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This article was published 03/07/2015 (3216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Janice Knight says each adoption is like a pebble dropped in a pond. It ripples out beyond the child to touch many kinds of parents, siblings and grandparents, down through decades and tinged by nearly every human emotion.

Knight, manager of adoption and post-adoption programs for the Manitoba government, is standing amid row after row of metal shelves crammed with roughly 50,000 individual files that date back to 1923. That’s a lot of pebbles, and the ripples are about to turn into waves.

Until now, those adoption records were sealed. Adoptees could ask social workers for non-identifying information about their biological parents — a social history that often included ethnic origins and medical details but with all the important stuff, names and towns and addresses, omitted. Birth parents could get similar information about where their child ended up, with all the vital parts, such as an adopted name, blacked out. Provincial social workers would facilitate reunions when they could, when both parties agreed. But thousands of Manitobans were left mired in mystery about their origins and identity, or the fate of the child they gave up years ago.

New legislation, long in the works and made official three weeks ago, changes all that. It unseals decades of records, allowing birth parents and adoptees to see everything — original birth certificates, home studies on adoptive families, hospital files, formal adoption forms and a host of other documents.

Already, more than 1,000 people, children and birth parents, have asked for their files, which gives them a name to Google, then a phone number to call, then — maybe — a parent or child to finally meet.

Every adoption story is different. Here are a few

 

The birth mom

‘He hasn’t left my mind’

Sharon Janakas has an exuberant, easy giggle, even as she’s eyeballing one of her three granddaughters drinking a precarious Coke on the sofa. Those granddaughters zig between the living room and the playground right out front, the youngest occasionally erupting in a minor temper tantrum and the oldest acting as her mother Leona’s second set of hands.

High up on the walls of the Weston-area townhouse are posted vintage family photos and a long row of Leona’s education certificates and awards. Janakas also has a teenage son. Asked what he does, shy Leona laughs and wiggles her thumbs, pantomiming an Xbox controller.

In this rowdy family circle, somebody is missing.

“My kids have a brother they don’t know,” says Janakas. “My grandkids have a uncle they don’t know.”

That person was born Micheal Jason — spelled that way, with the A and E in Michael reversed, the way a 16-year-old might think was cool. He turns 30 today and Janakas very much wants to see him again.

The last time she saw him, Micheal was nine months old. Janakas had just signed the forms giving him up for adoption. The next morning, she got him up and dressed and dropped him off at daycare while she went to school. Partly out of teenage spite and partly because she couldn’t face it, Janakas made her father pick Micheal up at the end of the day and take him to the child welfare office, where social workers were waiting to place him with a new family.

“I felt quite a bit of regret for that for many years… I didn’t actually say goodbye to him,” said Janakas. “Then I ran away from home.”

Janakas got pregnant at 15. Because she was so young, social workers didn’t want her to keep her son, offered no support and advised Janakas’s parents to do the same. But Janakas, herself adopted, wanted to try, especially because she knew what it was like growing up thinking her birth parents didn’t want her. She says for those nine hard months, she considered Micheal her only real family.

Janakas lived on Strathcona Street and remembers walking across a big field all winter to Safeway to pick up bags of diapers and cases of formula with Micheal strapped to her chest. She also remembers taking easygoing Micheal to visit her auntie who was in a wheelchair. The aunt would push Micheal’s stroller and Janakas would push the wheelchair, train-car style. Those months made it harder to give Micheal up, but also gave Janakas some memories to cling to.

“In some ways, that nine months I had with him, I treasure it,” she said.

After Micheal was gone, Janakas took off to Toronto and then Montreal. She hated her parents, she had just given up her baby and she was in the midst of a pretty determined rebellion. She spent some time on the streets, struggling with an addiction. Getting pregnant with Leona about five years later marked a turning point. Janakas returned to Winnipeg, trained to be a social worker, reconnected with her indigenous roots, married, and reconciled with her adoptive parents, especially her mother, with whom she is now very close.

She never stopped thinking about Micheal.

“He hasn’t left my mind,” she said.

As a young mother back in Winnipeg, Janakas thought first about finding her own birth parents. She registered with the province’s post-adoption office and social workers tracked down her brother and birth mother. She spent years getting to know them and other siblings. Then, her search turned to Micheal.

In 2008, she asked provincial post-adoption social workers to facilitate a reunion. They found Micheal and asked whether he was interested in contact with his birth mother. But he ducked followup calls and letters. Adoption staff took that to mean he wasn’t interested, and backed off, as was their protocol.

