Hana from VANISH speaks to Jude Newcombe about her self-published book Did You Find Her? A Mother’s Memoir: an honest, insightful account of relinquishing a daughter for adoption decades ago, the emotional and psychological impacts, and a reunion that still isn’t the neat and resolved thing people often expect it to be.
What follows is a conversation between two women with different lived experiences of adoption, condensed and lightly edited for length. Hana is a Korean adoptee who has been in reunion for sixteen years. Names have been changed, as they are in the book. Jude’s daughter appears here as Claudia and her granddaughter as Cecilia.
The writing process
How long ago did you write this?
I finished it late last year, but I’d started a long time before that. It was a slow process. I only ever wrote on a Tuesday morning, and that was deliberate. Another relinquishing mother I know, who’s also a writer, told me she’d never dare write about her own experience because it might tip her back into depression. So I gave myself guardrails.
So how many years did it take, all up?
Twelve, maybe longer. But only on Tuesday mornings, so I wasn’t writing in between. I was in a writing group that met every fortnight, and on the other Tuesdays I’d meet one of the women from the group at a cafe in Brunswick. We’d sit there for hours, scribbling away. She was very supportive. She’s since passed away.
I’d also kept a journal for most of my life, which turned out to be useful later on. I’d pour things out whenever I needed to sort myself out, not always to do with the adoption.
It sounds like the purpose of the book changed a lot over that time.
It did. When I started, I was thinking mostly of my granddaughter, who I call Cecilia in the book. I wanted her to know something about her background, so the early parts, about growing up and family history, are quite long. Then it shifted. Years earlier, when Julia Gillard gave the national apology, I’d had a piece published in The Age. A friend told me it was good because it wasn’t all about how terrible everything was, and I thought, that’s fine for a newspaper piece. But I couldn’t write a whole book without talking about the psychological repercussions, because that’s something shared by most relinquishing mothers, and it tends to surface later in life. So I did go into that. Towards the end, I had to work out how to finish it, given how little I hear from my daughter now.
So in the middle of that writing process, you felt this pull to be honest about the psychological impact? I think that’s something adoptees and mothers share. Adoptees often say they were completely fine, that they didn’t think about being adopted at all, often until their 40s or 50s. We suppress something for a long time and function well enough, until we’re forced to confront it.
That was absolutely the case for me. There are a lot of reasons a relinquishing mother eventually does the search. For me, it came from a dream. A terrible dream about madness. I’m not the only relinquishing mother who’s had something like that: some incredibly disturbing dream that feels like your subconscious telling you that you can’t leave this behind, that you have to follow it through.
Was that around a particular time? Your sons were young then, right?
They were about eight or nine. That’s a bit of a Goldilocks age with kids. They’re settled at school, not yet into adolescence, not needing constant attention. There was more room in my life. The other trigger was that adoption legislation was changing, and I had the opportunity to search.
The road to reunion
In the book you mention ARMS (an organisation for mothers) talking about the road to reunion. What is that, exactly?
You have to talk to people about the fact that you’ve got this child, so your identity is changing all the time. That whole thing of saying, I’ve got three children, and the first one lives in Germany, and I gave her up for adoption. That’s quite a big thing to do, with everyone in the family, because it had all been a family secret. My own sons I told when they were very young, so it was never a shock to them.
That was around when I first saw the woman I call Barbara One in the book, a family therapist. There was an enormous level of grief that came unplugged, which I’d repressed for most of my life, 19 years really. I couldn’t stop crying. I was emotionally completely raw. Every step you had to take felt like walking through mud up to your waist. Even writing to my mother to say I was going to do this was very difficult. And then the waiting. That was a long process too.
So that was the road to reunion. Then we [my daughter and I] exchanged letters, just before she turned nineteen.
I was struck by your commitment to openness with your extended family, even though it clearly wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t. I don’t like family secrets, of any kind. I think they always have consequences. That comes from earlier in my own life too. My father once told me he’d been married before, and that the whole circumstance of my parents’ marriage had been interfered with by the church. I’d had no idea. I’d thought they simply didn’t love each other, which was hard for me to sit with. Finding out wasn’t what horrified me. What horrified me was that the church had made that kind of ruling over them in the first place.
Once the search itself began, what did that actually look like?
Once the Queensland legislation changed, other women I knew through ARMS pointed me to a small service that two women had set up to do searches. They were very sensitive about it. They’d say things like, we’ll time the letter so it doesn’t land on a Friday, so she isn’t left sitting with it over the weekend. That kind of awareness of the trauma it could cause was very important.
