I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (4 page)

5

When I woke in the early hours of 16 June 1975, my sheets were drenched with fluid. I thought I had wet my bed. When I stood up to examine the damage I felt a gush of warm liquid escape me.

I hadn’t attended any of the antenatal classes that are commonplace these days. My limited knowledge of the birthing process was from the advice Dorothy gave me in the cafe and from reading my nursing textbook, which was for general nurses and did not cover midwifery in any detail. I may have heard the term ‘broken waters’ but this sensation was nothing I had expected. I crept down the passageway and alerted a nun, who called an ambulance.

The hospital looked completely different at night. The ambulance attendant and hospital staff lifted me onto a trolley and pushed me to an interview room where a nurse took my details.

‘Would you like me to call anyone?’

‘Yes, please.’ I gave her Bryan’s number.

Next she wheeled me to a small room where I was shaved and given a hospital gown. She checked my baby’s heartbeat. My contractions had become regular and more frequent.

‘As soon as a labour ward is available, we’ll take you there.’ I was left lying on the trolley in the corridor. To my surprise, my mother walked in.

‘How are you, little one?’

I was mortified; this was neither the time nor the place to meet with my mother.

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I asked the nuns to call me when your time came.’

In my naivety I thought she didn’t know where the home was. I knew Bryan would be on his way to the hospital and would not be expecting to see my mother. A man in green scrubs wheeled me to the labour ward, and I imagined the two of them sitting uncomfortably together in the waiting room. At that time, women were not allowed a ‘significant other’ in the labour ward during birth.

I was placed on a bed in the delivery room and the nurse began to put poles on either side of me.

‘What are those?’

‘Stirrups. We put your legs in ’em darl; makes the birth easier.’

She placed a green curtain on the stirrups, so that I could not see my lower body. Then she lifted each leg and placed it in a stirrup. I felt a strange kind of disassociation with what was happening between my legs and the green curtain. The pethidine injection helped me relax. The rest was a blur until I heard my baby cry.

‘What is it?’

‘A boy.’

‘Can I hold him?’

I saw the glance pass between the doctor, who seemed to say yes, and the nurse, who said clearly and emphatically, ‘No!’

So they knew. It only dawned on me at that moment that all the nurses in the delivery room knew my secret.

I was wheeled into a double room and was so relieved at the prospect of sleep. I sank into the pillows. Soon after I had drifted off to sleep the curtains around my bed were pulled with a sharp sound that startled me.

‘You need to pee.’ It was a nurse with a bedpan, the likes of which I had only seen in my nursing textbook.

‘I can’t!’ I yelled, after she had perched me onto the cold metal object that bore only a little resemblance to a toilet.

‘Well, you have to try a bit harder!’ She turned on the tap in the sink between the two beds in the room. ‘The sound of water will help.’

Bryan came to visit the next day. He was allowed a few minutes with me. We both cried.

‘Have you seen him?’ he asked.

‘No, they won’t let me.’

‘Me neither.’

I asked him how it had been the night before, with Mum in the waiting room.

‘She didn’t talk to me.’

The lady in the bed next to me was having trouble breastfeeding. Her baby was kept in the nursery and when it was time for its feed the nurses had to wheel it, crying, past my bed. My heart ached. I endured it for another day, crying silently to myself, listening to her visitors ooh and aah over her baby. She didn’t speak a word to me and when I could, I kept my curtains closed. On the day milk began to fill my breasts, causing pain, especially when her baby cried, my mother asked if I could be moved to a private room. The nurses agreed. But the move was to another building.

‘Can I see my baby, just once?’

The nurse hesitated.

‘He’s in a nursery on another floor. I’ll have to ask the sister-in-charge.’

Soon an officious-looking nurse was by my bedside.

‘I’ll let you go, but you can’t hold him.’

I nodded. My only concern was that the lady in the bed next to mine would hear her and know that I was an unmarried mother.

Soon my nurse came with a wheelchair. As we waited by the lift she said, ‘You’re not to cry!’ I shook my head. Once out of the lift she wheeled me to a door with a glass window and on the other side a sister wheeled a cot with my baby in it. Under the observance of these two sisters, for a few short moments through the glass window I laid eyes on my son.

