It was like falling in love

When Agnes Chartrand tells the story of her family, her families,
you'd think you were in the middle of a John Irving novel. It's
true, she says, a lot of people have told me I should write a
novel

Adopted as a child, she searched for her natural parents. She
succeeded in finding them and discovered an Irish mother and a
father of Jewish background. He was a doctor, she was a nurse;
they both worked in the same hospital and went out together three
years.

One day, something went wrong. While her mother took refuge in
Notre Dame de Lourdes where no one knew her and worked there
under a false name, her father married another woman.

Agnes was born. She was placed in a Mennonite foster home in
Morris for two years until a Catholic family, what her natural
mother had specified, decided to adopt her.

That family was the Chartrand family: Reginald, a doctor, his
wife Marcelle, a teacher. They already had two other adopted
children. For Agnes, it was a major change. Along with her new
family came a new name, a new language, a new brother and sister.

"It was always obvious that one day I would look for them. I
always wanted to know." Agnes says many people do not understand
what motivates such a search. "They tell me to look ahead,
toward the future. But you can't do that if you don't have a
past."

Her research began in Notre Dame where her adoptive father's
brother delivered her. There, she met people who remembered the
tall redhead.

"She told people she was a widow and that her name was Carman, but
her real name was Kathleen Lipson". One day the director of nursing
in the hospital aked Agnes if she would like to see the birth
registry. It was then she discovered her mother's false name and
the name that had been given to her as a newborn: Roseanne.

At the Children's Aid Society, Agnes discovered pages and pages
of typerwritten information about her family, given by her
mother: info about her father's family, about Kathleen's brothers
and sisters, physical characteristics, professions, etc.

That information allowed her to trace an aunt on her mother's
side. "In half an hour, she had called other aunts who
eventually called my mother in California. They had found me!"

She also found the courage to call her father, Fischel Clayton,
who since her childhood had played a mythical role in her life.
"I imagined him, like in fairy tales, coming to my rescue in a
white cadillac. Even when I became an adult, he was very
important in my life."

She vividly remembers the first time they met. "It was such a
beautiful day. We found we had a lot in common. It was like
falling in love and for a while, everything is just the way you
would like it to be.

Her father has since died but she remains in contact with two
half-brothers. She writes to an aunt on her mother's side on a
regular basis and waits for a time when perhaps her mother and
her will be able to meet.

"Since meeting my family, I'm at peace with myself. I had to
know. When you start searching, who knows what you will find.
Your mother could be a convict, your father could be Robert
Redford. You could also be totally incompatible. But it doesn't
matter. Knowing who your family is helps you understand
yourself. It lets you put things into perspective, allows you to
say, I want to be like this and not like that."




What's difficult is discovering who you are.



To be adopted is to be cut off from your family origins along
with all the familiar anecdotes and traits that make up one's
identity, for example, your mother's hair, your uncle's
personality, a grandparent's tic.


"Everyone says my children look like their father," says Agnes
Chartrand of her four sons. "As if they couldn't possibly look
like me!"

Since she was a child, Agnes was branded "adopted". We always
have to find arguments to fit in. On the one hand, her mother
would say to her, she had been chosen (and that they were like
her real children), but on the other, (she would tell everyone
her children were adopted) that the fact they were adopted didn't
change her love for them.

"I've never felt like a true francophone. I can't say I have a
francophone mentality. Yet at the same time, I can't say I'm
Jewish or Irish. I wasn't raised in those cultures. What's hard
is discovering who we are and learning to accept the fact we are
different."

And the fact she now knows more about her family has helped her
accept herself as she is because she now recognizes where some of
these traits come from, like her sense of humour which resembles
the Clayton humour more so than the Chartrand humour and her love
of elf and fairy tales, and of traditional Irish folk songs which
she used to sing to her infant sons as she rocked them. It all
seems to date back to another time, another world.


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