Hello and welcome here. My Secret History is the newsletter where I explore the ways in which being adopted has impacted my life, and continues to do so. It’s also the name of my memoir on the subject, available to buy here. Whilst I very much value your presence here, I also understand the deeply moving and upsetting nature of the subject matter for adoptees, birth mothers and fathers, and wider family. It’s important to me to educate, but also that people take care of themselves in this space…so if this newsletter isn’t for you right now, or at all, I completely get it.
My dear mate Mick was one of those rare people who shine like a diamond (they played ‘Diamonds’ by Rhianna at his funeral) He used to go house to house around the area, delivering sacks of potatoes and other goods at cut price, and when I met him, he couldn’t read. But Mick knew things. Mick knew ideas and concepts that weren’t mainstream, things I’d only ever read about in books you couldn’t easily get hold of. He offered his own viewpoint on illness and where it originated, and he had his own methods of healing, which worked.
Mick understood energy and how it flowed in and around animals, including humans, and where and how it could get blocked. One of the biggest causes of physical illness in humans, Mick believed, was harbouring resentment. A feeling of resentment comes unbidden, but it’s our choice to hold on to it, or to let it go. He was unequivocal on the subject; if we give it space in our being, it will lodge there and grow, blocking the flow of our life-force.
The only way to dispel the blockage and free the energies, and therefore the person, was to let the resentment go, and replace it with thoughts, which would lead to feelings, of a higher, lighter vibration. This action is not a one-off deal, but a change in an habitual way of being and thinking that might have to be repeated frequently throughout a lifetime. The way to achieve this change is otherwise know as forgiving.
Forgive. Forgiveness.
This is the big one. The one that sparks the most vehement cries of "No! Never. Never."
Those cries echo with pain, I know they do, I've lived inside of that pain before.
That pain felt like the only thing I had left of her
That pain of loss was my identity, it WAS me. Most importantly to me, it was my proof to the outside world that something huge, and wrong and terrible had happened, that I once belonged to someone vitally important to me, and I had suffered the loss of her. My pain proved that once I was whole until an unspeakable wrong had been committed to me, which disabled my mind, my spirit, my self.
I need to be very clear here.
Some adoptees carry a lot of anger towards their birth mothers for giving them up for adoption, even without knowing the circumstances. I make no judgement upon those adoptees, but I am most definitely not one of them.
My birth mother Lilly has done nothing for me to forgive. She has only given to me; she carried me in her body and she birthed me and she found somewhere for me to safely go to live my life without her. I honour her, and although I do not and never will ‘know’ her, I know her from inside of her, I know the sound of her heart and I love her.
The wrong that was committed to me was committed to us both, and was carried out by the prevailing culture at the time, a culture that not only devalued motherhood and women (kind of like it still does) but also felt that those who ‘got themselves’ pregnant and whose partner, like my birth father, was not supportive, should be punished. Actively punished, not just a neutral kind of, ‘oh dear’, but a positively active attitude of disdain, ostracism and punishment, for the crime of some kind of some spurious moral failure. An attitude directed at my poor mother by society no doubt, but not at my father, innocent of any wrongdoing by dint of his male hood.
If your’re interested in my personal story, I go into all the details of my adoption and how being an adoptee has impacted my life in my memoir, My Secret History
The prevailing culture at the time failed to support us in our hour of need, it failed to take the necessary steps to help us to remain together. Instead, it created a narrative which made it acceptable, preferable, honourable and almost holy, for well-off people who wanted to buy a baby could do so, and so everyone who mattered came out with a good result.
To be fair, I was blessed with a good result in my gorgeous adoptive parents, who didn’t buy me from an agency or from anyone, and certainly not all adoptions in the United Kingdom at least, proceed that way, but the wound is the same.
The pain is the same.
I didn’t want to let that pain go, in fact it felt like it might be wrong to do so, because it would somehow dishonour what we’d both been through, my mother and I, what we were still going through, and would go through until the days of our respective passings.
How could I forgive a culture that approved of the atrocities mothers from Lilly’s generation suffered?
But in the end, where did my lack of forgiveness get me?
I had to ask myself the difficult questions:
Does committing to never forgiving give you something worth hanging onto?
Do you commit to never forgiving because they don't deserve it?
Don’t you deserve the peace of forgiveness?
Does the thought of letting go feel too much like more loss, loss of control, loss of acknowledgement, loss of the only thing you have of the past, loss of your dignity and self? (again)
What if letting go was forgiveness, and forgiveness was not those things?
What if it was lightness and freedom? What if it was the freedom to belong, to become to be born, again?
Born into your own life.
What if it was the new beginning that lights your soul, that enables you to create your life, piece by piece, and belong there, in love.
Adoptee, you had everything taken from you at your most vulnerable. But no one took away your choice, today. Your right to choose how to proceed, from right now.
Go well today, with lightness in your soul, for you are here
And Mick xx
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Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for sharing your story Jil. I feel the same - that my poor birth mother was wronged as well as me by a society that couldn't countenance an unwed mother. I'm sorry that you never got to know her, that's a big loss to process. I also had wonderful adoptive parents, but the loss also co-exists with that, as you beautifully expressed.