The Pain of Adoption.
Fiona Cassidy
Interviewed by Sue Leonard
Published in the Irish Examiner. 30TH November 2010
Fiona Cassidy can’t wait for Christmas. She’ll be celebrating with her partner Philip, with her two children, her partner’s two, and their own three year old, Áine. Best of all, Fiona is pregnant again, with a baby due in March. It’s all a long way from the time when she struggled as a single mum of two.
“Christmas will be brilliant,” she says. “We have a mad brood. It was will be chaos, but I love that. I love the identity it gives me.” And that, for Fiona is a vital feeling.
Fiona was adopted. As a teenager, she often wondered who she really was. She wondered what life would have been like with her birth mother. And what sort of person was she?
Fiona had always known she was adopted. Her adoptive parents, Peter and Eileen Cassidy had told her she was special. They’d given her a magical childhood in County Tyrone, and said, simply, that her birth mother had been unable to look after her.
“My parents said I’d been ‘meant’ to come to them. They described me to others as their special wee girl, and when I was younger, I accepted that. But as a teenager you realise, ‘my mother didn’t want me.’ I wanted to know why.
“I was always close to my parents, and I felt almost guilty about asking questions. But I was dying to know if I looked like somebody. I hated those conversations other people had, when they were told, ‘you are so like your sister,’ or ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’ I would have loved somebody to turn round and say that to me.
“My parents always supported me,” she says. “They didn’t palm me off. When I said I would contact my birth mother, they said, ‘do what you want to do. We will always be behind you.”
Fiona expected her search to be long and hard. But when, a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday she went to the registry of births deaths and marriages, she procured her full birth certificate. That certificate had my birth mother’s full name and address on it.
It was a momentous moment.
“It was surreal. It was ‘wow.’ I was once somebody else. I carried my birth mother’s address around for a long time, and I never told mummy and daddy that I had it. I was afraid of their reaction. I felt I’d sneaked off without telling them, and gone behind their back. I knew they were keen for me to go through the proper channels, but I was impulsive. I didn’t want to do that.”
Although she was nervous about taking the next step, Fiona was excited too.
“I’d often dreamt of meeting my birth mother. When I saw people meet their relatives on Cilla Black’s ‘Surprise Surprise,’ I’d thought, one day that will be me. I waited for weeks. I only told my boyfriend about it. I didn’t trust anyone else enough. I was afraid if I told my friends, they would have told their mummies, and their mummies would have told mine.”
Eventually she and her boyfriend went to her birth mother’s house but Fiona hadn’t the nerve to knock on the door. In the meantime she’d found her baptismal certificate, and on it, was an aunt’s address.
“She had been my Godmother. My boyfriend did some sleuth work, and he came up with her phone number. He phoned her, she gave him the address and we went to see her.”
Fiona was hoping for her happy ever after ending, but she was in for one big shock.
“Two aunts were there, but they weren’t exactly welcoming. They told me that my birth mother had health problems, and it would be detrimental to her to meet me. They said it would not do me any good either. It was just awful to hear that. It was really upsetting. I was basically told to go away and not to come back.”
Fiona carried around the hurt for months, too upset to tell her parents.
“I was emotionally distraught. When I did tell them, it was straight to the family doctor, and he organised for me to have counselling. It was a very bad time for me. I do realise it was partly my own fault. If I’d gone down the proper channels I’d have had counselling before making contact. It would have prepared me.”
Shortly after that Fiona became pregnant. Her son is now 15. She had another child, and ended up coping as a single mum. Ten years ago she met her partner, Philip, and they live happily in County Tyrone with her children, with his two part time, and with their own child Áine, who is three.
Having her own family has helped Fiona. She now feels she fits in somewhere. But it’s brought back the pain too.
“When I had Áine, in particular, it did make me think, how could a mum give a baby away. You realise how precious they are, and how much you love them. You think, I would die if anything happened to them. I remember someone came to leave off a baby present when we had Áine. They said, ‘Oh you are gorgeous, how could anyone give one away?’ I was thinking, yes how could you?”
Fiona’s latest book, ‘Anyone for me?’ covers the story of an adopted child. She covers the issue in an authentic way, but gives Ruby the happy ending she would have liked for herself.
“Writing the book was cathartic,” she says.
