Adoption law reform. We’ve been saying those words for so many years. Many of us have expended hours, months, years of our lives to this end. To see the archaic 1955 Adoption Act and associated acts repealed.

And now, change is coming. Law reform is on the government’s agenda. They’ve convened a working group and outlined the scope of change.

So why am I not celebrating?

That episode where you realise your life is a 'statutory fiction'

If adoption secrecy were a game show, they’d call it called ‘How much do you really want this?’

Because I am adopted, I have no birth story. However, the state holds a large number of files on me. Legal documents, doctors notes, feeding recipes and home visit comments. Through these documents, I wish to build a picture of what happened to my mother and me.

There have always been inconsistencies in my birth story. The dates, the people involved, the actual circumstances. All missing, suspect or manufactured.
As an adopted person I have no legal right to know anything other than the story my adopting parents chose to tell. So I decided to challenge that.
I started with govt.nz, the guide to finding and using government services. Could it really be as simple as requesting a copy of my ‘pre-adoption birth certificate?’

Who owns you? Have you ever asked yourself this question?
If you are a non-adopted person then the idea that someone could own you may never have occurred to you.
If you are an adopted person, you may not be aware of the terms of your adoption. Or how current adoption laws resemble sale and purchase agreements.
I had this lesson rammed home last week.

I have a friend who loves biographies. She’s always telling me to read accounts of dire lives turned around, the fall and rise of a star or a tragedy overcome.
But I can’t. Biographies and especially autobiographies unsettle me. It is not the sweep of grand lives that leaves me undone. It is the minutiae.

I’ve spent most of my adult life searching for my biological family. I've encountered endless roadblocks. The majority of them from officialdom. During the search and now as I start a campaign to free all adoption files, I am often asked - what do you want?
But as an adopted person I know that often what people are really asking is -  what more do you want?

There once was a woman who kept changing everything: her hair, her glasses, her furniture, her style, her husbands and her lovers. She moved 34 times and changed her name seven times. Her restless journey was almost unconscious. She described herself as emotionally and physically peripatetic. The idea of not belonging was who she was. It was not so much that she had lost her identity, but that she never had one.