Why I conducted a 16-year ‘affair’ with my mother

Caitríona Palmer had a grounded childhood, so when her mother asked her on her sixth birthday to help make the bed, she didn’t find the request odd. They each took two corners of the sheet, wafted it into the air, and as it settled her mother began to talk. “Before you were born, another mammy carried you in her tummy but was unable to keep you … Now that you’re a big girl, I want you to remember her for yourself and to pray for her.”

Caitríona, understandably, was not prepared for this revelation. She wanted to cry. But she did not cry. She had been given an answer to her “creeping sense of otherness” and her six-year-old brain was already quickening with emotional calculations, apportioning consideration to her now multiple mothers, dividing the empathy, subtracting herself. If she cried, she might hurt Mary, the person she had always thought of as her mother.

There was barely a minute to register and evaluate these feelings while Mary smoothed the sheet, puffed the Paddington Bear pillow and patted the Paddington duvet into place. Caitríona’s parents read her stories about the adopted bear, perhaps in part to prepare her for this moment, and though she didn’t understand why, she had “an unusual attachment” to him.

Even at this distance, Caitríona, 43, remembers each high-speed thought. “I have young children myself and I look back and think, could I really have thought it at that moment? I absolutely know I did. I was awash with confusion and angst and total loss.”

As the years have passed, Caitríona’s emotional reckoning has lengthened and complicated. She has laid it all out in her memoir, An Affair with my Mother, in which she tells the story of Sarah, who conceived her outside marriage in 1972, in rural Ireland, and handed her over at birth to a Catholic adoption agency. Affair seems an odd word to describe a relationship with a parent, but that’s how it feels for Caitríona, who has spent the past 16 years getting to know her birth mother only on condition of the strictest secrecy.

Theirs is a relationship conducted entirely undercover. They have emailed and texted, and never once surprised one another with a knock on the door or a spontaneous call to a landline. Their meeting places lie safely outside the perimeter of Sarah’s social circle. Once, in a Dublin hotel foyer, Sarah, a teacher, was walking towards Caitríona with open arms, only to swerve at the last minute after recognising a friend, whom she greeted instead.

Yet Sarah (not her real name) welcomed Caitríona’s initial approach. She had been “waiting for this moment for 27 years”. She “sent her love”. She was “very happy”. Caitríona jotted down all Sarah’s words, relayed to her by a social worker acting as intermediary, on a sheet of paper now softened with age. It was only after the call ended that she began to ponder a note that still makes her flinch: “One concern – family doesn’t know / husband doesn’t know.”

Fine, thought Caitríona, and told Sarah to take her time. She little understood that the time Sarah needed might be a lifetime.

The predicament of Caitríona’s book is that she and Sarah are like magnets turned the wrong way. For all their love, their respective wishes repel the other. Set against Caitríona’s desperate, understandable wish to be the acknowledged daughter of her birth mother is Sarah’s desperate, understandable wish to preserve the shape of her life as she has publicly lived it. These wishes cannot both be satisfied. So which woman’s right is greater – Sarah’s to die with her secret or Caitríona’s to be known?

For Caitríona, concealment has nurtured “the feeling that I was something to hide, that I was not worthy of being brought out into the light”. Occasionally, the hurt tips into rage. In the book, Caitríona tries everything to reach back through her personal history to her beginnings, her pre-beginnings, the lives that her mother and father led. Time and again she is thwarted. She tries genealogical websites, she talks to women who worked at the Catholic maternity hospital where she was born, visits her birth father’s village and sits outside his house in her car. She interviews local historians, she even meets Philomena Lee, whose search for her forcibly adopted son was the subject of the 2013 film Philomena.

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“My story and Sarah’s story is the story of all these other people in Ireland who are in the same situation but nobody wants to come out and talk about it,” Caitríona says.

This sense of Caitríona chasing her origins, of Sarah retreating further into the safety of the secret, ripples through the book. There have been blissful incidents, such as when Caitríona introduced Sarah to her children – the eldest two knew who she was – and Sarah fretted about whether they were safe climbing trees. “It made me incandescently happy because she was being a grandmother,” says Caitríona.

Sarah is extraordinarily elusive and the book itself, as it jumps between past and present or draws a veil over a private conversation, abets her escape. When Caitríona interviews her, she provides information about the food she ate when she was seeing Caitríona’s birth father and the price of cinema tickets, but little emotional content. She is there, and she is not, in the text as in life.

