...since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent....
I’ll sing you a sad song.
It’s true.
It’s 6.23 in the morning, on Thursday the third of March, 2005. And I’m sat in my room, in the dark, with the curtains open and the streetlights still on and just enough light to be able to read coming through the window. And I’m thinking about people that I’ve never met, and maybe never will.
If I wasn’t a cliché, then I wouldn’t be smoking right now, and there wouldn’t be a glass of red wine next to me, and I wouldn’t be listening to a sad slow Gallon Drunk song on my headphones. And I guess if I wasn’t such a cliché then I wouldn’t be writing at all.
The burning in my stomach from last night’s argument was drowned by the wine a few hours ago, and all that’s left is a soggy unhappy ash.
I noticed it was cold, half an hour ago, and I pulled the curtain open for no particular reason. And there was a shallow veil of snow over everything, the road and the gardens and the pavements. I could see the last flurries of it falling through the white burn of the streetlights.
God. It was still and pretty as the girl I used to know, the girl with black hair.
There are patterns on the road now, geometric patterns, circles and lines looping through each other and leading off to other places, like an epileptic treasure map. The sky is that borderless pale grey that’s either cloudless or nothing but. Maybe one giant cloud, stretching the length of the country, as far as the eye can see in all directions.
I was writing something entirely different, and then the song came on, and I had another beer which tipped me into three-drink melancholia, and having a smoke didn’t help at all. So I started again, started with a blank page, and I ended up with a blank page and I ended up with this.
Let’s play a game.
It’s easy. All you need is your eyes and a street with people on it. And here’s what you do. First, imagine that absolutely anybody that you see on the street could be your mother. Second, imagine that anyone you see could be your father. That’s it.
Oh, and you can’t win.
I remember the first time that thought occurred to me. In town on a cold sunny Saturday afternoon with my longest-serving friend, wandering from one music shop to the next and not buying anything. We were sixteen and exercising our right to do nothing of any use in public.
On the high street, a woman walked past, just an unremarkable normal-looking woman, twenty years older than me. And I noticed she had dark hair, like me, and wore glasses, like me. And it hit me, then, the dull realisation that this everyday woman could have been my mother. Sure, the odds are against, tiny, infinitesimal, but you know as well as I do that strange things happen.
So. That woman could have been my mother. And I started looking around at all the people wandering by, carrying plastic bags or talking on phones or herding bored children, and I couldn’t stop thinking that any one of them – of a certain age, granted – could be my mother or father. Scanning the hundreds of faces and comparing them to an abstract mental image of what my parents might look like.
I told my friend I had a headache and I caught the bus home. I looked at the floor the whole way back.
I remember, very distinctly, being sixteen (and yes, I know, it’s the archetypal troubled-teenager age) and sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office. He was a specialist, for children, and I saw him rather than anyone else because I wasn’t classed as an adult yet, though I resented it at the time and maybe still.
I remember sitting there amongst the glaring plastic toys and cardboard books with letters as big as my hand, head full of painkillers and regret, and feeling a fire in my stomach whenever I thought back to what he’d said.
(Beginner’s guide to psychiatry - when seeing a patient for the first time, saying “I’m going to Australia next week, so if you come back, you won’t be seeing me” isn’t a good way to build trust and promote comfort.)
Him: Is there anything else that you think I should know?
Me: (Yeah. You’re a bastard and I hate you.) No.
Him: You’re sure? Anything you tell me won’t go any further.
Me: (Fuck. Off.) No.
Silence, for a while, him playing his game to perfection and me, of course, buckling and terrified of the silence.
Me: (Bloodyhellsaysomethingcomeoncomeon) Well, I was adopted.
Him: Really?
Me: (Idiot.) Yeah.
I remember seeing his face lift as if a crane had pulled his features ten feet in the air. Apparently he thought it was significant. I resented him for it. I used to think that who I was, the problems I had and have, had nothing to do with the fact I was adopted. And I hated him for jumping on the first easy answer that came along.
I was there for reasons too personal and – unfortunately – everyday to tell you about now, and he was there because it was his job. I remember very clearly his face when I told him that I was adopted, and it looked like the same face Sherlock Holmes would have had when he found that missing clue. I resented being there, anyway, but I resented him for thinking that my adoption was the cause of all my problems. But maybe he was onto something, after all.
