A HEALTHY BUB, BUT MUM S TILL GRIEVES
IT’S almost half a century since 14-year-old Thelma Adams from Geelong was forced to give her beautiful newborn baby away.
The pain wrenching at her heart no longer stops her leaving the house, but for many years she dragged herself through life, hollow on the inside.
It was 1973 when Ms Adams had her baby, a secret she had hidden until she was seven months pregnant.
Her parents whisked her to the doctor, using the back entrance of the surgery to avoid the shame of seeing someone they knew.
Ms Adams was sent to Kew to live in a home for unmarried mothers, but felt so homesick her family took her back in.
With her due date approaching, her family dropped her off outside a hospital and left. She was all alone, heavily pregnant and terrified.
Two days before Christmas, Ms Adams was sedated with a cocktail of drugs and doesn’t remember anything of the birth. When she woke up her baby boy was gone.
“I went to sleep pregnant and woke up not pregnant,” she said. “I never saw him and never heard him cry.”
Ms Adams spent Christmas in hospital, alone at the end of the ward so no one would know her shameful secret.
She said she was forced to sign away her baby after she left hospital, so distressed she couldn’t do anything but nod her head when asked if she agreed to putting him up for adoption.
“I was told to get on with life, but I couldn’t go back to school in case people asked where I had been,” she said. “For the first year I cried myself to sleep every night.”
In the harrowing years that followed, Ms Adams went to work, met her husband and tried her level best to start a new life. She had three children and survived almost another decade before she was diagnosed with panic attacks, anxiety and PTSD.
It took her a year of research before she found information about her son.
The first time she wrote to him he was 17. For more than a dozen years she sent him birthday cards, letters and photos that were mostly returned to sender.
But when her son was in his 30s he got in contact. He came to Geelong, met Ms Adams and her family and she gave him all the cards that she still hadn’t opened.
The National Wool Museum is hosting Without Consent, an exhibition about forced adoptions.
Ms Adams leads the Geelong Birth Mothers Support Group. Anyone interested in joining the confidential group can contact 0430 948 923.
The Victorian Adoption Network for Information and Self Help, and the Association of Relinquishing Mothers will meet at the exhibition today.