Barbara One, Barbara Two
You’ve written about having extended therapy with two people you call Barbara One and Barbara Two. Did you feel you got lucky with both of them, or was there some trial and error in finding them?
Barbara One was a family therapist, not a psychiatrist. She had a theory that any child had to be welcomed by the whole family. A friend of mine pointed out, since then, that this was a big ask. Claudia wasn’t just meeting me, she was meeting all these other people too, and that wasn’t necessarily reasonable. I don’t think it was, actually. My family were welcoming, but probably a bit intimidating in the end. I’m not sure. Claudia’s never spoken to me about it directly, but I think that might be part of what happened. It might have been too much for her.
Barbara Two was a psychiatrist. When I first went to her I was a mess, angry, not easy to work with or live with. I told her I wanted to talk about adoption, and she said if that’s all I wanted, I should go somewhere else. She dealt with how I was operating in the world generally, and eventually we got to the adoption too. She had no fixed theory. She was just incredibly skilled, with a lot of different ways of working depending on what I needed that day. A bit of CBT, some role-play to work through my sense of victimhood. She’d ask me what I’d say to the nun who once beat me in front of the whole school, if I imagined her standing there now.
There was also something about managing multiple dogs on a leash?
Yes. She’d say I could choose to respond differently, that I didn’t have to always be the angry, stressed person. If the angry dog turns up, you can reign it in and call in a different one.
It sounds a bit like what’s now called Internal Family Systems.
I don’t know that one, but it sounds like the same idea, before it had that name.
I think it’s interesting that Barbara Two wasn’t an adoption specialist, and was still the one who helped you more.
She was far more helpful, no question. Barbara One’s adoption knowledge was almost incidental to her GP work. I’m actually a bit suspicious of therapists who specialise narrowly in adoption. It has such a comprehensive impact on who you are that you need someone who can work with the whole person, not just the adoption part of them.
On victimhood and looking after yourself
You said something earlier that I think about a lot: that victimhood doesn’t help anyone. Speaking just for myself, anger has always been there. I think there’s a balance between acknowledging that real injustice happened, systemic forces, things genuinely out of our control, and not staying in a place of feeling powerless as an adult, because you can’t live a good life from there. Do you have thoughts on that balance?
Barbara Two used to ask me things like, have you planned another holiday? Do you laugh? Do you watch funny movies? All the things that build resilience. There’s a trap where you think you can’t afford joy because of what you did, because you gave a child up. Guilt creeps in. But you have to look after your mental health. It doesn’t mean you’re not politically active about the things that matter to you. You just don’t have to be a miserable, angry person while you’re doing it.
I have a strong memory of walking along a beach I love and thinking, I can’t keep being this person. She’ll (my daughter) never want to know me if I stay like this. So I had to work on becoming more open and approachable, rather than staying in that victim place. I think victimhood and guilt are closely linked. Neither gets you anywhere, really.
It’s easy to slip back into that unconsciously. A sense of not deserving good things.
Not worthy. Yes.
Exactly. It takes conscious effort to counter that and choose joy instead.
Sometimes it has to be very deliberate.
Do you still actively do things for your own wellbeing now?
I do that thing of naming three good things that happened today, even when I’m feeling low. And I’ve learned to recognise when a feeling is building, because I know what it’s connected to: the time I lost with my daughter and granddaughter. That grief doesn’t go away, even after reunion. Actually, that’s one of the things that irritates me: the popular idea of reunion, running through the park with your arms outstretched, as if that’s the end of the story. It isn’t, for anybody. It gets complicated after that.
The reunion myth
I’d love to talk about that, because I think this honesty about long-term reunion is missing from the literature, and from conversations in this community generally. There’s still a myth that reunion is going to heal you. I really believed, for a while, that if I could build a close relationship with my Korean mother, I’d recover some of that lost time and it would complete me. It’s been so much more complicated than that. How many years has it been now since you and Claudia first reunited?
She was nineteen, and she’s in her mid-50s now, so it’s been a long time, and it’s varied a great deal. She’s never expressed anger toward me. But the distance has grown over the years. It’s not just about her and me either. There’s her daughter, my granddaughter, and I think there’s more secrecy building there too, which I hate, because I don’t want secrets. My daughter’s priority at the moment is her dad, the father she grew up with. He’s elderly and frail now, and she comes back [to Australia] from Germany quite often to see him. I can’t let the rest of my family know that, because they’d be offended, and she doesn’t want anything to do with anyone else at the moment. That’s just where she’s at.
