For a Girl

But for years, 101 Grattan Street was where I thought I lived. It’s where people addressed their letters to us girls. The nuns—whose terrace covered a double block—gave us that address so that there would be no real address if someone came searching for one of the girls. The postman knew the letters were to go to the convent at 103. The nosy neighbour or father-to-be might ring the bell at the convent and the nuns would tell them, ‘No, this is 103. There’s no 101.’

  I only learned this years later, when I went back to Grattan Street with David, trying to understand something of what had happened, what I’d done. I went looking for the place I’d been and found it had never existed.

  In the home, I had my own room with its own sink. I met the other girls, one of whom became my good friend. Jill was a nurse and the father of her baby was an apprentice from her home town in northern Victoria. He was young, like us. I told Jill the father of my baby was a boy I knew at university, also young like us. The father of Jill’s baby came to visit Jill each month. They were going to be married one day, Jill told me, but not yet. They were not ready yet, their parents said. Same with me, I said.

  Jill and I sat up late smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. As our bellies swelled, we didn’t talk about babies. We talked about what we’d do when we got out. We talked about the other girls. There was a girl we hated, Paula, who came back at the end of September, after her baby was born, much changed.

  Paula was a chatterbox, never shut up—it was what we criticised in her—but when she came back to pack up after her baby was born, she had little to say. If this unnerved us, we never spoke of it. Later we heard she changed her mind and came back a second time, within the thirty days, and took her baby home. She changed her mind. Typical, Jill and I would have said, if we had said anything. Paula was weak.

  Another girl, Jane, wasn’t booked into the Royal Women’s Hospital like the rest of us. She was a patient at the private Catholic Mercy Hospital. I think her people were unhappy about what she’d done. She was alone at St Joseph’s. No one visited her despite the fact she came from Melbourne. She never mentioned her baby’s father and we never asked.

  Lily was a prostitute, pregnant for the second time, giving up a second baby. She’d had polio as a child and walked with sticks. When she was with us, we walked slowly. She said she didn’t know if she would give up this baby.

  When we went to antenatal classes at the hospital, we sat up the back of the room and giggled while the other women stretched and blew and panted on cue. There were men in the antenatal classes. They were the husbands of the women who were having babies. We were at the back of the room because we didn’t have husbands. The husbands blew and panted too, as if the baby was inside them. We giggled more when we noticed this.

  I never thought of the locals. Did people see us, pregnant girls in a line, and think we were the ones from the home, the ones without a man to speak for us? I didn’t feel self-conscious or guilty, not then. If I felt bad, it was for what I’d done to my teacher. I was young enough to believe I was on an adventure, like my teacher and her husband said. My only cause for shame was what I’d done to them, what I’d done to my teacher. I felt it was all my fault. I’d ruined something for them.

  I went to the zoo. I had only been to one zoo before, in Sydney on the family holiday when I was twelve. I drove to the Dandenong Ranges, going first in error to Dandenong the suburb, from where I could see the ranges miles away. I went into the city—it was such a big city—and wandered the shops.

  As my belly swelled, I began to see it as a lump, an inconvenience, that stopped me sleeping. Not as anything else. I never looked at books with pictures of babies in them. I didn’t notice if ever I happened upon a woman with a baby in the street. I didn’t see women with babies at the hospital when I went for appointments.

  Sister Mary told us that an occupational therapist was coming to see us on Thursday mornings. She was blonde, the occupational therapist, and worked hard to act as if we were normal. She smiled and trained her eyes on our faces, ignoring our bellies. In one of the first sessions, I said, ‘Are we going to do basket weaving?’ She told me I could leave if I wanted to, so I did. I went and hung around Sister Margaret in the kitchen.

  Sister Margaret was the cook at St Joseph’s. She cooked for the nuns and for us. ‘The same food,’ she told me. ‘I cook the same food for you as I do for us. I don’t let them do the other.’ She didn’t tell me what the other was. I think it was that the nuns would eat different food from the girls. This is what they did in some of the girls’ homes. The girls ate poorer-quality food.

