The girls in the Magdalene laundries were stripped of their names, their dignity and ultimately their babies. Documentaries and films have been made telling of this time in Irish history. Talk shows have devoted hours recounting the experiences of those who were unfortunate enough to experience the laundries. But how many women became pregnant, give up their children and held it all to themselves in the intervening years?

While researching my book Something Borrowed, which deals with an adopted daughters search for her mother, I wanted to be as faithful as I could to the feelings of all the parties concerned. I interviewed adoptive parents, adopted people but nowhere could I find a natural mother willing to talk to me, until a friend put me in contact with a woman had given up her child in the early eighties. Even though she has now met her daughter, the pain of what she went through is still there.

In the early eighties, Vanessa became pregnant. To her parents, it was a tragedy. Her mother urged her to have the baby adopted and because she was young, there was intense pressure on her.

“I would write it in my life’s blood on the floor – if I could have kept my baby - I would have”, she says.

“You could not get rented accommodation in Dublin as a single mother at that time. Well, not unless you wanted to live in a damp hovel.”

“I walked my feet off trying to make a different answer happen and I couldn’t” she says. Her voice breaks and she looks at me. “I did everything except keep her.” She admits that she never got over it and she never had other children.

“She was beautiful and perfect and lots of people wanted her. But the person that wanted her most couldn’t keep her.”

After she lost her daughter, Vanessa says she cried every day for a very long time.

She decided that when or if her daughter ever came back to her, that she would make her proud of her.

“I had a total open-armed feeling about a reunion – who wouldn’t want a huge slice of their life back. The adoption itself was a huge, huge driver for me regarding my career. I made sure that I got, as quickly as possible, into a position where I would never ever be forced to make a decision like that again.

Vanessa found her daughter through the APA contact registry. “I lived for the day my daughter would be eighteen. When the call came from the APA, I went into shock. Very happy, happy shock. I remember coming home and crossing the road to one of my neighbours and saying, ‘My daughter has found me’. They were some of the happiest words I could ever say.”

Their initial contact was through e-mail. Her daughter asked her questions and Vanessa answered them as best she could. I ask Vanessa if it took her long to compose her first letter to her daughter and Vanessa shakes her head. “I just wrote ‘Welcome to the happiest day of my life’. And we met three weeks later.”

Their reunion went well, but I ask, how are things now. “My biggest fear now is that I might lose her again, that at some point she might get whatever she wants from the relationship and leave me.

I know it’s irrational but most natural mothers feel, when they gave their children up, that they weren’t good enough to keep their babies.

And our children sometimes feel that they weren’t good enough to be kept.

Neither mother nor child ever loses that.

I hate to think that as well as giving my daughter her lovely soft hair and her blue eyes, I have also given her a feeling that she is not good enough.”

Vanessa is involved in associations dealing with adoption. She counsels women on line regarding reunions. She is adamant that all reunions are good.

“There is no such thing as a bad reunion. If all there ever was between my daughter and I was that one e-mail, isn’t it better than no contact at all? Even just to learn the child is alive and didn’t suffer abuse at the hands of people to whom they were entrusted is good. And the child learns that they belong somewhere on planet earth. And they learn that they were loved.”

And as I leave Vanessa’s house, I glance at the walls. There, centred among pictures of her father and family, is a picture of her daughter. And it belongs.

If you have lost a child to adoption and wish to make contact with other natural mothers, you can e-mail Vanessa at Mathairail@eircom.net

©Tina Reilly 2004