Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (5 page)

‘No of course not,’ I had tearfully replied. ‘Why would I ever want to do that?’

But later, as I lay sobbing on my bed, they were crying in each other’s arms in their own bedroom next door. Having failed to find any way of comforting their precious little ‘daughter’, they shared a fear that must be common to many adoptive parents. Now I knew who my ‘real’ mother was, and now I knew that she still lived less than an hour’s drive from my house with a new young family, might I demand that we all be reunited? After years of caring and raising me as their own, this loving couple were scared that the girl they thought of only as their own little daughter might suddenly vanish from their lives. It was to be a long time before they lost that particular fear.

Finding out such a momentous truth as I had that day, at an age when one can start to understand the ramifications, is an astonishing experience. Every family relationship you think you have straight in your head is thrown out of the window. My mummy was suddenly my grandma, and my daddy was my granddad. My sister was my mother, her husband was my step-father, my cousins were my brother and sister, my other big sister was suddenly my aunt with her children promoting themselves instantly from nephew and niece to yet more cousins. I instantly had a new little brother and a new little sister. And where was my real daddy in all this… and my real nan and grandpa, on the other side of my family?

Amidst such confusion it is perhaps not surprising that in my soon-to-come teenage years, my sweet little Miranda-wagon would soon be running off of the rails.

CHAPTER 5

LEFT BEHIND

I
still thought of my grandparents as my mum and dad, as indeed they legally were because they adopted me at the age of two or three shortly before Eileen, my birth-mother left home. I loved my nan and granddad dearly and would never suggest for a moment that they failed to give me the most loving childhood they could. Equally truthfully, however, I can’t pretend that I had same upbringing as my siblings and most of my peers at school. When one’s parents are in reality one’s grandparents there are significant, yet subtle differences that conspire towards presenting a unique experience of childhood. A combination of their greater age, their old-fashioned attitudes and their relative poverty left me feeling that for me, life was different from that of others my age. It wasn’t that I was jealous or envious of other children; just that I was always aware of the differences

In retrospect, I can also see that my grandparents’ own knowledge of the truth of our relationship might sometimes have influenced their attitude to me. I have never doubted their total love and devotion, but having suddenly to raise a young child must at times have brought them heartache as well as love. They never showed any resentment towards my unexpected invasion of their late middle-age but surely there must have been occasions when it must have have felt, albeit for fleeting moments, I was a fledgling cuckoo in their nest?

I have no more than the vaguest of memories of the day that my ‘big sister’ left home and left me in the care of the couple who were to become the only mum and dad I’ve ever known. My deeper understanding of what happened has come over the years from various members of the family. I’ve been told that during the first couple of years of my life my birth-mother, the woman I’ve always known by her first name, Eileen, did look after and care for me at my grandparents’ house. Apparently, at that age, I knew her as ‘my mummy’ – a crucial fact, of course, that was rapidly forgotten as I grew from an infant into a child. (These days, when speaking of my birth-mother I invariably refer to her simply
as
my birth-mother, rather than ‘Mum’ or ‘Eileen’.)

I later learned from my birth-mother that she was just 15 when she fell pregnant, although she didn’t recognise her condition until several months later, after her sixteenth birthday. Even when she was five months’ pregnant she apparently sported a 22-inch waist and it was only after that, as her tummy grew, that her pregnancy was revealed. It was far too late by then for abortion to be an option. Eileen has told me that I was probably conceived the very first time she made
love with her then boyfriend, a local lad who was her first serious boyfriend and her ‘first love’. Although they had been seeing each other for a while, her parents had never been keen on the relationship because they thought he was both undesirable and unreliable. He treated her well when they were together but would often disappear from her life with little explanation, returning to pick up the friendship again when it suited him. After I was born, she did have contact with him but he would still leave for weeks at a time. Finally her parents had discouraged him from having anything to do with the baby and encouraged Eileen to stop seeing him because he was so unreliable and they insisted that she needed more stability in her life.

For the first couple of years of my life Eileen lived in the bedroom next door to my tiny, nursery room in her parents’ West London home. She looked after me with the help of her own mother and our mother-child relationship was little different from that of any other. In the depths of my memory I have the tiniest snippets, like snapshot photographs in my head, of her being there; her smile perhaps and little moments like walking into her room and watching her doing her hair. But, because her parents were eager to share baby-sitting duties, my birth-mother could live a relatively normal teenage social life. In time she met and fell in love with another boy. Eventually that boy asked her to leave home and marry him.

The big unanswered question was: ‘What to do about me?’ My natural mother’s answer was… to leave me behind.

When I’ve thought about it through the years, I’ve tried to hide away the trauma of that decision. It’s been hard sometimes
to know that my birth-mother was able to abandon her first-born child. How could she not have taken me with her to live with her new husband? Why did she not send for me a few years later when she had another couple of children – my half-brother and sister – and when I might still have made the transition back to be part of her family? The truth is that, despite the effect it had on my life, it is hard now for me to criticise decisions made so long ago and in such pressurised circumstances.

Eileen has told me many times that she regrets her decision to leave me behind. But she was only a teenager and had a forceful mother and father telling her what was for the best; how could she have done differently? My nan and granddad were enjoying their new role as surrogate parents, I was settled and apparently happy in their home and they could offer a loving and stable upbringing for their beloved granddaughter. My birth-mother may well have been weak but I do believe she thought she was acting for the best.

I have long accepted that everybody at the time did what they thought was right and were acting with the best of intentions. And yet lingering doubts do remain. When Eileen tells me now that she wishes I had lived with her, it is hard not to think, ‘Well, why didn’t you say so at the time? Why didn’t you fight for me? When you had a new family, why didn’t you take me in then?’

