Gift of the gods

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Sandy McCutcheon

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Sandy McCutcheon's biography and other articles by this writer

For a few days as 2004 slipped into 2005, Tony Abbott and I had a lot in common. On December 26 he received the news that his son, given up for adoption in 1977, had made contact. He called the same day to be greeted with the now famous remark, "Thanks for having me."

Five days before Tony Abbott made that momentous call, I received an email from a young woman claiming to be my daughter. The name didn't ring a bell and for a moment or two I was hesitant until I read that she had been adopted out in 1968 and had her name changed. I had known her as Chantelle; she was now called Yvonne. It was just after five in the morning and I rang her immediately. Although I am sure she made several quotable remarks, the emotion of the moment has wiped them from my memory.

It seems Tony Abbott and I went through a similar mix of emotions: joy at having discovered a long lost child and anxiety about how they might react to the contact. "I was instantly anxious about how I was going to get on with the son I'd only seen once, for a few minutes, just after he was born," Abbott wrote in The Bulletin in March. My feelings were similar. How would this young woman on the other side of the world react to the moment of meeting? I had not one single clue to her identity, education or upbringing. The fact that she was Irish and living in Dublin further complicated things.

Yvonne and I spent a lot of time on the phone over the next few days. And the news I received was – to say the least – staggering. My daughter was a clinical psychologist, married with two young children. Suddenly, out of the blue, I had become a grandfather.

THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN OUR STORIES WERE, AT FIRST GLANCE, remarkable, yet on reflection some major differences emerged. Both babies had been handed over to a Catholic adoption agency, but only one willingly. Yvonne's mother, Margaret, had no intention of giving up her baby. She had returned from working in London to Ireland and, as she said in a letter, was full of joy and excitement at the prospect of devoting herself to raising the daughter she had named Chantelle Noelle. Sadly, this did not turn out to be the case. On returning to Ireland, Margaret was forced into a "mothers and babies home" by the nuns and told that she was not a fit person to be a mother and that her daughter must be given up for adoption. The night before the handover, in one last desperate attempt to keep her, she escaped with the baby through a window, only to be caught and returned to the home. The following day she was driven to a Wexford hotel where the baby was removed by the nuns handling the adoption. At the time I knew nothing of this. My subsequent letters, offer of an air fare to New Zealand and declaration of my determination to stay involved went unanswered.

To the credit of the adopting parents, both children were raised knowing they were adopted and both initiated searches for their natural parents. I had been adopted and denied any information about that adoption. I knew how important that knowledge is to adoptees, as they set out on the search for their roots. It is often the only certainty they have. Even then the quest is rarely straightforward.

Yvonne's search was a long and frustrating tussle with the layers of bureaucracy in the Irish Adoption Board. In the mid-1980s, while still a teenager, she approached the authorities and was told that there were no records. Refusing to accept this, she contacted the board time and again only to be continually rebuffed. The desire to find her birth parents did not diminish over the years. When she turned 20 she decided to pursue a new line of inquiry and track down the agency that had handled the adoption. To her dismay, she learnt that it had been closed down. But then came a breakthrough – Yvonne discovered the name and address of one of the nuns who had worked in the agency at the time of her adoption. She wrote to her and was surprised to receive a reply that further fuelled her search. The nun not only remembered her case but also gave her the first concrete facts she had ever had. In the letter, the nun disclosed that Yvonne's mother's name was Margaret and her father's Robert and that he was a New Zealander. Even more important was that, according to the nun, her father had written several times saying he wanted her and her mother to join him. Yvonne was elated. Knowing names and, more importantly, knowing that she had been wanted, was a huge emotional plus. She kept the letter for years, reading it over and over again until it literally fell to pieces.

Sadly, just knowing the first names of her parents was not enough to enable her to trace them. For that she needed information that she was convinced must be held by the adoption board. The board, however, still refused to divulge anything.

In the early 1990s, after a decade of searching, Yvonne approached the board with a request for a caseworker to assist her, only to be told that they had no brief to assist with tracing. The only breakthrough she had was a hint that there may well have been some information being held by the board. It was, she later told me, a period of intense frustration. It was to last for another decade. Working as a clinical psychologist, she was fully aware of where the records were kept and, as she once angrily pointed out to a stonewalling bureaucrat, if she changed departments she could access them with ease. The anger was still evident in her voice when she related the story to me earlier this year.

I, too, had been searching. The primary object of my search over the years had been for my own birth parents and, for me, such an emotionally fraught undertaking was not sustainable on a daily basis. Long periods of time would go by in which the constraints of earning a living took precedence and the search was relegated to the background. My own experience of adoption had left me with deeply felt issues of abandonment, which sadly flowed over to my personal relationships. The failure of my first two marriages seemed ample proof that I was a flawed individual and reinforced my sense of being destined to be abandoned. However, it also made me very aware of my responsibility to my children – those from my marriages and my missing child in Ireland.

Tracing Yvonne was an extraordinarily complex task. The affair with her mother had taken place in England. I had returned to New Zealand and subsequently moved to Australia and Margaret had – as far as I knew – returned to Ireland. Over a period of a couple of months back in 1968, I had written several letters, the last of which came back marked "unknown at this address". Having no knowledge of where she was living, and without the internet and Google, I had hit a brick wall.

Yet, as my other children grew up, I told them the story of my "Irish daughter" and though I was dispirited about my chances of ever finding her, my daughter Maha remained convinced that "the Irish Christmas baby" would turn up one day. As the years went by, my belief that Maha's conviction would prove true waxed and waned. Even when the internet and genealogical databases came online, there were some obvious difficulties.

Yvonne's mother's name was extremely common in Ireland and the search was complicated by the fact that I assumed, correctly, that she may have married and changed her name. So I hunted for my daughter. Her original name, Chantelle Noelle, was uncommon, so I figured it would be easy to trace. Unfortunately, given the delighted tone of Margaret's only letter to me about her birth, I had not even considered the possibility that she might have been adopted out and had her name changed. My searches and inquiries were fruitless.