Having been told when I was 5 or 6 that I was adopted, I always wondered what led to that happening. A part of me used to wonder if I was unworthy so I do think being ‘given up for adoption’ (deliberate use of words there) affected my self-confidence.
My wife Eve and I trained as coaches and that, plus the NLP training all helped my self-confidence for sure. I recommend personal development courses for everyone!
My adoptive parents, Pam and Fred Grace, brought me great happiness. I knew that they would be upset if I searched for my birth parents while they were alive. My wish though was to meet my birth mother and tell her I had incredibly loving, kind, and inspirational adoptive parents. Mum and Dad lived a long time, both passing within a year of each other at 92.
After my personal development training, I started discreetly trying to find out more about the background to my adoption, with the intention of not trying to contact my birth mother until my adoptive parents had transitioned. Around 2007, the story started to emerge. It transpired that when my Irish birth mother was pregnant with me, she was living in London (where I was born) separated from her Irish husband, who denied being my father. I imagine it must have been really challenging being an Irish Catholic mother in the 50s giving birth to a child that wasn’t your husband’s, so I can understand her going the adoption route. What I wanted was to be able to meet her and explain that I understood her reasoning and didn’t hold it against her…. Plus I’d had a very happy childhood.
After my English adoptive parents died (2015 and 2016), I started to search via people tracing services and my social services counsellor for my birth mother without success. (Sidenote: I ended up counselling my counsellor about her teenage son, so the courses definitely paid off!)
I decided to apply for an Irish passport to make life in the EU easier post-Brexit as we wanted to spend summers in either Spain or Portugal (we winter in Florida). (Eve’s maternal grandmother was Irish, so she is applying for an Irish passport too.) One of the requirements for the Irish passport is my birth mother’s ID or her death certificate, so I asked a genealogist to see what he could find out so that we could obtain one or t’other. Bless him, after he found out online that my birth mother had passed away in 2013, a few years before my English parents (still with me?!) he contacted other members of her family by phone and so, within a day, I had new cousins! Quite a shock for them, which is another reason I held back from trying to contact her or her family.
We found out that my birth mother spent her final years in…… Portugal! Coincidentally, the country in Europe that we had chosen to register in and spend our summers! We rented in and registered for residence in Portugal in a town called Albufeira on the Algarve as they are very expat-friendly there and my Irish birth mother Evelyn, (known as Evie, one of my pet names for my wife Eve!) lived out her final years in Loulé, a mere half an hour from where we’re staying!
I’ve been corresponding with two of her nieces & sent them a link to our UK TV Channel 4 ‘A Place In The Sun’ episode, filmed in Florida, so they can ‘meet us virtually’ as I’m sure it’ll be quite some time before we can get to Cork & mingle freely. Looking forward to it!
Life Lessons so far:
* People often have very good reasons for their actions. Try to understand those reasons first before being judgmental or feeling you must have done something wrong or not been good enough
* Out of trauma (adoption say) can come good things, like wonderful adoptive parents
* Genes will out….. (Nature vs nurture) My birth mother ended up in Portugal and so have I!
To be continued….
