SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER I SPOKE to Katrina, the records made by various people during my time in Melbourne arrived.
The records came in an unmarked envelope, along with a cheque for forty-five dollars because I had paid too much for them.
There was no explanation of the records, just a list of what was there. What explanation could anyone give? I thought later. There was no explanation.
The records from St Joseph’s, possibly taken down by Jenny Fish, say I don’t want the baby to go to English or Italian migrants. I don’t remember saying this, but I don’t disbelieve I said it. My teacher’s husband didn’t like Italian and English people. I didn’t want the baby to go to academic types either, the records say. Again, I don’t remember saying this but I’m sure I said it. My teacher’s husband hadn’t started studying yet. He hated anyone who went to university. He said they didn’t know anything about the real world, the world he knew about.
It made me realise what power my teacher and her husband had wielded in my life. I had taken on their views and made them my own. I have strong opinions and convictions and here I was, spouting the bigotry and anti-intellectualism of someone else. It shocked me to know that I was once so easily swayed. I am not so easily swayed these days.
In my records there should also be a description of the father, a bright young law student I loved but wasn’t ready to marry. I don’t know what happened to these records because I did tell Jenny Fish about this fictional father. I told many people about him. My teacher and her husband and I agreed I should. Maybe Jenny Fish didn’t believe me so didn’t write it down.
The records from the hospital are hard to read, as if the writing itself was in a rush to be born. A babe female born at 4.40 pm, someone wrote. The doctor who’d said I’d have a long night of pain had been wrong.
The records say the cord was wrapped tightly around babe’s neck; the word might be twice not tightly. I never knew this, twice or tightly.
Baby Ruth, they call her from then on. The records from the nursery at the hospital say that baby Ruth is posseting after feeds, has problems with wind, is crying in pain. The midwives change her formula, thicken it with cornflour, thin it, change it back, add gripe water at the end, treat constipation. Baby Ruth is still unsettled. She is admitted to St Joseph’s Babies’ Home thirteen days after I fly home to Brisbane.
When I read this, that baby Ruth spent thirteen days in a hospital nursery—waiting for a doctor’s report that she was fit for adoption, I was struck by the fact that I didn’t know—after she was born, after I left the hospital, when I got on the plane to fly home to Brisbane—where she was. She was my baby and I didn’t know where she was. And I didn’t ever ask.
Since I’ve given birth to Otis, I know what it is to be a mother. I know how every cell of your body is focused on this other life no matter what else tries to intervene. I know that in order not to know where Otis was in the minutes and hours and weeks following his birth I would have been physically restrained. He was where I was.
It had a profound effect on me, reading those records, because I understood, for the first time, how completely I shut out the reality of what happened.
Baby Ruth was unsettled, of course she was, because the one person she had a right, a birthright, to rely on was on a plane in a new size-twelve dress, heading to Brisbane, to her teacher and her teacher’s husband.
At some time, baby Ruth went from St Joseph’s Babies’ Home to a foster home with a foster mother who said baby Ruth didn’t smile. She was alert and serious and unhappy. She stayed in the foster home for thirty days, to give me time to change my mind.
I do remember being told about this. I remember I asked that it not happen, that baby Ruth go straight to her adoptive parents. I wanted there to be no delay. I didn’t want a chance to change my mind. I didn’t want baby Ruth to spend one more minute in the limbo of being baby Ruth than she had to. I wanted her new mother, her real mother, to drive to the hospital the day she was born and take her home.
There is a condition in which you can be pregnant and not know you are pregnant. I understand this condition. I had no concept of a human being inside me. I never ever ever thought of fingers or eyebrows. If there wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t leaving anything.
I was of course, and while my mind could think its thoughts, my body, my womb kept its dark secret. I had no idea of the grief that would come. But come it did, all these years later, to floor me. To punch me so hard in the jaw, in the solar plexus, as to leave me unable to breathe. Only my right leg keeps me upright, tilting this way and that in its corkscrew fashion.
Because, you see, when you give someone up like this, you must give everything up. You must not keep one small bit, not a hair, or a photograph, or a memory. If you do, it will eat you out, body and soul.
However much I tried to excuse myself, I was left with these bald facts, the facts I have had to accommodate:
It was my decision.
I was an adult in law.
I let go.
I did harm.
The way to live, I’ve discovered, is to let tears run through me like the sea, to swim in them, to surrender. I won’t tell you I’m not responsible. I won’t tell you I didn’t know quite what I was doing or realise the consequences. I won’t tell you because I want to tell the truth. I gave my child to strangers without a second thought.
After I read the records, I asked David to read them. He did and told me he felt raw. I felt raw too and it took some minutes before we understood our raw feelings were different. I felt raw because I had this baby, the baby, my baby, and what I did as a dead weight in my body.
But David saw this other baby—me, he said, too young to know my own mind, making a decision that even an old woman shouldn’t have to make and then having to live with it. His sadness was like a beacon, a little light at the end of a darkness.