Rejection #3 (2003)
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here. My heart is pounding, my head aches and my stomach is going like a washing machine. Part detective, part stalker. I’m in my car in a street in Isleworth. Strategically parked about fifty metres from the front door of a house my birth mother apparently lives in. How did I end up here?
It started late last year with a change in the law that entitles adopted people to actually have their birth records (previously we’d only been allowed to see them). I jumped at the chance. I had to go back round the social services counsellor process for the second time (see Rejection #2 for more on my first experience of that). The bureaucracy was much easier and the counsellor more counsellorish. She questioned my interpretation of the letter I had received 13 years before, triggering an explosion in my head. No she didn’t think my mother was shutting the door on further contact and yes she did think it was worth a further effort. She strongly recommended an intermediary to facilitate the contact, assuming I could locate her again.
I was a man in a hurry. 13 years of an assumption of rejection, of no contact. Now I was angry with myself for reading it wrong and angry with her for not communicating more clearly. Underneath the anger, hope and yearning tugged away at my heart strings. No time for long processes. Sod using an intermediary, I was on a mission. I reached out to a friend of a friend genealogist to shortcut my search. One week later I had what I needed, an address. And oh my goodness, not Derby any more but Isleworth, barely 20 minutes drive from where I was working.
If I was in a rush then, now I am frozen, unable to move. I am watching the house, but actually I am focused inward; a private hell of indecision, anxiety, guilt, hope and general lostness. I resolve to act. I don’t want to drive away, neither do I want to knock on the door. I write my contact details on a scrap of paper with the intention of posting them through the letter box. Enough to cause a reaction, not enough to be intimidating – that’s my thinking.
As I get out of the car a man exits the house. Too late now I am committed. I pass him as he goes off down the street. I walk up the short path to the front door and fumble trying to get my piece of paper through the letter box. The door opens, time stands still…
It’s a young lady. She asks what I’m doing. My mouth dry, I stumble with words trying to say something without saying anything. She invites me in, time stands still…
I’m in a sort of living room, everything is fuzzy. She asks me why I need to leave contact details. The truth tumbles out of my mouth. I hear floorboards creaking above me, somehow I know it’s her. The young lady politely responds that she will pass the message on and I’m back out on the street again. I wander, dazed, to my car and drive away. It takes two streets to realise I am not fit to drive. I pull over, shaking starts, followed by tears, a mixture of deep yearning and bitter guilt.
Two days later the phone rings at work. I’m not ready for the fragile, emotional voice at the other end. She’s telling me I mustn’t visit her again. She’s telling me the young lady was a professional colleague and so the damage was contained. She’s telling me the man I nearly met was her husband who doesn’t know of my existence. She asks me why I came. My answer is garbled and inadequate, but she understands I want contact of some sort. She listens and gets it. She says it’s complicated and she needs a few days to think about things. She promises to ring me back within a week and I promise not to turn up at her house again. The call ends.
It takes me about a month to realise she isn’t going to ring me back.