She hung up the phone after a whispered conversation with her boyfriend, and her mom called her name. When she turned around, her mom asked:
“Are you pregnant?”
When she admitted she thought she was, her mother replied:
“Your father can never know.”
And so began my mother’s journey. She was seventeen years old, and a recent high-school graduate. The year was 1963.
Mom was sent to Vancouver Island to work as a housekeeper and helper for a naval officer’s wife overwhelmed with raising three children alone while her husband was at sea. Mom’s dad and her five siblings were told Mom had accepted a job. No one else in the family, except grandma, knew Mom was pregnant. When Mom’s pregnancy advanced to the point she could no longer safely do her job, she was transferred back to mainland BC to the Maywood Home for Unwed Mothers in Vancouver.
Mom doesn’t remember exactly how long she stayed in the Home, a month or so, before her labor started. A nun escorted her to Vancouver’s Grace Hospital, where after laboring alone for hours in April of 1964, Mom eventually birthed a girl she named her for her youngest sister and her mother. Five days later, Grandma collected Mom from the hospital. They paused at the nursery window, and both left crying. Mom continued to cry for years afterwards, but always privately. Her mother had made it very plain she was to tell no one about the baby. And so, for almost two decades, Mom kept the secret bottled inside her. It nearly broke her.
I was fifteen when she finally told me about my older sister, and the circumstances around her birth. We sobbed, and sobbed. Mom’s pain and shame was a raw then as it was in 1998 when she finally met her eldest child. I’d like to say the reunion resulted in a lifelong and loving relationship. It did not. Not all adoption reunions get a HEA. That is in part what inspired me to write My Dear One; to give my heroine, Dianna, the happy ending my mother could only wish for.
Mom eventually sought counselling and received the guidance and support she needed to begin healing, some thirty-four years after leaving her daughter behind in a hospital bassinet for others to raise. There is no way to know if that was the best decision or if my mom could have provided a good life for my half-sister had she the resources and support to keep her, because keeping her simply wasn’t an option.
Mom died in 2023 one of millions of women throughout history coerced by family, society, or circumstances into relinquishing a child in belief it was better for both baby, and birth mother. Time, knowledge, education, and awareness of the psychological harm forced and secret adoptions inflict on not only the mothers but late, on the adoptees desperate to discover their origins has resulted in positive change.
People facing unexpected pregnancies today have options, resources, and assistance to help them make informed decisions. The Internet provides them and others access to a massive online network of support groups for birthmothers and fathers, adoptees, and adoptive families.
My mom found her greatest salvation in an online group of women who, like her, grieved the loss of their secret babies. They all became good friends and frequently got together to visit and to laugh, and to scold and encourage and challenge each other. With their help, my mom eventually came to terms with her birth daughter’s decision to not maintain contact, though Mom left the door open should C change her mind. Unfortunately, Mom passed before C could reach out again.
Please, if you’re a birth mother or father, or an adoptee with unresolved pain regarding the loss of your birth child or birth parents, please reach out before it’s too late. Help is there. You don’t have to suffer alone, or in silence anymore.
For more on where to find help in your area, please check out the following sites:
Adoption Support Groups (Canada)
State by State Support Groups (US)
Family Lives (Adoption Support, UK)
Mom wasn’t my only inspiration. Read about the other woman whose real-life journey was the impetus for my choice of transport for the heroine in my first novel.