Author Meg Henderson's adoption heartache

I remember the first time we saw Marion in a children’s home, a tiny 18-month old with a stern expression, sitting on the knee of a carer who was scarcely more than a child herself. Our son, Euan, was three years old and we were planning to adopt Marion and her sister, Louise, a year older than Marion. Euan, held out a present to Marion, a cuddly toy, and she turned her face away from him and ignored the gift. “A right little madam,” I thought.

We stayed at the children’s home for three days, the girls joining us in what would become their family group. One night at dinner Marion wanted to eat sweets instead and I wouldn’t let her, so she picked up a cup of milk and threw it against the wall. One of the carers jumped to her feet, ready to go to her defence, but I stopped her and told Marion she could have sweets later, after eating her meal. She shrieked but we ignored her. That night she went to bed hungry but the next night she ate her meal, still with that stern expression.

And so it continued after we brought her home, always a diva, always making a rumpus. Her sister Louise proved to be brain-damaged from early beatings, we found this out gradually over the years because the social services manager had decreed we were told the minimum about the girls – another fact we found out years later. Between the two Marion was the more difficult; determined, manipulative, devious, charming and always looking out for herself.

It proved impossible to instil a sense of morality or fairness, she took what she wanted, which was always more than anyone else, what she wasn’t given she stole, toys, sweets, money, anything. Whatever was done for her was never enough or good enough. That’s the way she would be all her life. We soon realised that reasoning and punishment meant nothing to her, being caught was a risk she was willing to take once, maybe twice, out of every ten times, and sanctions, she decided, were sentences to be served before the slate was wiped clean.

Then, when she was eight years old, we discovered she was musically gifted. Though we had no understanding of how gifted she was we hoped this was something she could build on, a talent to channel her energies into, something that would give her confidence.

She boarded at a top music school, played violin and piano and sang in the cathedral choir, and whatever it took we happily sank into her education. Because children like her were destined to become professional musicians they mixed with the kind of performers ordinary people held in awe. Yehudi Menuhin, who had joined her during a practice session, was “A nice old bloke and quite good.” Itzhak Perlman, she opined, had superb technique but didn’t have the emotion, the heart, of the less technically exact Menuhin. Joining Perlman after a performance one night she told him he hadn’t performed to his best and he agreed. She was all of ten years old.

But still her less than acceptable behaviour continued and we lurched from crisis to crisis, always hopeful. Over the years I learned to keep anything I treasured safely hidden, as she continued to steal from every member of the family and outside the family too, and not for attention, she covered each episode with well-constructed, logical lies that took years to uncover. Because she was so gifted her music school decided she was displaying “artistic temperament,” and, we discovered years later, paid someone to take her out every week to give the other children a break.

When she went to the Royal College of Music in London she was free of any restraints we had on her and we only heard from her when she was in trouble and/or wanted money. By then that was our function in her life, buying her out of trouble as she walked into more, cursing us as she went, and we could only hope that she would settle down and go on to the glittering career she should have had. And she was charming, able to act out a different character to everyone she met, so that they “knew” a different Marion. Our family knew every Marion though, which infuriated her.

In the meantime, her sister was diagnosed with a severe mental illness and we had our hands full. By the age of 16 Louise was brain-damaged, autistic and psychotic. We were heartbroken and exhausted caring for her, not to mention disgusted when we then found out how much information had been deliberately kept from us. Both girls, we discovered, came from a family riddled with mental illness and were the results of incest between the mother and one or two of her sons.

Though Marion’s behaviour was appalling at times, I think we didn’t suspect mental illness because we didn’t want to. Looking back all the signs were there. Having lost one daughter to it we just couldn’t contemplate losing another, so we didn’t. By comparison Louise was “lucky” in that she had no understanding of her situation, but Marion, with all her gifts and intelligence, was only too aware. With hindsight, it was perhaps easier for us to believe she was simply headstrong and badly behaved, conditions she could grow out of rather than one she could not.

