I will probably always feel like an outsider. But I'm here to find the love in it.

Does Everyone Feel Like an Outsider Sometimes?

As an adoptee, it feels like a permanent state that I’m learning to live with

Sweet Italian Jesus but its a right old mess over here in the land of the adoptee fog

Family here and there, blood related and not, different cultures and lands…but touching little similarities in the way the old religion seeps through the newer one in the little roadside shrines to Mary in both the countries of my biological origin and my adoptive family’s origin.

I am by DNA 100% Irish, but bought up in England in Italian first generation immigrant and Cockney families.

My Irish birth mother and father are long gone. But five years ago, after 54 years of wondering, of not knowing, my brother found me out of the blue and was able to give me information I’d never had. I saw our parents’ photographs for the first time, and I found out their full, proper names and the counties and little villages where they were both from.

It felt like a miracle.

I discovered the truth about my siblings. Growing up as an only child, I had three imaginary friends, who I thought of and referred to as my brother and two sisters. I always felt that I was one of four, but my adoptive parents didn’t know about my older sister at the time of my adoption. If they had known that three years after they adopted me, a little brother came along and needed a home, they would have adopted him, too.

I am in touch with my brother who found me, but after five years we still haven’t met and I honestly wonder if we ever will. I don’t even know where in the force-field between our hearts the reluctance on my behalf meets the reluctance on his.

Another sibling I missed by just seven years, she passed eleven years ago at the young age of 42, a beautiful woman. And the older one still missing. No name, date or exact place of birth (Eire)

My adoptive mum and dad are long gone too, and very much missed. They adopted me late in life to the astonishment and disapproval of most of their family members. The one aunt who did love me is dead. The others disappeared from my life with the loss of my parents. Dad missed the arrival of my firstborn by a matter of weeks and mum missed my fourth by a few months.

My beautiful babies’ lives have unfolded like flowers, and they’ve grown, and flown and have babies of their own.

I want to give my children and their children, my lovely grandbabies, so much more than this. I have on offer a confused muddle of strands and fragments and faces in photographs, people who bought me up, and people whose faces I didn’t see until my fifth decade, but who are blood of my blood. On top of this, a ridiculous number of Ancestry dot com ‘4th-6th cousins’…so called ‘matches’ who don’t answer my messages, but not the one I’m waiting for, the hope of meeting whom keeps me forking out the monthly subscription; my older sister.

Inside my heart the little version of me stamps a foot and blinks back tears and between gritted teeth says,

‘I don’t want ‘DNA matches’. I want people, I want kitchen tables, I want cups of tea. I want phone calls, messages and the sharing of laughter and tears with people who are of me as I am of them.’

I want real live people, the presence and acceptance from whom will give me my place in the world in the eyes of myself, for my children. For them to know that I am a person who belongs.

I know we all have the propensity for that longing inside of us, adopted or not. For some of us it’s a yearning that may never have the possibility of being realised, a true saudade, because it’s the yearning for something that may not, and may never have existed for us. So us adoptees hold hands together across the void of cyberspace as we each find the way to come home to ourselves.

I believe that I chose this contract to come in to earthly existence on. I chose to come down into this and to learn to see the love in it. To reach beyond the earthly story and to make a meaningful life. To be the first of my line for thousands of years to be born outside of Ireland, to take that deeply concentrated magic over the sea to a land that needs it.

To learn to live alongside the massive missing pieces and entire absent system of my people, my language, my culture, and to learn to live with the profound, unnatural and stressful feeling of always being ‘outside’.

To remember where I was loved.

And to love.