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Besides my crying, there was a further brake on our early bonding attempts. The adoption laws at the time allowed the birth mother a cooling-off period of thirty days, meaning she could change her mind and reclaim her baby. When I was an adult with kids of my own, Mum and I talked about this. She told me how hard she found it, grieving her first two daughters and desperately trying to bond with her third as I screamed and kicked and fought her – all the time fearing that this one, too, might be taken from her. Unimaginable.

  And Mum and Dad would tell me later how the angry baby became an angry toddler, obsessed with whose tummy I came out of and cross with Duncan, because he came out of Mummy’s and I didn’t. I cringed when Dad told me the story of how I punched a pregnant friend of theirs in her belly (thankfully without harm), declaring to Mum that I wanted to come out of her tummy. I recall none of this, nor do I remember asking Mum, at around two-and-a-half, if she was my mother. Mum told the story this way.

  ‘You looked at me with those intense eyes, waiting for an answer. I loved you very much but was battling my own fears that I was not worthy to be your mother. I took a deep breath and said, “Yes. I am your mother.” You flew across the room and into my arms and hugged me.’

  I wish my head could remember that moment, but I’m sure my heart does. I think it must have been the moment Mum and I locked in for life.

  Over a childhood we both healed and wrangled our relationship and she became, as mothers do, the most important person in my life. I grew up in a family, my family, where I felt unconditionally loved and wanted. My parents gave me countless opportunities and endless support. My dad and I shared a love of verbal jousting, and I loved to read and write, just like both my parents did. Duncan and Sophie, my brother and sister, were my companions and combatants in the same measure they are in all families, and I loved them. I may not have looked like anyone else in the family, but that happens, right? It didn’t matter. I was healed and I was home.

  And as I got older, the story of my birth, the reason I didn’t look like the rest of my family, became simply a technical detail that I would, at times, have to explain to people.

  ‘Why don’t you look like your mum?’ curious school friends would ask.

  ‘Because I’m adopted,’ I would reply with an assured confidence, as if I was explaining that the sky is blue.

  ‘So, who’s your real mother, then?’ they would continue.

  ‘Mum’s my real mum.’

  ‘No, your real one,’ they would press. ‘The one who had you.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not my mum. She was just my birth mother, the one who delivered me,’ I would reply, implying some kind of biological postal system.

  The names people play. No story here, nothing to see, nothing to tell. No problem. The first ten days of my life was summed up in my Year 3 story, ‘The Adventures of Me’.

  I was born on the 14th of July 1965. My mother who had me could not keep me. So Mrs G. McFarlane adopted me a few days after my birth.

  My sense of self, of home, the strength of my connection with Mum, was so locked in, it survived even direct challenges. Once, when I was in Year 3, I had forgotten my school lunch and Mum brought it to me in my classroom. I must have been talking to my classmates about my adoption recently because, as Mum approached the classroom, one girl cried out, ‘Don’t take your lunch from her! She’s not your real mother!’

  But she was. She bloody was, and I went and took my lunch to prove it. I had a mum and a dad and a family who loved me and whom I loved. End of story. Everyone else could deal with it.

  The tummy aches and tantrums of my toddlerdom faded, healed by Mum and Dad’s patient, constant love, and I grew up. And I forgot all about the other mother who couldn’t keep me.

  II

  FALSE START

  Prelude

  Robin

  In 1966 Tim left for Europe and I followed him in the spring of 1967, looking forward to the carefree adventures we both had wanted. The fact that we had adopted out a child was consigned to some never-to-be-opened file in the memory bank of the mind. We went on a hitchhiking trip together, travelling south from Paris, through France and Spain to Morocco before returning to London. Soon after our return, Tim secured a one-year contract as a drama lecturer at a college in Ohio. He left and I remained at my London post as a salesgirl on the men’s pyjamas counter of Marks & Spencer until a drunken late-night phone call from America rescued me with a marriage proposal from Tim. I flew to New York and we were married in the City Hall in December 1967.

  After a year in Ohio, we returned to Australia and, in 1969, Tim got a job with the drama department of Flinders University in Adelaide, and I taught English at a high school. It was at this stage of our life that the prevailing hippie culture with its philosophy of freedom from the bonds of bourgeois morality – which included monogamy – began to undermine our marriage. ‘Enlightenment’ through the use of mind-altering drugs didn’t exactly help either. In fact, Tim became more and more depressed and creatively jammed. In December 1972 Anna was born and, shortly after, we moved to Melbourne where Tim, abandoning academia, had joined the Pram Factory Drama Cooperative. That we had returned to the place where I had given up my first baby was a fact I must have registered but pushed down and away.

  Although there were good people and good things in our life in Melbourne, our lifestyle and marriage deteriorated and, with fewer and fewer moral boundaries, we got ourselves into a big mess. Our romantic and sexual entanglement with another couple – Andy and Charmayne – engulfed us all in confusion, jealousy, anger and grief. Matilda was born to Tim and me in 1977 amid emotional chaos, and soon after, Tim moved out to be with Charmayne, whom he later married. Andy wanted to be with me.

