Clayton Ruby, a well known and respected lawyer in Toronto is launching a court challenge to the Adoption Information Disclosure Act, 2005, which will come into effect late this fall in Ontario. Mr. Ruby believes that parents and children involved in adoption have the right of privacy and if they so wish, should have the right to restrict that information contained in their files so no one can access the personal information.
I so disagree with this. ( I will explain why I disagree in my father's story, the dundas side). Thank Gawd for Marilyn Churley who has led the fight to make Ontario open its adoption books. I am a foster child, I was never legally adopted. I was six months old when my maternal grandmother brought me to a farm in rural Whitby and left me with a family with the understanding that it would be for a short period of time. That short period stretched into 19 years. Now, I consider myself fortunate that I was never legally adopted. That means my birth certificate was never changed. What bit of information that was available to me was found quite by accident one day when, as a child of 12 years, I was rummaging through an old trunk in my foster parents' home and discovered a letter that had been written to my foster parents from my maternal grandmother. I had always known that I was "adopted" from an early age because my two older foster brothers would bring up that fact quite often when they wanted to be mean and nasty to me, in the sense that "you are adopted and you don't belong, you are not one of us".
I held on to that letter (it was never missed by my foster parents) because where I came from and how I was raised with this family, was never discussed. At a young age I knew not to ask my foster parents any of those kind of questions, knowing that I would not get an answer. Perhaps I was afraid that the answer would be what my foster brothers always said to me.."your mother did not want you so she gave you away".
When I was nineteen, I was no longer living with my foster family. It was 1959 and I was employed at Bell Telephone as an information and long distance operator. It was very easy for me to take the letter, written by my grandmother, and locate a telephone number for her. I did not think at the time about how shocked my grandmother would be when she got the telephone call from me. I have to give her credit though because not once did she scold me for calling or tell me that my mother would not want to hear from me, instead she asked me some information about myself, told me that I had a brother who was a year older than I and took my telephone number, promising me that she would give this information to my mother.
I left work that afternoon, going home to my apartment, waiting with a feeling of trepidation for the shrill ring of the telephone. The telephone did ring and on the other end was my mother. She began by asking me questions and then telling me why she had been unable to keep me. I discovered that my mother and father had been married, that my father was in the army and that my mother left him when I was a couple of weeks old because she said he had been physically abusive to her.
We agreed to meet the following Sunday and so with my boyfriend whom I had asked to accompany me for support, we drove to Cooksville, Ontario... to the restaurant where my mother and her common law husband were waiting..I walked into the restuarant, it was mid-afternoon but inside it was dark and gloomy (not a good sign). My mother saw us and immediately left the booth where she had been sitting and came up to me. I saw a stranger.
All those years of growing up, living with a family who were the complete opposite in looks to me...they were fair-skin, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, whilst I had jet-black hair, green eyes but I did have a fair skin (from my celtic ancestors, I later discovered). I looked at this stranger standing before me, looking for similarities but finding none, only in the shape of our body. My mother had a dark swarthy complexion, black hair and black eyes. This was not the mother of my childhood dreams.
We left the restaurant and followed my mother and her partner to a trailer park in Cooksville. They lived in a large trailer on a well-kept little street within the trailer park. Masses of climbing roses hung over the fence that bordered their corner lot and and competed for colour with scarlet geraniums that were planted in flower beds around the trailer.
My mother thought it best to have a talk first so she and I went into the trailer to the spare bedroom where we both sat down. I listened to what she had to say, again she placed all of the blame on my father, saying he used to beat her up all the time which was why she left him (I found my father 28 years later and my very first look at him convinced me that what my mother said was a lie, even thinking that just maybe it was the other way around, she beating my father). Now at 19, I was not that wise but I thought it very unfair of her to defame my father when he was not present to defend himself. I did not say this to her of course but that figured greatly in making me withdraw and not allowing myself to be open with her. It also prevented me from having any kind of deep feeling for her. She told me about my brother, a half-brother, named Larry who was one year older than me. She told me she was pregnant with Larry when his father was accidentally killed, racing a speed-boat on the Detroit River. She also told me she married my father to give my brother a legal name but then became pregnant with me right away.
We kept in fairly close contact from 1959 to 1972. I married in 1962 (the same boyfriend who accompanied me on my first visit to my mother), we had two daughters, born 1963 and 1966. My mother did visit quite often and our daughters called her nan. Our third child, a son, was born June 9th, 1970. He had a severe birth defect (a hole in his diaphragm) and lived only for three hours. From 1970 to 1971 we saw very little of my mother and in 1972 our second son was born on January 13th. I asked her to visit to see her grandson but she always put it off.
In November of that year she sent me a birthday card, wishing me a happy birthday but said she thought it was best for her if she did not visit but did want to stay in contact by means of a yearly birthday card. I chose not to reply. I have not spoken to her or contacted her since that date.
I will admit the relationship was very one-sided. I tried to give more but could not, a hangover I think from being abandoned because that is and has always been the way I look at what both of my parents did to me, they equally abandoned their responsibility to me. Consequently, to this day, I am close only to my husband, my daughters and my son and his wife.
Finding my father (the Dundas side of that story) will follow.