For a long time I felt, I still feel, disconnected from other people, from the world screaming by. A little lost and a little discarded, out of place and maybe out of time. I won’t get into it all now but it’s been with me for a long time and I don’t see a point when it won’t be with me. Perhaps these feelings are what drove me towards writing in the first place. Perhaps not.
I can’t remember who said it or when, but the gist was something like this; if you’re happy and well-adjusted and have a full life then you’ve no need to create anything, you’ve no need for self-expression because in the course of your everyday life you are expressing yourself, and you’re showing the world your true self. It’s only when you can’t show that true face to the world that you’re driven to show it in writing of painting or music or acting, whatever grips you most.
Now, I don’t entirely agree with that, partly because it gives credence to the bullshit mythos of the tortured artist, and more than that, it makes exclusive a world of expression that should be open entirely to anybody that wants to move into it. But there’s something to it, nonetheless. I know that I feel like a lost piece of a jigsaw and I know that writing is a place I can exert some control over my world.
I don’t know if I feel the way I do because I was adopted or if I’d feel the same whatever my circumstances happened to be.
It raises far too many old unanswerable questions to go into here – nature or nurture, primarily, but also what makes people spend so much time creating things that are, at best, abstracts of feelings.
My gut reaction to all of this is the feeling that I’d be the same whatever situation I was in, that I am the way I am and would be no matter the circumstances. But perhaps that’s just a strange stubbornness. Perhaps I can’t admit that I’m more susceptible to the vagaries of the world than I’d like to be, that I’m not quite as John Wayne-stoic as I’d like to be, that I can be affected by these things I have no control over.
Honesty? Okay, I’ll play if you will. It must have had an affect on me. I don’t know just what that it was, and is, but it’s there, I think, regardless. Knowing that I was adopted made me acutely aware, as far back as I remember, that there was always something a little different about me. That there was something about me that wasn’t like any of my playground friends, even on a prosaic level. Here:
My mother’s parents were Irish Catholics. And, as is their way, they had a hell of a lot of kids. Who, in turn, also had a lot of kids. The upshot being that my extended family – aunts and uncles and cousins and others whose designation I couldn’t guess at – runs close to fifty. Of that two-score, four of us are adopted. Me, my sister, and two of my cousins. And though we’ve only ever been treated as full and complete members of the family, loved and loving, if you came to one of our parties it’d be easy to pick those four from the crowd.
The fact that my two adopted cousins are black and everybody else is white would probably give them away, but there are things almost as obvious that flag me and my sister as not quite the same. Her complexion, dark, almost Mediterranean, the gift of an Italian father. And me, paler than a sheet of paper and the shortest male over fifteen in the room. It’s funny, almost, looking at the photographs, and seeing me stood next to my cousins. I look like a fucking munchkin next to them, though thankfully I missed the green skin and orange hair, and I’ve never worn lederhosen in my life. But the next-shortest cousin of mine is an even six feet tall, and my five-seven, well, it looks a little of place.
It’s things like that, tiny reminders that I’m not quite the same, though I know not one of them cares about it and loves me as they would anyway and I love them as I would if we shared blood. But somewhere in my mind it’s always there, the fact that we’re a little different, me and them. It’s not a problem. It’s just something I’ll always be conscious of.
But those feelings, of disconnection and difference and, yeah, okay, desertion, they spread like ink in clear water, until they’ve coloured all of your other thoughts, and it’s those feelings of difference and rootlessness that have been with me for a long time. Like I said, maybe if I’d never been adopted I wouldn’t feel that/this way, but who knows?
I always knew. It’s always been something I’ve been aware of, in the same way that I was always aware I have brown eyes and the sky is blue some days. It seemed, certainly, as banal and natural as that to me, and still does. One of the first books that I ever remember reading was a thick twelve-page slab of recycled cardboard called “Why Am I Adopted?”, in which baby giraffes asked mummy and daddy giraffes asked that very question.
So, I always knew. But as any half-rate philosopher (uh, me) will tell you, there are many different types of knowledge.
A few days after my eighteenth birthday my dad came into the room where I was sat playing Fallout (strange thing to remember, I know) and said he needed to talk to me. I thought, from his tone of voice, that he’d found that packet of cigarettes shamefully hidden in my coat. Not quite. Not close.