  In some of the homes, girls were made to work. At St Joseph’s, before my time, girls were made to work. The nuns took in linen and the girls washed it and wrung it out to earn their keep while they waited for their babies to be born. They were treated as unforgiven sinners. That was why their food was different from the nuns’ food. Their sin was not that they were going to give up a baby. Their sin was the sex that made the baby. Giving up the baby, sending the baby to a good home with two Catholic parents, was what redeemed them, got them out of the home where they were sinners unforgiven. It got them forgiveness which was worth having.

  The memory of these beliefs was still fresh when I was in Melbourne. There were still nuns living in the convent and this was their view, including Sister Mary, who looked after the girls. She liked me, because I was intelligent and read books. I think she might have found my behaviour hard to square away with who I was, would have preferred, I think, sinful girls to be unintelligent. It was such a sad place when I think back now.

  I liked Sister Margaret best. She was tall and large-boned, in her fifties when I met her, the youngest of twelve children. She told me that when her father died she was not allowed to go home to attend the funeral, so when her mother died she didn’t ask; she just said to her superiors that she was going. They said she had to take a chaperone. She took an eighty-four-year-old nun who had no idea who or where she was. Sister Margaret sat the old nun in a chair and left her there while she mourned her mother’s passing with her siblings.

  Sister Margaret had a red face, as if her heart was about to let her down or she’d just come in from a windy walk along a headland. She added so much salt to our food that sometimes it was hard to eat. ‘I have to cook it to someone’s taste,’ she said, ‘so I cook it to mine.’

  When we met up again in later years I felt uncomfortable around Sister Margaret but was unable to articulate why. Eventually I stopped replying to her letters and we lost touch. I kept a coffee mug she gave me, beige Dunoon porcelain with brown sheep embossed on it. I’ve tried to throw it out several times, but it keeps getting out of the bin and up onto the sink, so I’ve given up.

  I was living on sickness benefit, the only support available to pregnant women. I bought vitamin E because my teacher and her husband told me to take it for my skin, so I didn’t get stretch marks. I got them anyway, long red welts across my breasts and down my belly. I bought cigarettes and toiletries. I shopped at King & Godfree. Some nights the other girls and I went down Lygon Street and bought pizzas. I went to the cafes my teacher and her husband told me about. I went to Mass at South Melbourne, the parish of the priest who found the home for me.

  His name was Father Bob and my teacher’s husband knew him because he’d been an army chaplain. My teacher’s husband rang him on my behalf and told him that one of his wife’s students, a nice girl, had got herself in trouble and could Father Bob help. My teacher’s husband told me this, that he had described me as a ‘nice’ girl. It was a joke. I was not a ‘nice’ girl, we all knew, because I was already in trouble at school before my teacher and her husband met me. They’d helped me get out of trouble. I was lucky they’d done this. This was what I believed. It’s what they told me.

  Where the real pain begins

  Your other mother must have learned your name, Ruth, when the laws changed, because when I gave you up, they wrote to me and said their practice was not to tell the parents t
he baby’s name given by the birth mother and not to tell me your new name. Your real name, they called it. They reissued your birth certificate too so that my name and anything about me would be gone from your life. You would only have your new name, your real name, as they said. That’s what they did. It’s what they believed would help us all.

  The adoption agency, the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau, assigned me a social worker who came to see me once a week. Jenny Fish was a tall thin woman with a kindly nature. I liked her very much, although I sometimes felt there was something she wanted to say but didn’t.

  Jenny Fish worked for the same organisation that found babies for childless couples. One of her colleagues would select my baby’s other mother and father, she explained to me. There was a pool of other mothers and fathers by then because there were few babies and many infertile couples. They were screened, the other mothers and fathers, to make sure they were Catholic, financially secure and knew what they wanted. I would have a say in the matter, Jenny Fish said. She said this as if it would make me feel good. I had no idea why she’d consult me about anything.

