LAST NIGHT WE SAW THE moon rising at the end of the main street of the little town of Bangalow, an enormous red ball coming out of the land like a hot-air balloon. We ate at a restaurant and Otis saw a candle burning for a boy who’d worked in the restaurant; the boy had been killed on his motorcycle and the candle would burn for forty days, as is the Greek tradition. Otis wanted to know how you could die on a motorcycle and I did my best to tell him.
You don’t realise until you are a parent that you will have to lie. I have promised I will tell the truth. I have tried to be honest with Otis. I am afraid of dishonesty. I know it can harm much more than it helps. I know now what secrets do to people, how they cauterise from within. But I lie to Otis. I mediate the world because I know it may be too much for him.
A dog followed us almost all the way home through the dark streets of the town. It was broad-chested and stocky and it had no road sense but wouldn’t let me lead it. I walked as close as I dared—I have a fear of dogs, having been bitten half a dozen times as a child—and hailed cars to slow down as they approached. It would have been run over three or four times had I not remained near.
David and Otis kept asking me why I was letting the dog come with us.
‘What will we do with a dog?’ David said.
‘Is it really friendly?’ from Otis.
I knew the cottage wasn’t equipped for animals. I didn’t exactly have a plan but felt sure one would present itself.
As we turned into the street where we’d parked, a car I was hailing to slow pulled up. It was the dog’s owner, who had been searching frantically. The dog had escaped through an unlatched gate and had walked all the way to town. ‘I have a little boy too,’ she said after she’d snuggled the dog into its front seat bed. ‘That’s why he followed you. He thought your little boy was like my little boy and might know the way home. He’d have been killed if he hadn’t followed you, sweetie,’ she said to Otis.
Afterwards, Otis told the story of how we’d saved the dog’s life. ‘He thought I was his little boy,’ Otis would tell people. ‘That’s why he stayed with us.’
This morning when I swam, I went out through The Pass and around the rocks. The water was a dense green so I couldn’t see more than a few inches in front or below me. It made me afraid, this new blindness. The sea was calm, like a rocking crib, and still I was afraid. My fingers and ankles found bits of seaweed that startled me because I had no idea what they were.
I wanted to see, to know what was around me. I wanted to know.
Just before we came away on this trip, I was walking with my friend Cass. We walk once maybe twice a week up a hill near where I live. We call the hill a mountain because it makes us feel better. After we walk up our mountain, we have coffee.
After I hurt Otis with the stroller clip, Cass rang me every week, kept ringing if I didn’t call back. She told me it was not normal to get in the shower every morning and cry. Her niece, a physician, said it was not normal. She knew a psychiatrist, she said, the eighty-six-year-old father of a friend. At eighty-six, he’d have seen it all, she said. Maybe he could help.
‘Before you do anything drastic,’ she said once, although I hadn’t mentioned anything drastic, ‘will you call me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good,’ she said.
While walking on our mountain on the morning before we came away, I was telling Cass about my conversation with Mary, how much it had meant to me, how it had helped to have someone acknowledge that I’d made the wrong decision.
By this time, I was travelling much better. Cass and I would walk up our mountain and watch the sun and hear the mad cockatoos. We’d even spied an eagle’s nest that year, the baby eagles well protected by their fierce mother.
Cass stopped on the track. ‘I don’t think I agree with that, Mary-Rose,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t at all. How could anyone know that? How could anyone be sure? You don’t know what your daughter’s life would have been like. You can’t have any idea.’ She was shaking her head.
It occurred to me suddenly that Cass was right, just as Mary had been right. I made a wrong decision. Yes, I did. There is no way of knowing if I made a wrong decision. Yes again. Whatever baby Ruth’s life had become, it wasn’t the life she would have had with me. That was all I could really know for sure.
Not everyone in my life has agreed I should write this story. After I hurt Otis in the stroller clip, I had stopped writing anything at all and when I started again, I found myself writing the truth about what happened to me as a young woman.
