I was adopted. It’s National Adoption Week; I have been following some detailed and very honest tweets by @kosjanka on the hashtag #naw. In the hope that my experience of adoption may help others, both parents and children, I thought I’d write some of it down.
It was a long time ago. The system has changed. And, alas, you cannot hear my adoptive parents' views, for they have both died.
First of all, I’ve known I was adopted for as long as I can remember. Believe it or not, some adopted children aren’t told and when they do find out, as they’re likely to do sooner or later, have a very difficult time. I can’t remember being told; I do remember, when on a walk with my parents one Sunday, having a man pointed out to me, smartly dressed, though rather short in stature. ‘That’s the judge who said we could have you’, I was told. On another occasion, when I was eight or nine years old, my mother and father wanted to speak to me; it seemed that the family entry in a genealogical reference book was being updated, and my brother and I were recorded as being adopted. Did we mind? I wasn't sure; I had no opinion on the matter.
Like most adopted children, I wondered about my birth parents, and about what might have happened. I knew that my mother could not have given me up for adoption lightly; neither did I delve too deeply into the reasons why my parents did not have children of their own, which seemed both impertinent, and probably against my interests. Like others, I dreamed up various improbable and romantic scenarios about my birth.
The most troublesome issue was that of my name. It was, or so I was told, a condition of the adoption that I should retain the name my birth mother had given me, but it was never used in the family, who always called me Tom. I should not read too much into this, as my father, whose forenames were William George, was always known as Tim. So I have gone through life known by one name for official purposes and with another that I answer to.
Some adopted children are deeply troubled by ideas of loss, but I don't believe I was.My childhood was not without its difficulties; I was bullied at school, indeed had to change schools, but so are many children and I don't think adoption predisposes one to bullying. I was sent to a child psychiatrist, but to be unhappy at school because the other boys are beastly to you seemed to us both a sign of mental health, not illness. I am now a parent myself of two grown-up children, which I think went reasonably well, though perhaps you should ask for their view. There is a school of thought that adoption predisposes one to problematic relationships, drink and drugs: my experience of such things is average for someone of my generation. Finally, are adoptive children more creative and imaginative? My novel remains unwritten.
For years I thought little about the fact of my adoption. After my father’s death, I decided that I wanted to know more. I had no intention of seeking out my birth parents but I wanted to know who they were, and what the circumstances of my birth were. So this is what I know: I am the child of a liaison between a doctor and a nurse at one of the London teaching hospitals. He was married but separated from his wife, unusual in 1954, when he met my mother at a hospital dance. She became pregnant and decided to have the baby but give me up for adoption. She came from Belfast and did not want her child to have to live with the stigma of illegitimacy, which in those years and in that society would have been considerable.
She must have taken the decision to give me up for adoption before I was born. She was sent to a children's home in a seaside town. There she left me and there I stayed for about six months. My mother used to say I was a floppy baby. I don’t know if I was perhaps premature, though my mother attributed it to being kept in a cot. I'm not sure at that very early age it would have made much of a difference.
My adoptive parents provided for me very well, and I had a good education. But while they put on the fact of adoption (which they never concealed from me) the gloss that I was special, different from other children by having been chosen, I always thought that there was something missing.
For years I affected to have little or no interest in my blood parents. After my father died, I felt freer to investigate and went to locate the records. I was given counselling at the Family Records Centre (now closed: why?) and then shown what there was. The records were quite detailed, including the adoption society's reports on my mother, a pen portrait of my father and, worst of all, some pitiful letters between my mother and the adoption society, after I had been taken away. In them she pleads for a photograph of me. They refused, not unkindly.
My birth father, as men are, was fairly easy to trace. I know that he left Britain, and now lives in a former colony, and has had a distinguished academic and clinical career. My birth mother is more difficult., I believe her to be in Ireland and still alive. I know that they were both musical, as I am, and that I probably have her eyes, but his build.
I may demonstrate how nurture triumphs over nature. From my birth parents, I have my physical appearance, but I don’t think much more.