Don Parker's Story

My name is Don Parker and I was adopted as a small baby in 1968.

From as far back as I can remember, I carried questions that nobody could answer. Who am I really? Where do I come from? Why wasn't I enough to keep?

That last question is the one that haunted me most. Because however irrational it sounds, being given up for adoption feels like rejection. Even when you know intellectually that it wasn't your fault. Even when you are surrounded by love.

That feeling of being unwanted by the one person who should have wanted you most never fully goes away. It just learns to live alongside everything else.

As a young child, I was confused in ways I couldn't articulate. I didn't have the words for what I felt, just the feelings. And those feelings came out in my behaviour.

I gave my adoptive parents a hard time. I pushed them away, the very people who loved me most.

Looking back, I understand why. When you have already experienced abandonment at the very start of your life, you test the people around you. You push and push to see if they will leave too.

They never did. Not once. But I didn't make it easy for them.

I grew up in East London in the 1970s and 80s, raised by two people who loved me unconditionally, my adoptive dad Alfie, who gave me my values, my moral compass and a lifelong love of music, and my adoptive mum Maggie, who gave me toughness, loyalty and the courage to stand my ground.

But love, however unconditional, doesn't silence the questions. It just means you carry them alongside something warm.

As a teenager, those unresolved feelings intensified. The confusion, the rejection, the unanswered questions, they needed somewhere to go.

I found alcohol. I found drugs.

Not because I was bad or weak, but because the pain needed managing somehow. Because when everything inside you feels chaotic and unresolved, you look for anything that makes it quieter. Even temporarily. Even destructively.

I started searching for my birth mother at 17.

What followed was years of dead ends, false hope, painful silences and moments of unexpected discovery. The search consumed me. It shaped every part of who I was becoming, sometimes in ways I am not proud of.

Desperate to belong somewhere, I was drawn as a naive teenager into far-right politics. Looking back, I see myself as a victim, groomed by those who preached a politics I didn't truly believe in.

What I was really searching for was somewhere to belong. Someone to tell me I was enough.

What saved me was music, two parents who never stopped believing in me, and eventually, education. I qualified as a social worker specialising in children and families, despite leaving school without a single qualification years earlier.

In 1995, I met my birth father for the first time. A surreal and unexpected experience that gave me some answers, but raised even more painful questions about the woman who gave birth to me.

When I finally made contact with my birth mother, I was not prepared for what happened next.

The rejection I had feared my whole life became real.

She has never been willing to meet me. No explanation. No acknowledgement. Just silence.

That silence is its own kind of pain. Different from the questions. Harder in some ways. Because now I know she exists. Now I know she knows I exist. And still, nothing.

I now work with children in care who carry exactly the same wound I carried as a child, that desperate need to feel wanted, chosen and enough.

I bring something to that work that no textbook could ever teach. Because I have been that child. I have felt that confusion. I have made those destructive choices. And I came through the other side.

A near-fatal pulmonary embolism in 2022 gave me the final push I needed to tell my story. Lying in that hospital bed, I made myself a promise, I was going to write it all down before it was too late.

What I call the adoption paradox, being completely loved by your family whilst simultaneously feeling like you don't quite fit anywhere, is something I carried for over fifty years.

I have just published my debut memoir, The Space Between: A Memoir of Adoption and Belonging.

It is honest, moving and often darkly funny. It explores nature versus nurture from the inside, reflects on what it means to be a parent, a husband and a son, and confronts the silence of a birth mother who has never been willing to meet me.

This week, I was interviewed on local radio about my story, coverage that means the world to me as a debut author.

You are not alone.