Read Online Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business by Mike Milotte - Free Book Online
Authors: Mike Milotte
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Kenneth Cunningham.
‘If we had known that our child was still in Dublin when we married,’ said Michael, ‘an obvious choice would have been to go and take our baby back. We were in a predicament of course, because we had told no one about the baby before we married and Mary still couldn’t tell her mother. So we couldn’t suddenly produce this baby out of the blue and say it was ours. But we could have overcome that by adopting our own baby, telling everyone we had adopted a baby. But we didn’t get that choice. We didn’t know it was there for us.’
All together it was a shoddy business, but one founded on the notion that neither Mary nor her baby had any rights worth considering. None of this became apparent until 1995 when Mary and Michael finally found their (by now) 33-year-old son, Kevin Bates. Kevin was able to tell them that he had arrived in America in November 1963 –at precisely the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, and some 13 months after Mary and Michael had married, and 20 months after Mary had handed him over to the nuns at St Patrick’s Guild. If this came as a shock for Mary and Michael, Kevin, too, was astonished to learn that not only had his natural parents married but they had gone on to have six more children. He had six full brothers and sisters in Ireland. It was all the more poignant since Kevin had grown up in America as the only child of a couple who, although devout Catholics, had divorced when he was in his teens.
‘Well, all my life I’ve lived knowing there’s a woman out there somewhere in Ireland who gave me up,’ Kevin said. 7 ‘A father never entered into the picture. I almost thought I was born by immaculate conception. Then I learn of Michael’s existence and I think, gosh, what am I going to do now? I’ve waited all these years to know who Mary was, how am I going to cope now with knowing Michael? Having given birth to me, and then relinquishing me, there they were in Ireland, married. It’s amazing that I wasn’t in that family.’
And while Kevin wondered who his mother was back in Ireland, Mary never stopped thinking about the child she had given away. ‘You know, this was our life all along – where is he? How is he? We would see American soldiers fighting wars around the world and we’d sit glued to the television wondering – is he in the Army? Is he one of those soldiers? Has he been killed? It never left us. And of course it was a secret between us. No one knew until very late on. And a lot of it we never talked about even between ourselves. It was too painful. You just lived with it inside.’ It took a serious toll on Mary’s health over the years, but after finding Kevin she said she had begun to recover.
It was January 1995 when Kevin flew into Dublin. ‘The flight over was surreal,’ he said, ‘knowing I was leaving a part of me behind in America, but also finally getting back to Ireland, to a place where I thought I was destined to be, a place where I felt like I belonged.’ Meeting all his brothers and sisters – ‘people that looked like me’ – was an emotional experience. ‘All through your life if you are adopted you look for people that look like you because you want to find some type of identification. So this reunion was just an amazing revelation. It was such a good feeling to finally feel like I belong somewhere, and they wanted me. And I wanted to be there with them. It felt like I’d never left them before. It was remarkable. And we were all so alike, our temperaments were so similar. We all laughed and smiled the same way.’
But such a resolution to their sundered lives was not always in prospect. Finding each other had not been easy and St Patrick’s Guild seems to have been a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Mary first started to look for Kevin in 1980. ‘Well of course I was looking for Kenneth because I didn’t know what his name had become since he went for adoption,’ Mary said.
‘If we had known that our child was still in Dublin when we married,’ said Michael, ‘an obvious choice would have been to go and take our baby back. We were in a predicament of course, because we had told no one about the baby before we married and Mary still couldn’t tell her mother. So we couldn’t suddenly produce this baby out of the blue and say it was ours. But we could have overcome that by adopting our own baby, telling everyone we had adopted a baby. But we didn’t get that choice. We didn’t know it was there for us.’
All together it was a shoddy business, but one founded on the notion that neither Mary nor her baby had any rights worth considering. None of this became apparent until 1995 when Mary and Michael finally found their (by now) 33-year-old son, Kevin Bates. Kevin was able to tell them that he had arrived in America in November 1963 –at precisely the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, and some 13 months after Mary and Michael had married, and 20 months after Mary had handed him over to the nuns at St Patrick’s Guild. If this came as a shock for Mary and Michael, Kevin, too, was astonished to learn that not only had his natural parents married but they had gone on to have six more children. He had six full brothers and sisters in Ireland. It was all the more poignant since Kevin had grown up in America as the only child of a couple who, although devout Catholics, had divorced when he was in his teens.
‘Well, all my life I’ve lived knowing there’s a woman out there somewhere in Ireland who gave me up,’ Kevin said. 7 ‘A father never entered into the picture. I almost thought I was born by immaculate conception. Then I learn of Michael’s existence and I think, gosh, what am I going to do now? I’ve waited all these years to know who Mary was, how am I going to cope now with knowing Michael? Having given birth to me, and then relinquishing me, there they were in Ireland, married. It’s amazing that I wasn’t in that family.’
And while Kevin wondered who his mother was back in Ireland, Mary never stopped thinking about the child she had given away. ‘You know, this was our life all along – where is he? How is he? We would see American soldiers fighting wars around the world and we’d sit glued to the television wondering – is he in the Army? Is he one of those soldiers? Has he been killed? It never left us. And of course it was a secret between us. No one knew until very late on. And a lot of it we never talked about even between ourselves. It was too painful. You just lived with it inside.’ It took a serious toll on Mary’s health over the years, but after finding Kevin she said she had begun to recover.
It was January 1995 when Kevin flew into Dublin. ‘The flight over was surreal,’ he said, ‘knowing I was leaving a part of me behind in America, but also finally getting back to Ireland, to a place where I thought I was destined to be, a place where I felt like I belonged.’ Meeting all his brothers and sisters – ‘people that looked like me’ – was an emotional experience. ‘All through your life if you are adopted you look for people that look like you because you want to find some type of identification. So this reunion was just an amazing revelation. It was such a good feeling to finally feel like I belong somewhere, and they wanted me. And I wanted to be there with them. It felt like I’d never left them before. It was remarkable. And we were all so alike, our temperaments were so similar. We all laughed and smiled the same way.’
But such a resolution to their sundered lives was not always in prospect. Finding each other had not been easy and St Patrick’s Guild seems to have been a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Mary first started to look for Kevin in 1980. ‘Well of course I was looking for Kenneth because I didn’t know what his name had become since he went for adoption,’ Mary said.
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