Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen

by Clare Empson

  My first session of the day is group therapy, the terminology alone enough to trigger queasiness in days gone by. But I am too tired, too forlorn, to bother with cynicism.

  Our group of eight, seated in a semicircle of comfortable chairs, is led by Marion, who introduces me – ‘Everyone, this is Luke’ – to resounding support. It is too much to respond; their kindness, their congeniality, coupled with the reality of my being here, brings me to tears. I nod my greeting instead and they seem to understand.

  ‘Before we get started,’ Marion says, ‘I thought it might be useful to tell Luke what we gain from these group sessions. How helpful the act of talking can be.’

  A dark-haired girl around my own age says, ‘The brilliant thing about group therapy is that you bring your fears and anxieties into the open and you find out that other people feel exactly the same way. And that makes them less frightening. It makes you feel less alone.’

  The session gets under way and I tune in and out while those around me speak of mortification and self-sabotage with the same insouciance I once reserved for planning our Sainsbury’s shop. There’s a tea break halfway through and I am besieged with new friends. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate their efforts to make me feel at home, but it makes me want to cry. Everyone is so goddamn tactful. No one asks me why I’m here; they know through experience how to steer a safe conversation. Dark-haired girl tells me she has the same pair of Reebok trainers as mine at home, only hers are the grey version. A woman called Kate jokes that the instant coffee is a brilliant way to break a Starbucks habit: ‘We’ll save ourselves a fortune when we get out of here.’

  After the break, Marion asks me if I feel ready to share a detail about myself with the group.

  ‘Don’t feel you need to tell us why you’re here just yet. We would love to learn even one thing about you.’

  ‘I don’t much like being looked at,’ I say, scorching in the intensified heat of eight pairs of eyes.

  ‘Very few people do,’ says Marion. ‘But in these sessions the first rule is to assume support. When we look at you, we’re supporting you.’

  The dark-haired girl, whose name I discover is Lisa, says, ‘My first day I started with a list of things I liked. I could only find one and it was dark chocolate.’

  ‘Music,’ I say. ‘My job is in music. I listen to it all day. Sometimes I think I can only express my feelings through other people’s music. Like I can only connect to emotions other people have had first.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Marion says. ‘What kind of music do you like?’

  ‘David Bowie. The Rolling Stones. The Doors. The seventies is my era, I don’t know why. Bob Dylan. Led Zeppelin. The Who.’

  Pink Floyd are my undoing. I remember Alice telling me how she’d been to see them on their Dark Side of the Moon tour. I realise that Jacob must have been with her, and I am flattened by a vision of the two of them in their cheesecloth and flares, high on beer and marijuana and the saturation of new love.

  Here’s a thing I didn’t know about group work. If you wobble, no one jumps up to comfort you, no one says a thing. They want you to have your moment, and how quickly we have come to mine.

  ‘My father was a musician.’ I gasp it out. ‘My real father. He killed himself a few days before I was born.’

  Crying without consolation, a new experience for me. The rest of the group observe me quietly, without interruption; even Marion takes her time to speak.

  ‘You must wish you’d known him.’

  ‘I wish that more than anything. I have this sense he was like me and he would have understood me. Because I’m adopted and I feel …’

  A pause while I struggle to say the words that make sense of my entire life.

  ‘I feel that I’ve never fitted in anywhere.’

  Then

  Alice

  I am always left alone during the 3 a.m. feed. This is Charlie’s hungriest time; he’ll suckle for forty-five minutes, first one breast, then the other. The nurses tried him on a bottle the moment I’d signed the adoption papers, despite my protests, but he wouldn’t take it.

  ‘Here’s your crosspatch,’ says the night nurse, lowering a screaming Charlie into my arms. ‘I’ll leave you two in peace.’

  I detect the pity in her voice. Everyone knows that later on this morning is our big goodbye.

