The question came when I least expected it. Tilted back in the dentist's chair, wondering if I were going to choke on my saliva, I clutched the arms as the technician cleaned my teeth. Then, out of the blue, she asked, "Do you have children?"
"Glug!" I said. This unclear reply didn't matter. The technician was just back from maternity leave and wanted to talk about her baby and preschooler. I was her captive audience.
I remembered a winter day two years earlier. I was in the foyer of a church I'd started attending, waiting for my husband to pick me up after a book club meeting. The chief news-spreader of the congregation was standing with me, both of us making way for parents coming in to pick up their children from the day care centre in the church hall.
"Aren't they cute at that age?" she remarked. Clearly she expected a "yes", so I said "yes." Then she asked, "Do you have children?"
"No," I said, "I have a husband - and there he is !", and I escaped into the snowstorm.
"Have you any children?" is a question I was frequently asked when I was younger. When I said "No," people waited for me to explain, and looked displeased when I didn't. Now that I'm old, I hear it less, and when I do, it jars me. I suppose I should be flattered that people still say "children", not "grandchildren."
"Have you any children?" is not a good question to ask when making small talk with someone you've just met or know only slightly. Even nowadays there are strong social pressures on women to have children, and if you ask and the woman doesn't have any, it sounds as if you are prying or getting ready to criticize. Even among women who have had children, you can still strike a nerve.
An elderly friend in a retirement home whom I used to visit always introduced me to her new friends among the other residents. One woman in particular seemed very sociable, and after she had left us, my friend filled me in on the great tragedy of her life. She and her husband had had a son, who had suffered from an incurable disease of which he died in his early twenties. If he were alive he would be about the age of my husband. I expect that the pain of losing her child has become endurable over the years but I'm sure it's still there. I was thankful that it is not my practice to ask new acquaintances, "Have you any children?"
Someone else who might find the question uncomfortable is an acquaintance of mine who has two children in their twenties, one chronically unemployed and sometimes in trouble with the law; the other trying to make something of himself but struggling. A query about her children is like opening a can of worms.
A few months ago I learned something about making assumptions when I was having a conversation with a woman in my age group who, like me, has no children. She was telling me about a young couple she knows who have an infant and don't like being parents. My friend, who is a religious woman, wondered aloud why God had blessed them with a child they don't want, while she couldn't have any. This rhetorical question about the unfairness of life was a revelation to me, because I had thought that she, like myself, had decided not to have kids.
We never know the hidden pain that a careless question can cause. So instead of asking women, "Have you any children?", ask something else, like "How about those Senators?" or "Seen any good movies lately?"
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Far from the Madding Crowd
Every so often I reread my favourite Thomas Hardy novels: Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd, so naturally I was interested to learn that a new film version of the latter, starring Carrie Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene, has just been released.
I own the first film version of Far from the Madding Crowd, starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp. Back in the days when VHS players were state of the art, and few people had them, I rented this version to entertain a family we were visiting. The father of the family had his doubts about the entertainment value of the movie, but when it began, he was hooked by the depiction of Gabriel Oak's work tending his flock of sheep, because, as a cattle farmer, he knew the difficulties of making a living off the land. His interest confirmed my appreciation of the classics of literature. I was charmed, recently, when an acquaintance of mine mentioned that her ninety-year-old mother was rereading Thomas Hardy again in preparation for being taken to see the new version of Far from the Madding Crowd.
Roger and I saw it yesterday and were impressed. The earlier version is more faithful to Hardy's novel, but it was long; it had an intermission, and the new version had to abbreviate the text to achieve a more normal length. The new version has a more real feel to it. Landscape and weather play a big role in Hardy's fiction, and the film emphasized them. We get a sense of what it was like to walk around a farm at night in an era prior to flashlights, electric lighting and motor vehicle lights. The characters looked grubbier and more authentic than in the earlier film.
Bathsheba Everdene rises in the novel from unemployed governess to owner/manager of a large farm, and Carrie Mulligan conveys the young woman's delight at the opportunity to take over this inheritance, her nervousness as she meets her farm workers for the first time, and her pleasure in working in the field with them and being on the land. Hardy was ahead of his time in depicting a woman who lucked into a career that fully made use of her intelligence, a chance to head a business with great potential. In the end she succeeds in that, even though she has made mistakes in her personal life.
It is amusing to read Hardy, writing in the 19th century, in Victorian times, about a woman's erotic awakening. I remember first reading the seduction/rape scene in Tess and not being sure what really had transpired between her and Alec in the forest. In Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy was subtle and conveyed things symbolically so as not to offend publishers and readers. (He deeply offended them, later, with Tess and Jude.) On the screen, in this remake of Far, we get a better sense than in the novel as to why Bathsheba's romantic life works out as it does. Carrie Mulligan looks young, as befitting a heroine who is 20 when the novel opens and 23 at the end.
