A hidden daughter and secret sister explores the shame and rejection felt by B.C. adoptees

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Every year, around 400 children are adopted in this province, according to the Adoptive Families Association of BC. For every one of those numbers, there is a set of circumstances, often heartbreaking and shrouded in shame. The author of the new book Hidden Daughter, Secret Sister is sharing one such story, hers.

When Kim Mooney was a small child, her grandma once told her, “You’d better be good or they’ll send you back!” Even though her grandmother was kidding, that feeling of shame and worry always stayed with her, even into adulthood.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh! One person gave me away and the people who took me could give me back!’ My parents would have been shocked, I think, to know that my grandmother said that, first of all, and, secondly, how I interpreted it. It did set a path,” she explains.

“I know my grandmother wouldn’t have meant it with malice, but it hit home in a big way. I was probably six or seven when she said that and I used to worry about it anyway.”

LISTEN: Hidden Daughter, Secret Sister: A Story of Adoption

Mooney was born in 1952, at a time when society placed great shame on a woman bearing a child out of wedlock.

“I was able to secure from the government what they called non-identifying information. And so that gave me a few clues and told me where my mother was born. She was 29 years old and she had a career. And she told me that she was a teacher,” she explains.

She also learned her mother was from Saskatoon but had come to Vancouver to give birth.

“There are certainly a lot of stories out now that I think do tell how birth mothers, young women, or even women in their 20s, who had to give up children because of how our society looked at women who were pregnant outside of marriage. A lot of shame came with that. And that was put on them and they lived with that. And they had to give their children away because they had no option. And so tremendous shame came with that as well.”

She talks about the rejection she felt growing up, and continued to feel, even after she tracked down her birth mother.

“There is a story for every one of us and, so, by talking to a few other adoptees and doing some research, I wanted to be able to open up the conversation to show other adoptees that some of the feelings they may have were shared,” she says.

“The fact that my birth mother gave me away and my adoptive parents, who loved me desperately, would never talk about it. So, between those two was a gap that I filled in with shame and feelings of rejection and worry.”

Hidden Daughter, Secret Sister is a page-turner from front to back, as the reader not only meets Mooney’s mother, but her three half-sisters as well.

“The secret part of it is that I knew I had three sisters from when I met my birth mother back in 1985,” she says. “They just didn’t know about me until after my mother died in 2015. So that was a big surprise that they learned about me. It also helps explain some of their mother’s behaviours over the years.”

“She was a very secretive person and she was very sad. And when they met me, they put the pieces together and realized that because she had given me away, that there was a sadness that came with that.”

Look for Hidden Daughter, Secret Sister: A Story of Adoption from Austin Macauley Publishers.