  The moment she has gone, I manoeuvre myself out of the bed, one arm held beneath Charlie as he continues to feed. The slightest disturbance and he’ll yell out his fury and wake the whole ward. I’m barefoot, according to the plan, and dressed only in a nightdress, but I do swaddle him in the green cashmere shawl Rick brought for me.

  In the darkness, at first glance, the baby is obscured. I’m just a girl finding her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I stand behind the curtain for a moment, gathering my strength, while my heart slams against my ribs and Charlie continues to suck in his emerald cocoon.

  There are five other beds in this ward, all with their curtains drawn around them, and I force myself to walk slowly in what I hope is a soothing, rocking motion for the baby. Through the swing doors, pause, allow myself to experience the nauseating surge of pure fear. To my left, just metres away, is the reception desk, where two nurses are talking. They are facing the opposite direction, but just a 180-degree swivel of one of their heads and I would be spotted. To my right, a corridor with wards on either side, and at the far end a door that leads to the staircase where Rick is waiting. I continue with my stealth-like walking, the mild squeak of flesh on linoleum, the baby sucking, my breast slowly emptying.

  I am almost there, the door in sight, when a nurse comes out of the last ward, wheeling a cot in front of her.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the bathroom, bad stomach.’

  There is, mercifully, a bathroom a few feet away, and I slam open the door with my free hand. Inside, leaning back against the door, panting with fear, I somehow manage to dislodge the baby, and he yells out in protest. Forcing my nipple back into his mouth, stifling him mid-yell, praying that he will latch on straight away. The desperate thud of my heart. Did the nurse hear his cry? I am too frightened to open the door to find out. I wait, trying to steady myself with long, deep breaths, and each second that passes is interminable. There is so little time; I have to get this right. I count to ten and force myself to ease the door open, inch by inch, each squeak like a gunshot. No one there. Across the corridor, running now, heart squeezing painfully, through the door to Rick waiting on the other side, his frozen, fearful face a match for mine.

  He wipes his forehead to mime relief and takes my free arm to help me down the staircase, one step at a time. We mustn’t rush, we cannot risk jolting the baby again. Three flights of stairs, our progress painfully slow. And at the bottom, more terror as we open the door to the ground floor with no idea of what or who we will find. But at 3.30 in the morning the hospital is dead, and no one sees us escape through a back door into the night air. We are unchallenged, Rick wandering around a hospital where he has no right to be, me an undischarged patient, and the tiny package in my arms a baby with a new adoptive mother to meet tomorrow.

  Charlie has fallen off my breast now, but he seems quite content as I hoist him up over my shoulder, rubbing his back in soothing circles the way Penny taught me on the first day. I hear his sweet little belch against my ear – such a small, small thing, but it makes me cry, tears that drip down my face. To think I might have missed this.

  ‘Almost there, my love,’ Rick says, pulling a key from his jeans pocket as we approach the car park. ‘Check out our wheels, if you please.’

  A dove-grey Morris Minor with red leather seats and chrome wing mirrors that beam out in the darkness.

  ‘It’s perfect. Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Robin gave me the cash. I bought it this afternoon.’

  ‘Robin
knows?’

  ‘Only that we’re leaving, not where we’re going. No one knows that.’

  ‘Not even Tom?’

  He grimaces. ‘Definitely not Tom. We are no more. We both lost heart after … after what happened. And don’t look at me like that. Tom is the least of our problems.’

  Charlie and I get into the back seat, and the moment the car pulls away he falls asleep. I press my lips against his head, inhaling his smell, just the lightest touch so as not to wake him.

  ‘I didn’t know you could drive,’ I say.

  ‘Of course I can. Just haven’t got around to taking my test yet.’

  We lock eyes in the rear-view mirror, allowing our smiles to grow.

  ‘Richard Fields, I love you,’ I say, and he blows me a kiss.

  ‘Same here, Alice Garland.’

