Earlier this summer Deneena Hughes, who grew up in with her adopted family in Sedgewick, finally had an answer to the questions that had plagued her for as long as she could remember.
Was I wanted? Was I loved?
The answer was yes. Yes, she was.
Forty-two years ago, Stettler resident Joyce Kiryk went into labour and delivered a healthy baby girl. She refused to hold the child or even see her, knowing that if she did either of these things, she couldn’t manage to let the little girl go. It was a heartbreaking decision for Kiryk, who since becoming pregnant had watched her life as she knew it fall into pieces.
Engaged to be married, she broke it off when she discovered she was pregnant. She didn’t want to be married just because of the baby – a revolutionary thought during the 70s – and the relationship with her ex-fiancé had soured and become bitter.
The last time she saw him, he had signed the papers giving the little girl away for adoption.
Kiryk has never stopped wondering all these years about the girl she gave away. She has also never been ashamed of the fact she let the little girl go up for adoption.
“I told my husband on our first date,” she said. “Olivia (our daughter) knew about her. One year she said she wanted her sister back for Christmas.”
When the adoption laws changed, making other, Kiryk registered in the database and got what papers she could. The child’s name was blacked out and, when no one contacted her, she let it sit in the background.
Meanwhile, Hughes grew up in a happy family just north of Stettler in Sedgewick. She had her adopted parents and three siblings – two biological children and an adoptive brother.
She grew up knowing she and her brother were adopted, and while her parents had told glowing stories of adoption – making it clear to her that she was wanted and she was loved – the fact her parents had given her away at birth was an ache in her heart. Sometimes it wasn’t obvious, but it was always lurking, waiting for an errant thought to bring it forward.
Hughes married, and now lives in the United States with her husband and four children.
“I remember when I had my children,” she said. “I thought, ‘How do you give them away?’ It brought that ache back.”
Several times over the years Hughes filled out the paperwork to add to the database, saying she was looking for her biological parents, but she never had the courage to file it.
“I didn’t want to feel rejected twice,” she explained. “Was I a shameful secret? I decided I wanted them to find me, but of course by not filing the paperwork, I made it impossible.”
Impossible except for an error.
Kiryk’s daughter, Olivia Clutterbuck, decided she wanted to find her older sister and dug out the old paperwork the family had gone over dozens of times.
This time, she noticed that whoever had redacted the document, blacking out names and locations, had left something visible.
“Deneena.”
Starting on Facebook, Clutterbuck typed in the unusual first name and found Hughes in moments.
“She creeped her,” Kiryk admitted with a chuckle. “She came to me and said, ‘Mom, I think I found her. She looks just like you.’”
Clutterbuck sent a message to Hughes, but they didn’t hear anything for several months.
“I usually check Facebook on my phone, but one day I was checking my messages on the computer and I saw this greyed-out ‘Other’ option,” Hughes explained. When people on Facebook are sent messages from people who are not friends, they’re often sent there.
Hughes opened the message from the stranger, named Olivia Clutterbuck,
“It just rocked me back on my heels,” she said. “It was like being hit by a sledgehammer.”
She wrote Clutterbuck back, and after the exchange of details both were certain. They were sisters.
The two families decided they wanted to meet, and picked a place in North Dakota, which is about halfway between where Hughes and Kiryk live.
“Oh my word – I think both she and I were nervous wrecks the week before,” Hughes said. “I got to the room and there was a gift bag hanging on the door that said ‘Congratulations on your baby girl’ or something like that. It made me giggle right away, because I was thinking of coming with balloons. You know, ‘Congratulations on the baby’.”
Hughes said she didn’t have words for that moment when the hotel room door opened and she first came faceto-face with Kiryk. The two had never seen each other in their lives. They had never spoken or heard each other’s voices. They were complete strangers.
Except they weren’t.
“She’s a stranger, but she’s also the dearest person alive,” Hughes said, her voice becoming emotional.
Finding out why she had been given up, and that her mother had loved her and thought of her every day and could only give her away because she had never held her, took away the ache that had haunted her as long as she had lived.
But Hughes knew it was a Pandora’s Box situation. It was a positive experience for her, but if Kiryk’s situation had been different, it could have been worse. She could have been a child of abuse or rape, or she could have been rejected. Her family could have wanted nothing to do with her or resented her intrusion into their lives.
But she was loved. It was enough.
Her adoptive brother, too, found his family and was welcomed, though the circumstances of his adoption wasn’t as positive as hers, Hughes said. Her husband and children are excited about the new family, and her adoptive family is supportive.
Hughes said that there’s no blanket ‘Yes! Do it!’ is the answer she can give to the parents of children given away for adoption or adopted children, because each situation is unique, but she did have some advice.
“Be careful,” she said. “There are so many variables, and it has to be handled with delicacy and respect. Don’t judge – you don’t know the situation. Be loving and respectful.”