters and birth parents, on behalf of the adopted child. It’s administered by social workers, and fully anonymised. 

For myself as an adoptive mum, it’s a twice-yearly commitment to write a letter and attempt to provide an update to our child’s birth family on how he’s doing, what he’s achieving, and generally that he is happy and healthy. 

It’s a hard letter to write. Every single time. I battle with providing reassurance that he is well loved and taken care of, while not trying to suggest we are taking better care of him than they ever could. I share milestones in his life to let them know he is growing and developing well, while appreciating that this could also serve to highlight all that they are missing to those no longer in his day-to-day life. 

In normal circumstances, I find it very easy to talk about my child, to tell everyone I know all about his latest foibles, games, obsessions and achievements. I am a proud parent, and share these kinds of things with almost everyone I talk to. But when it comes to sharing this information with the other people who love my child as much as we do, it enters another space.

To maintain the required level of confidentiality, no locations or dates or details at all are included, and so the whole thing lacks nuance, and the personal element. This all translates into a letter which often sounds to me like I’ve written it for a child, rather than simply about one. There is no room for humour or irony – and crucially, I came to realise when I interrogated why this letter is so difficult to write – any kind of connection between the writer and recipient. We have never met, and our only common ground is a child who is no longer the infant they remember, and we never knew our growing child to be. 

To try and help with these letters, I have read around what birth families have said they enjoy hearing, or want to know more about. First and foremost, the consistent arrival of the letters confirms in itself that the recent news story they might have heard about the tragic accident suffered by, for example, an eight-and-a-half year old girl with red-gold hair is not their child. The prevailing thinking is that you can never say that the child is safe, well, taken care of and settled too many times, so this is something I start and end my letters with every time. In one article I read a birth mum noted that when she read the words “how are you?” in a letterbox letter she had felt that the writer really meant this as an enquiry and cared about the answer, so even though I have never met them, I made sure to include this kind of question and language in my next letter. 

The letters sound repetitive though. As much as daily life with our son is ever-changing, sharing six months of updates and information turns out to be both daunting in its huge scope, and hard to pinpoint things of real importance and worthy of sharing when I sit down to do it. I’ve recently started to make a note of things I think will be good to include when they happen, to make sure I don’t forget them, and to give me a headstart on the next letter – even when it’s as much as five-and-a-half months away yet. 

I also question myself about how much I am willing to give in these letters. Do I feel reticent to share too much, to truly share our child with them? In adoption, the fact that there are other people out there who love our child as their own as much as we do is the very starting point, and ever-present thereafter. But while they remain like shadowy, flat figures written about on forms, perhaps featuring in a few bad photos, its easier to push them to the fringes of busy family life. Once I’m writing a letter directly to them, they move closer and into the light. They take on the full three dimensions and become parents again, wanting nothing more than to know everything they possibly can about this child. It’s hard sometimes, as an adopter, to be selfless and generous with my child. After all, he’s my child. Not only my child, but I am his loving, protective, nurturing and caring mother. Being able to share that most important of roles with someone else is not easy. 

By questioning myself about this though, I go back over the letters and ask myself if I could share a bit more here, bring this section alive a bit more with some further info, and try my very best to edit myself and challenge my own level of protectiveness as his parent. I’m not sure I am very successful at it, but at least I try. Maybe, just maybe, the next letter will come out sounding a bit less repetitive though, and perhaps even be a bit easier to write…