I had something of an emotional hangover the next day.
Ted and I spoke in hushed tones over breakfast as we made plans to visit the doctor together on our lunchbreaks. Before, our chatter had been upbeat and excited, but now we dared not risk exuberance. The pregnancy suddenly felt too fragile to expose to further loud voices or emotions.
There were times as the morning passed when I’d fully engage with the class I was teaching and for a brief moment the image of my mother’s distraught face would fade from the forefront of my mind. I had three individual one hour classes to get through – including a kindergarten class which was always a challenge, and I was grateful for the distraction. I’d always felt that it was via music that I became fully alive, and that day, even the sounds of five-year-olds drumming against the desks felt like life support.
After I’d finished my last morning class, I went to my desk and withdrew my phone. I fully expected a missed call or voicemail from Mum, and my heart sank when the screen was empty. I opened a blank text message and tapped out a message.
Mum, I’m so sorry about what happened last night. I know it’s hard but please – can we talk, as soon as you’re ready? I just want to do whatever I can to protect my pregnancy, if there’s anything at all I can do. Love you xo
Our GP was empathetic, and suggested we undertake a series of routine tests in lieu of any firm ideas about where to start looking for potential problems.
‘Fertility issues aren’t always genetic,’ he assured us. ‘And even if they are, there’s nothing to say you’ve inherited your mother’s issues anyway, or that it’s not a problem we’ve managed to solve in all of those years – medicine has come a really long way since you were born. But I do think we should be smart about this, so we’ll send you for a scan next week to see how things are progressing so far, and I’ll order a series of blood tests in the meantime so we can look for the common issues.’
I didn’t feel any better after we’d seen him. I had the blood drawn and then Ted and I went for lunch together, but we sat in near-silence in the café with my still-silent phone on the table between us.
It was going to be a very long week until our first ultrasound. I was confused about which to focus more time worrying about; should I concentrate on Mum’s welfare, or on finding out as much as I could about her issues and trying to help the baby?
Ted reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
‘Do you want me to call her, Bean?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘She was so upset last night, I don’t know how to balance finding out all about this stuff with not upsetting her more.’
‘All of this stress can’t be good for you.’
I looked down at my plate. The chicken and mushroom pasta I’d ordered was now evenly divided into four quadrants but I’d eaten only a mouthful.
‘Are you saying that because I’ve barely touched my lunch?’
Ted chuckled.
‘Well, I’ve known you for nearly twenty years and I’ve never seen you too distracted to eat before.’
I smiled weakly and stabbed a chunk of chicken, then lifted it to my mouth. The sauce was decadent, laden with cream and cheese and bursting with flavour. I savoured the taste for a moment and felt my appetite kick in.
‘If we haven’t heard from her in the next few days, I’ll give them a call,’ I said, after a few quick mouthfuls of food. ‘Maybe Dad can explain it to me so she doesn’t have to.’
‘He seemed pretty spooked last night too. They must’ve had a nightmare time of it for them both to be so traumatised all of these years later.’
‘I don’t know how people survive losing . . .’ I started to speak, but my voice broke. ‘I just mean, it’s only been a few days, but I already love this baby. If anything happens to it . . .’
Ted reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
‘Let’s stay positive, Bean.’
When the afternoon passed with no response from Mum, I walked home from work and tried to fall into my usual routine. Ted’s car was in the driveway, and I immediately headed for the little office opposite our bedroom and planted a kiss on the dark hair on top of his head. He was on a call, a boring one judging by the news article he was reading on his computer screen. He pointed to the clock then held up six fingers, indicating that he wouldn’t be finished until 6 p.m. – another half an hour.
I put dinner in the oven, then changed into harem pants and one of Ted’s T-shirts, but was very happy to abandon my bra; my clothes had all become just a little bit too tight and I knew it had nothing to do with pregnancy and everything to do with too much indulgence over the summer.
At that time of the afternoon in autumn, the most comfortable place in our little granny flat was the dining room table. There I could enjoy the warmth of the dying sun and still watch the television all while working, or at least pretending to work. I laid out my lesson plans across the table and hit the power button on the TV remote. The oven timer counted down, but its audible tick was not enough to remind me that a meal was imminent; I opened packet of chicken biscuits on the table and promised myself just one more for at least ten minutes while the gameshow won the battle for my attention against my lesson planning.
