For a Girl

  It had a profound effect on me, reading those records, because I understood, for the first time, how completely I shut out the reality of what happened.

  Baby Ruth was unsettled, of course she was, because the one person she had a right, a birthright, to rely on was on a plane in a new size-twelve dress, heading to Brisbane, to her teacher and her teacher’s husband.

  At some time, baby Ruth went from St Joseph’s Babies’ Home to a foster home with a foster mother who said baby Ruth didn’t smile. She was alert and serious and unhappy. She stayed in the foster home for thirty days, to give me time to change my mind.

  I do remember being told about this. I remember I asked that it not happen, that baby Ruth go straight to her adoptive parents. I wanted there to be no delay. I didn’t want a chance to change my mind. I didn’t want baby Ruth to spend one more minute in the limbo of being baby Ruth than she had to. I wanted her new mother, her real mother, to drive to the hospital the day she was born and take her home.

  There is a condition in which you can be pregnant and not know you are pregnant. I understand this condition. I had no concept of a human being inside me. I never ever ever thought of fingers or eyebrows. If there wasn’t a baby, I wasn’t leaving anything.

  I was of course, and while my mind could think its thoughts, my body, my womb kept its dark secret. I had no idea of the grief that would come. But come it did, all these years later, to floor me. To punch me so hard in the jaw, in the solar plexus, as to leave me unable to breathe. Only my right leg keeps me upright, tilting this way and that in its corkscrew fashion.

  Because, you see, when you give someone up like this, you must give everything up. You must not keep one small bit, not a hair, or a photograph, or a memory. If you do, it will eat you out, body and soul.

  However much I tried to excuse myself, I was left with these bald facts, the facts I have had to accommodate:

  It was my decision.

  I was an adult in law.

  I let go.

  I did harm.

  The way to live, I’ve discovered, is to let tears run through me like the sea, to swim in them, to surrender. I won’t tell you I’m not responsible. I won’t tell you I didn’t know quite what I was doing or realise the consequences. I won’t tell you because I want to tell the truth. I gave my child to strangers without a second thought.

  After I read the records, I asked David to read them. He did and told me he felt raw. I felt raw too and it took some minutes before we understood our raw feelings were different. I felt raw because I had this baby, the baby, my baby, and what I did as a dead weight in my body.

  But David saw this other baby—me, he said, too young to know my own mind, making a decision that even an old woman shouldn’t have to make and then having to live with it. His sadness was like a beacon, a little light at the end of a darkness.

  Byron cows

  ON THE WEEKEND OF MY daughter’s birthday last year, we came here to the farm. There had been so many birthdays when I’d felt nothing, but suddenly I was feeling everything.

  With me, I brought half a brick, part of a ritual I was going through to unburden myself of a symbolic load I’d been carrying. All that grief was weighing me down, Stace said. I should find something heavy, put it in a bag and carry it around, let it go when I felt ready. It made sense at the time.

  The week before, I’d filled a knapsack with two-and-a-half bricks from our backyard. I’d walked with the bricks up the hill to Birdwood Terrace. They seemed to get heavier with each step. I found myself in Toowong cemetery, where I left the bricks under a tree. But I hadn’t felt relieved. I’d felt bereft.

  Not to anthropomorphise beyond what’s reasonable for bricks, I’d gone back the next day and retrieved the half-brick and that’s the one I took to the bay. The other two are in the cemetery still, as far as I know.

  I walked along the beach with the half-brick in a calico bag, around my neck at first, and then against my chest, in my arms. I cried as I walked. It feels like a long time since I cared when people see me cry. I used to be quite self-conscious about it.

  I walked from Main Beach to The Pass, meaning to swim with the half-brick and let it go some time in my swim, although I wasn’t sure when. In the event, I swam out but the sea was rougher than it had first looked. I found myself being pushed towards the rocks on the seaward side of The Pass.

  I heard my mother’s voice calling out to the child me. ‘Stick to the shallows or you’ll be dashed against the rocks!’ I felt I had to let go of the half-brick or myself, so I let go of the half-brick.

  Yesterday afternoon as the light faded on the hill across from our cabin, I watched the cows that gathered on the grass. Otis bent down to the grass and chewed the way they chewed to show me what they were doing. Both of us could hear the munch of grass in their teeth. They seemed so contented.

  Later, I heard them crying, those cows. They cried all night, deep throaty bellows nothing like the satisfied lowing I’d believed should come from creatures that had consumed so much grass. Their cries were more than sad; they were desperate. I thought perhaps it was the full moon.

  When I asked the farm manager this morning, he told me the cows were crying for the calves that had been taken away from them. They were on their way to market to be veals.

  I told Otis a bold-faced lie about why the cows cried. I said their calves would come back soon. Tonight I put my headphones on and listened to music. I couldn’t bear to hear the noise.

  You have had another birthday since we were last here. I wrote you a letter in which I said, If we don’t meet again in our lifetimes, I have said what I needed to say.

  In the first draft I wrote, If we don’t meet in our lifetimes, but I added ‘again’ because of course we did meet. You were in my body. My body gave birth to you.

