week 5 - beginning 1st january

monday
I've found out where my birth mother lives! I talked the whole way through my counselling session and there was me thinking I needed to cry! Well maybe I did but part of me was so excited I just wanted to tell the story of it all. I've found out where my mother lives!

I felt much clearer after the session which made me realise that I'd been in shock. My body had felt tight in some way, like it didn't belong to me. As I write my thoughts turn to how that shock would have felt to my baby's body and what damage the adrenaline coursing through my blood might have done. When I got home I took some homeopathic Arnica (good for shock).

I tried to ring Christopher but he's out. Checked my email instead - Mark, who found my mother's address, has replied to my email, I wanted to know how he got involved in searching.

Hello Emma,
The reason why I do these searches for people is because my wife was adopted at birth and found her mother about 18 months ago. I took 6 months to track her down and we did it before we had a computer and without the help of the Internet. It helped that my wife is in the Met Police and had an info disc at work, so we know how difficult it can be searching if you are a novice. It's amazing how many people are struggling to search when a lot of info is readily available to them, it's just that they don't know where to look. Some people have really complicated stories and very difficult to unravel and others like yourself very straight forward. You are the third person I have managed to find for successfully this week, and about 10 in all since I started, so it has been quite exciting. The only let down is you never get meet the people you have reunited. My wife's reunion turned out very positive and she was welcomed with open arms. She speaks a lot with her new found mother and has spent a couple of weekends with her and is always in touch. My wife also has 2 half sisters and a half brother who have also been very welcoming. I hope this encourages you to take it a step further and hopefully it will be an equally positive experience for you. If you want to speak to my wife (Claire) as she is always happy to share her experience with other adoptees as she says it is good therapy for her, then please don't hesitate.
Have a Happy New Year.
Mark and Claire.

(To see the part of the email detailing how he found out where my mother lives click here - more relevant to UK readers.)

I'm glad I know how he got into searching. It makes it seem more real to me now. The Internet is an amazing thing - complete strangers can help you out and you might never know anything about them. It's kind of surreal. I post one message on an adoption web site and three emails later I know where my mother and grandfather live! Perhaps needing to place Mark has something to do with being adopted!

wednesday
I wonder if anyone in my birth family will laugh like me?

Tried Christopher again, he's still out. He is the only person I want to tell. I didn't say anything to Una when she rang. I feel secretive, precious about who I tell (I must be feeling vulnerable!). Indulged my sugar addiction instead with chocolate and watched a crap film on TV. Is this early abandonment where my addictions stem from? In the film I cried at the bit where the good guy was kind to the bad guy's son. I always cry when people are kind to children in the movies.

I felt angry after the movie finished. And I felt like hurting myself. I haven't felt like that for a long time. I used to feel it often, hating myself thinking I deserved to be punished, that I was a bad person. There's a fascinating psychological theory that says when children are very small they believe that they are the centre of the universe and their understanding of what happens around them is that somehow everything is related to them. If anything bad happens they blame themselves for it. For me it went something like - "There was something so horrible about me my mother couldn't bear to stay with me." How I recognise it in my day to day to day life is when people want to be physically close to me a apart of me is surprised that they can bear that sort of contact with me. Somewhere I feel I'm too repulsive for any one to want to touch me.

My self-hatred came up a lot when I first started counselling, I would be crying about some of my early experiences and then suddenly the self-hatred would be there. I remember being totally shocked the first time it happened and sobbed my heart out that this was how I felt - 'how could I have felt like this about myself as a little girl?' Its still there. I almost marvel at its illusive nature. How it lives beneath my skin subtly effecting my whole being. How sometimes it stares me full in the face and still I don't recognise it. I misname it and go numb not realising that I simply feel that I'm bad. Unworthy. A line sticks in my mind from the Protestant prayer book we read from at church during the family service - 'We are not worthy Lord to gather up the crumbs from underneath thy table.' It just about summed it up for me. A mantra I carried around in my head. My terrible sin confirmed in that cold, dusty church, every Sunday for 10 years.