While it is clear that Gabriel Oak is the best man of Bathsheba's three suitors, his proposal to her, early on, after a short acquaintance, is so unromantic and direct that it is off-putting. He is ten years her senior, ready to settle down, and she is not. He has mapped out their future and that it will be a dull one, featuring a piano, cucumber frames and babies' birth announcements in the paper.Can we blame a twenty year old girl, who hasn't had any suitors, for wanting more? Later, when Mr. Boldwood proposes to her, he does it in similar terms; it is all about the material things he can offer her. He says she won't have to do farm work any more, not realizing that she likes being a hands-on manager, and that she can provide for her own material needs for herself. Sergeant Troy is clearly a slimeball, but to a girl barely out of her teens, dazed by her sudden rise in the world, he is glamorous in his red coat. Unlike the other two, he courts her by praising her beauty. No wonder she falls for him.
In the three novels mentioned above, Hardy creates complex female characters well worth reading about even in the 21st century. Like most Victorian novelists he is verbose, and sometimes in his role as omniscient narrator, discussing the characters' thoughts, he is not enlightening, and it is better when their actions speak for them. His explanations of farm work, however, are of interest nowadays, as technology has changed and most of us live urban lives. His appreciation of folk songs and customs and his love of the natural environment are attractive qualities.
Originally, Far from the Madding Crowd was written as a magazine serial, and as a result, the chapters usually end in cliff-hangers, thus maintaining suspense and reader interest. I hope the remake of Far from the Madding Crowd will encourage people to read the book.
I own the first film version of Far from the Madding Crowd, starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Terence Stamp. Back in the days when VHS players were state of the art, and few people had them, I rented this version to entertain a family we were visiting. The father of the family had his doubts about the entertainment value of the movie, but when it began, he was hooked by the depiction of Gabriel Oak's work tending his flock of sheep, because, as a cattle farmer, he knew the difficulties of making a living off the land. His interest confirmed my appreciation of the classics of literature. I was charmed, recently, when an acquaintance of mine mentioned that her ninety-year-old mother was rereading Thomas Hardy again in preparation for being taken to see the new version of Far from the Madding Crowd.
Roger and I saw it yesterday and were impressed. The earlier version is more faithful to Hardy's novel, but it was long; it had an intermission, and the new version had to abbreviate the text to achieve a more normal length. The new version has a more real feel to it. Landscape and weather play a big role in Hardy's fiction, and the film emphasized them. We get a sense of what it was like to walk around a farm at night in an era prior to flashlights, electric lighting and motor vehicle lights. The characters looked grubbier and more authentic than in the earlier film.
Bathsheba Everdene rises in the novel from unemployed governess to owner/manager of a large farm, and Carrie Mulligan conveys the young woman's delight at the opportunity to take over this inheritance, her nervousness as she meets her farm workers for the first time, and her pleasure in working in the field with them and being on the land. Hardy was ahead of his time in depicting a woman who lucked into a career that fully made use of her intelligence, a chance to head a business with great potential. In the end she succeeds in that, even though she has made mistakes in her personal life.
It is amusing to read Hardy, writing in the 19th century, in Victorian times, about a woman's erotic awakening. I remember first reading the seduction/rape scene in Tess and not being sure what really had transpired between her and Alec in the forest. In Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy was subtle and conveyed things symbolically so as not to offend publishers and readers. (He deeply offended them, later, with Tess and Jude.) On the screen, in this remake of Far, we get a better sense than in the novel as to why Bathsheba's romantic life works out as it does. Carrie Mulligan looks young, as befitting a heroine who is 20 when the novel opens and 23 at the end.
While it is clear that Gabriel Oak is the best man of Bathsheba's three suitors, his proposal to her, early on, after a short acquaintance, is so unromantic and direct that it is off-putting. He is ten years her senior, ready to settle down, and she is not. He has mapped out their future and that it will be a dull one, featuring a piano, cucumber frames and babies' birth announcements in the paper.Can we blame a twenty year old girl, who hasn't had any suitors, for wanting more? Later, when Mr. Boldwood proposes to her, he does it in similar terms; it is all about the material things he can offer her. He says she won't have to do farm work any more, not realizing that she likes being a hands-on manager, and that she can provide for her own material needs for herself. Sergeant Troy is clearly a slimeball, but to a girl barely out of her teens, dazed by her sudden rise in the world, he is glamorous in his red coat. Unlike the other two, he courts her by praising her beauty. No wonder she falls for him.
In the three novels mentioned above, Hardy creates complex female characters well worth reading about even in the 21st century. Like most Victorian novelists he is verbose, and sometimes in his role as omniscient narrator, discussing the characters' thoughts, he is not enlightening, and it is better when their actions speak for them. His explanations of farm work, however, are of interest nowadays, as technology has changed and most of us live urban lives. His appreciation of folk songs and customs and his love of the natural environment are attractive qualities.
