week 8 - beginning 22nd January 2001

to see previous entries first click here

monday
Saw a nature programme on TV about Australia. If I'd been born a decade earlier I might now be an Australian. Separated from my family and homeland with very little chance of ever finding my birth family. Stolen to populate a colony. When Una got back from her Australian trip she talked a lot about the other stolen babies, babies stolen from the Aboriginal people to be brought up in white homes. Stolen from their families and their people. Stolen to satisfy a racist agenda.

Just had dinner. Mashed potato. I really love mashed potato. I add things to it to make it so delicious you would not believe.

wednesday
My late bedtime reading tonight is an internet magazine. Should I be worried?

friday
I wondered today how long it will before I actually try and make contact with my mum. Sent my brother Ken an adoption e-postcard from adoptedlife.com - the one with the fish in a bag looking at her new parents in disbelief.

I'm so glad I'm writing this diary otherwise I imagine I could easily tuck away in the back of my mind the amazing fact that I have found my mum's address. I looked her up on the map today to see where she lives and it's right by the sea, a small town on the sea front. It's funny I feel the urge to have more information before I see her, I want to know if I have any full or half sisters or brothers, if my dad's still alive. What's funny about it is if I wait until we see each other I could just ask her (if she'll see me that is), that would be a lot quicker than trawling through the last 37 years of births and deaths in her locality! To think that I could go and sit in a car down her street and watch her come out of her house and maybe get to see my granddad too!! I wouldn't feel right about doing it, spying on her but I'll do it if she won't see me.

saturday
woke up to the news on my radio. They're calling them the US internet twins. And they've just been taken away from the English couple who bought them, to be fostered while a legal battle decides who owns them - the announcer said they're onto their fourth set of parents. Why take them away at this point or doesn't it matter after all they've been taken away so often they must be used to it by now. Do people still think that babies don't have feelings?

The scandal is the adoption agency selling the babies to one couple and then taking them back and selling them to a UK couple who made a higher offer. I am shocked - shocked that you can sell a baby and then shocked that if you buy one the deal isn't closed but open to better offers. I hope the adoption agency is disqualified from ever practising again.

Once upon a time the possibilities were quite earthly - you could get left in a cardboard box on someone's doorstep, or even a trash can but now you can be a cyber baby, bought and sold over the internet.

child - 'Where did I come from mummy?'
mum - 'Cyberspace darling.'

child (to herself) - 'Well that explains why I don't fit in around here.'

I wonder how I would feel knowing that I had been bought by my adopted parents. What if they'd had to save up for me? Make sacrifices in order to put money aside. I could imagine the thoughts that might run around in my head. 'Was I worth it?' 'Were they pleased with the deal?' 'Did they get their money's worth?' And then the realisation would come that if I was bought my birth family would have sold me. Unless of course I was stolen.

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

(Stealing babies is very common in some parts of the world see Romania selling babies and Indian babies sold in Australia on our news page.)