1
HELPLESS
In the fall of 1940 when the leaves covered the sidewalks and gutters of the tree-lined streets, a dark sedan pulled up and parked in front of 201 St. Joseph Boulevard West in Montreal. Staircases lined the outside of the three-story buildings and gold leaf writing reflected on windows against black. There was a chill in the air and the setting sun streaked the red and gold of autumn.
A man and a woman sat in the front seat. A hat covered her short wavy brown hair. He was agitated and she kept looking back where her pregnant daughter, hair messy, clothes soiled, was writhing in pain. People on the stairs, relatives, friends of the car's occupants, approached the vehicle, then turned back. They seemed scattered. The door of the building opened and closed. The girl in the back seat was scared, her mother distraught. Nobody seemed to know what to do.
The doctor in blue appeared at the entrance at the top of the stairs and for a moment the girl and her mother were stuck in the doorway. "This is not the way I'd have it done," said the mother, disgustedly. "If she were married … but she's not. It seems like he might be a reputable businessman but my daughter won't talk.”
The girl passed a radiator in the narrow hallway and was hesitant about going into the room. There was some commotion around the doorway, nurses going in and out, so many doors opening and closing and people rushing around. She simply wanted to get it over with. She was seventeen.
Nervous and confused, she finally found herself in a small white room with tiled green floor and indentations in the walls that housed high windows. There were people around her. Nobody was holding her hand. She heard mumbling. She could feel her hands but the rest was floating. Suddenly the baby was out … messy … she could see feet … just feet … and a big round clock, 6:10 a.m.
I looked down at my mother. Her legs were in the stirrups. Her face was like mine. She had brown hair and a big belly.
People with masks on … a lot of whispering … the baby was gone. No sounds. Something was uncomfortable … hands … wrists … something was going on in the other room. There were two rooms separated by a doorway.
Picking up and changing hands. Handed around. From side to side, legs are kicking. Muffled sounds. They're wheeling me away. Hollow sounds. There was too much space around me. I'm stuck in space. There's a huge vastness around me. My mother is in the other room. They're working on her and I'm left here. Two people around her are calming her down. There's some kind of disruption. It doesn't feel good. She knows how she's feeling. She doesn't seem to have anything to say except the figures around her are calming her down. I don't think she knew they were going to take me away from her. This wasn't her decision. It was his.
There's some kind of … not an argument but something's going on in that room around her. I'm just alone … still … something happened in my heart.
There was much movement in the hallway, angry words, some- body shoved against the wall, a small cry, a door slammed and then quiet. A car door closed. The motor started and its roar faded as it disappeared down the tree-lined street. The leaves were falling quietly and the setting sun streaked the red and gold of autumn.
Hypnosis session, August 12, 1992, Boulder, Colorado
A friend of the adoptive family brought the newborn to their home at the corner of Rachel around the block from Fletcher's Field, the "traditional park and playground of the city's less affluent, the downtown Jews of St. Urbain Street, Esplanade and St. Dominique." 1 At this time anti-Semitism in Quebec was at its height.
The birth certificate read: "The undersigned certifies that Renee Rosenberg, daughter of Myer Rosenberg, merchant, and Esther Rubin, his wife, of the Con- gregation Chevra Shaas, Province of Quebec, was born on the 27th day of October, one thousand nine hundred and forty, and baptized on the second of November 1940. Signed - S. Gerhuni." There was a handwritten file number, #9216, at the top left hand corner above the seal of the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec.
There were no other papers. With an exchange of monies, people became parents, illegalities turned legal and an adoption was consummated. A torn bond, an irrevocable trauma and nobody cared. A doctor, nurse, lawyer, judge and rabbi became a little richer, the birth mother got rid of her child, the birth father got rid of his responsibilities, the adoptive parents got what they couldn't manage to get on their own and the baby was lost somewhere in between.
And so began the life of this soul. No history, no ties, no strings attached. And now fifty-plus years later, the adoptive parents dead, the birth mother still wondering what ever happened to her baby, the birth father, who knows, might be wondering too or has completely forgotten or has never known, and the infant, now a full-grown woman with three children of her own, was trying in vain to search for her real mother, to find out who she was, her roots, her history … still trying to imagine what it would have been like to have a real mother's arms to cry in, still trying to see her mother's image in the face in the mirror, wishing that someday the telephone would ring and that call would come.
Your adoptive father was the one who initiated it, brought you home and adopted you. Whether you were a child from another relationship that he had, or a friend came to him and he wanted to help her, in either case another woman was involved and it didn't sit well with your adoptive mother. You symbolized something she couldn't deal with. That explains a lot of the disgruntlement and difficulty that she has given you. That has to do with her own sense of rejection and her own fears.
Psychic reading, November 3, 1983 by Mitra
"Women, if they love children at all, can love almost any child. Thus when a baby is placed in her arms for her own she may or may not feel a rush of innate instincts. She may feel a vague fear, even panic, which is not dispelled when her daily life is disturbed by a demanding baby. She who slept the whole night through now finds herself waked by an importunate cry, to which she must respond. She may wonder why she ever gave up her placid existence in order to have a child another woman bore. If so, let her take heart. These are natural feelings, and ephemeral. As the child becomes real to her - a personality delightful though sometimes troublesome - he becomes her own. She forgets that she did not bear him. She believes that she recognizes in him similarities to her own family or to her husband's, and she rejoices when someone says the child looks like one or both parents. She compares her child to other children and finds him superior in all important ways. She be- comes, in short, a full-fledged mother." :
A French-Catholic nurse was hired to care for me while my new mother watched and wondered whether she was happy about the whole affair. They had been trying for ten years. Had all the tests. Nothing happened. He blamed her. She blamed him. Then this opportunity came along.
It was wartime. "As shortages grew, rationing spread to items ranging from meat and butter to oil and gas." 3 We lived on a busy street where the milkman delivered milk from Borden's Dairy in a horse-drawn wagon. My mother paid with her books of ration tickets.
Our flat was on the ground floor of an older three-story building. The upper floors had balconies with ornate, wrought-iron railings. Three pale-green painted wooden doors with filigree-framed windows led to each apartment. Ours opened to a small closed vestibule, then to a long narrow hallway with a deep red carpet covering its length.
The first room on the left, with a large window that looked onto the street and bus stop, was mine. As I lay in bed trying to sleep I could overhear the conversations from people waiting for the bus. Heavy maple twin beds and a dresser filled most of the space in the front part of the room, separated at one time from