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This week, we hear from Keren David on adoption, and its varied consequences.
How does a family absorb an adopted child? The question goes to the heart of what a family is, how much is inherited through nature and how much through nurture. Are some children too damaged by a difficult childhood to be adoptable? What should happen to children with no family at all?
These were the questions on my mind, when I wrote my latest book, a novel about two teenaged siblings who, at the beginning of the book, wouldn’t recognise each other if they passed on the street. Cass was adopted by a wealthy Home Counties family when she was four, and seems to have successfully left behind her neglectful birth family. She’s a star pupil, heading for Oxford, a future Head Girl of her grammar school, well-behaved, hard-working.
Her birth brother, Aidan, grew up in care, moving between foster homes and children’s homes, interrupted by a brief disastrous stay with his birth mother. He’s almost illiterate and verging on alcoholic, but is trying to build a life for himself with a partner and her child. Aidan is haunted by the fear of losing everything, as has happened to him so many times before.
I tried to imagine what would happen if Cass met Aidan after twelve years apart. How would they feel about each other? How would their lives be changed?
This is a scenario which is being played out in families across Britain. Social media sites have made it much easier for birth families to trace children lost to adoption. Adoptive parents often react with fear and horror when their children start meeting birth siblings in secret, reaching out to a family they hardly remember. Many react by trying to ban them from Facebook, taking away their mobile phones, a strategy which can further alienate a rebellious teenager.
Adoption has changed a great deal in the UK in the last few decades. It used to be that the majority of adopted children were the illegitimate babies of single mothers. Now they are far more likely to come from neglectful or abusive homes.
We’re used to seeing heart-warming reunions on reality programmes between middle-class mothers who were forced to give up their babies, and their loving, forgiving adult children. It’s not the same at all if your beloved child was rescued from severe neglect. But often the extent of the neglect has been hidden from the children themselves, until they are deemed old enough to cope with their full history. The "Life Books" they are given by social workers often don’t tell their whole story - but when a vulnerable child is building a new life, would it be appropriate to remind him or her of the horrors of the past? You can understand the instinct of caring adults to save the brutal truth until children are older – an instinct that can backfire when their children are approached online by the people who abused them in the past.
Of course, birth parents may have worked hard to rebuild their lives, courageously leaving abusive partners, giving up drink or drugs, changing their lives. Is it so terrible for them to reach out to the children they lost many years before?
Social workers are there to support families, and yet many adoptive families don’t want outsiders interfering in their family life. It’s not so long ago that adoption was seen as a shameful secret in British homes, and that can prevent some from asking for help.
My book is told from the alternating points of view of Cass and Aidan. I love writing teenage voices, I think it’s fascinating to see the world from their limited viewpoint. Their lives are very different. But the question they ask - what is a family? – is one that affects us all.
Keren's new book, Salvage, is published by Atom and is out now.