What happened next?

[Olde Crone]

I was straightening the books on the shelf and spotted a book I haven't read for 30 years, called "Family Secrets" by David Leitch, a famous reporter in his day.

Briefly, it is about his search for his two sisters who he never knew - he was illegally adopted (well, sold, actually) in 1937. He found his BM and then found one sister. The book ends with them both trying to decide whether to look for and contact the other sister - they knew her name.

So today I thought "I wonder if he ever found her?" and googled him. Yes, he found her, she was pleased to know him but sadly committed suicide a few years later.

Leitch himself was obsessed with his beginnings and basically, drank himself to death over it.

I kind of wish I'd left the books alone today........

OC

[JBee]

That's so sad - they do say that for every good reunion there's another than isn't perhaps more which is why everyone is cautious of how it's done.

[Phoenix]

When the celebrity spotlight moves on to another victim, I rapidly forget the previous trapped rabbit. Don't you think that the need to talk to the cameras, to publicise your past by writing about it, indicates someone who is not happy in their own skin, and there is not going to be a happy ever after?

[Olde Crone]

Yes, I think that is true. He met his BM and they had quite a long relationship but it is obvious that even at that time, he could not really come to terms with what she had done, even though he said he understood. (She was completely unmaternal).

His "adoption" was only a partial success - he loved his adoptive father dearly but his adoptive mother was a very strange woman indeed.

Sad stories.

OC

It is I suppose, the glass half full and half empty syndrome ..
Some people have a seemingly wonderful childhood, great opportunities and loving family and yet are never happy.
I don't know how I would cope with feeling I was abandoned as a child.
Yet I know a person who was and had terrible things happen to him in later life and yet he had the kindest, nicest nature and was never bitter.
So does what happens to us, that is outside our control, form us or not ..

[Olde Crone]

Nature must have something to do with it I think. His own life was uncannily like his BF's life, BF was a big social drinker, lovely man, complete and utter pest to everyone around him.

He desperately wanted his BM to say she had made a mistake when she sold him, and that she bitterly regretted it. She didn't and in her own eyes she had done a practical thing which had given him many advantages she couldn't have.

OC

My friend told me in a quiet way that his mother was a prostitute and wouldn't have known who his father was.. I had a look and she was about 16 and unmarried when she had him .. so hardly a prostitute .. then I looked and her mother was similar .... I suppose you can let your past scar you, or you can say I have opportunities and I can going to make the most of them .. but it does depend a lot on your own nature ... David might have been scared more by his adopted mother's attitude and his birth mother's was the final nail in the coffin so to speak..

[Nell]

Very sad, OC, but I suppose the moral is that you can't hang your own mental/emotional wellbeing on other people's actions. Of course he wanted his BM to say she regretted it - but he had no control over her and yet was unable to prevent her control over his happiness.

I had two friends at college who were adopted. One was very happy (her adopted father was ghastly, but her adopted mother was absolutely lovely). She had no wish to trace her birth parents. The other friend had a ghastly set of adopted parents, the mother, I think, was a bit unhinged. She was desperate to find her birth parents, but I think she saw them through rose-tinted specs - they are my real parents so they will give me the love I haven't got from my adopted mother. We tried to tell her that her BM might well be completely different from the image she had in her head. I don't think she ever traced her.