A few years later, as the province was considering unsealing all adoption records, Janakas asked for all non-identifying information about her son, and received a long, detailed narrative social workers gleaned from his file. She learned that Micheal’s adoptive parents were in their mid-30s, both of Ukrainian and Greek Orthodox heritage. They collected antiques, were artistically inclined and loved curling. They lived in an immaculate three-bedroom house in a small Manitoba town. He had “a good sense of humour and was a straight-forward person.” She was organized, easy-going, fun-loving and was able to speak her mind but in a softer way than her husband.”

Though the letter contained no names, no locations, no dates, it gave Janakas some peace.

“From what’s written on the paper it gave me a feeling he would have had a good life,” said Janakas. “I just wanted him to have a better life, and I hoped my decision would give him that.”

But Janakas is hoping to learn more. Now that adoption records are unsealed, she plans to apply for her son’s full file, including his adoptive name and the town where he was raised. The forms sit on Leona’s coffee table, ready to be filled out.

“If he comes back into my life, I’m going to be his friend and get to know him first,” said Janakas. “I can’t automatically step into the role of mom, because he has a mom.”

Micheal may have filed a veto already, asking for his file to remain secret or barring his birth family from contacting him. Only about 60 people, mostly birth mothers like Janakas, have filed vetoes. Or, if Janakas is able to track him down, he may rebuff her.

“That’s a big fear,” she said. “It would definitely be heartbreaking. But I’d have to respect his decision. I don’t know that I would give up hope.”

 

The adoptee

Few clues, but undeterred in search for dad

RUGBY, ND — The secret her mother took to the grave is now the mystery that marks Kate Sunaert’s life.

For 20 years, the North Dakota nurse has tried to unravel her father’s identity. She’s had only hints and hunches based on incomplete information. And she was thwarted by her birth mother, Diane Zaik, who stubbornly refused to reveal the name of the man who got her pregnant 44 years ago this month.

Sunaert’s father might be a guy named Jean or Gene, a foreman at a Brandon paving company. That’s all Diane would say during an initial, unguarded telephone conversation after Sunaert tracked her down. He may have been married at the time Sunaert was conceived. He may have broken off the secret relationship when he realized Diane was pregnant. Or, most frightening, he might have been violent or abusive, Sunaert’s conception the product of some traumatic event.

That’s a lot of mights and may haves left to fester for the last two, maddening decades.

“She said, ‘I’m not going to tell you who he is. You don’t deserve to know. It’s none of your business,” said Sunaert, recalling her last, tense phone call with Diane before she died 10 years ago. “And that was the end of the conversation.”

It was Sunaert’s own son who sparked her search for her birth parents when she was 21, the same age Diane was when she gave Sunaert up for adoption in Brandon in 1972.

Sunaert’s own pregnancy came with some complications and doctors warned of worst-case scenarios. That got her wondering how other family pregnancies turned out and what other health problems might run in her family.

From a young age, Sunaert knew she was adopted, that her slightly distant and disconnected family in Killarney wasn’t the one she was born into. Shortly after her son was born, perfectly healthy, Sunaert applied to Manitoba’s post-adoption registry for her records. Back then, adoptees and birth parents could only get general information — occupation, religious affiliation, education level. The most important thing, the names of her mother and father, the essentials of Sunaert’s identity, were blacked out.

But not very effectively.

When Sunaert got her documents, she could read through the black marker and see her birth mother’s name — Diane Zaik.

As hundreds of Manitobans, armed with their uncensored adoption records will be doing this summer, Sunaert grabbed a phone book and started calling. Twenty minutes later, Diane called back. It was warm conversation that lasted three hours, but Diane said matter-of-factly that she had no regrets about placing Sunaert for adoption.

“She made it very clear that she made a decision that day when she gave me up and she was satisfied with the decision and she never thought about it again,” said Sunaert, her eyes welling up. “That was odd. It was very odd.”

It was during that call that Diane said Sunaert’s father was named Jean and he worked for a Brandon paving company, which fit with the tidbits of information Sunaert gleaned from her file. Later, in another phone conversation, Diane claimed she couldn’t remember who the father was, a reversal that baffles until this day.

Diane didn’t tell her sister or brothers the name of Sunaert’s father. She didn’t tell the man she later married. She may not have listed a real name on Sunaert’s birth certificate. Even sick with cancer in the hospital before she died, she clung to the secret, refusing to tell family members who asked again on Sunaert’s behalf.