Originally, Far from the Madding Crowd was written as a magazine serial, and as a result, the chapters usually end in cliff-hangers, thus maintaining suspense and reader interest. I hope the remake of Far from the Madding Crowd will encourage people to read the book.
Friday, May 8, 2015
My story in Passages anthology
Back in the winter I entered a creative writing contest held by Carleton University's English Department, and a few weeks ago I was delighted to learn that I came second in the fiction part of the contest with my short story, "They Can't Understand It". The honorarium and gift books from Anasi Press were very welcome, and so is the news that my story is not only being published in the anthology, Passages, but will be mentioned, or included, on the Carleton University English Department website.
Friday, April 17, 2015
"A CAKE" - my poem in Good Times magazine
A friend emailed me to tell me that my poem, "A Cake" is in the current (April 2015) good times magazine
and that she is saving her copy for me.
Here is the poem.
A CAKE
by Ruth Latta
I'm going to bake a plain white cake,
the sort that Mother used to make,
with flour, sugar, milk - Let's see:
What else is in the recipe?
The cookbook's in a cupboard, lair
of bake pans, clutter. Here is where
some serviettes have taken rest.
I may well need one for a guest.
I must clean out this hidey-hole,
not be a sloven, lose control
of cupboard space. Beneath the sink?
Oh, what would Betty Crocker think?
The page where "White Cakes" ought to be
is missing, left out, lost to me.
The loose leaves here are old and worn.
My plans for cake have died stillborn.
A thought occurs to save the day -
the food store, just a block away.
In "Bakery" there is a cake
much like my mother used to make.
and that she is saving her copy for me.
Here is the poem.
A CAKE
by Ruth Latta
I'm going to bake a plain white cake,
the sort that Mother used to make,
with flour, sugar, milk - Let's see:
What else is in the recipe?
The cookbook's in a cupboard, lair
of bake pans, clutter. Here is where
some serviettes have taken rest.
I may well need one for a guest.
I must clean out this hidey-hole,
not be a sloven, lose control
of cupboard space. Beneath the sink?
Oh, what would Betty Crocker think?
The page where "White Cakes" ought to be
is missing, left out, lost to me.
The loose leaves here are old and worn.
My plans for cake have died stillborn.
A thought occurs to save the day -
the food store, just a block away.
In "Bakery" there is a cake
much like my mother used to make.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Shameless - a review
My review of Marilyn Churley's recent non-fiction book, Shameless, has just been posted on Compulsive Reader, and I thought I would post it here, too.
Shameless: The fight for adoption disclosure and the search for my son,
by Marilyn Churley
reviewed by Ruth Latta
Marilyn Churley's non-fiction work, Shameless (Toronto, Between the Lines, 2015, ISBN 978-1-77113-173-5) is a mother-child reunion story, and more. The former Ontario (Canada) cabinet minister has written a memoir about the search for the baby she relinquished in 1968, and, as well, a history of the struggle to get the Ontario adoption disclosure law changed. She shows how social mores of the 1960s were hostile to women's needs, and how men's concerns delayed the effort to open adoption records to adoptees and birth parents.
"On January 30, 1968, at the age of nineteen, I delivered a seven pound, thirteen-ounce boy in a hospital in Barrie, Ontario," she writes. "I never got to hold him." She gave him up for adoption through the Children's Aid Society because she lacked the means to support him on her own.
Churley's story is commonplace, yet unique. She grew up in a log cabin in Gander-Happy Valley Labrador where her father was a cook at the military base. Her parents, from Newfoundland, had married young and had little education, although her father eventually retrained for a skilled trade. The second of five children, Marilyn did well in school, attended church, and was raised "blissfully ignorant" about sex.
On graduating from high school in 1966, she went to Ottawa, the nation's capital, to attend university. Churley underwent extreme culture shock, experiencing a major city, so different from the small town in which she had grown up. Living in student co-op houses, she found that "a sexual revolution was happening; women were fighting for equality and being sexually active was part of that equality, yet it was nearly impossible for unmarried women to get birth control... abortion was illegal."
When Churley sought a prescription for the birth control pill, her doctor refused, saying that it might "make her promiscuous." When she realized she was pregnant, she and her boyfriend, the father, were no longer a couple, so she briefly considered abortion. After seeing the seedy abortion venue, she fled and decided to have the baby.
When she contacted her former boyfriend, he said she could move in with him and his spiritual mentor, a charismatic monk who was hostile to her. Fearing for her safety, she contacted a woman friend in British Columbia and asked to come and stay. Knowing her parents would be shocked and angry, she didn't tell them she was pregnant, but instead said she was dropping out of school to get a job in B.C.