  In one of our first interviews, Jenny Fish asked me if I would want to know if my child died. I said yes, I would want to know but why was she asking me. ‘I’d be allowed to tell you that,’ she said. ‘The courts allow me to tell you that.’

  Mum and Dad drove down to Melbourne with my little brother Lachlan for Christmas. I hadn’t seen anyone from home in six months and I was so happy to see them. The nuns lent us a terrace house they owned behind the home. I stayed in the terrace with Mum and Dad and Lachlan.

  It was their first ever trip to Melbourne. I don’t remember what we did. I was uncomfortably pregnant by then and had very few clothes. We may have stayed in the house mostly. I think we went to the beach at Apollo Bay because Mum wanted to see the ocean. I just don’t remember.

  On the morning they were leaving, I didn’t want to go back to the home. I was crying, finding it hard to manage. I hugged Lachlan, Dad and then Mum. I was crying and one of us made some inane joke which was our family’s not very helpful way of dealing with emotional difficulties. It made me laugh through my tears.

  Dad was backing the car, looking out the driver’s window, and I saw in his eyes that he had begun to cry too. It was the only time in my life I ever saw him cry.

  Now I can imagine what he saw: his young tomboy daughter in a polyester floral dress that might have suited someone twice her age, standing at the door of the terrace house. He reversed the car—a frog green Mazda 323 we owned at the time—into a drainpipe. He waved and pretended to smile, as if his tears weren’t real.

  I remember that smile, tears in his eyes, tobacco-stained teeth. I felt embarrassed for him, wished I could disappear.

  My teacher and her husband had told me they would visit me in Melbourne. They would be with me for the birth. But my teacher’s husband had had a car accident in their car and now it needed major repairs to the engine. As a surprise I sent my own car back home for them to use. I put it on the train and got Andrew to pick it up at the other end and put a ribbon on it and take it to their house. They really appreciated it, my teacher’s husband said. I thought they could drive my car down to Melbourne and we could all drive home together.

  When the time was getting close, my teacher’s husband told me by phone that it would be too much for my teacher, who had been unwell. They wouldn’t come and visit me after all.

  I sent them a letter saying I felt angry that I would be on my own. Although I didn’t tell them this, I had watched other girls go over to the hospital. They came back changed. I was worried. I wanted someone with me.

  I regretted sending the letter almost immediately. I thought they would be mad at me for feeling as I did, so I rang and told them to rip up my letter without reading it. I was terrified that if they read it I’d lose them. And while I wasn’t sure of anything else, I was sure I didn’t want to lose them.

  They didn’t rip up my letter. My teacher decided to read it. She rang me, furious. ‘How dare you?’ she said. ‘After all we’ve done for you. After what you’ve done to us.’

  I capitulated immediately, dissolved into tears, went into labour.

  Otis likes the idea that he has a sister and wonders if you are as good a teacher as Leah, who, as he’s told me, doesn’t ever get angry. When she tries, she just laughs. I have told him that I don’t know what kind of teacher you are; I don’t know anything about you.

  There are things I remember. I remember in the morning my waters break over the bathroom floor. I clean up the bathroom floor, collect my bag, tell Sister Mary and walk across the road to the hospital like I’ve been told to do.

  I remember that when the doctor examines me it hurts and when I flinch he smiles and says I have a long night of pain ahead.

  The other girls from the home come over to be with me. I don’t remember which ones, but Jill isn’t there. She has already gone home, has rung me every week since to see how I’m going. The other girls and I go out to the visitors’ area to smoke, but I have to excuse myself because of a feeling down there as if I might explode.

  I remember my right leg is up in a stirrup. The midwife has put it there to get it out of the way. Only the right leg; they’ve turned me on my side to slow the birth because it’s happening too quickly. I hear them say that. When the midwife lifts me, she says to the orderly on the other side of me, ‘There’s nothing to her under all that baby, is there?’