When my doorbell sounded, I glanced at the wall clock: 5.43 p.m; prime door-to-door sales hour. As I rose and approached the door, I tried to ready myself to be firm, practicing the shape of the words no thank you under my breath. I could see silhouettes through the stained glass of the door and I grimaced as I reached for the doorknob. Two doorknockers? More than one usually meant the product on sale was religion, and I always felt particularly guilty cutting off that sales pitch. The motivation seemed so much more innocent.
When I realised that it was actually my parents on my doorstep, my natural reaction was delight and relief. A split second later, my heart sank when I realised that they had both been crying.
‘We need to talk to you, Sabina.’
There was an unusual defeat in Dad’s stance, and as I surveyed the way he held himself, it slowly dawned on me that they weren’t there to talk about the events of the previous night or my pregnancy at all. Surely, given the way Dad’s shoulders slumped, someone was sick or dying. My mother, standing next to him on the tiny porch to our equally tiny home, was all tension and fight – holding herself bolt upright and stiff, her brown eyes flashing with fire. She looked every bit the part of someone ready to go into battle.
‘Oh God. What is it?’ I was frozen. Maybe if I didn’t let them inside, I wouldn’t have to hear whatever it was they’d come to say. Dad motioned towards the cramped living area behind me.
‘Can we come in?’
‘Ted,’ I called, as I opened the door to let them inside.
‘I'm still on the phone, Bean.’ The words floated down the hallway at me. Ted was sending me information, not expressing irritation at the interruption.
‘Ted.’ I said again, this time letting the strain and urgency slip into my voice. I saw Dad's broad shoulders rise and fall as he inhaled and sharply exhaled.
‘Let's take a seat,’ he said, and he slid his arms around my shoulders and directed me towards our living area. Dad's scent, of soap and spices and safety, wound its way around me and my eyes watered. As he sat me down on the couch he kissed the side of my head, and with that kiss he knocked the tears onto my cheeks. Mum sat stiffly on the edge of the other couch opposite us, just as she’d done the previous night. Ted stepped into the room.
‘What's going on?’ There was instant alarm in his bright blue eyes. My parents ignored him though, their gazes were locked on me.
‘I'm sorry to drop this on you, sweetheart,’ Dad said. His words were measured and calm, but for the red rims of his eyes this could have been any ordinary conversation. ‘I know this is going to come as a shock, but you have to believe that we have kept this from you only because we believed it to be for the best.’
Mum still hadn't said a word.
‘What . . . what is it?’ I felt the anxiety rising as bubbles in my throat and electric shocks down my arms. My thoughts were stumbling into one another. Cancer. It was probably cancer, and if they'd kept it from me for some time, maybe Dad didn't have long left with us.
‘Sabina,’ Dad's whisper was rough, and I felt the trembling of his arm across my shoulders. ‘You were adopted.’
There it was. Three short words, and my life fractured. I didn’t realise it yet, but that was the thick black line down the middle of my timeline: there would forever be a Before those words, and an After.
I really had no concept of that yet though, because my first response was that Dad’s statement was nonsense, in fact, it was hilariously far-fetched. I looked straight to Ted. He raised an eyebrow at me, mirroring my own initial reaction – total and utter disbelief.
There was just no way.
No. Freaking. Way.
Surely I’d have known, or at least, suspected. I wouldn’t share Mum’s brown eyes and Dad’s smile. I thought of the interests and habits and traits we shared in common – too many to recount, far too many to be coincidental. What a ridiculous statement. Was this some kind of joke?
I laughed. The sound started as the last burst of confidence from a woman who had known entirely who she was, and then when no one else laughed, it faded away to a confused whimper.
‘Is it a j-joke?’ I glanced at Mum, who was staring at the floorboards and now seemed defeated. The tension had drained from her and she'd visibly slumped. But no, this was not the delivery of a punchline – this was a truth long held behind a wall, and the wall had just collapsed.
I rose, away from my parents as if they were suddenly a threat, but I couldn't take my eyes off them, and so I found myself backing away blindly to find the comfort of my husband. Ted caught me and wrapped his arms around me, anchoring me. So many questions rushed at me at once that I couldn’t even organise myself to ask a single one of them.
