The Way We Never Were: Afterword

The closing chapter to the book I'm writing with my brother:

"Adoption is constantly in the news, often for all the wrong reasons: because it went wrong; because it only happened because of some huge miscarriage of justice; because the process is outdated and Kafka-esque. In the last few years the Conservative government has made it a priority to try to make the adoption system smoother, easier and quicker. I am most certainly not a Conservative and have never voted for them, but I have been hugely impressed in particular with Tim Loughton’s efforts in this area.

I still to this day describe myself as a poster child for adoption, and am so deeply and desperately grateful for the opportunities and experiences it gave me. I am closer to my parents than almost anyone I know is to theirs. My dad is and will always be my greatest role model, and if I am ever half the person he is I know I will have succeeded. To me he epitomises all that is good about human nature – the love, wisdom, humour and compassion that makes up a truly great man. I am the product of a grand experiment of nature versus nurture, whereby nurture has triumphed. Although there are inevitably things that are sad about the whole state of affairs, the positives far outweigh the negatives. Controversially, I don’t agree with “letterbox adoptions”, where children keep in touch with their “real” parents. My real parents are the two people that raised me and still to this day love me and care for me, and letterbox adoptions strike me simply as glorified fostering without the pay. I also – again, contentiously – disagree with constant attempts to force children to live with parents who are not in a position to look after them. Of course we don’t want to return to the days when children are whipped away from parents because of our own prejudices, but at the same time I don’t see that it’s in the interests of the child to go backwards and forwards, from foster home to foster home, until eventually the system admits defeat – those are the children that then find themselves permanently in care because they are “unadoptable” or, even if they are adopted eventually, face longer-term problems. Being adopted as a baby was wonderful because it didn’t require me any special efforts to incorporate me into my new family – they are the only family I have ever known, and I have never had any doubt that that was where I belonged.

Recently I watched a programme called “Finding Mum and Dad”, which almost broke my heart. It showed older children going to “adoption parties”, which seemed to me like speed dating for unwanted children, with prospective parents effectively looking around going “ooh, that one’s nice”. In it a seven-year-old boy showed off his little sister’s old room at his foster parents’ house. “Where is she now?” the interviewer asked, to which the boy replied seriously, “She’s been adopted.”

The programme made me realise that, although I look back with regret on a childhood we never had together, and for which we can never quite make up, Lee and I were incredibly lucky to end up in loving, caring, nurturing homes – me through adoption and he through long-term fostering. Beryl Linehan was truly our guardian angel, first arranging my adoption and then scooping up Lee and shaping him into the lovely man he is today while, across the English Channel, my parents did the did the same with me.

And now, finally, we have each other too.