  Then it’s late afternoon, and I’m watching the sunset through large windows overlooking the city of Melbourne. A medical student with long brown hair and soft eyes comes to me while I’m eating ham sandwiches and says, ‘I just have to tell you, that was the most marvellous thing I’ve ever seen.’ He takes my hand, the one I need to reach the sandwiches. I have no idea what he’s talking about, what he’s seen that was marvellous.

  I called you Ruth after the character in the Bible. I didn’t think about the verse until just now. She’s the one who says, Wherever you go, I shall go. Wherever you live, so shall I live. Your people will be my people.

  I’m in a gynaecology ward. Someone tells me there’s blood on the back of my nightdress. When I look in the mirror, I see that my hair is standing on end like the crest of a cockatoo. There are three other women in my ward. One of them had an irregular smear test and now has cancer of the cervix. She gives me cigarettes. When she leaves she hugs me and cries and says, ‘I hope you’ll be okay, honey.’ I don’t know why she’s crying—she’s the one with cancer—but I’m sure her tears are for me.

  I have a picture of you, taken in the foster home. At least I think it’s you. Your skin is wrinkled. Your eyes are red and puffy. You look like a wheezy old woman, wearing lemon booties and a lemon jacket. Do you know I smoked through my entire pregnancy and drank five cups of coffee every day?

  I turn nineteen. The girls bring me a box of stationery they all chipped in for, with red-breasted robins on brown flowers. I keep the box for twenty years and then throw it out.

  I went to see you, apparently. I remember walking along the hall with Sister Margaret. The hall has a beige floor which curves up as a skirting for the wall. Sister Margaret is standing to the left of me, so tall and solid in front of a sea of cribs, and that’s as far as I can go.

  It is the third day after the birth, and I am crying. I cannot stop my tears. They run down my cheeks and all over my nightdress, bought especially for the hospital because the booklet they gave us in antenatal classes said we should buy a nightdress. I know what antenatal means now: it means pregnant; it means before birth. Jenny Fish says these are the baby blues and will pass. I am so convinced she is right that when Otis is born, twenty-three years later, I will wait in hospital for uncontrollable tears to start on the third day, some hormonal kink in the birth system. But when Otis is born, there will be no uncontrollable tears. Jenny Fish says she hates to do this to me but I must sign the papers. I don’t stop crying but I do sign.

 
Some days Otis is a mouse and I am a mouse mother. Some days he is a possum and I am a possum mother. This morning he was a flipback whale so I was a flipback whale mother. For whatever animal he is, I say, I am that animal’s mother.

  I know now what Jenny Fish always wanted to say but never did. ‘Don’t give up your child.’ She would have said it quickly, furtively, and run out of the room, saying behind her, ‘I have seen them later, girls like you. I know what happens to them. Don’t let them take your baby.’

  I am sorry, Miranda, so sorry for what I did to you.

  PART II

  Disappearing

  A different skin

  I DISCHARGED MYSELF FROM THE hospital in Melbourne as soon as I could stand up and spent two days in the home before packing and leaving. Sister Mary told me to wait until I was stronger but I didn’t want to be there one minute more than I had to.

  I had no clothes that fit my post-pregnancy body so I went into the city to buy a dress. I remember it was maroon with a black leather belt, a size twelve. Afterwards, I wore it to interviews until it became too big. I bought presents for everyone. I flew in my first plane.

  Mum and Dad picked me up at the airport. It was so humid I felt like I was covered in honey. I was still bleeding heavily. My breasts had been bound in the hospital and I’d taken drugs to dry up the milk I was making. They were less sore but still engorged. I didn’t say anything about what had happened. No one mentioned it.

  My body was no longer me.

  A few weeks after I arrived home, I saw a baby on the television. I felt as if I was going to be sick and ran out of the kitchen.

  Mum followed me into my bedroom and found me on my bed crying. ‘It will be like this,’ she said.