When I was three months old, I got adopted from Bogota, Colombia. Right after I was born, I was brought to an orphanage. From what I understood, my mother, who was 18 years old then, was unable to raise me. She was in a relationship with my father, who was 26 at the time, but he did not want to have me. My mother was also not in touch with her biological family. I think she was very lonely and in a difficult situation.

I am happy with the family I grew up in. I got many opportunities and, especially with my adoptive mother, I can share how I am feeling and what I am doing. I have a boyfriend and friends. I am studying pedagogy because I want to help children in the future. But it is not easy. I tend to worry a lot, I often wonder if I am good enough. Social situations are stressful to me, because I wonder if I am doing things right. I often take things that people say personally. I tend to avoid the things I find difficult, so I cannot fail. But then I will still feel like I failed, so it is not really helping. My anxiety increased to the extent that I took a break from studying and went back to therapy. I have had anxiety since I was twelve years old, and that is when I started to get panic attacks. At that time, I did not talk about what I felt, I was scared that others would be unable to understand. These days I do talk more about what I feel. However, I am still anxious. I can feel it in my body: my body is always so tense that I received physiotherapy to learn how to relax.

<strong>Am i doing things right?</strong>

During the years, I started connecting my adoption and anxiety more and more. The stress, fear of failure; they came from somewhere. The stress that my mother must have felt during pregnancy, I was affected by that.

I never went back to Colombia. I wanted to. After secondary school, I took a gap year. I learnt Spanish and I was planning to go to Colombia and to communicate with people there, including my mother. My adoption organisation started searching her for me and found her. I was very happy. But when my adoption organisation asked her about me, she denied everything: she said she never gave up a child for adoption. She changed her mind later, she said that it did happen, but that the adoption was concluded to her, and that she wanted nothing to do with me. The organisation asked her to think about it. In the end, I am still her daughter. After that, they did not manage to contact my mother again. She stopped answering her phone and she does not work at the same place anymore. I was disappointed and angry for a long time. But anyway, I believe that my mother had a very bad time and that she does not want to be reminded of it. Otherwise, you would not react the way she did when your daughter wants to meet you. Yes, it seems easy for me to talk about, but that is not how I experience it. That is another thing I am good at: hiding my emotions behind a smile. If I am completely honest, the fact that I was given up for adoption is difficult for me, but it is even worse to be rejected by my mother a second time after my adoption.

Tekst: Inge van Meurs                        Fotografie: Ton Sondag