‘Why would—but how—why would—and why—?’
The words wouldn't come. They never flowed when I was distressed; instead they stuck, as if the record of my language soundtrack had been scratched. I'd hit a word or a sound and circle back over it endlessly, until I found a way to still myself and to enforce a rhythm onto my voice. The gentle squeeze of Ted's arm around my waist slowed me enough to finish the sentence, but even when I managed to form it, my words sounded thin and high.
‘I don’t understand. Why would you keep this from me? How could you?’ Now the record of my words was playing, but the speed was too fast, and I sounded ridiculous and panicked even to my own ears.
‘We thought it was for the best,’ Dad said. I looked at Mum – my best friend, or so I thought. It suddenly struck me that she hadn't made eye contact since they arrived.
It was no wonder she’d panicked when I asked her about her pregnancy with me. She hadn’t actually had one.
‘How could it be for the best to lie to her for four decades?’ Ted's incredulity hung in the silence that followed his question. Dad pleaded with us for understanding.
‘It was a different time, guys. When you came to us, Sabina, we had been told that it would be better if you just never had to deal with it. And by the time society’s thinking on that changed, you were old enough that it just seemed too late. We thought . . .’ The sentence faded, and his lip trembled when he finished in a whisper, ‘ . . . we really thought you’d never need to know.’
‘So where . . . where did you get me?’ I had visions of being left on a doorstep somewhere, unwanted and unloved. I pictured driving rain and darkness and wailing alone and helpless at the coldness of it all, and the image was so vivid that for a second I wondered if it could be an actual memory.
Was I discovering an origin story for myself that was the polar opposite of the one I’d always known?
‘You were adopted from the maternity home where your mother worked.’
‘She-she worked there?’ I was confused. My mother? Who was my mother? Was it Megan, sitting in the crumpled heap before me, or the nameless, faceless woman who had given birth to me and then apparently abandoned me?
‘Yes. Oh, hang on, you mean – the woman . . ?’ Dad didn't seem to know what words to use either. ‘No, she was a resident at the home. Mum worked there.’
I looked at Mum. Had she really physically shrunk since her arrival last night, or was it a trick of the light? Her face was in her hands now. I wondered what she was thinking, and how this woman who had shared and overshared with me over so many thousands of hours over so many decades, could have decided time and time and time again to not mention this one, vital fact.
I was having an out-of-body moment, floating around on the ceiling while the conversation happened below me. We were no ordinary family – we were an extra-ordinary family – close-knit and open and honest and all round healthy. And, it now seemed, liars to our very core.
'Why are you telling me now?'
Even Dad seemed uncomfortable. He didn’t generally do uncomfortable, Dad was confident and strong, and he just handled things. Dad could talk to me about periods and boys and sex and which dress I might wear to the party, dealing with the awkward moments of parenthood with ease.
‘We knew Megan panicked you last night. She shouldn’t have told you about our problems, you didn’t need to know. But we understand how worried you must be that you might have inherited the same issues . . . we couldn’t let you spend your pregnancy worrying for nothing or, God forbid, stress yourself about it such that something terrible did happen.’
Later, much later, when the shock wore off and the truth sunk in, I'd return to this moment and dissect it from every angle. For now, I just had to cope, and that seemed difficult enough without critically analysing the information I was being drip fed. That was a blessing, because had I really understood that Dad was actually admitting to me that they were only telling me because they felt they had no choice . . . well, I think I’d have broken into a million pieces, right then and there.
‘Why did she give me up?’
Mum finally looked up. There were silent tears drenching her face.
‘It was a different time, Sabina. She was sixteen years old. Keeping you was never an option.’
‘Was this hospital involved in the forced adoption business that's been all over the news?’ Ted asked. He always laughed at my lack of interest in news and current affairs – but this was exactly why. This was the first time I'd heard the term forced adoption, and I'd rather never have heard those two words together. All of the implications of this rushed at me, but before I had time to untangle the jumbled mess of thoughts, Mum sobbed, and the sound broke me. I slipped from Ted's grasp and sat beside her, wrapping my arms around her slim shoulders. I had just discovered the biggest betrayal of my life, but I couldn’t bear to see my betrayer crying.
