Falling for Myself by Dorothy Ellen Palmer

Author:Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
Published: 2019-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

No Place Like Home

I didn’t meet another living soul related to me until I gave birth. Then, at fifty-five, I found my birth mother. I’d looked for her all my life, in vain. Canadian adoption files were closed by law, controlled by a male church and state to ease their consciences and their wallets. Inconvenient little bastards like me have been taken from young, poor, disabled, Indigenous and racialized unwed mothers for centuries. We weren’t orphans. We all had living relatives. Sealed birth records have long ensured that abandoning men can’t ever be held accountable.

I lived over half a century with my family in a government file I couldn’t read.

Since turning eighteen in 1973, I’d joined several adoption search groups, like Parent Finders, but couldn’t legally get any information. Pre-Internet, looking for a birth parent was like searching for a forbidden needle in uncountable haystacks. I had something many adoptees didn’t have: my birth name, Susan Gail Johnston. But in the 1950s, a baby born to a married mother legally had to bear her husband’s last name. My birth name is only almost mine: Johnston is the surname of the man my mother married before my birth, but he is not my father.

Finding my mother took historic change: a global feminist movement, decades of adoptee activism, a relaxing morality and new legislation. In 2010, on the first day I could legally do so, I applied for my “Statement of Live Birth” and learned my mother’s name: Florence Ada Mclean. I hired a private detective specializing in adoption reunions, who found her in October of 2010. I wrote her a letter and drove it to the airport. She called me the next day.

We met in 2011, when she was eighty-three.

We met just once before she died.

She gave me so many answers. She has my daughter’s eyes. All three of us share the same tiny hands. She made the same joke I do referring to a word we couldn’t pronounce as kids, because we’d only seen it in books, and thus “put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong sy-LAB-le.”

Her favourite book as a child was Anne of Green Gables.

I have a half-brother and a half-sister. My half-sister refuses to contact me. Her name is Susan. I can only imagine her shock in discovering she was not the first Susan. When my half-brother and I met, in a gatekeeping, pre-screening before I could meet my mother, he withheld another treasure I couldn’t read: my mother’s memoir, Memories from Canada to California. I was allowed to read about her family history and childhood only. All adult pages were barred by giant paper clips. He said, “Look at it as baby steps. It’s all we’re comfortable with.”

For all my life, others have decided what is “good enough” for me and it’s never enough.

It never includes all the things they want for themselves and those they love.

Of course, when my birth mother wrote her life story, she omitted the shame of me entirely. But I have often wondered, in the short time we were together, if she whispered some of her history.

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