week 32 - beginning 13th July 2001
visit to an adopted adoption counsellor

to see previous entries first click here

monday
How will I tell my birth mum about my childhood? Surely she’ll be the last person who’ll want to hear how unhappy I was. If I tell her it won’t be the same as telling a friend. I will want to cry. I’m frightened that I will want her to comfort to me because I never had her comfort me when I really needed it. I’m frightened that I will just want to cry and cry about how lonely I was and have her say she’s sorry it was so hard and she’d have never let me go if she’d known what a tough time I was going to have. I’m frightened to want something from her. I don’t want her to get into feeling guilty I just want her to acknowledge how hard it must have been for me and for her to let me cry.

tuesday
I saw an adoption counsellor today. She is an adoptee herself. I talked to her about my adoptive family and how they all know about my search and most of them are very supportive. She told me her adopted parents rejected her when she told them she’d met her birth mother. Her mother was so shocked and said ‘when you were 14 we sat you down and asked you if there was anything you wanted to ask us, wanted to know and you said no and now you’ve gone ahead and searched for your mother.’ I know it happens but it seems very immature to me for grown ups to abandon their grown up children because they traced their birth parents. Hey ho! Anyway it made me feel good about my family, even my dad! Although he won’t ask me anything about my search or be supportive at least he won’t reject me for it and I know he will always consider himself my father.

She asked if I had a fantasy of what my birth mother looks like and how she might be. I said no. I remembered later that I do occasionally get flashes of a teenage girl with dark hair maybe in pig tails. It would be amazing if the vague flashes of her I’ve had match up to what she really looks like.

She asked how I wanted the relationship with my birth mother to go; do I want to see her straight away or phone and write letters for a while? How can I know that now? The next move will be up to her and I will respond. If she says she wants to see me straight away I will know if I’m ready for that or not by how I feel. I might feel completely panicked and need time just to get used to the fact that she wants to see me or I might feel really excited. If she only wants to write for a while and I feel disappointed then I’ll know that I want to see her straight away. I do know that I want to see her but when is another matter. When I first found out where she lived I was so not ready to meet her that it took me eight months to get to the point of being ready just to make contact. I needed time to integrate the enormous fact of knowing where she lived, that she was still alive, that she was a real person.

I also talked about how hard it is for me to see any good in my childhood. I can sort of understand why for even when good things happened they happened in the context of me feeling isolated and unloved and disconnected from my family. But there were some good things. Like my dad not giving me up when I was four when my friend’s parents offered to adopt me off him after my adopted mum died. Like us children being allowed to roam around in the countryside around our village. Dad drying my hair after I’d washed it; he’d rub it with a towel. He taught me to swim. We had a garden with trees at the bottom which I was always climbing. He used to take us for long walks on Sundays and sometimes we would go blackberry picking. We used to go and visit old castles and I always loved exploring the dungeons and walking up the spiral stairways of the towers. We used to have picnics on the beach sometimes even at breakfast time. Mum would do art things with us; my favourite was burning wax crayons in a candle flame and then dripping the wax onto paper. We used to toast crumpets over the fire in the sitting room and crack nuts. Sometimes after dinner mum would make us a big bowl of chips, which we were allowed to eat while watching Star trek on TV.

To be continued.......