‘I am away from my camera so no access to my camera card. As you know I always love to use different photos in stories with 2 or 3 parts. Just cropped and changed colour Mads. New one for Part 3.’
Madeleine Smith – continued (Part 2 of 3)
“I think I was quite immature for my age. It was overwhelming. I felt more nervous than emotional. My birth mother was awkward probably because my other siblings had just found out of my existence. I looked a little bit like all of them. When my birth mother was labouring with me, the midwife shift changed and the new midwife didn’t know I was being given up for adoption so she let her hold me for half an hour after I was born and then….No, no, no..sorry…you can’t form any attachment to that child and I was whisked away. Back then they usually didn’t even let the women see their babies if they were being given up for adoption. It was nice for me to hear that I was held and I wasn’t just whipped away.
Thank goodness for Gough Whitlam in the 70s who brought in single mothers benefit and threw away all the stigma attached to being a single parent. I watched that series Lovechild which was a good insight into what it was like. Covering up records and giving babies away to the wrong type of people. You would put your name on the list and you got a baby.
My younger two siblings who have a different father are a lot younger than me but Georgie who also has a different father and I are close. When I met Greta she had found Christianity and she invited me into the family and took me to a big family gathering and I remember feeling weird like this isn’t my family. She tried to put her religion on me and I had seen what the Catholic church had done to some of my brothers friends. There was a moment where I basically said back off…’I’ve got my own cousins and I have my own aunties and uncles.’ I was a bit insensitive. Greta remarried again and moved to the States where I visited her once.
I moved to Brisbane to work on a project for a year and I met Ove at a Valentine’s Day party a month after I moved. He was a gym instructor at the time. We are really different people but we connected. At the end of that year we moved back here and we lived all over the place..Surry Hills, Bondi, Kings Cross. I was studying Naturopathy and Ove was studying Fine Arts at the National Arts School. He is one of those talented artists/musicians who can put their hand to anything creative. He is an immigrant child so in a lot of ways we have a similar vibe going on. We moved down to the South coast before moving back here.
I wrote Greta a letter when I was pregnant with Sonny, asking her what her pregnancy was like. When you’re pregnant you’re thinking, there’s some little person is going to come through me who is the only person who is related to me. Sonny came along in 2003. I was a Naturopath at the time and I thought I’d be one of those women who have the baby under the desk and work away. Some people can do that but I couldn’t. I gave up Naturopathy (laughs).
We tried to have other children and I can’t even remember how many miscarriages I had. On my 40th birthday I woke up in hospital after a pregnancy loss. I said that’s it! I’m happy having one child. We thought we were too old and then I got pregnant with Floyd when I was 42. I thought this one is not going to stick, none of the others have and I’m much older now…and he’s here. He’s an amazing boy. Sonny had 8 years of being an only child and he’s now moved to Melbourne so now I have another 8 years with Floyd being an only child.
When I had Sonny I was besotted and I feel like I was over the top controlling. I was singularly focussed on being his Mum and I was very invested in being the best mum I could. Because of that whole need I guess to have an imprint on someone’s life. We are still very close. It is lovely now to be in a family with people who are related by blood because I wouldn’t have adopted children and I wouldn’t have had IVF.
Ove and I have done the DNA test. Both his parents are Norwegian so he had some questions about a grandparent on his Dad’s side. We were laughing because I have quite a lot of Scandinavian in me. As the years have gone on they have updated it so they can pinpoint exactly the area where your bloodline starts. I had a lot of Eastern European too. It didn’t even occur to me I could find family through it.
I’m a bit all over the place but when I was 29, internet was just starting but there was a Micro-fish at the State Library and my birth mother had told me the name of my birth father so I decided to look it up. I looked him up and found him. It was so much easier back then. I can visualise when I called him on the landline as there was no mobiles. I remember being really nervous….Oh hi, my name’s Madeleine, I think I may be your daughter.”