As I moved toward a happier life I wondered more about where I came from and I talked to my Dad about my birth mother. He was enormously supportive and not at all hurt that I was curious. We didn’t really get anywhere because when I was adopted the records in the UK were sealed. In order to find more out, I could put my name in a registry but would have to go back to England for counseling before anything could go further. That was not a practical solution, so I put my name in a public Internet register as being willing to hear from my birth mother. I didn’t feel any urgency about the process and wasn’t disappointed when I never heard anything. I wondered what she looked like and where she was, but it was a distant sort of curiosity, the sort of curiosity you have about your great-aunt Gertrude who went to China as a missionary and was never heard from again.
Still, I think of her from time to time. I wonder if I look like her, or if I have half brothers or sisters. I wonder how she fills her days, what her likes and dislikes are. I do know from my adoption papers that she worked as a chocolate maker, which makes me laugh because given my sweet tooth I think she must have eaten a lot of chocolate when she was pregnant with me!
If I had children when I was married I might have felt more urgency about my origins, but I’m not sure of that. I come from an era when adoptions were far easier and you generally ended up with someone who was from your same background. I look quite a bit like my father’s Anglo-Irish family and my mother’s family, too. Besides, life has its mysteries; genetics isn’t the whole story of a person’s life or family, and I have had quite a life and family. I adored my father. He strode through my early life like a colossus. Handsome, charming, and kind, he was also unable to rescue himself from the demons that plagued him towards the end of his life. I can’t imagine trading him for an imagined, unnamed father. I loved him even when I despaired for him, and I mourn his loss every day.
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