no evidence that their grandfather had fathered me: only the word of a retired social worker, and the missing letters their mother had sent to Hilary over fifteen years ago.
I’d caused a lot of upset. I’d caused a lot of astonishment. I know, because they told me so.
What had I hoped to achieve by exposing their mother’s secret? I still don’t know; perhaps, like I said, everything just fell into place. Did they deserve to know; did they need to know; should I have exposed their mother’s secret? Probably not.
When Hilary had written to Social Services all those years ago, she needed answers:
•She needed to know who she was.
•She needed to know where she was from.
•She needed to know why she’d been given up for adoption.
•She needed to identify herself.
•And let’s face it, everyone loves to investigate a secret, (especially if you’re the secret).
Mum and Dad accepted Hilary’s curiosity, and they both supported her wholeheartedly. Mum said that she’d always expected that we’d want to know more about where we came from, who we were, and why we’d been offered for adoption.
I’d always known that Hilary was my full sister. Apart from the fact that we look like natural siblings, Mum had always told us so. As a little girl, Hilary always said she wanted to be a farmer’s wife when she grew up, (I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be, and I’m still waiting to grow up), so when the social worker told Hilary that her birth-family had a farm, she was delighted and said she felt an urge to wear dungarees and feed chickens.
Discovering your identity is usually fairly easy for an adopted person.
After about a year of putting it off, Hilary’s persistence won me over and I made the time to visit the General Register’s Office.
I like Belfast; it’s a droll city that has in some ways benefitted from thirty years of bombing and rebuilding. Unfortunately no terrorist had the foresight to remodel the hideously unremarkable building that houses the General Register’s Office. I entered the unwelcoming block of glass and steel on Chichester Street, and woke the nice woman slouched behind the bulletproof window to ask her what I had to do to see my birth certificate. It was simple: she just needed my name, my address, and a Five Pound note. Then she told me to go away again; I’d receive a Certified Copy of Original Birth Certificate in about a week by mail.
I’d almost forgotten about the impending arrival of the certificate by the time it arrived in the post. I eagerly ripped it open, anticipating some marvellous revelation.
I was so disappointed, so disheartened.
My mother had named me ‘Eric James Adair,’ and I hated it like a bad joke, like someone had written kick my arse on my back; like everyone would laugh (and did laugh) when I’d eventually tell them (many years later).
I’ve never really felt like I owned my adopted names, Thomas, and Brian; not because I knew I was adopted, …. it’s just that they never felt like a good fit for my personality.
My first name, Dad’s father’s name, is Thomas. A good solid-sounding name, and my grandfather was someone I really admired, (although he died six years before I was born, he’d been a successful entrepreneur and politician and reformer, and everyone who had known him only ever had good things to say about him). My middle name, Mum’s favourite uncle’s name, is Brian. Uncle Brian was a doctor in Comber, and he was also a very popular and well-respected man; everyone loved Dr Brian Henry.
But despite owning two precious family names, I still don’t feel like a Brian, or a Tom or Tommy or Thomas. I don’t know what name would suit me. I ask my Claire what she thinks, and (guess what) she says I look like a Brian, (she’s obviously still blinded by infatuation).
You know the way most people look like their name? Well, personally that never worked for me, I think. And then I finally discover the names my birth-mother chose for me, and I’m so disappointed. Eric James? Eric Adair sounds like a geeky technical manager, thin hair and thick glasses (no offence intended to balding, bespectacled technicians), but it’s just not me. James, Jim, Jimmy; that’s not me either. I’ve never felt like an Eric or a James (and I don’t feel like an Adair, either). (Pillow talk with my Claire, I asked her if I looked like a Jim Adair: that woke her up, laughing.)
If you had to pick your own name, what would you choose? Chances are that you’re happy with what you’ve got. I don’t think mine is a problem with being adopted, or with adopting another family’s choice of names for me. My brother has a great name: ‘Paul’ is such a clean sounding, honest and reliable name; ‘Brian’ sounds like a henchman.
Names are important to me. When our kids were born, Claire and I took a long time to consider good names for each of them. Claire wanted to call our first boy Brian, but (yes, you guessed it) I wouldn’t have it; so we sort of way named him after her, and he’s called Blair. Then we had a daughter, and I agreed to do the same sort of thing and we named her after me, and she’s called Briar. Then, when we found out that our third child was going to be a boy we had a couple of months to think of a name. I wanted to give him a manly yet gentle-sounding Celtic name, and we eventually chose to name him Bowen.
Our kids tell us that they love their names, and sure enough they all look like their names suit their personalities. But I don’t feel like I suit Thomas or Brian, or Eric or James. At school I was called Bailie, which would’ve been okay had it been pronounced “Bay-Lee”, however a typical Ulster accent pronounces the name more like, “Bee-Alee”, and I didn’t like that either.
I was so disappointed when I saw what my birth-mother had chosen for me; perhaps she knew it didn’t matter because my names would be changed anyway. I don’t know what I was hoping for, I’ve yet to hear a name that I’d like to go by. (I know, stop moaning about it – it’s just a name.)
Our birth-mother had named Hilary, ‘Emily’. Hilary likes that name, and she prefers it to Hilary.
Hilary had been corresponding with our birth-mother through a social worker since 1993. She had shown me the letters from our birth-mother, and the photographs. The letters were short generalised chit-chat, but the photographs spoke a thousand words and fascinated us the most, and we examined every detail of every face for a similarity to ourselves, (no harm to them, but they did look like a bit of an odd bunch).
Sure, I’d like to have written to my birth-mother too, but the correspondence seemed so slow and complicated. Making direct contact between adopted children and estranged birth-parents wasn’t considered a good idea for lots of sensible reasons, so everything went through this social worker who, I guess, censored our correspondence before forwarding the mail in a brown envelope to our mother. And it worked the same way in reverse. It seemed so unnecessarily nosey and slow and inconvenient. (And what would I write, anyway? “Hi, how are you? It seems like a lifetime,…..”)
Although we only had a nutshell synopsis of the circumstances surrounding our origins, Hilary and I had had a long time to accept what the social worker had told us about our natural parents, and I kind of liked it: it’s fun to realise that I’ve a father sixty years my senior, (the old scallywag).
But for my birth-mother’s family, receiving my letter five months after their mother’s death must’ve been a really shocking revelation that turned their whole world upside-down. My letter interrupted the lives of this blissfully
