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I am a late discovery adoptee who found out by chance in the 1990s when I already had 3 children that I had been adopted at three months old. When I was told I had a maelstrom of emotions, suddenly everything made sense, all those little hints that I was not quite the same as other members of the family and I should be grateful for things I wasn’t even aware of. I immediately went into a flurry of research into my first identity and family. As this was slightly before mainstream online resources I spent months looking at archives and finally accidentally doorstepping a brother of my original mother. I had lots of therapy which provided a safe space to explore my anger and pain, beating up cushions and shouting (virtually) at my birth and adoptive mothers, ‘wasn’t I a perfectly lovely baby, why did you abandon me’ and ‘why oh why did you continue to lie to me that about my real identity.’ My adoptive father had died when I was nine so that was given as a reason for not telling me as we had been very close.
When I was given a photograph of my original mother it was the first time I had the shock of a genealogical mirror.
I was too late to meet my original parents who had both died before my discovery but met half siblings from both sides in America and Canada. Good to have a sense of genealogical identity but too late to reknit the lost shared history.
Over time I have explored these experiences of Dis-Locations and Broken Narratives in video and mixed artworks and a practice-based 2018 PhD. This has included work on 19th century Child Migration to Canada on a route travelled by my original mother without me after my birth.
I am continuing to be surprised by my own responses to different discoveries including ongoing research into the effects of CPTSD and the molecular interrelationships between mother and child.
It is a bit like kintsugi, a reinterpretation of the self with clearly defined fissures and cracks joined by gold. “Every life is a piece of art held together with whatever means available”, Pierre Janet quoted by Bessel Van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score.
I was the Parcel
Passed from Hand to Hand
Never Knowing who would catch me
Or if I should
Fall into the Darkness
And be
Lost
Written after first discovery