Heartlines

by Susannah McFarlane

  About the Book

  This is what happened the year I met my other mother.

  In 1965, Robin, unmarried and pregnant, comes to Melbourne to give birth and give her baby up for adoption, then returns to Perth to resume her life having never seen her baby. After 10 days alone, the baby, is taken home, named Susannah, and made part of a wonderful family that loves her. The adoption laws at the time guarantee that there can be no contact between birth mother and child. Ever.

  In 1984, the law is changed and sealed files can be opened. In 1989 Robin tries to make contact with Susannah who is now the same age as Robin was when she had her. Susannah replies to Robin in a letter, declining contact.

  In 2014, Susannah, at the same age Robin was when she wrote her first letter, writes Robin a different letter. The heartlines open. After nearly fifty years apart, a mother and daughter are reunited. But the path to a relationship is not smooth. Very few adoption reunions result in meaningful, long-term reconnection. The fragile relationships stumble and fall under the weight of years of repressed anger, hurt, grief and loss, different beliefs and of whole lives spent apart. A feeling of connection isn’t enough. You have to fight for a relationship.

  This is the story of two women who did. The raw openness of their writing and the breakneck speed of their reconnection is compelling. Heartlines is at once both unique and universal. It’s a story of courage and what can happen when you open rather than close your heart; when you decide to stay just as every fearful instinct tells you to run away.

  Heartlines is about connection and reconnection and why relationships are worth the fight. It is a piercingly honest and often hilarious story of what it takes to reconnect – and stay there – after a lifetime apart.

  Fast-paced, warm and funny, this is an adoption story that pulls the reader on to a wonderful if wobbly rollercoaster ride, exploring themes of family, motherhood, loss, belonging, hope, courage and the importance of never giving up.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part I: START AND FINISH

  The mother

  The child

  Part II: FALSE START

  Prelude

  Waking up

  Do not disturb

  Robin’s first letter

  The letter I dreaded

  ‘With all good wishes …’

  Closing the door

  Part III: OPENING LINES

  Something stirs

  Early 2014

  Closing and opening

  Reading between the lines

  Careful correspondence

  Watching our words

  Discombobulated

  Losing it

  Déjà vu

  Love Child?

  Where has Susannah gone?

  Rewriting my feelings

  Something opens

  Part IV: CLICK AND CONNECT

  Click, click, click

  Spinning tops, slightly wobbly

  Susannah’s inner child goes nuts

  Email exhaustion

  Out of our heads

  Hi Robin, I’m Susannah

  Part V: RIDING THE ROLLER COASTER

  ABBA to the rescue

  Over-thinking feeling

  Heed the carousel

  Round and round the garden

  Lamb shanks for $12

  Derailment

  Crawling back

  Part VI: TAKING REFUGE

  Longleaf – 1

  Longleaf – 2

  Part VII: THE RIPPLE EFFECT

  All in together?

  Clue: having together a mixed garnish (7 letters)

  Meeting Matilda

  Timidity

  My family and my biological friends

  Balancing the biologicals

  Throwing the stone into the pool

  Pressing pause

  Family reunion

  Part VIII: EMOTION SICKNESS

  Buffeted by the waves

  Separation anxiety in the snow

  Family Christmases

  Back together – and falling apart?

  Throwing an Anna in the works

  Meeting Tim

  Down the ‘what if’ rabbit hole

  Part IX: RUNNING AGROUND

  Walking on my sore leg. Part one.

  Walking on my sore leg. Part two.

  X marks the spot

  Crossed wires

  Part X: SALVAGE

  Searching for stillness

  Eyes wide open

  Missing the moment

  Robin in Brighton

  Telling Dad

  Out in the open

  All in together

  Over the top

  Once more with feeling

  ‘Heart attack’

  Return to Gwinganna

  Part XI: HOMECOMING

  Letting go

  Holding dear

  Mother’s Day 2015

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Notice

  For my Mum, Gerie

  Preface

  Susannah

  I didn’t really mean to write this book. I write children’s books, in particular adventure stories about a little girl being brave; I never thought I’d write anything like a memoir, let alone one with my birth mother.

  My life would not make for a great read – most of it has been much too happy, filled with wonderful family and friends, comfort and opportunity, being loved and loving. Then, at nearly fifty, something happened that would bring me right back to where I began and I, too, became a little girl who had to be brave. It started almost accidentally, triggering an emotional journey that would take me to the very heart of my identity, of me.

  This is that story; it’s also an adventure story, not of my life, but of one year.

  The year I met my other mother.

