The baby seems to be growing by the minute. Its limbs extending beyond the oblivious knot below her ribs. She has carried it in the smallest part of herself, ignoring the flutters and kicks. But now, on the train, it fills her with its presence. She has been living in a fog, denying the evidence of her own body. She curls her arms around the bulge and imagines the child already born. It lies calm against the curve of her empty belly, its skin smooth, eyes open and knowing.
She sways as the train lurches into a station. When she stands her skirt is so tight she can hardly walk. An old woman seated nearby clucks her disapproval. They serve tea in thick cups and scones with jam and cream. Pamela extracts some of the money Jessie had saved from her housekeeping. She sits on her own with the tepid tea and the dry scone, the cream turning sour in her mouth.
How much did Jeannie tell me and how much did I invent? I remember crying and my girls rushing to comfort me. Jeannie was telling my story, the one I’d had no right to, the one they’d written me out of.
Psychologist Paul Sunderland says knowing and understanding your relinquishment story is essential.17 It’s how you make sense of your later life. He calls adoption a denial. A happy-ever-after hope that buries the real story of relinquishment. ‘The cover-up is that these children are chosen and saved. That they are fortunate.’ The horrors of war, he says, pale next to the loss of a mother at the beginning of life. He says the idea that if you can’t remember something it can’t affect you is an ‘old lie’.
None of us can remember those long floating months or even our first years. That’s because the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, is the last to develop. But the limbic system is active before birth. Implicit memory, instinct, emotional life and flight or fight reside there.
Sunderland’s description of the science of brain development makes sense. Experience is the architect of the brain. And it makes me wonder about those first ten days I spent alone in a nursery, far from my mother.
When relinquishment is your first experience, your brain wiring changes to accommodate it. This alters how you might handle stress. How you might process the world. It changes you. Many adopted people have catastrophic thinking. But we are so accustomed to living on red alert we do not recognise the formless dread as a condition. We fear abandonment above all else. Many of us have a heightened sensitivity to criticism. We suffer from depression, hypervigilance and addiction to adrenaline.
I am woven together and defined by all these conditions. Sunderland says many of us are expert at hiding it all. Often from ourselves. This, Sunderland explains, is because we have no pre-trauma personality. No experience of being any other way, of even being okay.
My personality and character as a fractured post-trauma construct? The idea fills me with grief. In adoption we talk about the triad of loss. The mother loses her child. The child loses her mother, and the adopters lose the child they might have had.
But there is a fourth loss, a different kind that no one speaks of. It is the loss of who I might have been. As a daughter, a mother, a wife, a friend, a writer. As a woman. As myself. A whole life spent attempting and mostly failing to create a coherent self.
And all this time it has been my limbic brain on relinquishment. As if self is a separate thing, unrelated and always out of reach. Recalled but not remembered.
In the poem ‘Lady Mink: A Sort of Requiem’, Marylyn Plessner asks: ‘Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair.’18
I now understand it was my mother. But then Fred, her father, hurt her beyond repair. And I, in my turn, fear for the hurt I have caused my own children. Pearls of damage strung together down the generations.
Jeannie sat with Rachel on her lap, plaiting her hair. The girls had taken to her, showing off their drawings and their makeshift rooms. She had brought sticky buns with her, and I made fresh tea and laid it out like a picnic for the girls.
‘Your mother came looking for you, you know,’ Jeannie said. ‘You were five or six. She was living in Sydney, in love finally, and they came to New Zealand to meet with Dr Gleeson.’ She took my hands between hers. ‘The doctor told her you were happy and it would be a criminal act to look for you.’
I felt a jolt of recall. A memory of the Onekawa swimming pools, as I lay sprawled in the shallows, the sun burning my back. A woman sat on the concrete lip nearby, her feet in the water. I could feel her eyes on me. She smiled and waved and I used my hands to propel myself towards her. I was almost there when Mavis rushed over, scooped me from the water and carried me away.
18
Sort of an orphan
Jeannie postponed her meeting and stayed till mid-afternoon. We took the girls for a walk around Victoria Park. The rain had disappeared as fast as it arrived. And the sky was Auckland blue, the weeds around the park edges wilting in the heat. I had so many questions.
‘How did you meet Pam?’ I asked Jeannie. Whenever I said my mother’s name, I wanted to call her Mummy. I rolled the word around in silence, feeling the intimacy held within its soft vowels. I felt I had no right to use it.
Jeannie gave a half-smile. ‘Through my husband. The Wellington am-dram scene.’ She described the world of amateur dramatics as ‘wine, cheese and behind the scenes’. ‘There was an indiscretion. Your mother, my husband. I think she only went to a couple of table-reads.’ She laughed and did not seem at all bitter. ‘For
