By Fiona Sampson
It may be made as untidily as any stork’s nest, out of ramifying networks of relationships, meanings and habits. But for the most part, I suspect, families represent our best attempt at living well. I believe this: yet my own long habit is to associate the family with anxiety, intimate surveillance, and as many codes as a Rosetta Stone.
Last summer, though, this began to change when I wrote a piece about adoption for The Tablet. It was something I very much wanted to write. I’d come to feel that secrets are pretty much as grubby as any other white lie, and that I had something to confess. But it didn’t come easy. For several days in a row I sat at my desk making nonsensical false starts, deleting, starting again.
It was August and, in the vivid air outside, house martins looped repeatedly between the farm pond and their nests in the eaves. They seemed real in a way I couldn’t get myself to be. This has something to do, I think, with inauthenticity. For there is an out-of-kilter lilt to living with a secret at the heart of your identity. It’s like there’s a stone caught in the engine. I’ve always been rather taken by the old riddle about the cherry fruit, “A stick in my hand, a stone in my throat” – as the eponymous trickster sings in Harrison Birtwistle’s opera Punch and Judy.
“Give me a child until she is seven and I will give you the woman.” Shame alters not only how you act, but even how you think. And there’s plenty of shame around adoption. Not only the traditional sexual shame associated with accidental conceptions like my own, either; couples dealing with infertility face fierce social and emotional pressures too. So I had internalised my adoption, and in some ways by extension my entire self, as a kind of taboo. To put it another way, for most of my life I’ve felt a series of indebted obligations to uphold my adoptive family by pretending not to be myself, and to protect my biological family from myself. To support them: in a way, to carry them. The struggle to write last summer’s article made me realise how badly I needed to lay them all down.
So I decided to have one last search for my father and his family. Which sounds counterintuitive; but, of course, I’d been keeping away to protect them. I’d ignored my own practical and emotional need-to-know, the tug of belonging, the questions on my medical records, sheer human curiosity. I had searched, from time to time. But there were also practical obstacles that helped such attempts fail. My biological father came from another continent, with its own data protection rules, and he had a very common name. And then there was the mainstream belief that to look for a birth parent is needy or – even worse – somehow fake. This confused me. In an uncertain world, certainties reassure, and we live in an era of essentialisms, identity politics and gender debate. What then is the adoptee’s “essential” identity? Or, to ask the question in the terms in which it was presenting itself: who do I write as?
In the global north we embrace the hyphenated identities – Chinese-American, Nigerian-British – which acknowledge the richness that comes with being two-in-one: both Nigerian and British (say), and to whatever extent the individual chooses. Perhaps an adoptee could be both, too? But no. Something seems to happen when the hyphen is a concealed stitch, like the one in “The Invisible Mender”, Sarah Maguire’s tender 1997 poem about her birth mother. Then what is it that renders this particular hyphenation un-essential? Today, the “public families” of an open adoption often replaces old-style privacy and denial, so it can’t just be secrecy that cuts this umbilical tie.
But adoption is above all a hopeful act, and I suppose that almost by definition one of its hopes must be that the past stays past. So when I searched for my birth father I did so in secrecy and shame. Perhaps this was complicated by the experience of finding my birth mother. To meet someone I resembled for the first time ever was as uncanny – as unheimlich – an experience as any fantasy haunting could ever be. Here indeed, passing between us, was Thomas Hardy’s “Heredity”: “I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on.” But my birth mother’s concern – her kind of social exorcism, if you will – was to maintain the distinction between her “real” family, those subsequent children she had chosen to attach to, and me. Of course, loving and rearing someone does create something more than mere biology. Family relationships are built as well as given; no one knows this better than adoptive families, obviously. But adoption’s great risk is that none of the adoptee’s own personal relationships, on either side of the family hyphen, exist as it were whole-heartedly, without some kind of caveat; that not really which can sound so very close to not real.
Dangerous territory, in other words. Nevertheless, about seven years ago a popular genealogy website led me to a distant relative in the US, a keen genealogist who revealed that the all-too-common surname I’d been hunting is, as I’d come to suspect, a nineteenth-century Anglicisation – and from the Scots. Bless you, fifth-to-eighth cousin Leonie, for your interest in those early gold-prospecting, vine-planting, draft-dodging, occasionally convict Australian ancestors, which led you to my birth father’s coordinates in New South Wales.
I went straight to Google. All I found there was his funeral announcement. Still: tracing is all about traces, and even this column inch told me plenty. I learnt that my father had left a widow, and a son who was himself married with kids, that he had probably died from cancer, and was a Catholic. To read of this half-brother, nephew and niece gave me a feeling of connectedness, even if it was to something at the vanishing point of far away.
And there things might have rested, had it not been for the Tablet article. For I was left with the sense of having got only so far. Adoption is neither terrible nor miraculous, but it does ask the adoptee to stay in a state of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact”, as John Keats had it. Yet one needs some modest degree of certainty to steer through life. So I went back through my DNA “matches” on the genealogy website, and wrote a second time to someone who appeared there as my first-or-second cousin. Then I found her on social media, and wrote again. At hazard, I also messaged two people in New South Wales who have my half-brother’s name.
Nothing happened for about a fortnight, and I couldn’t settle to anything. Then tentative, confused messages started to arrive. I hadn’t declared myself: I’d just invoked “a close family matter”. Truthfully, I’d assumed the family knew about me, that my messages would work as a hint if I’d found the right people, and that if I had, these right people could choose whether or not they wanted to be in touch.
But they didn’t know about me. Gently, gently, over several days, I had to break the news to them. I was terrified of causing hurt: particularly to my dad’s son who had, I found, also lost his mother. Yet as my identity – my biological dad’s identity – gradually established itself, no chill descended. Instead, the messages became warmer and warmer. The word “excitement” was used a lot.
What I discovered was a widespread, loving Catholic family. Many of its members are larger than life in a way Les Murray calls “The Quality of Sprawl”: the poet was himself, of course, a New South Wales Catholic, his famous Bunyah not so very far from where my father’s family lives. Sports heroes, horse-breeders and publicans, nurses and managers, pilots of small planes and mariners on large vessels, they have their inevitable share of illnesses and loss. Yet they also have the emotional resources to welcome me in as the daughter of someone they loved. They’ve given me what I could only hope for: my dad as a much-loved family man, someone who loved children and whose own warmth and decency were out of the ordinary. They have also given me what I never hoped for: a family homecoming.
In return I need do nothing except be considerate and grateful, because this welcome, like the one the soul receives in George Herbert’s famous Love bade me welcome… from “Love (III)” is unconditional. Family love, I’m learning, is not earned. It doesn’t matter what I am: I will always be the afterburn of the man they lost. This meaning of family reaches beyond give and take, motive and transaction. Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back. In its comprehendingness – something to me still almost incomprehensible – it surely echoes the divine.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. The language of reunion is familiar, made so by TV shows and social media posts. It can feel used up. But I think it works like liturgy, the words reinfused with meaning every time they’re truly meant. “If he would of known about you he would have loved you dearly.” Since my biological father did know about and fought for me, I receive this, like the Blessing, as “your father loved you dearly”.
So I did sit and eat. – The Tablet
