A few weeks ago, my birth mother died. Her name was Joyce Angrave. I was removed from her due to severe physical and emotional neglect and maltreatment in the first years of my life.
In many and most respects I was the lucky one because I was the only child of hers that was adopted. My full older birth brother James was fostered by relatives. Joyce met another man and became pregnant. She dumped my three older half sisters at a children’s home in Leicester, and disappeared with her new partner to Yorkshire, carrying my younger half sister and didn’t look back.
I know firsthand what the enormous psychological impact had on one sibling, but it isn’t for me to discuss it. Karen, another sibling, committed suicide after suffering significant mental health issues in adulthood. Joyce then mawkishly sought attention from her death. I came across a website dedicated to Karen where she spoke of her “Three surviving daughters”, failing entirely to mention that she had a son (my birth brother James, who was never given up for adoption and who had attempted to create a relationship with her, only to be rejected yet again. I didn’t expect to be mentioned as I had been adopted), alive and well. This was absolutely symptomatic of Joyce’s calculated, cold and indifferent personality. I have also experienced considerable struggles with complex anxiety disorders and mental illness as a direct result of the neglect inflicted by Joyce Angrave in that first critical period of life. These issues began emerging in my early twenties. I have been in psychoanalysis for the last three years. This has helped above all else to give me answers, not only with regard to my own difficulties but also how Joyce’s toxic behaviour left such a trail of destruction.
I originally set out to look for my siblings for health reasons, and to also try and locate them in warning because I was diagnosed with Homozygotic Factor V Leiden – a blood clotting disorder, that although not particularly uncommon, it increases the risk of miscarriage and stillbirth during pregnancy, and those with the disorder have a higher likelihood of developing DVT’s, Pulmonary Embolisms, TIA’s and Stroke. It was serendipitous that I almost immediately found my birth brother James on Facebook. Almost everything else that occurred after that regarding the contact I had with other members of my family, James aside, was an utter nightmare. But I realise, as painful as it has been, it was a necessary nightmare.
Because I only know of my own bad experience with my birth parents, I perhaps unsurprisingly assumed that Joyce’s other children would have been taken in to care, fostered or adopted. I certainly never imagined that anyone, except for my younger half sister, Leah, would still be in her orbit. And to a point this is how it seemed to be presented, when after an aborted and short lived communication with Leah, who was indeed very close to Joyce, and who had either absolutely no sensitivity to my own fears or was simply oblivious – she simply went on a “hard sell” Joyce campaign, which pushed me away almost instantly, Maggie my older half sister, and one of three dumped at the kid’s home wanted to make contact.
Maggie, it appeared, had barely any contact with Joyce. She was brutally honest in her assessment of her as a mother. She said that she had not socialised with her for years. She told me that it had been her that had mashed her food up and given it to me because I wasn’t being fed by Joyce. She said she wouldn’t let her grandkids spend time her because it made her feel uneasy. But then weird slip ups in her conversation started appearing. She lived in Loughborough but would suddenly “bump” into Joyce in Leicester, and then these chance encounters were clearly not chance encounters but social encounters. But still she completely character assassinated Joyce. Which was ok if that’s what she wanted to do. But I had to walk a fine line. Because I was aware, that regardless of my own antipathy towards Joyce, she was her mother and the only mother she had. Further the last thing I wanted to do was to even begin to suggest that my childhood had been a happy, solvent, carefree one, because I liked Maggie and I felt guilty because she had spent years in a children’s home. And then I came across a Mother’s Day post she had left for Joyce. Which was the polar opposite of everything she had said to me. It read like a bad Barbara Cartland novel crossed with the most saccharine Hallmark card one could imagine. Think pink vomit with candy floss. And then I realised two things. Firstly, that for months she had been feeding me a crock of shit. And secondly, that she had very serious problems.
I felt utterly betrayed by Maggie for many months. Now – I couldn’t care less. What I do care about though is ensuring that Joyce Angrave isn’t Lionised. She was not a wonderful mother. She was a dreadful, neglectful mother, a selfish, deceitful, abusive and manipulative mother. She has caused untold damage to at least three people’s lives – of that I am one hundred percent certain. One of them is no longer here to tell the tale. Maggie Jane Bethell, Leah Harris and Laurraine Pardoe, my remaining half sisters, are perfectly entitled to inhabit whatever fantasy realm they so desire – an entirely manufactured world, where, bizarrely, she is Mother Earth and they have forgotten their own past – forever stuck in a Ground Hog day created by Joyce Angrave, where her daughters play the grovelling Maids of Honour in a frankly masochistic and sick tableaux, acting out the same old lines over and over again. They denied me my reality even after one of them gave that very reality to me themselves – an offence on a cosmic scale, and something that I can only conclude to be the actions of deeply pitiful and sad individuals. And at it’s epicentre the Geiger counter was off the scale, because there was Joyce Angrave.
Whilst there is no elation in her passing, there is relief. And the sense of threat is fading. I wished her no harm in her life, however great the sense of fear I felt from her. But I could not like nor love a woman who gave nothing to a child she had given birth to. Not that I was the only one. My sadness has always been collective. There is frustration, and not including James, I’ve garnered enough of my birth family to know that we are from different places and different worlds and our differences would have outweighed similarities had there not been the schisms.
I would never advise an adopted child not to discover their birth family. But I would give them one enormous bit of advice. I didn’t do it and I should have. If possible try and do it through official channels and through mediation where a third party is involved. A neutral party can close the lid on a Pandora’s Box. The only thing that’s closed this box has been the death of my birth mother. It’s over now, and it’s done with. But an adopted child trying to tread the line of diplomacy between your adopted family, your birth family and attempting to keep your sanity at the same time for me was an impossible task – it caused me enormous suffering, and it triggered concern for my family.
This is the truth about finding my birth family and a more realistic obituary of my birth mother, Joyce Angrave.
