Mummy Dearest

Bonnie Sumner interviews her mother Barbara Sumner about her search for her mother – and her adoptive mother’s decision to cancel her family

An intimate interview with my daughter, Bonnie Sumner, from 2020. Reprinted from Newsroom.

It’s interesting to see how my knowledge of the architecture of human adoption and my responses to it have evolved (and sharpened) over the last five years, especially since completing an adoption-focused PhD.

My mother Barbara Sumner was raised as the daughter of two working-class parents in 1960s New Zealand. From the outside they looked like the perfect nuclear family. But it was a fabrication. Her book Tree of Strangers is a myth-busting memoir about growing up as an adopted person, her search for identity, and being a young, single mother in New Zealand in the 1980s. We sat down recently and I conducted an interview with mum.

You describe what you call a “stolen generation that has never been acknowledged”.

Yes. Over 100,000 women had babies taken from them between 1955 and the late 70s. One in three New Zealanders has some link to adoption today because of how prevalent it was. Many women who had their children taken from them talk about them being removed directly from their wombs and hidden in a separate part of the hospital.

The context for my story is that I was taken in a forced adoption and my birth certificate was changed. So there was a lie at the heart of the construction of my so-called family that everyone was very desperate to keep alive.

In the adoption heyday infertile people had a right to babies. Then and now it was about who holds the power – a single, often unsupported mother didn’t stand a chance against a system designed to privilege married couples. Now, particularly that adoption isn’t as common, we talk about it from the perspective of science and technology and how cool it is – in terms of surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies – and we talk about it from the right of people to have children. We’re doing the same thing to women with nothing left to sell but their wombs.

You smash so many myths and fantasies about adoption.

The idea that adoption is a win-win is a form of state-sanctioned gaslighting. We rarely consider it as commoditising a child. We’re told that one set of arms is as good as another, and that a pre-verbal child does not experience anything. We hold onto the idea that a mother without support is making a selfless sacrifice. We’re told we’re gifts. Or that the womb is a benign place that does not impact on the child; that once a baby is taken from their mother there is no connection.

Then there’s the idea that you are lucky and must be grateful because the myth says your mum didn’t want you.

Another is that you’re chosen when in fact you were just the next on a conveyor belt of children removed from their mothers to meet a market demand. Adopters often say you were really wanted, but what they wanted was their own child. And you were ‘a’ child, not ‘the’ child. I think this is an important distinction.

Another story is that your mother loved you enough to give you up – so love is about being discarded. You feel that growing up. You know you are not your parents’ first choice. Instinctively, you understand you were discarded, so you have to behave well to avoid another catastrophic loss.

In my situation each time I behaved in a way that was not acceptable, I was abandoned – as a teen, then as a young mother, and now.

I love the way the story travels around the country, from your birth in Napier at a home for unwed mothers, to life in small town Runanga on the West Coast, to Christchurch and then Ponsonby in the 80s as a sole parent. This book is about adoption, but it’s also a beautifully written story about time and place, marriages and mothering.

It’s about New Zealand culture in the 80s and 90s. I was coming up at a time when feminism was expanding, and I was single and had young children and that didn’t exactly fit the feminist ideals. And as a young, solo mother I was considered a threat to the good married wives in Ponsonby. And then there was the whole solo mother bashing thing. It was the 80s.

You’ve been writing since you were young – you were once an award-winning columnist – and now you’re completing your masters at Victoria, but it’s taken until now to have your first book published. What does this journey feel like?

It feels like I needed to write about adoption from the inside to find my voice. The story of adoption is told by adopters or the medical profession, but it’s very rarely told by adopted people because we are commoditised in such a way we have no voice. My adopter said to me ‘we love you as if you’re our own’ but their own child would be a very different person to me. To find your own identity it’s not just about papers, it’s also about recognising that you are completely different. You can’t fall back on family culture as a way of finding yourself because that isn’t your culture. So this book has freed me up to write in a different way. I used to write in quite a technical way, now I write more emotionally. I can finally own my emotional life.

But it’s terrifying to step out. Look at how long it took me to fully acknowledge what was lost. The process of writing it was gruelling, especially because in order to write it I had to experience complete rejection from my adopter and their extended family and that my children and grandchildren also had to experience it – it turned out we were all expendable.

Yes – when you began writing the book, the person I call Nana decided to disown us all. I was so shocked she would choose not to see even her great-grandchildren.

I know. When I went to court to gain my files and began to write the book she disowned not just me, but my children and grandchildren. Her reason was I had a problem with adoption so she would remove herself from the problem. I tried many times to discuss it with her. I invited her to go on the journey with me, to understand what happened to both of us. She declined and cancelled us.

That action speaks to very heart of the book. Adoption creates a fictive kinship. We are told it there is no difference, but that is not my experience, or the experience of many I know in adoption circles. Sadly, despite a number of advances from us, the woman you’ve always known as your grandmother maintains her position and is adamant she is doing it for our benefit.

I feel like the reaction to Tree of Strangers is going to be quite divisive given the general feeling about adoption.

Mothers of loss and most adopted people will recognise the truths threaded throughout the book and hopefully find it resonant. An early response from people not involved in adoption is that they never considered these things – they believed in the myths of adoption. In 1971 we were removing 76 babies a week as if it was a pandemic of maternal indifference. That women just gave away their babies was part of the gaslighting. Most adoption is a failure of society and systems to support a woman and her child and to support mothering.

It was really weird to read about myself as a child, how different things are from the child’s point of view than it is from the adult’s. You write about the terrible car accident you had when I was about six years old, and of course about the search for your mother – my grandmother – which ends in tragedy. It’s really hard to read about how much trauma you went through as I was growing up.

All of us live through things that are traumatic and they just become part of your own story. I so wish it didn’t have to be part of yours too.

Bonnie Sumner is part of the Newsroom Investigates reporting team.
More by Bonnie Sumner

Tree of Strangers by Barbara Sumner (Massey University Press) is available here:

Rave review by Linda Burgess at the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

Article reprinted with permission from Newsroom