‘Mum . . .’ I didn't know what to say to her, and as strong as the shock and the confusion was, the urge to comfort her was still stronger. I rubbed the space between her shoulder blades, staring at the floor as I tried to wrap my mind around the enormity of the disclosure. The peculiar numbness of physiological shock was settling. I was standing in a glass cage watching a hurricane rage past outside.
Dad rose and crouched beside Mum, his arm meeting mine across her back.
‘Keep it together, Meg.’
He whispered; his words flat and desperate, but I caught them anyway. In his tone I recognised the one dissonant note that I’d always been aware was sounding in the symphony of our family. Ted could have said that same sentence and sounded both sensitive and sensible, but from Dad, it sounded like a command. Dad was passionate about our family, which was a very good thing nearly all of the time . . . except for those few moments when the passion went just a little too far, and he seemed controlling and demanding.
It jarred me. It had before, but that night, hearing Dad speak to Mum with such sharpness . . . it was almost too much – I cringed, averting my gaze to my husband, my anchor. Ted sat down on the sofa opposite us, resting his elbows on his knees, dangling his hands between his legs. He really could be very sensitive when he needed to be, but more than anything, Ted was rational. He would find a way through the mess of this to a truth that I could digest.
‘So, who was she?’ he asked quietly.
No one answered him, not for a long time. The silence was ragged, then it was awkward. It hadn't occurred to me to ask, but now that the question was out there, I desperately needed it to be answered. When I finally realised that they were just ignoring him, I prompted,
‘Mum?’
‘We never knew anything about her.’
Was she lying? Mum was avoiding my gaze again, but her guilt was palpable. She slumped when she spoke, as if the heaviness of the words was pressing her into the earth. I glanced at Ted, and he raised his eyebrows at me. He saw it too – the hallmarks of a lie.
‘Megan, she deserves to know everything you can tell her,’ Ted spoke softly, reasonably.
Mum shook her head and the tears started again.
‘I’m really sorry Sabina, there’s nothing I can tell you. I don’t know anything else.’
‘Well, are there records?’ Ted said. ‘Surely there is paperwork. What about Sabina’s birth certificate?’
There was the glimmer of hope I’d been holding my breath waiting for. I sat up straight again and turned my attention to Dad.
‘It lists your names.’ I felt washed in relief, too confused to note how ridiculous the notion was – as if, perhaps, they could be mistaken after all. ‘I’ve had a copy of it for years, Dad. It lists your names.’
‘Is it not the original?’ Ted asked softly, and I slumped again.
‘No, it’s the original.’ Mum shook her head. ‘I told you, it was a different time. We adopted you at birth so we were listed as your parents, and we are your parents. Sometimes back then, hospitals didn’t even bother to keep records to the contrary.’
‘So, I can’t find her, even if I want to?’ I was instantly grieving, feeling an acute loss for something I hadn’t even known existed until minutes earlier – something I wasn’t even sure that I wanted yet.
‘I doubt it very much, love,’ Dad said quietly.
We sat for a moment, all of us lost together in the mess of it all. No one spoke, but the room was noisy anyway: the television was still on in the background. Someone had won big on the game show, and triumphant music played while rainbow balloons and streamers rained on them from above.
I’d never been diagnosed with anxiety, but I supposed this was probably the best label for the way my fears ran out of control sometimes. When caught off guard, my mind would churn a situation over and over, until I could almost lose myself in the swirling tornado of thoughts. I’d learned, almost by accident over the years, to manage that panic by being mindful of the hard facts about a moment, to ground myself in reality, instead of floating around in my fears.
So yes, the sun was still streaming through the window, a patch of bright light reflecting uncomfortably into my face from the polished floorboards in the kitchen – the world had not ended. The oven was still ticking down, and judging by the hearty smell, the lentils and lamb were just about done. Time was marching onward, just as it always had. My bare feet on the floorboards were comfortably cool. I was still me, and I was still here. The red lines on the skin of my stomach caused by my too-small work trousers would have faded now.
And as for that tiny life sprouting deep inside me, I felt a supreme confidence that no circumstance on this earth could inspire me to give it up, and no force in the universe could make me. It was the physical manifestation of the soul-solidifying love I felt for Ted. How could someone ever part with such a thing? An answer came to me almost instantly.
