Growing up as an adoptee, Mother’s Day was a burbling stewpot of emotions.
In front of me was a sure thing; the mother who chose and loved me, who sacrificed to raise me, and whom I loved. She was my Mom. But in the ether somewhere was the bigger-than-life mystery woman who delivered me then gave me away. I simultaneously loathed and longed for that woman, most keenly on my birthday and Mother’s Day. Those are hard feelings to deal with and they came bundled with guilt, loneliness and identity issues I still wrestle with. It’s incredibly complex, to say the least.
Mom, a stay-at-home mother, was always there for me. She was caring and loving and I knew that she loved me. Still, I felt that something was lacking between us. It felt like a gap — maybe a barrier — and it made me antsy. I admired her, but felt like we were from different planets. I’m sure to everyone else it all seemed great. Lovely, even.
When I didn’t get my first period until I was 13, Mom said it had been different for her, which made me wonder when my birth mom, Sylvia, had gotten hers (I know her name now, but didn’t know it then). So it was with my first pregnancy, labour, and breastfeeding, the torments of menopause and more recently, arthritis and bad hips. Did Sylvia have natural curls like me? The same weird teeth and deep voice? Did she hate fish and lamb, but love pasta? I ached for connection and understanding. Kinship. Shared similarities.
I didn’t want for anything growing up. I had love and security, nice clothes and good food. We went on summer holidays and had oppulent Christmases. There were piano and swimming lessons, and I went to Brownies and Girl Guides. I felt the kinship I speak of with Dad — we were two peas in a pod, always laughing, sharing deep talks late into the night, enjoying music together. So why did I always feel restless? Why weren’t these riches enough?
Eventually I did find her.
It was the early 80s and without the Internet, using libraries and directory assistance and business directories, I tracked her down in England, and she flatly refused contact. But the mysterious woman I fantasized about in childhood now had a name and a face, a history and personality. It’s impossible to grasp the importance of this if you know where you came from and who your people are, but filling in these blanks helped me to feel whole. At about the same time I found my birth father and his family as well, and armed with the knowledge I’d always yearned for, I could feel the hollow space in my chest begin to close.
Decades passed. I became a journalist and got a job with our daily newspaper. When the Internet came along I’d plug Sylvia’s name into Google every once in a while, but always came up dry. Then one day I remembered seeing a letter she’d written where she signed her name as Sylvian, with an ’n’ at the end, so I typed that into the search bar and hit enter.
Boom.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was staring at my mother’s photo and bio on the website of Christine Green, a British author’s agent.
Sylvian Hamilton has never been in the CIA, owned a racehorse, met the Aga Khan — or even Prince Charles — won the lottery, walked to the North Pole or climbed Mount Everest. She has however managed to stay married to the same man for forty years, raised a wonderful son and daughter and countless cats, had a farm in Wales, an antiques shop in Scotland, and for several years was a bookseller specialising in Sherlock Holmes. None of these occupations made her rich.
In her teens she wanted to be an opera singer but life got in the way. She spent five years in Canada lurching from one disaster to another and still has occasional nightmares about crossing the Atlantic in mid-December.
She wrote The Bone-Pedlar because it’s the kind of book she enjoys reading but seldom finds. Technophobic, she approaches her computer with trepidation every morning but couldn’t do without it. If she doesn’t write something, however little, every day, she gets crotchety. If the next morning she re-reads what she wrote the day before and doesn’t like it, everybody’d better duck!
She’s a pagan, but not a witch — no talent — and considers herself greatly blessed by her gods and goddesses. She survived cancer — no time for it — but arthritis eventually shot her down and put paid to any ideas of visiting the pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the terracotta army, or the Great Wall of China. As for walking to the North Pole — in another life, maybe.
Until my husband George got home and I could show him the website, I was a soggy mess. He made a note of the titles and went, unbeknownst to me, to the local Chapters with a plan to order them for me. He was stunned when the clerk did a search and advised him all three books were in stock.
Mother’s Day came just a few days later. As I noshed on a lovely breakfast in bed, George handed me a festive giftbag, surprisingly heavy for its size. When I pulled out the colourful tissue paper and peered inside, I was unable to move for a few seconds and couldn’t speak. My mother’s novels had been on the shelf at a bookstore where we live. I must have walked past them a dozen times. The lump in my throat was the only thing that kept my heart from leaping out of my body.