During this time, I had been meeting with my friend Kris Olsson to workshop what we were each writing. We used to meet after my cold-water swimming at South Bank for breakfast, but for a long time I hadn’t had anything to workshop.
After I started writing again, I read out loud to Kris what I’d written. We sat there in the winter sun crying together.
Some time later, Fiona Stager from Avid Reader Bookstore in Brisbane hosted an event where I read from an essay I’d written for Griffith Review, published by Julianne Schultz, telling some of the secrets I’d kept. It was terrifying, and I was glad I did it.
If these women hadn’t been willing, I would never have kept writing.
Some of my friends said I should not under any circumstances share the story of what happened to me, to us, with my daughter. It is too much for a child to bear, even in adulthood, they said. Others said some secrets are better kept. Past is past. Leave it there.
I do not agree with them. I agree with my friend Cass.
‘Of course she has a right to know,’ Cass said. ‘We all have the right to information. People make me sick the way they hide things, as if information can harm a person.’
It’s secrets that harm a person. I know this much now.
I had resumed contact with my daughter’s other mother. I had written a version of this story. I wanted to explain to my daughter how I arrived on a dark beach on the night of her conception, and how I came to leave her with strangers.
I would rather have sat down and told her in person, but that was not an option. I knew it was entirely possible that it might never be an option—many children adopted at birth decide not to meet those who gave them away. My daughter had not expressed interest in any contact with me. I wanted to tell her the truth.
I sent the story through my daughter’s other mother, which was still the only way to contact my daughter. I asked her other mother to pass the story on. I told her I wanted my daughter to have the information, that I didn’t want anything from my daughter but I wanted her to have the information.
This is not your story, and perhaps there will be some comfort in that. It is not even half of the story of where you come from and it is none of the story of where you are going. You came through me on your own journey. This is mine. You can take what is useful from it and move on. I read Women Who Run with the Wolves: ‘The wild woman carries with her the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things.’
My daughter’s other mother rang me, out of the blue. I heard her voice for the first time on my answering machine, this woman I’d been corresponding with on and off for over twenty years, this woman who is my daughter’s mother. She’d read my story, she said, and she wanted to talk to me. She didn’t leave a number, just a time she’d call again.
When she called again, she said she had decided to read the story before she told Miranda about it, and now that she’d read it she did not want to tell her of its existence at all. ‘Some things are private,’ she said. ‘A person’s sex life is private.’
‘This is not my sex life,’ I told her. ‘This is nothing to do with my sex life.’ I felt alone.
She wanted to throw my words in the bin, she said. She had hoped for a fairy tale ending, but this is no fairy tale, she said. This is devastating. She was frightened of what my words might do.
I was upset to hear her say these things. I was a child too, I found myself wanting to say, and then felt guilty for those feelings. Oh, the cost of all this. It’s just so hard, too hard for anyone to comprehend.
Later though, I admired a mother so fiercely protective of her daughter.
‘Think before you decide on her behalf,’ I said finally. ‘Maybe tell her you have the story and give her the choice. She can always say no.’
Some time later, I got an email from her saying that she had passed the story on to Miranda, that she wasn’t sure how Miranda had responded but that Miranda was glad her other mother hadn’t kept it from her.
Months later I heard from Miranda. Actually, I didn’t exactly hear from her. She wrote to her other mother and told her she didn’t know how to respond to me. Her mother was pressuring her to respond and she didn’t know how to. She was so glad her mother was her mother. Although I said several times in the story that I made the wrong decision, she was sure I made the right decision. She didn’t have room for me in her life. She wasn’t sure how she felt after reading the story. She couldn’t see how she could possibly go forward. Maybe her mother should just copy the email to me, she said. And this is what her other mother did.
Some time later, she wrote to me and said other things; how difficult this was, how confusing. We emailed one another from then on. I don’t recall much about the content of the emails. I sent her the names of songs. I don’t know if she ever listened to them. ‘I Dream a Highway’ by Gillian Welch. At least one song by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ by Bob Dylan. She told me about her life, her real life.