This work is the first in a series of pieces inspired by the Parliamentary JCH Rreport of July 2022 'The Violation of Family Life: Adoption of Children of Unmarried Women 1949 - 1976. I superimpose family photographs plus marginalia across the report's text to confront a system that treated my mother so appallingly when she was young and vulnerable. Most of the photographs are of me growing up, knowing little of the difficulties my mother had faced, of the way 'officialdom' had treated her (and me), yet all the time somehow sensing in the background the 'shadow' of a different life in a different family. My mother and I were reunited when I was 25.
