My Name is Why

by Lemn Sissay (2/52) Proper wanted to like this book too. It is a brave book but I could not warm to it on first reading. The poems on first reading left me cold too. But I guess you have to realise that I have “skin in the game” and that might have coloured my…

Mapping the Way Home

Mapping the Way Home: the Sufis and the Three Stages of Spiritual Awakening Food, body image and self-acceptance have run like a royal road right through my life.  Food is and was my safety, my comfort and my security, my north star through a difficult childhood adoption spent in fear of abandonment and fear of…

A Woman Submerged

A Woman Submerged So, for me, this very beautiful wall art (created by Sean Yoro and preserved somewhere in a bay East of Canada) sums up my real time experience of adoption. Not waving but drowning.  Not drowning but waving. Ahead then below. Below then ahead.  Submerged then free – ecstatically free – then back….

The Invitation

The invitation sits in my in box. I think its spam but when I open it she asks me to meet on Friday. The last time we met I asked her to stop keeping me a secret. A Dirty Little Secret.  O Kate, mum says to me gently, why do you use those words? Because…

Adoption and the Fish Ladder

My sometime favourite piece of advice  in life reads something like: “This Life is a journey – you will take two steps forward and one step back – what ever you do , don’t give up or rather –  I have handled everything that has come my way so far and I will handle this…

Reading Matters: The Fish Ladder and Ynys Las

June and a review of the Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury (Bloomsbury Publishing) And I’m remembering a time with my first husband out on the Llyn Peninsula – this book (the Fish Ladder)  has made me think of that. We were young together – we met at school on the stage in a  school play,…

The Un-Birthday

I chose not to send you a birthday card. But I still thought about you all day. I thought about Mum, back in the day and her fierce disapproval that I had chosen this quiet protest. “Oh Kate,” she would have said, the rest left unspoken. Fuck You. This morning I see you are in…

Reading Matters: February

Moonlight – Best February Movie. Its Sunday today and the Oscars tonight and I can only hope for recognition for this exhilarating, life affirming movie. The film tells the story of Chiron, a young black man grappling with his sexuality while growing up poor in Miami, at three pivotal points in his life. There’s a…

Meeting Jenny

1pm and I am waiting in my car to meet her. I am watching for her by the door. She doesn’t come. The clock moves forward and I wonder, momentarily what to do. I do feel however that she will be there – it’s just that, once again, I need to find her. I wait…

Reading Matters “How to Stay Married”

(In which the writer explores a black gloom with Jilly Cooper, gets stuck with Milo (from the Phantom Tollbooth) in the doldrums, talks with Rhona Cameron about adoption, consults Walt Whitman and finally decides to make her peace) Black Glooms Black Glooms Jilly Cooper calls them. I have been stuck in once of these since…

Adoption Story

Yesterday I found out from a complete stranger that my birth father’s name placed my paternal heritage as 100% Kashmiri. I am standing in my office at work watching the clouds scud by in the rain and wind – talking on the telephone to a complete stranger and I let my guard down. Knowledge is…