Media: My Secret Mum: How meeting my birthmum led to a different sort of pain

The_Conductor

From the Indo

I can relate with this unfortunately.........

Article as follows:

It was a moment Caitriona Palmer will never forget. She was meeting her mother in a Dublin city centre hotel, and when the pair spotted each other, Caitriona was stunned to find the usually warm Sarah blanking her. She would soon discover that at that very moment, Sarah had set eyes on an acquaintance in the lobby and didn't want to be asked awkward questions about who the younger woman was.

It wasn't the first time Caitriona would wish that she had a normal parent-child relationship with the woman who had given birth to her in 1972 and had immediately given her up for adoption. Instead, when she and Sarah met, the sense of something elicit going on was rarely far from the surface. Caitriona was happy to tell her family and friends about her real mother; Sarah hadn't told anyone that she had given birth to a child in early 1970s Dublin, and she certainly wasn't revealing to anyone that she would meet with her first-born whenever they could.

Washington-based journalist Caitriona, a regular writer for this newspaper, documents her experiences in a frank, just-published memoir, An Affair With My Mother. It's a book that offers a stark reminder that when birth mother and adopted child reunite after years or decades apart, the initial euphoria can subside quickly and profound difficulties can be just around the corner.

Caitriona was employed as a human rights worker in post-war Bosnia in the late 1990s and as she was helping families who had lost loved ones in the conflict, she became motivated to try to find her birth mother. She had known she was adopted since the age of six and although she felt deeply fortunate to have such kind and thoughtful adoptive parents, there was always a dull ache within her to reach out to her closest blood relation. She assumed the wait would last years, but thanks to a social worker at the adoption agency, Caitriona and her mother were reunited within months. Caitriona was delighted, yet apprehensive; Sarah was overjoyed to meet a daughter she had last seen for just two days 27 years before.

Caitriona learned that Sarah had lived in rural Ireland and had not been married when she became pregnant. The father wanted nothing to do with his child. She felt she had no option but to escape to the relative anonymity of Dublin and then give the baby up for adoption once it was born.

But Caitriona would soon learn that Sarah had never told anyone about the child she had given birth to in the still devoutly Catholic Ireland of the early 1970s. She told Caitriona that she had a husband and children but neither they, nor her friends, knew about her. It's a secret that remains.

So careful has Caitriona been to protect her mother's identity that 'Sarah', which she uses in the book, is not her real name. "I really don't want her to think that the book was an attempt by me to get her to tell her family about me," Caitriona says.

"But I wanted to tell my story and to show that there can be very complicated relationships when mothers and their children are reunited after so long."

The pain that Caitriona feels is exacerbated by the fact that she has not heard from her mother since Christmas Day, 2014. "We communicated by text message, but she hasn't responded to any of the ones I've sent since then. She wasn't in touch for my birthday last year, which hadn't happened since we'd made contact. I will text her on Mother's Day [tomorrow], but I don't know if I'll hear from her... it's like she fell off the face of the earth."

When she appeared on ITV's This Morning on Tuesday, host Phillip Schofield asked her what she wanted to say to her mother, should she be watching back home, and Caitriona said: "I would tell her that I love her... I wish her nothing but happiness."

Since beginning promotional rounds for her book, mainly in the UK to date, Caitriona's story has resonated with other adopted people who also found reunions weren't as perfect as they might have hoped. "I've been taken aback by it," she says. "There's so much sadness there, and I think what I've been saying has connected with others in a similar sort of situation. For me, it's validation."

Caitriona's sentiments echo with Sharon Lawless, who makes the popular Adoption Stories series for TV3. Now working on the fifth series of the show, she has been in contact with countless Irish people who have either sought their birth parents - typically the mother - or mums who gave up a child for adoption decades ago and desperately want to re-connect.

"The laws in this country, which are from 1952 and are completely outdated, make it very difficult to get information," she says. "The situation in Ireland is not like you'd find in Long Lost Family [the BAFTA-winning UK documentary series that helps adopted adult children make contact with their birth parents, and vice-versa] and that can be a shock for people."

But, Sharon says, many of those who do succeed in making contact can, like Caitriona Palmer, find they are not fully embraced.

"A woman who's the same age as me [48] had a baby and felt she had to give her up for adoption because of societal pressures in 1980s Ireland," she says.

"Years later, when she managed to make contact with her adult daughter, the great happiness she felt disappeared when she felt as though her daughter didn't really want her in her life. She had a great adoptive family and an amazing life, and her mother began to feel she wasn't being asked to events or kept up to date in important aspects of her life.

"The woman said to me that there was no role for her in her daughter's life and almost regretted having made contact with her."

Another anecdote recalled by Sharon Lawless demonstrates that the restrictiveness of the Ireland of years gone by can still hold some older people in its grip of shame.

