week 29 - beginning 23th June 2001
My intermediary

to see previous entries first click here

Update - Emma's known where her birth mother lives for 6 months now and also found out she's not on the Adoption Contact Register which makes her more nervous about contacting her. She has an adoption social worker who is gently encouraging her to move forward with her search. She recently fell in love with her best friend, John, who jilted her for someone else, and now it looks like she might be getting involved with somebody else herself.

monday
I had a good counselling session this afternoon. My counsellor got me to decide to give up all desperate hope that I will ever find the love I should have had as a baby and young child. I will never have the love that I should have had when I was very young. I can mourn that. I need to accept it. That'll take a while! Meantime I keep crying at the loss, the loss of my mum. I still get it mixed up with the loss of men in my life now. I am still looking for her love in them and am grief struck when they don't want to be with me as much as I want to be with them.

tuesday
Alison my social worker rang, she wanted to know how things were going and how I was feeling and did I want to continue with the process we'd started.

This got me ringing SWAN (a local after-adoption agency) to see if any of their intermediaries are adoptees themselves or birth mothers. I think a birth mother would be my preference as they would have the most understanding of my mother's position and therefore put her most at her ease. Anyway SWAN don't have any on their list and the only adoptee they have lives and works in another town. So now that was sorted I felt I could just get back to Alison and ask her to go ahead, she has already said she would be happy to be my intermediary if I wanted her to be. I rang her back and we made an appointment for the week after next. Oh god!

wednesday
Read some more from the adoption reader. In 'A love Story' by Kathleen Scully Davis - Angelo the father of Kathleen's baby is Mexican and he wants to keep the baby she is planning to put it up for adoption. It's the birth mother speaking: "Angelo's very large extended family were enraged. Angelo had no idea why if I wasn't going to keep the child, why I wouldn't let him keep it. Who ever heard of giving babies away. In the Mexican community there is always a place for a baby."

It makes me think of how unnatural our society is that giving a child away has become a solution. It makes me think about how our culture doesn't support connection between people and how the word extended family hardly means anything anymore.

thursday
I'm hoping Andy will contact me, it feels scary to contact him because even in our friendship he's needed a lot of space. I don't want him to feel threatened. I wonder if it's okay for me with my abandonment issues to get involved with someone so easily threatened. Or maybe more to the point someone with whom I don't feel safe to show the vulnerable side of myself. Someone who might reject me for being honest (well that's my fear anyway). I thought I wasn't supposed to be getting involved!

saturday
Rang Andy I'm going over to see him on thursday. Its my turn to cook dinner.

To be continued.......