My parent was adopted - guest blog from Sandra

I always knew my mother was adopted and it was very much a cognitive understanding – just a fact of which I was aware but rarely spoke about  and neither did my mother. It was not in any way a secret and I always viewed my mother’s adopted parents as my grandparents. My mother always called my grandmother ‘Nan,’ and she always referred to her as either ‘Nan’ or ‘Sandra’s Nan’ when speaking to others. It seems incredulous that I never enquired why she never called her ‘mum’ or ‘mother,’ but I just never asked.  It was normal to me. 

My mother and I lived together until we were parted when I was 17 in 1975.  At the time I had no understanding of it being a truly traumatic event and I never considered this relinquishment in terms of it being a repeat of what had happened to my mother many years earlier.  My mother was adopted when she was two years old, so it is not known how many relinquishments she experienced after she was separated from her biological mother at birth.  

My mother told me that she did not know she was adopted until she was 16 and this information was given to her without any accompanying explanation. So, the way this information was conveyed to me was, again, as just information.  I was to find out the true impact and how deeply unhappy my mother was over 30 years later when we began seeing each other again. Sadly, this reconnection was far from desirable for so many reasons and, retrospectively, I was able to see that she never enjoyed a secure attachment with either of her adoptive parents.  It will not  surprise you reader that I have a therapist. And perhaps what my therapist wrote about our mother-daughter relationship in terms of attachment will not surprise you either – in my therapist’s words:  The attachment you had been offered was so severely neglectful that it does not match up with any attachment theory diagnosis. It was not disorganised or ambivalent or insecure. It was an absent attachment.

My mother’s last reference to her biological mother was shortly before she died.  During an encounter with me she told me I was a beautiful baby; I responded by telling her that I was sure she was a beautiful baby too.  ‘I couldn’t have been’ she replied, ‘because my mother gave me away.’   

Having access to so much my mother wrote when she found her biological family where she talks about her 47 yearlong ‘longing’ to find her ‘real’ relatives has impacted me greatly because I now know how much it impacted her while we were together. How did she really relate to me?

And now I have met members of mine and my mother’s biological family I feel a sense of belonging that was so unexpected and certainly unpredicted. It is wonderful to have found kin in my 60s who are like me – if only I had met them long ago. It feels like a bereavement in reverse.

Peer support group for the offspring of adopted people

I was looking for a support group or information for the offspring of adopted parents and found none.  I am posting this on the How To Be Adopted website to see if there is any interest in starting a group. You can email me on sandra@endersbytraining.com

Photo by Goutham Krishna on Unsplash