She was in her early twenties when she was diagnosed with mental illness, though by that time she was living permanently in London, hundreds of miles from home, so it was easy for her to hide it from us. The demands for money, the threats and abuse if she didn’t get what she wanted became part of our normal, if exasperated life, we lived amid constant conflict caused by Marion. She was in her late twenties before we found out how ill she was, even though there never seemed to be a clear diagnosis. Personality disorder, bipolar, schizophrenia, and mixtures of all of these and more were mooted over the years. She was put on anti-psychotic medication that was so strong it needed other medication to control the side effects.

Between the illness, whatever it was, and all the medication, she had no real life, and she hated how the tablets made her feel. Often she would stop taking them, convinced that this time she would be all right, that it had all been a mistake and she wasn’t mentally ill after all, only to quickly become deluded, wandering the streets hallucinating until she was found by someone, usually the police, and sectioned once again.

At one point, without our knowledge, she went to the social services area where her family had come from and was allowed to read the case notes. She was absolutely devastated. Though she had always known the gist of her background, possibly seeing so much in black and white horrified her. Ours was an entirely different family with different beliefs and values and, even if she didn’t share them, she was mortified by what and who she came from.

And so she came up with a delusion to deal with it. She decided I had given birth to her as the result of an affair and, to cover it up, we had put her into a children’s home then gone back and adopted her. It was fiction, but to Marion it was preferable to reality. This made us the worst human beings on the planet, me especially, and she said she intended killing me and exposing our betrayal to the world.

After each episode she was put back on her medication and everything was sweetness and light for 10 minutes. Then it would all start again, the phone threats and abuse that she could keep up hour after hour, day after day and always from different numbers. Reasoning with someone in the throes of multiple delusions is impossible, so we got used to changing our phone numbers, only re-establishing contact when she was lucid again. This happened over and over. And always in the back of my mind was that “worst fear,” the horror of what I always believed she might one day do and, a few months ago, at the age of 37, she did.

Her sister now lives in a village for learning disabled adults and is as happy and contented as she is capable of being, but bright, talented, troubled and troublesome Marion is dead. My husband had a stroke about the same time and was too ill to be told, it will be some time before he is well enough to know, if ever.

After a very long marriage it’s hard to keep this from him, and a huge grief to hide from him. Instead of dealing with it in a normal way I have to keep pushing it to the back of my mind. When he was in hospital he didn’t want her to know in case it sparked a relapse of her mental illness. I agreed, though I knew by then that she was already dead. He always defended her, found excuses for her, worried about her and never, ever lost hope. The word “adopted” meant and means nothing to him, or to me. Though we went through all sorts of anguish over the decades, she was our daughter, our youngest child.

Everything we poured into our daughters has been for nothing and all these years later all we are left with is a yawning abyss. Now that it’s over we look back and see the amount of time, patience, energy and, especially, emotion we had to pour into coping with Marion, surviving one disaster only to be on tenterhooks waiting for the next one. It’s natural in awful situations to want someone to blame, but no one was at fault either for her death or for the horrific way Marion died, certainly not Marion herself. All the same, along with grief we all feel a great deal of illogical guilt. Guilt, because we feel there must have been something more or better we could have done, and illogical because we also know there was nothing we could have done, for Marion or Louise. The truth is that they hadn’t a chance and we hadn’t a chance of helping them either. They weren’t doomed from birth; they were doomed from conception, as are many children still being offered for adoption.

This should be a warning to anyone encouraged to jump on the adoption bandwagon, anyone tempted by pictures of beautiful children who only need loving families and homes to make them blossom. It is very rarely true, the mythical TLC is merely a handy, hurtful lie told to entice well-meaning people to adopt. The actual adoption process is the easy part, the real problems can unfold years, often decades afterwards. For us, as our son said, “It’s over now,” but for many, many families duped into adopting children they have no hope of coping with, it is still going on. The emphasis remains on making adoption easier and quicker, on thinking up different ways to have more children adopted, instead of sorting a system that causes misery to people who can’t speak out for fear of being trolled by the ignorant – everyone demands happy ever after for these children, whether it is possible or not. Despite the dewy-eyed promises of social workers, damaged children don’t just need and, very often, can’t cope with, what we think of as normal family life. The plain, cynical fact is that having them adopted is cheaper for local authorities than keeping them in care. And that is all that matters.

Some names have been changed.