That’s why I end the book with the metaphor of the bridge. She’s on one side, with her current family, her daughter, her partner, and the parents who raised her. I’m on the other side with the rest of my family. The bridge stays there. She could still cross it if she wants to. We’d love that. I’d love to see my granddaughter now that she’s grown. It’s probably been 16 years since I’ve seen them both in person.
Sitting with silence
That reminds me of another moment in the book where you go to visit your mother, “full of expectation and misguided belief in [your] skills in persuasion and understanding”, to finally talk about the adoption properly, and she’s just not ready. And then later that day, your mother and her partner acted as if the conversation had never happened. It reminded me of reunion in a way. You want something so badly, but you have to find some peace with the fact that it might not happen in either of your lifetimes. I feel that with parts of my Korean family too.
I know. It’s very difficult. For a long time I was so angry with my mother. That was around when I was seeing Barbara One, and I’d go for long walks just to work through it. But one of the good things that came out of writing the book is that when I went back through a lot of my mother’s old letters, I noticed she’d actually written quite early in the piece that maybe we would have done things differently. I hadn’t picked up on that at the time. I was too angry to see that she was trying to deal with it in her own way too. It took me years, with counsellors, to understand that any of these shifts are enormously difficult, for her as much as for me. I don’t think I understood that at the time. There was a period where adoption meant a complete break in real conversation with my mother. We’d talk about day-to-day things, but nothing that mattered. That changed eventually. Before she got sick, she’d met Claudia a number of times, and it had gone well.
The other thing is knowing that I’ve had people to talk to, professional support, all the way through this. My mother never had that. She never would have done anything like that.
I know what you’re talking about – it’s a very difficult waiting period, and in a sense I’m still in it, because when Claudia’s father dies, things may shift again. Cecilia might come back into my life. She might not. You just have to sit with it and get on with the rest of your life in the meantime.
When Claudia first started to pull away, did you find yourself wondering whether you’d done something wrong?
I did wonder about that. But I think about the other relinquishing mothers this has happened to, and that helps. Knowing it’s not just me. There’s also that feeling of walking on eggshells, not quite knowing when you’ve put a foot wrong. When she cut us off on Facebook, all of us, I sort of felt that my oldest son didn’t deserve that. Since he met her he just thought she was wonderful. Our relationship with her has grown more distant over the years, in ways that are hard to fully explain from my side. I know that she still carries some of the impacts [of the adoption/separation] and it gnaws at me.
What the body remembers
You also write about the split between what you were taught to believe about adoption and what your body seemed to know.
According to the rules I was raised with, I shouldn’t have got myself pregnant in the first place. That was the sinful thing. But once I was pregnant, I was told adoption was the right thing to do, the only responsible thing, because I wasn’t capable of keeping the baby. I believed that completely at the time. On the first anniversary of her birth, I started haemorrhaging, and the GP told me, that’s your grief. I was furious. I didn’t believe that was the cause. I thought it was something else entirely, anything but that, because I genuinely couldn’t recognise what my own body was telling me.
Intellectually, I was trying to do what I was supposed to do, which was move on, pretend nothing had happened. But there’s no moving on, not really. Your body doesn’t move on, even while your mind is trying to. There’s a primal loss in it. I feel that very strongly, and I think it’s even more relevant now, with things like surrogacy, where there’s sometimes an assumption that a woman can just carry a child and hand it over and move on. It doesn’t work like that. It matters in every cell of your body.
Adoptees talk about the primal wound too. It strikes me as a mirrored experience, something each person in that relationship carries in their body, in their psyche, whether or not they can name it.
That’s right. You recognise that it’s there. It’s not the whole of you, but it’s there.
You’ve also written: “Any loss becomes another layer to add to the grief of losing a baby; any distance from any of my children or grandchildren becomes a trigger so that I have to be mindful of my mood.” And about your oldest son: “I became aware of how I had kept distance between us – a deep-seated fear of losing him too.”
Yes. As soon as I started proper counselling, I became much closer to him. But I think, as a little boy, I’d been emotionally somewhat absent, without meaning to be.
Have you talked about that with him as adults?
No. He has a copy of the book, but he hasn’t read it. His wife has.