There is a family story of the day that Eileen left me with her parents. Apparently she swore that if I cried when she left she would be unable to walk out of the door and would have to take me with her. That upset was side-stepped by my grandmother who took me off into the back garden so that I would
not have to see my mum walk out of the door… and she would not see any tears. Even before she left, my birth-mother had signed adoption papers to make the arrangement legal. I’ve never seen a copy of my original birth certificate which my grandmother apparently destroyed. Many years later when I wanted a passport I applied for a birth-certificate copy. It is a surprisingly short and little-detailed document, failing to record my mother or father’s names and merely stating the date of my birth and that I am, thankfully, ‘a female’.

At some time soon after Eileen had left, I simply forgot who she was. It’s hard to understand how any child can forget their own mum, you might think. But I, of course, did have a mum and a dad, in the shape of my grandparents. They became my whole childish world and my reality: so much so that when Eileen got married shortly afterwards I was recruited as a bridesmaid. Far from recalling that event as my mother’s marriage, I can remember only that I was as pretty as a picture in a new pink dress. The significance of the actual event had, by then, totally passed me by.

That was all long before I rediscovered the truth about why my ‘mum and dad’ were so much older than me. One girl at my school did have an astonishingly young mother. She seemed like a baby compared with my own mum: so young, highly attractive, lively and full of energy. I remember her as going out to parties all the time, being very trendy and ‘hip’, a huge contrast with my own mother’s life. As far as I could see only one other person in my class had parents anywhere near as old as my mum and dad. Her name was Amanda and, partly because we both had elderly mums, and partly because my mother earned a few extra shillings by child-minding Amanda
after school, we became close friends. Amanda had two far older siblings and she confided in me she’d been told she was ‘a late addition to the family by mistake’. I believed that I must have been a similar ‘late addition by mistake’ despite ever really understanding what that meant. What I did know was that other children, who will seize on any slight differences to tease and annoy, were only too happy to take the mickey out of me for having an ‘old mum’. I was glad that Amanda was around to share that particular burden.

The other reason for valuing Amanda’s friendship was that I was painfully shy at that age and didn’t always mix comfortably with other kids. It was not that I was unpopular, just that I rarely joined in with the crowd or sought to be a leading light in the group. I would talk to the others but if they were doing their group thing, what you might call ‘girly games’, then I did not want to know. If a sports game was in the offing, however, then I was always the first to be picked. I was ridiculously flexible, so was very good at gymnastics, and my height gave me an unbeatable advantage for netball. In our mixed school the boys were always playing football and asking me to join in their games. The speed at which I could run and the length I could jump kept me at the forefront of all the athletics as well. Without a family car and with ageing parents I rarely went on the sort of school-holiday outings that many of my friends seemed to enjoy. Instead you would find me most likely in our little back garden, messing around with the netball or trying to do some gymnastics, seeing for how long I could sustain a handstand or attempting the splits. Exercises and backflips on the lawn would keep me amused for hours on end.

I loved all sports and might in different circumstances have considered a sporting career, I still train several times a week with the help of a skilled, personal trainer and have always tried to keep myself as fit as possible. But any possibility of becoming a professional sportswoman foundered at school on the rocks of my parents’ financial problems. Watching sport on television, I noticed that some people actually seemed to make their living from this one activity I loved; the one activity at which I truly excelled. Seeing gymnastics in particular I would ask my grandmother, ‘How do these girls end up in competitions and stuff?’ and she would reply ‘Oh they’ve got personal trainers and do nothing but practice all day.’

‘Wow… can I get a trainer and do that?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly Miranda; we haven’t got the money for anything like that.’

I had endless enthusiasm to do a variety of things with my life but my grandmother had neither the money, nor the know-how, to encourage or pick-up on my interests.

None of the above means that my grandparents did not love me to pieces and I enjoyed a surfeit of emotional warmth and affection from them. Some of that may have come my way because my nan had herself been raised in an orphanage with no mother-love whatsoever after her own mother died and her father had remarried. She always told me that being in the orphanage was better than the abusive life she had led at home with her father and the original evil stepmother. My granddad had been in the Navy and had then worked at the local Hoover factory before being made redundant when I was very young. He was never able to
work again because he suffered from chronic pulmonary obstructive disorder (COPD) which meant that his ability to breathe worsened progressively year after year. At heart he was a fun-loving person but as time passed he was completely struck down by the limitations of his illness. His lung capacity was terrible, really bad, so that even walking up a flight of stairs would cause him to puff and pant. In his later years all his efforts were expended in just trying to breathe, which cost him his sparkle and brought on depression. ‘What bloody use am I to anyone? I can’t do anything,’ he would sometimes say. ‘My bloody legs are no use to me at all, I can’t go anywhere.’

I was asthmatic from an early age but never suffered remotely as much as my grandfather did. Whereas I might trigger an asthma attack by sudden exertions such as running for a bus, his breathing troubles were continuous and would leave him struggling for air in the day and coughing through the nights. His one regular pleasure was a trip to his local pub where he would play dominos and down a pint or two prior to coming home and falling asleep on the sofa. He used that pub for nearly 50 years and yet never had any sort of drink problem – he just enjoyed the company and the routine of that part of his life. Even so, some of my funniest childhood memories are of teasing him when he was a little too much the worse for wear before those afternoon naps. I would put all his hair in elastic hairbands as he slept and try to draw on him before my nan realised what I was doing. She took my joking in her normal good-natured way until the day I drew a picture of Granddad and wrote a note across it: ‘Too Drunk To Remember.’