“The mother-child bond is the essential and primary force in infant development.” Lauren Lindsey Porter
This is me, aged 66, and still recovering from the trauma caused by being separated from my mother as a baby and being adopted into a family that was not my own.
Like many adoptees I was brainwashed into thinking that adoption doesn’t matter – that it doesn’t matter who brings you up as long as they are decent, well-intentioned, loving people.
I now know that this is not true. The quality of your adopters’ parenting is not the problem. The problem is that you have been separated from your mother and your natural family. If you don’t know who they are, it becomes very difficult to know who you are. If you havn’t fully acknowledged the disaster of that initial separation, coping with later separations and the normal stresses of life may be particularly difficult for you.
I always intended to search for my family, but like many adoptees, I did not want to cause pain to my adopters, and so I waited until after they had both died. I finally got round to it when I was 58. I wish I had started earlier.
If you have never read a book about adoption, start now, with Nancy Newton Verrier’s The Primal Wound.