  I

  START AND FINISH

  The mother

  Robin

  I could hear my voice, strangely detached from me, roaring in the drugged darkness. The bellow of an animal caught up in some sort of universal, impersonal cataclysm of nature. Then, blackout. End of scene. Hours later, I awoke, as if from a dream.

  And so it was here, in St Andrew’s Hospital, Melbourne, on 14 July 1965, that I gave birth to my first child. For me, there was no visible product to testify to the objective reality of the birthing experience. No sign of a baby. I was still just Robin, pretty much as before: one, indivisible, alone. Yes, there were bodily changes and medical procedures, but they were all still me-centred, self-contained, self-preoccupied. Awake from a dream, but unawakened. Sleeping Beauty slumbering in an emotional time capsule.

  Well, here was the problem, or part of it at least. This dreamlike state of disengagement from reality didn’t begin with the surreal, drugged-out labour.

  I didn’t even know I was pregnant till I was five months along, despite suffering classic symptoms of cessation of periods and nausea. To try to explain how such naivety was even possible in a 22-year-old woman, I need to describe the social and cultural milieu of Perth, Western Australia – which is where I and my sisters, Pam and Susan, grew up and where I was attending university at the time I became pregnant.

  Perth was a provincial society, isolated from the more cosmopolitan ‘eastern states’ as we called them. The rules of middle-class respectability were conventional and rigid, and while ‘nice girls’ could flirt and tease, they certainly did not ‘cross the line’ before they were married. ‘Sexual intercourse’ and ‘unwed mothers’ were terms spoken of in a whisper and shrouded in an aura of dark mystery.

  So, back to Robin Leuba, in 1964: twenty-two, a university student, fa
lling in love with Tim, also studying Arts at uni. Two years younger than me, Tim charmed with his flair and wit and we frolicked together on the beaches and in the beer gardens of Perth and in the flat I had recently moved into with two girlfriends, where I indeed confirmed my parents’ fears by ‘getting into trouble’.

  I do not place all the blame for my incredible naivety on the social mores of the time – such extreme dumbness was surely my own work – but I did go to our family doctor about my nausea and loss of periods, and he did not enlighten me. After examining me, he asked me if I could be pregnant, but I looked him in the eye and with total conviction said ‘no’. In my mind I could not be pregnant because I had not met the basic requirement – surely what Tim and I had done on the floor of my flat didn’t qualify as that forbidden, earth-shattering event, sexual intercourse? (Granted, in the particular circumstances, conception was a long shot, but clearly not impossible.) The doctor knew my parents and was disinclined to rock the boat of respectable society. I suppose he thought he was being tactful and that surely I would get the message from his indirect hints, but he obviously was not aware of the solidity of my delusion. He proceeded to talk about boyfriends and choosing one of them to marry. I honestly had no idea what he was on about. He prescribed some anti-nausea pills and sent me on my way. When I rang him about three weeks later to say the pills had worked but I still didn’t have my period, he still kept silent. So, I did nothing and, for me, the first half of my pregnancy was unrealised, and therefore unreal. It was not till I was about five months’ pregnant and still didn’t have a period that the fear of the ‘impossible’ struck me and I knew I had to check it out further.

  I told Tim my fears and he drove me to see another doctor in the outer suburbs, far removed from any family connections and therefore less likely to be so socially squeamish. Indeed, he was brutally honest: he confirmed that I was at least five months’ pregnant, and by his harsh and disdainful manner, he made it clear that he held me in moral contempt.

  In shock, Tim and I drove to a hotel to have a drink: we needed time to take in our situation before we had to return home. We sat down in the lounge and, in a characteristic gesture of bravado, Tim ordered champagne. It was perhaps a sentimental gesture, not connected to any practical plan for the future but, if only for that moment, there wasn’t a problem, there was something to celebrate. We had made a baby together and there was something special about that. For that hour in the ladies’ lounge of that suburban Perth hotel, we were in our own little bubble of wonder.

  The bubble, of course, had to burst. The next morning I broke the news to my mother.

  Mum was sitting up in bed with her morning cup of tea when I told her. I can still see the look of crushed defeat on her face: my poor mother, already suffering from a maiming social inferiority complex, was now dealt another blow of shame. Mind you, I learned later from my younger sister, Susan, that Mum had had her suspicions that I might be pregnant but she had also kept silent, I guess hoping against hope that it wasn’t true.

  Now that the worst was confirmed, though, what to do? Well, obviously, the first priority was that no one could know; this thing must be hidden. In other words, I must be hidden, and before it was altogether too late. Here’s where the beauty of the remote ‘eastern states’ came into play: my parents could send me away to the far country – Melbourne, to be precise.