This feeling that adoptees have that we're bad doesn't go away. Its not like once we're adopted we say to ourselves 'well at least this family wants me', its more that we have an unconscious fear running everyday that one day they're going to find out that really I'm a bad person and leave me too. Adopted children never quite manage to relax.

The constant threat of being abandoned again makes upsetting or angering people seem life threatening. I think this is compounded by the emotions of the situation we were born into. It's almost inevitable that as tiny babies before we were given up for adoption our mothers would have been very upset, no doubt they would have got more upset as the day of parting drew nearer, and then the day itself would have been very painful for them. Whether or not they could express it and cry we would have felt how upset they were and we would have assumed it had something to do with us. Of course it did have a lot to do with us, but not us in ourselves, not us as the delightful babies we were, but we would have thought that we were somehow causing the upset and then what……..our mother goes. In our unconscious mind upset only leads to one thing. Abandonment by the one we love. Looking at my life I can see times where I sacrificed myself so as not to upset the people I was close to. I have only recently understood how deeply unconscious this has been and since then I have been fighting my own fear of abandonment for my right to say no. I understand now that if I don't give myself this right then I am not living my own life.

When Dad hit me all I wanted afterwards was for him not to feel upset, not to feel bad about himself. I would bite my lip trying not to cry and smile at him as soon as I could get my cheek muscles to turn my mouth back up. The message I wanted to convey was "See I'm okay, no need to feel bad about what you just did." And now it falls into place. Why I was desperate for him not to feel upset, not to feel bad about himself, why my survival seemed dependent on it. I realise now that not only would my birth mother have felt upset when I was taken from her but its almost certain that she would have felt really bad about herself. So many birth mothers talk about the overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame they feel for abandoning their baby even if it wasn't really their choice.

After my adopted mum died Dad was very upset and what happened to me? He sent me to live with my uncle and aunt for a while up in the far north of England and I didn't see him for 3 months. I remembered it as a whole year. I was 4 years old. When I came back somewhere inside me I was always wondering when was I going to be sent away again.

thursday
Tried Christopher again. I want him to be the first to know. What if he's on holiday or a long business trip? Went to see my friends in Frome - we're going to a party tonight. I was driving along with Simon (who had cooked the roasted duck at Christmas) when I suddenly came out with it. I'd been thinking if people asked me at the party how things were going I'd feel funny not saying as it's just about all I can think about at the moment! And it's part of my work, people always ask about that don't they? It felt fine telling him although it came out a bit rushed and was over before I'd really begun. Back at the house I told Tom and Philipa. Philipa's father left when she was a baby and Tom was in an incubator for three months, they both carry a lot of grief. They were really excited about my discovery.

At the party I was talking to this really friendly woman, Sue. We were in the kitchen, I was washing up and she was stabbing cocktail sticks into pieces of cheese and pineapple, when she asks me about my life. So I tell her. I tell her about the web site, I tell her about my diary and then I tell her how I've just found out where my mum lives. She was very interested and you'll never guess what! It turns out that her older half-brother (born before her mum was with her dad) was put up for adoption! No one had told her until one day out of the blue her dad had rung her up drunk and blurted it out. It was what she said next that really amazed me, she said she started to search for her brother herself. She wanted to meet this person who had been kept secret from her for all these years. She tracked him down eventually and wrote to him. They've met twice now. The second time he introduced her to his adopted family. He doesn't want to meet his birth mother and doesn't even want her to know that he's seeing Sue. Another secret lying in the dust. Sue thinks one day he might be ready to meet her. It's a revelation to me that a sibling would search. Maybe if my siblings knew that I existed they would want to find me.

Stayed the night at Tom and Philipa's. Woke to the sound of their Cock crowing in the garden. I couldn't get back to sleep so went for a walk in the woods behind the house. All I could hear were the birds and the sound of my own feet as they crunched down on the fallen leaves and twigs that carpet the forest floor.