There is a generally accepted narrative around adoption. It might be difficult, but everyone gets over it. The problem disappears and everyone moves on with their lives. In that fairytale, there is no loss. The family preserves its dignity. The young woman sacrifices her child to avoid the ruination of an out-of-wedlock baby. The stigma of illegitimacy disappears and everyone moves on with their lives. To allow others to take your baby is a courageous and loving thing to do.
It is this rhetoric of love that most disturbs me. We’ve whitewashed stranger adoption for so long we’ve blanched the emotion from it. We’re told over and over that there is no greater love than to sacrifice your child for the greater good.
I’ve always wondered about the biblical story of Abraham and his son, Isaac. It is echoed in the Muslim festival Eid al-Adha. The trusting boy accompanies his father on a walk up a mountain. Isaac asks his father, ‘Hey, Dad, where’s the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham ignores him. He’s busy listening to the voice in his head that has told him to build an altar. He takes the wood that little Isaac has helped him carry. Perhaps Isaac was playing or watching the birds as Abraham sharpened his knife. Did he squirm and beg for his life as his father tied him to the makeshift altar? Did his mind collapse with the knowledge his father was about to murder him?
And we are told that this is love. That such a sacrifice will bring blessings more numerous than stars. We ignore the father’s sadism, justified by his belief in God. Instead we focus on God’s flip-flop that avoids the human sacrifice. We come away from this story relieved the child is saved, and with our belief that sacrifice is righteous and necessary to satiate the gods intact.
My grandfather had thrust his daughter and unborn grandchild into the night. In a new country. As if that act alone would appease the gods of gossip and shame.
I imagine my mother in her room in the house in Tawa. Secluded behind the net curtains as though marooned on a dinghy out at sea. Did her stomach churn, rising sour into her throat, as she waited for him to discover her sin?
I asked Fred how pregnant my mother had been.
‘Enough to see,’ he said, without looking at me.
Jessie must have known. Did she help her daughter to hide her state, only to allow her husband to lock the door behind her? Did Isaac’s mother know that morning as she dressed her boy that her husband planned to murder him? I wondered then if my arrival had hastened Jessie’s illness, the knowledge of what her husband would make her do exploding through her cells until they overwhelmed her body.
I sat with my grandfather in their small living room with its shelves of cheap ornaments. In the kitchen, Ruth continued to bang on the pots. It did not seem to occur to Fred that she was his great-granddaughter.
‘My pretty ponies,’ he said without looking up, his eyes red from crying. ‘I used to call them my pretty ponies.’
He had been working at Kirkcaldie & Stains, the fancy department store, painting the walls in time for the grand opening of the ‘off the peg’ floor. Jess and Pammie. They came to visit him at work. He told me how proud he was to escort them through the revolving doors. ‘Jessie was not too happy with the naked mannequins, I can tell you that.’ He smiled at the memory. He recounted introducing them to his workmates, telling one lad to keep his eyes to himself. ‘I thought she could get a job, a counter girl.’
I could have listened to him all night. But Ruth started to cry and I took her to the guest room. Twin beds pushed against the walls. She was always a contented baby, but I could not settle her. She took long ragged breaths, rigid with fury one minute, floppy with exhaustion the next. I held her damp heaving body tight, and it was as if she’d taken all the sadness of that house into her tiny limbs.
11
Husband, father, painter, paperhanger
We stayed one night. Ruth cried and fussed through the long hours. By morning we were both exhausted. Fred said he slept well. ‘Not a peep,’ Betty said when I asked her about the noise. She smiled over her shoulder as she made porridge the old-fashioned way, with salt and butter.
After breakfast, Fred showed us the garden. He walked a wide margin around the glasshouse with the tomatoes. Dahlias were his thing. They lined the back fence, their drooping red and pink heads nodding in the sun. He touched each bloom as we walked by.
Betty watched us from the kitchen window.
‘Tell you the truth —’ Fred nodded towards her — ‘can’t stand them tomatoes. She grows them to spite me. But dahlias. Did you know you leave them in the ground over winter? They need a lot of mulch, mind.’
It occurred to me his head appeared large because his body had shrunk, his chest hollow, his arms all bone. ‘Are you unwell?’ I asked, and felt breathless from the intimacy of the question.
‘No more than the next man.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And a bit funny up here sometimes.’
We sat on a garden seat behind the glasshouse hidden from the kitchen window, and I asked what he meant.
‘Nonsense in me head.’ He leaned towards me. ‘The Japs.’ His eyes welled up. There was a saucer of old rollie butts on the ground and he pushed it under the bench with his heel. I looked at his long thin
