‘So this is his bastard, is it?’ he quipped. ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t turn out to look like his father.’ Then he went on his way.
Was this what it was going to be like? Would people always see him as that? He was just a baby, a tiny baby. How could anyone be so cruel?
I’m not sure when the pain happened or how it started. I was putting the children to bed one evening when I felt strange, light-headed and suddenly terrified. My hands were sweating, my heart was pounding in my chest, and I was struggling to breathe. I was terrified. What was happening to me?
I ran into a neighbour’s house, and she sat me down and called the doctor. This was to begin the chain of events that destroyed a huge part of my very being. After what seemed like hours my GP and a social worker arrived and I was taken back into my own home.
‘We don’t think you’re coping, Cassie,’ my doctor said slowly, as though if he spoke any faster I wouldn’t understand. ‘It has been a terrible time for you and we feel you have made the wrong decision in bringing the child back here.’
No, no mistake, I wanted to scream. It was not a mistake. But I didn’t. I didn’t speak, I couldn’t speak. All my strength and energy had left me. I was totally mentally shattered. The social worker started to talk.
‘You won’t be able to afford to keep the children. You have no income, just a small amount of maintenance for your daughter. Nothing for the baby.’ She said it as if it was an accusation, as if I didn’t already know. She went on: ‘I want you to think about what you have done. Your neighbour has said she will
stay here tonight to make sure you are OK. I will see you in the morning and we will decide what to do next.’
With that she left, with my doctor close on her heels. He had given me something to make me sleep and, like a zombie, I went to bed.
The next day dawned and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Back in 1971 there was no state help for unmarried mothers. The social worker was right. My only income was the small amount that Edward paid for Melissa. I had given up my job in the pub before my son was born and wasn’t well enough to work at this time. Family help was non-existent and I had few friends.
As promised, the social worker arrived, along with my health visitor, a lovely lady who I liked very much. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
‘You have two choices,’ the social worker said. ‘You can give up your son for adoption—not to the church society as they won’t take him now, but to the social services. He will go back into care and then to the next couple on the list.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Adoption was supposed to be the best option for the child. How was this the best?
But what came next shook the very core of me.
‘Your other option is this.’ She didn’t even sound embarrassed. ‘If you keep both children, if you deny your son a good start in life, the authorities will monitor you and find you wanting. You will not be able to look after all three of you on the little amount of income you have. This will mean that the children will not have adequate care. You’re not well, physically
or emotionally, and you have no family support. And you are also taking antidepressants. This will go against you.’ I don’t think she stopped to take a breath. ‘So, if you insist on keeping the baby, you will possibly—no, certainly—lose both children.’ She stopped now. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at my health visitor.
‘What do you mean? What will that mean for Cassie’s daughter?’ asked the health visitor, whom I had known for the whole of my little girl’s life. ‘What will happen to her? Will they both be adopted?’
I didn’t know what they were talking about. It was as though I wasn’t even there. The air was stuffy and I thought I was going to faint. I wasn’t sure they were talking about me, me and my children. Both my children adopted? I was trapped in some kind of nightmare.
‘Because the little girl is three years old and we like to keep the children together, I don’t believe either of them would go to adoption,’ said the now slightly red-faced social worker. ‘She is older than most couples want. They would both stay in care until they were seventeen years of age.’
My health visitor came over and sat beside me. She tried to put her arm around me but I moved out of her reach.
‘You have to make a choice: either give up your son for adoption, or we will eventually take both children. We have lots of parents eager to take baby boys. He will have a wonderful home, a wonderful mum.’ She actually smiled at this point.
I wanted to shout at her that no one was taking any of my children away. No one would separate me from them again. I
wanted to shout that he had a wonderful home, he had a mum. Me.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Couldn’t function. After a long empty silence, a little voice from somewhere said, ‘I can’t lose my little girl. She’s my life.’ That’s all I said.
After what seemed like an eternity, both women in the room accepted that I would keep my daughter, which meant that I would have to let them take my son. They talked between themselves for a while, and my health visitor became quite upset.
‘Two weeks?’ she asked the social worker. ‘But that’s cruel.’
The other woman looked annoyed. ‘That’s the soonest we can do it. We are having to make right the wrong that she did by taking back the child. He wasn’t on our lists so we have to start from scratch and find a foster parent for him as an emergency!’
They were discussing my son’s future as though I wasn’t there. I don’t think I have ever felt as bad as I did at that time. Throughout the abuse, which was unrelenting and horrific, throughout my life without any motherly love or guidance, I had felt the deepest despair and loneliness. But this was different; this time I was completely broken. Completely shattered. Devoid of all feeling and all emotion.
I was told that I would have to keep my son with me for two weeks until they found a suitable foster home. Then they left.
I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see the look in his beautiful blue eyes. He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t know that he was to be taken away from me again and
placed somewhere else. And then my precious little girl—what would I tell her? How could I tell her that her baby brother was leaving us? She knew how much I loved him. What would I say? What would we do now?
True to their word, these so-called health professionals left him with me, while I knew that they were going to take him away again soon. It was the most awful time. I cared for him but showed no emotion. I bathed and fed him but I didn’t play with him. I tried not to look at him any more than I had to. He would sit in his little chair and I brought it into whatever room I was in but I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t hold him. The pain sometimes lessened and in its place was this horrid numb feeling. Heavy and yet empty. My GP increased my medication. He said it would make me feel better but really it just enabled me to get through the days.
And then I had a brainwave. From somewhere, hope returned. I decided to contact my baby’s father. I would ring Larry and ask him to come round.
What did I think would happen? That he would see our baby and fall into my arms and that we would live happily every after? Stupid, stupid fool.
