Lara Bradley/The Sudbury Star
Lifestyles – Monday, November 20, 2006
Editor’s note: This is the second part of the First Mothers. The first part ran last Monday.
A reunion with their babies was a long time in coming.
Both Esther Tardif and Mary (she didn’t want to give her name on the grounds that it would hurt her son’s adoptive family) surrendered their sons up for adoption during the late 1960s. Like most of the unwed pregnant women of the time, it was never a matter of making a real decision to give up their children. Without any form of government financial assistance or support from their families, they were steered firmly into doing the “right thing” by social workers as well as by those who ran homes for unwed mothers. They were told that if they really loved their babies they would do what was best for the child.
Both women did go on to marry. Mary had three children and Tardif a daughter with the father of her son. Despite what social workers had told them about forgetting their babies, that was an impossibility. Birthdays of the babies they had lost were times of great personal sorrow. A sadness they couldn’t really share with others so ingrained was the idea this was to be kept secret.
In the intervening years they would search the faces of children and then adults for a looking for a resemblance.
“The constant looking can drive you crazy,” said Tardif. “You have to stop after a while.”
In 1989, Tardif found out about the Adoption Discloser Register. Immediately she registered her name, hoping her son would one day seek her out.
“I waited for 12 years,” she said.
“I sat there for 19 years. I prayed everyday he would find me,” said Mary, who had registered in the early 1980s.
Both of their sons were 35 years old, with families of their own, when they went looking for their first mothers.
When Mary found out that her son wanted to meet with her, “the shock was so great I literally fell down weeping.” She had broken the news to her older children already that she surrendered a child for adoption as a 16 year old. But now Mary had to tell her youngest. He fell back on his bed when he heard the news. She worried that her children would hate her. They didn’t.
Both women describe their reunions with the sons they had lost at the happiest moment of their lives. Their greatest fear, that their sons would hate them, was not realized and they are slowly building relationships with their first borns and their families.
“I wanted my son in my life,” said Tardif.
Both count themselves fortunate their children were adopted into such good homes.
“It’s a blessing to know that he was adopted into such a warm and loving family,” Tardif said.
The adopted mother of her son gave Tardif photos of him at different ages. Now mounted in chronological sequence, it’s clear the pictures are more precious than gold to her.
Mary also has photos of herself with her son. There’s no denying the resemblance – with only 16 years between them, they look more like brother and sister.
The mothers talk about other similarities that run deeper that bone structure -shared gestures, interests and even character traits they’ve noticed in their sons.
But it’s not quite been the ride into the sunset that you might imagine. Meeting the baby they last saw through the nursery window, now a tall, handsome man has brought with it both indescribable happiness and terrible grief.
“We realized the extent of our loss,” said Tardif.
“I cried for five months. Day and night,” said Mary.
“It’s the most incredible of emotions. All that wait and worrying,” Tardif said.
For about two years following her reunification Mary couldn’t concentrate on work; at times it felt like almost split in two, like part of her was floating above people’s heads. At one point, distraught she went to the Children’s Aid Society looking for counselling. This was the organization that had urged her to put her child up for adoption. But it had no help for her now.
The Sudbury Adoption Support Group has provided to cope with the grief and this dizzying sense of loss. They wish that Sudbury had counsellors who specialize in adoption issues and reunions.
Christine Lachaine is a certified adoption counsellor specializing in adoption issues, as well as reunions.
Unfortunately, she’s based out of Ottawa. A psychotherapist, she went on to get further training on Carlini Institute, based out of B.C. on adoption issues. There are not many in her field and not much available in the way of research on the trauma mothers experience when giving up a child to adoption.
Lachaine explained that psychology students such as herself receive about 7.95 minutes of instruction on adoption issues compared to 76.82 minutes on schizophrenia. And yet adoption touches the lives of so many.
An adoptee herself, Lachaine finds it “mind blowing” that there is so little specialized help for those involved in the adoption triangle.
Many of the mothers she’s counselled are in a state of post-traumatic stress.
“A lot of it has to do with the secrecy, of having repressed so much,” she said. “It’s disenfranchised grief. Not being able to publicly mourn.”
Remember, these mothers were told to return home and tell no one. Pretend it didn’t happen.
They talk to her about the sensation of “splitting themselves” into two of experiencing grief, anger, guilt, depression and having this horrible “empty feeling.”
Many of the women she’s counselled never had any other children “as a way of punishing themselves,” she said.
Consider too that for many of the women, their families turned on them at what represented their greatest moment of need; a fundamental betrayal of trust from which many don’t recover.
“It destroys them,” Lachaine said.
The idea that the women shouldn’t be allowed to see or hold their infants came from a notion of not allowing bonding to take place.
“We now know that bonding starts in utero, that you can’t break that bond,” she said.
Some of the women were tricked into giving up their babies. They signed papers they thought gave them access to counselling but they were really signing away their children. Others lost their babies in what turned out to be black market adoptions.
“There needs to be more awareness and more education on these issues,” she said. “These people are living a life of trauma and they need help.”
BILL 183
A CHANGING SOCIAL SITUATION
SOURCES OF HELP
The Adoption Information Disclosure Act, 2005, was passed last year, but will take nearly another year to be fully implemented. The act will allow more open access to adoption records for adult adoptees and birth parents. The changes will be applied retroactively and apply to all adoptees whose adoptions were registered in Ontario. It will allow:
An adopted person who is 18 years old or older to obtain a copy of their original birth record and adoption order. The adoptee would be able to learn their original name at birth. These documents may also provide identifying information about birth parents.
A birth parent to obtain the information contained in the birth registration and the adoption order of the child they gave up for adoption, once that child reaches 19 years of age. These documents may provide identifying information on the adoptee including their name after adoption. Any information about the adoptive parents would be removed.
A birth parent or adoptee who does not wish to be contacted to put a “no contact” notice on their record. The individual requesting the “no contact” notice would be asked to voluntarily provide family and medical history and a brief statement about his or her reasons for filing a “no contact” notice.
Sanctions for violation of a “no contact” notice up to $50,000 for an individual or up to $250,000 for a corporation.
Birth parents and adoptees to apply to the Child and Family Services Review Board to prevent disclosure of identifying information where there are concerns for personal safety.
Birth control: The sale of contraception became legal in Canada in 1969. However, as historian Doug Owram noted: “gaining access to the Pill in the face of medical practitioners was, in some communities, more difficult than buying LSD.”
Abortion: That same year, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to allow therapeutic abortions.
Financial support: In 1969 Quebec instituted social aid to mothers. Soon after each province followed suit.
Social mores: By the mid-1970s they weren’t being called unwed mothers anymore but rather “single mothers.”
Fewer couples available: There were fewer couples in the 25-40 year age range because of the low birthrate during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This caused the social work community to rethink its push for adoption.
Changing statistics: In Ontario maternity homes, 45-75 per cent of the residents decided to keep their babies in 1976, compared to 10-25 per cent a decade earlier. By 1982, 84 per cent of unmarried girls in Canada were leaving the hospitals with their babies.
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