Little Green

Born with the moon in Cancer
Choose her a name she will answer to...
Call her green for the children that have made her ...
Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed.
Little green, have a happy ending -
Little Green - Joni Mitchell

In my trip here down memory lane, reading about Joni Mitchell's early Toronto days as a struggling artist, I stumbled upon a side of her that came as a real surprise to me:

It is all there, encoded in the song. A true story of secrets and lies. The child "born with the moon in Cancer" is the baby that Joni Mitchell gave up for adoption. She felt she had no choice. At 21, she was Joan Anderson, dirt poor and pregnant, an unknown folksinger in a Toronto rooming house. The girl was born on Feb. 19, 1965. The child’s father, a Calgary artist named Brad MacMath, had, as the song says, disappeared "to California/hearing everything was warmer there." Joni balked at the prospect of being a single, destitute mother, and was not prepared to ask her parents back in Saskatchewan for help - they did not even know she was pregnant. She tried a desperate marriage of convenience, to a fellow folksinger named Chuck Mitchell, but it would soon collapse, leaving her nothing but a new surname. "Weary of lies," as Joni sings in Little Green, she "signed all the papers in the family name," and sent her baby, Kelly Dale Anderson, into the unknown. Kelly, as in kelly green.

Read the article: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0011323

Mother Country

I'm just about to start this new book and am really looking froward to it. It reminds me of a close friend who went in search of his biological father's roots. In the end he decided not to contact the family, it was enough to know he was walking the same streets his dad once had. The worst part was having discovered that his mom had deceived him all those years by covering up the truth.

Synopsis:

This is a hugely moving and affecting literary memoir of adoption, a family mystery, and the need to belong. When Jeremy Harding was a child, his mother Maureen told him he was adopted. She described his natural parents as a Scandinavian sailor and a 'little Irish girl' who worked at Woolworth's. It was only later, as Harding set out to look for traces of his birth mother, that he began to understand who his adoptive mother really was - and the benign make-believe world she'd built for herself and her little boy. "Mother Country" evokes a magical childhood spent in transit between Notting Hill Gate and a decrepit houseboat on the banks of the Thames. It is a detective quest, as Harding searches through the public record for a clue about his natural mother, and a rich social history of a lost London from the 1950s. "Mother Country" is a powerful true story, full of thrilling revelations, comic confusion, and tender memories, about a man looking for the mother he'd never known, and finding out how little he'd understood about the one he'd grown up with.