Legacy

Legacy is often thought of as the consequences or results of past actions or events. It can also describe the lasting impression someone or something leaves on the world. This might include personal values, beliefs, traditions, or even the positive changes driven by an individual.

To me, legacy also means the imprint others have left on my life, and the imprint I hope to leave on my children and family. But then there’s the often-invoked idea of intergenerational trauma. Is that separate from legacy, or are the two intertwined? I believe they overlap in profound ways, shaping how we feel about ourselves and others.

For me, legacy is not theoretical. It began the moment I was born.

As a newborn, I was taken from my birth mother. Peggy had no real choice. She was under 21 and, at the time, not considered a legal adult. She didn’t fully understand her rights as a mother. One week after I was born, she signed the adoption papers, most likely while medicated to suppress her milk. That detail alone breaks my heart.

Reading through the hospital records was like piecing together a life half-kept in shadow. One detail leapt out: Peggy had been admitted nearly eight weeks before I was born. She was battling a severe bladder infection that required weeks of antibiotics.

Why the infection? The notes were vague, but I found enough to sketch the outline. Peggy had been confined to her bedroom by her parents, locked away for returning home unmarried and pregnant. She was punished not just socially, but physically and psychologically. Her room became a prison. She wasn’t allowed out. Her parents believed isolation would preserve the family’s reputation.

To a modern reader, it sounds cruel. But for an Irish Catholic family in 1964, it was considered a plausible, some might have even said merciful solution. What else could they do with a pregnant teenage daughter? She had brought shame into the house. So, they shut her away.

I imagine that room: the air stale, the curtains drawn, hours dragging by. No visitors. No conversation. No comfort. Just her body, changing daily, and the silence of her punishment growing louder by the hour. Her notes mention being prescribed opioids, likely to help her sleep, to keep her sedated, to dull the weight of it all. I don’t think she was coping. I think she was disappearing.

Society labelled her "unfit", not because of who she was, but because of what she lacked: a ring, a husband, a family willing to stand by her.

I often wish things had gone differently with Peggy. I had hoped to make amends before she passed, but she didn’t want that. The legacy of her past weighed too heavily. She had already been rejected once by her parents, and then again, she felt, by her daughter, surrendered to strangers. It was too much. So, she kept her distance. And I understand.

Can anyone blame her? The shame and stigma of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy were woven deeply into her story. They never left her. And in some ways, they never left me either.

I often imagine Peggy’s side of the story. We never really connected enough to talk about it in person, or later in letters and on the phone. Peggy wanted it her way. She didn’t want us to blend. She wanted me to know the hurt and betrayal, but how could I understand that at 21, with a child of my own? Peggy tried to push onto me what I wasn’t ready to carry. And so, the cycle repeated.

But when I do imagine, this is what I see:

They say I gave her up. Like it was simple. Like I signed a form and went on with my life.But I didn’t give her up. She was taken from me before I even had the chance to hold her.I was just twenty, not old enough to vote, not old enough to be trusted with a child. According to the law, I wasn’t a legal adult. According to my parents, I was a disgrace. A problem to be hidden.

When I came home pregnant, they locked me in my bedroom. Literally. They turned the key in the door and kept it in the drawer by the phone in the hallway. I had to give up my job and my friends. They wouldn’t listen; it was all my fault. They didn’t want to hear the circumstances.

The wallpaper was blue roses, faded and peeling in the corners. I stared at those roses for hours, trying not to cry. I wasn’t allowed out except to use the bathroom. Meals came on a tray, left outside the door like I was contagious.

I developed a bladder infection. No surprise no fresh air, no movement, no kindness. My body was trying to carry a child, but the rest of me was shrinking. My only comfort: cigarettes from my brother and sister-in-law, and the odd Women’s Weekly to read.

I remember lying on the bed, knees drawn up, waves of pain rolling through me. Mum decided the hospital should take care of me, so Dad drove me there, suitcase in hand, and Mum signed the paperwork. The doctor looked annoyed to be called. He prescribed antibiotics. Then something else, to help me “rest.” That was the word they used.

It didn’t help me rest. It made me float, foggy and far away. Which, I suppose, was the point.

They didn’t want a girl with feelings. They wanted a girl who complied. And I did, because what choice did, I have?

The nurses were kind enough. I could see it in their eyes: pity. Some were older, mothers themselves. I think they knew I didn’t want this. That I didn’t understand. But there was judgment too, sometimes whispered voices.

A week after giving birth, I was handed a pen and told to sign. I don’t remember doing it. But the paperwork says I did.

After that, I wasn’t a mother anymore. Not to anyone who could see. Not on paper. But my body remembered. My breasts filled with milk they told me not to express. They gave me pills.

