Growing up adopted

I don't actually remember when I first knew that I had been adopted. I had had my suspicions from quite an early age, though. I knew that I was born in Scotland, but that my parents had never lived there - my mother lived for more than 100 years in the town where she was born, on the south coast of England.

I was also aware that people remarked on how much my sister took after our parents, but they never said the same about me. That was hardly surprising, given that they were short and dark and I was tall and fair. My sister's name was there on the baptismal roll at church, but mine was not. These things made me feel that I was different in some way from other children, but I never regarded my parents as being anything other than "mine" - I have never referred to them as my "adoptive parents", for example.

When I was about ten, long after I knew that I was an adoptee, I found an old diary belonging to my live-in uncle, with an entry that read "baby John arrived, birth name Clayton".

When I was much older, and had left home, I decided to find out who I was. I was able to track down my original birth certificate, which of course gave my full name at birth (Derek Alexander Clayton), and also revealed that I had been a home birth, even giving the full address.

I wrote to the address, in Falkirk, just out of curiosity, and was amazed to get a reply, from someone who turned out to be my half-sister. She was about to go with her family on their annual holiday, in the same West Sussex town where I was then living!

I therefore met her, her husband and two daughters, and these were the only blood relatives I had ever met - I was about 30 at the time (I am now in my late 60s). I corresponded with my birth mother for a time, but it was soon clear that we really had very little in common, and the links were eventually broken. I never met my birth mother, and I have not seen my half-sister again either.

So does it matter that my parents were not the people who created me? I have always thought the answer was No, but these days I am not so sure. We are now told that there are many health conditions that are inherited, and that knowing your family's medical history is a generally good thing.

Having a child of my own also makes a difference. My son has an autistic spectrum disorder (a form of Asperger's Syndrome) that caused him huge problems at school and made a mess of his education (he is now nearly 30 and, despite being highly intelligent, does not have a single qualification to his name). Looking back at my own life, I can see that I probably had something similar, but in a much milder form. Was my natural father the cause of his unknown grandson's problems? As I shall never know who he was, that is a question that has no answer, but a legacy that my own son must bear. On the same line, there are conditions that can skip a generation, but my son can have no warning of these, should they exist.

Being adopted has not affected me all that much, to be honest, and I now have absoutely no wish to find out more about my origins. I do know that I was unwanted at birth, probably because my mother was having an affair while her husband was away in the Army. Had that been the scenario today, she would almost certainly have terminated the pregnancy. That somewhat colours my views about abortion, because I quite like being alive.

I am also aware that my family tree is not really mine. I am quite interested in genealogy, and can trace my family back to 1770 (amazingly enough, that is only four generations!), but I know that these people are someone else's ancestors, not mine.

To end on a lighter note, I feel a bit like the character in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore" who "inherits" a manor house full of portraits of dead baronets. On being told that they are not really his ancestors, he remarks: "I may not know whose ancestors they WERE, but I know whose ancestors they ARE!"