Twenty-nine years later, on the beach in Hervey Bay I told him: ‘When I saw you in your cot, through the window, you opened a pair of dark eyes, as if to say hello. That was why I felt sure you would have brown eyes.’

I didn’t cry. That came later in the privacy of my room, after I’d been transferred to the other building. Separated first by a ward, then a building – and then a lifetime.

The next few days in the ward were spent keeping my episiotomy clean, taking pills, and binding my breasts to stop the milk. Mum and Bryan visited regularly. I desperately wanted to leave that place of horror and sadness.

The day before I was due to be discharged, a representative from the government adoption agency visited me. I had to sign the papers. I assume the government official told me I had thirty days to change my mind – I don’t recall this happening, but I found out many years later that it was the law at the time. Sister Ann Mary had given me my pep talk a few weeks before the birth and she told me that, according to my religious tradition, I was to stipulate that my son was to be raised in a Catholic family.

Sister also told me that I was not obliged to write the name of the father on the birth certificate. I was prepared with a false name and address and dutifully lied on the form. It wasn’t until years later that I regretted taking this advice, realising its significance: protecting the man’s identity.

The adoption laws, at that time, stated that women ‘relinquished’ their babies. Relinquish:
to renounce, or surrender, to give up, let go, release
. We were instructed that it was final. No going back. That part I understood.

I called him Christopher Anthony on his birth certificate. Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, and I reasoned that this would assist him on his life’s journey. Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost articles – I hoped that one day we might find each other. I knew his adoptive parents could give him a name they chose. At that time a new birth certificate would be issued with their names on it as his parents. But I secretly hoped they would be told the names I gave him and keep them.

I was preparing my belongings to leave the hospital when a priest slipped into my room, uninvited. I learned some years later that everyone who had access to the nurses’ office – including the priest – would have known that I was giving up my baby for adoption, since my name, on the list of patients, would have been annotated with ‘BFA’ – baby for adoption. Bending his head piously, he took a seat by my bed.

‘How are you?’

I was at a loss to know how to respond and replied that I felt terrible.

‘Why?’

‘I had a baby and I just signed the papers that gave him away.’

‘What a marvellous thing,’ he said. ‘You’re a mother now!’

He went on to ask me about the father of my baby and, when I told him he was around and supportive, he asked why we weren’t getting married. I was flabbergasted. I’d had nine months to think over this decision, and it had been the hardest one in my life. Marriage was the short-term easy solution. Who did he think he was, waltzing into my room unannounced and telling me to retract a well-considered decision? I reasoned that his suggestion had probably taken him less than five minutes to come up with, and it was without consideration for the sort of relationship I had with Bryan. What hurt the most was that he called me a mother. What mother gives her child away? A terrible mother.

I’m sure that priest remembered me till his dying day, because I began to cry so loudly that the nurses came rushing to see what the commotion was. He didn’t utter a word, but scurried from my room. The nurses couldn’t get a word out of me either. I couldn’t speak for the sobs and they had to close the door because my cries were disturbing other patients.

‘Is it because of the papers you just signed?’

‘No, the priest.’

Sister Ann Mary was called. I told her what the priest had said. She hugged me and went to speak to the nurse in charge. When she came back, she told me the nurse was shocked. Before my outburst, she had thought we were heartless, selfish girls, giving up our babies without any thought for them, so that we could continue with our immoral lives. But, on that day in 1975, in a private ward of the Royal Brisbane Hospital, she heard my primal howls and it dawned on her that we weren’t all brazen hussies, having unprotected sex without a care, giving our babies away willy-nilly. How must she have treated other relinquishing mothers before she met me?

6

Mum took me home when I was discharged from hospital.

‘When you were in labour,’ she said. ‘I had birth pains.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I was feeling so much for you that I think I wanted to take the pain for you.’

This must have been Mum’s way of telling me that she felt some sympathy for me in my predicament. Perhaps it was a moment when I could have opened up and talked, and maybe things between us could have turned out differently, but at the time I couldn’t help but feel that only once the baby was gone from my belly I was acceptable to her. I can’t have been too clear in my own mind about what I wanted, because on the one hand I longed to remain a child at home, but on the other I was embarrassed that she saw me in my post-pregnant state. A few days later she took me shopping for a corset – I had gained weight and my belly was out of shape. I had never worn one before. She picked it out.

