Finding Cynthia Winters: Sue Watson’s adoption journey and the seek for her erased beginning story

A number of weeks later, a handwritten letter arrived that Lizzy had left along with her lawyer.

“Dear Sue,” it learn. “You have been loved. You are loved now and if there is any kind of afterlife, you will continue to be loved.

“Thank you for coming into my life on two counts – at birth and as an adult. Go well and be happy. My love, Lizzy.”

The letter, like all of the others Lizzy had despatched her, went right into a white cardboard field.

And that’s the place they stayed for one more 17 years, till Watson lastly felt prepared to choose up the fragments of her previous and attempt to piece them collectively. The course of, she knew, can be painful.

“Who was my birth mother, Lizzy, and why did she leave me with so many half-told stories?” she writes within the opening pages of her new memoir, Finding Cynthia Winters.

“Why are her children, my supposed half-sister and half-brother, so determined to keep me at a distance?

“Which of the two men Lizzy described is actually my birth father? And most importantly, if I find these answers, what will I learn about myself?”

More than 85,000 infants got up for adoption in New Zealand within the a long time after World War II, when pregnancies outdoors marriage had been shameful and infants taken into different households had their previous neatly excised.

Drawing from the clues and nuggets of knowledge in her beginning mom’s letters, Watson has spent the previous three years tracing her whakapapa from no matter sources she will be able to discover.

The Lizzy Project, as she calls it, is about breaking the silence in order that their historical past doesn’t die along with her.

“The whole architecture of the state through adoption was erasure,” says Watson, who has lived on Waiheke Island for the previous 10 years and is launching her ebook there subsequent week.

“It provided a social script that says, here’s a wonderful, elegant solution to a problem.

“Naughty girl gets pregnant out of wedlock. Over here, we have some infertile couples or people who still want babies, so we’ll just lift and shift the baby.”

Born in 1962, Watson was faraway from Lizzy at beginning – mom and child weren’t allowed to the touch – and spent the primary 12 days of her life in a nursery earlier than being positioned with a household.

Hers isn’t a horror story, though an entire part of the 2024 Abuse in Care report covers adoption trauma. Watson and her elder sister, who can also be adopted, grew up in a loving house with nothing however gratitude for the mother and father who raised them.

But it’s a story of severance and disconnection that has rippled via the generations.

A former CEO who advocates for social housing and mentors girls into management roles, Watson is now in her early 60s, the identical age her beginning mom was when she died.

It was solely when she requested her pre-adoptive beginning certificates in 2021 that she realised she as soon as had a unique identify: Cynthia Winters.

The discovery got here as a shock to Watson. For her, it represented not only a identify she had misplaced, however part of herself that had been erased.

Cynthia was the undesirable little one. Susan was the chosen and excellent daughter. Cynthia had been deserted. Susan was adored.

“It had never occurred to me that I’d been given a different name; no one had ever told me that,” she says, lifting Lizzy’s letters from the cardboard field she carried along with her, unopened, for therefore a few years. Taonga, she calls them.

“There was this realisation that Cynthia has been with me the whole time. That dear little baby, trying to make sense of going from a womb to a cold, untouched world, and my [adoptive] mother, Cicely, working so hard to fix me in her amazing loving way.

“And then making sense of why in my life I’ve almost had a compulsion to help people who have been unhomed or treated badly.

“I think there was a sense in which I intrinsically understood that people experience vulnerability for a whole lot of reasons that are beyond their control.”

In 1985, the Adult Adoption Information Act ripped the veil of secrecy, permitting beginning mother and father and adopted youngsters to hunt contact with one another via the state.

At the time, the legislation change meant little to Watson, who had by no means been fascinated by her organic roots.

“My sister and I knew we were adopted,” she says. “We were special because we got to be chosen. And to be honest, for a lot of my life, it suited me to go along with that narrative. I wasn’t harmed. I wasn’t damaged. That was an identity I didn’t want.”

Yet when a fats brown envelope from the Department of Social Welfare landed in her letterbox in 1987, her response was instinctive.

“I knew as soon as I saw the envelope,” she writes in her memoir. “My birth mother was knocking on the door.”

Watson faces as much as some harsh realities about herself within the ebook, describing her behaviour as “pretty brutal” at occasions. Keeping Lizzy at arm’s size, she broke off contact between them fully at one stage for a number of years.

Nor does she flinch from acknowledging the challenges some in her beginning household have confronted with psychological sickness and alcoholism.