There’s also research by Jenny Conrick on adoptees becoming parents themselves for the first time, and a similar fear of bonding too closely with your own child, out of a fear of separation. It seems like this kind of forced separation creates that fear in different ways, for mothers and for adoptees, of getting close to someone only to lose them.
That’s a pity to hear. I know my granddaughter is close to her father. I wouldn’t say she isn’t close to her mother, but I suspect the warmth comes more from him. I don’t really know. I think that’s the thing about adoption. It breaks natural links between people, all the way through a family. I see it in the break between my mother and me, and between me and my daughter. Maybe not with my granddaughter. She seems like a vibrant young person, so I think she’ll be alright. But she needed to know her history too. That mattered.
Making peace with what happened
You also wrote: “Over the years, some part of me had denied the reality of my role in relinquishment… it took many years for me to understand what I had done, for my heart, soul and body to get somewhere close to acceptance.”
Yes. It’s hard not to be angry with yourself. A few women I knew kept their children. I sometimes ask why I didn’t fight harder to do that. I didn’t have that kind of courage, and I’m still critical of myself for it. What took a while to understand was the split between my mind and my body. My body knew this was a loss, a terrible thing. My mind, shaped by what society wanted, believed it was the right thing to do. Those two things never sit easily together. There’s also a real difficulty in saying I did the wrong thing, because of what that implies about my daughter’s life. She was raised well, by parents who loved her. So there’s a place somewhere in the middle. This is what happened. There were rights and wrongs woven through all of it. I have to live with it and keep working with it, and be honest about my own vulnerabilities in all of this, and my own part in it too.
So even with very few real choices and resources at the time, accepting your part in it was still an important piece of your healing?
It was. I wasn’t one of the women who went off to Perth to have the baby quietly and keep her, with a different identity. That was beyond me. I couldn’t even imagine it at the time, though I can see now how it might have been possible. A couple of years later there was actually support available for mothers wanting to do that. At the time, there was nothing. It was a decision I made, and I have to live with that, even without feeling proud of it. My daughter-in-law, before she’d read the book, said to me, I don’t understand how somebody like you could have done that.
Really?
Yes. She sees me as strong, someone who takes things on. But I think I only really became that person after the adoption. It shifted something in me, made me far less willing to just go along with what was expected of me.
I get that impression from the book too, and from meeting you, that you’re a very strong, capable woman.
At the time, though, I was 23. Not 15, but still a 23-year-old, full of nonsense, if I’m honest. More concerned with what dress I’d wear than with thinking deeply about anything. I wasn’t taught to think deeply. I was just starting to edge away from Catholicism, and my friends were starting to challenge things too, protesting the Vietnam War and so on. Before that I’d been in quite a conservative environment. It changed, and I feel lucky for that, but at the time I didn’t have much to draw on.
My mother has said something similar. Looking back now, she wonders if she could have kept me, and she feels regret. But at the time she wasn’t working, and she didn’t have the same confidence or skills she has now.
With hindsight, you can see how it might have gone differently. At the time, I didn’t see how I could have done it differently. All the voices around me were against keeping my child.
It felt remarkably vulnerable to me, reading that thread in the book, where you really confront the decision itself. But I found myself wondering whether it was a real decision at all.
I know. The term ‘forced adoption’ – I agree with it in the sense of the broader social experiment that ran through so many parts of our society at the time. Intercountry adoption, the removal of Indigenous children, there was a belief that it simply didn’t matter, no real recognition of the importance of motherhood. But within all of that, some women did buck the system. So there was a choice, technically, but it was an extremely difficult one.
And then I do think about whether my daughter would have been better off with me. She wouldn’t have gone to the private school she went to. I couldn’t have afforded that. I’d probably have been a fairly cranky single mother. Whereas the parents who raised her adored her. So it’s difficult, isn’t it.
Thank you for your honesty in this conversation.
And thank you too. I find it fascinating listening to adopted people, trying to understand, because it helps me understand my daughter, and this whole experience, a bit better.
It’s fascinating for me too, and healing, honestly. We used to run a mixed support group here at VANISH years ago, bringing different parts of the adoption community together, but otherwise it’s rare to get the chance to talk like this. I don’t think we get to hear from each other enough.
Jude’s book Did You Find Her? A Mother’s Memoir is available to borrow from the VANISH library. Get in touch with us if you’d like to read it.
The views shared and adoption terminology used in this conversation are Jude’s and Hana’s own, and do not necessarily represent VANISH. We’re publishing this conversation because we value the diversity and complexity of lived experience within our community.