I had been sorting out our official papers following my son’s eighteenth birthday when I spotted it for the first time. In a separate column on my adoption birth certificate were the words ‘Provisional Adoption Order granted October 1969 by Sheffield County Court’. I know that I had seen this thousands of times before but the words had never really sunk in. I had always just breezed over them without thinking too much about it, I guess that I just assumed that this was the standard wording on everyones certificate. Yet this time I looked a little closer.
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arranged or existing for the present, possibly to be changed later.
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“a provisional government”
What did this mean? That I was provisionally adopted? If that was the case then where was my official adoption certificate?
I started to look into what this Order might be and came to this page on Wikipedia that dealt with the Adoption Act of 1953. The key sentence is this one: The Act also created a “provisional adoption order”, issuable by the High Court or County Court, which allows an adopter not domiciled in Britain to adopt a child under the law of the country in which he lives. Such adoption orders require six months notice, and the child must have been in the adopter’s care in Britain for at least six months. Orders last for two years, and are designed to act as a place holder until the adopter’s nation authorises the adoption of the child.
All of this meant that my ‘intended parents’ had been given a travel permit in order to leave the country with me for the purpose of adoption. This was not an adoption. Surely my parents had adopted me in their country of origin? But had they?
After a day of working through the implications of what this meant I reluctantly called my adopted mother and asked. That was when the final nail was hammered home – I was told that they had never even started the adoption process in their country of origin or in any other country. And so it came crashing home to me, I could not use my pre-adoption identity because of the rules of the UK government, but neither could I use the identity that I had been given because legally it was not mine. In the eyes of the law, my birth parents had given me up but my intended adoptive parents had never legally adopted me either. My birth certificate should have been indicated a completed adoption, but in actual fact I had found nothing permanent.
Provisional Adoption Order (UK 1958) 