My Story Is Mine To Tell

Contrary to what I might write on a CV, or how I hope I present myself at work, I actually have very few skills. I obtained two degrees mainly due to tenacity and writing about things so mind-numbingly dull that I'm not sure my tutors even bothered to read them, and I get through life on a combination of long words and hit-and-miss witticisms that provide an illusion of intelligence.

The one thing I can do to a passable level is communicate, and so, for the past few years, I've been trying, in writing and in interviews, to convey in an accessible way the many complexities and conflicts around adoption. I volunteered, as I explained in my last post on this now-sporadic blog, for an adoption charity, which basically meant that, if adoption was in the news for some reason and they wanted someone who could vaguely string a sentence together to comment on it, out I would come. This came to a head before Christmas when I had an article in Metro. It was extremely hard to write, and the resulting fall-out from the charity's insistence I change a word, and constant follow-up from journalists demanding "just a bit more", drove me close to the edge. What drove me almost to a literal edge as well as a metaphorical one was a message from my birth father's wife telling me "everyone" was "sick and tired" of me "carrying on" about being adopted and I needed to just shut up and get on with my life. While I might eventually write (if anyone is really interested) about what happened next, I am going to write this now for two reasons: 1.) This is my story to tell, and while I am under no illusions that many will find my navel-gazing uninteresting, I will not be told how, if or with whom it should be shared. 2) I've been having specialist therapy for the first time ever (having tried the more generic kind several times before) and after a cathartic discussion this week about my grandmother, I feel able, for the first time, to write about her. 

In my therapy, we've isolated (without too much difficulty) the death of my grandmother earlier in the year as the trigger for a recent, destructive downward spiral. From all my "carrying on" about adoption, many people will know I was "found" a few years back by a family member, resulting in the opening up of many potential relationships, often with people whom I didn't even know existed. Some were positive, some difficult. Some fizzled out, others are continuing, to one degree or another. But by far the most positive was with Barbara, my nana. I realised that I never really paid tribute to her, perhaps because her death last year was easily one of the most devastating things ever to happen in my life.

Adoptees often tire of the many documentaries that present a happy-ever-after. You know the ones: an adoptee and their family member - usually the mother - meet for the first time and immediately they fall naturally into one another's arms; there are tears and comments like "you look so much like me!" and "this just feels so right." Non-adoptees think this is beautiful - after all, everyone likes a fairytale - and adoptees sigh because once again here we are providing the rest of you with a good story. Meeting my mum and brother - both of whom I love - I was almost straining to find things in common, willing myself to feel some deep and instant bond when common sense dictated this just wasn't logical with people I had never met. And then I met my grandmother, and everything fell into place.

My grandmother - Nana - was wonderful. She was ebullient, funny, naughty. She sparkled with life, with joy. She was a natural communicator, a poet, a genius with words. I soon discovered, like me, that not only did she write, but she wrote humour. My Nana could sit with a circle of people around her and have them in stitches for hours. Her personality dazzled, engaged and amused. The first time I met her a little bit of my world clicked into place: immediately I felt relief and joy at finally finding this common bond without making any special effort to manufacture it; immediately I thought "this is where I came from."

Over the next couple of years my Nana and I exchanged old-fashioned letters, and I giggled at her easy, conversational style. "I've been watching that Roger Federer in the tennis," she wrote once, "ooh, I do love him." 

We met just once more - a joyous, boozy family evening with my aunt, uncle and cousin. I owe them all so much. They - who had known nothing about me until a couple of years before - welcomed me into their family unconditionally. they showed me a level of love and kindness I did nothing to earn, and for that I am eternally grateful. 

The week my grandma died I tried to get a flight over to see her, but I had a conference at work on the Monday and Tuesday, so I arranged to fly over on the Wednesday, knowing this would be a trip with the sole aim of saying goodbye one last time. She died on the Tuesday morning, and I will hate myself for the rest of my life for not going sooner. While again the family was at pains to include me at the funeral to the point that my picture was even included on a collage of family photographs. Nearly ten months on, if I'm honest I am still consumed not with good memories (though they are there) but rage, regret and pain that I had only 3 years to get to know this amazing, special, vibrant woman, and no words can do justice for the admiration, love and gratitude I still feel for her. 

When my (adoptive) grandma on my dad's side died I was very sad, because I adored her, but it was not devastating in the same way. I had known her all my life, had watched her grow old and slip into dementia. She died in her 90s after a long, fruitful life which she had lived full of love for those around her. I didn't get this chance with Nana. Barbara Fitchett, this is too little, too late, but I love you dearly and I thank you from every fibre of my being for every moment, every letter, every hug. Rest in peace.

