My child came back to me

PAT I nuzzled her downy cheek, sniffed her hair and held her close. I felt choked with anger. I wanted to howl. But instead, I smiled; I wanted my 22-month-old daughter to remember me that way. Then I stoically handed her over to my steely-eyed mother-in-law who delivered her to the adoption agency.

I was 17 years old and every fibre in my body wanted to grab her back and say: ‘No! I’ve made a mistake!” But my mother-in-law’s words echoed: ‘You don’t want her to grow up like you, do you?”

Earlier that day, my 20-year-old husband, Andrew, told me how he’d taken our daughter to the park and she’d gasped with excitement. I knew we would never again witness her exploring the world. Andrew had just discovered photography and so he took pictures of our last moments together.

I still get raised eyebrows when I tell people that at 15 I had a lover, fell pregnant intentionally and had a child. Being a headstrong teenager from a chaotic background (eight years in an orphanage, three with a foster family), I’d decided to have a baby. Looking back, I realise I was an insecure girl who yearned for love.

The hippie era had faded by 1973, but South African teenagers had just caught on. Andrew thought a baby was a cool idea, and together we plotted to live in a commune. It wasn’t long before we celebrated, thrilled with our fertile achievement.

I felt guilty about disappointing my appalled foster mother and edgy about Andrew’s parents, who reacted with icy control. Fearing their son could be charged with statutory rape (I was still 15 — legally a child), a shotgun wedding was arranged, after which I was packed off to my mother’s farm where I was less embarrassing. Andrew worked as a telephone technician to avoid conscription into the army, visiting me every fortnight.

Datcha Janet Meintjes, named after our grandmothers, was born on May 1 1974 after a three-day labour. When they brought her to me I didn’t want to see what had caused me such trauma. After a month on the farm, Datcha and I relocated to my mother-in-law’s house in Johannesburg, but I resented her rigid routines. I had no interest in how to make a chicken last for three dinners.

When Datcha was five months old, we finally moved into the wreck of a cottage they had bought for us. Andrew would go to work at 7am, returning at 7pm, and being with a baby on my own all day was not as stimulating as anticipated. My friends were at school and the mothers in the toddler groups seemed ancient.

Often I would hitchhike across Johannesburg to visit friends with Datcha tucked under my arm, and at night Andrew would take her while I partied. Then we turned our house into a commune where friends played music and smoked dagga, and we both took other lovers. It didn’t take long for his parents to discover our ‘open” marriage, and they promptly instructed us to get divorced.

I was enraged by their callous proposal that Datcha be adopted. But I felt guilty for having an affair and wanted her to have a solid family life. I felt she was the sacrifice I had to make for being such a bad girl, and I knew I was powerless to battle it out with Andrew’s family.

The adoption agency soon found a suitable family — piano-teaching mother, banker father and seven-year-old daughter — who desperately wanted another child.

Under South African adoption laws, we would never meet her adoptive parents, but I was consoled by a letter from her new mother. She told me they had changed Datcha’s name because it was so unusual.

From then on I threw myself into anti-apartheid politics, completed a university degree and became a journalist while Andrew studied photography in Cape Town. We met up occasionally — without animosity. I never hid my past from my friends but would only talk about Datcha to close friends. Each year on her birthday I would say to myself, ‘My God, I’m a mother. She’s five [six, seven, eight …].”

In 1992, as I was about to move to London with my new family, the adoption agency contacted me: my 18-year-old daughter had been told about us. A year later came another call saying she wanted to meet us. Andrew and I met in a state of shock. What if she wants to live with one of us? What if she’s a religious fanatic? A racist?

A meeting was arranged, and I sat with the counsellor, braced for the worst. Then, in walked an attractive blonde woman. ‘Doesn’t look anything like me — there’s a mix-up,” I thought. Then I stared at her hands, my hands. We exchanged polite talk, but I was thinking: ‘She must be angry with me for giving her away.” And then: ‘She can’t imagine what a terrible mother I’d have been.”

Gavin, my husband, instantly recognised Frances when they met a few days later. ‘She looks like you,” he said. But Tessa, our three-year-old daughter, was alarmed. One night I heard her say: ‘Daddy, if Mummy got Frances adopted, will she have me adopted too?”

Frances took me to meet her adoptive parents, Bill and Illona, and I felt uncomfortable — like a cuckoo who’d laid an egg for them to raise — but I could not have chosen better. I realised I could never recreate a mother-child relationship, and that I had done the right thing.

Frances came to stay with us in London and we spent time getting to know each other. Tessa and Caitlin (our next daughter) were bridesmaids at her wedding and we would meet for family gatherings — Frances, Andrew and I, and sometimes Gavin and our daughters and Frances’s husband, Jordan.