Her story . . . my story . . . might not be one of love.
A chill came over me. I released Mum, and stood.
‘We should go and let you think about this.’ Dad rose too, extending his long body to its full height, and I took a moment to think back to the fear I’d had when he first arrived and I thought he might be sick. I’d have preferred that outcome – sickness, we could fight together. Sickness and age were inevitable. Sickness meant there was still some kind of hope, even if it was fragile. This . . . this meant that everything would immediately and forever be topsy-turvy.
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ my ever vigilant husband was staring at my face, and I wondered what he was thinking and if he knew how shaken I was. I could taste panic simmering in my gut. When the shock wore off, I would be wrecked.
‘Do you still love us?’ Mum asked. While Dad was already making moves towards the door, it was obvious that she didn’t want to leave until I promised her that everything was okay. And in any other circumstances I’d have done just that, so she was probably expecting it.
I looked from her gaunt, tear-stained face, to Dad’s more subtly pleading gaze, and then to the floor.
‘Of course I st-still love you.’ I was mumbling and stumbling, the words clumping together into a mangled mess. ‘You just need to let me t-think this through.’
They left, and after Ted shut the door behind them, we stood in silent confusion side by side at the entrance, almost frozen in time until the oven timer rang. Ted moved first; he turned the oven off, removed the casserole dish onto the top of the stove, and then wordlessly poured me a glass of the ginger beer I’d made several months earlier with Dad. I followed Ted, meandering hopelessly in his general direction, not really cognisant of where I was or what I was doing. After a moment or two of standing near the TV staring at the floor, I took a few further steps to the dining room table and sank into a chair. The upholstered cushion was still warm from when I’d left it only five minutes earlier. How could so much have changed in the time it takes a seat to cool down?
Ted pushed aside my lesson plans to sit beside me. I stared at the bubbles rising through the soft drink he placed before me.
‘I wish this was real beer,’ I whispered.
‘I can get you one if you want, Bean. I’m sure one won’t hurt.’
‘No, no.’
I took a long, soothing sip of the beer and then turned to him. The evening’s normality had shattered, and in its place, I sat in the bubble of a nightmare. I tried again to re-ground myself in the warmth of the fading sunshine, in the glow of the floor lamp between the table and our little kitchen, in the bitterness of the ginger beer, in the closeness of Ted’s thigh near to, but not quite touching, mine.
It wasn’t working now. What kind of stress relief could I employ in this particular instance? Was there a mindfulness practice big enough?
‘Did that really just happen?’
‘I can’t believe it either.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Did you ever suspect?’
‘Of course not.’ I drank more, until even the creamy bitterness reminded me only of Dad. Mum had the refined palate of a woman who could sip a merlot and comment on the hint of chocolate in its base, but to me, all wine tasted like vinegar. Instead, Dad and I shared a fanatical obsession with beer – all kinds of beer actually; ginger beers and stouts and pilsners and porters. He had a trellis in his backyard where he grew a series of hops varieties, and every few months we’d spend a whole evening cooking from scratch our own elaborate home brew. The last time, just a few weeks earlier, I’d soaked the grain at home during the day while I was at school, and then driven across the suburbs in my little hatchback, the giant pot nestled like a baby beneath a seatbelt. It took us nearly six hours that night to boil and strain the grain to just the right temperature, then to cool it and to apply the yeast, and to transfer it into a vat to ferment.
In another few weeks, it would be ready to bottle, and we’d spend half a day on a weekend chatting while we decanted it into glass bottles with bottle caps pressed on to seal it.
I thought I’d inherited from Dad that love of the intricacies of the craft, not to mention the satisfaction of the yeasty taste at the end of all of the work and waiting.
‘But everyone says I look just like them. Don’t I have Mum’s smile? Don’t I have Dad’s eyes?’
‘I thought so too.’
‘So everything they’ve ever said to me is a lie?’
‘I can understand why you would say that,’ Ted said, after a moment. ‘But it’s not true. For all of their faults, you can’t deny that your parents have genuinely adored you.’