  I often think of that sentence: If we don’t meet again, I have said what I needed to say. It has a way of calming me.

  The decision I made

  IT WAS EARLY SPRING AT Thomas Street when I started hearing voices in the night, or one voice, a child’s voice, crying, softly enough to be wind through a window crack on the front veranda. It was not Otis; he was at the other end of the house and the voice was older, sadder. Seven, I would have said if forced to testify. The child was seven and alone in suffering. If I sat up or got out of bed and concentrated on them, the cries receded to nothing. I had to focus on something else and they returned in the back of my mind.

  David reminded me that it had been a bad year. I was overwrought. But he didn’t argue when I suggested we move from the front bedroom. I told him I couldn’t stand to sleep near the veranda. He didn’t even ask why.

  You must understand I am not a believer, not even an agnostic. I would call spirits nonsense to their faces, would walk out of a séance, ignore a psychic. But there was something in the house, I felt sure now.

  The people who lived at Thomas Street before us were a Catholic family, five children, a mother, father and two uncles who slept on the veranda. Devout, the neighbours on the near side said. I asked the woman who lived over the back, who’d lived there her whole life, if it was possible that ours had been an unhappy house. Yes, she said, it had. She would not say more despite my prompting and offering of tea, just changed the subject whenever I raised it.

  I told Louise the whole story of what had happened in my young life, the guilt I was now feeling. I told Louise because she had been with me since the start and I needed her help. Before I told her, I worried she would judge me harshly. Once again, she did not. ‘How could they?’ she said. ‘How could they do that to you?’

  I told her sometimes I thought my life wasn’t worth going on with. She sent me flowers and a card. You’re going to pull through this, she wrote. You will, and David and Otis and I will make sure you do.

  Louise started visiting more often, sitting with me, with Otis. She never once suggested I shouldn’t be the mother of a child, even though it was something I was becoming certain of. I w
as frightened that if people knew what was happening in our house, if they knew how I would fall apart and not manage, they would come and take Otis away from me. It was for a time my biggest fear, that I would lose Otis too.

  I told Louise, ‘You kept your child, I gave mine to strangers.’

  Like me, Louise had fallen pregnant unintentionally as a young woman. Her circumstances were completely different, as she reminded me. She and her baby’s father, Gerard, were going to marry sometime anyway. It just sped things up. But it was still the truth. She held on to her baby. I gave mine to strangers.

  My friend Louise stayed with me through all of the years I was of no use to the world. At times we lost contact—my fault, not hers—and our values don’t always mesh on things. She invested everything in four children and a house needing renovation and cars and life in private schools. I invested in a career of sorts and at any rate could not cope with too much time around her children, around her babies. When their son Josh had his twenty-first, I couldn’t bear to go. I wrote him a letter I never sent.

  Dear Josh,

  I was sorry to be away for your coming of age. It’s a milestone for you I’d have loved to share in. Were you the barista? If so, I am doubly sorry to have missed the occasion.

  When I was eighteen, I became pregnant. I gave the baby, a girl I named Ruth, up for adoption. She has lived a happy enough life as far as I know. I believed I was doing the only thing I could.

  When Louise told me she was pregnant with you, she was not much older than I was when I was pregnant, not much older than you are now. Your mother has such courage, Josh, and such conviction. Nothing would take you away from her. She is one of the best people I know.

  Your life has been a blessing for me in ways you can’t have understood. Once, when you were about two, I was sitting on the floor and you came and sat by me and put your hand on my leg like we were buddies. You just sat there. For you it was just what you did, but for me it was an acknowledgement of me as a person in your little life.

  I have no advice to give you Josh, just a hope that the rest of this life will be rich and full.

  He is a fine boy, Josh. They are a fine family.

  For a time, I feared the presence in our house for presentiment, a future rather than past evil; evil would be done to a child of seven here, and that child was Otis. We should move away, I told David, move anywhere to make sure Otis remains safe. Even as I said it, I knew this for what it was, my poor worn-out imagination, just as I knew I would not die on the Golden Gate Bridge or be taken by a shark while swimming in the bay yet still feared them.

  In my kahuna sessions with Stace, we started to feel the presence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with us. This did not seem odd.

  I asked Mary, a mother who lost a child, to intercede on my behalf, to talk to God about giving me my life back, so I could mother my son. ‘You already have your life,’ she said, smiling. ‘Look, don’t you see?’

  For a while, I saw my fear of bridges as a metaphor. Terrified, I walked from pylon to pylon, experienced a measure of safety, and then set out again. But at times, it felt as if there would be no end to this, no Sausalito. It was like labour; labour that could not end in birth. After Otis was born, I wanted another child. I longed for another child. But the child I longed for was baby Ruth, who was gone. She could not be born, that is the truth. She could not be reborn. I could not atone. And so I laboured.

  I was put on Earth to make one decision. I made the wrong decision. For a long time, I could not get past this.

