‘We’re not the type to turn up at the door and say, Surprise!’
AS a child, Teena Casey’s parents loved to tell the story of bringing her home to Waterford at Christmas; how her mother attended a top doctor in Dublin and Teena was born at St Rita’s, a private nursing home in Ranelagh, on Christmas Day, 1956; her father’s descriptions of the deserted capital city when he went to Dublin to bring mother and new baby home.
“If you had told me three years ago I was adopted, I would have laughed in your face,” she said.
On January 16, 2019, Teena returned from work to find a registered letter from Tusla. Having worked as a pre-school teacher for 15 years, her first thought was of child protection. She rang the telephone number. No, she was told, it is to do with your birth certificate. Could we come to Waterford and meet you next week?
That evening, Teena made light of it with her husband and children, joking that she might be younger than she thought. Then her son recalled reading in the media that St Rita’s private nursing home had been mentioned in connection with a review of adoptions ordered by then Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone.
Teena did not sleep that night. When Tusla phoned the next day, she said: “I can’t wait until next week.” The next day, she was in Tusla’s offices in Waterford, meeting a social worker.
The meeting was a blur of information she struggled to take in. The social worker mentioned St Patrick’s Guild, the adoption society run by the Irish Sisters of Charity. He gave her a copy of a record, an index card with her name and date of birth: December 14, 1956.
“I wasn’t even born on Christmas Day,” she said.
The words “adopted from birth” leapt out.
She was born at St Rita’s private nursing home in Ranelagh, not to the woman who raised her but to a girl whose full name was redacted from the file.
The index card noted: “Girl is an only child. Her mother is aware of the trouble.”
“That’s me, I’m the trouble,” Teena said.
The card continued: “Conditions of payment: £70 in instalments.” The “girl’s mother” was “responsible for payment”.
Teena was discharged to her mother and father on January 3, 1957. As there is no record of her in St Rita’s files, she does not know for sure where she spent the first few days of her life.
She was incredulous, and turned to a cousin, a genealogist, who helped her with online DNA testing to try to find a match.
“Until that DNA came back, I genuinely thought, you have made some mistake here,” she said.
Through a DNA match online, she found a cousin who had heard about her birth mother’s pregnancy as a child. “She said she always wondered what happened to that baby,” Teena said.
Now she knows who her birth mother is, but she has no desire to push herself on her. “We’re all intelligent, and we’re all getting on in years,” she said. “We are not the type who are going to arrive up on anyone’s doorstep and say, ‘Hello, surprise!’”
Instead, Teena wrote her birth mother a card, which she gave to her social worker.
“I thanked her for my life. I told her I had a beautiful life. I also wrote to her daughter, and told her if you ever come looking, I am here. I told her I had no animosity towards her mam. I just wanted to say that I had a good life.”
Her search for her birth father was more fruitful.
He embraced an approach from social workers made on Teena’s behalf. His name was Paddy, and he was from Leitrim. They were a DNA match.
He sent her a card and a bracelet. They met last year, a few months before he died, and she embraces his children, her half-siblings
“I met an elderly man who had the courage to do a DNA test and the courage to acknowledge me,” Teena said. He was her birth father, but he does not replace her dad.
Her mam and dad, who are now dead, would have never knowingly done anything illegal, Teena said. “My parents were the best, the love I feel for them,” she said. She believes they are guiding her on her journey.
“It is a strange and peculiar journey I am still on,” she said. “This is something now that I am going to have to live with. I sometimes think I am split in two. There is the brain of me that says let it go. There is the heart of me that says I would like to meet my birth mother, to look at her, to see has she got my mannerisms.”
She would love to meet her, “just once, to say hello”. “Did she give me my name? I’d like to know.”