Late Discovery Adoptee: My story
I am a Late Discovery Adoptee. I found out I was adopted when I was 42 years old.
I was adopted at birth.
My mother never had the chance to touch me (‘they’ told her I died).
I never knew consciously. My origins were kept a secret from me. However, my body knew. My soul. My unconscious. My cells. My muscles. My marrow. My blood. My dna.
The relinquishment orchestrated my life as a phantom conductor might.
That tear, that loss, that irrevocable rupture reverberated. On every level.
So that when I found out, much became clear. The undiagnosed chronic psychological pain. The childhood depression. Marginalisation. Insecurity. Constant anxiety etc…sometimes there are no words to describe the tearing…(see what A for Adoption has to say about her poignant birth experience)
I was very grateful to find out, to be given the chance to understand what has been wrong all these years.
Very grateful.
To know.
To have a chance to consciously grieve instead of that grief leaching out inexplicably into all areas of my life across the silent years. To express what my body had to keep imprisoned (and still, to some extent, does). To heal. To integrate. To hold myself. To embrace my truth.
I have written my story in a fictionalised memoir (the names changed) that I hope will be published soon.
So what happened to me as a child, adolescent, young woman and adult, and how I found out, what happened next… I will leave hanging for now…
In the meantime there are a few themes that I would like to highlight and discuss on this website regarding Late Discovery Adoptees and Relinquishment/Adoption in general.
Themes such as:
The Rights of the baby/child/adult to know…
This is very much an issue these days with laws still banning the release of birth records, donor inseminations, surrogacy, and wombs for hire etc. So it is still a topic to be compassionately understood, and I would argue, from the baby’s perspective. So I will state my bias upfront: I believe every child has the right to know who their parents are (and to contact). I believe their rights supersede the rights of the adults involved. I am not against adoption. But the child must be told and then nurtured through the loss. The adoptive parents also have to know what it means to lose your mother at the very moment you are coming into Being. To lose your Universe. Your Self. Their love cannot replace the lost mother’s love because at birth the baby and the mother are one in ways that can never be replicated. This is where the ‘primal wound’ is given. It is a wound that can never be healed (those lost moments, hours, days, weeks, months, years can never be replaced as they were and might have been). The wound can only be understood. Embraced. Integrated. Nurtured. Seen. Witnessed. Allowed. Made Legitimate. Only then can the wound become some kind of reconstituted nesting place where we can re-womb and give birth to ourselves within our truth, not as marginalised, liminal human beings, not as objects of personal and societal and cultural shame. Only then can we render adoption ethical.
So I write and paint the last (and lasting) memories of my mother.
I photograph the liminal spaces, wherein I find her and, therefore, myself.
I sing – unbeknownst until I was 42 – with her voice. Her echoes. Her reverberations.
That timbre my own.
Kim Coull 
Reminds me of my own story very much. I was 48. Thanks for sharing! If you want to check out my story, read: http://orphanedheart.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/submission-for-secret-sons-and-daughters/
Thank you so much for your reply… I must have missed this altogether. I do apologise! And I will certainly check out your story. Thank you so much for stopping by and reading my story. I appreciate it so very much. Kindest regards to you on the journey…
Dear Kim,
I have just discovered your site. Like you, I was into my mature years when I discovered that I was adopted. It was four years ago, not long after my 66th birthday.
I have just started work on a PhD which has the tentative title: A CUCKOO IN THE NEST – the Lived Experience of Late Discovery Adoptees.
I would like to establish contact with you. My email address is barry.carozzi@gmail.com
I look forward to hearing from you, and indeed any of your readers who are also Late Discovery Adoptees.
Barry Carozzi
Dear Barry, thank you so much for your message. It’s so lovely to connect with you and how wonderful also you are also working on a PhD. I know its important work for you personally and for society in general and really look forward to hearing more about it! Finding out only four years ago it must be overwhelming to you still. I am so glad you’ve found my site and hope as LDAs on a similar path we can try and make sense of it all. Thanks so much for your support.
So welcome, welcome!
How wonderful to know you are out there…
The very kindest and heart felt regards and best wishes Barry!
My partner and I stumbled over here coming from a different web address and thought I might as well
check things out. I like what I see so now
i am following you. Look forward to finding out about your web page for a second time.
Thank you so much for your message and for following. It’s very much appreciated.
It’s great to see you and I really look forward to your presence and input here.
I don’t know the particulars of your story but I have worked with foster children for 20 years. I know the “System” in all countries is so very flawed. The system deals with human souls for a little while and then forgets them. Closed cases is the goal. The system deals with the case and forgets. But the babies don’t. No matter how old they get. The system attempts to deal in yes or no, right or wrong, now or later, easy terms to decide for them. But I have been around long enough to really understand that all of that is an illusion. The children never forget and have to live with decisions they had no voice in and as in your case not even the real information about themselves. I am now going to begin reading your stuff to see what you have done and become around that question. Just looking over your site it looks like you are a real artist. Maybe I am too but for a long time my medium has been children and families. All little souls wanting to be whole. Knowing this little bit about you makes me think of hundreds of little faces over the years as well as the mommas and daddys who were also small dependent souls at one time too. I think I will enjoy what I find here.
I can’t thank you enough for your incredibly insightful and generous comment and your appreciation and understanding of this type of experience.
We are all so connected in so many unseen ways and it seems amazing to me that you have had so much experience of this type of trauma and spent so much of your life healing and helping children with abandonment issues.
Not many seem to understand the life long legacy of these experiences. Thank you so much for sharing that you do in such a visceral, deep, and practical way.
Thank too, very much, for following my blog. Knowing that I have resurrected for a moment those “hundreds of little faces” is such a poignant gift to me…I appreciate and thank you for your presence here so very much.
This bolg stuff is fun in a most life giving way. Hugs from Alabama, USA
You made me cry, but in a good Lenard Cohen kinda way. 🙂 Your soul does know doesn’t it? Looks like you have created something beautiful from the chaos. He sang “there are cracks in everything, but that is how the light gets in.” Your light is unique and most lovely. Right now I want to kiss and hug all of the people that belong to those many faces and then turn and stand in line for for the kisses and hugs that the little boy in me needs.
Thank you so much for your beautiful words… I agree so much with the quote. Sometimes I think our souls are stretched thin (almost breaking) to the point of transparency and, because of the delicate gauze left by such stress and tension, allows the light to stream through… Thank you so much for your presence here…it is so much appreciated…
You are most gracious my lady. Your work is providing a place for new miracles to happen.