ABSTRACT
Melanie Light describes her family history as one which ‘begins before it’s begun’: family histories which involve fostering and adoption always do. As Light was five years old and her brother, two, when he was adopted, his life existed in parallel to hers before he came to live with her family. Light pictures her memories of her own early years as being in colour – some Technicolour, others hand tinted – and imagines her brother’s as infused with a kind of emptiness, an out-of-focus quality, perhaps only a sketchy, tattered black and white photo standing in for the missing years. There is a relevance to this description of her childhood, as both ‘colour’ and ‘black and white’ are woven through Light’s family narrative. Light reflects on the long adoption process and her memories of the now outdated practices from the 1970s around adoption, reflecting on how this resonates for her today. At the time, placing a mixed-heritage child in a white family was highly unusual. There was no support given to thinking about the complexities of identity and belonging or the importance of cultural links and links to heritage this adoption would raise. Now working as a psychotherapist based in schools, Light highlights how the adolescents referred to her often need answers, or at least need the chance to live more comfortably with the kinds of questions that represent their attempt to capture more nuanced internal states relating to the complexities inherent in shaping their identity in light of their heritage.