The province’s new rules say all adoption records are open, unless a birth parent or child files a veto. Only about 60 people, mostly birth mothers, have. Sunaert is sure that her mother would have been one of those people, had she still been alive.

“How do you keep a secret like that, for all that lifetime? How do you never talk about that? I can hardly keep Christmas secrets,” said Sunaert. “Whether it’s a bad secret or something that broke your heart, I can’t imagine keeping a secret like that for so long.”

Though Diane was increasingly distant, the Zaik family was warm and welcoming. More than once, Diane’s sister tried to finesse an in-person reunion but Diane was unwilling, right up until the days before her death. Even today, Sunaert practices trying to see things from her mother’s point of view, trying to find a version where her mother’s secret makes sense beyond selfishness.

In the meantime, Sunaert lived a life. She got divorced after a bad marriage, raised her son, nursed all over Manitoba and North Dakota before meeting her fiancé four years ago and settling down on his grain and cattle farm in central North Dakota. Sunaert’s fiancé is also adopted. Not long ago, fueled by a little liquid courage, he got up the nerve to call his birth father and then made Sunaert drive all night to Montana for what turned out to be a joyful reunion.

Though the two are in their forties, they thought about having more kids because they both always wanted a big family, in part to create that kinetic family connection, to have faces and mannerisms and histories that match theirs.

“You always tease people when all the sisters wear the same dresses and they kinda hate it,” said Sunaert. “But it’s really neat to see people match and fit in and look the same. I never had that.”

Sunaert will apply to see her uncensored adoption records now that they’re unsealed. It’s possible that, when she gets them, her father’s name on her original birth certificate will be fake. Years ago, adoption staff who specialize in reunions tried to track the man down and came up empty. Sunaert even once called the Brandon paving company — Zenith Paving — hoping their human resources department might have records from 1972. Another dead end.

In May, she posted a hand-written note on Facebook appealing to anyone who might have known her mother in Brandon. It was shared thousands of times, but netted no leads.

That means everything is riding on the records. The mystery will unravel or ensure based on what’s in those documents.

“Whatever happened 43 years ago, happened 43 years ago. Even if it was a bad thing that happened, I would hope that he was not a bad person,” said Sunaert. “I think I can handle just about anything. I’ve been through lots. I think just knowing the answers to the end of it all would be enough. I just really want to know who I am.”

 

No desire to be ‘found’

At peace with the past

Years ago, Cynthia Firth helped her parents trace their history and track down long-lost relatives overseas. They walked where her mother’s family walked in Sweden and met her father’s Dutch relatives for what turned out to be a warm reunion.

Those relatives later traveled to Canada for Firth’s wedding and created a huge genealogy chart, tracing Firth’s roots back to 1549. It’s hanging in Firth’s bedroom.

“That’s my family. That’s where I come from. That’s who made me who I am,” said Firth. “You can’t make that up, that feeling, the chills. It doesn’t rest in your DNA, because it was as amazing for me as it was for them.”

Firth is adopted and she has no burning desire to reconnect with her birth family. In fact, she’s one of a small handful of people — about 60 — who have filed vetoes asking for their adoption records to remain secret and their birth parents not to contact them. If they do, they could face a $50,000 fine.

Most disclosure vetoes have been filed by birth mothers who don’t wish to be found, not adoptees who would prefer not to meet their birth families. But Firth thinks there are more adoptees like her — those who harbour no abandonment issues, who have no mystery to solve and no “real” parents to find. Those folks just never make for heartwarming headlines.

“The world loves a good story, especially a good reunification story — the tears flow, how amazing…” she said. “But those of us who aren’t interested are very quiet. If you speak out, you’re that much easier to find and you’re not interested in being found.”

For this story, the Free Press agreed to use Firth’s married name, and limit the amount of identifying information published.

“I’ve always felt like I was the product of four loving parents– two who loved me enough to give me up and two who loved me enough to raise me.”

-Cynthia Firth

One of Firth’s first memories as a toddler was sitting on her dad’s knee, listening to the story of how she was adopted. Firth’s dad said she was exceptional because she was hand-picked from a room full of babies.

“It was actually kind of cool to be adopted because I could say, ‘I’m special. They picked me. They got stuck with you,’” quipped Firth.

For someone who isn’t looking for the kind of emotional reunion that will likely be happening all over the province, Firth knows a lot about adoption. She’s read the research, and has tons of friends who are adopted, are birth parents or who gave up a child of their own. She jokes that she’s become “Adoption 101.”