"I know of a guy in his 50s who now has contact with his mother, who's in her 70s. They'll spend time together and might even have Christmas together, but she will never verbally say that he's her son. And that's not just to other people, this man hasn't heard her acknowledge who he is either. They skirt around it."

Today, the numbers of children born in this country and given up for adoption is virtually negligible, but it was a very different story right up until the end of the 1980s. In 1967, the record year, some 1,502 children born were adopted, a figure almost exclusively comprised of those born outside marriage. A Trinity College Dublin study on adoption in Ireland showed that in 1967, 97pc of all children from single parents were put up for adoption.

The proportion of children born out of wedlock - to employ that archaic term - has gone from 5pc in 1980 to almost a third of all births today, but the numbers facing adoption steadily decreased over that period - a direct result, surely, of the loosening grip of the Catholic Church and the growth of a more inclusive and permissive Irish society.

But societal pressures of yesteryear continue to reverberate for those people who seek answers today. Joanna Fortune, a psychotherapist who specialises in family matters, says we all have a fundamental need for a maternal bond, especially as young children. "You hear of children who go to loving adoptive families where they have great relationships with their parents and yet there's something missing. It's that pebble-in-a-shoe analogy."

A danger, and one that's perhaps unavoidable, is when the 'seeker' builds up an unrealistic picture of their parent or child. "The image they might have created in their minds over many years simply can't be matched when they meet the person," Joanna says. "It's impossible. And, for the adult children seeking their mother, the reasons why they were put up for adoption might be difficult to accept once they learn the facts."

Caitriona Palmer talks about a loved-up few months after she and Sarah first made contact, likening it to a honeymoon period, and Joanna Fortune says it's not unusual for adoption reunions to feel as such at first. "It's great when both people embrace the contact, but what's crucial is what happens next. It's about repairing relationships, rebuilding. It's probably unrealistic to expect to meet and simply get on like nothing has happened. Years have been lost, but that's in the past - it's what the future holds that's important, and both need to be mindful of that."

She says some people who seek contact can have their hopes dashed when they find their parent or child has died. And there's very real anguish in those instances where the relation being sought flatly refuses to meet. "It does happen and it can be incredibly painful, because it's like a further rejection. I think in those cases, it's important that the person seeks counselling. In fact, it's a good idea to have counselling anyway before that first meeting and in the period afterwards because talking to someone who's impartial and isn't a friend or family member can really help."

Despite the pitfalls, 'what-happened-next' instalments of both Long Lost Family and Adoption Stories suggest there are many happy relationships that have grown out of tearful reunions. Sharon Lawless has seen them with her own eyes and several feature in her book Adoption Stories. "I've witnessed so many happy people who have very strong relations with their birth mothers," she says.

"They've worked on it and their lives have been enriched so much by having each other in their lives. In several cases, there's been a really strong connection between siblings too - a lot of people are touched by adoption.

"One thing that strikes me time and again working on Adoption Stories is that primal bond between the mother and the child."

For those who have not been adopted, it may be difficult to grasp how life-changing it can be. The American writer AM Homes captures the experience powerfully in her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter: "To be adopted is to be adapted, to be amputated and sown back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue."

The_Conductor

And the Irish Times review of her book:

Caitríona Palmer found out that she was adopted on her sixth birthday. Her mother, Mary, told her as they made her bed. It explained why Caitríona had been told she was special her whole life. From that moment a sense of incompleteness grew within her.

“That was a really indelible moment in my childhood,” the Washington-based Irish journalist says. “I guess I began to grieve the loss of my natural mother from that point onwards . . . But it was also disconcerting, because I was very safe and secure in the home where I was and where I grew up, and completely devoted to my parents, but I always felt as though a part of me was incomplete.”

At the age of 27 Palmer decided to look for her birth mother. She was working in Bosnia for Physicians for Human Rights, responding to press queries about the organisation’s exhumation and identification projects around mass graves discovered in the late 1990s.

After six months on the job she realised that it was not the dead she was having trouble adjusting to but the families of the missing, searching for their loved ones.

“In retrospect I’m amused at how it wasn’t more painfully obvious at the time. I was living this really grim life, meshed in the world of missing persons and dealing with these extraordinarily grief-stricken relatives of the missing. It was there that the penny dropped; it really made sense that I needed to find this missing piece of me,” she says.
Shock

Palmer found Sarah, her birth mother, through St Patrick’s Guild, the agency that had arranged her adoption. She has written a stark account of the meeting in her new book, An Affair with M y Mother, which tells their stories.

She writes that when they met she stood stock still as she embraced her birth mother, unable to cry.

“I was numb and full of second doubts. I was sure I wanted to look for her, and then, when that moment came, I realised I didn’t want to do it, which I now realise is very common. Other adoptees I’ve spoken to felt the same way,” says Palmer.

