Something is happening

I had an email from my brother, my real one, my birth mother's son Jon. My mother has had another operation to remove cancer. Apparently it was successful and she will be ok, but I am worried because she's had lots of operations, is not well at all and I'm scared I will never get to meet her.

I'm going to open a special bank account and start hassling all my friends to put a couple of quid in so I can make the trip.

Of course the whole possibility of actually going to Canada has thrown things up in the air in my head. I've been having nightmares. I just have to accept that it's time to start processing again. It's not going to be just about meeting the birth family, but also about revisiting, remembering, trying to make sense of what happened in those early years.

Just in case anyone is interested, and also to help me with the processing, I'm going to start filling in some of the back story.

The problem with that, is how can we really trust our memories? I was looking at the earliest home I can remember on google street view, and God, that was wierd. For one thing it is not quite how I remembered it, unless it's all been changed quite radically. I don't think so. The house is a bit like I remember, but alot smaller. In fact the whole area seems really tiny. That is to be expected of course, I was only a little kid then. But I'm sure the front lawn was bigger and more sloping and I didn't realise that there are hardly any windows on the house!

With Street view I was even able to have a bit of a nose around the back of the house. That was a bit sicky, because it just reminds me of all the time I spent looking out of my window when I was locked in my room. It's no wonder no one knew what was going on in there, all the fences and blank walls.

Set me off remembering about being in court when I was 11 being made a Ward of Court. I went with a social worker and sat on the other side of an aisle from my parents. I had a present for the mother, but she wouldn't take it. They wouldn't even look at me. I seem to think that I was actually asked questions in court but I don't remember what they were.

I didn't really understand anything that was going on or what was said. I went kind of blank. So blank that I really thought I felt nothing. It came as a surprise when afterwards, in the car park with the social worker, I burst into tears and cried for ages. But inside I felt nothing at all and couldn't understand why I was crying.

Right at this moment, I feel really sick with it. The hearing was all about how crap I was and how the parents couldn't cope with me any more and how I'd tried to change but it hadn't been enough.

I guess I was a bad kid. But actually, since I found my adopted brother again (on the internet, after 30 years -what an experience that was!) the stuff that he tells me he and my other brother got up to were loads worse. I'm still trying to figure out what I did that was so wrong. She just didn't like me I suppose.

But then there are these nightmares. I always used to think that there was an event, a specific something really awful that I did that I could never be forgiven for. The nightmares suggest that there was something...

I'll talk more about this another time.