I knew I was adopted before I knew what adoption was...

My story is long and goes back way before I was born. I have pieced together information from different places but I dont know if my info is accurate - its just all I have. My Grandmother The story begins in 1942. My maternal grandmother was unmarried and got pregnant. The records say that she had some kind of learning difficulties but do not elaborate on what was actually wrong. There is also no info on the father. In those days 'bad' girls were often sent to asylums for being unmarried and pregnant and this is what happened to my Grandmother. When her daughter was born, she was taken away and my Grandmother was left in the asylum for the rest of her life. The baby, who went on to be my mother, was raised in childrens home and foster homes. My mother. In 1963 my mother was living in a port town training to be a nurse. She was 21 and when she found out she was pregnant with me the father, who was a sailor in the merchant navy, shipped out and she never saw him again. I was born in November 1963. I was born by caesarian and has Rhesus positive blood, whilst my mother was rhesus negative. The relevance of these two things will become apparent later in my story. My mother had no family, no money and no support, however she did have a close friend whose family took her in for a short time after my birth. I am told that she wanted to keep me and tried to find a way to do so but I also ended up spending time in foster care with different families. When I was 9 months old I was fostered by the people who eventually adopted me. My mother agreed to let them adopt me and backed out of it the first time. She really didnt want to give me up but her circumstances did not improve, there was no welfare in the early 60s and just after my 2nd birthday she finally signed the papers and walked out of my life. I am told that when I was being fostered my foster ( later adoptive) mother made it very difficult for my real mother to have a relationship with me. She purposely put me to bed for a nap when she knew my mother was coming to visit and she made no secret of the fact that she disapproved of my mother. I can remember my adoptive mother running her down to me on many occasions - even telling me that I came with a cheap pram and old clothes which she threw away and replaced with a better ones. My adoptive mother. My childhood was safe and secure for the most part but I can remember never feeling like I fit in, having panic attacks in the middle of the night and going into my parents room to make sure they were still breathing - they were in their early forties when I was born and had a very elderly outlook and appearance and I used to be so afraid that they would die and I would be alone. They had older, grown children who were not adopted and there was resentment from two of them about my presence in the family, even though they had both left home. There had been less money when they had been growing up, they were born during the war and had experienced rationing and obviously there were three of them competing for parental attention whereas, to them at least, I was a spoiled brat who had a whole lot of stuff that they never got. I say 'appeared' because I never felt it, I felt lost. Like a round peg in a square hole. My memories of my childhood were that I was dressed in old secondhand clothes from jumble sales or handouts from neighbours, I was teased at school for the way I was dressed. I remember only getting a bath once a week on a sunday and if I missed that bath then I would until the following week. My mother smoked 40 cigarettes a day and hung washing to dry over the oven - where chips were fried daily. Looking back, I must have been the smelly kid in the class that no one wants to sit next to or befriend. I can remember hiding in the toilets at school during break times so that no one would notice that I didnt have any friends, and as I got older that turned into not going to school at all and wandering around the town until I was expected home. My adoptive mother was a controlling hypochondriac attention seeker. It actually seemed like her ambition in life was to be sick and frail so that everyone would feel sorry for her and give her attention. I was ashamed to bring anyone home (on the rare occasions that I did manage to make a friend), because the house stunk and it was run down and filthy. If my friends every asked her how she was they would get a half hour long account of her ailments, her hospital appointments, what the doctor said etc followed by 'oh I know Fiona (me), doesnt care'.....What she didnt see was that a ten year old girl who asks how you are, is doing so because its polite, NOT BECAUSE SHE REALLY WANTS TO KNOW! When I reached 11, much to my horror she got a job as a dinner lady at my school. That was the same year that she started to wear a caliper on her leg due to some exaggerated injury - more attention seeking - and I then had to deal with questions about what was wrong with her, being teased because she was the same age as everyone elses grandmother and having her standing over me in the dinner hall insisting in front of EVERYONE that I eat my greens. I remember her being nice to other peoples kids but never to me. I can remember one summer she made me cry over something EVERY single day over a six week period. I was never told I was pretty and she would get my hair cropped really short so I looked like a boy. I started my