‘If they adore me, Ted, why would they lie to me?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘I’m only thirty-eight. Surely even thirty-eight years ago people understood that denying someone the truth about their birth was not going to be great for them.’
‘Well . . . I don’t know about that, honey. I’ve seen the news about this forced adoption controversy, it really sounds like young mothers weren’t even given a choice about keeping their kids. Hiding the actual adoption from the child is not much of a stretch from there.’
‘But . . . why, Ted? Why weren’t they given a choice?’ I’d been stoic until that moment, but the idea suddenly slipped through my shock-cocoon and I felt myself dissolving. This concept was so monstrous and outrageous that I couldn’t even stand to think that it had anything to do with me. When I spoke again, my whispered words were uneven, punctuated by the tremors of barely restrained tears. ‘Are you seriously saying that women’s babies were just taken from them?’
‘Well . . . as I understand it, yes. I think it was about the shame of babies being born out of marriage,’ Ted murmured, sliding his arm around me. ‘We can do some reading . . . but I am pretty sure that single women, especially young single women who were found to be pregnant were taken to maternity homes, like the one Megan must have worked in. I think the mums were often coerced into signing the paperwork, and the babies were taken after the birth and adopted out from there.’
‘But I just can’t even believe Mum would be a part of such a thing,’ I whispered. ‘Surely that must be some mistake, maybe she didn’t understand what was happening there. But then, even if that was true—’ I was thinking out loud now, and I sat away from Ted so that I could stare at him, searching the blue depths of his eyes, seeking comfort. ‘Even if she didn’t know . . . she definitely knew about the adoption. And hiding that from me? Mum has always talked to me about everything.’ I slumped again and leant into him, and a sob escaped. ‘I thought she did.’ Ted pressed a soft kiss to the side of my head. ‘Do I even know them?’
‘I guess your parents’ role in all of this must be the hardest part to digest,’ Ted murmured. ‘The thing is . . . your parents . . . well . . .’
‘I know,’ I said grimly. He seemed uncharacteristically stuck for words but I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. I assumed that he was going to refer to how close I was to them, and how invested they were in my life. He’d eventually grown accustomed to us over the years, but in the early days of our friendship, he’d remarked often with suspicion and confusion at how fond I was of my parents. In turn, I’d always thought his family was the strange one, with their polite distance, and the convoluted web of ex-spouses and step-siblings and half-siblings that formed their structure. ‘My parents are just wonderful.’
Ted cleared his throat, and shifted just a little. I frowned.
‘What?’
‘Bean, your parents can be wonderful . . . but even so . . . I really feel like sometimes you look at your family through rose coloured glasses. This is a really, truly shitty thing they’ve done to you . . . and yes it’s come out of nowhere, but then again . . . I totally get that they would be capable of keeping a secret like this.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I just mean . . . honey . . . they can be manipulative.’
‘Ted!’
‘Remember when we bought the house?’
‘They were delighted for us!’
‘They were delighted for us. The day we exchanged contracts, we went out for dinner and your Dad popped open the bubbles just as he always does and we talked with them for hours about our plans for the house, and how we’d rent this granny flat out for a bit of extra income. Remember?’ I nodded, but I was on guard.
‘So?’
‘So the very next day, you went shopping for décor with Megan, and when you came home, you were adamant that it would be foolish for us to move into the big house and rent the flat.’
‘B-but it didn’t make sense. There’s only two of us, and the house is huge.’
‘It was huge when we inspected it, it was huge when we bought it, and it was huge when we told your parents we’d gone ahead with the sale . . . and not once did you question the sense of that until they did. It’s a large, luxurious house. We went to Dubai and I worked ninety hour weeks for two years so that we could save up enough to buy that house and set ourselves up. What didn’t make sense was for us to buy the house, and then install some other family in it just to maximise our tax deductions. But that’s what Graeme thought was most sensible, and so that’s what Megan thought was most sensible, and eventually that’s what you thought was most sensible. And believe me, Sabina, when your parents convince you of something, you are loyal to that idea almost beyond rationality. Look at our situation now – crammed in here like sardines, and now we’re going to have to figure out how to break the lease and get the tenants out of the house before the baby comes.’
‘But you agreed to move in here too,’ I whispered, stung.
