What happened to me will never happen again

My experience was typical of the era. My adoptive parents were missionaries who lived in East Africa. They had already adopted a little boy, and now they wanted a little girl. It was very much about meeting their needs, rather than my needs as the child. They came to the courts in Northern Ireland, where I was being adopted, and took me straight to Burundi. Luckily, they were very loving parents, but they could have been anyone!

My brother and I didn’t find out about being adopted until I was eight. It was a terrible shock. My parents knew very little – an unbelievably tiny amount – about my birth family and origins. We were also told that it was best not to talk about our adoption to anyone outside of the family.

I was sent to boarding school when I was ten, which coincided with a lot of self-examination. I found myself wondering what my birth parents were like and fantasising about my birth mother, in particular. Would she have sent me to boarding school? Was I like her?

I was so different to my adoptive mother. I was a wild teenager and expelled from school twice, while my parents were very strong Christians. I was also physically different, which people used to comment on. Although I felt loved by my parents, we had a tricky relationship during those teenage years. I felt they were trying to make their mark on me, to make me somebody I wasn’t.

My brother and I were quite needy children who competed a lot for our parents’ attention. I didn’t make the link between that difficult behaviour and my adoption until my mid to late twenties. I think an adoptive person does need that extra support, that extra affirmation.

One day, I saw somebody on television who specialised in tracing, and I knew I had to go for it. We arranged a meeting with my birth mother, Sue, which my adoptive family drove me to. They were very supportive.

When I finally met Sue, a lot of things came out that put the past right. Some information I’d been given by my adoptive family was factually wrong, as they had known so little. My birth father hadn’t left Sue when she fell pregnant at 18 – he had wanted to marry her but she felt too young. I could actually understand this and even thought she’d been brave. I wouldn’t have wanted to marry at 18 either. There seemed to be similarities between us, as we were both strong personalities.

The whole experience of tracing was a mixed bag. I found it hurtful that my birth parents had hardly told anyone about me. My birth father wrote that he couldn’t meet me as he’d never spoken about my adoption with his wife. I felt like a shameful secret. But then, this was mitigated by the answers I finally got hold of, the myths that were dispelled. And although I was happily married, with two lovely boys, meeting my birth mother did so much for my self-esteem and identity.

Physically, I had finally met someone who looked like me! Sue is also tall with huge brown eyes. She said I looked like my birth father too, but I have never seen a photograph. She didn’t have the same hair as me, but she was able to provide some clues…

I hated my dark and curly hair when I was younger. But when I found out that my birth father was Welsh, I wondered whether there were links to Tiger Bay, a dockyard area of Cardiff that contained many migrant communities, particularly black Caribbeans. I was later told that a blue mole at the base of my spine can sometimes indicate mixed ethnicity. Since finding out all this information, I’ve become more at peace with my hair and the way I look generally.

I would have loved access to some of the things that looked after children have today, like indirect contact, where you send things like letters and photos. It would have been wonderful to have had two sets of parents who worked together to help me develop as a person.

I can understand that some adoptive or foster families might perceive a child’s past and birth family as a bit of a threat to their affection and loyalty, but I would argue that a child needs as much information as possible. In the long term, it really helps a child to know where they’ve come from – why complex things have happened. When looking over your life, some frame of reference is essential.

Now I sit on an adoption panel, and find it fascinating how much attention is given to developing the identity of a looked after child. I know that what happened to me will never happen again, and that comforts me.

Annie's real photograph could not be used in this article.

So how can we be sure it won’t happen again?

Adoption legislation and practice has changed a lot since Annie was adopted in the 1960s. And the changes began with the Adoption Act 1976.

This Act instructed that a child's ethnic origin, culture, language and religion be taken into account when family finding. Perhaps most significantly, this Act also gave adopted people a legal right to their birth certificate – on the agreement that, if born before 1975, the person have counselling, due to the strong likelihood that their birth parents might not welcome any tracing, as they had not been prepared for such a possibility.

At long last, the days of secrecy for adoptive people, and not knowing anything about their origins (sometimes not even knowing until later in life that they were even adopted), were coming to an end.

It wasn’t long until further changes were on the horizon. These changes were influenced by adoption practice abroad, in countries like New Zealand, where a much more ‘open model’ was in use.

The passing of the Children Act 1989 meant that social workers were committed to considering contact between an adoptive child and their birth family. The Act also declared that the wishes and feelings of adoptive children were paramount, and that they must have access to relevant information and records.

Originally published in the Be My Parent newspaper in March 2009.

This article is published with the kind permission of the people involved. You may download it for your own reference but if you wish to use it for any other purpose, please contact Be My Parent for authorisation: Be My Parent, BAAF, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Telephone: 020 7421 2666/5/4.

Last updated: 30 April 10

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