“People used to say, ‘Well, don’t you want to find your real family?’ And, as flip as it sounds, my response would always be, ‘Why? Did I lose them?’ she said. “I never felt like I was missing anything. I was quite happy with the ones I had, and who needs more?”

But she said every adoption story is unique, with its own complicated set of past circumstances and emotional fallout in the present. People who might be searching for a child they placed for adoption or a birth parent need to do what’s best for them. But many adoptees like Firth had wonderful lives and don’t want to be “found.”

“If your biological children aren’t looking for you, they’re probably OK,” says Firth.

In fact, Firth is angry the province decided to unseal the records, essentially legislating away her choice around her birth story. Instead of keeping the records confidential, the process now feels to her like negative billing — people like Firth have to opt to protect their privacy, filling out all kinds of notarized documents and hoping to get them submitted before their records are released to a curious birth parent.

Firth jokes that she can’t even phone the cable company to get her parents better channels because privacy rules are so strict. But the province, and nearly all other jurisdictions in Canada, changed the privacy rules halfway through so birth parents and adoptees can suddenly see what’s been confidential information for decades.

And, she said, the reunions might now be a bit of a free-for-all, instead of gradual, facilitated meetings finessed by experienced provincial social workers who for years arranged reunions and made sure both parties were willing.

Growing up, Firth had a fear almost universal among adoptees — what if she ended up dating a sibling and didn’t know it? She also had a bit of curiosity about her birth parents, satisfied by a two-page letter from social workers her adoptive parents kept.

Firth’s birth parents were teenagers and they had plans to be together forever. They were both children of divorce and feared a baby so early would doom the relationship.

“If it’s true, I think that’s remarkably mature. As far as I’m concerned, they made the right decision. They made the best decision they could have made.”

Firth’s adopted parents desperately wanted children and had a ton of love to give. Firth’s childhood was filled with educational opportunities, travel, encouragement and stability. She says family is created by common experiences and memories, by mannerisms and speech patterns that families share, by a lifetime of blood.

“I’ve always felt like I was the product of four loving parents — two who loved me enough to give me up and two who loved me enough to raise me.”

 

The missing sibling

A brother they’ve never known

If you are Chris and Tara Urniezius’s long-lost older brother, born Aug. 17, 1972 at St. Boniface Hospital, you should know about the following conversation, which took place one sunny Monday evening over coffee at The Forks.

Tara: “I don’t know how I would react if I read about myself in a newspaper article. We don’t want to scare him away.”

Chris: “But if he knows he’s adopted and he sees it in the newspaper, only a select handful of people in the whole world will be able to correlate it together really quick.”

Tara: “What if he doesn’t know he’s adopted and he sees his birthdate in the paper and it twigs and he thinks, ‘Wow, maybe THAT’S why I’ve never really looked like my parents?’”

Chris: “But maybe that’s something he’d really want to know. I don’t think there’s a hope in hell that some guy born Aug. 17, 1972 will read this and go “Boom! Now it all makes sense!” If you got to 42 years old and you didn’t realize you’re adopted…?”

This back-and-forth rumination went on for the better part of an hour, with the siblings finishing each other’s sentences, fast-forwarding through various scenarios, trying to work out the most respectful, most sensitive way to make contact with a brother they would love to meet.

“If he had a cottage, that would be cool,” deadpans Chris, the joker to Tara’s sober second thought.

Tara first found out about her secret brother when she was 18 and cornered into an awkward teenage heart-to-heart with her mother, Wendy. It was then a tearful Wendy revealed that, at age 19, she’d had a son whom she’d placed for adoption. Wendy didn’t want to give the baby up, but her family circumstances at the time made it impossible to keep him.

“I think she was concerned about making sure I didn’t make the same mistakes she did,” said Tara. “It was kind of surreal… We talked about it that day and that was the last we talked about it. It was almost like it didn’t happen.”

Tara kept the secret for two years — “It wasn’t my story to tell” — until Wendy was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer. Two weeks before she died she summoned Chris and told him there was something he needed to know.

“Last time she said something like that to me, it turned out to be that she was sick. She was getting worked up and I was thinking, ‘What’s she gonna tell me that could be worse than what’s going on here?’ I thought she was going to tell me I was adopted, ironically.”

Chris said he was perfectly comfortable with the news. In fact, the revelation helped make sense of an undercurrent he sensed in his otherwise totally devoted single-mother.

“You could just tell. She always had something. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, in retrospect,” nods Tara. “It was a void, in a sense.”

