This story was created as part of the VANISH Storytelling Workshops for Adult Adoptees, a new initiative supported by Relationships Victoria and the Australian Government’s Forced Adoption Support Services Small Grants Program.
Facilitated by adoptee, theatre director, and teaching artist Dr Alison Ingram, the workshops offered a safe and creative space for adoptees to explore and express their experiences through storytelling.
“Infant-maternal separation”
This is the singular event I am forever changed by, and since the lifting of the fog, actively trying to heal from.
The first hurdle, acknowledging and accepting this event even exists, because I don’t consciously remember it, has taken me 48 years to do. All I had been told was that I was adopted from birth, via a short stay with Mrs King. Even after I received all my documents a few years ago – I read it with voracious interest but still failed to put it all together, to connect with it, on a timeline. It was like reading disconnected snippets of stories, about someone else. I just popped the file in the cabinet to be forgotten. Until now.
And this first event – for me – begins before I was born—in a small country town in the mid 70s where my mother 15 and father 16 said goodbye to their childhood the moment she realised she was pregnant, which wasn’t for the first few months. It was devastating. She told my father but no one else. In that time and place, despite the availability of the single mothers pension, being young and pregnant outside of marriage was still a scandal. Girls were hidden away, families were shamed, secrets were kept, illegitimate babies were sent to childless married couples. It was a very well-oiled automated machine.
Eventually, she confided in her best friend, who said, “My aunt in the city will help you.” So she packed a small bag and left. She told her mother she’d found a job. In reality, she was seven months pregnant and incredibly lonely and scared. The support was short-lived, and soon she was back in her small home town—living in a caravan, then sleeping in her friend’s lounge room.
She finally told her mother, and despite her support, they continued to tell no-one, it was still a shameful secret, and she strongly encouraged adoption as the only option. “Too young. Too selfish. Too immature.” My father’s family couldn’t know either—as his father was the town’s gynaecologist. I guess these things were only allowed to happen to other people’s children.
And then, in the early hours of October 4th, she went into labour. She was just 16. Alone. Terrified.
I was born healthy. A perfect baby, by all medical accounts. And then I was taken away immediately. No first skin to skin, no smiles, no soft voices. No one held me. I was placed in a sterile nursery and became another unnamed baby in a row of bassinets.
I had spent 9 months hearing my mother’s voice, sharing biochemistry, registering her heartbeat. And then she was gone. The first 9 months after birth are called external gestation because we are born so underdeveloped. We are utterly dependent and helpless and have an unconscious expectation for nurturing, for immediate contact after birth with our mothers. For survival. But this was not the case for me.
Research tells me that I did not experience ‘relinquishment’, I experienced abandonment. That first separation triggered a series of biological, emotional and psychological disruptions which would and will persist for my entire life.
No one came for me. A nurse from the adoption era was asked how the babies up for adoption reacted when taken from their mothers. She paused and said, “We always waited… until they stopped crying. Two days, maybe three.”
How long did I cry before I gave up trying to find her? And determined that I was just that unlovable.
My mother and father saw me once, a week later, held me once. A part of the process. After that, I was alone again. Poked, prodded, measured, weighed—blood tests taken, physicals done—all part of the adoption paperwork. Did anyone show an interest in me?
For two weeks, I stayed in that hospital. I imagine it was the same every day. Feed, sleep, check the vitals, repeat. And what about the flat spot on the back of my head? I can’t ask, but it’s there, a subtle reminder of the lack of care or attention I received? I have read of nurses who were designated primary carers for babies for adoption – often trainee nurses, who loved the babies and gave them lots of cuddles and attention. I would love to think I had someone like that.
On October 21st, I was discharged—not to my adopting family but to the Department of Social Welfare in Melbourne. One file was closed, another opened. From there, I was placed with Mrs. King, a foster carer for the department. Her house became my temporary home along with other babies, also waiting – for what I’m not sure. Did we still think our mothers were coming for us? Did we hope? Had we given up and were now just looking for the first person to latch on to for survival?
The department kept more notes. My file described me as irritable, with poor feeding, colic, and a blocked tear duct. My foster mother described me as “not a good-looking babe”—another added in pencil over the typed notes, “but is appealing.”
Someone documented my smile—as if it were a sign things might be getting better. Maybe it was me trying to connect, to attach, to survive.
Then, on December 9th, aged nine weeks old—the age you’d collect a puppy—I was taken away from Mrs King, and collected by my adopting parents. They gave me a new name.
Before that, I was simply Unnamed baby P, or sometimes “Jane” in the documentation—as in Jane Doe. The name for someone lost. Or dead.
And with that my past was erased, and a new life began.
Piecing together this event for me is not about guilt or blame. It’s about understanding what happened to me. It’s about truth. Because the earliest parts of my life—the ones I can’t remember—still live in me. And it is in this truth that I finally feel seen, I feel real. I feel safe.