North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Debbie

Right okay Debbie what I would like you to do is tell me about yourself and your life experience and the best way you could do that is start with your birth the little child you once were and tell me about the things that happened one after the other until today you can take your time in doing this and give as much detail as you feel comfortable with because everything you say to me is important and any information you give me will not be shared without your consent or permission

So do you want me to concentrate on the adoption side or just general?

Erm on the adoption side of it.

Right - yeah - okay well I was born in 1958 I was adopted at 6 weeks old em by my adoptive parents who already had 1 child which they had previously adopted she's 3 years older than me pause and erm my parents couldn't have children of their own or so they thought cause they went on to have 2 children of their own after they'd adopted my sister and I so I have 1 elder sister that was adopted and 2 younger sisters that were my parents natural children there's just 1 year between me and my first younger sister and there's 5 years between the youngest (pause) erm I had very normal childhood em not the greatest childhood in the world not the worst just everybody's story nothing particularly interesting happened erm (pause) no everything was fine erm I sometimes used to think about being adopted but you know it wasn't something that I dwelled on really I was always given you know the story that I'm sure everybody's given you were special you were chosen you know all of that and you know things were fine erm my eldest sister who was also adopted decided when she was about 18 that she wanted to look for her birth mother (pause) and she was told under no uncertain terms that she would be disowned if she did there was know way it would be allowed and erm it was just not a matter for discussion and was never discussed again so when I decided I wanted to search for my birth parents you know it was not something I could broach with my adopted parents although I have quite a good relationship with them on every other front its just where they weren't prepared to go I wouldn't say I have a difficult relationship with them but erm you know but searching for birth parents was something they wouldn't even discuss so erm it wasn't a road I went down you know and I wasn't particularly bothered it wasn't something that bothered me really. I thought she was probably a teenage mother so I've got many years left if I got to 40 she wouldn't yet be 60 so I could search later on in life so I just go on with my life I met my husband at 17 and got married when I was 18 by the time I was 21 I had 2 children so (laughs) which I think was probably looking back on it I wouldn't give it a moments thought at the time but I think it was a way of trying to have somebody that belonged to me like a blood relative you know so we deliberately chose to have children at a young age and that's fine they're grown up now they're 25 and 23 and erm I have good relationships with both of them still married erm my life went on part time jobs when the children were small and then when they got to about 9 and 11 went back to work full time as a secretary in an engineering firm and then em bout um 8 years ago decided to open up my own business selling children's clothes which is something that my adoptive parents do so they have a shop down in York so they were a lot of help in helping me set that up and er getting it off the ground and that's been a great success I'm very happy with that so I quite like being my own boss and then the children were getting older and I think they were probably about erm well probably about the same time as I took on the business I started thinking well yeah I wanted to do something more about this finding my birth parents and I think I'd made the break more from my own parents.