Helpless (23 page)
I
picked up another envelope from the coffee table. Inside were two letters that I had never posted. I had written them at the time when that adoption law had changed.
In them I told each of my daughters in turn how much I had loved them and how I had never forgotten them or ceased to miss them.
‘And if one day you decide to find me,’ I had written, ‘will you bring all those photographs that tell the story of the years I’ve missed – those pictures taken of you as a baby and then as a toddler, when you were just learning to walk? I want to know how you looked on your first day at school, read one of your reports to see if you have any of my interests. Your parents, the ones you have called Mum and Dad, will have those memories imprinted in their minds, whereas mine stop when you were just a few weeks old. They can look at them, those memories of all the magic moments, at will, smile at some and chuckle at others. And I just want to borrow them, to pretend for a short time that they were mine.’
The hours ticked by without me noticing that the day was passing. It was not until I heard the door open that I realized it was late afternoon. I heard my husband’s voice calling out to me, and then he was in the room.
‘Marianne, whatever is the matter?’ he asked the moment he saw me huddled on the settee, and it was when I heard the note of concern in his voice that I broke down. Tears of guilt and shame poured down my face.
I passed him the letters I had written.
‘Read them,’ I said.
For a few minutes, apart from the rustle of paper, there was silence.
‘You had two daughters,’ he said. ‘Two, not one?’
His voice, I realized then, was more sad then angry. But still I was unable to look at him.
‘Thirteen!’ he said incredulously. ‘You were thirteen and you went through that? Why did you never tell me?’
I told him I had been too ashamed, that I had felt that way about myself since I was eight. Then for the first time in my life I blurted out the whole story of my childhood and the man next door. As I spoke, I could feel Bob’s anger filling the room and I shrank into the corner of the settee.
He asked me questions, until finally the whole story was out.
‘The bastard, the bloody bastard,’ he said, when he learnt that the man next door had fathered both my children.
‘Maybe you were right not to tell me,’ he said, at last, ‘because if I had known I don’t know what I might have done to that bastard.’
Gradually he reassured me that his anger was only for what had happened to me.
He was just so sorry, sorry that I had carried that burden for so long.
‘Marianne,’ he said at last, as he watched me sobbing for the past and for the future, ‘listen to me! You did nothing wrong. You were only a child. Oh, you might have known what was happening was wrong, but you could not have understood why. Children don’t. God, you must have been so frightened, so unhappy! And your parents did nothing to stop it! Your father is such a bully. If it were my daughter, I’d have killed him. I swear it.’
It was then that I showed him the letter from my daughter.
We talked for the rest of that evening. I asked what our sons would think.
‘Things have changed since we were young, Marianne,’ was Bob’s answer to that. ‘You’re their mother, and they love you as much as I do. Nothing is going to change that. We’ll invite them up this weekend and tell them together.’ He kissed me then, and as I felt the warmth of his body and of his spirit I felt safe again.
‘So, I guess you have rather a special phone call to make in the morning.’
I
would like to say that a week later, when I opened the door to my daughter and my grandchild, if we had met somewhere else we would have instantly recognized each other. That the bond I had felt all those years ago had somehow kept us connected. But I can’t. I simply saw an attractive young woman standing on the threshold.
And was I the person she had imagined? I asked this of her after we had talked for a while. ‘No,’ she had replied, ‘because I have always thought of you as that vulnerable fifteen-year-old girl who had been made to give her baby up for adoption.’
We talked, my daughter and I, of the years that had passed, and she showed me the photographs that when I made the telephone call I had asked her to bring.
I was wrong about them, and as one by one I looked at them I realized that there was no substitute for shared memories – they were just pictures of a child I could not recognize.
I told her that she had a sister and finally explained who her father was.
She took it in her stride, for after all the man who had brought her up was her real father, as was his wife her real mother. It hurt to hear that, but I am glad she felt that way; it meant they had loved her, they had made her their own and she had been happy.
When they left, with her promises to keep in touch, I cried for what was my irrevocable loss.
Bob and I told our sons together that they had two sisters. Their response was to ask when they were going to meet them.
Sonia, as I had hoped she would, traced and contacted me a year later.
She was overjoyed to learn she had a sister and a niece, and their meeting was a happy one.
She had never married, she told me; maybe it was her adoptive parents’ cold marriage that had put her off that idea.
Sadly I learnt that my eldest daughter had never connected with the couple that had adopted her. They were middle aged when she went to them and she told me that it was a house without laughter.
I felt, as I remembered that tiny baby dressed in that boy’s blue romper suit, that she blamed me for that. Or maybe this was just the guilt I felt, for I had wanted at least to hear that both my daughters had been happy.
Since we met Kathy, whose name her adoptive parents never changed, her family has increased and I am a grandmother several times over. We keep in touch with birthday and Christmas cards and even the occasional visit.
Sonia decided that, whereas she wanted to stay in touch with her sister, there was too little to connect us to warrant staying in contact. I still hope one day she will change her mind.
When Bob sees that look on my face, the one that tells him my mind has slipped back to my teenage years, he takes my hand and tells me that not every memory can be a happy one. ‘But,’ he says then, ‘I’ll try and make the new ones good.’
And he does.
To my husband, for his encouragement and support in writing the book, but mostly for giving me a life of stability, security, happiness and love.
To my sons also, for their support and understanding, and for completing my life with the happiness they bring me. I am so proud of the men they have become.
To my sister and her family, who have always been there for me, through my rollercoaster life of emotions.
To all of my dear friends, old and new, here and abroad – they will know who they are. Thank you, each and every one of you, for always being there.
To my daughters, thank you for giving me the pleasure of getting to know you and to hold you again.
To Toni, without whom I could not have written my story.
And to Barbara and HarperCollins for making it possible.
This is a work of non-fiction. In order to protect privacy, names, identifying characteristics, dialogue and details have been changed or reconstructed.
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Published by HarperElement 2009
© Marianne Marsh and Toni Maguire 2009
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