Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette begins to look into her adoption records, but feels rattled by the process. She endures several confusing communications with the court—she describes all of the court’s correspondence as being conducted in the “dead and distant language of the law.” Jeanette finds the protocol that must be obeyed “difficult to follow,” and she wishes the process were “simpler and less insensitive.” She wants to stop the process, but with the support of her new partner—a psychoanalyst and writer named Susie Orbach—she presses on. “Adoption begins on your own… Therefore, the journey back should not be done alone,” she writes. Susie stands by her side each day of the difficult ordeal.

Also at Jeanette’s side is Ruth Rendell, a longtime friend. Jeanette refers to her as the “Good Mother.” Ruth is well connected, and reaches out to her friends in the government on Jeanette’s behalf. All of her connections believe Jeanette should “proceed with the utmost caution” due to her public profile in the UK, lest a journalist uncover Jeanette’s mother before she does. Ruth helps arrange a meeting with the chief of the UK children and family court advisory service, who meets with Jeanette and agrees to help her track down her mother “without the risk of the whole thing leaking.” Jeanette gives Anthony the names of her parents—Jessica and John, and their surnames. Weeks later, Anthony calls to tell Jeanette that her file has been found, but that the names of her birth parents do not match the names she gave him. Jeanette wonders whose birth certificate she found in the drawer.

Next, Jeanette must meet with a social worker at the Home Office. She and Susie meet with Ria Hayward, who looks through the documents that Jeanette has, and reassures her that her mother always wanted her. She passes Jeanette a piece of paper with her birth mother’s name on it. Jeanette contemplates her lifelong struggle to learn how to love, and is overwhelmed by the love that is all around her now and her own struggle to “dissolve the calcifications around [her] heart.”

On the train home, Jeanette is shell-shocked and stunned, and turns to a remembered Thomas Hardy poem in order to “find the feeling” she needs to have.

Ria helps Jeanette to put forward another request for information in to the court that might hold Jeanette’s original adoption records. The court locates the file, but must place Jeanette’s request to see it before a judge. Jeanette is upset and angry. A few weeks later, another letter from the same local court arrives; the judge has issued a clinical advisement for Jeanette to fill in the “usual form” and send it back. The letter also advises Jeanette to hire a lawyer. Jeanette is overwhelmed with frustration and confusion, and wets herself in a panic. After calming herself down, Jeanette contacts Ria, who comforts her and tells Jeanette she will take matters into her own hands. Jeanette remains enraged by the court’s “legalese” and unwillingness to help her. She has been “thrown back into a place of helplessness.”

Ria, Jeanette, and Susie continue to struggle against the courts, who demand that Jeanette follow strict and obscure procedures. Jeanette and Susie make an appointment at Accrington Court, where an official has all of Jeanette’s papers but will not allow her to see them. Jeanette experiences a “pre-language physical pain,” but Susie talks them both through negotiations with the court manager, who agrees to tell Jeanette the name of the adoption society which handled her case. When Jeanette presses him for more information, he clams up, unsure of what he is and is not allowed to tell the women, and Susie instructs Jeanette to leave the room. Jeanette leaves the courthouse and stands on the sidewalk outside, wondering for the umpteenth time who the woman in the garden from her childhood could have been.

Susie extracts a promise from the court manager to meet with the judge in session, find out what he is allowed to tell the two of them, and meet up again in forty-five minutes. Jeanette and Susie head to a café that used to be the Palatine—Mrs. Winterson’s favorite. Jeanette has not been here since Mr. Winterson’s funeral some years ago. Jeanette interrupts the narrative to reminisce about her father’s funeral—after her check payment for his burial wasn’t received, she had to convince the cemetery that she was not going to stiff them—she produced a copy of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit from her purse (she had intended to bury her father with it but changed her mind), the men were impressed, and they allowed Jeanette to write a new check on the spot. Mr. Winterson was buried with his second wife Lillian, far away from the plot that held Mrs. Winterson’s body.

Susie and Jeanette meet with the court manager once again. He is able to tell Jeanette her birth mother’s age at the time of her birth, but not her mother’s actual birth date. Her birth mother was seventeen—the same age that Mrs. Winterson had always told her. As the two women drive back to Manchester, Jeanette wonders if every woman she sees is her mother—and whether her mother is even still alive, as Mrs. Winterson had always told Jeanette she was dead.

After hitting more and more dead ends, Jeanette takes her search into her own hands via the internet, and wonders what made her birth parents give her away. She says it had to have been her birth father’s fault, “because [she] couldn’t let it be her [mother’s.]” The adoption society eventually contacts Jeanette and tells her they will allow her social worker—not Jeanette herself—to view her file. Jeanette begins to worry that her birth mother is dead, and that her whole search will have been in vain.

On a trip to New York City, Susie tells Jeanette that Jeanette doesn’t know “how to be loved.” Jeanette admits that she does not trust Susie to love her, but admits she must do the “love-work” of allowing herself to stay with Susie. This conversation echoes Ria’s entreaty of Jeanette to believe that she was always “wanted.” 

Jeanette meets with Ria in Liverpool. Ria divulges details about her birth father, and also reveals Jeanette’s mother’s date of birth. Ria reveals that the Wintersons had planned to adopt a baby boy named Paul—Mrs. Winterson had already purchased baby boys’ clothes, and Jeanette, for the first few months of her life, had no doubt been dressed in those clothes. Jeanette finds humor in the situation, and when she relays it to Susie, a psychoanalyst, Susie tells her that “mothers do everything with boy babies differently,” and that if Mrs. Winterson had “psychologically prepared herself for a boy, she would not have been able to shift her internal gear when she got a girl.” Jeanette and Susie believe that this, combined with the abandoned baby Jeanette’s attempts to survive a loss, might have shaped Jeanette’s identity from an early age. Jeanette feels “freed” by this information, but is “no nearer” to finding her birth mother.

One of Jeanette’s friends, attempting to help her by combing through ancestry websites, eventually is able to contact an uncle of Jeanette’s. Jeanette develops a cover story and calls the man, who tells her that her mother, Ann, is alive. Jeanette, whose “whole identity [has been] built around being an orphan,” now has a mother and perhaps a whole family. She writes a letter to Ann, and sends it to her through the uncle she contacted. A week later, she receives a text which begins “Darling Girl”—Susie leaves the room with Jeanette’s phone, calls the number, and then comes back upstairs to announce that she has just gotten off the phone with Jeanette’s mother.

A letter arrives several days later with a baby photo of Jeanette enclosed. The letter explains that Ann was sixteen when she got pregnant, looked after Jeanette for six weeks after her birth, and had a very difficult time giving her up. Ann writes in the letter that Jeanette was “always wanted.”