British Columbia denied her welfare assistance unless she could show that she'd told her parents of her condition and that they'd refused any financial assistance. Eventually, the ex-boyfriend of her woman friend, who was visiting from Ontario, asked Marilyn to come and keep house for him until the baby was born. She accepted, and moved with him to Barrie, Ontario, near his military base, where they "lived the life of a normal couple expecting a baby", except that the baby wasn't his. Though Marilyn hoped they could be a family and raise the child, the young man insisted that he wanted her to move out once she had recovered from the birth and relinquished the baby for adoption.
In hospital, after a terrifying labour, a nurse called Churley a "shameless little hussy". Marilyn replied: "I am frightened and sad, but I am not ashamed." (This insult provided the title for her book.) After giving up her baby, Marilyn went to live with friends. Some months later, after the grace period for reclaiming her baby had passed, the man who had provided her with a roof during her pregnancy asked her to marry him. She did, but on her mind was the thought: "Here we were, married, and my baby wasn't with us."
Marilyn writes that this man, her first husband, was "a product of his time, as was I", and "one of the finest men I've ever known." Clearly he didn't want to raise another man's baby. Certainly he had no obligation, and he never led her to expect that he would, but his attitude is ungenerous, compared, for instance, to that of the adoptive parents who took Marilyn's son to be their own. Thirty years later, when Marilyn contacted the birth father because her newfound son wanted to meet him, she received a similarly cold, ungenerous response. Her former boyfriend, now married with children, first reacted with the thought that she or his son wanted money. He had never believed that the baby was his, and wanted a DNA test to prove paternity. It did. His attitude was like that of those who later opposed changes in the law governing adoption disclosure.
Marilyn and her first husband went to Europe, then broke up. She spent a year travelling in Europe and North Africa, then returned to Toronto to become a temporary worker in government agencies. At twenty-five, in a relationship with a music events promoter, she had a daughter under happy circumstances. The family moved to Montreal, then to Vancouver, where Marilyn enroled at Simon Fraser University. But her common-law husband was not the sort to settle down, so eventually she returned with her young daughter to Toronto, where she administered a community health centre and a housing co-op, and found a new relationship which was to last fifteen years.
Her activism on social issues like affordable housing brought her into the public eye, and in 1988 she won a seat on Toronto City Council. She next ran as a New Democratic Party (social democratic party) candidate for the Ontario legislature and won her Toronto-area seat. When the New Democratic Party won a majority in 1990 and formed the provincial government, Marilyn became Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations and Registrar General of Ontario. Adoption records were part of her purview.
Between 1927, when "closed" adoptions became the rule, and 1979, when the first step toward opening records began, over 250,000 children were adopted in Ontario. By the 1970s, adoptees were demanding to know their biological roots, and organizations such as Parent Finders were being formed. In 1979, thanks to a New Democratic Party legislator, an adoption disclosure registry was established. It allowed birth registrations and adoption orders to be provided to an adult adoptee or to a birth parent, provided that both parties had indicated a willingness to have that information divulged to the other. If one party had asked and the other hadn't, no disclosure could take place.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, Churley started looking for her lost son. When she contacted the Simcoe County Family Services for non-identifying information about the adoptive parents' circumstances, she received a patronizing refusal. She then joined Parent Finders, an organization of volunteers who searched old newspapers' adoption announcements, and published a newsletter in which adoptees and birth parents could request information. Parent Finders located the family who had adopted Marilyn's son, and, in 1995, Marilyn wrote to him, saying that she did not want to disrupt anyone's life, but only wanted to know if he was all right, and to explain why she had given him up.
In 1996 he replied. He had always known her name, which was on his adoption orders. In recent years, he'd seen "Marilyn Churley" as the signature on elevator certificates (thanks to her position as Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations) and wondered if she could be his birth mother. Busy with university and happy in his adopted family life, he hadn't gotten around to looking for her. Their reunion and subsequent relationship is the sort of story of which adoptees and birth parents dream.
When the New Democrats lost the next provincial election to the Conservatives, the their full-disclosure bill on adoption became defunct. As a private member, Churley introduced another bill on the subject, and, in 1997, went public with her own story.
"People told me I brought a bourgeois respectability to the movement, which made me laugh, but I guess it was true," she writes.
In 2001, Churley's third adoption disclosure bill reached committee stage, the opportunity for people on both sides of the issue to air their views. Opponents of retroactive full disclosure claimed concern over the privacy of birth mothers. In fact, no birth mother had ever been guaranteed privacy in writing, and birth mother's names were usually on the child's birth registration, as in Churley's case.
In time, Churley realized that the opponents, mostly male, were worried because birth mothers sometimes named the birth fathers on the registration. Men were afraid that children they had fathered, or might have fathered, would turn up on their doorsteps.
