North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Debbie

they were very poor it was obviously a very poor family erm had been many years ago and to a greater extent still was now they were living in a council house and obviously didn't have a great deal and I didn't want her to feel that I was disappointed in what I'd found out and that's why.

Why I wasn't contacting her again so I think I will contact her again erm but as of yet I haven't erm (pause) so that's where I am with it all at the moment I'm really glad I did it erm even though there wasn't a lot of good news there I think erm the age that I did it at as well I'm really glad that I didn't do it earlier as I think I was a an age to cope with it all a lot better when I was 40 than I would have done if I'd done it when I was 18 20 you know I'd have been a lot more emotional about it yeah whereas I could really think well yeah that's the way it is once I'd got to 40 erm it taught me a lot about my relationship with my adoptive family (pause) erm that yeah that wasn't all as great as I'd thought it was so it made me think about my relationships with my sisters and erm up until I'd done this search I would've said you know it makes no difference whether you're a natural child or an adoptive child you know having experience of both my parents having natural siblings as well as my sister and I who are adopted and now I would disagree with that completely there is a big difference erm looking back on my childhood erm yeah I think we were treated completely different because we were adopted children and siblings er not necessarily worse I think my mother favoured my two younger sisters and erm my father probably tried to compensate by favouring the 2 older ones and I don't think that's exactly a helpful situation you know when erm a families growing up I'm not particularly close to any of my sisters erm my elder sister is a great loner and er she lives by herself with her 2 children she's bringing up by herself now and really like the standing joke in the family is you only hear from Phillipa when something's wrong as long as everything's fine in her life she doesn't really erm want to know about the rest of the family you know if she's got a problem then you hear from her which is fine you know its not a problem if I was to ring her up you know we'd chat for an hour an er catch up on all the news but I might not speak to her for another year you know but that's fine er my middle sister whose just about a year younger than me I have a very difficult relationship with erm for whatever reason we don't see eye to eye over a lot of things erm my youngest sister I get on great with and she's probably the one whom I keep in contact with the most but I wouldn't say we were a particularly close family but er yeah its definitely different if your adopted than it is if your erm a natural sibling and I think I did miss that in my childhood and that's why I wanted to get married so young and have my own family you know to compensate for that you know at the time I had no idea that that's what I was doing but looking back on it I'm sure that was what I was doing and erm that's about where I am at the moment