This photo was taken around the time our parents died, our mother when I was two and a quarter, and our father a year later. Looking out to sea, as if wondering what the future held.
My three eldest sisters were then shipped off to relatives in NZ, which might as well have been Heaven, for all I understood either. They weren’t even brought to say goodbye to me and my twin as “It would only upset them”.Nowadays there’s far more understanding of what early bereavement can do to children, in those days it was assumed that small children would forget….now it’s recognised that the psychological after effects can last a lifetime.My twin and I were adopted, and we had to learn to speak English, instead of Mancunian! After quite a few carers between my parents dying and our adoption, when someone from ‘home’ came to visit us six months later, I reportedly wrapped myself around my Dad’s knees, and said “They’ve not coom tae tek us back, ‘ave they? “.Learning a new way of speaking, learning new ‘accepted behaviours’, can make one feel an Outsider,  and by internalising that feeling one then unwittingly behaves like an outsider, compounding that identity.
And for all that I’ve always felt like an outsider, I’ve also spent a lifetime trying to belong, with all the fruitless people-pleasing that that entailed, and the resulting resentments when people just weren’t pleased…. it’s perhaps no wonder that I became an artist!

This second photo…again not seen by me until I was 52, when the youngest of my three sisters who went to NZ came to meet me for the first time.
I’m the serious, (if not pouting!), wee thing being held on the right. When I asked my older sister who the lassie was, it was a mother’s help, who had been with us from before my mother died until after my father died.
Nobody remembers her name, which I regret SO much, only that she was from Ireland.

Which set me thinking….I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, ricocheting up through England, and then to live in Scotland where my birth father originally came from. Was my move to live in Ireland caused by some distant resonance from this lass? Certainly, I will never ‘belong’ here…but in building my own house I do now have roots of a kind. Perhaps this blog stems from a deep craving to be known, to be understood….the quest of an adoptee?None of this is written for sympathy, Heaven forbid! What has happened to me has made me who I am, fascinated by human psychology,  always an outsider, always a champion of outsiders and underdogs, and hopefully an empathetic friend to the unique individuals I’ve met along the way. I’ll finish with a cartoon from Michael Leunig…who speaks to my soul!