  Family energies were harnessed to achieve the success of the cover-up plan and there was much to organise: my urgent departure for Melbourne, ostensibly to take up an unspecified and unlikely offer of employment; the matters of accommodation, doctor, hospital – and the arrangements for the adoption of the baby, already established as a given, an inevitability.

  Why was it assumed, by me as well, that I could not actually keep the baby and care for it? What was wrong with me?! I suppose parental and social pressure combined with an immature selfishness and the desire on my part to continue my youthful hopes and dreams as I had always imagined them – which did not include being an unmarried mother. Tim, at twenty, certainly was neither ready nor willing to be a father. He felt that his own adult life had barely started. His personal ambitions were half-formed but enticing, and he didn’t want his wings clipped just as they were unfolding; and neither did I. I had completed my Bachelor of Arts degree at the end of 1964 and I wanted to travel, to have adventures – and I did not want to lose Tim, which, wrongly or rightly, I thought I definitely would if I kept the baby. I see now that it was a sad and selfish choice, but that is who I was then.

  So it was that I sort of sleepwalked my way through the plan. I caught the plane to Melbourne (not a moment too soon as far as concealment of the pregnancy went), and, as arranged, was billeted with a kind single-mother nurse in Doncaster, an outer suburb of Melbourne. Living with a stranger in a strange town, I became further alienated from reality. Life in a bubble.

  Tim visited me once during this period and stayed for about a week. We were sort of ‘together’ but whatever conflicting thoughts and emotions we may have had, we both remained committed to the plan of adoption. As to where our relationship might go afterwards, we didn’t really discuss it – we were like children ourselves, rather than serious, responsible adults.

  About two weeks before my due date, I moved down to a city hotel to be closer to the hospital. My mother came over to be with me, which I appreciated, but the time was emotionally fraught. I have a memory of myself, nine months pregnant, hurrying along Bourke Street, tears streaming down my face. A young man from a Christian group reached out to me with compassion and said, ‘Jesus loves you.’ Some fifteen years later I would come to know this wonderful truth for myself, but at the time I shrank away from what seemed to be an embarrassing exposure of my needy humiliation.

  In due course my waters broke, Mum called a taxi, and we arrived at St Andrew’s Hospital. I retain a memory of the labour ward, coldly sterile and flooded in a lurid white light. People in masks administered strong medication, which took me into a shadow world where I was an actor in a drama, detached from myself. At the moment of delivery, I was given an even stronger anaesthetic that knocked me out completely. Blackout. When I woke, all was how it should be: Robin was no longer pregnant. Nor was Robin a mother. The plan had worked most efficiently.

  There were small cracks in the coffin lid of denial, though. I remember sitting like a stone statue with my mother in the doctor’s office as he went through the final paperwork for the adoption. First, the birth certificate: I was told that my name would be recorded but the father’s name would be left blank, as was common practice if the relinquishing mother was unmarried. The doctor then asked me to give the baby a name for the birth certificate. I was not prepared for this, as it had never been discussed, and, as I dumbly and numbly hesitated, he suggested, ‘What about Helen?’ A tiny shoot of ownership pushed through my façade and I said, ‘No. Florence.’ It was my mother’s name and seemed to make the baby one of us – no one in the family had ever been called Helen. I glanced at my mother and saw tears in her eyes. Then it came to signing the adoption consent form, which would ‘permanently and totally’ deprive me of my ‘parental rights’, and the crack widened, allowing my own tears to leak through. But the deal was done, the die was cast.

  I returned to Perth, where I resumed my life and my relationship with Tim, and buried the whole experience deep within my subconscious. In general, I tend to be a bit of a blabbermouth, not the soul of discretion, but the fact that I had adopted out a child was my one dark secret. It lay largely undisturbed for twenty-four years.

  The child

  Susannah

  I can’t remember being told that I was adopted: it was just something I always knew, part of our family story. Mum and Dad had had one little girl who died just hours after her birth, then came my brother, Duncan, and then, tragically, another little girl who was stillborn. Then came me in 1965 and, two years later, my sister Sophie.

  The story of my adoption went something like this: The
woman who had you loved you very much but she couldn’t keep you, so she made sure you went to a family that could look after you and love you. Mummy and Daddy waited and waited for you and were so excited when we were called to come and get you. We walked down the hospital corridor and there you were – our beautiful daughter.

  The nurses at the hospital had called me Joan Sutherland. This had always been told as a funny story, but the reason for the name was anything but amusing: I cried and screamed so much, and so loudly, they thought I had the lungs of an opera singer. And, apparently, I kept on crying when I was taken home. I wouldn’t take the bottle, I threw up the formula when I finally did drink, and I fought everything. Mum, still grieving the loss of two daughters, cried with me.