‘I’ll get Max,’ she replied. I heard the screen door bang and the tone of her raised voice but not the words. She came back on the line. ‘They didn’t tell us,’ she said. ‘I’ve already told you we know nothing. We got you and that was all that mattered.’
I made my voice soft and warm and thanked her for putting up with me. I did not want to fight.
‘We talked to Bruce and the girls,’ she said. I waited. It was unlikely she and Max would ask why I’d left him. But even if they did, I could not have explained the valley between us. ‘He misses you so much,’ Mavis said.
‘He only has the girls on weekends.’ It was impossible to hide my defensiveness. ‘And he has plenty of support.’
Max coughed to let me know he was listening on the extension. I was straying into unwelcome territory.
‘We have to go,’ Mavis said, and they hung up.
I called Jeannie. She would know the name Pamela had given me. But Jeannie was unsure. I wanted to ask all the questions. Did Pamela talk about me in the weeks and months after? Did she use my name? Did she share her secrets?
‘Come and meet me next time you’re in Wellington,’ Jeannie said. ‘We’ll talk then.’
I wrote another letter to the Department of Social Welfare. Trying again to find my files, to access any information on my identity. Weeks later, the same reply came back: ‘We have no trace of you in our records.’
Months went by and there it was on the six o’clock news. An amendment to the Adoption Act 1955 had passed into law. Adopted people could now access a version of their original birth certificate.
I applied right away. Counselling was mandatory. I was twenty-five with three children, but my desire to know was insufficient. I had to prove to the counsellor I was mature enough to know my own identity.
She was a motherly older woman with a warm air of disapproval. ‘Some things should remain hidden.’ She glanced at the photos of happy families that covered one wall of her office. And I wondered if they were adoptions she had brokered. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she said as she signed my form with a tiny signature.
I imagined Pamela boarding the plane, the door closing behind her, the fog rolling in. The counsellor was right. And now there was nothing left to wish for.
I took the precious form to the Social Welfare office and went home to wait.
I’ve altered my name seven times. I used to change everything with regularity. Glasses, hairstyles, furniture, lovers, husbands and friends — everything was movable. I’ve burned through my life like a campfire of twigs. I’ve moved house thirty-four times. My restless journey was almost unconscious. I would once have described myself as peripatetic. The idea of not belonging was who I was. It was not so much that I’d lost my identity but that I’d never had one.
‘Who am I?’ may seem like a question at the core of being human. But social theorist Zygmunt Bauman calls it a postmodern issue. ‘Identity as a concrete concept would hardly occur to any of us if it were not denied in some way … When “belonging” remains your fate — a condition with no alternative — identity does not occur to people.’ He says that until quite recently the time and place of your birth determined your identity. Very few occasions arose for questioning provenance.
Bauman does not mention stranger adoption. He died before the current practice of buying and selling anonymous gametes. But his work describes the internal dislocation experienced by adopted people. And now that extends to those created in service to the fertility industry.
We are so reluctant to grapple with the idea that each of us intrinsically belongs somewhere. That humans are not interchangeable commodities. That eggs and sperm are not random raw ingredients. Being uplifted from your place in history and grafted onto the tree of strangers is a profound loss — to both the individual and the continuum of their genealogy. Trying to construct an identity in the face of that loss is difficult. Bauman says it’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that has lost its box. ‘With no image to consult, you may never know which pieces are missing.’13
I remember the plain brown envelope franked with the Department of Social Welfare logo. I took it to the bathroom and sat on the toilet seat. My name was Lilian Sumner. At that moment, I wanted to be her more than anything. An ethereal name without sharp edges, a name that conjured warmth.
Our names carry resonance and energy. In the esoteric world, onomancy is the divination of names. They say that the meaning, sounds and rhythms of the name you choose for your child make the tasks of that new soul easier. Names connect us to the past. They are genealogical roadmaps.
Barbara means stranger or traveller from a foreign land. There was once a Saint Barbara imprisoned in a tower by her father. He killed her for refusing to recant her beliefs and was later killed by a bolt of lightning.
Lilian means an offering or a vow. A name wrapped up in flowers, purity and beauty.
I started calling myself Lilian right away, but it did not go well. Bruce laughed. ‘Everyone will think you’re mental,’ he said.
Max responded with silence. ‘You have to understand,’ Mavis said years later, after he’d passed away. ‘He was an only child, the last of his line. His name was important to him.’
I asked why they’d had no problem with my married name.
‘That’s different,’ she said. We were in her kitchen. She had a small portable document shredder on the bench. They’d begun to shred anything showing their names after a news item about how easy it was to steal someone’s identity.
‘Do