Fiona is still close to her parents. They’re looking after the children while Fiona is in Dublin for this interview. Over the years, Fiona has tried contacting her aunts again; she wants, at the least, to know how her mother is doing, but each time she’s knocked back.
“They’ve always snubbed me, and that’s hard. I’ve done some research. There are politicians in my family on both sides of the border. There’s a famous actor, even a writer. There are cousins the same age as me. I can’t contact them because I have a duty of care towards my mother. I do understand that her sisters want to protect her.”
She doggedly kept contact, using Philip as an intermediary, but in the Autumn, when Philip met a relative, he was abruptly told that Fiona has been a mistake; and that when she’d been adopted, her birth mother’s family gave up all legal and moral responsibility towards her.
“I’m so shocked,” she says. “And so saddened. I can’t agree that they have no moral responsibility. It’s so harsh. If I could, I would ask them to walk in my shoes for a day. I never asked to be born, any more than any child did, and I’m not wanting to intrude, but I’d love them to acknowledge me.
“One of my biggest fears is I am going to open the obituary pages and see my birth mother’s name. Why can’t they extend their hand and say, ‘I am glad you are well – this is how your mammy is.’
Anyone for me by Fiona Cassidy is published by Poolbeg Press at 13.99 euro.
FOR MORE INFORMATION on ADOPTION
www.adoption.ie
www.aai.gov.ie
ends.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Mark Patrick Hederman, Abbot of Glenstal
Underground Cathedrals.
Mark Patrick Hederman
Interviewed by Sue Leonard.
Published in Reality Magazine. December 2010
What has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland? Why, when it once controlled our lives, has it lost both its power and its influence? This was the question Mark Patrick Hederman, Abbot of Glenstal was asking himself.
“I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t ask themselves exactly what has happened,” he says, on the phone from Glenstal.
In pondering the question, Hederman has written a thought provoking book called Underground Cathedrals. He writes movingly, as he studies the history of the church, and hypothesises how we should best, now, get spiritual succour.
“My proposal is that, at this time, the Holy Spirit is unearthing an underground cathedral in Ireland which could help to replace the pretentious, over-elaborate Irish Catholic architecture of the twentieth century,” he says. “An underground cathedral is a metaphor which describes an alternative place and time of worship.”
The church’s problems were inevitable, Hederman feels, because of the way the church was originally set up.
“The problem, for me, was that the Christian Church, at the beginning, mistook what it meant to be spiritual as meaning the flesh was evil.
“I identify Augustine as one of the main purveyors of that doctrine, so that priests, especially, were to be spiritual, and that meant dehumanised. It was then regarded as second rate to be married, whereas being celibate was first rate humanity; and all that was a misjudgement of the reality of the incarnation.
“The truth is, that every great religion has a group of people who are celibate because they have a love relationship with God. That only applies to small minority of mystics, but it was actually forced on all authority and all religious, and it didn’t work. Sexuality, obviously, finds its own way of avoiding the ban, and we now see the result of it.
“Priests thought that they understood human nature, and they knew nothing about it,” he contends. “They were cordoned off from their own nature by the training they got. They were trained to eradicate all beauty; to close their eyes rather than to open them. It was ‘don’t touch.’ It was all to do with purity and chastity.”
The Abbot has huge sympathy for the late John Charles McQuaid, the former Archbishop of Dublin. In bringing a kind of spiritual terrorism to Ireland; in banning books and films with sexual content, as part of his campaign to shield the young from bad influences, he was, Hederman argues, only following the leaders of his day.
“I don’t believe that McQuaid was an evil man,” he says. “He was a well meaning person who was brought up in a particular way. He was a diligent, sincere and absolutely honest man who did his duty as he saw it. By the end of his reign he personally had not changed greatly, but others had.....he stood out as the personal embodiment of all that a new breed of liberals despised and were embarrassed by.”
As for the horror of child-abuse, Hederman contends that McQuaid, along with many other priests, never fully understood it. And whereas children were the victims, nuns and priests are the victims now. And not just the innocent ones.
“We’re always looking for scapegoats, and the priests, even those who were abusers are victims of society. The abuse of children is horrifying; it’s like an epidemic, and it’s not just a church phenomenon. We are still trying to find villains to hunt down, and we’re the other side of the fence. They’re the monsters we can point towards and put in the stocks, but it’s not as simple as that.”
