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6 - The Secret

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2023

Mary Cardaras
Affiliation:
California State University, East Bay
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Summary

“My sweet boy, my beloved child, my good boy, I would have liked to be keeping you in my arms till I die, to have you near me from the moment you were born, to warm your sensitive heart with my love and affection, but fate was really hard to me and the morals of our country cruel and inhumane. I gave your life from my life and flesh from my flesh, but I lost you, my child, right from the moment you were born, and only great unspoken and incurable pain was left to me. Now that you are a man, I can open my heart to you.”

Athens, January 18, 1984

This is the first paragraph of the first letter that my biological mother, Maria, wrote to me after my wife and I located her in June of 1983. It is so beautiful. I was ecstatic and humbled at the same time by her words. I always believed my biological mother must have been a good person, and this verified my deepest intuition about her.

Maria speaks no English, and I don’t speak any Greek, so Billy Maganiotou, the administrator of the Babies Center Mitera in Athens, translated this letter into English and sent it with the original in Greek. Billy Maganiotou was the administrator who worked with my adoptive parents when they first laid eyes on me on Christmas Eve, 1957. Billy knew quite a bit about me, because my mother, Jean, consistently sent updates as I grew up; about my personality, and about my accomplishments throughout my life.

The second and third paragraphs of the same letter:

“Thirty years ago, a very young girl, almost a child in mind, soul and body, left her village and came to the jungle called Athens. She wanted to work to make a dowry for herself, to make a better living than in the village, where, in those years, life was very poor and difficult. Because of her young age and innocence, she could not understand the dangers around her. She came to Athens and was hired by a family as a housemaid. She was very unhappy, she missed her family, cried a lot, but she kept her work patiently and time went by.

Type
Chapter
Information
Voices of the Lost Children of Greece
Oral Histories of Post-War International Adoption
, pp. 71 - 84
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2023

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