Why I gave back my adopted son at three

Warning: this story is taboo. It is about adoption breakdown, a subject which, in the enthusiasm to find homes for the growing number of children in care — now pushing 70,000 — is hardly discussed. Figures vary wildly as breakdowns are not recorded, but a study released last year suggests that one in 30 UK adoptions ends with the parents handing back the child. This is the spectre that stalks falling adoption rates; when failure has this high a price, who would risk it?

When Patterson gave up Tom (not his real name), the baby she had taught to walk, who had become not just a son to her but a cousin, grandson and neighbour to others, she became a pariah to many. Most people in her situation feel cowed into silence.

Patterson has waived her anonymity because she wants change. Why should parents take all the shame of failed adoptions, when the matching process is so blunt, with adopters usually never seeing the child in the flesh until it is under way? Why should adopters feel blamed when we ask of them what we rarely ask of ourselves — to look after the most hard-to-parent children?

As she tells her story I keep asking myself: “What would I do?” As she points out: “You don’t know how difficult and emotional this is until you walk in someone else’s shoes.” But that’s not enough for her: for the sake of other vulnerable children and parents she wants us to ask: “What can we do?”

There are guinea pigs in Patterson’s cottage garden, three cats in her living room, and she fusses over visitors like a mother duck; this feels like a home children would fantasise for themselves. Patterson, now 40, had done that “classic thing” of getting to her mid-thirties and not meeting the right man. She sailed through adoption approval, but was clear that she couldn’t cope with a disabled child. She takes herself back from the last time she saw Tom to the first: in a video montage of available children.

“It was just this one moment,” she says. “He looked up and gave this lovely big smile. It’s really hard to explain, but after seeing loads of children, you just get this feeling, a magic spark; this is your child. I felt that smile is what I’m going to work with.”

Apart from the few seconds of video and a conversation with social workers, all she knew of Tom was a summary report saying that at one year old he had poor muscle tone and couldn’t crawl or talk. This was classed as “mild developmental delay”, common with children in care. Patterson clung on to the potential in that smile: “You have to base an incredible amount on very little. You’re guessing, hoping that you guessing right.”

The first time she met Tom was at the beginning of the two-week settling period before she brought him home. He was 18 months old. As soon as she set eyes on him she had doubts about his condition; she now recognises that he wasn’t mildly delayed, but severely. However, the sense of occasion overrode them.

“There was so much expectation and so much going on,” she recalls. “But I wish I’d queried more. He still couldn’t roll, there were no sounds coming out of him, despite the report saying he happily babbled. He would never babble. I just felt he hadn’t got the attention he needed. You think: ‘I’m going to bring him on. With my devotion, he’s going to be fine’.”

Each day brought a fresh surprise: wonder at becoming a parent and the horrible realisation that something new was wrong. Tom was silent, wouldn’t play with toys, was unattached to his foster parents or to her. She learnt sign language, took him to speech therapy, held his hands to walk up and down the football pitch every day. Work was reduced to a few days a month; he never missed her when she was gone. When he was in the garden she would find him “zoning out”, staring at the sky.

“I was aware of it, but perplexed,” she says. “I would find him stiff in his bed at night and think he was having a nightmare. The doctors told me later he had been having seizures from birth, which was obvious with hindsight.”

Did she love him? “Definitely. I went into it feeling my love would grow, it did grow, it became real. He felt mine. We’d got to that lovely point where I felt so optimistic about our future. That’s when it all went really wrong.”

One night, when he was three, asleep in the little bedroom next to hers, she heard his breathing rasp. He began to have a fit. It was the start of a steep downward spiral. Doctors diagnosed neurological damage present from birth, causing autism and severe epilepsy. “All those little doubts joined up in a hurry.”

Patterson believes that many of these issues could have been better diagnosed before the adoption, although his condition would not be fully known until his full-blown epilepsy began. The fits were barely controllable and required hospitalisation for weeks at a time, Patterson not leaving his side.

By this stage he was sleeping downstairs on the sofa, bag packed ready for the ambulance. “I didn’t sleep,” says Patterson. Every glimmer of progress was gone. “He was just blank. There was no recognition of me, as much as I liked to hope.” She flicks her phone for footage of him staggering to stand, drunk with medication. “I must delete this. I don’t know why I’ve still got it. I took to show the doctors.”

She felt desperate, “beyond exhausted, living off adrenaline, trying to do my absolute best for him, and yet thinking, ‘How am I going to carry on?’ ”

I ask if there was a turning point that led to her giving up Tom, but she says it felt as if the decision made itself. She called in social workers and they, in dialogue with his doctors, agreed it was impossible to keep him at home.

A little over two years after she brought him home, seven months into his worst symptoms, she said goodbye to him in hospital, “on my last legs”. She came home to an empty house and packed up his clothes for a social worker to pick up. “That time was a blur.”

Yet suddenly, at her most burnt-out, Patterson felt the world turn against her. Alone in the house, she also felt morally alone. A legal “care order” is required to take a child back into care; it implies parental blame. This came at her darkest hour, but Patterson went to court to win a “no-fault” phrasing: “Why would I have negative things written about me for a child I only ever loved?”

Well-meaning people often ask after Tom, as recently as the week before we meet, two years after she had to give him up. “It’s too hard to respond,” she says. “The best I’ve got it down to is ‘I’ve lost my child, I don’t have him live with me any more. It’s a really sad, complicated story.’ One of my best friends would not have any more to do with me; she didn’t believe in what I’d done. That was devastating. Losing a child is people’s biggest fear.”

Patterson feels that, for local authorities, “there is no sense of culpability on their part. It’s always your fault that you can’t cope. That needs to change.” She would like the shame taken away from adoption-breakdown parents. Without openness to their stories and appreciation of their struggle, how can adoption improve?

It’s time, I say reluctantly, for some tough questions. Anyone who becomes a biological parent knows that a child brings unknown risk — but generally they commit to that child. Mother love is supposed to be unconditional.

“Adoption is different and there is no point pretending it isn’t,” she says. “You choose the child you wish to adopt and you place a huge amount of trust in social workers to get a match that is right for you. You have choices all the way along that you don’t with a birth child.”

Don’t you feel you had to stick with Tom out of a greater duty to a child with a bad start? “It makes you feel terrible, as you always have that in the back of your mind. You’ve tried, and there’s a feeling that you’ve failed. It’s difficult to live with, especially with the stigma attached.”

I ask Sir Martin Narey, the former chief executive of Barnardo’s and then the government’s adoption adviser, to look at the website Patterson has started, which offers support, advice on changing the wording of care orders and pressure for improving the adoption process.

“You can sense the grief and guilt as you read it,” he said, “but she should not feel that. There are just some children whose future is in residential care; if her child was very ill he may well be one of them. Adopters take a frequently badly-damaged child. They are heroes and need practical and moral support.”

Patterson hopes to adopt another child, which is not easy. She has a lot of love still to give. I pass Tom’s high chair, tucked in the corner, as I leave. His ghost presence will always be felt. She gets regular updates from the home where four foster carers provide 24-hour care. As she doesn’t believe he recognises her, she is “full of indecision and confusion” as to whether to visit.

“I think he won’t get anything from it,” she says, “which is a really hard thing for a mother to know.”