Once upon a time there was a little girl called Hannah Headstrong. Hannah had a doll which she loved very much. One day, Hannah was in the main street when somebody snatched her doll and it disappeared.

Hannah was distraught. She cried and cried, until her mother said she was being self-indulgent, and just had to face the fact that the doll was not coming back. Everyone else seemed to forget about the doll, but Hannah couldn't. At night, she would lie in bed stroking the doll's clothes, remembering how lovely it had been when she could go off to sleep with her doll clutched in her arms.

Her mother put the doll's clothes away one day when Hannah was at school. When she came home, she was very upset. Even the small comfort of those clothes had been taken from her. She couldn't eat her dinner, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling as if no one understood why she felt so awful.

Suddenly the room filled with light. Well, a rather feeble light. A woman stood at the end of the bed, holding a small torch which needed new batteries.

"Who are you?" asked Hannah. "Are you my fairy godmother or my guardian angel? I know they sometimes turn up when things feel really bad, and I can tell you they couldn't be any worse right
now."

"No," said the woman. "I couldn't possibly be either of those. I look silly in sparkly clothes, and I can't fly. I get around in a small, dented Japanese car. I'm a community education coordinator."

"What's that?" asked Hannah. "I'm a little girl with a 6-to-8- year-old vocabulary, and I've never heard of such a thing."

"Well, it just means someone who organizes classes for other people," explained the co-ordinator. "It's not one of those jobs children think they'd like to do when they grow up."

"No," said Hannah, "it isn't something you hear much about.Anyway, why are you here?"

"I know you're unhappy, Hannah, so I've come to tell you about some of the classes we're running, to see if they might be able to help. Adults do them mostly, but sometimes I let children do them too. We're just starting a course called 'Finding Your Inner Child' and that might interest you."

Hannah thought the course sounded like a good idea. Besides, the co-ordinator was a grown-up and she had always been told that grown-ups knew best. She went to the class for a couple of weeks.

Then she rang up the co-ordinator. "I don't like your class very much. All the others are grown-ups, who keep going on about finding the child within, and drawing lots of pictures. I am a child; there's no one else to find inside me, and I'd rather play with Lego than do drawings. And I still feel really sad about my doll."

"Oh, sorry," said the co-ordinator. "Bad guess. Well, what about aerobics? I don't do them myself, but I'm told they're fun."

So Hannah went to aerobics. Once was enough for her. She rang up the co-ordinator again.

"That's no good. I feel like you are just trying to distract me from feeling bad about my lost doll. She's still lost, no matter how much I jump up and down. My mother bought me a new pink leotard,but I don't care. I want my doll."

"Look, I've got a better idea. Why not go to woodworking? You could make another doll," suggested the co-ordinator, who was starting to sound bored with the whole thing. Hannah felt like she was being a nuisance, so went along to woodworking.

She stuck with it for three weeks, then got really angry. She rang up the co-ordinator.

"Come here! I'm not talking about this over the phone. I am so cross!"

That night the co-ordinator dropped into Hannah's bedroom again. The torch batteries had finally expired, so there was a thud as she found the bed in the dark and knocked her shin against it.

"Right," said Hannah, "I've had enough. Woodworking is just stupid. I don't want to make another doll. I want my own doll. All these silly classes don't help at all, and I think you're silly too.Why couldn't you be a fairy godmother? They are much more useful. You're not even that good at your job, or you'd have known I wouldn't have liked the things you told me to do. I could scream. Nobody understands. You don't know what it's like."

"You're right, Hannah, I don't know what it's like. I've never lost a doll," said the co-ordinator. "What do you think you'd like to do? Tell me what you want."

"Well, I think I'd like to talk to someone who does know what it's like. I can't be the only little girl who's ever lost her doll."

"No, I'm sure you're not," said the co-ordinator, who had once done a counselling course, and was trying hard to practice her listening and empathizing skills. "And you know what it's
like. Why don't you run a course for people who have lost their dolls? You've found out what sorts of courses don't provide what you want - why not make one up that does work for you?"

"That's no good," sighed Hannah. "I don't know what works. How could I run a course? That's stupid."

"Hang on," said the co-ordinator, who wasn't sure at what stage you stop affirming people, and start challenging them instead. "It's all in the way we do it. How about we get a group of little girls like you together; little girls who have lost their dolls. You can be the person who starts it going - that's called a facilitator. It's your job to write things on the blackboard, and to pass tissues around if anyone cries. You get paid too."