Hederman is wary of the direction in which Pope Benedict is leading the Church.
“The Pope is calling everyone back, almost to Vatican 1. He says, ‘let’s go for a leaner church.’ In other words, weed out anyone who won’t obey the rules. We could end up with a fanatical church, but I don’t think many people in Ireland ate going to be attracted by that, or browbeaten into returning to that.”
Which is why, Hederman feels, we should turn to art and beauty for our spiritual sustenance. He cites playwrights like Brian Friel; artists like Louis le Brocquy; and poets like Seamus Heaney, who can show us the work of the Holy Spirit.
As an example, in 2007, when Hederman went to a retrospective exhibition by the artist Anne Madden, he saw beyond the mere objects in the paintings, and he was profoundly moved.
“It was to see what the eye has not yet imagined and which comes towards us, not as something domesticated and familiar, but as an intense feeling that edges its way towards appearance.”
So what is Hederman’s principal message?
“That we should be dancing to our own rhythms. During the 20th Century, when all those ghastly scandals and all those terrible abuses were taking place, the Holy Spirit was inspiring a number of people with the truth. And the monuments to that truth are all around us. We should all go and visit them and revisit them, and listen and learn.”
Underground Cathedrals by Mark Patrick Hederman is published by Columba Press.
Ends.
Mark Patrick Hederman
Interviewed by Sue Leonard.
Published in Reality Magazine. December 2010
What has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland? Why, when it once controlled our lives, has it lost both its power and its influence? This was the question Mark Patrick Hederman, Abbot of Glenstal was asking himself.
“I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t ask themselves exactly what has happened,” he says, on the phone from Glenstal.
In pondering the question, Hederman has written a thought provoking book called Underground Cathedrals. He writes movingly, as he studies the history of the church, and hypothesises how we should best, now, get spiritual succour. “My proposal is that, at this time, the Holy Spirit is unearthing an underground cathedral in Ireland which could help to replace the pretentious, over-elaborate Irish Catholic architecture of the twentieth century,” he says. “An underground cathedral is a metaphor which describes an alternative place and time of worship.”
The church’s problems were inevitable, Hederman feels, because of the way the church was originally set up.
“The problem, for me, was that the Christian Church, at the beginning, mistook what it meant to be spiritual as meaning the flesh was evil.
“I identify Augustine as one of the main purveyors of that doctrine, so that priests, especially, were to be spiritual, and that meant dehumanised. It was then regarded as second rate to be married, whereas being celibate was first rate humanity; and all that was a misjudgement of the reality of the incarnation.
“The truth is, that every great religion has a group of people who are celibate because they have a love relationship with God. That only applies to small minority of mystics, but it was actually forced on all authority and all religious, and it didn’t work. Sexuality, obviously, finds its own way of avoiding the ban, and we now see the result of it.
“Priests thought that they understood human nature, and they knew nothing about it,” he contends. “They were cordoned off from their own nature by the training they got. They were trained to eradicate all beauty; to close their eyes rather than to open them. It was ‘don’t touch.’ It was all to do with purity and chastity.”
The Abbot has huge sympathy for the late John Charles McQuaid, the former Archbishop of Dublin. In bringing a kind of spiritual terrorism to Ireland; in banning books and films with sexual content, as part of his campaign to shield the young from bad influences, he was, Hederman argues, only following the leaders of his day.
“I don’t believe that McQuaid was an evil man,” he says. “He was a well meaning person who was brought up in a particular way. He was a diligent, sincere and absolutely honest man who did his duty as he saw it. By the end of his reign he personally had not changed greatly, but others had.....he stood out as the personal embodiment of all that a new breed of liberals despised and were embarrassed by.”
As for the horror of child-abuse, Hederman contends that McQuaid, along with many other priests, never fully understood it. And whereas children were the victims, nuns and priests are the victims now. And not just the innocent ones.
“We’re always looking for scapegoats, and the priests, even those who were abusers are victims of society. The abuse of children is horrifying; it’s like an epidemic, and it’s not just a church phenomenon. We are still trying to find villains to hunt down, and we’re the other side of the fence. They’re the monsters we can point towards and put in the stocks, but it’s not as simple as that.”
Hederman is wary of the direction in which Pope Benedict is leading the Church.
