week 22 - beginning 7th May 2001

to see previous entries first click here

Update - Emma's known where her birth mother lives for 4 months now and found out she's not on the Adoption Contact Register. She recently fell in love with her best friend who jilted her for someone else.

Apologies to readers for the recent delay in postings (I got stranded abroad without internet access!).

tuesday
On the way home from walking by the river I was singing 'on a wagon bound for market there's a calf with a mournful eye' - remember that one? I used to sing it a lot in my early teens I must have identified with the calf. When I was much younger there was a record that I kept asking my dad to play over and over it was about a sheep that got lost and was then found again by the shepherd - my dad says I used to sit and listen to it on the sofa crying quietly all the way through. I was that lost sheep.

wednesday
Got the information from NORCAP and filled in the form for membership which means I'll get 3 newsletters a year about adoption. I'm excited about that as they'll have stories in of people's experiences of reunion. I've asked for a list of their publications and back issues of the newsletter, I feel I have an insatiable appetite to hear other people's stories. I want to hear it from adoptees themselves. In the NORCAP leaflet it says one person in 10 is affected by adoption. 50,000 people are on the NORCAP register

thursday
Tonight I phoned my younger brother Jamie, I told him about my search. Everyone in my adopted family knows now except my father. First of all he said that when I make contact I need to have the opinion that she won't want to see me - although it was hard to hear I can see its very different from going with the hope that she will. I thought I could have some counselling sessions on imagining that she won't. And then he said if she does want to see me - prepare yourself…… it was all said in quite an ominous tone of voice, to do with his experience I guess (his birth mum refused to see him). We talked some more and he said that it was quite likely my mother was in the same mother and baby home as his was. We were born in the same town and the same hospital and no doubt our adoptions were dealt with by the same agency. He told me about a woman he used to work with who had been in the same mother and baby home as his mother was, just 3 years after he was born. She had her baby when she was 16 (the same age as my mum). She'd told him the home was run by nuns who made all the girls feels like dirt. They had to pray every night and morning for their sins and were made to work all day. They were constantly scrubbing the floors. His friend was scrubbing the floor the day before she gave birth.

Jamie also talked about how during the second world war there wasn't so much taboo about being an unmarried mother. It was accepted that people would be having a last fling before they went off to war, that people had affairs with every intention of marrying. Married fathers were dying by the thousands anyway so there were lots of fatherless children around. I guess it was more hidden if you were illegitimate. (I haven't noticed before that this word - illegitimate - stems from the word illegal, so I was an illegal baby! Ha - does this then mean I'm outside the law and can do what I want?). Perhaps there was more tolerance anyway because such terrible things were happening in the war. It makes me so angry that mothers were made to give up their children before and after the war because of respectability, because of what other people think. Why do we care what other people think? What other people think is just about always influenced by what other people think anyway and so on ad infinitum So what's the goddamn point?

When I asked Jamie how he knew all this about the war he said it was one of the TV programs he'd seen over the years about adoption. And I have to ask myself how did I miss them, how is it that I have never seen a single program about adoption? I did once manage to get myself to the cinema to watch Secrets and Lies, in fact I went with Christopher! It was probably him that got me to go. Secrets and Lies what an apt name for a film about adoption.

friday
First off I was the secret, my mum didn't tell anyone she was pregnant until 2 weeks before I was born. I was a shameful secret. And the secrets continued with the adoption taboo. How did I know that it wasn't okay to ask about my birth? I wasn't told anything about it except the usual vagaries, 'your mother wasn't in a position to look after you and you were put up for adoption so that you'd have a better start in life.' How could I make a story out of that? Why didn't they say 'your mother was 16, and wanted to keep you and marry your father but her parents wouldn't let her. She liked the Beatles and secretly longed to be an actress but had to go to secretarial college first before her parents would let her apply to drama school. She wore her hair in plaits schools days but had it loose at the weekends, it was so long it reached her bum. Her favourite food is strawberry ice cream and she knows the name of all the planets and star constellations. She cried when we came to take you away and wouldn't let you go. In the end it took 3 nurses to get you away from her. She had signed the papers and it was too late for her to change her mind." I made that up. The only information I got was when I was 15 I'd just been expelled from school and my Dad was being very hard on me. The first thing he'd asked me when he came to pick me up was 'Are you pregnant?' It was a few weeks after that when my dad was particularly nasty to me, that my step mum told me that my birth mother was 15 when she got pregnant with me. It wasn't all she told me that day but that's another secret. Her secret.

And the lies - well the first is babies don't have real feelings, separate them when they are young and they won't remember. My mum actually wrote in her letter to the adoption agency that she wasn't going for the foster option until such time as she was married or felt in a position to look after me herself because she wouldn't want to separate me from my foster parents 'as by then I would have proper feelings'. The second lie is that mothers get over the separation. The third and perhaps the biggest of them all is the lie of respectability. Who in their right mind would want to be respectable if it means going against all that is natural, if it causes such hurt and heartbreak. So then the lie becomes 'it is important what other people think' so important that it's worth suffering for, worth breaking human hearts for. We have been hypnotised. And yes I am angry about the lies. It makes think of the time when babies were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were born and brought back to them every four hours for feeding. Few mothers were brave enough to keep their babies with them in the face of the pressure from the doctors, the social pressure to conform breaking the mother child bond along with both their hearts. That's a whole generation of babies separated from their mothers at birth, on the whim of a few male doctors wanting to make their name in child rearing practises? What happened when those same babies grew up and gave birth, became mothers?

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