  By Anna’s sixth birthday – 6 December 1978 – it seemed the storm winds had died down and the four of us found peace and reconciliation with each other. The girls and I left with Andy to go on a beach holiday together and, on 14 December, Andy drowned.

  Nineteen seventy-nine was a year of intense pain and attempts to ease that pain in all sorts of wrong ways, especially promiscuity. I was desperately trying to replace love lost, but of course it doesn’t work that way.

  Towards the end of the year, I moved with Anna and Matilda into a dear little cottage in Dryburgh Street, North Melbourne. I was able to buy it thanks to money left to me by Andy, and it provided a safe and secure haven where emotional healing could begin. Sometime in 1980, I found myself with a new quest – not for love and happiness, but for truth. I wanted to know the answer to that old question: ‘what is the meaning of life?’ That search unexpectedly led me to Jesus Christ and in January 1981 I became a Christian.

  I was born again in my spirit, but it took some time for the new life on the inside of me to grow and gradually change the rest of me – my thinking, and my old ways of doing things. For a while, I was a strange sort of hybrid, mutating from one thing to another, which was confusing to me and to others. It was especially perplexing to Graeme, whom I met on the cusp of my transformation; I slept with him and became pregnant. If I had not yet grasped God’s thinking with regard to casual sex, the Holy Spirit did arrest me on the matter of abortion – and I am so glad He did, because in June 1982, I gave birth to my fourth daughter, Marian, a joy to both me and her father. Graeme and I did not stay together, but we have remained friends and family, as have Tim and Charmayne and their children, Finn and Billie.

  Waking up

  Robin

  T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land …’

  Resurrection is costly; it’s easier sometimes to stay dead, sleeping or numb, rather than feel the quickening pain of pins and needles that signal the return of blood flow and the consequent call to feel and live again. But then, you never get to enjoy the beauty of the lilacs.

  In the Spring of 1989, God, obviously with lilacs in His sight, decided it was time to wake me up regarding the birth and adoption of my baby in 1965 – a matter that was never di
scussed and I thought was well and truly dead and buried.

  It was a strange week in October when I first started thinking about it again. After my initial out-of-the-blue thought, every day brought a reminder – like an alarm clock that refuses to let you lapse back to sleep. God was on my case! I turned on the radio – a talk about adoption; I opened a newspaper – an article on adoption; a lady came to stay with me from interstate as a billet for a conference – she had a personal story to tell me about adoption. Okay, God, I thought, I get it!

  The conviction came to me that firstly, there was no place in my new life for deep, dark secrets and secondly, that I wanted (heart pounding at the thought) to try to reconnect with the daughter I had given away.

  The first step in bringing everything up into the light was to tell my three other daughters, Anna, then aged seventeen, Matilda, twelve and Marian, seven. I was terrified. What would they think of me, a mother who gave away her child? Would they recoil from me as from a monster? Would they lose all trust in me?

  Their reaction in fact was beautiful: no judgment, just mercy and compassion and excitement over the fact that they had another sister somewhere whom, unanimously, they wanted to meet.

  The next step was to contact the Department of Community Services and initiate the search for my daughter. I was required to go into the city offices for an interview and counselling, and when I got there I found many others there for the same reason: the desire to reunite. Parents seeking children, children seeking parents.

  I gained some information about my daughter too: she was no longer called Florence, but Susannah; she lived in Hawthorn, Melbourne; her father taught English at university, her mother was a librarian. I was told, thanks to recent changes to the Adoption Law, that I was allowed to write Susannah a letter, which the department would pass on to her, if she was willing to accept it.

  I wrote a letter.

  Do not disturb

  Susannah

  While I believed that I had accepted my adoption as something that just was, that didn’t need to be discussed, over the years many friends found it endlessly interesting. People continued to comment; my birth and adoption fascinated them, if not me, and it was regular dinner-party fodder. ‘Aren’t you curious?’ ‘Wouldn’t you want to meet her?’ ‘What if you have sisters and brothers?’ ‘Don’t you just want to know?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I would answer. ‘I have my family and I love them – I don’t have another one. I don’t have another mother.’

  Except I did.

  And I was completely unprepared when she came looking for me.

  I was twenty-three. I had finished uni (graduating with an utterly un-vocational Arts degree) and had recently returned from overseas (where I had roamed Europe avoiding thoughts of what job one got with an Arts degree) when finally, with Dad’s help, I found a position with a publishing company. I had worked my way up from super-menial to menial and was now a publicist and loved it: I loved the work, I loved the industry, and it seemed I had fallen into the perfect place for me. I had also fallen in love with a very handsome Swedish boy whom I planned to visit in Sweden at the end of the year, so I had moved back home to live with Mum and Dad while I saved money for the overseas trip. So, I was in a good place, a happy and exciting place. And then, one afternoon I came home from work to a letter from the Department of Community Services.

  There was supposed to be a band around the letter that warned it contained information of a deeply personal nature and that the letter might be best opened in private. The band was actually inside the deeply personal letter, which I found only after I had opened it – not a good start. And it did not get any better.