The letters and cellphone calls they sporadically exchanged type the backbone of their story as Watson navigates life as a single mom after the collapse of her marriage, completes a PhD in academic sociology from Victoria University and spends two years on a prestigious analysis contract on the University of Pennsylvania.

Lizzy, who educated as a scientific psychologist, was married for 20 years and had two extra youngsters earlier than settling in Dunedin. She by no means met her grandson, Max – Watson’s solely little one, who now has a younger son – and stored her family largely off limits.

Watson met her beginning sister for the primary time on the hospice the place their mom died and has nonetheless by no means had any direct contact along with her organic brother.

For her half, Watson felt so protecting of her adoptive mother and father that the long-distance relationship she had with Lizzy felt nearly illicit, “like having an affair with another mother”.

Another complication is that even Lizzy wasn’t certain who Watson’s father was. In true Mamma Mia vogue, there have been two potential candidates.

One was an older Greek man, who by no means knew she was pregnant. The different was the person she later married, who had supplied to lift who he believed was one other man’s little one – elevating the tantalising risk that Lizzy’s three youngsters are, in reality, full siblings.

The depth of Lizzy’s love for the wee lady she surrendered shines via her letters, as does the guilt she carried to the top of her life. However, her account of occasions was typically slippery, leaving Watson with many unanswered questions.

It’s nonetheless not clear why Lizzy, who was 20 when Watson was born, selected to surrender her child for adoption. Birth data Watson later uncovered recommend Lizzy’s mother and father didn’t know she was pregnant.

Perhaps, Watson speculates, she merely wished to start married life with a clear slate.

Despite some moments of actual connection between them, Watson’s ambivalence in direction of Lizzy is one thing she has come to just accept in herself. Not all reunion tales have a happy-ever-after ending.

“I think Lizzy felt enormous guilt, as many birth mothers do, but the depth of her need was overwhelming,” she says. “It was too big for me. I felt like she wanted me to be her child again, to make everything all right.

“There’s often a lot of romanticisation about this reconciliation with a long-lost birth mother, which I didn’t feel at all.

“When I think of how I reacted to my birth mother, and how my birth siblings react to me, the question is, why would people react like that?

“And then comes the compassion – understanding it’s because of the rejection, the abandonment, the secrecy. And mostly because of the shame.”

It’s uncommon for individuals in senior management roles to show their private lives so overtly within the public area, as Watson has executed. For girls, particularly, revealing vulnerability or emotion is commonly considered as weak.

After a corporate career that included heading South Pacific Press and three years as global chief executive of Kea NZ, Watson founded her own company in 2015, mentoring women into leadership.

She’s also on the board of Haumaru Housing, a joint venture between Auckland Council and the Selwyn Foundation that provides affordable, long-term housing for older people who would struggle to afford market rentals.

In June, Watson has a second book coming out called Connected Leadership: Wisdom for Women Who Lead. She admits the decision to publish her memoir would have been harder if she were still the chief executive of someone else’s company.

“But I’m feeling bold now, and I think the best leadership is deeply connected to our human story,” she says.

“I was determined that what would bring healing for me and also for my son was to tell the unfettered truth, including the truth about myself, which I’ve never been able to do before because the whole adoption premise is secrets and lies.”

Watson writes movingly of the final days she spent at Lizzy’s bedside and – after being banished from the funeral – an unsuccessful attempt to find her grave a year later.

The closing chapters of the book follow her attempts to identify her biological father, but that’s not for revealing here.

In April, Watson will perform a solo show based on her story, Cynthia, at Waiheke’s Artworks Theatre and BATS Theatre in Wellington.

That’s not as much of a stretch as you might think. A former amateur actor, she once taught drama and dance at secondary school.

A few weeks ago, she was in Grey Lynn for the first rehearsal of her play when she realised the site of the maternity hospital where she was born was just around the corner.

Established to support unwed mothers like Lizzy, the Motherhood of Man was a non-denominational movement that had survived being caught up in a baby-farming scandal in the 1950s.

It’s since been replaced by a co-housing community – “very much my vibe,” says Watson, who was told the original building had been shifted around the corner.

Standing outside the now beautifully restored villa, in the shade of a plane tree, she imagined a heavily pregnant Lizzy walking up to the front door alone.

Watson has come to accept and respect her birth mother, who remains a mystery to her in many ways.

“I still don’t feel that I really know her,” she says. “Through the making of the play, I hope that will be the next step in coming to understand her more.”

Joanna Wane is a senior way of life author with a particular curiosity in social points and the humanities.