"Banished baby" finds birth mother after almost 45 years

By Anne Schindler
First Coast News
February 11, 2015

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/features/2015/02/10/real-life-philomena/23171753/

Catherine Deasey holds what she calls a "marketing picture" used by the orphanage to advertise which babies were available.

Adoption day: Deasey (center) says she was terrified when she arrived on the flight from Ireland

Deasey's mom, Johanna Sheehy, on the farm where she worked before she was sent to work in the church laundry.

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. -- The Oscar nominated movie "Philomena" was the first time most people learned about the dark side of Ireland's convents, and the forced adoptions that occurred in some. But it wasn't news to Catherine Deasy.

She was one of tens of thousands of children born in so called mother-baby homes in Ireland. Run by the Catholic Church, and called "Magdalene Laundries" for the work the women provided, they served as refuge for girls in trouble – unmarried and pregnant. But while they provided a place to live, the tradeoff was cruel.

"My mother was locked up for 40 years in hard labor as punishment for being pregnant and not married," says Deasey. "They were all enslaved there."

Some 10,000 women passed through the laundries between 1922 and 1996. Most were forced to cut their hair, and work in total silence. They weren't paid and many endured physical or sexual abuse. Worst of all, they were forced to give up any claim to their children.

The laundries have since become a source of national shame, earning a formal apology from the Irish prime minister and compensation for survivors. But it was decades before Deasey learned about them. Her mother was a farm girl named Johanna Sheehy, sent to work in a Catholic laundry after falling in love with and getting pregnant by the farm owner's son. Deemed unfit for society, and without resources, Sheehy remained there until she was well into her 70s.

Holding a picture of herself as a child – what Deasey says amounted to a church "marketing picture" for orphans – she chokes up: "This was the last picture my mother ever saw of me."

Deasey arrived in New York at age 4½ – alone, afraid, feeling thoroughly abandoned.

"I just remember how confused I was, and frightened," recalls Deasey in her comfortable Florida mobile home. With her bright orange hair and freckles, she recalls, "I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb." Though she accepted embraces from her new mother and sister, the very sight of her father caused her to scream, the first sign of a rift that never healed.

Throughout her childhood, her father repeated a narrative she had no reason to doubt: She'd been abandoned by her mother, left on the doorstep of a convent by a woman her dad characterized as a "tramp – a loose woman."

"He would throw in my face -- you probably won't amount to very much or you'll turn out like your mother," she recalls.

It wasn't until Deasey saw an episode of "20/20" on the history of the Magdalene Laundries that she began her own search for her birth mother. After tracking down her mother's name through adoption records, she began contacting the convent where she believed her mother lived. More than once, Deasey says, she was told no records existed.

Finally, with the help of an adoption assistant, she was able to locate her mom, and her surprisingly large extended family. In April 2002, she traveled to Ireland and met them for the first time. The reunion, which Deasey filmed, is emotional, the elderly Sheehy weeping – overcome, and incredulous at the sight of her adult "baby."

But the connection was just the first in an amazing trail of discovery. Far from abandoning her daughter, Deasey learned, her mother had loved her -- breastfed her for three weeks before she was taken away, and once even snuck into the nursery to give her baby the booties she'd knitted.

Sheehy told Deasey she'd been forced to sign a document – despite not knowing how to read or write – that made her child a ward of the convent. "They told my mother that's the last you'll see of your daughter, and you're never to see her again or seek her out," Deasey says.

Since learning the truth, Deasey has formed a loose network of Magdalene orphans in the U.S. And the movie "Philomena" proved oddly validating, a kind of big screen catharsis. "I cried, I just cried," she says. But on that first trip to Ireland, and several since then, she's been able to meet the family she never knew she had, and make a connection she'd missed her whole life.

"I lived with that insecurity for many many years not knowing the truth," she says. "So when I found out the truth from my own mother - that she loved me and she wanted me and it broke her heart -- that's all I needed to hear."