Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
suggesting they’re not out there; I’m saying I’ve never met them. The driving force always seems to be to meet a need for that parent. To allow them to fill the child-shaped hole in their lives. For a long time I felt guilt and enormous hurt at not being the child my mother really wanted. It wasn’t even that I wasn’t a true part of her, that she hadn’t carried or breastfed me, or that if things had worked out the way she wanted, I would never have been her daughter. It was that I sensed she felt that had she had a biological daughter, the child would have been more like her, an extension of her. Someone for her to mirror and be mirrored.
As I grew older, particularly in my teens, I would be overwhelmed by the sense that my mother was eternally disappointed by me. I wasn’t the daughter she had really wanted – not as a baby, and certainly not as an angry, confused teenager and young woman fraught with problems. That of course gave me further reason to resent her, I felt so desperately misunderstood and unable to speak about the feelings of sadness, insecurity, abandonment and otherness that haunted me every day. It is a familiar feeling among adoptees. That we must be silent and, above all, constantly grateful.
In their bid to become parents, Mum and Dad wrote to nearly a dozen adoption agencies. It was the early seventies and, socially, things were beginning to change. There was no longer such a stigma against unmarried mothers, and the contraceptive pill was readily available. This meant there were considerably fewer babies available for adoption. Eight organisations wrote back saying that their waiting lists were closed, but the Independent Adoption Agency wrote back asking them to fill in a questionnaire.
The questions included whether they would consider adopting a child with learning difficulties. Dad thought he couldn’t cope with this and Mum thought she couldn’t cope with a child with ongoing physical needs. But they both agreed, believing it to be a good thing, that the colour of a child’s skin made no difference to them.
Eventually, in 1979, they were approved to adopt. They were initially introduced to George. George’s story is every adopted child’s worst nightmare. As a small boy, he had been adopted by a British couple living in Hong Kong. When, a few years later, the couple had a child of their own, they decided they no longer wanted George and apparently tried to convince him that he didn’t want to live with them. They succeeded and George was bought to England to be put up for adoption again. After a weekend with George, Mum and Dad decided he was not the child for them. I often wonder about George and pray he cannot remember any of this.
A few months later they were told about another boy, a toddler of eighteen months living in a children’s home on the small Channel Island of Jersey, having been given up by his biological mother, a woman named Margaret. Margaret was a chronic alcoholic with a history of mental health issues, who claimed to have had a fleeting relationship with a Jamaican man, resulting in her becoming pregnant. (Years later we discovered that she had fabricated the story and had no recollection of the father, least of all his country of origin.) She gave her son the name Aaron. She was a big Elvis Presley fan and named him after the The King, Aaron being the singer’s middle name. My parents flew to Jersey to meet and bring Aaron back to their home in Surrey where he would be their son and, later, my brother. They changed his first name to Adam, they say to avoid bullying, but I wonder if, in part, it was also to make him more ‘theirs’.
At eighteen months, Adam spent the entire flight back to London trying to drink from the gin and tonic my mother had ordered from the air steward. No one realised then that the incident was a precursor to what would follow in the years to come.
After Adam had been living with my parents for a while, they decided it would be nice if he had a sibling. A sister. It was suggested to them by the social workers that their second child be ‘similar’ to their first. Less contrast, similar ‘challenges’. I asked my mother once what ‘challenges’ they were referring to; ‘Raising non-white children in a white community,’ she said. Strangely, though, none of these ‘challenges’ would ever be discussed in our family. They simply brewed under the surface of the smooth, yet unhelpful veneer of colour-blindness, naïvety, denial and, ultimately, I think, in my parents’ defence, love.
I once asked my mum if she would ever have married a black man. She replied with an answer that troubled me. She said that she didn’t think she would because they would have nothing in common. I realised then that Mum did not, perhaps could not see who I was outside of being her daughter. Where the colour of my skin had been the very reason I had been given away by Kris, to Mum it was no more than an aesthetic difference between us. And so while we knew we were loved, my parents’ ignorance and inability to acknowledge our skin colour as being crucial to our identities ultimately led to both Adam and I navigating, in isolation and confusion, a painful and self-destructive path to make sense of who we were as individuals and in the world at large.
By the time my parents adopt me, they are both forty, although my mother, having been born in March, has eight months on my father. I think this is strange; daddies should be older than mummies. That’s just the way it is. Like Tom always chases Jerry and teachers don’t have first names. They’re always Mrs So-and-So, or sometimes Miss So-and-So, but never Sally or Anne or Lucy. Either way, forty is old. Much older than my friends’ mummies, who are all in their mid- to late twenties, maybe early thirties. When I am old enough to be concerned by such things I am embarrassed by Mum’s ‘old-fashioned’ clothes (particularly her disregard of ‘pointy’ heels), her refusal to let us eat McDonald’s (I have my first Big Mac aged twelve at a friend’s birthday outing), or even have sugar in our tea. She is so old fashioned. Only Jessica Hartley-Moore’s mummy is older than mine, and that doesn’t really count because she’s got a much older sister who’s already a grown-up and Jessica was an accident anyway, whatever that means. As a child, I often think to myself that Mummy should have adopted me when she was younger. It would be nice to have a younger mummy, I think. It doesn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t even have been born a few years before! As far as I am concerned, there is no kismet between the time Kris decides to give me up and the time my parents are ready to adopt another child. It’s as if I believe they were somehow given a choice as to when I arrived, as is the case with ‘normal’ babies.
Not only were Mum and Dad not given a choice as to when I arrived, they certainly weren’t given much notice either. They were asked if they’d like to be considered to adopt a baby girl coming from South Africa only two weeks before I came to live with them and were only told Kris had chosen them from a list of potential parents some 48 hours before they collected me. My mother has described those two days as a frantic rush to acquire all the necessary paraphernalia required for an eight-week-old baby. How she rushed off to buy bottles, baby formula, nappies and baby clothes, having been told I would be arriving with nothing. She loves to tell the story of how none of the clothes she bought me fit, despite them being for a baby zero to three months old. She had to return them and exchange them because I was fat, like a ‘little Michelin Man,’ Mum says.
I am eight and a half weeks old when they collect me from the adoption agency in Camberwell in South London on 30 September. It is a Tuesday. I am handed over by Kris with just three babygros, a tube of baby cream (my mum still has the pink Johnson & Johnson tube with the swirly blue writing) and a yellow blanket. I often wonder whether those were all the clothes I ever had (perhaps because she knew she wasn’t keeping me, she only bought the bare minimum?) or whether she kept some.
I bond well with my new parents, am a ‘good’ baby, and Angela and Malcolm are delighted by the new addition to their family, although Mum loves to tell the story of how Dad went into blind panic when, a few days after my arrival, he is literally left holding the baby as my mother announces she is heading to her upholstery class.
Mum loves to upholster. Most of the things she upholsters are things no one wants any more, cast off by their owners; they are things she has found in junk yards, and at antique fairs and the like. Mum does her best to make them like new again. Not new actually, because she doesn’t make them look exactly like they where when they were new, but rather more to suit her taste. One of the pieces she has worked on at evening class is a Regency-style armchair, which when she found it had been discarded in a hedge covered in ugly black leather. On the seat part, some of the leather has been torn in places and you can see the white foam padding trying to escape. After