“The Pope is calling everyone back, almost to Vatican 1. He says, ‘let’s go for a leaner church.’ In other words, weed out anyone who won’t obey the rules. We could end up with a fanatical church, but I don’t think many people in Ireland ate going to be attracted by that, or browbeaten into returning to that.”
Which is why, Hederman feels, we should turn to art and beauty for our spiritual sustenance. He cites playwrights like Brian Friel; artists like Louis le Brocquy; and poets like Seamus Heaney, who can show us the work of the Holy Spirit.
As an example, in 2007, when Hederman went to a retrospective exhibition by the artist Anne Madden, he saw beyond the mere objects in the paintings, and he was profoundly moved.
“It was to see what the eye has not yet imagined and which comes towards us, not as something domesticated and familiar, but as an intense feeling that edges its way towards appearance.”
So what is Hederman’s principal message?
“That we should be dancing to our own rhythms. During the 20th Century, when all those ghastly scandals and all those terrible abuses were taking place, the Holy Spirit was inspiring a number of people with the truth. And the monuments to that truth are all around us. We should all go and visit them and revisit them, and listen and learn.”
Underground Cathedrals by Mark Patrick Hederman is published by Columba Press.
Ends.
Kate Morton
Bricks and Morton
Interview: Sue Leonard
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Distant Hours
By Kate Morton
Pan McMillan; €18.45
KATE MORTON has it all. A luminous brown eyed brunette, she fizzes with happiness. She lives in Brisbane with her musician husband Davin, and her two young sons, and professionally, is a commercial and critical success. Yet her third book, The Distant Hours, is not the one she’d originally planned.
It started well. She’d transported her family to England; had lived there, researching, for three months; and, back in Australia, had completed 60,000 words.
"I loved my characters," says Kate, "but this other family crept up on me. The Blythes, who lived in an English castle, invaded my mind. There were three sisters and the youngest wanted to marry, and didn’t.
"I couldn’t make those sisters go away. So I decided to put the book I was writing aside for a while to write these ladies out of my head. That night I wrote a chapter, and I knew that the book about the sisters was the one I had to write. I felt this emotional tie to it. I had to find out what happened."
The result is a fascinating family saga stretching most of the 20th Century. A young publisher, Edie, becomes embroiled with the ageing sisters when her mother receives a letter from one of them, posted half a century earlier. The crumbling castle, holding family secrets, is a character in itself, and there are so many twists and turns, so many genuine surprises, that it would be disingenuous to describe the plot in detail.
Suffice to say the father, a writer, puts his art before the wellbeing of his children. And the ties that bind those children through to their old age are not what they first appear. I adored this book — and was — literally — unable to put it down. There were echoes of Daphne du Maurier; of Victorian novels, and of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. So it was no surprise to learn that Kate has long admired such authors. "I loved Atonement particularly," she says. "My favourite thing as a reader and a writer, is when a tragedy is affected through a tiny misunderstanding. That really attracts me."
A less obvious influence on Kate was Enid Blyton. Kate adored her books from the age of four. Her mother was a second hand dealer and Kate procured many books from the 1950s, reading them whilst secreted away at the back of dusty shops.
Now 34, Kate is a publishing star. Both her earlier books became best sellers. The first, The House at Riverton, won the 2007 Richard and Judy Summer Read, and her second, The Forgotten Garden, was a Sunday Times bestseller. But the start of her career was a little bumpy. At 23, Kate had three frustrating years. She wrote a crime book, got rejected, wrote a second, only to get rejected again. The break came after she’d given birth to her first son, Oliver. Was it motherhood that made the difference?
"In a number of ways it was. Your palette has more colours in it after having a baby, and your chances of being grief-stricken are so much greater.
"I was so aware that the balance of the love I felt for Oliver was the possibility of losing that person. That really changed me.
"And it was timing. I had, effectively, dropped out of the world. I felt isolated, and felt I would probably never be published, but I had to write anyway.
"I decided not to think about genre or what publishers wanted, and that freed me. I immediately gained the ability to make people up and live with them in my head. And I was writing the kind of book I like to read — the kind of book that is rarely written these days. That made all the difference."
The first two published booked were carefully planned and structured. But ‘The Distant Hours’ came more instinctively. And there were difficult moments in the writing of it. June this year, with her deadline looming, was a case in point.