periods when I was 9 years old and she told me that I was losing bad blood, that men lose bad blood too and then she threw a sanitary towel at me and told me to get a shower - because I was covered in blood was in agony and thought I had been stabbed in the night. She would then make me suffer the humiliation of ASKING her every time I needed a fresh towel and in order to get one I had to SHOW her the soiled one. When I was introduced to people it was ' This is our ADOPTED daughter'. One day, I dont recall how old I was, I asked what 'adopted' meant. She told me that it meant that she did not give birth to me but that statement was instantly followed by ' BUT you are MY daughter and I will be DEEPLY HURT IF YOU EVER TRY AND AND FIND YOUR REAL MOTHER'. It was then a closed topic and I was never allowed to mention it again - however she would occasionally mention it when she could say something negative about my real mother, for example when I gained weight as a teen and got acne she told me that my mother had bad skin and was 'heavy'. Both my real mother and I are 5ft 3ins and petite build so the 'heavy' part was a lie - my weight issues were due to the APPALLING diet that I was fed daily. When I was 14 she took me to the doctor and put me on the contraceptive pill ' because she couldnt stand the worry'. What she saw was an attractive young woman who was getting male attention - but she saw this before I was aware of it and it was her constant references to how I looked that made me AWARE of the attention I was getting. I was playing with dolls and she was accusing me of having sex. She would stand over me every night and check to make sure that I had actually swallowed the pill - because she didnt want me to end up like my real mother . My relationship with adopted father was amazing, he was the kindest sweetest man you could wish to meet, but he was henpecked and controlled by her and she nagged him non stop. As I grew older and rebelled the fights got worse. My adopted dad had a heart attack when I was eleven and I knew that his days were numbered. I sensed that this wonderful man was going to be taken from us and my hate for my adoptive mother just kept growing as I watched her nag and berate him on a daily basis. It got worse and worse and I started to feel like if I was out of the equation then she wouldnt be able to use me as the reason to nag him so at 17 I left home. I was in no way ready but I had to escape her. When I was 18 I began my search for my real mother. I found her quite quickly as the address of the friends that she stayed with after my birth was in the adoption records and the family still lived at that address and were still in touch with her. We met and it was like coming face to face with a stranger. She came to the place where I was living and she was accompanied by her husband. She explained that she had married him the day after my 11th birthday. He hovered around and I just wanted him to go away so that I could speak to her. Eventually he went for a walk but he came back half an hour later. I was living in a small town and it turned out that her husband came from the same town and his mother still lived there. I was asked NOT to talk about any of this with anyone from my work as word could get out and people may know his mother - you see his mother did not know that I existed, she was from a strict religious background and would not have approved of her son marrying a 'loose woman' who had had a child out of wedlock. I believe that the only reason that HE even knew of my existence was because of the caesarian and the fact that any subsequent pregnancies that my mother had would encountered problems due the positive / negative blood issues. At this time she told me that she had two small children ages 5 and 7. A boy and a girl. I tried to maintain contact with her but I felt like a dirty stain on her sheets. I didnt even know where she lived, all mail was passed 'care of' the friends address. She didnt trust me to even know where she lived. Contact stopped for a while. When I was 19 my adoptive dad passed away from a massive heart attack. I was lost and grieving and at 21 I got pregnant. There was no contact with my adoptive mother until I was 29, married and pregnant with my third child. She sent me a lovely card and we spoke often on the phone but she never once met any of my children and we never saw one another again. I asked about her children and it was then that she told me that after she got married she never managed to conceive again and her children were not my biological brother and sister - she adopted them. I have never been sure that this is the truth and I have often wondered if she doesnt want them to know about me as it would open a pandoras box that she just want to have deal with. Maybe I will never know. In 2002 I went on a TV show about adoption. I wrote to her and said that I didnt want to let time pass without trying one last time to have a relationship with her, I wanted to try before it was too late. I never got a response. However when the TV show makers got in touch with her regarding the show she called them within 5 mins of getting the letter threatening legal action if her name was mentioned. The last time I heard from her it was a nasty email, typed and not signed saying that she wanted to be left alone. There is more to this story regarding my father but that can wait for another post.... Thanks to anyone who takes the time read to this.