Adopted at birth in Ireland,Caitríona Palmer eventually found and got to know her birth mother. But there was one strict rule in their relationship – it had to remain a secretCaitríona Palmer had a grounded childhood, so when her mother asked her on her sixth birthday to relieve make the bed, or 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, and another mammy carried you in her tummy but was unable to sustain you … Now that you’re a big girl,I want you to remember her for yourself and to pray for her.Caitríona, understandably, and was not prepared for this revelation. She wanted to sob. But she did not sob. She had been given an retort 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 (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own), or subtracting herself. whether she cried,she might hurt Mary, the person she had always thought of as her mother.
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Source: theguardian.com