“It is very important to be optimistic because there are dark sides,” says Mari, who believes if, as with most things in life, you overthink the negatives you would never do anything. Inevitably, they were bringing their own pain, that of infertility, to what is a triangular relationship of adoptive parents/birth parents/child, each of whom has some kind of sorrow to carry.
Mari would be the first to admit that she and her husband were naive when they went to their first meeting about adopting a child back in 1996.
MARI 2 MY BEST FRIEND KEVIN TRIAL
Tanya also refers to the coincidental, yet poignant, timing of the recent launch by Minister for Children Katherine Zappone of an expansion of post-adoption services run by Barnardos, just 24 hours after the two 14-year-old boys on trial were found guilty of Ana’s murder. “I got a few questions in school: ‘Are you following the case?’ ‘You know she’s adopted?’.” The way the media rooted it back to adoption “kind of irked me”, she admits. “Yes, she was vulnerable and could have been struggling at school but anyone can get into any sort of trouble with the wrong people.” However, Tanya feels it wasn’t fair to link what happened to her adoption. But she acknowledges it shone a light on how Ana “just not fitting in led her to be prey for somebody”. Mari, who can identify more than most with Ana’s parents, struggles to find words to talk about what to her was “an unspeakable case”. The testimony in the recent Ana Kriégel murder trial about how the 14-year-old girl, adopted from Russia at the age of two, was bullied over having a “fake mam and dad”, offered a deeply disturbing glimpse of how those perceived as an “outsider” can be victimised among teenage peers. Yet society’s understanding of the underlying complexities is still a work in progress. The fairytale view of it as being simply about matching parents desperate for a child to love with a child who needs a loving home and that then everybody can live happily ever after, has undoubtedly been tarnished. Home in Newbridge, Mari and Tanya give their own, fascinating perspectives on the fraught “journey” of adoption. But, crucially too, her birth mother Marina, was open to contact being made. Tanya was very fortunate that her adoptive parents, Paul and Mari Gallagher, were pro-active from early on in trying to track down her birth parents and also those of her older brother Kev (21), who had been adopted from Russia two years earlier. “I see adoption like a puzzle and I am constantly looking for little pieces to put into it,” she says of her life story so far. She reckons she is in a small minority of the estimated 6,000 children adopted to Ireland from overseas to have so much information about her birth family and to have been reunited through social media, although still separated by geography. Tanya acknowledges she has been very lucky to get some answers to the many questions she has been asking from an early age.
When she learnt the truth about her birth circumstances and understood her birth mother’s decision better, it was like a burden had been lifted from her young shoulders. “I always thought ‘this is all my fault’.” “Your parents are your parents and if they don’t want you, it must be because they don’t love you,” is what her younger self reasoned. “I was naive, I was a kid,” says the now 18-year-old school-leaver, who was raised in Co Kildare. As a child growing up, Tanya Gallagher always thought her parents in Kazakhstan had given her up for adoption because they didn’t love her.