  We arrive at the beach at sunrise, as if we’d timed it so that our new beginning would be filled with pink and orange and stripes of gold. Charlie wakes the moment the car stops, but instead of wailing for food, he gazes up at me with Jacob’s eyes.

  ‘Let’s sit on the beach for a while,’ Rick says, and he takes Charlie from me, still wrapped in his green blanket, and passes me his jacket to wear over my nightgown. We arrived at this beach as the sun rose once before, Jake, me, Rick and Tom. The sorrow is acute as we walk down to the water’s edge, the crunch of sand beneath my feet, the salty air whipping my face, and I understand that it always will be. But I also know we’ll be all right. One day. Some day.

  I reach for Rick’s hand and we stand together, the three of us, with the heat of the new sun on our faces.

  Now

  Luke

  The real architect of the brain is experience. And if you are abandoned by your mother at birth, your first experience is a sense of danger. Fear of the unknown can become truly terrifying to the adult adoptee.

  Who Am I? The Adoptee’s Hidden Trauma by Joel Harris

  Joel Harris has become something of an expert on adoptee trauma; he has even written a report on it. An addiction counsellor for almost thirty years, he explains he gradually became aware that adoptees were overrepresented in his clinics.

  In the following decades of research, both practical and theoretical, he realised that the trauma of adoption – or ‘the relinquishment wound’, as he calls it – is stored within the body. Adoptees, he says, are born with a trauma personality.

  ‘It’s quite common for an adoptee to have a fear of abandonment – for obvious reasons – but coupled with the contradictory hunger to attach. And that abandonment feels life-threatening – is there any bigger trauma than being separated from your mother, the one person you needed at the beginning of your life? I don’t think so.’

  I cry openly through these one-to-one sessions, partly with sorrow but also relief. For the first time in my life, my fucked-up-ness is beginning to make sense.

  Joel explains about the trio of grief that marked my beginning. Mine at being separated from Alice, Alice’s at losing her child and Christina’s at her failure to have a baby of her own.

  ‘You begin life,’ Joel tells me, ‘with an impossible job description. From the word go you have to be a son to parents you don’t fit with genetically and you are there to fix an enormous grief in them at not being able to have children. As an only child, the onus is entirely on you to make things better.’

  ‘My mother admitted yesterday that she’s never really got over losing her baby,’ I say. ‘He was stillborn in her final month of pregnancy and I now think she was battling depression right through my childhood. And that made me feel guilty. I knew, without her telling me, that she was mourning her dead baby. But to me it felt like I was a constant disappointment because I wasn’t him.’

  ‘Do you think you would have felt different if you’d grown up with Alice? And Jacob?’

  Jacob, this man I never knew; just the mention of his name triggers instant painful tears.

  ‘I don’t even know why I’m crying. Jacob died before I was born.’

  ‘Is it possible to feel grief for someone you have never known? Absolutely. You are grieving for a man you believe would have made a perfect father and a woman who wanted very much to be your mother.’

  ‘I’m poleaxed by sadness, but I didn’t even know of Alice’s existence until a few months ago.’

  ‘That’s part of it. Adoption is based on secrets and silence and nobody talks about how they’re feeling. How ridiculous is it that you spend your entire childhood without knowing who your real parents are and not feeling that you can ever ask? And without having the facts, you start to believe you must be flawed, because why else would someone have given you away? Sound familiar?’

  ‘As if you’re looking inside my head.’

  Joel laughs. ‘You’d be surprised how many people say that to me. The problem is that everyone from the adoptive parents to the birth parents to the social workers bands together to protect the myth that it’s a great thing. “You were so lucky to be adopted,” how many times were you told that? I bet your parents said they “chose” you, didn’t they?’

  ‘My mother told me she’d gone to a hospital ward full of babies and picked me out because of my spiky black hair and my dark eyes.’

  ‘But you know that couldn’t possibly be true, don’t you? There’s no ward full of babies ready for adoption, like a supermarket pick ’n’ mix. It’s not a litter of puppies we’re talking about.’