  Mary was a friend of a friend who came to the hospital after Otis was born. She had five adult children and had trained as a social worker after her kids grew up. She’d worked with teenage parents. Mary took an interest in new mothers, in me and little Otis. I put the yellow stuffed toy dragon she gave Otis in his cot with him after we got home from the hospital, along with Blue Bear, given to him by Louise. The brand of the dragon is Gund, German, and that became the dragon’s name. To me, it meant that good mothers were watching over him. The nightjars notwithstanding, surely Gund and Blue Bear, from mothers like Mary and Louise, would keep him safe.

  I gave Mary a copy of the essay I’d written about birth. It was the first time I’d put in writing that I’d had a baby before Otis, and before it was published I sent it to everyone in my life who hadn’t known. I sat down with many of my friends, including Kim, and told them in person. I didn’t tell them everything, not then, but it was the beginning of telling the secret. It was terrifying, as every step on this journey has been, and it turned out all right, as every step on this journey has.

  Before the essay was published, I emailed Mary and told her I’d had a baby as a teenager and I wanted to let her know before the essay came out because she’d been so kind to me when Otis was born and I’d felt dishonest not telling her the truth.

  Some months later, Mary called me and we met for coffee. She told me she already knew I’d had a baby earlier in my life. I asked her how.

  Her daughter in Melbourne, she said carefully, was going out with a boy, and the boy was my daughter’s cousin. My daughter had told the boy that her biological mother was from Brisbane, and she told him my name. Mary’s daughter knew my name because Mary had mentioned me.

  Her daughter and this boy were about to marry, Mary said.

  This was such a strange coincidence I could only believe it must have come from something beyond us.

  We met again. I told Mary there would be no rules from my side about what she said or didn’t say. There would be no rules from me. I don’t believe in secrets.

  Mary and I became closer. She was someone I could lean on in those months I felt so treacherous. In all the time she worked with young parents, she said, she only ever met one family where the baby might have been better off somewhere else. It felt like truth to me at a time when everyone else in my life was serving up platitudes—you did the best thing, she was better off, you made the right decision.

  ‘And even then,’ Mary said, ‘you’d have to be sure before you took a baby from his mother.’

  It was a relief to hear someone say it.

  I said, ‘Mary, I was put on Earth to make one decision. I made the wrong decision.’ I was crying, had been crying for months. Whenever I told people this, they said, ‘Of course you didn’t. You did the best thing for your baby,’ which I knew to be untrue.

  Mary looked me in the eye directly, which was rare for Mary. She mostly let you slide away. ‘You made a wrong decision,’ she said. ‘You probably did. That’s okay. You’ve made others. You’ll make more.’

  What happens to women

  I COULD WRITE AN ESSAY on adoption, the harm the policy we had here in Australia did to those women who gave their babies to strangers, to those babies who found themselves in a different place from their kin, to adopting parents who believed they were given a blank slate to write on. We were cheated, all of us, when we were told taking a baby from a mother had no effect.

  Australia is one of the few countries that decided in the 1960s to make adoption secret. In other places, parents could have an ongoing relationship with their children. In Australia this was not an option, because social policy makers felt it was important there be a clean break. Mothers were not encouraged to spend time with their newborn children. Everything was secret. When state legislatures were moving to change their adoption acts so that children and parents could have access to information and each other, some people objected very strongly.

  But I am in the frame when it comes to adoption so I am probably not a person to write in this area. Having said that, I have no hard and fast views about adoption itself. Would I want a child to spend a life in foster care, or be adopted into a family where they might thrive? Would I want a child to grow up in an institution, or with parents who love them?

  My complaint would not be with adoption. My complaint would be against any system that offers no alternative to women who find themselves pregnant.

  The system we
had in place for adoption when I gave my baby to strangers is the same kind of system every woman comes up against today when she has a baby, the system of maternity care. Our choices are limited. This is an area I feel very comfortable writing about, the ways we control what happens to women’s bodies.

  I worked on a review of maternity services in Queensland in 2005. I read the submissions from women, some of whom had had the most horrendous experiences of birth as a result of their care. Women whose babies died were cared for in the same ward as women whose babies lived. They’d hear babies cry all night, watch new mothers breastfeed them. They’d have to explain over and over again to the staff who asked them when they were due or how their baby was that yes, they’d already had a baby, but their baby had died. When I asked the midwives in the hospital why these women couldn’t be cared for in another place, they said, ‘They’ve had a baby. They have to be in a ward where there are midwives, not nurses.’

  ‘Couldn’t the midwives go to them?’

  ‘I suppose so, but that’s not very practical.’

  Women were bullied by obstetricians because they did or didn’t want a particular kind of pain relief during labour. One woman had an episiotomy the midwife described as a ‘hindquarter resection’ because the obstetrician was in a bad mood with the woman; she had a birth plan. As a matter of routine, women had their babies taken from them and placed in nurseries where they were fed formula when the women wanted more than anything to breastfeed. Or women were treated as pariahs by midwives because they had decided not to breastfeed. Women were punished and abused and neglected because they wanted something, anything; to hold their babies straight after birth, to bury their placenta under a full moon, to save their cord blood, to cry.

  I did not connect what happened to these women in 2005 with what happened to me in the 1980s. But it is drawn from the same wellspring, that cruelty to the most vulnerable in order to impose your own belief system—by force if necessary, by hindquarter resection.