So we have an MB to stalk now..Yay!! A blood relative of some sort at least .One step nearer to the goal. It is fair to say at this point I was stalled. What now? I established this MB was at least registered to the address we knew was the last known postal address of my Birth Mother some 8 years back. Where did she move to..(not Blackpool as far as we knew from the brick wall we hit there) Running out of names to check, cross reference and check again. This is hard work on your eyes and your typing fingers I tell you. Google and I were rapidly losing patience with this thread as it wasn’t exactly leading anywhere .

The thing you have to remember is at the point when you really believe you have find your BM you have to decide how you are going to ‘introduce’ yourself to her. You are a complete stranger, a possible guilty secret, or even a dirty one…Hmmmm, lets not go there…Either way , you don’t have a clue how she is going to react to your entering her world. You might rock up like an unwelcome door to door saleswoman with a bag of flannels or she may welcome you with open arms. You just have no way of knowing . So, be careful here. This is the point you have to plan ahead for.

Do you ring up and say ‘ Hey, I think you are my Birth Mother!Happy Days!’…click…….or do you attempt a pretend identity to get close enough to really see if its the right person.

I did hear a sad story recently  where a lady was the carer of an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s Disease. She specifically sought her out and found her in a care home, applied and got a job there and became this ladies’ sole carer. Its a poignant tale as the elderly lady was in and out of lucidity and on the rare occasions when she may have been capable of recalling an adoption in her past , the opportunity to broach it never arose. Sadly the carer, her long lost biological daughter never ever got the chance to tell her who she really was before the lady was totally memory locked down. She found her , nursed her to her death and never in that time did the lady know the real identity of her Nurse carer. That’s so tragic to me.My thoughts would often darken to a point of wondering if my BM were in fact dead. Or almost as bad, destroyed by disease that I might encounter in my own life.

Lets not forget those awkward conversations with doctors and midwives and the like who ask you ‘Any History of Cancer, Heart Disease, High BP etc ?’ How the hell do I know is screaming inside your head…You answer, ‘Er Nope’ Praying that this is actually true.  I was even asked once if I had any special dietary requirements due to my heritage. I kid you not! In the maternity ward this struck me as a weird question. Given that ward is now the Wines and Spirits Department of our local Waitrose maybe it wasn’t such an odd question after all! Ha!

Anyway moving along…before you reach for the Vino….

I needed to find this woman for the sake of my child too. She will ask where she is from heritage wise and know the differences in Mummy and Granny…she said to me once

” Mummy, I’ve got soooooo much Hair!!! Is that because you do to?” I replied “Yes it is baby girl, because you came out of my tummy you have lots of things that I have”

She thought for a minute . Put her head on one side and said ” Ok then, so Granny is your Mummy , but you didn’t come out of her tummy !’ It was a statement of fact, not a question. Here in front of me is a 5 year old child telling me the facts of life as her mind sees it. My response was one I repeat every time we have Mummy Daughter chats on the subject.

I tell her this : A Mummy is the person who raises you, washes you, puts the plaster on your grazes, cuddles you when you cry, listens to you read, lies awake listening to your breathing (and in my case puts a handbag mirror over your nose to make sure you are in fact alive as you sleep) and keeps you safe , well fed, warm and secure. Granny did all of these things for me as I do for you.  She accepts this and skips off to watch Peppa Pig.

Every time a similar subject comes up it is my job to help her understand the importance of family, no matter how we appear to the world around is, its these family traits that often make us so obviously our Mothers children. People have often told my Mother how much I am like her? Clearly not visually but in mannerisms and traits. Some not so good I suspect but hey , we are human. I might have the phrases and the raised eyebrows at the same things but I wonder how much of this is nature  and how much nurture. Its a question you can only really answer when you meet you BM surely. The whole point of nature is your personality traits. Easiest way for me to see which are mine is those that differ entirely from those of my adoptive family. The ones that give me the title Black Sheep. Many times I think , Jesus I really am from another planet to these people. I love them but they can frustrate the hell out of me. They are introvert. I am extrovert. They shy away from risk. I embrace risk as a challenge. They are highly intellectual. I am streetwise and creative. They have an abject fear of meeting new people for the sake of it. I collect friends everywhere I go…be it in the steam room at my club ( a select group of larger than life elderly gents particularly like it when I greet them as ‘ The Boys’ when I step into the hot tub) I trust my own judgement when I meet someone for the first time. They just wouldn’t waste their time. I will talk for England if given the chance, be it on text, phone or email. If three words will say the same thing, they will find those three words and be happy with them being an answer.The list goes on. What I do know is that my personality is most likely to be that of my Blood relatives and nothing to do with nurture. Its interesting to imagine an older version of myself ? They may even look like me too..Yikes, poor them. Whatever the outcome I will learn something good or bad so lets press on….

My next plan is to stalk MB and that address and that’s exactly what I do . Google Street Map shows me exactly where the house is in my Birth city of Manchester. As I said before , not the most salubrious area, but the sofa outside the corner shop looks quite comfy!?

A cul-de-sac so there is no way my man on the ground PD could set up a spy camp without drawing attention to himself massively! As this is a predominantly Black neighbourhood this was also a definite no-no for him.

We threw that idea away as a very bad one! 

From the Resources I mentioned before , I now had the means to establish who lived in the entire street! Result! LOADS of people to stalk..I was back on a roll and what I did next went against every red-tape method known to man. Forget Data protection ! My own data included. Given you are only using information already in the public domain this process is 100% legal and not guaranteed to work but it was worth a shot. With the help of 192.com, the information you can now gather is that of the people living in the street where she lived!

Someone must surely know what happened to either MB or in fact my BM?

Surely……………

Thanks for Reading

Love

Black Sheep

xxx

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