  ‘And anyway, Alice managed to keep me for the first few weeks of my life.’

  ‘Did she tell you what you were like?’

  ‘Happy, always smiling. I never cried, apparently.’

  ‘And when you arrived in your new home, what were you like then?’

  ‘I cried day and night for the first three weeks. My mother thought it was colic.’

  ‘I listen to a story like yours every week and it amazes me that this great conspiracy still exists. Why don’t people understand the trauma of relinquishment? That pain you felt as a baby is still there, Luke. It’s locked away inside you.’

  I’ve been crying almost without noticing for the last ten minutes. Now I press a tissue against my face, holding it there with the palms of my hands. Inside me there is a shaft of such intense sadness my heart is actually hurting.

  Our time is probably up, but Joel lets the silence run on; he waits until I take the tissue away from my face. We gaze at each other while I try to find the right words.

  ‘Will I ever feel better?’

  ‘I think so. You’re already beginning to understand the reasons why you feel the way you do. That helps, doesn’t it? With therapy you can learn to manage the trauma so you spot it the moment it walks through the door rather than waiting for it to knock you down.’

  Most days my mother picks me up from the Priory, waiting in the car park in her navy-blue Golf, with my small son and his ragged bear strapped into the back. Samuel always smiles as soon as he sees me. He has mastered his version of a wave, one hand flung out in recognition, accompanied by a whoop of delight.

  Sometimes I get into the back beside him. I kiss his face, his tight, smooth cheeks, his unfeasibly long eyelashes. My mother likes to brush his hair into a 1950s sweep-over. Hannah jokes that he looks like Laurel from Laurel and Hardy.

  ‘Hello, Laurel,’ I whisper as Christina starts the car and pulls away.

  And Samuel laughs and claps his hands, his latest trick, waiting for me to do the same.

  Then

  Alice

  The hundred pounds I earned for designing the Disciples album cover, the advance from my show at Robin’s gallery, means that Rick and I can survive the first few months of parenting.

  Stick it in the bank or something, you might need it someday. How long ago was it that Jake spoke those words, as if he had seen the future, could picture me alone?

  For the moment, a
few months at least, there is a kind of freedom in this tiny seaside cottage of ours. The place belongs to Rick’s elderly great-aunt, who has been on the brink of death many times but is proving, at eighty-nine, to be a survivor. We’re glad of this, of course, but the situation sheds uncertainty over our future. The minute she dies, the house will be sold, its profits split between her nephews and nieces.

  Now, though, Rick and I have it to ourselves, a pale-blue two-up, two-down in which to learn the roles of mother and father. Every day Rick surprises me with his aptitude for fathering, although why wouldn’t he make a good parent, with his unfaltering good humour and his huge, all-encompassing heart? It is because of Rick, I am sure, that Charlie begins to smile at a few weeks old. How could he fail to mirror back that daily injection of warmth?

  Without saying anything, Rick also gives me the space to grieve, acres of it when I need it, constant companionship when I don’t. From the moment we arrived here in Southwold, I made a decision to hide my pain, to let it out only in private, at night when the rest of the world was asleep, or on my solitary walks along the beach. It was partly Mrs Taylor Murphy’s words about babies soaking up their environment ‘like a sponge’ and my determination that my son would not have his beginning marked by sadness, but also my need to find some light for myself. Just glimmers of it, just sometimes.

  Midnight is my crying hour, and I look forward to the relief of being able to let out my grief and rage and guilt. I’ll hold Jake’s shirt to my face and inhale the scent of him, getting fainter each day, and I’ll whisper into the blackness, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ until I eventually become so exhausted I know I can fall asleep.

  One night as I’m crouched weeping in the corner of the bedroom, the door opens and the room floods with light from the corridor.

  ‘Alice.’ Rick kneels beside me, taking hold of both my hands. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’