So I left Vault 13 behind, turned the computer off, and we sat down on either side of the dining room table, as if we were negotiating the release of a hostage. He put an A5 envelope on the table between us, an envelope that had my name written across the front in his handwriting. It looked in good enough condition, at first glance, but looking closer it was plain to see that it had been around for a while.
Eighteen years, give or take a week. It wasn’t sealed. It sat between us, indifferent, and I didn’t reach for it. He stood up and told me what was in it and asked me to read the contents and said he’d be in the next room when I’d done.
I took out of that envelope four stapled pieces of paper. At the top of the first page it said ‘City of Sheffield’ and underneath, in smaller type, ‘Confidential.’ I’m looking at it now. Top right, ‘Family & Community services department.’ Everything hammered onto the page by a typewriter, folded once, the crease permanently scarred through the middle of each page.
The first two pages were a report written by someone who hadn’t bothered to put their name on it, someone who had written the story of my life before I was born. My other name, date of birth, time of birth, place of birth, weight and length at birth, type of delivery. Underneath that, neat paragraphs that told me of my other mother and father, who they were, what they looked like, the things they were interested in, how they met and how they came by the decision to give me up for adoption.
Full of complementary detail – “she is a quietly mannered, sensitive girl who has a pleasant sense of humour and a friendly nature”, “[he] is a likeable, sensible and friendly person who has a good sense of humour and he shares the same interests as [her].” A few lines about their parents, their backgrounds.
All of it bullshit, of course. I suppose you’d have to present these things in the best light. Can you imagine the alternative? “She was a drunken sleeparound and he had just enough brains to get his trousers off but not enough to put a condom on.” Doesn’t flow quite so well, does it?
(And for the record, I don’t think of them that way. It’s purely for illustrative purposes.)
My birth parents (that’s what they’re called, for those of you unfamiliar with the process of adoption) were at university when they met, she 19 and him 20, and they’d been going out for, I think, about six months when she got pregnant. To his credit, he stood by her and wanted full involvement in the whole process. Perhaps I shouldn’t give him credit for something that I expect him to do, but it doesn’t always happen, so, y’know.
After a few months of deliberation, they decided that they weren’t in a position to look after a child. Fair enough. I know at that age I wouldn’t have been. So they decided to give me up for adoption. For which I am eternally grateful – I’m a full believer in abortion (or, if you prefer, the right to choose) and they could have easily chosen that route for little foetus Ben. But they didn’t, so they went through it all together, the pregnancy and the labour, and then they let me go to a foster parent for six months. After which my adoptive parents picked me up, gave me another name, and took me home.
That, too might be something that you didn’t know. Certainly it had never occurred to me, but I suppose you’ve got to call the baby something before he or she is legally entrusted to another set of parents. So, yeah, I have another name entirely, a Christian name and a surname that I didn’t know about until I was eighteen and read what was in that envelope.
Anyway.
I was given this envelope a few days after I came of age, and pretty much every day since I’ve been thinking about him and her and the two of them together. Where they are and what they’re doing and even if they’re still alive.
My adoptive parents have said a couple of times, when the subject has come up, that they would understand completely if I wanted to try and make contact with their doppelgangers. I believe them. Well, I believe that they believe they’d understand. I don’t know if they would or not. God, I hope so.
Wanting to make contact with my birth parents is not and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection of my feelings towards my adoptive parents. I don’t know just why they had to adopt (yet another subject I wouldn’t know how to broach – “so, which one of you wasn’t capable of having kids, then?”) but in a very important way it doesn’t matter at all to me. Maybe it’s because of the situation that I’m in – again, perhaps it’s affected me more than I’m willing to admit – but I believe that it’s very easy to fuck and very easy to get pregnant. I think, though, that it’s very hard to raise a child.
Being a parent is not having sex and getting pregnant. You want a fuller (and fouler) explanation, go listen to Bill Hicks on the subject of children.
A parent is a person that raises you and stands by you and loves you. And that’s what they did for me. They couldn’t ever be replaced or overthrown in my affections – God, though, doesn’t that sound cold? In my affections. In my love. I love them and my sister; I love the three of them most of all, above everything else.
I don’t ever want to hurt them and I don’t ever want them to think that looking for my birth parents is an attempt to find replacements. Because it’s not, I sincerely believe that it’s not, it couldn’t be, not ever.