“One day I’ll tell everyone,” Sarah promises Caitríona. She taps her throat, as if the secret were a fishbone. “It’s right here.” The pain for her has been immense and she confides, “I often think of suicide.”

So how far should Caitríona go, in her despair to be an acknowledged member of Sarah’s family? Despite her great wish for openness, she says she has never tried to persuade Sarah to divulge her existence to her husband and three children.

But she also colludes in that secrecy, accepts it as the necessary condition on which she can know her mother. Her father, incidentally, is more evasive. After managing to identify him (without Sarah’s knowledge), Caitríona passed a letter to an intermediary, but her father declined to read it. His contribution to this story is really that of two potent silences. The first, appallingly, is in response to Sarah’s news that she is pregnant.

All this elusiveness frustrates Caitríona with the sense that she has spent years “being solicitous to the two people who hold the keys and the clues to who I am”.

How fateful her initial insistence must seem that Sarah should take her time. Would she have said it if she had known then what she knows now? “I think initially I would be accepting but after a certain passage of time I would tell her that it was not possible to continue in the way that we did,” she says. “I’m older now. I have more insight. I’ve been a mother for 12 glorious years … So I would be stronger and not put myself through what I’ve gone through … I would do it in the most loving and gentle way, but I don’t think I would have gone on with the duration of the affair.

“I often worry that I complicated her life by showing up in 1999,” she says. “Did I do the right thing by seeking her out? Have I made her life worse in a sense because I came back? Did she want to take this secret to the grave?”

Did she ever put these questions to Sarah? “I’ve broached it and she is always emphatic that she needed to know I was OK. One thing she always told me was that throughout my childhood and my teenage years she would worry incessantly about me, particularly on stormy nights of which there are many in Ireland. She would be lying in bed hearing the windows rattle and the wind howl and she would be possessed by panic and worry and hope that I was safe. That broke my heart when she told me that. To be yearning for your child …”

In the book, the women’s competing and overlapping desires create odd echoes. After Sarah confides that she was “madly in love with” Caitríona’s birth father, Caitríona describes herself as “madly in love with” her husband Dan. Both women lie to each other, both impose silence as a form of emotional management, both make unilateral decisions about what should happen next.

The most staggering example comes late in the book when Caitríona’s phone beeps while she’s driving. She pulls over to find a text from one of her three birth siblings. The phone beeps again. Sarah has told two of her three children about her! But any hope that this is a step towards resolution quickly vanishes.

To Caitríona’s knowledge, the third sibling, and Sarah’s husband, remain in the dark. By sharing her secret with some but not all of her family, Sarah has traded openness for a more complicated secret. The truth, if Sarah ever tells it, will now need to include the subsidiary revelation that the news is news to only half the family. And the other half will need to admit to having exchanged “wonderful, warm emails” with Caitríona whom they have met on her trips back to Dublin from Washington, DC. How much more treacherous the divulgence must now seem.

Caitríona still eyes “the fairytale ending” – in which Sarah comes clean. The book is part of that plan. She has tried to make it do so many things. Memoir is only one function. She also tells the story of “the bizarre collusion between the Irish church and state and what that collusion did to women like Sarah”, of the double standards that allowed men to have sex as they wished while women paid the price, and of the history of the agency that brokered her adoption.

The book is an attempt to publicly exonerate Sarah, but in an awful twist there is a danger that it may lead to her irrevocable estrangement. Caitríona obtained Sarah’s permission before writing, but as she wrote silence descended. Caitríona has received no word from Sarah since Christmas 2014. She sent the book to Sarah and her two known birth siblings but none has responded, though her adoptive parents, Liam and Mary, have read and loved it.

“Sarah has gone underground,” Caitríona says, adding, “I can only speculate that it’s motivated by fear and anxiety over the book.” Caitríona hopes she will resurface, but what if she doesn’t? “It would break my heart to lose Sarah,” she says. “I consider that a terrifying possibility. But I had to tell this story, my truth, and to break the toxicity and hold of the secret.”

As Caitríona’s older children turned six – the same age she found out about Sarah – she told them she has two mummies, “one of whom is secret”. Only her youngest child, at four, remains in the dark. In the meantime, Caitríona says, she is the perfect age for Paddington.

• An Affair with my Mother by Caitríona Palmer is published by Penguin, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846