‘Because . . .’ Ted sighed and entwined my hand on the table with his. ‘Because one of the things I love most about you is your loyalty, and your optimism, and even those damned rose coloured glasses. I’m assuming that you use them on me too, given that you put up with me.’ I smiled weakly, but there were tears in my eyes, because if there was one thing I was still sure of it was that I didn’t need rose coloured glasses for my husband. He was genuinely amazing. ‘I did try to talk you out of it, but it was obvious to me that pleasing your Dad meant a lot to you, and eventually I figured I would just go along with it for a year or two to make you happy. But it was never what we wanted. And it wasn’t just the house, it was you going to uni, and—’
‘I wanted to go to uni, Ted.’
‘Yes, you did. But you didn’t want to study teaching, did you? You wanted to go to the conservatorium to study performance. You told me that the very first time you met me. Your parents convinced you to do the safe course, instead of the brave course. I love your parents. I really do. But I don’t think I can listen to you wax lyrical about how wonderful they are any more, not after tonight. What they are, and what they’ve always been, are two people who love you more than anything else – but to them, love and control are all jumbled up together somehow. I can’t help but wonder if a part of your Mum’s distress last night was because we didn’t ask her permission to have a baby of our own.’
‘You make them sound like monsters.’
‘No, Bean, I don’t mean to. I just want you to look at this rationally. This is a God-awful thing they’ve done.’
‘They said they were advised not to tell me.’
‘That’s probably part of why they didn’t. But surely they questioned that, as you got older and society evolved enough to realise how unfair that is?’
‘I have to believe that they kept this from me because they really thought it was in my best interests.’
When I glanced at Ted, he sighed and shrugged.
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘But you don’t think I am.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Who was it at these maternity homes – I mean, who actually took the babies? Was it doctors?’
‘From what I’ve read, midwives and doctors . . . and social workers,’ Ted added the last words very softly, and even though I’d feared as much, I was instantly defensive and surprisingly angry with him for saying the words out loud. I wanted to rage at him, and maybe I would have, but he cut me off with a hasty qualification, ‘Look, I really don’t know about any of this – I just skimmed over an article or two in the news over the last few months. And Bean, of course I struggle to see Megan participating in any evil institutional scheme to rob mothers of their babies. But there really were schemes like that and she was a social worker and now it seems that she did work in a maternity home. . . I’m just saying that as awful as it is to consider, we’re going to have to keep an open mind about her role in all of this until we know just a little bit more.’
‘Christ, Ted.’ There was just enough weight in that realisation that my emotions suddenly broke free, and the sobs came in an avalanche. ‘Please don’t say these things. Please, just leave it for tonight now. I don’t think I can handle any more than this.’
‘I’m sorry, honey.’ I could hear the echoing waterfall of remorse in his tone, just as I’d heard the way his words spilled forward as he talked about my parents manipulating me. He’d been waiting a long, long time to point that out to me, and maybe he’d pushed it farther than he should have given how upsetting the night had already been. ‘We don’t even have to talk about this if you’re not ready yet.’
‘I think . . . I’m going to have to digest all of this, piece by piece, and it might take a long time.’
‘Yes . . . it might.’
‘When they said they didn’t know anything about her. . . do you think they were lying?’
Ted sighed and nodded.
‘Yes. I hate to say it, but they were definitely lying.’
‘I felt like that too, the way Mum wouldn’t look at me. But . . . the whole conversation happened so quickly, my head was spinning. Is still spinning.’
‘They knew her age, remember? Meg said your birth mother was sixteen, she said that’s why she had to give you up. They did try to quickly move the conversation on, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they just didn’t want to tell you any more.’
‘So they’re still lying to me,’ I whispered thickly. It was a fresh punch to the gut to think that this wasn’t something terrible my parents had done, but rather, something terrible that they were continuing to do.
‘Maybe they’re just going to let you have some time to digest all of this. We can ask them and push the issue a bit more somewhere down the track. It will be much easier to press for those details later on when everyone is calm.’
I looked to the television. The evening news was starting. This was the time when I would normally reach for the remote and turn over to a soap or cartoon or just about anything else.
My routine may have changed forever; it seemed that my attempt to avoid the worst of news in the world had failed; the bad news had found me and in the most personal way possible.