I know that. I hope that they would.
I mean, I’m lucky. My adoptive parents love me and have always loved me and have stood by me through all the terrible things that I’ve done, and they’ve supported me and encouraged me to do the things that I wanted to, even if they didn’t understand why they were so important to me. I’ve never gone hungry or cold or thirsty. They did all of this and more for me and I love them, though I don’t think I’ve ever really told them that.
If I’d never come to the parents that I have then my life would have been infinitely different. Maybe better, maybe worse. But I’d never have heard those songs that I love so desperately, or seen those films or read those books, been to those places or, most important, met those people. These people that I love, the girls and boys and cousins and aunts and uncles and my little sister, adopted too, her story sadder than mine despite the peace she’s made with it. The kid I spoke to in the schoolyard when we were both five and who I’ve known ever since and who I’d do anything for. The girl with the black hair, sitting with her on those stoned nights that faded into morning. The kid with the shock of blond hair who finally convinced me that dancing to songs you like is A Good Thing. Even those teachers that told me to keep writing. Even that girl that I loved and treated so badly.
There’s good and bad and better and worse there. But it’s mine, it’s who I am, and though my life hasn’t been too out of the ordinary, in that even I’ve seen amazing things.
None of that would ever have existed. Maybe I’d never have started writing if things had been different, and writing is the thing I cherish most, the one place that I feel I’m capable of doing what I want, where I’m not stumbling or faltering. The place where I can say true things that I can’t when I have to look people in the eye.
It helped me, even, being adopted and knowing it, because it made me realise how arbitrary it is where we end up and who we are. I think that it made me see some commonality in people, despite the intrusions of darkness into my consciousness. It made me realise that it’s all built on sand, it’s all arbitrary, and that the only meaning to anything is inside us, not pressed on from the outside. I don’t believe that I am here through any fate or plan or destiny or divine intervention. I’m here by the same fate that lets you roll snake-eyes three times in a row. Chance, luck, whatever. It doesn’t matter, in a way. I’m here. That’s enough.
It always amazed me how little people understood about the whole thing, too. I remember distinctly sitting drunk in a bar with a girl I know, talking about our families. I told her that I was adopted, and that my sister was, too. She asked me what little sis was like, and I told her, as honest as I could. Then this;
Her: What does she look like?
Me: Uh, she’s got dark hair, brown eyes, pretty, about 5’ 3” or so.
Her: She’s pretty?
Me: Yeah.
Pause.
Her: Do you fancy her?
Do you fancy your sister? I mean, what the hell? She didn’t say it with any accusation, with anything other than interest, but still. I amazed me that she thought I could fancy my bloody sister, just because our genetics, DNA, blood, whatever, wasn’t the same. And I realised she thought there was something intrinsically different about me and my sister, as compared to her and her siblings, all because we were adopted. She was a smart girl, smarter than me, but surrounded by my cigarette smoke and the chatter of late-afternoon drinkers, she leant forwards over the table and asked me that with a straight face and all sincerity.
When I tell people – and I tell people in the same way I might say I once tried mushrooms, not casually but certainly not as something to be greeted with a grave expression – the thing they ask most is whether I feel any resentment towards my birth parents, and whether it was a shock to find out. As if my life was an Eastenders script, and there had been tears and shouting and smashed glass, long-time secrets exposed. And I suppose it might be like that for some people, it might be a seismic event, but like most big things, it’s rather everyday and decidedly undramatic.
People have asked me what affect being adopted has had on me, and I find it impossible to answer. You may as well ask me what affect not being able to fly or not being able to walk through walls has had on me.
I’ve never been in a situation where I wasn’t adopted, I’ve never been unaware of my situation. Perhaps it’s a failing on my part, but I can’t imagine my life not knowing that I was adopted. I have what I have, and I can’t fall into conjecture about what could have been. You play the cards you’re dealt, as best you can.
I’ve been thinking, for a while now, that I’ll write her a letter. That I’ll put down on paper and in my best hand all those things that I think she should know and hear.
Which, on a level of etiquette if nothing else, raises a question. How d’you start a letter like that? And how do you end it? Yours? Yours sincerely? Love? Fondest regards? Just sign your name at the end?
I’d meet her, too, if she wanted. I still wouldn’t know the etiquette, though. Shake hands? Hug? Cry? Who knows? I think of a train station and standing there and waiting and another person standing waiting too, and long silences.
