COMING HOME

"We are all born into a story. Some inherit it with certainty. Others spend a lifetime discovering it."

Looking back over my life, I often wonder whether the search for identity began the moment I took my first breath. Long before I understood words like adoption, belonging, or loss, I had already begun a journey that would shape every chapter that followed. This is not simply the story of an adoptee. It is the story of a twin, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a healer, an advocate, and a woman who spent much of her life trying to understand where she belonged. It is also the story of learning that sometimes we are born between worlds - between two families, two cultures, two identities, and two versions of ourselves. My greatest challenge was never choosing between them; it was learning to embrace them all.

People often ask when my story began. It began, like all stories do, with a mother.

Where It All Began

In November 1971, my twin brother, Rory, and I were born in Dublin. Two months later, in January 1972, we were adopted through St Patrick's Guild. We were incredibly fortunate in one important respect - we stayed together. Although we lost our first family, we did not lose one another. For that, I will always be grateful. Unlike many adoptees, adoption was never hidden from us. We always knew we were adopted. There was no dramatic revelation later in life, no family secret waiting to be uncovered. It was simply part of our story. 

Yet knowing you are adopted and understanding what adoption means are two very different things.

Growing Up Between Two Cultures

My childhood was rich in experiences that many children never had. Our home was bilingual and bi-cultural. German was spoken with my mother, English with my father, and somewhere in between existed our own family language - a mixture of both whenever one language could not quite capture what we wanted to say. Looking back, I realise that was a gift. Our family travelled frequently, spending holidays with family and friends in Germany, Italy, Croatia and other parts of Europe. Those journeys gave me an early appreciation that there were many different ways of living, thinking and seeing the world. Perhaps this is where my lifelong curiosity about people and cultures first began.

Yet while our home was filled with different languages and traditions, it also contained contradictions that I struggled to understand as a child.

The Twin Bond

Being a twin is unlike any other relationship. From the very beginning, Rory and I shared everything - our earliest experiences, our birthdays, our family, our adventures and, eventually, our grief. We were inseparable. Of course, like many twins, we also fought with spectacular enthusiasm. Our arguments were physical, dramatic and often over as quickly as they had begun. One minute we were best friends; the next we were sworn enemies. Looking back now, I smile at the intensity of those childhood battles. Rory was diagnosed with dyslexia in primary school and repeated a year, meaning we were separated in school for the first time. It was a significant change after always being side by side. 

Our family continued to grow with the arrival of my younger brother and sister during the 1970s, and many years later, in 1987, another baby brother unexpectedly completed our family. Life moved in cycles of beginnings, even though I had not yet realised that it would also become marked by profound endings.

My Parents

As I grew older, I began to understand that parents carry stories long before they become parents. My father came from rural County Tipperary, raised on a family farm where education, music and faith were highly valued. His father was an engineer, his mother a school principal, and his family was considered well established within the local community. Like many young Irish men of his generation, he considered the priesthood and attended Maynooth Seminary before recognising that his true vocation lay elsewhere. Music became his life's passion.

His career led him from school inspector to music professor and eventually to becoming a composer of contemporary classical music. His work meant our family moved frequently - from Ireland to Germany, later to Boston, and eventually to Italy, where he found great peace in a small villa nestled in the Umbrian countryside. From him, I inherited curiosity, creativity and a love of learning.

If my father brought art, intellect, and gentle quiet into our world, my mother introduced a very different kind of atmosphere. She was German, intelligent, complex and deeply wounded in ways I would only begin to understand many years later.

Our relationship was one of the greatest challenges of my life. As a child, I never felt emotionally safe with her. My memories are not filled with warmth or comfort but with criticism, unpredictability and emotional confusion. She seemed unable to form healthy relationships with women, and both my sister and I experienced the consequences of that. There were moments of manipulation, emotional cruelty and stories that left me constantly questioning what was real. For many years, I believed these experiences reflected something lacking in me.

Only years later did pieces of her own history begin to surface—an abusive childhood in post-war Germany, long stretches of untreated psychiatric illness, and the private reckonings she had kept hidden behind closed doors. Knowing what she had survived did not undo the fear or confusion of my childhood, but it softened the lens through which I remembered her. When I was around twenty, I made the painful decision to end contact. By then, my own health was failing, and every visit left me hollowed out rather than restored.

Years later, after a painful divorce from my father and a long struggle with alcohol dependency, my mother died from organ failure in 2002. I almost didn't attend her funeral. But something inside me knew I needed to go. Standing there that day, I made a choice - not for her, but for myself. I forgave her. Not because everything had been forgiven or forgotten, but because I no longer wanted the pain of our relationship to define the rest of my life. Ironically, a small inheritance from my grandfather, received the same year, paid my college fees.

Even in death, life found an unexpected way of helping me move forward.

My Early Health

My body began teaching me about resilience long before I understood what resilience meant. Following my twelve-month childhood vaccination, I experienced severe convulsions and was later diagnosed with epilepsy. I was prescribed powerful anticonvulsant medication, and much of my earliest childhood remains blurred or completely absent from my memory. For years I mourned those missing memories. Now I wonder whether forgetting was also a form of protection. Perhaps my mind knew what my heart was not yet ready to carry. Health challenges would continue throughout my life. During my twenties I developed severe lower back problems due to stress that eventually led to hospitalisation in my thirties. Yet these experiences also became the beginning of another journey - one that would eventually introduce me to Reiki, holistic healing and the extraordinary capacity of the human body to recover when given the right support.

The Rebel Within

If there is one thread that has woven itself through every chapter of my life, it is this: I have never accepted injustice quietly. Even as a child, something within me questioned unfairness. As a teenager, I vividly remember watching the Band Aid concerts and asking myself, How can people be starving while the rest of the world carries on as though nothing is happening? That question stayed with me. Throughout my life I have challenged systems, institutions and beliefs whenever they conflicted with my sense of justice. Sometimes this served me well. Other times it created conflict. I questioned authority, resisted decisions that did not feel right, and often paid a price for speaking up.

As a teenager, my rebellious nature led to my being sent away from home on several occasions for days or even months at a time. As a young woman, I challenged sexism, racism and rigid patriarchal attitudes that limited women's voices. As a social care professional, I advocated for vulnerable children, homeless people and unpaid carers. As a mother, I questioned medical decisions when my instincts told me to look deeper, particularly after my own experiences with epilepsy and my son's health challenges. As an adoptee, I questioned why I had to spend decades searching for information about my own origins. By the time I received my adoption records in 2024, I had already spent years pursuing pieces of my story through persistence and determination.

Looking back now, I realise that my rebellion was never about breaking rules for the sake of it, but about searching for truth, giving voice to those who had been silenced, asking difficult questions when everyone else seemed content with easy answers, and, most of all, holding onto the conviction that things could be different. That belief has shaped every chapter of my life. Today, my work has evolved into supporting women to recognise their own strength, find their own voice and become leaders in their own lives. I no longer see rebellion as resistance alone.

I see it as the courage to challenge what no longer serves us, to imagine something better, and to become part of creating it. Perhaps I was always destined to become a rebel. Not because I wanted to fight the world. But because, from the very beginning, I was searching for a place where truth, compassion and belonging could exist together. And that search, born between worlds, became the story of my life.