My daughter and I wrote The Wild Track together: the story of my attempts at motherhood was hers, too, after all. But when lockdown happened, it added another dimension to the relationship of adoptive mother and child, so we agreed to create an epilogue in a shared voice, a ‘we’ that spoke for us both. Lucy, just turned 18, wrote, ‘In our lives and in the world, there is no perfect. We know that. But we don’t need perfect to make this work.’ In lockdown, as in our 12 years together, that has been the case.
When I decided that I wanted a child, I was single, past childbearing years, but I had a teaching job that I loved, a career as a broadcaster, and a staunch group of friends.…