The B.C. Catholic continues a series on forced adoption in Canada with part 2. This week, a Senate report that called for an apology, a new documentary, and a sister’s perspective. See links to additional stories at the end.
“The past is a foreign country ... they do things differently there.”
The quote is from The Go-Between, a 1953 novel by L.P. Hartley. The story that follows is my family’s.
I am the eldest of 11 children Bernadette Dumas-Rymer mentions in the documentary Mum’s The Word. Nine of us were silenced for decades about what happened to Bernadette when she was whisked away to Canada, to deliver and be forced to leave her little daughter to return to Australia. I was one of these silenced nine siblings, living in Sydney preparing and giving birth to my first child.
What caused and enforced our silence and our lack of compassion? Our father’s domination, which represented the views of the Catholic Church and society as a whole.
Only one sister (whom I’ll call Anne) tried to challenge this culture of secrecy and denial. She had stayed in Vancouver when the seven others returned to Sydney at the beginning of the 1970 Australian school year. Anne recalls that after the birth of Bernadette’s child, while waiting the mandatory 10 days before signing the adoption papers, Bernadette cried constantly for her baby.
Anne saw Bernadette’s distress and approached Dad, offering to stay in Canada with her; together they would raise the baby, whom Bernadette would have named Marnie.
Dad told Bernadette that she could keep her baby, but she would have to stay in Canada and never return to Australia. She would have to promise to never contact her family or friends again, and if they contacted her, she must promise to never respond. Her mother also strongly opposed the plan.
Anne remembers that Bernadette was so hysterical with grief that she could not understand what he was saying. And so, her baby was adopted, and Anne joined this bond of secrecy and never discussed it with anyone.
Two years after Bernadette was forced to relinquish Marnie, all the family, except one sister, migrated to Canada. This is a separate saga but painful because the family was now in the same city, on the same continent, as this never-discussed grandchild.
For Anne and Bernadette, this silence lasted 38 years – 32 years after our father’s death and four years after our mother died. At a family barbecue in Vancouver, Anne asked Bernadette why she refused her offer to stay in Canada. Bernadette was baffled by the question as she had no memory of Dad saying that Anne would stay with her in Canada. Both sisters were dumbfounded and devastated by what Bernadette calls “Dad’s deceit and manipulation.”
What does it take for a culture to change? What enables individuals to recognize their complicity, sometimes willing, sometimes unconscious, to talk to the wounded in their families and friendship groups and to realize that for those in pain and still suffering trauma, the past is not a “foreign country”? This country is their present world.
For me the change was gradual. Since 1977, a year after our father’s death in Vancouver, I had lived in Indonesia. In 1986 I returned to Sydney to live and work. Each year I was “blessed” to return to Vancouver for a visit. I stayed with various siblings each time but always spent a week or two in B.C.’s Interior, where Bernadette lived and worked. Over the past 20 years Bernadette has told me bits of her story. I have been privileged to really see her pain. This began my process of reviewing my family experiences and those of my siblings. I now see many events and situations in a different light.
The years have enormously increased our family numbers. The marriages of 10 siblings added in-laws and Mum had 56 grandchildren by the time she died. Only a few years before her death she stopped saying “55” and she acknowledged and welcomed Bernadette’s daughter. But this didn’t happen until Marnie was in her twenties. She and Bernadette had met and were trying to build a relationship. As I write, this vulnerable connection has broken, bringing Bernadette more pain.
One moment in our family history, which Bernadette hasn’t mentioned, still appalls me. It was our mother’s 80th birthday celebration. The 11 siblings and Mum had a dinner in a Vancouver hotel. We sat in the usual places for meals as we had in the big home in Sydney before 1970. One sibling shared an anecdote about Mum crying one day in Sydney. She explained that she was sad because it was the birthday of Mum’s 11th child, Gerard, who died about a day after he was born. We all “ooed and ahhed” at Mum’s steadfast love for this lost child. Only later, when Bernadette began to share her story and feelings, could I see Bernadette at that table, still and mute. Her child and her pain had been erased from our collective memory.
It is painful to confront the past hurt and injustices that we have caused or ignored or denied. This is now happening in our family. Some are hearing and believing Bernadette. Others are denying what happened. Recently one sibling refused to listen as Bernadette tried to explain her adoption advocacy work and contact with Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller and his colleagues. This sibling silenced Bernadette by saying “that is nonsense.” When she tried again the retort was “that’s rubbish, you don’t know what you are talking about, this never happened.”
By contrast, some other siblings have really listened and have opened their hearts to a story that was in their midst, unacknowledged for fifty years. After reading Bernadette’s story, one sibling wrote to me:
“That is the saddest story I’ve ever read. I had to read it in bits; couldn’t take it all at once. And all in our own family! Tragedy within tragedy. Blocked by lies on all sides. And no compassion anywhere, except from Anne which, thanks to her father, Bernadette didn’t even know about! Really really terrible.”
“But what a champion Bernadette is. Despite all that continuing pain over 50 years she is so active in helping the thousands of other mothers bereft of stolen babies. Hopefully Bernadette and others can draw a little consolation from the governments’ and churches’ acknowledgement finally of the dreadful treatment of those poor young mothers. I’m still overwhelmed by her story and my ignorance.”
Therese Curtis has been a high school teacher for 50 years. She is currently a tutor and freelance writer and editor living in Sydney, Australia.