Their fears were unfounded. If the birth mother had added the father's name to the birth registration, the government deleted the father's name from the birth certificate. Relinquishment of a baby meant that the birth parents had no obligations - as well as no rights over - the child. While a few adoption reunions hit the headlines, such as singer Joni Mitchell's with her daughter, in most cases any contact between adoptees and birth parents happened discreetly, not in the realm of public knowledge.
Adoptees told the media that they were well aware that their births had involved problems. They had weighed their fear of what they might find out, against their need for medical and other information about their roots, and most had decided that they wanted to know.
In 2003, when a new Liberal government in Ontario announced its plan to reform the adoption disclosure laws, Churley got behind their bill. It faced strong opposition and a court challenged. Although 75% of Ontarians wanted full and retroactive adoption information disclosure, the opposition Conservatives "conjured theoretical scenarios" about aged rape or incest victims being "outed" in their old age by unwanted offspring. In response to one farfetched article in the National Post, Churley wrote: "This bill is not a search and reunion statute, but about the right to personal information."
Finally, in June 2009, an adoption disclosure bill, which included disclosure veto and contact veto provisions, became law, and Ontario joined the many other jurisdictions that had updated archaic systems. Nowadays, when adoptions occur, the birth parent is usually given the option of staying in touch with the adoptive parents and receiving photos and updates about the child. The right to know one's background is still a struggle among people conceived through reproductive technology and by aboriginal Canadians adopted by white families during the "1960s Sweep."
These days, Churley is happily married and the grandmother of two little boys, one her daughter's, the other, her son's. Her son is proud of his background, both birth and adoptive, and is on good terms with all of his relatives. Still, Churley says she still can't look at Billy's childhood photos without weeping.
"I was a tough little nut," she writes, "a real survivor, and, as bad as things were, I got through it and was able to do well in my life. But what I really wanted was my baby back."
Information about Ruth Latta's books is available on http://ruthlattabooks.blogspot.com
Shameless: The fight for adoption disclosure and the search for my son,
by Marilyn Churley
reviewed by Ruth Latta
Marilyn Churley's non-fiction work, Shameless (Toronto, Between the Lines, 2015, ISBN 978-1-77113-173-5) is a mother-child reunion story, and more. The former Ontario (Canada) cabinet minister has written a memoir about the search for the baby she relinquished in 1968, and, as well, a history of the struggle to get the Ontario adoption disclosure law changed. She shows how social mores of the 1960s were hostile to women's needs, and how men's concerns delayed the effort to open adoption records to adoptees and birth parents.
"On January 30, 1968, at the age of nineteen, I delivered a seven pound, thirteen-ounce boy in a hospital in Barrie, Ontario," she writes. "I never got to hold him." She gave him up for adoption through the Children's Aid Society because she lacked the means to support him on her own.
Churley's story is commonplace, yet unique. She grew up in a log cabin in Gander-Happy Valley Labrador where her father was a cook at the military base. Her parents, from Newfoundland, had married young and had little education, although her father eventually retrained for a skilled trade. The second of five children, Marilyn did well in school, attended church, and was raised "blissfully ignorant" about sex.
On graduating from high school in 1966, she went to Ottawa, the nation's capital, to attend university. Churley underwent extreme culture shock, experiencing a major city, so different from the small town in which she had grown up. Living in student co-op houses, she found that "a sexual revolution was happening; women were fighting for equality and being sexually active was part of that equality, yet it was nearly impossible for unmarried women to get birth control... abortion was illegal."
When Churley sought a prescription for the birth control pill, her doctor refused, saying that it might "make her promiscuous." When she realized she was pregnant, she and her boyfriend, the father, were no longer a couple, so she briefly considered abortion. After seeing the seedy abortion venue, she fled and decided to have the baby.
When she contacted her former boyfriend, he said she could move in with him and his spiritual mentor, a charismatic monk who was hostile to her. Fearing for her safety, she contacted a woman friend in British Columbia and asked to come and stay. Knowing her parents would be shocked and angry, she didn't tell them she was pregnant, but instead said she was dropping out of school to get a job in B.C.
British Columbia denied her welfare assistance unless she could show that she'd told her parents of her condition and that they'd refused any financial assistance. Eventually, the ex-boyfriend of her woman friend, who was visiting from Ontario, asked Marilyn to come and keep house for him until the baby was born. She accepted, and moved with him to Barrie, Ontario, near his military base, where they "lived the life of a normal couple expecting a baby", except that the baby wasn't his. Though Marilyn hoped they could be a family and raise the child, the young man insisted that he wanted her to move out once she had recovered from the birth and relinquished the baby for adoption.