Wendy’s death was a terrible whirlwind for the siblings, then in their early 20s and both in school. Wendy’s last six weeks were spent getting her affairs in order — her will, her house, saying goodbye to old friends and trying to have as much time with her kids as possible.

Tara and Chris learned a little more about their older brother — that he was conceived during Wendy’s first year of nursing school, that the father was someone she knew from summers at Grand Beach, that the baby might have been adopted by a family of similar Ukrainian background. It was an intriguing, intense conversation to have, amid the tears and laughter and chaos of their mother’s last days in the palliative care ward.

In the 15 years since Wendy died, Chris and Tara have made gentle attempts to find their brother. Chris has listed his information on adoption registry websites. They’ve tried to glean a few more details from family. Chris even has a customer who looks uncannily like their mother, so much so that Chris did a little Facebook creeping to see when the guy was born.

Though the province just unsealed thousands of adoption records dating back nearly 100 years, only birth parents and adoptees can apply for the documents.

But, as they’ve always done, staff at the province’s adoption office will try to facilitate reunions, even with siblings. Staff there, who are trained to carefully navigate delicate conversations, can contact the Urniezius’s older brother and gauge whether he’d be interested in having any contact with Chris and Tara.

With adoption in the news lately, that has prompted the siblings to contact provincial staff hoping for help, hoping to be part of the wave of reunions set to take place this summer and beyond.

“My wife gave me a good perspective,” said Chris. “Maybe he’s thinking, ‘What if this family doesn’t want to know me or doesn’t know I exist? Do I want to throw their life into a big pickle?’”

Tara and Chris are fine with the pickle. But they are quick to say they don’t need to meet their brother in order to fill anything like the void their mother felt.

They each have families of their own and good careers. They aren’t looking for a big brother or some place to spend Christmas. If their brother isn’t interested in a relationship, that would be entirely OK. But they feel obliged to try.

“This would be a really neat bonus on top of what I’ve already got, a cherry on top,” said Chris. “We lost our mum 15 years ago. If we could find someone to replace just a 50th of her, even just in spirit, that would be cool.”

 

The reunion

A complicated journey

WINKLER — For a week after she gave birth, from her window at the Salvation Army home for unwed mothers, Patti Landreville could see the Grace Hospital where her son was waiting.

During that week in the spring of 1986, the small-town girl often walked across the parking lot and into the Grace to admire her baby, whom she’d carefully named Christopher.

“I felt like I wasn’t wanted there. I looked at him through the window. No one talked to me. No one said, ‘Look at your beautiful baby. Shall I go get him for you?’” remembered Landreville, now a happily-married small-business owner and mother of two more boys. “I remember standing there, my heart wanting, my head saying ‘no.’ And nobody talking to me.”

More than 20 years later, with the help of provincial social workers, Landreville was reunited with her son. For their first meeting, she picked Christopher up from an apartment tower right next to the Grace, a tower she could also see from her window at the maternity home. When he jumped in Landreville’s car, they both stared at each other for a few seconds, then burst out laughing.

If that sounds like a Hallmark movie, a tidy, uplifting television ending to a heartbreaking tale, just wait.

For Landreville, as joyful as her reunion was — and still is — with her first-born son, it’s not quite that straightforward.

Nor will it be for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of Manitobans who are about to be reunited with their own Patti or their own Christopher. Roughly 50,000 Manitobans have been placed for adoption since 1923. Their records were unsealed less than a month ago by long-awaited provincial legislation. Now that the province can share names of birth parents and adopted children, reunions like Patti and Christopher’s will be spreading all over the province and beyond.

For adopted children, those could raise hard questions and unearth resentments and confusion. For Landreville, feelings she’d tried to stifle for nearly 30 years bubbled up.

“It brings you right back to that time in your life, and all kinds of emotions– fear, anger, hurt, pain, happiness.”

-Patti Landreville

“It brings you right back to that time in your life, and all kinds of emotions — fear, anger, hurt, pain, happiness,” said Landreville. “The social worker said it would be emotional. I thought: Happiness. It wasn’t just happiness. It was all this stuff finally working its way out.”

She saves her tears for when she’s working, grooming dogs in her basement alone. Otherwise, she is deliberate and matter-of-fact when she tells her story from her bungalow’s sunny living room, nursing an Iced Capp, her little dogs barking at cars outside.

Landreville remembers another living room, that of her parents in Winkler nearly 30 years ago, during an even more conservative time. She’d just told them she was pregnant.

“This had taken the cake,” she recalled. “This was not good.”

Christopher’s father was a high school friend — they are still friendly — but they weren’t in love and had no plans to get married.

