SITTING THINKING ONCE AGAIN....ABOUT MY BIRTH MOTHER

I talked recently about my being adopted and some of the mysteries surrounding that event, i.e. discrepancies in dates etc etc. I think I also mentioned I had got to speak to my birth mother (only by telephone unfortunately) and I have been thinking about how far that relationship evolved over several years and how it came about in the first place.

You have to bear in mind that my mum (clarification needed here....when I speak of my adoptive mother she is always my mum whereas my birth mother is always my mother (or EM), the former being more informal for the lady I grew up with as my mum) had told me when I was about 18 that my mother had died when quite young and intimated that alcohol had been involved. This occurred when on holidays at Mandurah and my mum noticed I was drinking a port and lemonade at a birthday party and having come from a teetotal family she was not in favour of alcohol. This I now think was meant as a deterrent to me and a warning about drinking alcohol. I realise now that it is really not possible that she would have known when EM had died or indeed what had caused her death, but at age 18 I didn't really think that hard about it. I had always accepted I had been adopted and that was that.

Now back to the original story....there are so many strange 'things'that took place that this story is somewhat convoluted in the telling. Please bear with me.

My mum died in 1985 at the great age of 87 after having lived a rich and full life (perhaps more about in another story) and several years after that I thought it would be a good idea to undertake some digging into my birth mother's family history with the idea of finding some medical history which could be beneficial to both me and my children and so on.

I could not find where my birth mother had died (I had assumed this was somewhere in the 1940s perhaps....following on what mum had told me in 1950) but I did find the deaths of her parents (my grandparents) and in fact visited their graves in Karrakatta Cemetery. It was strange standing there and thinking that these two people were who they were in relation to myself, we had all lived in Perth and yet had never met. I felt a little sad as I'd never had grandparents that I had had anything to do with nor aunts, uncles etc.

After failing to find when EM had died I wondered if she had married, so I paid a fee to the BD&M people to do a search but with no result. "O.K." I thought "let's extend the search a little further". Lo and behold she had in fact married at the age of 35 in the year 1945. I then searched for her death in her married name for up to 10 years after that date but once again there was no result. I kept searching and found where her husband had died but not until February, 1987 and it seemed that EM was still alive at that time. Wonders of wonders....then she didn't die when she was young. Why was I told that story? To stop me from searching perhaps? Who knows what reasons some folk have for doing what they do?

After finding John N's death I knew where he and EM had been living at that time and from then on with a little help from some friends I was able to ascertain that EM had been living in a State Housing Commission unit within one kilometre of our home. There is a lot of irony in that....my birth mother within walking distance of where I lived. After more research we found that she had been admitted to a nursing home but still within a few kilometres of us.

Then came the task of perhaps being able to make contact with my birth mother....will continue with that story in part 2 of this ongoing saga.

Hope you have managed to stay with me this long and will take the time to read the rest of the story soon.