In hospital, after a terrifying labour, a nurse called Churley a "shameless little hussy". Marilyn replied: "I am frightened and sad, but I am not ashamed." (This insult provided the title for her book.) After giving up her baby, Marilyn went to live with friends. Some months later, after the grace period for reclaiming her baby had passed, the man who had provided her with a roof during her pregnancy asked her to marry him. She did, but on her mind was the thought: "Here we were, married, and my baby wasn't with us."
Marilyn writes that this man, her first husband, was "a product of his time, as was I", and "one of the finest men I've ever known." Clearly he didn't want to raise another man's baby. Certainly he had no obligation, and he never led her to expect that he would, but his attitude is ungenerous, compared, for instance, to that of the adoptive parents who took Marilyn's son to be their own. Thirty years later, when Marilyn contacted the birth father because her newfound son wanted to meet him, she received a similarly cold, ungenerous response. Her former boyfriend, now married with children, first reacted with the thought that she or his son wanted money. He had never believed that the baby was his, and wanted a DNA test to prove paternity. It did. His attitude was like that of those who later opposed changes in the law governing adoption disclosure.
Marilyn and her first husband went to Europe, then broke up. She spent a year travelling in Europe and North Africa, then returned to Toronto to become a temporary worker in government agencies. At twenty-five, in a relationship with a music events promoter, she had a daughter under happy circumstances. The family moved to Montreal, then to Vancouver, where Marilyn enroled at Simon Fraser University. But her common-law husband was not the sort to settle down, so eventually she returned with her young daughter to Toronto, where she administered a community health centre and a housing co-op, and found a new relationship which was to last fifteen years.
Her activism on social issues like affordable housing brought her into the public eye, and in 1988 she won a seat on Toronto City Council. She next ran as a New Democratic Party (social democratic party) candidate for the Ontario legislature and won her Toronto-area seat. When the New Democratic Party won a majority in 1990 and formed the provincial government, Marilyn became Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations and Registrar General of Ontario. Adoption records were part of her purview.
Between 1927, when "closed" adoptions became the rule, and 1979, when the first step toward opening records began, over 250,000 children were adopted in Ontario. By the 1970s, adoptees were demanding to know their biological roots, and organizations such as Parent Finders were being formed. In 1979, thanks to a New Democratic Party legislator, an adoption disclosure registry was established. It allowed birth registrations and adoption orders to be provided to an adult adoptee or to a birth parent, provided that both parties had indicated a willingness to have that information divulged to the other. If one party had asked and the other hadn't, no disclosure could take place.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, Churley started looking for her lost son. When she contacted the Simcoe County Family Services for non-identifying information about the adoptive parents' circumstances, she received a patronizing refusal. She then joined Parent Finders, an organization of volunteers who searched old newspapers' adoption announcements, and published a newsletter in which adoptees and birth parents could request information. Parent Finders located the family who had adopted Marilyn's son, and, in 1995, Marilyn wrote to him, saying that she did not want to disrupt anyone's life, but only wanted to know if he was all right, and to explain why she had given him up.
In 1996 he replied. He had always known her name, which was on his adoption orders. In recent years, he'd seen "Marilyn Churley" as the signature on elevator certificates (thanks to her position as Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations) and wondered if she could be his birth mother. Busy with university and happy in his adopted family life, he hadn't gotten around to looking for her. Their reunion and subsequent relationship is the sort of story of which adoptees and birth parents dream.
When the New Democrats lost the next provincial election to the Conservatives, the their full-disclosure bill on adoption became defunct. As a private member, Churley introduced another bill on the subject, and, in 1997, went public with her own story.
"People told me I brought a bourgeois respectability to the movement, which made me laugh, but I guess it was true," she writes.
In 2001, Churley's third adoption disclosure bill reached committee stage, the opportunity for people on both sides of the issue to air their views. Opponents of retroactive full disclosure claimed concern over the privacy of birth mothers. In fact, no birth mother had ever been guaranteed privacy in writing, and birth mother's names were usually on the child's birth registration, as in Churley's case.
In time, Churley realized that the opponents, mostly male, were worried because birth mothers sometimes named the birth fathers on the registration. Men were afraid that children they had fathered, or might have fathered, would turn up on their doorsteps.
Their fears were unfounded. If the birth mother had added the father's name to the birth registration, the government deleted the father's name from the birth certificate. Relinquishment of a baby meant that the birth parents had no obligations - as well as no rights over - the child. While a few adoption reunions hit the headlines, such as singer Joni Mitchell's with her daughter, in most cases any contact between adoptees and birth parents happened discreetly, not in the realm of public knowledge.
Adoptees told the media that they were well aware that their births had involved problems. They had weighed their fear of what they might find out, against their need for medical and other information about their roots, and most had decided that they wanted to know.
