Tree of Strangers Read online

  He kissed me, his lips dry, the moisture sucked away. I gave myself up to it, the Lilo floating out to sea, the water warm and gentle around us.

  Leon rolled off before I knew what his weight on me had meant. He placed his hand on my belly where he had pushed up my top. Later in my notebook I wrote that if you added up the hours, we’d known each other for less than a day. I wondered out loud if we could only tell our secrets to strangers.

  ‘So the more you know someone, the less you tell them,’ Leon said.

  I thought about how my parents communicated by looks over our silent dinner table.

  ‘What should we tell people?’ he asked, all his bravado gone.

  The floating feeling turned to heaviness. ‘Nothing. That way it will always be a mystery.’

  The school bell rang in the distance and we changed back into our school uniforms. Needles of pain shot down my leg. The discomfort had begun the year before. Growing pains, Mavis said every time I complained.

  I walked home along the wide and treeless street, trying not to limp. I planned to put the money back in her purse when she was in the toilet before we went shopping. As I neared the house, I could see the windows shut tight, despite the warmth of the day. Inside the light seemed dusty, diffused through the net curtains. I walked down the hall, arms extended, fingers tingling as I traced the wallpaper pattern. For the first time, I thought the place lovely.

  She was at the kitchen table, the ashtray full. The teacup in front of her was stained with lipstick, half-empty, filmed over and cold.

  They say losing your mother at birth encodes trauma in your pituitary sensory system. You become hypervigilant. To stay safe, you observe and copy your new parents’ behaviour. I was adept at following the mood of any room, the slightest whisker shift enough to put me on high alert.

  But that day there was no need for hypervigilance. Mavis stared at me without a trace of warmth. I was too afraid to speak. ‘The school called. You were absent all day. The principal said you were planning to go to Australia. With a boy.’

  I remember crying and how warm and pleasant the tears felt. I denied it all, gulping, caught up in my own wounded tone. I spread my fingers over the Formica and wondered about the money.

  The slap came as I glanced toward her purse. My face stung. ‘You’re a liar.’ She grabbed my fingers and squeezed them till I thought they’d break.

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘No. It is you who are hurting me.’ She dug her nails into my wrist till I yelled. When she let go, she opened her handbag and held it open in front of my face.

  ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’ I must have smiled then as she slapped me again.

  ‘Your father will have something to say about this.’

  ‘You wouldn’t blame me if I weren’t adopted!’ I kicked a chair and sent it spinning across the polished lino. The words that had piled up inside me came spilling out. ‘I’m not like you. You tried to force me, but I’m someone else.’

  She turned as Max stood in the doorway. He walked past me and took his wife’s hand as if I was not there, and led her from the room.

  In my bedroom, I closed the door and adjusted the venetians. Late afternoon sunlight hit the blinds, brightening the edges of each slat. I imagined myself a swimmer. I would live under the sea, in the cavern of a crusted ship, while above the storm subsided, the surface turning glassy and tranquil.

  The light faded and hunger overtook me. When I stood, pain shot down my leg and along my arms and I fell and could not get up. I called for help but no one came and I lay on the floor unable to move as the night came on.

  5

  Another kind of memory

  Runanga, 1983.

  When I came to, I was on the floor. Jim and Bruce were kneeling over me, imploring their God to free me from the spirit of harlotry. My teenage self disappeared. It was dark and all I could see were our reflections in the big window. Three hopeless people surrounded by the blackness of the night. I felt a pain deep in my chest, a sense of time running backwards. Past the birth of my three girls. Beyond my unmoored life before Bruce. Back further than the flattened plain of childhood. To memories that were not memories.

  With closed stranger adoption you have no birth story, as if you exist by magic alone. But that day, on the worn carpet in my lounge, the story of my birth rushed at me. As if I’d actually been there. As if my mother and I were one. I have never experienced that exact feeling again, but the story stayed with me.

  It began with drizzle, a dark corridor and an image of curtains, luminous as mist. A woman I knew was my mother stretched her hands towards a baby in a stranger’s arms. The curtains were like wedding veils between them. I was then in an old graveyard. She was sitting in a white-painted portico surrounded by mossy gravestones. She wore a coat that did not cover her belly; her eyes were closed against the slant of the early winter sun.

  Beside the graveyard, the city fathers (never the mothers) had planted a park on the sides of a gully. Low walls of volcanic stone led down to a grassy meadow. I found myself walking along those paths as if I was my mother, the baby that would be me heavy within her. The moo of cows drew her on. She dozed against a tree, watched by the cows, curious and indifferent. When she woke, it was dark. The baby curled tight inside, calm for once. She held the weight of her belly and trudged back up the steep path. The restless cows ran to the edge of their meadow, their breathing heavy behind her.

  Her name was Pamela. She was tall and auburn-haired. In the photo above my desk she is modelling swimwear. She looks right down the lens, all eyeliner and the puffy hair of the early sixties. She was nineteen when I was born, a vulnerable new immigrant from London. Her parents were here too. On the evidence of her belly, her father, Fred, had thrown her out of their new home in Tawa. Her mother, my grandmother Jessie, was dying from breast cancer.