“I wanted to burst the fairy-tale bubble surrounding adoption reunions. I see a lot of it on reality TV in America, where it’s always portrayed as this almost Disneyesque moment, when in reality it’s traumatic. Certainly in my case it was traumatic and jarring, and I still, to this day, regret my demeanour in that moment, that I couldn’t cry or express real emotion.

“Looking back, I think I was just numb. That didn’t take away from my joy at meeting Sarah, but it just all felt too much.”

Palmer had told her parents, Mary and Liam, that she was meeting her birth mother – not to “would have been a slap in their face”, she says – but Sarah, who by this stage had a husband and children, had never told anyone she had put a child up for adoption.

Although Sarah ultimately told two of her children, her husband and wider family remain in the dark. More than 15 years later, Palmer remains Sarah’s secret child.
Kept in the dark

"It mostly makes me feel incrediby sad. It’s painful for my children to be kept in the dark. But now that I’m a mother I feel nothing but sorrow for Sarah, that she’s so constrained by the weight of the secret that she must still be living this double life. It fills me with sadness.

“At the end of the book I talk about my love for Sarah and how my door is always open, and I stand by that. I just wish that the affair could end and that she could release herself.”

Sarah, Palmer says, still feels as though she has done something terrible. Although we’re familiar with stories of women shamed for becoming pregnant outside marriage, of Magdalene laundries and of mother-and-baby homes, we tend not to realise that the shame and guilt don’t dissipate once the baby has been adopted.

“It’s a testament to the power of the times,” says Palmer. “Sarah once said to me that it was the worst thing that could have happened, that she felt she could have committed murder and it wouldn’t have been such a terrible stigma and shame.

“In this generation we forget how difficult it was for women back then, and how constrained their lives were, and how their moral and sexual lives were constrained by society.

“One of the things I was amazed by was how the State apparatus at the time kicked into gear when Sarah realised she was pregnant and that the State apparatus and society allowed for her to be hidden away. The National Maternity Hospital gave her a fictitious health certificate for an alleged kidney infection that allowed her take time off work. A Catholic charity sequestered her in the home of a kindly couple.”

Palmer became a mother herself more than a decade ago, when she gave birth to her first child, Liam. After that she felt she had a much greater understanding of what Sarah must have gone through.

“I finally got it. Holding Liam for the first time, and looking into his eyes, I had this almost shock force of connection and love. I realised in that moment that I would never let him go. It was just incomprehensible to me, in those first few days with Liam, realising that, two days in, Sarah would have had to hand me over.

“It really solidified my love for her, but it also confused me, because in that moment I could never have given up Liam, so how could she have done the same? The shaming of these women at that time must have been so enormous that she felt she had no other choice. That’s an extraordinary statement about Ireland and the legacy towards unmarried mothers.”
Treated like “a nonentity”

Even as an adoptee, Palmer felt she wasn't treated as an adult by many of the organisations she encountered while figuring out her own story and while writing her book. When she approached St Patrick’s Guild, the organisation from which her parents adopted her, about accessing her birth records, she says she felt as if she was treated like “a nonentity”.

“I felt like an infant. I think that’s the prevailing attitude, that you should let sleeping dogs lie. Why potentially wreck lives by going to search? Why knock on people’s doors? Why not let everything be the way it is? [Their position is that] I’ve had a wonderful life with wonderful parents and I’ve done well, and surely that should be enough.

“We’re not encouraged to search, and I think even now, with the current discussion on legislation into the opening of birth records, adoptees are considered children still, even though we’re grown adults.

“For an adoptee who has been kept out of the facts of their own life, even the minute details, even on the durations of the pregnancy or anything, it’s like gold dust. It really helps build a picture in your mind.

“I was desperate for those facts, and I was very frustrated by St Patrick’s Guild refusing to grant me access to those. It’s information only I need and that is of value to me,” she says.

Palmer felt a strong urge to tell her and Sarah’s stories. In writing the book, she says, she wanted people to understand the legacy for unmarried mothers in Ireland.

“I wanted people to understand the tragedy of the lives of these women. I wanted there to be empathy and compassion towards Sarah and all of the secret mothers, that they did nothing wrong and that the double lives they are leading are a great injustice.

“I would like some resolution for Sarah and for the other mothers. I just want Sarah to be happy, and I think that while she continues to keep this secret that happiness – real, complete happiness – will be elusive. I would just love to take away her pain.”

While Palmer has for years lived with being a secret, she would like the veil to be lifted for her children, and for Sarah. She’s not looking for closure for herself, she says. “The mere act of writing this book has healed many parts of me, I think. At the very beginning, when I set out to do this, many people said this would give me a sense of closure, and that was never my intention.

“There can be no closure, because the secret still exists and I’m still in the dark. However, it allowed me make sense of the pain of my life and of Sarah’s life. It allowed me weave a narrative out of the chaos, and I think that’s a privilege to be able to do that as a writer.”

An Affair with My Mother is published by Penguin Ireland