In 2003, when a new Liberal government in Ontario announced its plan to reform the adoption disclosure laws, Churley got behind their bill. It faced strong opposition and a court challenged. Although 75% of Ontarians wanted full and retroactive adoption information disclosure, the opposition Conservatives "conjured theoretical scenarios" about aged rape or incest victims being "outed" in their old age by unwanted offspring. In response to one farfetched article in the National Post, Churley wrote: "This bill is not a search and reunion statute, but about the right to personal information."
Finally, in June 2009, an adoption disclosure bill, which included disclosure veto and contact veto provisions, became law, and Ontario joined the many other jurisdictions that had updated archaic systems. Nowadays, when adoptions occur, the birth parent is usually given the option of staying in touch with the adoptive parents and receiving photos and updates about the child. The right to know one's background is still a struggle among people conceived through reproductive technology and by aboriginal Canadians adopted by white families during the "1960s Sweep."
These days, Churley is happily married and the grandmother of two little boys, one her daughter's, the other, her son's. Her son is proud of his background, both birth and adoptive, and is on good terms with all of his relatives. Still, Churley says she still can't look at Billy's childhood photos without weeping.
"I was a tough little nut," she writes, "a real survivor, and, as bad as things were, I got through it and was able to do well in my life. But what I really wanted was my baby back."
Information about Ruth Latta's books is available on http://ruthlattabooks.blogspot.com
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Count Me In (a review)
My review of Count Me In is in the current issue of the online magazine, Compulsive Reader, and I thought I would republish it here.
Count Me In
by Emily White
reviewed by Ruth Latta
Emily White, a Canadian environmental lawyer turned author, published her first book, Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart) in 2010. It became a national best-seller. In it she shows that loneliness affects one out of every four people, that it is "being egged on and aggravated by our culture," and that it is hazardous to our health.
White blended her personal experiences with an examination of the existing medical and sociological writing on loneliness. Among the studies she referenced was a 2002-5 survey from Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, showing links between loneliness and cognitive declined. She cited research showing a sharp and continuous decline in socializing over the past thirty years.
Loneliness first hit White as a child when her parents' marriage broke up, and was worsened when she was a young adult and her father died. Distinguishing between "depression" and "loneliness", she says that depression feels like something "hounding and snapping at you" while loneliness is "drowning in absence." Surprisingly, she found that the depictions of loneliness in fiction were more accurate than those she found in medical/mental health literature.
White ended Lonely by noting the few efforts here and there being made by public health agencies to encourage social connection. Her own plight was eased when she found a life partner and moved with her from Toronto to Newfoundland.
White's new book, Count Me In (McClelland and Stewart/Random House, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7710-8771-4,) picks up where Lonely left off, with regard to her personal story, but is subtitled: "How I stepped off the sidelines, created connection and built a fuller, richer, more lived-in life." We meet White back in her home town of Toronto, having broken up with her partner of five years. Although she had (has) family and friends in Toronto, she missed the sense of community she'd had in Newfoundland, and, because of her change of circumstances, had to abandon her work-in-progress, which was about the nature of community in small towns. Back in the city, she combined her personal quest for a social network with research into how to achieve a sense of community.
As a young environmental lawyer working on contract in Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, White had a sense of belonging. She walked under the midnight sun with her roommate's dog and gained inner peace from the land. Hoping to attain that feeling again, she listed the things she needed for "belonging": a dog, nature, faith, home and neighbourhood. Since she already had a beloved aging cat, she decided not to acquire another pet. Her project led to satisfactory involvement in a community garden, an organization drawing attention to the inhumane treatment of pigs, and a gay Catholic congregation. Other ventures proved less rewarding, and she examines why.
White's search for community confirmed her belief, first expressed in Lonely, that social policy affects people's sense of belonging. Her good experiences at a public pool and community garden were made possible by elected officials of the past who directed tax dollars toward construction of a the community centre that housed the pool and the park that had space for the garden. These days, governments are providing less funding to public spaces people can meet others, and White thinks it's a shame.
White's quest taught her several things. One was to be open and receptive to people from different walks of life. In one group, she gravitated toward people in her age group (mid-forties) with careers, until one evening she conversed with a man in his eighties who told fascinating tales of Toronto in the pre-high-rise days.
She learned, too, that, she had to start with what she cared about. She walked out of a group that was both badly led and homophobic. Much as she loves language, literature and helping others, she decided she lacked the patience to tutor students taking English as a Second Language. She rejected team sports because she doesn't enjoy them, but notes that they are a highly praised form of social connection and work for some.
White advises people to examine their expectations. Close friendships won't blossom right away, if ever, but when relationships are lower key, as in the community garden, you can relax and don't have to be "on" all the time.
If a group situation doesn't work for you, don't be too quick to blame yourself, she says. Volunteer work, for instance, is always lauded as the route toward community building and a sense of belonging, but may not be so. Fewer organizations use volunteer help these days. Some that do are very task-oriented at the expense of human connection.
