IDENTITY
Birthdays were always strange. He didn’t even know when his actual birthday was. He didn’t know the names of his biological parents or any name that they gave him. He didn’t even know for sure his nationality. He also didn’t know his ethnicity or his biological family’s religion. In short, he did not know who he was or where he had come from.
He was not suffering from amnesia. He was a foundling; an old term for an infant abandoned by his parents and discovered and cared for by others. When he was no more than a couple of weeks old, he had been placed in a car parked in a stranger’s driveway near a police station in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With a bottle of milk, he was wrapped up, and placed in a red tartan bag.
David was raised by adoptive parents. Yet despite their love for him and his for them, as both a child and an adult, that sense of abandonment and not knowing who he was or where he had come from, never really left him. He didn’t know of a single blood relative in the world, or anything whatsoever about his family history.
Last year through extensive DNA searching, David now 56, was matched with the DNA of his parents. Unfortunately they were both now dead.
However, he was also matched with a sister; a full sister at that, as they shared the same mother and father. Later he and Helen describe meeting each other as life-changing; for the first time in his life David met someone who looked just like him, and particularly so around the eyes. This was also the first time that Helen had met anyone who looked like her.
51 years previously Helen as a baby had been found by a stranger in a public telephone near a hospital in Dublin across the border in Ireland, with a bottle of milk, wrapped up, and placed in a red tartan bag…
This is an extraordinary story. There were further dramatic elements. Their parents were not married to each other, the father was married to someone else, and they had an affair for over 30 years. Also the father was Protestant and the mother Catholic. During ‘The Troubles’ David was subsequently raised in Belfast as a Protestant while Helen was raised in Dublin as a Catholic.
Yet less dramatically, there will be many ordinary aspects of this story that will resonate with many care experienced children, young people and adults, and their struggles around ‘who am I?’. This could be:
information gaps in their knowledge and understanding of their family history, their early life and why they came into care
relational gaps in terms of their connections with known and unknown members of their extended family, or other significant adults and/or
cultural gaps, and particularly so for indigenous children
Some organisations routinely undertake ‘life story work’. Some organisations use kin care as their preferred form of care. Some organisations invest in genealogy and connect children and young people with extended family members not otherwise known. Some organisations build a network of family and community relationships around those preparing to leave care. And some organisations provide opportunities for children and young people to not only learn about their cultural background, but also to experience it. How about your organisation? And do these issues always get the time and attention that is needed?
There is of course more to our sense of identity than the cards that we were each dealt at birth. Nonetheless, most of us who are not care experienced at least get to see all of the cards in our hand, and get the opportunity to play them if we want to.