Dear birth mother: You were a TB patient when you had me. Who was my father?

Posted on August 4, 2024 by Peggy

This First Person article is the experience of Marilyn Ringland, an Anishiniew woman who has family roots in Garden Hill First Nation and was raised in Selkirk, Man. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see this FAQ.

Dear Irene,

I must apologize for using your name instead of calling you “mom.” I didn’t get the chance to know you in the way a child knows their mother.

I do hope you had the opportunity to hold me, and that you got to choose my name — a name that my parents, the ones who raised me, kept as is to honour you. I was promised to people who you knew would love me as their own.

I am slowly finding out your story through records and archives. I don’t know which residential school you went to.

A woman with short black hair, wearing black glasses and wearing a grey sweatshirt, holds up a computer image of a woman. — Marilyn Ringland shows a photo of her birth mother, Irene Monias, who was a patient at the sanitorium in Ninette, Man. ‘I hope that I can be the voice that you didn’t have the chance to be,’ Marilyn writes in a letter to the mother she never knew. (Trevor Brine/CBC)

I only knew that you contracted tuberculosis and were residing at the Ninette, Man., sanatorium when you got pregnant with me, and were there until your demise.

Demise. I can’t even say the words “death” or “dying.”

Maybe it’s because of what you went through in the short time that you were here. Spending your adulthood in an institution should not, cannot be the end. I can only say that you do live on through me and my children.

Did you know you have three grandchildren? I wish you had the chance to meet them.

Also, my husband. We’ve been together for more than 30 years. I smile and think that he’s crazy to be stuck with me all this time.

I am doing more sleuthing to find out about your life.– Marilyn Ringland

I was very fortunate to be with the family you picked out for me. You knew my mom was Anishininikwe, like you, and my dad a WASPy kind of guy. Both of my parents came from large families. I don’t know how much stigma they went through as a mixed couple, but my grandparents were accepting, and that was what mattered to my parents.

I was told at a very young age that I was adopted, and I felt comfortable enough to let people know that it wasn’t such a big deal, and no one asked me if it was. My brother was also adopted, though under different circumstances. I also had an older sister and two other siblings, and all three have since died.

‘Finding out bits and pieces’

My search for you in earnest happened after my mom passed away. I don’t know how she would have felt, but I do know that I would have let her know what I was doing. I guess because I knew I was adopted and my family life was content, until that point, there wasn’t that need or want to find out where I came from.

Finding out bits and pieces of your life has been frustrating. The people who might have known you and your family are gone. I know that I had an uncle, your brother Walter, and a grandmother when you passed.

I have a picture of you at a hospital, but I’m not sure of which one — either Brandon or Ninette.

Grainy black and white image of a woman with black hair and glasses, standing in a robe and staring into the camera. — A photo of Irene Monias, taken at a hospital. Ringland hopes her mother found companionship with ‘someone with the shared experience of being away from home.’ (Submitted by Marilyn Ringland)

I don’t have the patient records, but I am doing more sleuthing to find out about your life. I do know where your resting place is — Glen Eden Memorial Gardens.

I had mentioned to my daughters that you might be buried in one of the cemeteries that line Highway 9, north of Winnipeg. My mom had mentioned this one time and that stayed with me. I didn’t have the courage to ask which cemetery, but my daughter was inquisitive enough to phone around and find you.

‘Maybe you had a moment with each other’

Now I am looking for information on my birth father. What will I find once I have his name?

At first, through Manitoba Post-Adoption Services, the post-adoption registry could give me his age but legally, nothing else. At least, not until he turned 101 or had died. (Really? That was the remarkable information that I received from the registry.)

Well, if he is still alive, he would have turned 101 this spring. So now I can find out his name, but that won’t tell me what kind of person he was.

Maybe I’m hoping that you found someone who, like you, was stuck in a place that wasn’t of your choosing. You found someone with the shared experience of being away from home, lonely and not being able to have the life that you should have had.

And so maybe you had a moment with each other — and that was enough.

Finding out that information is what I’m willing to risk, in order to find out the circumstances of what you went through to have me. A lot of questions that might not be answered.

As I close this letter to you, I hope that I can be the voice that you didn’t have the chance to be.

Your loving daughter,

Marilyn