But the changing of the television programmes was proof that the progression of time continued as it always had – the world had not stopped, although in just a few moments, its axis seemed to have forever shifted.
I tried to sleep, after a few hours of sporadic, confused and disjointed analysis with Ted. I repeated myself a lot. We’d start to talk, and then the conversation would become too painful and I’d insist it stop, only to bring the topic up myself again just minutes later. When he suggested we go to bed, I resisted at first, because I still had work to do and I couldn’t imagine stilling my racing mind anyway. The deciding factor was that he was going to leave the room and I couldn’t bear to be alone.
I lay within the confines of his arms until he was asleep, but I couldn’t even bring myself to close my eyes. Every time I did, flashes of my childhood shot past me; the playful holidays we’d regularly taken, the comforting overnight presence of my mother when I was sick, the patient provision of endless speech therapy for all of those years when my stammer seemed like an undefeatable foe. Instead of warmth and a feeling of unbelievable fortune, now those memories inspired a shame at not even suspecting the lie – not once.
How could they have kept this from me?
How could I not have known?
I gave up and left the bed when Ted started his deep snoring routine. I made a cup of tea, and sat back down at the table, taking the same seat I’d been sitting in so many hours ago when the doorbell rang. The sun was gone now and it was cold. I pulled my dressing gown tightly around my shoulders. Then I opened the laptop and brought up a search engine, and my fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Where to begin?
I knew that both Mum and Dad had been working at a rural hospital four hours west of Sydney when I was born, in a sleepy rural city named Orange; one which we’d never visited in spite of my curiosity over the years. Every time I had to write a place of birth for an application, I’d wondered about this mysterious place and I’d often asked her if we could go there together, to see the hospital and so she could tell me about my birth and show me the house I first came home to. She always offered the most plausible excuses. I’d never so much as suspected there might be a sinister reason behind her avoidance of that place.
I typed in the word.
Orange.
And then my hands froze up as I thought about those strange words Ted had introduced me to; maternity home. I closed my eyes and pictured a prison-like structure with bars on the windows and faces of pregnant teenagers peering helplessly from between them.
My fingers went to work again.
Maternity.
Home.
I clicked search.
There was recent news coverage – lots of it. I clicked on the top link.
Pressure is mounting on the Australian government to apologise to families impacted by the government’s forced adoption policies in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s in Australia . . . Although exact numbers are unknown as records were often destroyed or not kept at all, it is believed that up to 150,000 babies were taken from their mothers during the period, with some commentators calling this an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. Midwives, doctors and social workers—
As soon as my eyes hit the words social worker, I hit the back button with a little too much force.
I turned to Wikipedia.
Orange and District Maternity Home.
There were a few pictures of a nondescript red brick building; no bars on the window, no signs out the front. It could have been any post World War Two office block. I skimmed the brief text.
Operating from 1954 until 1982, the Orange and District Maternity Home was a Salvation Army sponsored home for unmarried mothers. It is believed to have housed more than 1,000 young women during their pregnancies, although record keeping practices were notoriously poor. The home is believed to have been a participant in government sanctioned forced adoption practices.
In 1982 the Maternity Home was closed, and the building was repurposed as a ward of the Orange Base Hospital until its move to the new Bloomfield Campus in 2012. The building is currently vacant.
I stared at the photos. The building seemed far too ordinary to have housed such an evil scheme.
Eventually, I closed my laptop and rested my head in my hands. I thought of the first time I left home, when I graduated from uni and decided to take a job singing on a cruise ship. It had been an adventure that I’d loved every second of – after the first night.
But that first night, docked in Sydney in my tiny, window-less berth, I’d felt more alone than I ever had in my life, and it had been terrifying. The enormity of the ship, of the Harbour, of the journey ahead and of the world itself had dwarfed me and I’d allowed myself to become overwhelmed and lost.
It had been a long, cold night of regret and anxiety and fear.
But then, of course, I had left my berth as the sun rose and at breakfast made friends and spent the next few years in one endless party here and there all over the planet.
From the fear had grown courage, and from the courage had grown confidence, and now the stint at sea was a part of the fabric of my character.
I wanted to believe that this long, cold night would grow something beautiful in me too, but I couldn’t even imagine how that could ever happen.