To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 16 January
Hello, I gave up a daughter for adoption in Melbourne through the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau. Can you tell me who I might contact for information about my daughter? Thank you.
Mary-Rose MacColl
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 17 January
Hi Mary-Rose,
I will send you a registration form so you can register for information about your daughter. There is a fee for service set by the Department of Human Services, which is $75, or $30 for Health Care Card holders. Please return the form together with payment for us to begin the process. You are entitled to all information pertaining to you and non-identifying information regarding your daughter. If you wish to search for her, we will assist you with that. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Regards,
Helen Administration
To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 17 January
Hi Helen,
Thanks for responding so quickly. I had some contact with my daughter and her other mother some years ago but all the details are currently in storage and difficult to access quickly. I may wish to search for my daughter and will contact you once I’ve filled out the forms for information.
Mary-Rose
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 22 February
Hi Mary-Rose,
I should have clarified with you earlier whether you wanted the records you received previously reissued. As you are already registered, we should not have charged you the $75 registration fee, and I will arrange a refund for you. If you want the records reissued (there is a $30 reissue fee), I will arrange a $45 refund, otherwise we will refund the full amount. Your case has been reopened, and a social worker will be in touch with you soon. Sorry for the delay.
Regards,
Helen Administration
To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 22 February
Hi Helen,
Yes, it would be good if you could reissue whatever I have already, thanks.
Cheers,
Mary-Rose
To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 27 March
Hi Helen,
I’m emailing again as I haven’t received the records I requested from your office. Also, I sent a letter to my birth daughter’s mother via you a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to make sure it has been forwarded on. Can you let me know when I might get copies of the records I requested, please? Thank you.
Mary-Rose
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 28 March
Hi Mary-Rose,
I am not sure if you have spoken to Katrina (your social worker) yet, but she is the one who will be sending everything on to you and forwarding the package. She will be in the office tomorrow, so I will ask her to give you a call. I am not sure what the delay is, but everything should be sent to you shortly.
Kind regards,
Helen Administration
To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 28 March
Hi Helen,
No, I have not spoken to Katrina. I have not heard from anyone since your last email in February. Will Katrina know whether the letter I sent to my daughter’s other mother a couple of weeks ago was forwarded on? I addressed it via you at Centacare. Thank you.
Mary-Rose
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 28 March
Hi Mary-Rose,
We have received your package for your daughter’s mother and Katrina will be sending it on. I will ask her to give you a call tomorrow so she can discuss things with you. Now that you have been allocated a social worker I don’t really know what stage in the process it is up to. The records that you are entitled to have been copied and court records obtained, so I am sure Katrina would have been contacting you soon.
I am sorry for the delay.
Regards,
Helen Administration
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 29 March
Hi Mary-Rose,
I’m sorry. I told you Katrina would contact you today, but she is at a workshop all day. I have spoken to her, and she will contact you next Tuesday (she only works part-time).
I am sorry for the delay.
Regards,
Helen Administration
To: adoption@melb.centacare.org.au
Subject: Adoption
Date: 4 April
Dear Helen,
I am sorry to have to email you again but I have no other contact in Centacare. I am still to hear from anyone about:
• the records you have about my experiences of giving up a baby which I requested in January of this year;
• the letter I sent via you, by Express Post, to my birth daughter’s mother a few weeks ago.
I know you and your staff are probably busy. I have been through a long and emotionally racking process for the last year or so. I had not anticipated that the agency would delay its response to me. It is a thorough blow. I really need to know that the letter to my daughter’s other mother has at least been forwarded. I am asking you again to respond. I would prefer contact by email as most weekdays I have a young child who doesn’t necessarily understand my need for focused telephone conversations. Thank you in advance.
Mary-Rose
To: maryrose@email.email
Subject: Adoption
Date: 4 April
Dear Mary-Rose,
Katrina has sent a letter to you today. She is not in the office this afternoon and I am on leave for the rest of the week, so I can’t check with her, but she has sent you a cheque for $45 (the amount overpaid for your records to be reissued) and I believe a copy of your records has been enclosed. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the parcel has been sent on as yet. All mail that is exchanged through us must be checked before being forwarded, and as Katrina is out, I can’t check that for you. I will be back at work again next Tuesday, so if you what you receive from Katrina is not satisfactory, please let me know and I will ask Katrina to contact you as soon as possible. I am sorry for the delay and hope that the correspondence from Katrina will cover your queries.
Regards,
Helen
After I started seeing Wayne again, I began to want to know what happened to me when I was a teenager. I remembered only small moments of kindness and unkindness and there must have been more than these, great swathes of ordinary time that were simply gone. I wanted to know the truth.