I talked about Nana in more detail when I was carrying on about adoption on this podcast.

Not with a bang but a whimper

In the last few days, it feels as though another proverbial chapter has closed in the strange and unpredictable novel that began last August. In trying to make light of it to a friend, I summed it up thus: "To reject a child once may be considered a misfortune; to do so twice looked like carelessness."

As an adopted child growing up, the one person with whom you think you may possibly, one day, be reunited is your birth mother. As a woman especially, it always bothered me to think of someone carrying a child all that time, only to have to give it away. The mere idea of it seemed so impossible and unbearably painful to me. I fretted that, whoever and wherever she was, my birth mother may have doubts or regrets, be angry or sad. I toyed for many years with the idea of writing a letter simply to say that I was OK, that I bore no grudges, that on the contrary in her selfless act of giving me away my mother had granted me the gift of a wonderful life.

I didn't know I had a brother, and it certainly never occurred to me that there would be a birth father on the scene who actively wanted to get to know me. Wrongly and perhaps without basis in anything other than stereotype I always sort of assumed there wasn't a father, in that his role may merely have been, as a friend so delicately put it, ejaculation. So it was a surprise - a pleasant one - to find myself in touch with two blood relatives who had never crossed my mind, and, at the same time, a little sad to have no contact at all with the person who (from a physical point of view if nothing more) had the most intense connection with me before adoption.

When I read about my birth mother and her background I assumed there was no mileage in a potential reunion. As contact with my brother increased in earnest, I watched her post comments under mine on his Facebook wall, knowing fully who I was and making no attempt to acknowledge this, and it wrenched my heart just a little. I assumed this was simply her way of dealing with it until I discovered, as the drip-drip-drip of information (the whole process being hugely fragmented and unsatisfactory) continued, that when I was three she made a request to the agency for a photo of me, but the request was declined. This changed my view a little. This woman, I reasoned, had wanted to see her little girl, to know how she turned out. This woman was not cold-hearted, and most certainly not uninterested. That her request was denied seemed overwhelmingly cruel. I hoped that one day I might be able to provide her with the photo she'd asked for all those years ago, and got my chance when eventually, on my brother's Facebook, she suddenly wrote "hi Polly."

Having sought advice from two adoption charities, I contacted her by private message, taking a slow and careful approach. I sent her a picture of me aged 3, which was a fairly emotional experience. She sent me some pictures of her, and asked for photos of me now. I posted her a picture of me and my husband on a rooftop bar in Bangkok, which she said she would frame.

But things felt difficult. On the one hand, our conversations were natural and easy - we discovered we had a lot in common, including that we both have problems with our left knees but not the right ones. On the other, she seemed to be seeking validation that I could not give. "You are my life", she said of the 32 year old she had never met, not even (according to my records) directly after birth. "I think of you all the time. Did you think about me?" I felt bad admitting that, actually, I hadn't, as I'd known nothing about her, simply replying that I'd wondered about her. At the start of our conversations she told me she'd always thought about me on my birthday, but later asked "when is your birthday, January or February isn't it?" She was unhappy that I would not make her boyfriend my friend on Facebook, even though I explained that I didn't know him and was uncomfortable about this.

After less than a month of contact, and for reasons I still haven't been able to unravel, having told me the previous day that I was pretty and seemed "kind" and having made a photograph of me her profile picture, she sent me a string of messages saying she did not want to know me any more. She had asked if we could meet and I had said "soon", then suddenly she was messaging me saying "you don't want to meet me that's ok its your life do what you want." The final message simply read "I won't be messaging you no more. nice knowing you. bye."

I don't think there is a blueprint for how one should feel about this, and at the moment I'm not convinced I am really feeling anything. On the one hand, I know that I have tried. I can assure myself that I occupy a sort of moral high ground, as I could have rejected her - I could have said "You made your decision 32 years ago" and left it there. But I simply couldn't. That would have been wrong, and it would have been unfair. Instead, I achieved what I had wanted all this time: she knows that I am safe, happy, and bear her no grudges. She hopefully found peace in that. I am currently busy launching a tentative and rather self-conscious stand-up career so am going to huge lengths to invest all my energies into that. On the other hand, a little bit of my heart just irreparably broke.

So that was that - a cold, underwhelming, undramatic ending - not so much a bang as a whimper. I have never been good at rejection - a psychiatrist would, I'm sure, have a field day with all this. I have been disproportionately devastated by friends walking out on me, or even by criticism. I have spent my life feeling that I do not deserve to be here, and that I need to constantly prove my worth if I am to be allowed to stay.

And so, to misquote Oscar Wilde, as any good stand-up comic should, I will say only this before trying to start again: "To reject a child once could be considered a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness." I hope my mother got something positive out of our brief relationship and is moving on. I am doing my best to do just that.