On hand at this living-room summit was a local social worker, who described a maternity home in Winnipeg where unwed mothers could go to school and get counselling as they prepared to give birth and, in most cases, give their babies up for adoption. Landreville packed and left almost immediately and spent the next seven months in the maternity home.

Now, 30 years later, she says her time there amounted to a kind of brainwashing, particularly effective on a naive, unworldly young woman who’d never left Winkler and who felt she’d done something shameful. Placing her baby for adoption was sold as a form of redemption, a selfless gesture, a way to erase the sin.

“From the time you set foot in there, the only thing they talked about to you was adoption, how wonderful it was,” she said. “They said, ‘It’s selfish to keep your baby. If you love your baby, you’ll do this.’ We were asked to draw up lists. On one side it was what can the adoptive parents give your child and on this side, what can you give your child.”

As a single woman with no job, her side of the page was pretty short.

But looking back, Landreville says she was perfectly capable of raising her son. She was an adult. She came from a good family. She had no addictions or mental-health issues. She was just unmarried. With a little help and encouragement, she would have done fine. But when she broached the idea of keeping her son with a social worker, she was dismissed.

Instead, even when Christopher was born, no one called the child “her” baby. It was always “the” baby.

“They laid him beside me for two or three seconds. I looked over, I saw his face and they took him away,” she said. “After that moment, the hospital stay is like a haze.”

She didn’t know whether to ask for her baby, whether to feed him or change him, where to go in the hospital to see him. No one said much to her. After a day or two, Landreville was discharged and sent back to the maternity home, while arrangements were made with the adoptive couple and the paperwork was completed. It was during that week she walked over the to the Grace to stand watch over her son.

“It was confusion,” she said, “One minute it was like ‘Oh, I have to go get him.’ Then my brain would kick in — ‘No, that’s not the right decision, Patti.’”

During that week, she developed complications from the delivery and had to be rushed back to the Grace for surgery. It was then, lying on a gurney in the hallway after the operation, a nurse told her Christopher was gone.

Year’s later, Landreville asked a social worker why they took her child so abruptly. “Patti, we had deadlines,” was the reply.

Landreville was told she would forget about her son and move on as if nothing had happened. She tried to do that, but Winkler knew about her pregnancy. Some thought she was paid to give the child up, or wondered how anyone could ever part with their own flesh and blood. A boyfriend later found out about her past and his family forced him to end the relationship.

On Christopher’s first birthday, Landreville and Christopher’s father went to the Morden Motor Inn for supper, a melancholy celebration. Early on, she looked for Christopher in grocery-store parking lots. She wrote to a social worker to ask how Christopher was doing, to make sure he was loved and well-cared for. She got no reply.

Later, Landreville freaked out when she heard news on the radio about a 19-year-old man killed in an accident near Portage la Prairie. She’d never know if that was Christopher.

When her son was 22, Landreville finally contacted the province’s post-adoption office and made a formal reunion request. Back then, when the records were still sealed, provincial staff would act as a go-between, tracking down an adult adoptee or birth parent, gently finding out whether one party was open to a reunion with the other.

Six months later, while she was at work downstairs, giving Toby the dog a haircut, Landreville got the call. Staff had found her son and he was interested in having contact. A few tentative but excited emails, Facebook messages and phone calls later, Landreville and her son met in Winnipeg.

The initial joy came to be tinged with an awkwardness common in nearly every reunion, as both side try to figure out what their relationship ought to be, and how their new family fits with the old.

“We try,” she said.

And Landreville’s joy was tinged with the growing sense that she’d been done a profound wrong. As Landreville was getting to know her son, she was also reshuffling her memories of the maternity home.

She now feels she was railroaded into giving him up, that religion trumped what was best for her son, that she missed years with her first-born child because of it. She was so angry she started making calls, demanding answers, asking one social worker who handled her case why Christopher was taken.

“She said, ‘We didn’t realize what we were doing and the harm we were causing with these adoptions’,” recalled Landreville.

That reply still cuts. At one point, Landreville gave a social worker such an earful on the phone and via email that she was barred from contacting her again. Landreville’s outrage is quieter now.

Landreville said every adoption story is unique, even for each person in it. When those perceptions collide, it’s bound to be more complicated than anyone can predict or any movie cliché can capture.

“It will be very overwhelming. You’re going to be surprised with the emotions that come out,” she said. “Whatever fantasy you have, it might be completely different. Once it’s open, you cannot close it back up again.”

 

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca