Ill know you the minute i see you

By Siobhan Holliman

UNDER the skyscrapers and cold winter skies of New York, a mother and daughter who were last together at the Tuam Mothers’ and Babies’ Home, will enjoy a pre-Christmas reunion – just over 56 years later.
Bernie Kerridge has no memory of her mother Maureen*. She knows she spent the first 11 months of her life with her in the Tuam home on the Dublin Road before she was adopted by a family in Bohermore in Galway and her mother boarded a plane to what is now JFK Airport.
Her mother, as far as she knows, never returned to the village where she came from on the Galway-Mayo border and has spent over half a century living in Connecticutt where she went on to marry and have four more daughters.
Bernie, who now lives in Leixlip, didn’t discover she was adopted until her adoptive mother Elizabeth passed away when she was just 11 years old.
“Over the years it has been like finding pieces of a jigsaw and I hope in December the final pieces will come together,” Bernie explains.
Maureen is 74 years of age now and the planned meeting is the result of many years of turbulent emotions, patience, understanding and a recurring longing by Bernie to find out more about her background.
“I’m very nosy by nature,” laughs Bernie. She was born in the Galway Regional Hospital and then she and her mother were taken to the Tuam home. She doesn’t know what her mother’s circumstances were in the late 1950s.
“I was spoilt rotten growing up,” says Bernie, whose adoptive brothers and sisters were much older than she and had emigrated to England. But they always sent money and gifts home for her.
In 1969 Bernie’s adoptive mother Elizabeth died from lung cancer. This is her first memory of hearing the word adopted when an uncle from Fermanagh referred to her as “the little adopted one” during her mother’s wake.
“Shortly after that I remember rooting in a big wardrobe and finding a piece of paper and again seeing that word 'adopted’ on it but I did nothing about it.”
After Elizabeth died, Bernie’s adoptive sister Josie came home from England with her son. Her adoptive father went on to re-marry and moved away and Bernie found herself at age 12 playing mammy to her one-year-old nephew and two other young nieces aged seven and eight, while Josie worked.
A year or so later, she heard the word 'adopted’ while out on the street. “I got a crumpled dictionary I had from attending the Convent of Mercy and wearing my medical card pink prescription glasses peered at the word 'adopted’.”
Again, Bernie went on with her life. Years quickly passed and everyone in the neighbourhood was delighted and proud when she said she was moving to England to study nursing.
“I knew from the moment I saw my mother sick in her bed that I wanted to be a nurse,” she recalls.

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