  My ‘natural mother’? My birth mother, right? I was already offside. Mum was my natural mother and she would be home from work soon. She would know what to do.

  She’d barely made it through the front door when I handed her the letter and I can still remember her face when she saw what it was. It kind of crumpled and I could see her fighting to not look upset. ‘Oh,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice even, ‘I did wonder if this day might come. Let me read it and then let’s talk.’

  She took the letter into her study and stayed in there some time: when she came out she was calmer but still tense. Then Dad arrived home from work and we all talked about what to do next. ‘Well,’ said Mum. ‘You should call the counsellor. See what she wants.’

  I don’t remember what else happened that evening but I called the counsellor the next day from work and I do remember that call – it was awful.

  The counsellor said I must be very excited.

  I said I wasn’t.

  She carried on – my mother wanted to meet me.

  I told her that I didn’t want to meet my birth mother.

  The counsellor became a little cross at me – why would I not want to meet ‘my mother’?

  I told her I had just left ‘my mother’ at home.

  ‘You mean your adoptive mother,’ she said, a little testily.

  Now I was getting cross too. ‘No. I mean my mother.’

  ‘Your mother wants to meet you. Are you really telling me that you don’t want to meet your real mother?’

  But I had had years of experience in explaining to people who my real mother was, and this counsellor was no match for me.

  ‘She is not my mother,’ I said.

  There was a change of tack on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Will you accept a letter?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll accept a letter – but I can’t meet her. Please understand that I can’t meet her.’

  So, I waited for a letter.

  Robin’s first letter

  Susannah

  I don’t have the first letter Robin sent. I don’t know what happened to it, but it must have got lost. I kept nothing about Robin’s contact, but after Mum died I discovered that she had kept a folder containing all the letters and notes about my adoption. But this letter wasn’t there and Mum is no longer here to ask.

  In a funny way, part of me is glad it’s lost.

  Robin

  This is what I remember writing.

  I expressed my hope that this letter would not distress Susannah, and I was at pains to say that I in no way wanted to challenge or intrude upon the relationship she had with her adoptive mother, who had earned and fulfilled that title in reality.

  I wanted to be completely honest and put all my cards on the table. I confessed to her that I had gone on to marry Tim, her father, and that she had two full sisters, Anna and Matilda, and one half-sister, Marian, all of whom would love to know her. I told her I had become a Christian. I asked her to forgive me for having given her up. I said I would love to meet her if she wanted to.

  I waited for her reply. I waited a long time.

  The letter I dreaded

  Susannah

  Mum and Dad were on an overseas holiday at the time I received the letter from Robin. I waited until they got home before I answered it.

  I remember reading the letter, but not everything in it. I remember Robin saying she was sorry, all the more so because after having me, she went on to stay with my biological father. She also said that I had two full biological sisters and a half-sister. I don’t remember how I felt, but I do remember thinking it strange that she called her daughters my sisters. And strange that she seemed to think we would be meeting. She wanted my forgiveness; my ‘sisters’ wanted to meet me.

  But I already had a family and most of all I had Mum and Dad, who had loved me and looked after me all my life and whom I loved wholeheartedly. Seeing Mum’s face when I showed her the letter from Community Services had already told me what I needed to do. I would not risk breaking my mother’s heart: I wouldn’t, couldn’t, meet my birth mother.

  And how could I, anyway? I couldn’t meet Robin as my mother, yet I couldn’t meet her as anything else either. So, I couldn’t meet her at all.

  But I could certainly forgive her and tell her that it was okay, that it h
ad all worked out really well. And perhaps she could tell me any genetic medical history? I was tired of not being able to fill out medical forms, tired of writing ‘unknown’ in every single box about my ‘family’ history and tired of enduring nurses’ sympathetic looks. And, sometimes I worried: Did cancer run rampant in my biological ancestry or were there other horrible afflictions waiting to genetically pounce? Would it be okay to ask her about that?

  I wanted to say to her: I have a wonderful life, I am loved and love, and I am happy – I hope you are too. I forgive you. Can we leave it at that? But, actually, can you also please let me know my medical history? Was that a fair letter to write?

  I thought it was, and Mum and Dad thought it was too, so I sat down at the long dinner table in our back room and tried to write that letter. I tried to be honest, I tried to be open, and I tried to make everything okay. I don’t remember feeling upset, I don’t remember feeling anything other than worried that I would upset Mum and Dad, who waited for me to show them my draft.

  Robin had put her address on her letter to me but I didn’t do that on mine. I remember Mum saying, ‘Don’t name the college, don’t name the uni, don’t say where you work – I could find you if I had that information.’ This was pre-Internet of course, pre-Google; if you were going to be found you had to want to be.

  And I didn’t.

  ‘With all good wishes …’

  Robin

  So. What did I think when I finally received Susannah’s letter? How did I feel?

  There was no ambiguity about her decision to have no contact with me. Certainly, I felt the blow and disappointment of rejection, but I was in no way offended. How could I be? I understood where she was coming from, and I took satisfaction in the fact that at least I had, albeit in a very superficial way, reversed the roles: now I wanted her, but this time she could reject me. It felt better that way.