I found my birth mother through the newspaper small ads
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Version 0 of 1. How do you find your mother? Let me count the ways. Agencies, internet, offices, registers. I had tried everything. The idea of advertising for your own mother had not occurred to me. I was young when I found I had been blessed with a magic trick; a one liner I could deliver when I felt in danger of becoming invisible. “I am adopted.” The effect was always instantaneous. The next question was usually, “Do you know your birth parents?” to which the answer was no and I don’t want to. Not knowing brought advantages: for a child storyteller, it kept the fantastical plot lines open and these bestowed a certain mystery on an otherwise ordinary little girl; for a tricky adolescent, not knowing gave me a furious independence, riding the rapids, not moored to either bank; and not knowing or asking was always a safe state of affairs for me and my adoptive family – to continue the analogy, knowing would surely rock the boat. Deep down, I believed it a serious possibility that I might drown in the knowledge. Fifty is not an uncommon age for adults to seek their birth parents. Children are leaving home, parents are ageing, the stark reality of the sole self strikes home. Like many others, I had decided to wait until my wonderful adoptive parents had died before undoing the unknowing. That changed the day I was recalled after a breast scan. It struck me as ironic, to put it mildly, that while waiting for other people to die, I myself could go under the proverbial bus. I started at home, but this was a conversation too far for my adoptive family, so I applied for my full birth certificate. Six months later, I was at the social care offices, waiting for the appointment at which my identity would be handed over. I work in therapeutic provision. I expected the half-drawn blinds, the tissues on the table, two chairs, suitably angled. Even the initial information seemed manageable: I was Irish; my mother, Kathleen, was a nurse from Galway; no father noted. But one thing astonished me. I was called Fionnula Jane. In all the 50 years of speculation, it had never occurred to me that anyone had ever loved me enough to have named me. After the certificate, the file. I sit on an adoption panel now, and as I study the paperwork, I think of these babies as adults, reading their histories in other people’s words; in my case, a series of jottings and doodles from interviews, faded reports smudged with blue carbon paper, handwritten letters from my mother, dignified, but with the recognisable grammar of the powerless. “I would be grateful if you would let me know how Fionnula is. I forgot to mention I left her clothes on the ward. I hope it is not too much to ask, but I would dearly love a photo. I didn’t have much opportunity to get one, but it would be lovely to keep.” Amid all the pain and bureaucracy is an astonishing sentence from a social worker, included in a letter from her to Kathleen. “I do hope that in a few years’ time, welfare work will have improved so that a mother will be able to keep her baby …” In some respects, at least, we have made progress. Most of our mother and baby story is quite ordinary. I was born in August, in the UK, in a Salvation Army mother and baby home. Three months later, I needed an operation and was admitted to hospital and then discharged to a “babies home” and eventually from there to my new family. By then, Kathleen had left for Canada. So what had happened to September and October? They are the unusual months. Kathleen had taken me home to Ireland with her: a single mother, in Catholic Galway, at the end of the 1950s. It may not have lasted, but I can only imagine how strong she must have been to have bought the ferry ticket, crossed the Irish Sea with a baby at her breast, and turned up on the doorstep. Whoever this woman was, I hated her for having given me up but I loved her for having tried to keep me. Returning to Ireland last year for the first time, I met an old woman who had been at my grandmother’s funeral, I was recognised by a man in a bucket and spade shop and I spoke with a priest who knew the whole story, but not one member of the family felt able to meet me. No matter. When I was a baby in Ireland, I lived in a house that looked west over the sea. Now, I have been back and stood on the shore of Galway Bay and known a mysterious feeling of deep, keen belonging. Back to the adoption file. Disappointingly, it took me no nearer to Kathleen. I registered with tracing agencies with no success. I found her birth registered, I didn’t find her on a boat to Canada. I found a thousand red herrings in a sea of information, but not one way to get in touch with my mother. Enter serendipity. Out of the blue, through work, I met an American who was in the UK to meet her birth family and we got talking. How had she traced them, I asked? She had placed an ad in the local paper. One week later, the following notice appeared in the Galway Gazette alongside an announcement that Gypsy Rose, the fortune teller, was retiring. “Many years ago, I lost touch with —, born 1936, — Salthill, Co Galway. I believe she may have emigrated to Canada in 1959? I am now trying to contact her if she is still alive, or any of her family/friends. Please get in touch if you can help. Thank you. Fionnula Jane.” Then I waited. I don’t know who looks at missing person ads, but I suspect part of the human condition is a sense that something has been lost, so readership was probably higher than I had anticipated. In the end, it only takes one. On my birthday, bizarrely, I received two lines: “Please reply to me outlining the connection to Kathleen and the reason you would like to contact her again. I am her nephew.” My reply had to be as enigmatic as his. We were both dancing in the dark in the graveyard, terrified of waking the dead. I never heard from him again, but I did get a call from his mother, my aunt. It was short, confirming Kathleen was in Canada, had never married and never had any other children. The implication was that there was little to discuss and she did not expect to hear from me again, but she did promise she would tell Kathleen I was looking for her. I never heard from the aunt again either, but she kept her promise. Eighteen months after first discovering my name, my birth mother wrote, through an intermediary, a short, tragic, apologetic email to me ending, “It is very important to me now not to disrupt the lives of anyone else.” Was that it? Only then, did I notice the PS: “Please answer me.” In the years since, Kathleen and I have not met, we have never spoken. We communicate by letter, sometimes email. She says she would like to meet, but she is a Buddhist now and believes this will happen if it is meant to be. I cannot blame her for turning her back on the Catholic faith. I also believe that for everything there is a time. One of the most extraordinary discoveries we have made about each other is that we are both published poets. Some of her poems, like mine, are explorations of loss. “This house was robbed long ago,Remember how they came,Swift and silent,As robbers do, in the night.I could hear the wind weeping …” Others, like mine, are run through with rivers and reflect our shared love of fly fishing. What are the odds? One surreal Sunday at home, I typed up our poems and laid them out, side by side. Nobody could tell whose was whose. I reread them, contemplating the age-old debate. Nature, nurture. Fionnula, Catherine; Catherine, Fionnula. Kathleen has also sent photos. There are some of her sitting on a boulder beside a great river in Canada, the autumn leaves catching fire in the late sunshine and suddenly I am a twin out of time, with near identical pictures of myself at the same age beside the Cumberland Falls in autumn when we lived in the US. Obviously we were going to look alike, but when they slid from the envelope on to the kitchen table, I was left breathless. It only occurs to me now that she must have felt the same, in her flat on the other side of the world, the faces of my children laid out on the table in front of her, mirrors through the generations. Contrary to my aunt’s account, Kathleen does have a son and a granddaughter. I set out thinking there would be truths, but no story is that simple. Kathleen says she hopes to find the courage to tell them about me before she dies. I hope so too. Some names have been changed • Well by Catherine Chanter is published by Canongate, £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, including free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 |