We were still living at Thomas Street, still working on renovation plans. I was learning to let my body do its work. I read articles and books about post-traumatic stress disorder and much of it resonated. But the things I needed to do according to the books—cry or rage or otherwise express powerful feelings—weren’t always easy to achieve. I had to look after a small child and meet work deadlines. I don’t like strong emotions as a general rule. What I needed was a tap that would help me get into my body on demand. I found one. It is a song called ‘The Long Road’ sung by Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Once I found this song, I was able to go out on my bike early in the morning and cry my way to South Bank and swim in the lake there and then sometimes cry my way home. Some days I wouldn’t need to cry but most days I did. For a while, I did this every morning, like exercise.
The words of the song were important but just as important was the sound of Nusrat’s Qawwali chanting. It is hauntingly beautiful. For me, it was how I imagined grief might sound.
I yelled along sometimes as I rode. I wept. In real time, it didn’t feel so easy. In real time, I worried I’d never get better. I trusted the process not because I had a plan. I trusted the process because I didn’t have a choice. I’d have to say now that I was dragged kicking and screaming into trusting the process, frankly. If it hadn’t been for Stace and Wayne, I may not have survived.
Other people on the bikeway saw me. I’m sure they thought I’d crossed the bridge from sanity and perhaps I had. These were the best days, when I could get to the yelling and the tears early in the morning. The worst days were before I knew what needed to emerge from me, when I would simmer and rage and have no idea why.
I could still be overwhelmed with feelings and I won’t say they didn’t frighten me. Of course they did. It was a kind of madness. I wondered what was happening. I wondered if I’d ever feel better. I drank, ate strong chocolate, survived as best I could. I learned that sometimes I had to settle Otis at something and go and get in the shower and let the tears come. Frankly, the greatest harm I did, to Otis, to David, was when I didn’t get to the tears.
I decided to resume contact with my daughter’s other mother, having written nothing since Angels in the Architecture was published. If I’d told myself anything, it was that I had ‘worked through’ the adoption. I’d moved on, I would have said. When Otis came along, I was hesitant to write for other reasons. I hardly knew what to say to her, to my daughter, now in her late twenties; that here I was, the young woman who gave a child to strangers, now a woman who has had another child she is keeping.
I sent a parcel to my daughter’s other mother via the adoption agency. In it was a letter and a book that included an essay I wrote about birth. It was from a collection published by the State Library of Queensland, and a canny editor had encouraged me to write more personally. So I mentioned my first birth, my secret baby.
I put my letter and the book in a sealed envelope, as that was what I’d done in the past. A month later, I contacted Centacare by telephone for the first time. I spoke to Helen, who put me through to social worker Katrina.
Katrina worked on Mondays and Wednesdays. She told me she was a custodian. She said it twice. Katrina hadn’t had time to photocopy the records but she would, she said. She hadn’t forwarded the letter yet, she said, because she was checking that the address was current.
She’d had the letter for over a month and now she was checking that the address was current. I let this go. I knew I was not an easy person at that time.
A day later, Katrina emailed to tell me my daughter’s other mother had rung her to say yes, she wanted the letter. Katrina said she’d forwarded the letter and book. It hit me when I read her email. She was not just checking the address. She was not even just checking that my daughter’s other mother wanted the letter. She knew there was a book. The only way Katrina could know there was a book was by opening the sealed envelope.
Katrina had opened my private mail. She had done so without first telling me this was what she was going to do. She opened my letter and read it, read my private letter about the grief I was experiencing.
I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. Not angry. I wanted to be angry but I felt too sick. And the sick feeling was what powerlessness feels like; it was a feeling, I realised, I knew quite well.
I rang Helen—being part-time, Katrina was not available that day—and Helen confirmed that it was possible the social worker had opened my letter and read it. Helen didn’t know for sure, and she’d have the social worker ring me the next week. Helen said she was so sorry all this had gone so wrong for me; said she thought it was partly her fault, for some inane reason. She said she knew sorry wasn’t enough. She should be a social worker, I thought. She was kind, could hear in my voice the degree of despair. She didn’t talk like a custodian.
Katrina rang a week later and left a message. Helen told her I had concerns about the process, she said. Perhaps I could give her a call and we could talk. In the past, I would have called her back and had an angry interaction with her. I would have left her in no doubt as to my view of her: she is incompetent, or worse; she really understands her use of the term custodian.
I didn’t ring her back and yell. I didn’t even return her call. Because what would it achieve? She opened the letter, she may have read it and I simply didn’t want to know whether she was stupid or incompetent or mistaken or worked for a terrible organisation. I just wanted nothing to do with them.
When my daughter’s other mother replied to me at my own address, she gave me her name and her address so I never had to write through the agency again.