Turning 40

Graphic art depicting a slightly uprooted plant in a triangle of soil, with it’s leaves blowing in the wind.

By. Lizzy Kirk

Prologue

As I sit here on a rainy Sunday morning, days away from entering my fortieth year of life, I find myself reflecting on everything that happened this year. 

How will the year 2020 be remembered?

For many, they will remember the global pandemic that so far has claimed the lives of three hundred and ninety three thousand people. People will remember the grief of loved ones dying alone, not being able to attend funerals. People will remember being isolated from friends and family, the strain it had on their finances and their mental health. I guess people will also not forget a sense of pride and admiration for all the critical workers around the world that despite the global pandemic still went to work every day to serve and take care of the rest of us, and how something as small as coming out of your house on a Thursday at 8pm to clap not only showed the world that we cared for those people, but brought our communities together in a time when every single one of us needed hope.

 A lot of people will look back on 2020 and remember it as the year that people woke up, spoke up, and said this is enough! As another black person died at the hand of police brutality, it sparked one of the most significant civil rights protests around the world. Black lives matter!

As a black woman, I have felt so many different emotions over this, I've cried a lot! Racial injustice and oppression are still very much alive and well, all over the world. I'm upset by the lack of understanding, empathy and education from the white people around me. Martin Luther King had a dream in 1963 he dreamt that his four little children would one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Nearly sixty years on, and we are still fighting for his dream. His dream is our dream, and we are still fighting for it.

At times it has felt like the world was unravelling, as I sat in isolation watching these monumental events unfold on the news and social media, these are things that I will remember forever, but for me, I will remember 2020 for another reason. This will be the year my life changed; my identity changed, and a story I'd been telling all my adult life turned out to be something completely different.

It started with a post. 

Everyone knows I love social media, but even I sometimes forget the power it has. Once you post something out there into the world, you never know what's going to happen. Just one single picture of my birth parents, Colin & Norma, who I have never met or have really been interested in meeting shook my world upside down.

I was adopted when I was a baby, and my family has always been my family. I feel grateful to my birth parents for creating me and often look at the one photo I have and wonder where they are in the world (but nothing more). Still, it felt different this time, I felt emotional I cried, but I laughed it off as a life crisis with the impended 40th birthday.

Moments after posting the picture, I received a message from a friend on Facebook who said she had never realized I was adopted and that she knew the man in the photo. I can't really tell you how I felt at that moment, it was enough to pour a gin at 1pm in the afternoon. We had a conversation back and forth, and it turns out he was best friends with her dad, she hadn't seen him for a long time. However, they were still in contact, and she said that if I ever wanted to meet him, she could perhaps bridge the gap. I explained that this was never something I ever expected to happen, so I had no way of knowing what I wanted to do so would need some time to think about it.

Me being me, I can just never leave something alone, I needed to do some detective work. I now knew his last name, and with a few minutes of female, FBI worthy Facebook stalking I had his profile right in front of me.

Wow! That's my dad, I thought, and suddenly I started feeling things, new things that I hadn't felt before. I needed to know more about him. I looked through his page, but because we weren't friends, I was limited to what I could see. I knew that around the time I was conceived he worked in a restaurant as a chef in Nottingham. Suddenly I thought about a friend of mine that had told me stories about when her dad who had worked on the doors of the pubs and clubs back in the day, I wonder if he knows my dad? So, I call her "Hey mate I need you to do me a favour, can you call you dad and ask him if he knows this guy, I think he's my dad".

A few minutes later she calls me back ‘yes my dad knew him, they were friends back in the day.’ I remember thinking, this really is a small world, he knew my dad and I've found all this out from one little social media post. My friend then said, "oh dads calling me back I'll ring you back". I waited for what felt like hours for her to call me back. Still, in reality, it was a few minutes but me being me, very impatient I felt like I was going to explode, I called her back, she didn't answer. What the hell’s going on? Finally, she called me again, and this is where the story takes a life of its own!

Her words were, "I don't know what to tell you, he knew your mum as well" In all of the fuss about Colin I'd forgotten about the other person, Norma. I just felt like the shocks just kept coming, time to pour myself another gin. 