A few months later, after endless introspection, I screwed up my courage and wrote to Christine Green. I laid out the sensitive nature of things along with the whole story. “But life is short, Christine,” I said, “ and I want to give her another chance. I don’t want her to regret saying no back then and not know how to reach me. Would you be willing to speak with her privately to ask if she’s open to contact now?”
She replied, “Sylvian doesn’t come to London much any more. She’s in a lot of pain from arthritis and she cares for her husband, who is quite a bit older than she is. But here’s what I’m prepared to do: Make a book and send it to me, with photos from your life and things you always wanted to ask her. The next time she comes to London, I will give it to her. I can’t guarantee she’ll respond, but I’ll do that much.”
For weeks I second-guessed each selection I made and finally assembled a wee green binder and shipped it off to London. I wrapped it snugly in brown paper, like a baby. As it left my hands, I felt so vulnerable. In my mind I pictured Christine handing it to her; imagined her reacting a thousand different ways.
Some six months later, hearing nothing, I wrote again to follow up. Christine replied, somewhat crisply, that she would let me know if it happened and to please, leave it be. Another year passed. I told myself to let it go, and never did hear from Christine again.
On Mother’s Day, in the spring of 2005, thinking of her as usual, I did what I’d done so many times before and pulled up Sylvian’s bio. In bold font at the top of the page, I read:
Sylvian Hamilton died on 28th February 2005. She left behind three books (a fourth was uncompleted) and a huge gap in the lives of those who knew her. Her shining intelligence, her humour and her warmth will be greatly missed by her family and friends, and by her readers.
It was a gut-punch. A haymaker. A shotgun blast to the heart. How do you grieve for someone you never knew, other than to grieve that now there will never be a chance? I didn’t think I’d harboured any hope of meeting her, but clearly I had.
I had to breathe and regroup. I wrote to Christine and asked how Sylvian died, explaining how I’d seen the note on her bio. She got back to me immediately — horrified — to say she had sent me a letter right after it happened. Turns out it had gone to an old address.
She was able to find it in her files and re-send, Poor Christine — she felt awful about that — but in the details I learned my mother had died of cancer.
In my grief I gave myself a shake. I still had my Mom.
It took about two years after I started my research in the 80s before I summoned up the guts to tell my folks. I knew Mom was insecure because of how she answered my questions growing up — briefly, vaguely, while looking out the nearest window. As I spun the tale of discovery, Dad was excited and amazed, while she stood up and started wiping down the cupboards. When George gave me Sylvian’s books I showed them to Mom. I thought she might even like to read them. I think she said, “Mm. Huh.” I put them in front of her on the table, but she wouldn’t pick them up. Sometime after Sylvian died, I told her that news too, and she said “Oh.” Perhaps I expected too much of her. I just wanted to be honest.
Dad died in 2001, and without him around I got to know Mom a lot better. She was over one day while I was re-finishing furniture and as I worked I asked her about her childhood. That conversation shed so much light on how the trauma in her youth had shaped her response to life and relationships. At the end of the day, I’m grateful to have gleaned that undestanding.
In her last five years her health was poor and she pined for Dad. Dementia followed a stroke and then she fell and broke her hip, spending her last eight months confined to bed, confused and in pain. She lashed out and said cruel things that were hard to take, even knowing it was the dementia talking. I have to say it’s finally getting easier to remember better times with her, now that two years have passed since her death.
These days social workers and prospective adoptive parents know about something called the Adoption Constellation. To wit: there’s me, bursting into the cosmos as a little star, with a host of heavenly bodies in orbit around me. My birth parents and all their kin and my adoptive parents and all theirs — those are the planets. As time goes by, comets, meteors and asteroids come along and get pulled in — those are the friends and lovers, co-workers. Therapists.
In the constellation, what happens to one affects all, so we know now that since birth I have been affected by the energies of two families, even though one of them wasn’t physically present. I only mention it because if parents in the 50s and 60s had known this, their adopted children might have felt less guilty and more … heard.
It’s Mother’s Day again. I’m all out of mothers these days but I AM a Mom, and my children and grandchildren are the greatest blessings of my life.