Writing an adoption memoir helped Sue Watson find Cynthia

“I just want to smell you. You're so beautiful,” were the first words Sue Watson heard when she met her birth mother ‘Lizzy’.

Watson had always known she was adopted. She grew up as part of a happy family in West Auckland.

It wasn’t until she was in her 20s, in the 1980s, that she got a letter from her birth mother asking to meet, she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“The first contact I describe as a visceral shock and a thunk. A brown envelope, stamped OHMS, as they were in the day, arrived in the letterbox. I didn't even have to open the envelope. I knew that that was going to be my birth mother knocking on my door.”

It was not something she had sought, she says.

“I hadn't chosen to deny her the opportunity to be able to have contact with me, which adopted children could do under that Adult Adoption Information Act. So, I guess I'd had a vague sense that it might happen but hoped it wouldn't. And suddenly there it was.”

Lizzy fell pregnant as a young woman in the 1960s when she was training to be a nurse in Wellington. She didn’t know who the father was, she was involved with two men at the time, Watson says.

“And she told neither man. She simply ran away, basically. She ran away to Auckland, where she was picked up by the Motherhood of Man.”

That was an organisation that took in unwed pregnant women, she says.

“Effectively as domestic slave labour, frankly, to a family where they could hide their pregnancies or they'd be kept inside.”

When Lizzy later gave birth to Watson in hospital, she wasn’t allowed to hold her baby, Watson says.

“When I was birthed, they said, you can't touch or see that baby. You've given it up for adoption. And they took me away. And she was never allowed to touch me.”

But Lizzy, who didn't even know if it was a boy or girl, was determined, to see her child, she says.

"She told me that they held me up behind the glass window in the nursery. And she said, ‘unwrap her hands and feet’. And she counted that I had ten toes and ten fingers. And that I was, in inverted commas, normal.

“And that meant that she could leave because she felt that I would have a good chance of being adopted.”

Watson, who has written about her experiences in the memoir Finding Cynthia Winters, stayed in touch for a while, exchanging letters, before she decided to end contact with her birth mother.

“It was just, I felt it was too much for me. And I was very protective of mum and dad. I felt like I've got my parents. I don't need another mother. I have an amazing mother.”

Lizzy had a raw need connection, Watson says, "which I just didn't feel equipped to give her".

Later, when she learned Lizzy was dying, she went to see her.

“And it was this deeply, of course, profound moment of seeing this woman who I hadn't seen for more than 20 years, as I describe her, a frail scrap of a person because the cancer had been incredibly damaging to her.

“And it was the first time in her life that she said to somebody in public, in fact, it was one of the nurses, this is my daughter, Susan.”

They had a short time together reconnecting, Watson says.

“She was extremely unwell and she was literally on her deathbed. But it was a time where I felt that there was an unspoken, deep acceptance and love for each other.”

The process of writing about her life has given her compassion for Lizzy and for herself, she says.

“And of course, the person I've met, and I only found her a year ago, is Cynthia, and that's me. That's the baby. So, I was given a name by Lizzy, which I only found out a year ago when I got my original birth certificate.”

At the launch of her memoir somebody asked Watson if she felt lighter having written the book.

“And I said, ‘I feel lighter, but more substantial', because I feel like there's two of me now. There's this dear little baby Cynthia, and all she knew was abandonment, and she's been with me this whole time.

“And now it's my turn to look after her, because she's been trying to look after me for more than 60 years now and to keep me safe.”