Nobody wrote a bloody etiquette book for this kinda thing. It would have been useful.
I’m reconciled to the fact that my birth parents have probably split up. They were young and probably away from home for the first time. I don’t know many relationships that started that way and endured. It happens. That’s okay.
So I keep thinking about these things. I’ve already written that letter. It’s in my desk drawer, in my best handwriting, waiting for something. Waiting for me. I don’t know where to send it, but it won’t be hard to find out. (Another note for those of you unfamiliar with this – the kid can find the parents, but the parents can’t find the kid. In theory, at least.) It’s been there for a little while now, and every so often I’ll take it out and read it and put it back, and think about sealing it in a envelope and sending it to her.
Maybe I’ll send it and she’ll go to pick up the post, and there will be a letter there in handwriting that she doesn’t recognise. I wonder if she’ll guess at what it is. Maybe she’ll put it separate from the rest of the post and take it somewhere private to open it. Maybe she’s married to somebody else, maybe he knows, maybe not. She might have other kids, I suppose, though I’ve no idea what my relation to them would be. Still, potential bone-marrow donors are always useful, no?
I think about how much (or how little) she thinks about me. If she’s any regrets. If she wishes that she’d never done it. She’ll know when my birthday is. I don’t know how you’d forget that. I wonder what she does – if she thinks of me or tries not to, if she’s ever cried for me.
I don’t say this out of ego. God knows, I’m not Captain Self-Confidence. But I try to think of how I’d feel if I ever had to do what she had to do, and what I’d feel. And I think I’d want to know who and how my child was and is.
I want her to know, and I want him to know, that I bear them no ill will. I can’t say that I love them, because I’ve never known them, but I’m grateful to them and Jesus I’m shaking now, writing this, because it’s the first time really that this has ever been anywhere but in my head, but I don’t want them to live their lives with a question hanging over them, I don’t want to be the person that is the root of regrets for them. Maybe they’ll live with regrets still; maybe they won’t care either way, maybe they’ll get angry that I ever intruded upon their lives. But whatever their reaction, they’ll know, at least, they’ll have a truth, and it’s all that I can give them, despite all that they gave me. I wish I could make it better. I wish I could make it okay. All I can give them is the truth of how I feel. I hope that it’s enough. Maybe it will be, maybe not.
So it goes. So it goes.
John Updike once wrote “every true story has an anticlimax.” And, I know, it will be like that when and if we finally meet. Maybe it will just be a letter from me, and one back, and that will be it. Maybe we’ll meet and we’ll find that we don’t have anything in common beyond that thing that happened a long time ago. Maybe we’ll find that there’s nothing to link us other than ghosts, like two strangers standing at the same vigil.
I don’t think that it will fill any of the holes. It won’t be an epiphany and I won’t have miraculously found a reason for my existence. What it will do, I hope, is to answer some of those long-held questions.
But, you know, I’m lying to you. I know that Updike was right. I know that writing that letter or, more terrifying by far, meeting my mother or father won’t change anything within me. But still, though I try my damndest to ignore it, there’s that pocket of ridiculous hope, an indefensible prayer that looking into the eyes of the people that conceived me will change in some way for the better my life. I can’t deny that anymore. In all things I wanted that single moment of realisation, always wanted that epiphany. And in this more than anything.
And that part of me always thought that if I did meet him or her, if I could just talk to one or both of them for a little while, if I could just look into their eyes and see something of myself, then I’d get it. I’d realise why I’m here. Things would click into place and all the darkness would clear.
But it won’t happen that way, because that great American nailed it. But even an anticlimax is still an ending. And to quote somebody else, the end is important in all things.
Dear Linda & Richard,
I know you won’t read this. Which is, I guess, why I can write it. But I wanted to say something, to tell you something, and perhaps someday I’ll say it so that you can hear.
You did more for me than I can imagine. I’m alive because of you, and I don’t care that you gave me up for adoption. I hope I’ve never given you any cause for regret. Because you’ve nothing to regret. I hope you’ve never cried for me, though I’ve cried for you on occasion.
I still think of you both. I will until the day I die.
Thanks. From the bottom of my heart. And I think you would have been fine parents to me, regardless.
Love,
Your son,
Philip.
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