week 1 - beginning 11th december 2001

Introduction

I’ve been thinking about how to start this diary of an adoptee and I guess you’ll want to know who I am. My name is Emma Rivers. I am 38 years old, English, white, middle class, heterosexual, single, adopted and brought up Protestant. I have two non-blood brothers also adopted and a much younger non-blood sister, biological daughter of my adopted dad and step-mum.

It’s funny writing down adopted in the same list as white, middle class etc., I’ve never done that before. Although I know that I’m adopted, I’m shocked to see it as part of my identity. Maybe I’m just shocked by the fact. By the fact of adoption. By the fact that my mum gave me away to strangers. Or am I afraid of being associated with it? Afraid that people will feel sorry for me.

There’s a way in which adopted is different from the other things I wrote. Everyone can see that I’m white and as soon as I open my mouth they know I’m middle class. No one can tell that I’m adopted. People ask about my relationship status, sometimes my religion, occasionally my sexuality but no-one has ever asked me if I’m adopted. It’s not something we ask about is it?

How much background shall I give? How much do you want to know? One of the happiest days of my childhood was finding an unopened mars bar on the step outside the doctor’s surgery. I made it last all the way home. I liked climbing trees and made my own bow and arrows. I grew up in a village where we could play out in the fields and woods as much as we liked. My parents were unhappily married. My dad was angry a lot and we were frightened of him. I loved him but the only time I could feel his love for me was when he winked at me.

My adopted mother died when I was 3. She got sick with double pneumonia and died 4 days after going into hospital. My dad says the pneumonia was getting better and it was a hospital infection that killed her. We didn’t get to visit her in hospital and we didn't go to her funeral. Soon after my Dad who was retraining as a teacher so he could look after us, sent me to live with my Uncle and Aunt 300 miles away until I was old enough to start school. I missed him and my brothers terribly and all my childhood thought I’d been sent away for a year when in fact it was only 3 months. He married again when I was 6 to a woman 22 years younger than him. She was 21 and he was 43. My step-mum adopted us when I was 7 but I’ve always referred to her as my step-mum. You can’t adopt someone that old and suddenly be their mother. It felt like a trick and was made all the more confusing because my dad adopted us again at the same time so they could adopt us as a couple - a quirky legal requirement. The official term was that he re-adopted us.

Anyway once she'd had actually married dad I hated her, I couldn’t bear her telling me what to do, I didn’t see that she had any right. When she wanted me to do something I would go and lie under my bed and plan my revenge. Me and my younger brother dutifully called her 'mummy' but my older brother refused he held out for a couple of years, despite pressure from my dad and called her by her name, Helen. It served as a constant reminder that she wasn't our mother. Helen gave birth to my younger sister when I was 8 and I started going to the nearby Catholic convent where I learnt about hell. It wasn’t long before I understood that's where I'd be going when I died. In spite of this the school was lovely. The nuns were very sweet to me and their caring made a big difference in my life.

When I was eleven I was sent to boarding school. I was very homesick. In my first year I cried the whole hour and half drive it took to get there at the beginning of each term. I was inconsolable and filled with a terror I could not understand. Once I got over the grief of being sent away I noticed that I didn’t get hit at school. I realised I was safer there than at home, safer away from the anger and my parents unhappiness so although I can't say I ever really liked it I started to prefer it. That came to an abrupt end when I was 15 and got expelled for sneaking out of school to meet my boyfriend in the early hours of the morning on the golf course. It took years for my parents to forgive me for that. Later I went to university and drank a lot. I studied philosophy of all things mainly because I hadn’t done it at school. In the end all I learnt was things aren’t as they seem, something I’d been learning one way or another all my life. I made some good friends and remember how amazing it was to be listened to for the first time. 