Then, on October 5 2004, Frances phoned to say Andrew had been shot dead in a robbery. I flew to Johannesburg to be with her at the funeral. The death notice Frances placed for him read: ‘Andrew: you were my father, my friend, teacher and mentor. Part of me has let go of the need to understand why. Another part is crying out for the memory of our future.”

Andrew’s death means I have lost someone who remembered that blonde toddler; who felt fulfilled meeting her again and was proud of her. Only to Andrew could I say: ‘Remember, her first spoken word was ‘light’.”

Thirty years have passed since we said what we thought was our final farewell to our baby. But now Frances and I are forging a new bond; not daughter, not friend, but something more challenging: a relationship about coming to terms with our past, present and future.

FRANCES I discovered my birth name when I was 13: Datcha Janet Meintjes. Whenever my parents left the house I’d rifle through their cupboards. I finally found the adoption file, with its instruction manual from my grandmother. For the first time I’d made some connection with my origins.

I don’t remember the first meeting with my adoptive parents, Bill and Illona Charlton, and my new big sister, Candy, in February 1976, but they still joke about it: ‘You were a bouncing blonde baby delivered after an eight-day pregnancy, and what a gift you were.”

Before my adoption became official, my new parents were nervous about my birth parents backing out. My mother told me she once saw a strange woman at our front gate and her heart stopped. She feared it might be my birth mother coming to claim me, but she turned out to be a stranger asking for directions.

I remember them sitting me down at the age of three to tell me I was adopted. Growing up, I didn’t think it strange and I didn’t feel sorry for myself, but had feelings of not belonging to my family and being alone. I didn’t feel a full Charlton — although I certainly felt loved.

I would often sneak back to the file to spy on myself. I found my birth-grandparents’ number in the phone book, but what would I say if I phoned them? ‘Hi, I’m the child you handed over!” What if they were horrible? They might be conservative Afrikaners as ‘Meintjes” implied. They might reject me.

When I turned 17, my dad told me my maternal grandmother, Cynthia Thirtle, was trying to contact me and had made an appeal on radio. He and my mother thought I should meet her through the adoption agency. This threw me; I drove past her house a few times.

Two years later, the adoption agency contacted me to say it may be my last chance to meet my birth mother, because she now lived in England. I was frightened, but also feared never discovering where I had come from, so I agreed.

As I sat in the adoption agency reception area, I felt like running away, scared of whom I might encounter. I would be connected forever to this unknown person and I feared we may dislike each other intensely. I wanted her to be ecstatic to see me, but my worst fear was that she would be overbearing and want to compensate for her guilt. I never thought she might be as petrified as me.

When I walked into the room, we were both composed and there was no immediate connection or recognition. I expected to see a clear physical resemblance, but we seemed so different that I was unsure she was my mother.

Soon after, I met my birth father, Andrew, for the first time and thought, ‘Who’s this stranger? They must have mixed up the records!”

But when I was 21 I went to stay with Pat and her husband, Gavin, in London, and was astonished at how similar we really were. For the first time in my life I experienced kin — the realisation that I shared someone’s genes made me feel I belonged. But I didn’t see Pat as my new mother, more as a sister. The 15-year age gap meant we shared tastes in films, music and books.

Andrew and I grew close and he convinced me he would not leave again. We shared a great deal, including photography. We would talk like siblings about love and life, although I always reminded him that the relationship was earned and not a given.

He once told me he was afraid I would be angry with him when I held my own child in my arms and realised his mistake.

He never had other children and apologised for giving me away in small ways. He had become my mentor, teacher and friend, as well as a father.

Then, two years ago, Andrew was shot in his studio — a botched robbery that netted his murderers an old cellphone. I was called to the crime scene and sat with Andrew’s body, thinking as I sobbed, ‘I don’t deserve this! I expected to have Andrew around to return the lost years. Why must he be taken from me again?”

Pat and I are separated by thousands of miles. She lives in England with her family and I am on the southern tip of Africa, but each year brings a few more holiday weeks that allow us to learn more about each other and come to terms with our oddities and similarities.

Adoptees spend a great deal of time in introspection. We all ask ourselves: ‘Who am I?” When my parents couldn’t fully answer that question, I began to look within. And so, a journey that most people start from the outside in, began from the inside out.

I still wonder what would have happened had my biological parents stayed together. Would I be the same person? I would have liked that time with them, but then again I wouldn’t have known them without the baggage of a parent-child relationship, and I would not have had the opportunity to meet my special adoptive parents and sister, who inspires me constantly.

Sometimes I think I’ve had the best of four worlds — a solid upbringing with two parents who love me and birth parents who’ve been like siblings and have helped me find direction in adulthood.