  On the day she went into labour an anticyclone covered the country. A slow-moving depression deepening in the east, bringing fog and low cloud.

  Mesmerised on the lounge floor in Runanga I saw a doctor take her arm. He led her past a nursery of swaddled babies. When one began to wail, the child inside her shifted. In a windowless room at the end of the corridor, she removed her faded dress. She slid her arms into a gown washed almost transparent, climbed onto a narrow bed and pulled up the sheet.

  In the late stage of pregnancy you are lethargic and drenched in dreams. I imagine her facing the wall, whispered incantations rising from heart to mouth. She tells her baby everything as the contractions merge, propelling me from her.

  And there my dream state ends.

  I’ve had four children, so what comes next is easy to imagine. The way a contraction rises up, feathery as a shadow, stealthy as a rogue wave. Each surge breaks through the silent conversation you’ve been having with your baby. It is only as your body splits itself in two to expel the child that you understand what it means to be pregnant. To hold life within and feel it grow till it might break through your blue-veined skin.

  I want to think we had some time together. On the outside, as it were. That I lay in the curve of her naked body, my mouth inching instinctively toward her breast.

  But I think she woke in an empty room bright with light, groggy from the drugs they would have given her. She was alone on a distant beach far above the high-tide line with the sure knowledge her baby was gone. Removed from her bruised body as if it never belonged there. As if I had had no right to be there.

  Was it Dr Gerald Gleeson who took me from her? By the time he retired, he’d delivered ten thousand babies. He was the doctor of the day for the good married ladies of Napier. In his general practice, he discussed their infertility. In his obstetric practice, he canvassed for the cure. Young, single, pregnant women were the answer.

  Women like my mother. With three months to go, her parents sent her to stay with Dr Gleeson and his wife. A woman who knew the doctor described him to me as a friendly man who let women birth without their legs in s
tirrups. She’d been to dinner at his house but seen no sign of pregnant girls scrubbing and cleaning.

  But the files don’t lie. It’s clear they put my mother to work cooking and cleaning the three floors of the Gleesons’ large house on Hospital Hill. He’d trained as a priest and I’m told he was surprisingly light on his feet for a man of his size. Not tall, but heavyset, his white coat only ever partially buttoned. Reading the doctor’s obituary, you get the impression he was a man in his element among grateful women.

  Or perhaps it was the matron, Brigadier Gladys Goffin, who took me away. She ran the Salvation Army Bethany home in Napier for twenty years. An article in the local paper described her as preaching hellfire and damnation that left you shaking in your shoes. ‘She could prompt soul-searching in even the most self-righteous’, and believed unmarried girls ‘drifted’ into pregnancy because of aimless lifestyles.2

  It hurts me to imagine my mother condemned and shamed for getting herself pregnant, my father as blameless and distant as a deity. It’s easy to see how the pious doctor and the self-righteous Brigadier could destroy my mother’s hopes and dreams.

  Twenty-five years later, in a heartbreaking letter, my mother’s husband described my adoption as forced. New Zealand was unforgiving and unrelenting, he said. Pamela was so confused by what had been done to her that she had a nervous breakdown following her loss. ‘The scars never left her,’ he said.

  Under the Adoption Act 1955 a mother cannot consent to the adoption of her child until it is ten days old. Ten short days to decide to give away or keep your baby. For those days every mother in New Zealand, married or single, has sole legal custody of her child.

  Every unmarried mother I’ve spoken to says her baby disappeared. Straight from her womb or shortly after delivery. From across the country, the mothers’ stories echo each other. Their babies taken and concealed in other parts of the hospital as they were readied for adoption. On day ten, the matron escorted the mother to an office where a lawyer read a general waiver out loud. With matron standing behind, they signed away their babies. Not one had legal representation.

  I now think of the ten-day provision as the basis of the idea that mothers willingly gave away their babies. It was a whitewash. A way to hide the mechanics of the adoption industry in New Zealand.

  Back in my living room in 1983 with Jim and Bruce, I scrambled up from the floor. My breathing was shallow with my mother’s pain. I am sure I saw the pallid curtains part. I am convinced she reached for me as a woman with black hair turned in alarm, the baby she held tight already hers.

  Bruce put a blanket around my shoulders. Jim took up his guitar and began to sing.

  Something beautiful, something good,

  All my confusion He understood

  All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife.

  But He made something beautiful of my life.

  The music woke Bonnie and Rachel, and they came and sat with me and we sang together. Ruth would be awake soon for her first feed of the night.

  I thought about each of their births. I could pick their cries in a crowded room. I could sense every shift in mood, even a change in their body temperatures. Scientists say oxytocin, the motherhood hormone, causes this heightened awareness. Researcher Robert Froemke says oxytocin enables a mother to understand her baby’s needs ‘[b]ecause your baby depends on you absolutely to take care of it’.3

  I know I am biologically wired to my children and that the wiring persists long past childhood. Now my daughters are adults with lives and families of their own. But I am still wired to them in ways that defy logic. Did my mother hear my cries from the distant nursery? I can hardly bear to imagine the pain she must have felt.