‘Can my sister, who’s just had a baby, try this on?’ she asked the shop assistant. It would have been better had she not said anything; after all the shop assistant didn’t need to know we were mother and daughter. I think she thought she was helping me to fit back in, look normal. But I wasn’t normal and no amount of reshaping my body could ever alter what I now carried within me.

Closed adoption meant that by law I was to maintain a clear distance from Christopher and his adoptive parents. I was not allowed to try to locate him and certainly not to attempt any contact with his new family. I would never have tried anyway, so sure was I that what I had done was best for him. My sorrow was of my own making. Holy Cross had been a haven and it had protected me from the scandal of being unmarried and pregnant. I believed that one day I would marry, have another child – and then my sorrow would dissipate.

I had got myself into the situation – single-handedly, apparently – and had to deal with the consequences. It riled me that my boyfriend had no birth scars and no signs of his indiscretion. If we were walking down the street, nobody would shout ‘Whore!’ at him. Pregnancy and birth had not ravaged his body.

Madeline, Dorothy and I delivered our babies within a week of each other. Dorothy had a girl and Madeline a boy. Though the same doctor, in the same hospital, at the same time, attended to us, we did not see each other. We bore our crosses separately.

Dorothy stayed in Brisbane for a few weeks after her baby girl was born. We kept in contact and a month after we had given birth and before she returned to her country town I suggested that she, Madeline and I meet up one more time. I invited Dorothy to stay at my parents’ place and we met Madeline for dinner. We went to a Mexican restaurant in the city. Over margaritas we talked about our birthing experiences and what had happened in the meantime. Dorothy told us she regretted giving up her baby.

‘Before I gave birth I was very clear about my decision, so I signed the papers. But it was after I left the hospital that I realised I’d made a huge mistake. I want my baby back.’ This made me extremely sad.

That evening over dinner I began to relax. We had no secrets between us and were able to talk freely. It was a huge relief to be able to express my thoughts and feelings. It was a rare moment that I would not be able to repeat for a long time. Being unused to alcohol, later that night at home, I vomited. As I was returning to bed, I found my mother in the corridor.

‘Too much alcohol,’ I said.

‘How do I know you’re not pregnant again?’

In that moment I realised my mother had no understanding of the agony it had been for me to give up my son. How could she think I’d fall pregnant again, after the trauma of the home, the birth and the adoption? Her words knifed through me in a way that I couldn’t comprehend. I realised with horror that she, like so many other people I had met since my pregnancy, believed I was a ‘loose’ girl who had unprotected sex and would easily find herself pregnant again. What hurt me most was her lack of understanding of the grief I was silently suffering, the self-loathing and guilt.

The next morning I was eager for Dorothy to leave. If my mother judged her own daughter so roughly, what must she think of someone she didn’t know?

Three weeks after Christopher was born, I turned eighteen. I didn’t celebrate.

No-one at all talked to me about what had just happened. Not my mother, my father, Charlie or Teresa. Alexis and Ken didn’t even know. This secrecy made it patently clear that I had to bear the consequences alone.

My mother sent me to stay with my grandmother, who lived in a small town in New South Wales. She was a gentle lady who brought me tea with a swig of brandy in it each morning before I got out of bed. We went for walks around the small village with its parks and green open spaces. We picked daffodils, which Grandma referred to as forget-me-nots. I later learned that the name belonged to a different flower but whenever I see daffodils I think of her – and I forget her not. Mum didn’t tell her about my indiscretion, which on the one hand meant that I didn’t have to discuss it with her, but on the other it reinforced that this was a taboo subject. Either way it was good to feel accepted.

On returning to Brisbane I had some time to fill before commencing my nursing training. I found a daytime job as a waitress in a German restaurant in the city. I enjoyed the diversion. The laying and clearing of tables, though seemingly menial, has its own satisfaction. I liked the customer interaction and got the occasional tip, which gave me a thrill – money for nothing! Best of all, I had something other than grief to occupy my mind. No-one in the restaurant knew about my baby. Being on my feet most of the day also helped me to lose the weight I had gained during pregnancy.