I Need To Know! - Part One
As I'm sure is the case with a lot of adoptees, I have very little knowledge of my beginnings.
Just a couple of months old when I was transferred to my ‘forever family’, key sections of first-hand information are missing, from my parent's memories of me as a baby in those first few weeks. I'm sure to them it doesn't seem like a big deal, for me though, and, no doubt for many others in my position it feels weird. We can't ask our parents what our birth was like or how they felt carrying us for 9 months for instance, because our parents were not there.
I always used to say that I just wasn't interested in finding out more about my adoption. But the more gray hair I acquired (started that bloody process off in my twenties!), the more I wanted to know, it just got the better of me. Applying for and receiving closed adoption records isn't a straightforward task, well it certainly wasn't back in the nineties. Closed adoptions are a thing of the past, giving way to open adoptions which allow all 3 parties in the adoption triad (Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and the children thereof) much more freedom physically and contractually. So where to start?
Because I had the forethought to write a diary of the main events during that time, we can go back to 1998. Try not to fall over while the screen goes wobbly!
Twenty-five and married for the first time, living in a small terraced house in Nottingham. I'd been starting to think more and more seriously about finding some answers regarding my adoption. to kick things off I went out for a meal one December evening with my parents and broke the news to them. I remember feeling extremely nervous about it and I waited until we had finished eating before I spilled my beans (I didn't order beans). Of course, they were expecting something like this and were as supportive as I hoped they would be.
My parents informed me that they arranged my adoption through Derbyshire County Council (DCC). Great, I’ll start there.
My first goal was to be able to get copies of my adoption records and depending on what they contained, that might be the only goal.
I knew that my adoption was a ‘closed’ adoption. birth parents were told that a closed adoption meant that there would be no further contact with the adopted child by law unless the adoptee wished to trace them personally. Since the Adoption and Children’s Act 2002, all adoptions in the UK are ‘open’. Both Adoptive and birth parents must agree to some form of contact that is arranged and agreed upon before the official adoption is finalised.
The internet was very much in its infancy so a lot of the work I needed to do was conducted via letters; face-to-face, in offices and at reception desks, on the telephone, or trawling through the yellow pages and phone books.
1999 clicked over and in January, with a 'New Year - New Me' attitude I telephoned Derbyshire County Council (DCC) at the Long Eaton office as it was then, to ask for the correct contact details of the department responsible for handling historic adoption records. The person I needed was Mrs. Helen Jones (not her real name), who worked out of DDC’s County Hall in Matlock.
The next day I wrote a letter to Mrs. Jones asking for access to my records, popped it in the post box on the corner of my street, and settled down to wait. I was expecting months to go by before I heard anything. To my surprise on the 13th of January, I received word from Helen that she did indeed have the documents I was requesting. Also included was information about how to apply. DCC required me to attend a counseling session before my documents could be released and I had to apply to the General Register Office to set it up. I did this as soon as I could so as not to include any delays of my own doing. And again, settled down to wait.
This time I had to hang on until 4th March before a response letter came through the door. This contained an application form for counseling and document retrieval. More delays. I was getting impatient and it had only just started! I needed to chill out a bit.
To Be Continued.
Image: © Andy Wallis