When I left university I got very depressed – my childhood was over and I didn’t have a clue what to do. Looking back on it now it seems to me that the kind of feelings I was having, fear, anxiety, hopelessness and grief were very similar to how I must have felt in the first few weeks of my life when I was taken out of my mother’s arms for good. I know I would have longed for her, I know that I would have felt terror. I’d been with her for over nine months, her heartbeat in my ear. As far as I was concerned she was part of me, we went together and now she was missing? Of course I couldn’t express any of this, couldn’t verbalise it to myself even, to survive I had to get on, I had to put it behind me in some way and hope that such terrible things wouldn’t happen again. And so I buried it all, but the body knows how to heal and I believe our pain lies waiting for a time when the crying can come again. And come it did when I was 23 and alone in the world with no structure to distract myself with and no sense of direction. Those early feelings buried for so long got triggered. Yet I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t get the help I needed and so I was in a mess for a couple of years, wanting to cry all the time but trying not to, feeling completely hopeless, wanting to die, terrified of everything. Something changed when I started practising an ancient meditation, handed down through the centuries by old yogis. By some miracle I connected to myself again. I could breath. The hollow nervous feeling I had in my gut that had been there every day for two years went. I could not believe it although it was what I had been praying for.

I wonder why I am writing about this? Why the words are there without me having to work out what to say next. In some ways I think my depression was the beginning of my healing. That is why it’s so close to my heart. That’s why it’s important to write about here. It was the beginning of my search for myself.

I’ve done a lot of counselling since that time and have pieced together some of the puzzles of my life. I have named the terrible feelings I grew up with, understood some of how I come to be the person I am and found ways to turn around much of my self-negativity. I’ve come to realise how out of touch with my feelings I can be. And how often I’m afraid. Knowledge and understanding are powerful tools. If we can name the terror we feel, understand it’s root, we will know that ‘it’s’ not happening now, that mostly we are not in danger, that things will never be as bad as they were when the terror first surfaced. 

And now my search for myself has finally led me to search for my mother. My loss of her is part of my story. But is it the beginning? I want to know if anything came before that loss. Did she hold me? Did she sing to me? Did she love me? Is it something about her that has sustained me through the losses that followed, given me the strength to know that however painful and however long it takes I am worth searching for?

So why a diary? Well I’ve always wanted to write – I entered my first writing competition when I was nine and still remember the first poem I ever wrote. Years later I joined a creative writing group and found I loved the process of a piece of writing taking shape. I loved how words could turn mundane experiences into poetry. How writing about myself brought long forgotten stories tumbling out of the other people.

And why now? Well that’s a story in itself. I had just decided to really focus the coming year on finding my mother when Christopher rang me from America and asked if I would write something for his web site adoptedlife.com. I immediately thought a diary, I’ll write a diary of my search for my mother. 

I met Christopher in India in 1995 at an ashram. When we discovered we were the same age and both adopted it was like we had always known each other. He came to stay with me in England the following year and started drawing adoption cartoons. I’d go out to work and when I came back in the evening there would be a cartoon waiting for me on the table, and dinner if I was lucky. We talked a lot about adoption, it was a special time. I’d never had a friend before who was adopted. Sometimes we would just say out of the blue ‘Hey I’m adopted!’ 

The second time Christopher came to England he gave me my first book on adoption -subtitled the life-long search for self - that’s when I first read that adopted people had more psychological problems than the general population! I was struck by how I’d never read anything about adoption before. And that’s another reason why I want to write this diary.We need to write about ourselves for each other. Most of the books already written are by professionals and I find them kind of dry and over simplified. What’s it really like to be adopted? I’m fascinated to understand the implications of adoption in my life and relationships. It has been enormously helpful for me in the past to hear about other peoples experiences and how they think they have been affected by them. If you are adopted how has it affected you? Are there things in your life that don’t go so well that you think might be related to the fact you were adopted? What strengths have you gained from the experience? I wonder what we might have in common as adoptees and wonder what we can learn from each other as a result. 

And lastly but perhaps most importantly I believe that although our early experiences will have affected us deeply we are not victims to them, we can heal and we can have our relationships the way we want them to be. It is a belief that inspires me in my life and gives me hope. It sits behind me as I write.