When I was eighteen I went to Joyce House in Dublin.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, what can I do for you?’
‘Tell me who I really am please.’
Two years later they’d completed their search. ‘Sorry, nothing exists on you prior to your being left on the orphanage steps as a baby.’
‘OK, bye now.’
‘Bye.’
That pretty much sums it up.
A job in a café paid the bills and because meals were included I was able to put by a little each week while I waited for a place at University College Dublin for a degree in psychology and social studies. I wanted to become a child psychologist. That was how I saw my future and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would never find my mother.
But then a letter arrived containing my long birth certificate and a note from a Sister Joseph, telling me who I really was: Frances Anne Donavan, daughter of Anne Donavan, Clonkeelin, County Kildare.
The question was how to deal with it. Giving me Anne as a middle name was a good sign of course, but I’d have to remember that Anne Donavan herself hadn’t sent me the letter and what that implied. A mother doesn’t give up her baby without a very strong reason. Whatever her present circumstances, whether she had a husband and children who didn’t know about me, or was unable or unwilling to trace me, I would have to approach her in such a way that she wouldn’t see me as someone who would upset the life she had now made for herself.
It required a good long think.