Reunion With Son Eases Decades of Grief

The morning Margee gave up her child, she ran to the window of the convent to get one last look at her boy as they drove him away in the muted light of dawn.

She wanted to feast her eyes and her senses on her beautiful baby boy because the nuns hadn’t allowed her to see much of him since he was born, and she didn’t know when she would see him again. She’d been up most of the night, crying, and had only a few precious moments while she dressed him for his adoptive parents.

But, in her distraction, Margee went to the wrong side of the building. She didn’t see her son again for more than three decades, until he was a grown man.

In between, Margee, not her real name, endured years of loss and an aching, empty sense in her soul that not even six other children could fill. All that because she, and so many women of her generation, were pressured by Ireland’s strict Catholic society to give up children they conceived out of wedlock.

Margee’s story mirrors those of thousands of other Irish women who gave up their children between the 1940s and the 1970s. Many of those babies were subsequently adopted by American families and are now trying to trace their birth parents.

She was only 19 and still lived with her mother and father--as many young, unmarried women did--when she found out she was pregnant. She knew that they would be furious and that to have the baby would shame her family.

She was so afraid of her mother’s wrath, in fact, that she hid the truth for seven months, until she collapsed one day and a doctor figured out her secret.

As she had feared, Margee’s parents sent her away--to a home run by the Sacred Heart nuns in County Westmeath, where she gave birth to a 6-pound, 13-ounce boy named Francis and reared him until he was 15 months old.

Then, in 1963, under pressure from her family, she signed him over to an American family.

“I always felt I wanted to keep him,” Margee remembered one recent afternoon from her home in Dublin. “For me, he was taken away. I was very, very scared. There was nobody there to stand behind you. You didn’t ask questions. You just did it. You were so frightened and so traumatized. There was no other way out, really. No way.”

Like many others, Margee eventually married. But she always wondered if her firstborn was alive. What kind of person did he turn out to be? Was he in a good marriage?

“He never went out of my mind or my heart,” Margee recalled. “I could never feel right until I knew. I felt I wouldn’t die happy if I didn’t know.”

She went into counseling in 1996 and let the adoption society know that she was willing to be found if her son ever came looking. When he found her, she was ready.

His name is Neal Keavney and he lives in San Francisco. They met this fall on the East Coast and spent several days together, talking for hours, seeing parades and getting to know each other.

“I feel completely at ease with him and he with me,” she says now. “I never stopped loving him.”

But nothing can make up for the lost years. “It is the most cruelest thing that ever could be done to somebody,” she said. “That a child would be taken away from them.”