Your other mother must have learned your name, Ruth, when the laws changed, because when I gave you up, they wrote to me and said their practice was not to tell the parents the baby’s name given by the birth mother and not to tell me your new name. Your real name, they called it. They reissued your birth certificate too so that my name and anything about me would be gone from your life. You would only have your new name, your real name, as they said. That’s what they did. It’s what they believed would help us all.
The adoption agency, the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau, assigned me a social worker who came to see me once a week. Jenny Fish was a tall thin woman with a kindly nature. I liked her very much, although I sometimes felt there was something she wanted to say but didn’t.
Jenny Fish worked for the same organisation that found babies for childless couples. One of her colleagues would select my baby’s other mother and father, she explained to me. There was a pool of other mothers and fathers by then because there were few babies and many infertile couples. They were screened, the other mothers and fathers, to make sure they were Catholic, financially secure and knew what they wanted. I would have a say in the matter, Jenny Fish said. She said this as if it would make me feel good. I had no idea why she’d consult me about anything.
In one of our first interviews, Jenny Fish asked me if I would want to know if my child died. I said yes, I would want to know but why was she asking me. ‘I’d be allowed to tell you that,’ she said. ‘The courts allow me to tell you that.’
Mum and Dad drove down to Melbourne with my little brother Lachlan for Christmas. I hadn’t seen anyone from home in six months and I was so happy to see them. The nuns lent us a terrace house they owned behind the home. I stayed in the terrace with Mum and Dad and Lachlan.
It was their first ever trip to Melbourne. I don’t remember what we did. I was uncomfortably pregnant by then and had very few clothes. We may have stayed in the house mostly. I think we went to the beach at Apollo Bay because Mum wanted to see the ocean. I just don’t remember.
On the morning they were leaving, I didn’t want to go back to the home. I was crying, finding it hard to manage. I hugged Lachlan, Dad and then Mum. I was crying and one of us made some inane joke which was our family’s not very helpful way of dealing with emotional difficulties. It made me laugh through my tears.
Dad was backing the car, looking out the driver’s window, and I saw in his eyes that he had begun to cry too. It was the only time in my life I ever saw him cry.
Now I can imagine what he saw: his young tomboy daughter in a polyester floral dress that might have suited someone twice her age, standing at the door of the terrace house. He reversed the car—a frog green Mazda 323 we owned at the time—into a drainpipe. He waved and pretended to smile, as if his tears weren’t real.
I remember that smile, tears in his eyes, tobacco-stained teeth. I felt embarrassed for him, wished I could disappear.
My teacher and her husband had told me they would visit me in Melbourne. They would be with me for the birth. But my teacher’s husband had had a car accident in their car and now it needed major repairs to the engine. As a surprise I sent my own car back home for them to use. I put it on the train and got Andrew to pick it up at the other end and put a ribbon on it and take it to their house. They really appreciated it, my teacher’s husband said. I thought they could drive my car down to Melbourne and we could all drive home together.
When the time was getting close, my teacher’s husband told me by phone that it would be too much for my teacher, who had been unwell. They wouldn’t come and visit me after all.
I sent them a letter saying I felt angry that I would be on my own. Although I didn’t tell them this, I had watched other girls go over to the hospital. They came back changed. I was worried. I wanted someone with me.
I regretted sending the letter almost immediately. I thought they would be mad at me for feeling as I did, so I rang and told them to rip up my letter without reading it. I was terrified that if they read it I’d lose them. And while I wasn’t sure of anything else, I was sure I didn’t want to lose them.
They didn’t rip up my letter. My teacher decided to read it. She rang me, furious. ‘How dare you?’ she said. ‘After all we’ve done for you. After what you’ve done to us.’
I capitulated immediately, dissolved into tears, went into labour.
Otis likes the idea that he has a sister and wonders if you are as good a teacher as Leah, who, as he’s told me, doesn’t ever get angry. When she tries, she just laughs. I have told him that I don’t know what kind of teacher you are; I don’t know anything about you.
There are things I remember. I remember in the morning my waters break over the bathroom floor. I clean up the bathroom floor, collect my bag, tell Sister Mary and walk across the road to the hospital like I’ve been told to do.
I remember that when the doctor examines me it hurts and when I flinch he smiles and says I have a long night of pain ahead.
The other girls from the home come over to be with me. I don’t remember which ones, but Jill isn’t there. She has already gone home, has rung me every week since to see how I’m going. The other girls and I go out to the visitors’ area to smoke, but I have to excuse myself because of a feeling down there as if I might explode.
I remember my right leg is up in a stirrup. The midwife has put it there to get it out of the way. Only the right leg; they’ve turned me on my side to slow the birth because it’s happening too quickly. I hear them say that. When the midwife lifts me, she says to the orderly on the other side of me, ‘There’s nothing to her under all that baby, is there?’
Then it’s late afternoon, and I’m watching the sunset through large windows overlooking the city of Melbourne. A medical student with long brown hair and soft eyes comes to me while I’m eating ham sandwiches and says, ‘I just have to tell you, that was the most marvellous thing I’ve ever seen.’ He takes my hand, the one I need to reach the sandwiches. I have no idea what he’s talking about, what he’s seen that was marvellous.
I called you Ruth after the character in the Bible. I didn’t think about the verse until just now. She’s the one who says, Wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you live, so shall I live. Your people will be my people.
I’m in a gynaecology ward. Someone tells me there’s blood on the back of my nightdress. When I look in the mirror, I see that my hair is standing on end like the crest of a cockatoo. There are three other women in my ward. One of them had an irregular smear test and now has cancer of the cervix. She gives me cigarettes. When she leaves she hugs me and cries and says, ‘I hope you’ll be okay, honey.’ I don’t know why she’s crying—she’s the one with cancer—but I’m sure her tears are for me.
I have a picture of you, taken in the foster home. At least I think it’s you. Your skin is wrinkled. Your eyes are red and puffy. You look like a wheezy old woman, wearing lemon booties and a lemon jacket. Do you know I smoked through my entire pregnancy and drank five cups of coffee every day?
I turn nineteen. The girls bring me a box of stationery they all chipped in for, with red-breasted robins on brown flowers. I keep the box for twenty years and then throw it out.
I went to see you, apparently. I remember walking along the hall with Sister Margaret. The hall has a beige floor which curves up as a skirting for the wall. Sister Margaret is standing to the left of me, so tall and solid in front of a sea of cribs, and that’s as far as I can go.
It is the third day after the birth, and I am crying. I cannot stop my tears. They run down my cheeks and all over my nightdress, bought especially for the hospital because the booklet they gave us in antenatal classes said we should buy a nightdress. I know what antenatal means now: it means pregnant; it means before birth. Jenny Fish says these are the baby blues and will pass. I am so convinced she is right that when Otis is born, twenty-three years later, I will wait in hospital for uncontrollable tears to start on the third day, some hormonal kink in the birth system. But when Otis is born, there will be no uncontrollable tears. Jenny Fish says she hates to do this to me but I must sign the papers. I don’t stop crying but I do sign.
Some days Otis is a mouse and I am a mouse mother. Some days he is a possum and I am a possum mother. This morning he was a flipback whale so I was a flipback whale mother. For whatever animal he is, I say, I am that animal’s mother.
I know now what Jenny Fish always wanted to say but never did. ‘Don’t give up your child.’ She would have said it quickly, furtively, and run out of the room, saying behind her, ‘I have seen them later, girls like you. I know what happens to them. Don’t let them take your baby.’
I am sorry, Miranda, so sorry for what I did to you.