“It’ll dry up soon,” the nurse said, as if talking about a leaky faucet, not a child I would never feed.

And the shame? That dried up too, or so I pretended. But it never left. Not really.

Years later, when she reached out to me, I couldn’t face her. What would I say? That I failed her? That I let them take her? That I shut myself away because it hurt too much to look?

I know she probably thinks I didn’t want her. But the truth is, I never stopped wanting her.

Peggy’s legacy was shame, and that was the cruel irony. She carried it deep, numbed it with alcohol, and unknowingly passed it on to me. I grew up in a family where the mother wanted me to fix her problems, her issues and to put a stamp on someones head, like they had been a good boy. It was not for love, not for me, it was a calculated move that would leave its own legacy.

That legacy, of nurture, identity, and complex emotional ties, brings the age-old question of nature vs. nurture into sharp focus. I think adopted people are uniquely positioned to help answer that. Francis Galton coined the phrase in 1874, but long before him, ancient philosophers grappled with the same idea. Even Freud believed personality arose from both instinct and experience.

What’s always intrigued me is how, from a very young age, I knew how to read my adoptive mother’s moods. It felt like instinct. Later, I learned it, what would fly under her radar and what would spark a reaction. That’s true of most children, I suppose. We test boundaries. But in our house, boundaries came with a price. You didn’t just live with them; you lived inside them, in the suffocating hum of knowing, trapped in a truth you couldn’t escape.

I was about eleven, outside in the front yard. It was a Saturday. Dad had just mowed the lawns. Mum asked me to check the mailbox for pamphlets. She didn’t like them jamming it up before Monday’s post.

It was summer. Our fruit trees were full of plums, apricots, and peaches. Mum was making jam from the backyard fruit. Gough Whitlam was about to be dismissed by the Governor-General. In my small world, Saturday meant dusting, cleaning shoes, reading, or watching black-and-white movies. I always hoped for Ma and Pa Kettle or Francis the Talking Mule.

As I walked down the path, a car pulled up. Kids my age, arms out the windows, called my name.

“We’re going to the movies! Want to come?”

Thrilled, I said I’d ask. I almost skipped back up the stairs. But of course, it was no. No explanation. Just no.

I returned, crestfallen. The car had started to roll away. I smiled and said I couldn’t go. They drove off, their laughter fading. I stood there, angry tears on my cheeks.

There was no practical reason I couldn’t go. The reason was emotional, psychological. She didn’t want me to have fun, not unless she allowed it. She didn’t want people in my life who might show me a freer, kinder version of the world.

I remember one story vividly. I was about eight or nine. Traveling puppet shows and educational performances were popular at the time. A permission slip and a small fee were sent home to “parents. Mum always returned mine signed: “No, my child cannot attend.”

She never explained to the school. To me, she’d say, “It’s a lot of money. Who can waste it on pap like that?” Dad didn’t object. The cost would have been fifty cents.

Families a few streets over lived in Housing Commission homes. One boy, Robert, had a lovely nature. We got to know each other on the assembly hall steps, where the kids who weren’t allowed in had to sit. We could hear the show, and the laughter. We just weren’t allowed to watch.

Once, a teacher came over and pressed a fifty-cent coin into our hands.

“Go on,” she smiled, nodding toward the doors. “You can’t miss this one.”

Inside, I found a place on the floor with my classmates. Someone drew shapes on my back; I did the same to Marcy in front. It was a beautiful moment.

But as we packed up, dread returned. How would I explain this to Mum?

When I got home, she confronted me. I told her the truth, that a teacher had paid. She was furious. Her face went red. She threatened to go to the principal. But then she stopped. Maybe she realised how foolish she’d sound. I always wondered if went around with a sign on my forehead that gave away any information Mum needed.

After that, Mum never said another word. But she started signing the slips. And she sent the money.

Now, years later, I think of Peggy and her silence. I’ll never fully understand her legacy, or how she suffered in that locked room. But maybe, just maybe, I was given a glimpse of the same kind of torment, when someone else decides how much light you’re allowed to feel on your skin.

Maybe, in my tears on that path, in Mum’s cold refusal, I touched the edges of Peggy’s invisible prison. If only we could have made it to that point of understanding.

And maybe, just in seeing it, I’ve begun to put something down. Not the weight, perhaps, but the silence.

A new kind of legacy. One I can choose to pass on, or not.

The wallpaper may have peeled. The room may have been renovated But the memory of blue roses endures. When I look at the house on the internet now, you often wonder if the walls could speak what stories would tell the next owner.

And maybe now, that Peggy has gone, she can open that window to her room and climb out, without fear and without regret.