"I’d almost finished the book; I had 90,000 words written, but I’d intuitively written in all these loose ends, and I didn’t know how to tie them up. I must have been unbearable to live with. Davin said I had to go away. I went to a spartan lodge in this mountainous area. It was like having a Rubik’s Cube in your brain. I was twisting and turning the plot, but I couldn’t see how all the elements fitted together.
"I was looking out of the window at the rainforest one night, when a huge storm blew up. I had a vision of this child in a castle tower in a storm, when something in the moate started to move. I raced to get it down. I wrote the prologue, and everything fell into place. That taught me to trust my unconscious mind. There are so many moments like that in the writing of a novel."
This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, December 11, 2010
Interview: Sue Leonard
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Distant Hours
By Kate Morton
Pan McMillan; €18.45
KATE MORTON has it all. A luminous brown eyed brunette, she fizzes with happiness. She lives in Brisbane with her musician husband Davin, and her two young sons, and professionally, is a commercial and critical success. Yet her third book, The Distant Hours, is not the one she’d originally planned.
It started well. She’d transported her family to England; had lived there, researching, for three months; and, back in Australia, had completed 60,000 words.
"I loved my characters," says Kate, "but this other family crept up on me. The Blythes, who lived in an English castle, invaded my mind. There were three sisters and the youngest wanted to marry, and didn’t.
"I couldn’t make those sisters go away. So I decided to put the book I was writing aside for a while to write these ladies out of my head. That night I wrote a chapter, and I knew that the book about the sisters was the one I had to write. I felt this emotional tie to it. I had to find out what happened."
The result is a fascinating family saga stretching most of the 20th Century. A young publisher, Edie, becomes embroiled with the ageing sisters when her mother receives a letter from one of them, posted half a century earlier. The crumbling castle, holding family secrets, is a character in itself, and there are so many twists and turns, so many genuine surprises, that it would be disingenuous to describe the plot in detail.
Suffice to say the father, a writer, puts his art before the wellbeing of his children. And the ties that bind those children through to their old age are not what they first appear. I adored this book — and was — literally — unable to put it down. There were echoes of Daphne du Maurier; of Victorian novels, and of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. So it was no surprise to learn that Kate has long admired such authors. "I loved Atonement particularly," she says. "My favourite thing as a reader and a writer, is when a tragedy is affected through a tiny misunderstanding. That really attracts me."
A less obvious influence on Kate was Enid Blyton. Kate adored her books from the age of four. Her mother was a second hand dealer and Kate procured many books from the 1950s, reading them whilst secreted away at the back of dusty shops.
Now 34, Kate is a publishing star. Both her earlier books became best sellers. The first, The House at Riverton, won the 2007 Richard and Judy Summer Read, and her second, The Forgotten Garden, was a Sunday Times bestseller. But the start of her career was a little bumpy. At 23, Kate had three frustrating years. She wrote a crime book, got rejected, wrote a second, only to get rejected again. The break came after she’d given birth to her first son, Oliver. Was it motherhood that made the difference?
"In a number of ways it was. Your palette has more colours in it after having a baby, and your chances of being grief-stricken are so much greater.
"I was so aware that the balance of the love I felt for Oliver was the possibility of losing that person. That really changed me.
"And it was timing. I had, effectively, dropped out of the world. I felt isolated, and felt I would probably never be published, but I had to write anyway.
"I decided not to think about genre or what publishers wanted, and that freed me. I immediately gained the ability to make people up and live with them in my head. And I was writing the kind of book I like to read — the kind of book that is rarely written these days. That made all the difference."
The first two published booked were carefully planned and structured. But ‘The Distant Hours’ came more instinctively. And there were difficult moments in the writing of it. June this year, with her deadline looming, was a case in point.
"I’d almost finished the book; I had 90,000 words written, but I’d intuitively written in all these loose ends, and I didn’t know how to tie them up. I must have been unbearable to live with. Davin said I had to go away. I went to a spartan lodge in this mountainous area. It was like having a Rubik’s Cube in your brain. I was twisting and turning the plot, but I couldn’t see how all the elements fitted together.
"I was looking out of the window at the rainforest one night, when a huge storm blew up. I had a vision of this child in a castle tower in a storm, when something in the moate started to move. I raced to get it down. I wrote the prologue, and everything fell into place. That taught me to trust my unconscious mind. There are so many moments like that in the writing of a novel."
This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, December 11, 2010
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