Guardian Angel

An appropriate extract from "The Way We Never Were" to mark Mother's Day

Thinking about it, Beryl Linehan probably had more influence on my life than anyone else, outside of my immediate family. She is one of those of whom people will sigh fondly if you mention her name – a selfless, caring, strong and courageous woman – my dad calls her a modern-day saint. I will never know the full story of my adoption, but I do know that this woman was instrumental in it, both persuading my mother that it was the best option for me, then making it her business to find me the right parents.

Around the time the matter of my future was being discussed, my parents, several hundred miles away in the north of England, had been waiting for 7 years to adopt a child. They had almost done so on several occasions, but each time it had fallen through, for various reasons – they had been about to adopt a young deaf girl, but she had gone to parents who knew sign language, which mine didn’t. Approaching forty, they were about to become “too old” to be considered as adopters. If they didn’t get someone soon, they would remain childless forever.

My parents have always felt that they got me by the skin of their teeth, and I know the process they faced was difficult and intrusive. It infuriates me even today that you read of parents being asked ridiculous questions, and of social workers undertaking ludicrous feats of social engineering in putting families together. I understand that it’s in the interests of children to be placed with a family with similar characteristics to them, be they racial, social or whatever, but that can go too far. There isn’t an equivalent, whereby the state looks at natural families and dictates whether they’re doing things correctly or not. I know of many families where there are several natural siblings, brought up in the same way by the same parents, who take completely different paths in life. Two of my friends at school were twins: one is straight, one lesbian; one didn’t go to university, the other has a higher degree. In my parents’ case, they say that serious doubt was at one stage cast on their suitability to adopt me, because both of them were considered to be highly educated (though in my mother’s case she took her degree part time through the Open University, having not had the opportunity to do it earlier in life.) The social worker genuinely believed that this would put pressure on me, that I was going to have special educational needs and that it would be detrimental to me (rather than encouraging/aspirational) to grow up with “high achieving” parents. My mother and Beryl clubbed together to persuade her that they would be able to provide me with any help that I needed, not least because of my mother’s teaching experience. Reluctantly, they say, the social worker agreed. The ironic thing is that, years on (and thanks largely to my parents' encouragement and meticulous care), I have exceeded everyone’s expectations – I have a Masters degree as well as an undergraduate degree, a legal qualification and have been lucky enough to travel to two continents with work. Perhaps I’m an example of why the so-called experts should be a little more reasonable and have the humility simply to do their best and not to attempt to play God when creating new families. My mother wrote to Beryl soon after I received my second degree, knowing how thrilled she would be, as I had studied Christian Ethics at a Catholic institution and was awarded my certificate by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor. I like to think that Beryl felt a sense of pride, and possibly even smugness, at my success, though I doubt she did as she was far too modest a person for that. However I know she kept the letter, as it was this very letter that eventually led to my brother tracking me down.

After I was successfully bundled off to the North with my new parents, Beryl subsequently rescued my brother, too. We’ve never had an adequate answer of why I was placed for adoption and he was not, as he never returned to his mother, and her relationship with our father had broken up by then. Instead, he stayed within the care system, in a sort of limbo – not adopted, not at home. After unsuccessful foster placements Beryl did something that sounds characteristic of her: she decided she would do a better job than anybody else of taking care of him, so she took him home as one of her own. He grew up, like me, in a loving family with several foster siblings. Like me he played musical instruments and was sporty – as a teenager he was an impressive swimmer (I stuck more to music). He also became fluent in sign language, because one of his foster brothers was deaf. Still one of the most intriguing coincidences in the whole saga is this: at fourteen, bored, trapped and itching to leave the small community in which I lived (I did indeed run away to London as soon as I could, and am still here), I made one of my regular trips to the local library to try to find something to occupy my time. I found a book on sign learning sign language and taught myself the alphabet and a few basic signs. Not far away, the brother I was yet to find out about was chatting away to his sibling using those very same, little-known gestures.

I met Beryl once, but didn’t know who she was. It was the Feast of the Assumption and I had been invited to sing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” at a local church. A couple of rows back was an older lady, and as I approached the second verse she started crying. I was a little startled at the time, and joked to my mum afterwards that I must have been rubbish, because I’d made someone cry. I assumed, I suppose, that it was a barmy old woman of my grandmother’s ilk, a devout Catholic moved to tears by the Blessed Virgin. I didn’t know that afterwards she had gone up to my dad, embraced him and, nodding to me, said “I did that.”

