GIVE ME A BREAK:Having given birth in secret as an 'unmarried mother', a friend now wants to meet her child. But could her husband and other children cope with the revelation?

I KNEW MY friend for many years before she shared with me the secret turmoil that has dominated her inner life - a secret that has come between herself and her children, between herself and her husband and between herself and her parents - a Berlin Wall of emotion that no one in the family, including herself, has ever dared breech, so that her family have never really known her.

As a young, single woman, she became pregnant. Brainwashed by the Catholic Church into feeling overwhelming shame and guilt, she travelled alone to England, where she gave birth to a son and put him up for adoption. It was her only option. A few years later, she saw a picture of him and his adoptive parents in a magazine. Since then, she knows nothing of his life. He'd be in his 30s now. Is he happy? Married? Has he children of his own? Has my friend grandchildren she may never know? She has registered with the agencies that enable birth mothers and adopted children to trace one another, but there has been no news so far.

My friend told me and a couple of other women her secret, even though her own children, now adults, still have no idea. In the beginning, when she met and married her husband, she believed the advice she'd been given: give up your baby, tell no one and forget it ever happened. She did tell her husband before they married, but after that initial confession, they never discussed it again, despite decades of supposedly intimate marriage.

While her children were young and living at home, she was so busy and preoccupied with bringing them up that she was able to suppress her secret. But now she's in her 60s with an empty nest, she is assessing her life and the pain of losing her first-born has surged back with renewed force. More than 30 years have passed, yet emotionally it's as though the trauma happened yesterday. And the overwhelming feeling for her at the moment seems to be anger.

Anger at the Catholic Church, anger at her parents for knowing what was going on yet never acknowledging it, anger at society in general for also sweeping this issue under the carpet. As we all know, anger is a necessary stage in grief, so she needs to feel it, but listening to her it's clear that her anger is also turned in on herself for having conformed to the morality of her time. The lie she was told - that she could carry a baby for nine months then give it up for adoption and get on with her life without massive psychological scarring - has turned out to be not just a lie, but a form of emotional abuse. Her unprocessed pain has multiplied tenfold as a result of being suppressed due to the secrecy.

There are tens of thousands of women in my friend's situation. Since 1952, Ireland has seen 42,000 domestic adoptions - most of them in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Not all birth mothers feel as she does, but many do.

Apart from her anger at the Catholic values of shame that forced her to give up her son, my friend also feels fear. If her adult children were to discover her secret, would they condemn her for having lied to them? As a mother who tried to instil good values in her children, would they see her as a hypocrite? Would they believe that their mother's ability to surrender a child in order to keep her good name means that she loves them less than they thought? Does it make her unmotherly?

She also fears talking to her husband about her feelings. They've been together so long that she wonders if their relationship could sustain the explosion of feeling that would take place were she to be honest with him about her pain. This is a woman who has kept the lid on her pain for so long that lifting it for anyone but her therapist and her closest confidantes is terrifying.

And while she may disagree with me, I think she also feels a sense of being out of sync with society as it is today. When Sarah Palin can celebrate her teenage daughters pregnancy and still run for US vice-president, and when Irish parents whose teens and university-age children become pregnant can be open and find ways to rear the new child - their grandchild - it hurts all the more for women like my friend. She is living in a liberal society, yet in her mind and heart she still has to live with the consequences of a 1970s mind-set when so-called "unmarried mothers" and "illegitimate children" were frowned upon.This makes her a stranger in a strange land - surrounded by liberal attitudes, yet living with fear and anger that make her afraid to make the most of the new openness by telling her own story.

She would like to see women of her age - women now in their 60s to 80s - sharing their stories and going public with their legacies of pain. Partly because she would like the support of hearing how others coped, but also because she would like see the terrible secret she has carried put on the record for today's generation of ethically privileged young people who have no idea of the repression their parents and grandparents suffered.

• kholmquist@irish-times.ie All e-mails and letters treated in confidence