Who am I?

Image by Alisa Dyson from Pixabay


I was fourteen when I first read Psalm 139. That was when my father handed me my adoption file, which contained my adoption certificate and a series of letters from the secretary of the adoption society. I already knew my birth name (not all adoptees of my generation were lucky enough to have that information).

I didn’t find out the names of my biological parents until I was 34. That was when I embarked on my search for my birth mother, the best decision I ever made. My birth mother was from South East London, where my adoptive family had also lived, but she moved to Northern Ireland in 1963, the year after she gave birth to me and gave me up for adoption, and she never left. She had four more children. I’m the eldest. In my adoptive family, I’m the middle daughter.

In July 1990, I was staying with friends in Northern Ireland. That was a hot summer, the country was baking in a heatwave, and the peaceful hills and fields of County Down seemed a very long way from the Troubles. While my friends and I explored the beauty of Strangford Lough and the Antrim coastline, I had no idea that my birth mother was living just a few miles away.

She and I finally met in October 1997, at her sister’s house in Bury St Edmunds.

We all have fascinating stories to tell. I’ve been listening to The Gift on Radio 4, which explores what happens when people take a DNA test, often gifted to them by well-meaning friends. The results can be explosive: family secrets are exposed, people find out that they have siblings they didn’t know about. In one extraordinary recent episode, a woman discovered that back in 1967, the year of her birth, she had been accidentally swapped as a baby – due to a hospital error, her mother was given another baby girl to take home. The consequences for the three women in this triangle – the mother, the girl she took home and her biological daughter – have been both devastating and life-affirming. I was struck by the grace and maturity of the mother and her biological daughter, who had been deprived of a happy family life (her childhood had been traumatic). I feel deeply for the woman who had to be told that her mother wasn’t her biological mother – her life has been completely turned upside down, and she is finding it very difficult to deal with. Understandable.

Families are complex. Adoption is complex. Reunions between biological relatives are complex. There are plenty of grace-notes in my own story and that of my two families.

All of us ask at some point: who am I? Who do I belong to? It’s the heart-cry of every human being.

Do you write about families? What complexities of family life are reflected in your own writing? And where is the grace of God in these stories, both real and fictional?

… you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
Psalm 139: 13-16, NIVUK

I’m an Anglican lay minister and also work as an administrator in the United Reformed Church at Church House in London. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.