I contacted a friend of his, as I had no idea where he was living at that time. I rushed around and tidied the place and made sure my baby boy looked wonderful. Surely he wouldn’t be able to resist him? Everything would be fine after all.
Then I got a phone call from the friend. Larry had heard already that I’d brought our baby home but he wasn’t coming over, he was never coming near us. Hope was shattered again.
I don’t really remember much about the following days and nights. I know I didn’t sleep. I had to answer Melissa’s questions about why we couldn’t keep our baby. Why he was going to another mother? It was breaking my heart. What was I doing to these two beautiful children? I knew then that I had no choice. I had to give him a chance of a good life, to enable me to give my little girl a good life. I shouldn’t have had to make that choice, but I did.
When the day came, I asked my neighbour to look after Melissa and to keep her at the back of the house so that she didn’t see him go. I wasn’t ready. How do you get ready for parting with your precious son? My health visitor was the first to arrive, and then the social worker drove up in a large estate car, a Volvo. I have hated those cars since that day.
My son was in his pram in the back garden. A tiny elephant and a tiny brown bear were hanging from the front of the hood.
‘Go and fetch him then,’ the social worker said abruptly. ‘We haven’t much time.’
I went into the garden, feeling as though I was about to break apart. I reached into the pram for this tiny scrap of life I was about to lose. As I lifted him out, he grabbed at the elephant and it broke off the hood. I was devastated. Did he know what was happening? Did he want to stay? Was he hurting too?
With my heart breaking, I carried my son out to the waiting car. But then I stopped. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t someone come and help me?
But there was no one. My health visitor tried to coax me to place my baby in the carrycot in the back of that awful car. I
couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t let go of him. There was a struggle as the social worker tried to pull Jack out of my arms, while I resisted and started to scream.
‘No, you can’t take him. He’s mine. I won’t let you. Please. Oh, please.’
This was the point when my heart broke. I tried to hold on to my baby son, the child I had given birth to only weeks before, but I failed. He was placed in the carrycot and the car pulled away.
I fell to the ground sobbing.
It was over. All I had left was a lifetime of guilt and regret. A lifetime of missing him.
A few weeks later I asked to see him one more time. He was still in foster care. Because I had been so ill and depressed, my GP asked social services to arrange a final supervised meeting at his surgery. I was so excited. I still hoped that someone would force them to change their minds. I thought that when I saw him everything would be OK.
When they put him in my arms I felt such love and such pain. Then reality came to me like a bolt out of the blue. Of course things wouldn’t change. Of course ‘they’ wouldn’t change their minds. He was to be adopted. I stood up and carried him into the garden. Was there a back entrance? For one fleeting moment I thought I could run away with him. Where to? I didn’t know. Just run. I was hurrying to the bottom of the surgery garden, hoping to find a gate. Hardly breathing. But the social worker appeared and quickly took him from me.
It was over.
No more hope.
I knew then that things weren’t going to change. He wasn’t coming back to me, ever. I had lost him for good.
G
rief is a terrible emotion. It eats away at you until the very soul of you is destroyed and permanently damaged. The next few months were like living in a horrible murky smog. I was taking a large dose of tablets, which numbed my emotions, but still I couldn’t stop thinking about Jack. I avoided prams, avoided places where mums take babies. I concentrated on looking after Melissa, and in the evenings after she went to bed I would just sit without moving. I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t even think about crying.
The weeks went by and autumn was turning to winter when the social worker turned up on my doorstep again one day. In my confused state I thought at first that maybe Jack was being sent back. Maybe his new parents didn’t want him any more. Unbelievable things had happened to me in my life. Why shouldn’t something unbelievable happen again, only this time something unbelievably good? But good didn’t happen to me.
‘Your son’s new parents would like something from you, Cassie,’ she said, as though she were asking for a reference.
Hadn’t they already had enough from me?
‘They have asked for a letter to keep and give to the baby when he is grown up. Something from you, his biological mother.’ She spoke as though she were doing me a great favour.
I wanted him to know about me. I wanted him to know me in person, but that couldn’t happen. If a letter was all I could give him, then that’s what I would do.
Over the next few weeks I tried to write a letter for Jack, but it was so hard. What do you say to someone you have lost forever? How do you tell them that your heart is breaking? I would start it and then have to walk away.
One day while I was coming home from town on the bus with Melissa I saw Larry, the father of my son. He was standing next to a car he had bought just before he walked out of our lives. I don’t know what was going through my mind, but I rushed off the bus and over to where he was standing, taking my little girl with me. He looked up and, seeing it was me, ran over to where his works van was parked and sped off at top speed.
I was angrier than I had ever been. I could feel the fury rising in my tummy. What happened next, I don’t know exactly. I vaguely remember picking something up from the ground and running towards the car. I know he loved that car. He’d brought it round to show me just before he ended the relationship, when I refused to have a termination. It was his dream car; he had always wanted one. So I know he loved it.
The next thing I know is that I arrived back home again feeling sick. Melissa seemed upset and confused. I was hot and sweaty and needed to take a bath, so I took a bath with my daughter. She always enjoyed this. We played in the bubbles and the world seemed a long way away. After she was tucked up in bed, I sat in my bedroom trying to think about the day. I knew something had happened but I didn’t know what it was. My heart was beating hard and I felt scared. What had happened while we were out? I had a feeling I had done something but I didn’t know what.
The doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone and was reluctant to answer but then I heard a voice I recognised: it was the friend whom I had asked to contact Larry for me when I had Jack at home. Apparently Larry had phoned her to say that his beloved car had been damaged. The word ‘coward’ had been scratched across the windscreen. He was mortified. But what she said next shook me and I had to sit down. He had seen me running towards him and so had a neighbour. When he went back to his flat in the evening, his neighbour told him I had done it. She had seen me.