Beryl was our guardian angel. I like to think that she had always hoped we would be reunited: by becoming my brother's foster mother and keeping channels of communication very much open with my own mum, there was always a very real possibility that one day we would be together again. I’m just sad that this happened after her death. It is perhaps my greatest regret in life that I never said thank you, that I never hugged her and got to tell her just how deeply grateful I am to her, and that she didn’t live to see two of her greatest success stories get to know one another. I hope, somewhere, she knows.

The Way We Never Were - Moving On

Another extract from the book-to-be, from the chapter Moving On
While I was at university the then Labour government set out to change the law to allow relatives to trace. At the time I was infuriated. My opinion then was that I was not some piece of property to be collected at a time of someone else’s choosing. I felt it was unfair for anyone to be able to “Trace” me, even if it were done through a third party, as it seemed a huge and potentially dangerous invasion of privacy. I wrote a letter to Margaret Hodge, the Children’s Minister, setting out my concerns, but she never wrote back. A letter from my own MP explained, rather patronisingly, that everything would of course be dealt with sensitively through a third party, but even that seemed to me to be too much – as I discovered when Lee eventually found me, once that door has been opened, it’s almost impossible to say no. If you never want to be “found”, you shouldn’t be placed in a position where you have to say “No”. In my letter to Mrs Hodge I proposed a different system whereby both the birth relative (mother or father or sibling) could lodge a letter with the agency responsible saying they’d be happy for contact and specifying whether they wanted this to be in person or just by letter et cetera. If the adopted person did the same, then the intermediary could be in touch to explain how this could actually happen. Such a system would also have perhaps meant my own decision not to trace might have been different: I did think about doing so once, but my mum rightly warned that I didn’t know what position my birth mother was in: if she had kids of her own, for example, I could potentially cause tremendous damage by turning up out of the blue, however delicately this was done.

For much of my life, being adopted has been an interesting quirk rather than something that has caused me distress or discomfort. But I’ve always wondered, on and off, about the circumstances of my adoption, worrying that it might have been the result of something terrible – for example, that my mother was raped – or that my mother might not have had a choice in the matter. The Magdalene Sisters came out while I was at university and was a stunning film that had a big impact on me due to my Catholic upbringing, even though I wasn’t Irish and knew that I wouldn’t have come from such cruel beginnings. At 22 I wrote a play called Ducklings, where I wanted to give a sympathetic portrayal of the birth mother. I left adoptive parents out of it altogether, not wanting to upset or implicate my own in any way, and focussed on the (admittedly rather irritating) adopted main character and the lack of relationship she had when she was cajoled into tracing her mother mother. Much of what you read or watch about reunions between long-lost family members is heavy on dramatic impact and told from one extreme or the other: the heart-wrenching first meeting where the protagonists become inseparable, the tearful bear hugs surrounded by dramatic scenery (these people never just meet up in the pub) or the exact opposite, where they find themselves hating one another. I wanted Ducklings to look at the possibility of a third option: that Maria, the mother, was, for want of a better phrase, not all that bothered. Based on the change in law, rather than either the mother or daughter triggering the reunion it is an aunty that first writes to her adopted niece, introducing herself. The daughter then takes it upon herself to go in search of her mother. It was meant to be funny, and succeeded in some ways, I think – it was performed in the studio at the Hampstead Theatre, though nothing ever came of it after that. Interestingly, years later, my lack of reunion with my birth mother and the fact that it was a relative I didn’t know existed that traced me through their own detective work showed it to have been not all that inaccurate.

Extract from “Ducklings”
SUSIE: What did you name me?
MARIA: You didn’t have a name.
SUSIE: Why not?
MARIA: I didn’t even know what sex you were!
SUSIE: But you must’ve thought about it, though? I’ve thought about what names I’d call my children loads of times.
MARIA: And what did you come up with?
SUSIE: I keep changing my mind. I like Paul, for boys. And Maisie for girls.
MARIA: Sounds like a breakfast cereal.
(Pause)
SUSIE: So… you didn’t even think about it?
MARIA: No. You were taken away immediately. Your new parents wanted their own baby, not somebody else’s. (Pause, explaining:) It’s like ducklings. You take a duckling away from its mum and he’s buggered. She’ll not take him back because she doesn’t recognise him any more, but no other duck wants him because he’s not theirs. But if his mum dies, it’s a different story altogether. Another duck’ll take it under her wing and raise him like one of her own. I think it’s ducks do that, but anyway, you see what I mean.
SUSIE: So why did you give me up?
MARIA: You don’t mess about, you, do you?
SUSIE: No, but I was… I mean…
MARIA: What did your parents tell you about why?
SUSIE: Nothing. They said they didn’t know. They swore they didn’t get told anything!
MARIA: Well then they probably didn’t.
SUSIE: Was I a mistake?

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.