Turns out, back in the day her dad went out with Norma, shortly after that she got together with Colin. Norma then discovered she was pregnant, creating a possibility that I could, in fact, be the child of Tony…. my friends dad…. not Colin… Sorry, what? Is this serious? This cant is happening? My friend is telling me that possibly her dad is my dad!

To be honest, the rest of the conversation that day is a bit of a blur. I just needed some time to let all this sink in and think about what the hell to do next.

I didn't sleep a wink that night as you could imagine. My mind was racing a million miles an hour, this can't be real! The next day I called Gemma as soon as socially acceptable to do so. More facts were unraveled, back in the day there was talk that maybe the baby (me) was Tony’s, but Norma said I was Colin’s, so that was that. The can of worms had well and truly been opened now, and I couldn't leave it, so the only thing to do was a DNA test. Never in my life did imagine during a global pandemic I would be ordering a DNA test online, to test if I share the same father as my friends. 

Gemma & Nicola have been friends of mine for a good few years, we would meet for coffee, we go out for drinks, we go to Christmas markets together, go to the cinema to watch murder mysteries. I scrolled through social media to find photos of us together at parties, me with their children, Mac their younger brother used to work for me as waiter when I managed a restaurant, we used to go out after work, get drunk and have a laugh, these people had been in my orbit for some time, how can it be possible that they could now be my siblings. 

Fast forward seven days, possibly the longest, most anxious seven days of my life and the results were in….

The words "the probability of paternity is 99.9998%" right there on the screen staring at me.

Which part of this do I process first, I've found my dad, my friends have overnight become my siblings or the fact that I suddenly feel like a large part of my identity has been taken away from me. When I was younger, I made up stories about my birth parent with my friends. We called them Ann and Tyrone. It wasn't until I asked my mum about them that she gave me a box she had been saving for me with letters from my birth mother, details about both my parents, my adoption and a photo. Colin and Norma, there they were the people that created me. 

Reading about Norma, a recognized so much of myself in her. So, from that day on, I knew who I was, I was part of Colin and Norma, they created me. I felt no animosity towards them for giving me up for adoption. They were 18, and when I think back to what I was like at 18, I wouldn't have coped in this day and age with a baby, never mind back in 1890.

Turns out that wasn't my story and the photo I've been looking at for all these years is just Norma and some guy. I'm a total hothead, act before I think every time, I stormed downstairs with the box, and I threw it in the bins outside my building, followed the next day by me coming to my senses and going through the bin to retrieve it. The box needs to stay, it's part of the story even if it's changed now. I do wonder if Norma really did think that Colin was my dad or did she just want him to be? Questions that I will probably never know the answer to so I'm just going let that one go.  

People keep asking me how I feel, I never tell the truth, I've never been able to truly open up about how I really feel about things it's just not my way. The weight of everything that's happened is just so massive, and I don't know what I should deal with first or even how to deal with things. Suddenly I have a dad, I've never had a dad, I mean I had a dad but not since I was about 10, how does it work? Just saying the word dad is weird to me. The anxiety of rejection from people stops me from putting myself out there every day in ordinary life, and now I feel the pressure of all these new people coming into my life, what if they don't love me?

I know in my heart that nothing but positivity is going to come from this, my head just needs to catch up a little. I have a really lovely relationship with the siblings I know already. Hence, it is only going to get better and better, and the others are a great bonus. Should I ever need a kidney, the pool of candidates has been dramatically widened. 

Growing up in a white family has been great, don't get me wrong, and they will always be my family. Still, these people have the same DNA running through their body, the same ethnic background, and that's massive when as the only black person in a family you can't help but feel on the outside. 

Having to deal with all of this while being in a national lockdown has been a wild ride. Pretty sure not many people have had to do a drive-by DNA swabbing and have gained a father and six siblings during a lockdown. I mean its total madness!

I now sit and ponder, what will the next chapter of my life be like…..

Lizzy is pictured smiling, wearing a brown lacy tank top, and a head full of beautiful golden and brown curls.

This year is Lizzy’s 40th year, but in so many ways, it feels like her first. She has woken to so many things, and finally, she thinks that things are making sense. She is not a professional writer; she has just written her story the way she sees it.