On finishing Count Me In, I wished I could talk to Emily White about some of my recent ventures into the community. She would probably encourage me to explore more activities. When you create a sense of connection for yourself by becoming part of a group, she says, you are helping to bring more warmth into the public realm. In her view, the world is now at a tipping point where we will either match our desire for connection with action, or turn to "private relationships, commercial experiences and pre-packaged community of the type you might find on a cruise."
"All it takes is one step," she says, "the first one off the sidelines."
Count Me In
by Emily White
reviewed by Ruth Latta
Emily White, a Canadian environmental lawyer turned author, published her first book, Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart) in 2010. It became a national best-seller. In it she shows that loneliness affects one out of every four people, that it is "being egged on and aggravated by our culture," and that it is hazardous to our health.
White blended her personal experiences with an examination of the existing medical and sociological writing on loneliness. Among the studies she referenced was a 2002-5 survey from Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, showing links between loneliness and cognitive declined. She cited research showing a sharp and continuous decline in socializing over the past thirty years.
Loneliness first hit White as a child when her parents' marriage broke up, and was worsened when she was a young adult and her father died. Distinguishing between "depression" and "loneliness", she says that depression feels like something "hounding and snapping at you" while loneliness is "drowning in absence." Surprisingly, she found that the depictions of loneliness in fiction were more accurate than those she found in medical/mental health literature.
White ended Lonely by noting the few efforts here and there being made by public health agencies to encourage social connection. Her own plight was eased when she found a life partner and moved with her from Toronto to Newfoundland.
White's new book, Count Me In (McClelland and Stewart/Random House, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7710-8771-4,) picks up where Lonely left off, with regard to her personal story, but is subtitled: "How I stepped off the sidelines, created connection and built a fuller, richer, more lived-in life." We meet White back in her home town of Toronto, having broken up with her partner of five years. Although she had (has) family and friends in Toronto, she missed the sense of community she'd had in Newfoundland, and, because of her change of circumstances, had to abandon her work-in-progress, which was about the nature of community in small towns. Back in the city, she combined her personal quest for a social network with research into how to achieve a sense of community.
As a young environmental lawyer working on contract in Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic, White had a sense of belonging. She walked under the midnight sun with her roommate's dog and gained inner peace from the land. Hoping to attain that feeling again, she listed the things she needed for "belonging": a dog, nature, faith, home and neighbourhood. Since she already had a beloved aging cat, she decided not to acquire another pet. Her project led to satisfactory involvement in a community garden, an organization drawing attention to the inhumane treatment of pigs, and a gay Catholic congregation. Other ventures proved less rewarding, and she examines why.
White's search for community confirmed her belief, first expressed in Lonely, that social policy affects people's sense of belonging. Her good experiences at a public pool and community garden were made possible by elected officials of the past who directed tax dollars toward construction of a the community centre that housed the pool and the park that had space for the garden. These days, governments are providing less funding to public spaces people can meet others, and White thinks it's a shame.
White's quest taught her several things. One was to be open and receptive to people from different walks of life. In one group, she gravitated toward people in her age group (mid-forties) with careers, until one evening she conversed with a man in his eighties who told fascinating tales of Toronto in the pre-high-rise days.
She learned, too, that, she had to start with what she cared about. She walked out of a group that was both badly led and homophobic. Much as she loves language, literature and helping others, she decided she lacked the patience to tutor students taking English as a Second Language. She rejected team sports because she doesn't enjoy them, but notes that they are a highly praised form of social connection and work for some.
White advises people to examine their expectations. Close friendships won't blossom right away, if ever, but when relationships are lower key, as in the community garden, you can relax and don't have to be "on" all the time.
If a group situation doesn't work for you, don't be too quick to blame yourself, she says. Volunteer work, for instance, is always lauded as the route toward community building and a sense of belonging, but may not be so. Fewer organizations use volunteer help these days. Some that do are very task-oriented at the expense of human connection.
On finishing Count Me In, I wished I could talk to Emily White about some of my recent ventures into the community. She would probably encourage me to explore more activities. When you create a sense of connection for yourself by becoming part of a group, she says, you are helping to bring more warmth into the public realm. In her view, the world is now at a tipping point where we will either match our desire for connection with action, or turn to "private relationships, commercial experiences and pre-packaged community of the type you might find on a cruise."
"All it takes is one step," she says, "the first one off the sidelines."
Monday, February 9, 2015
Recent publications
My review of William Klaber's book, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, is in the current issue of Compulsive Reader.
My short story, "M.J." and regular column "Ruth's Ruminations" appear in the February/March 2015 of Canadian Stories.
My short story, "M.J." and regular column "Ruth's Ruminations" appear in the February/March 2015 of Canadian Stories.
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