week 20 - beginning 21st April 2001

to see previous entries first click here

Update - Emma's fallen in love with her best friend who might be embarking on a relationship with someone else, also called Emma! She's also found out that her birth mother isn't on the Adoption Contact Register.
And apologies to readers for the recent delay in postings (I got stranded abroad without internet access!).

monday
Watched East Enders on the television. I don't watch it much but it's my favourite soap opera. They've got a story line going at the moment about a young teenage woman who has just had a baby. She split up with the father a while ago and now she wants to give her baby girl up for adoption (that innocuous phrase again - give the baby up) but the baby's father's mother wants to bring the baby up or support her son to. (Well she's a Fowler isn't she?) What it brings home to me is that usually when you're adopted a whole family is rejecting you/abandoning you.

wednesday
John rang can you believe it - he's chosen the other woman! Not me. Not me. Not even me and her, but just her. He's finally decided. He wasn't very nice about it either. It's like he feels so bad about saying no to me that he can't stay connected to me. Yet he's pretending that he is and that somehow I'm doing something wrong. I'm frightened to talk to him now. So much for saying he'll never abandon me. He has and he's denying it. Give him a month or two and he'll finally realise and then perhaps we'll be close again. You can't tell John anything he has to come to it in his own good time. Still at least he comes to it eventually. Meantime I imagine I'll be crying a lot. I'm crying just writing this. I really wanted to be with him.

Its worse that he told me over the phone, can't believe after all we've said that he doesn't want to come and see me to talk it through, complete something with me. That's it. Finished. I might not see him for months. He was my best friend.

thursday
Today I found a piece of writing on the web entitled 'a birth mom's thoughts'. I printed it out and took it to a counselling session and read it out loud - the bits that make me cry are: "Do you forgive me for not being there as you were growing up, for not being able to reach out to you when you cried out for me? Did you know that you NEVER left my heart, it still holds a place only you can fill? What I pray for: is that some day you will want to meet me as much as I want to meet you; that you know that somewhere out in this big world your first Mom has never forgotten that you exist and that somehow you can feel the love I have for you." I cried wishing that my Mum was saying the same things……..

saturday
I've decided to join a dating agency!! I've just been reading some of the entries on the one I've decided to join - you can look at a random sample of profiles without joining and there were 3 that I liked the sound of, not bad out of 20. At least people on dating agency books will be single. (I guess there'll be a few liars - now that would be just my luck to fall for one of those!)

The three times in my life that I've really wanted a relationship with someone with all my heart, the loves of my life, they have all chosen someone else instead of me, even 'though they loved me. Two of them were already in relationships they were trying to leave which they eventually did and then fell for someone else! Is this to do with being adopted? The ones that do choose me I haven't been so into. Do I only let myself really love when I intuitively sense that it won't go anywhere? Am I afraid to really love because I was abandoned? Or do I just seek out ambivalence because it's familiar. (One of my counsellors says my birth mother was ambivalent - she loved me and didn't keep me, the dictionary definition is coexistence in one person of opposing emotional attitudes towards the same object, me being the object!) I also realise with a shock that they have been at least 10 years older than me. I used to think I was looking for a father figure but now I wonder if I'm simply searching for my mother.

To be continued next week.......