Our image of the month is by RR’s Artist in Residence, Paul Brian Tovey.

Paul is an adult adoptee whose adoptive parents physically, psychologically and sexually abused him in childhood. His work describes the impact of his maltreatment on his mental and physical health, as a child and as an adult.

Paul also campaigns for adoptees to have the legal right to revert back to their birth identities, which many adoptees say is essential to their ability to heal from the impact of their adoption.

This process is currently unavailable to most adoptees in the UK because of the costs involved, and a high legal bar which makes granting a reversion almost impossible. 

This month’s painting is titled, “Blue Moon In The Mom Questionmark Valley.”

The poem below, also by Paul, is meant to be read alongside his art:

Birth mom’s question-mark ghost came in dreams and visions
All across Adoptee ages of life in millions of questing missions
Past her death too when I achieved photographic evidence
That we were together in life and a camera gave quick sense
I am beyond that now and just walking inside my comic life
Past even: “it’s all gone” and all the waste of Adoption’s knife.

What a strange gift it is to be a child of encyclopedic Time
Entering with my free spirit any type of life and history rhyme
A common crown of nature to children of our sparkling play
Where like young animals the stars and winds our nature prays

Miracles we humans are, that can transcend what society crazed
Miracles to rediscover through social anesthetics we were raised
Miracles restoring how snowflakes can feel themselves through us
Miracles to know all creation and us come from pure magic dust

What a journey you brought me on my astral love and mother
Through the rocks of birth and the dark channels of smother
To conflicts where my life was given thorns and a morphine cup
I am your born child and in me your fire nature, never gave up