Two selfless mothers

This is the essay 'The Globe and Mail' had said would be running today to kick off Mothers' Day.  A senior editor cancelled it, presumably because he googled me and my blog came up and he didn't like what I write.  I was pissed off because the essay editor loved it and even had me go so far as to sign legal waivers confirming publication.  Here they are......adoptive mother, Lillian Griffith, and birth mother, Shirley Latimer, below:

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The selfless love of two mothers gave me everything

 “We entered a huge room, where there were rows and rows of cribs.  Daddy and I walked up and down the rows looking at each baby, but when we saw you, we just knew you were the most beautiful and happy baby in the whole room, so that’s how we were lucky enough to choose you!”  Growing up, I treasured this story my mother always recounted about how I came to be my parents’ daughter.  I’m adopted, so every Mother’s Day I celebrate two mothers; the one who raised me and the other who birthed me, but was never able to meet.  It didn’t happen like that of course, but what a wonderful way to let an adopted child know how loved she is.  In fact, I can’t remember not knowing I had been adopted and it made me feel chosen and special.

Growing up, I proudly told all my friends I was adopted, but sometimes they could not understand that.  When I was in grade four, one classmate stood up in and asked the teacher if it was true Nancy was adopted?  Calling on me to answer, the teacher asked me to stand up and tell the class about it.  Instead of being ashamed, as this girl had hoped, I positively beamed telling them the story of the rows of cribs from which I had been chosen.  During a parent/teacher interview, I overheard the teacher telling my parents how proud they should be of the way I had handled the embarrassing situation, but for me it was a moment to celebrate.

The reality of my beginnings was far less romantic.  When I did the research years later, I learned my birth mother had only been 17 when she got pregnant.  The father, older and married, had preyed upon her at a party and then disappeared.  This was back in the late forties, when having a baby out-of-wedlock was the worst shame imaginable.  Today, all kinds of young women get pregnant and decide to keep their babies, but back then it was unheard of and forbidden.  To do so condemned a young woman to lifelong shame and lies.  It also ruined their lives, forcing them to quit school and often leave the family home.  In my case, my mother had been sent away “to school” in another city to have her baby under the care of a Salvation Army Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, as they were then called.  That’s where my mother and father got me and it had all been arranged before I was born.  My adoptive parents were unable to conceive a child and because my father was Catholic and my mother Protestant, the province would not allow them to adopt because theirs was considered a “mixed” marriage.  I can’t imagine anything so ridiculous, but that was how conservative the world was back then.

So, they turned to a lawyer who sent them to the Bethany Home to find a baby.  In those days, birth mothers had to keep their babies for six weeks before turning them over to the adoptive parents.  As a mother, I cannot imagine anything more tortuous than caring for a newborn, knowing all the while you would have to give it away after six weeks of bonding.  I can’t even imagine having to dread the approaching day when your baby would be ripped rom you, but that’s the way it was then.  Of all this, I was blissfully unaware as a child.  It was only when I married and became pregnant that I began to be curious about my birth origins and genetic background.  That’s when I started to secretly try and find my birth mother.  But these were pre-internet days, so the research was dogged and grinding.  I started by casually asking my mother, a propos of nothing, which lawyer had handled my adoption.  After she told me, I forged a letter from my father, asking for the file.  The lawyer sent it, but there was precious little information in it – only her name and, job – no address, nothing else.  Armed with this, I searched city directories for weeks, estimating her probable age and looking for her family.  Eventually I found several with the same last name.  Calling each up, I finally hit the jackpot, but it was an empty one because her aunt told me my birth mother had died a year earlier at the young age of 49. 

I was crushed.  I had anticipated a tearful reunion and the beginning of a wonder relationship with the mother who had given me life, but that was not to be.  Instead, I contacted her relatives and introduced myself.  They all knew about Shirley’s shame; some were welcoming, but others didn’t want anything to do with me.  These rejections didn’t dim the pride I had always felt in how my loving family came to be my family.  Eventually I travelled to the towns and cities where they lived and enjoyed learning everything I could about my birth mother – including the fact that I was so glad she had been brave and selfless enough to give me up.  Had she not, I would have been raised in poverty instead of the middle-class upbringing I had been so fortunate to have had.  The saddest part was that she had died just a year before I had found her, never knowing what had happened to her long, lost baby.  When she did marry, she was unable to have any more children and when she died, her brother found pictures of me hidden among her things.  How tragic.  I finally knew all about her, but she never learned what had become of her child.

I often hear stories about how adopted adults have suffered all their lives from the stigma of having been rejected by their birth mothers.  Rejected?  I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world and feel only gratitude and admiration for the young 17-year-old girl who cared for her baby for six long weeks and then had to give it away, never to see it again.  Back then, open adoptions didn’t exist.  In fact, the original birth certificates were replaced by the adoptive one, effectively erasing the baby from the face of the earth.  Frankly, it worked better that way.  Everyone got on with their lives and adoptive parents didn’t live in fear that a birth mother would change her mind and take the baby back.  How unbearable that would be, always waiting for the other shoe to drop and finding your dreams of becoming a mother shattered.

So, every Mother’s Day I celebrate and give thanks for two mothers.  Their gifts to each other and me are incalculable.