Hannah was starting to get interested. She had always fancied herself standing up in front of other people writing things on the board.

"But you still haven't said what I'd do."

"Ah," said the co-ordinator, who was warming to her subject, even if she wasn't much good about lost dolls. "You don't have to do much at all. We get everyone to contribute ideas about ways of helping little girls who have lost their dolls. All of you can talk about it; get cross with the people who didn't help, maybe draw some posters or make some pamphlets telling people how they can help. And we make up a really good title; something like 'A Forum to Examine the Psychosocial Factors Involved in pubertal Loss of Attachment Objects.'"

"What do you mean, we make it up? You made that up, whatever it means. Still, it sounds pretty important. Could I really do all that?"

"Sure," yawned the co-ordinator, who wished she didn't have to go out so much at nights. "And Hannah, there could be a career in this for you. No one else, so far as I know, has really done this. You could become an expert, with all the information you gather. Maybe you could write a book about it one day, and run seminars."

Hannah yawned too. "What's the difference between a forum and a seminar?"

The co-ordinator tucked Hannah into bed, and started to climb out of the window.

"Not that much, really, except one person gets to do most of the talking in a seminar. Goodnight, Hannah, come and see me at work tomorrow and we'll work out the details."

Hannah went to sleep. It had been fun, being rude to a grownup, but it was also good when a grown-up stopped behaving like one, and just listened. A fairy godmother might have been more conventional, but her power seemed to run out about midnight,
and then you had to pretend to be something you weren't, to make some prince marry you.

Hannah thought that might get a bit tedious, although she also thought that if that went wrong, maybe you could get to be an expert on that too, and get paid to talk about it.

Hannah slept. Maybe she wouldn't live happily ever after, but perhaps there was the possibility of doing some interesting things on the way.

Hannah emerged in early 1993, at a time when I was working in adult education, and for the first time addressing the loss of my twin sons to adoption twenty years earlier. She came to life one night as I drove back (in the small, battered Japanese car) to the small town in which I lived. I had just spent an evening in the city with a group of birthmothers.

Of course, after writing the story, I realized that it contained so many aspects of myself, and my search to make sense of what had happened; both to me, and to the other women I encountered
in those early days of connecting with others.

In 1998, the story seems to have foretold some of the events which occurred in the ensuing years. Since Hannah met that bumbling but well-meaning adult education co-ordinator, she has moved on. She developed a course for birthmothers similarly addressing issues of loss and grief, and began a local support group for triad members.

When she moved to the city, she met an adopted woman, also a tutor, with whom she has run courses for birthmothers and adopted women. In addition, she began lobbying for change to adoption laws. Although New Zealand has a particularly enlightened attitude to open records, there are still changes needed in law and practice.

Hannah returned to university, to complete a degree abandoned twenty-five years earlier, and after finishing it, went on to do a masters degree which she completed this year. Her thesis has a title which is not quite as tortured as the one dreamt up by that busybody, adult education co-ordinator, but which addresses aspects of adoption policy, including the issue of long-term support for birthmothers. Hannah has decided that success is the best revenge!

Now she finds that she is indeed regarded as something of an expert, though she acknowledges that much of what she knows is because of the generosity of triad members who have told her
their stories. She is now an old hand at talking in public, at conferences, at seminars, and to the media.

Three years ago she discovered the Internet, and found a whole new adoption community online, a valuable extension to the networks she had already forged in New Zealand.

Hannah still hasn't found her doll. And she still yearns to do so. I know the identities of my twin sons, but they are not yet ready to meet me or talk with me. This is not the tragedy it might
have seemed at the time Hannah first came into my life.

Both intellectually and emotionally, thanks to Hannah and her earnest search for coping trategies, I've moved past romanticizing reunion. I've observed many, including that of my father and his birthdaughter, and know that reunion is another beginning, not an end. Adoption is for life, and Hannah's relationship with herself, about the past, is as important as the relationship with her lost doll. She profoundly regrets the loss of her doll, but accepts that the doll she could have had is gone forever.

My friend Hannah will continue to be my intimate companion, as she insists on finding her own voice about her adoption experience, and challenges those who want to speak for her. She doesn't expect fairy tale happy endings, but at the same time she is optimistic enough to believe she deserves good things. Hannah sustains me on my journey, and she was right - there certainly
have been interesting things to do along the way, with plenty more in the future.

© Copyright 1999