  But then, so early in my journey, I remember how Bruce hugged Jim and thanked him. Jim smiled at me distantly and raised his hand. ‘I hope that helps,’ he said. I gathered myself and put the girls back to bed and washed the dishes.

  Bruce returned to his chair. His face was already going soft. His halo of hair needed cutting. I was no longer mad at him. This was as far as we could go. We had found the outer rim of our emotional compatibility. I thought about the way time had rushed backwards beneath the men’s prayers. In some unspoken way I’d always felt that without a past I could have no future. ‘It’s like I’ve been paralysed my whole life,’ I said to Bruce.

  He’d already opened his book. He looked up and nodded. ‘Do you feel better?’ he asked.

  Strangely, I did. I felt lighter, with my mind resolved. Perhaps the spirit of harlotry had forsaken me after all. Without a past I only had now. I would leave in the morning. My mother was coming.

  6

  The changeling

  Before the curtains bloomed with morning light, I had milked the goat and made sandwiches. While the girls ate their porridge, I filled the car with clothes, toys and food. Bruce watched in silence from the safety of his chair. Beneath the girls’ chatter, stillness settled over us. While the words remained unsaid, he was innocent. He’d done his best, even called in the preacher. He could live in the comfort of his wife’s betrayal. The act of leaving would be all mine.

  I strapped the girls into their car seats. Bruce leaned in to kiss them. He cried and I touched his face. ‘Wait,’ he said, and went into the house.

  He came out and held up my favourite, almost-antique platter. I had served countless meals on it, gravy consuming the faded blue patterns. It had been missing from its usual place. Now I understood. He had hidden it so he could present it now, a peace offering, a show of support, to win me back.

  He opened his hands and the platter slipped from his fingers and shattered on the concrete. He looked right through me. I was beyond his redemption but not his retribution.

  ‘You can’t have them, or any of this.’ He swept his hand over the car, kissed my cheek and told me to drive with care.

  ‘Wave to Daddy,’ I said. But Bruce had already gone inside and the girls turned in their seats and waved to the blank eyes of the house.

  We drove away and Bonnie asked why I’d upset Daddy. ‘You shouldn’t say bad things to him,’ she said.

  The question stunned me. How did she know that deep down I believed this was my fault, my character flaw, my genetic defect?

  Adoption can do this to you. From the beginning you are ‘a’ child. But you are not ‘the’ child, the one they longed for and could not have. And despite everyone’s best efforts, you are never quite right, because in all kinds of love we look for a mirror, a reflection, a version of ourselves. The parent–child relationship is no different.

  You start out as a warm weight to fill the empty arms. But as you grow with no resemblance to your new parents you become the other.

  Of course, all children transform into other as they become themselves. As parents, we shepherd that transformation. But the mythology around adoption says that there is little difference between a natural child and an adopted one because you raise them up the same. So natural differentiation is hampered, even squashed, to keep the myth of sameness alive. As you slip between being the desired baby and being the stranger in their midst, your identity becomes a constant and often unconscious internal negotiation. Until you have children or meet family in reunion. It is often at this point that you realise you’ve been looking for someone you resemble your whole life and that you begin to understand genetic mirroring.

  Biological families never get to question mirroring. It’s as natural as air. Parts of you are reflected in the people you see every day. It goes beyond physical resemblance.

  In reunion with biological families, adopted people speak of the shock of the mirror. How strange it is to recognise an inflexion or the rise and fall of a laugh. A matching earlobe or a subtlety of language. In these moments we begin to comprehend what the adoption myth denies.

  I’ve heard reunion described as shedding a skin. But what if I sloughed off my salamander skin, translucent as milk, to find there is nothing beneath? This fear of being without substance in
form or function haunts me still.

  But consider the newly minted adoptive mother. What does she see when she gazes into the eyes of the child most longed for? She will not find her reflection there, not even a scrap of similarity. The new baby is as much the other to her as she is to it. A part of her knows this is not her baby.

  Historically, women who gain motherhood with someone else’s baby occupy an uncomfortable place in society. In folklore, elves or fair folk took the rightful child and replaced her with one of their own. The changeling child. In Rumpelstiltskin, a woman in fear of her life must promise away her firstborn to survive. An ugly troll takes her baby. In Rapunzel, a husband offers up their future child to save his wife. The one who returns to claim the eventual child is of course an evil witch. Even the Bible gets in on the act. Moses’ mother must choose between her son being killed or letting an Egyptian princess raise him. When two women claim a newborn as their own, King Solomon threatens to divide the baby in two. It is the real mother who is willing to give up her child to save it.

  The message has always been that only dire circumstances will part a mother and her child. And those who take advantage of that situation are never real mothers.

  But even now, all these decades later, I know Mavis’s heart’s desire was to be the mother and not just a mother. Despite her discomfort, she wanted to love the baby she ended up with. But she had to bond without the help of hormones. Without the oxytocin released in breastfeeding. Without nine months of the shared journey, or the element of the mystical that lingers over birth. An adopting mother must nurture without the welcome home from the travails of childbirth, without celebration or the sense of ancestors hovering nearby.