From the day Ruth Lush brought her newborn daughter home to Triton in 1969, she suspected the baby girl wasn’t the one she’d given birth to at the Springdale cottage hospital.
Earlier this year, she learned she was right.
“When the nurse brought the baby in, I said, ‘I don’t think that’s my baby’ but the nurse said babies change a lot overnight and I believed her,” Lush told CBC News in a recent interview. “They both had blue eyes. They both had a little bit of light blond hair.”
With the nurses insisting the child was indeed her baby, Lush pushed down her doubts and raised Arlene, the baby girl she brought home, but the question wouldn’t go away.
That was the very hardest thing, that I didn’t raise my baby.– Ruth Lush
“I had this motherly intuition or gut felling that used to come up every now and then,” she said.
“I mentioned it to Arlene several times and she wanted no part of it. My husband wanted no part of it. They all said I was crazy and I accepted [it].”
Arlene Lush was raised in Triton, on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, with the Lushes’ five other children. She said there were signs that she didn’t fit with her siblings.
“Growing up I was totally different from my siblings. I didn’t look like them. I definitely didn’t have the same attitude,” she said. They all finished school and went to university while Arlene decided at 15 she’d had enough of school and went to work in the fish plant and her uncle’s pool hall.
Then, in January 2022, DNA testing done by a 53-year-old woman on the other side of the country touched off a series of revelations that would prove Ruth Lush was right, and she would learn her biological daughter was living in the Northwest Territories.
‘Wish that it had never come to light’
Caroline Weir-Greene of Yellowknife grew up in Springdale, N.L., believing she was the youngest of her mother’s nine children but with questions about who her father was. Late last year she took a DNA test to try to get answers with the results showing the woman she thought was her mother actually wasn’t.
The results connected her to a sister she hadn’t known about in Halifax, and eventually to Ruth and Arlene Lush. A subsequent DNA test showed the woman Weir-Greene thought was her mother was in fact Arlene’s.
For Ruth Lush, the truth sparked powerful emotions.
“I cried for days. What was breaking my heart was that I didn’t raise my own child, and that is still what is very difficult to come to terms with,” she said. “I had a child. I did not know her until she was 53 years old. Can you imagine not knowing your own baby? That was stolen from me. That was the very hardest thing, that I didn’t raise my baby.”
Arlene Lush also found it difficult to accept.
“I believe it but it’s still hard to believe,” she said.
“When I heard, I fell to the floor. Dropped. I thought the world is done. I don’t have nobody now. You know, the parents that I had are not my parents and the parents that created me are no longer around. So I thought I don’t have nobody.”
Arlene said the first DNA test would never have happened if it had been up to her.
“I wish that it had never come to light or if it happened I wish I was dead when it happened,” she said. “It’s hard to think about all the what-ifs, and you can’t change it and you can’t stop thinking about it. People say, ‘It’ll be OK, you’ll get over it.’ It will never be OK, ever. It’s fresh and it will always be fresh.”
Arlene Lush, who lives in British Columbia now, drove back to Newfoundland this month to meet her biological siblings in Cow Head and Springdale and to visit the parents who raised her. Sitting in the Triton home where she grew up, she said it was difficult to return.
“I wasn’t going to come here. I was going to stay in Springdale but then I thought I got to go see my dad and my mom. They are my parents,” she said fighting back tears.
She’s says it’s been “surreal” meeting biological siblings who look like her but she’s also deeply angry about what happen to her.
“I lived somebody else’s life. Fifty-three years of my identity was taken from me. I lost my identity. I’m figuring it out but I lost everything. I would have known who my mom was I would have known who my dad was. I’m very angry, mad, sad, a mess. I cry a lot,” said Lush.
Lush calls the family she grew up with the “originals” and says they were a normal family, but she wonders what her life would have been like if she had been raised by her biological family: five older siblings with one dad and four younger ones with another father. The child switched with Arlene, Weir-Greene, was raised by an aunt.
“Some of them were given up for adoption. Some were raised by family members. I think this family [the Lushes] is probably where I was better off.”
Struggling with the truth
Weir-Greene wanted to know the truth but she’s struggling with the news too.
“It might have been decades ago but I’m just finding out and it’s my whole life that’s been a lie,” said Weir-Greene.
“It wasn’t my choice and this was taken away from me and all I keep thinking is what if? what if? Every day this has consumed me. Every minute. My sleep is interrupted. Every thought that I have is about this.”
Weir-Greene and the Lushes want an apology and compensation.
“I’m not going to stop until I get an apology. and I want more than an apology — if I need counselling or a family member needs it then they should be provided with that. Compensation that would cover our pain and our suffering,” said Arlene Lush.
Weir-Greene also says anyone who was born at the Springdale Cottage Hospital, which closed in 1977, should be offered free DNA testing.
No apology from health minister
This fall, the provincial Progressive Conservatives questioned Health Minister Tom Osborne about what will be done for the families. Osborne didn’t apologize or offer compensation.
“We have said that we share the sympathy with the families who have gone through this. It is a very difficult situation for any of those individuals to have gone through,” said Osborne, who said the government is looking for ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“This situation happened a number of decades ago,” he said. “This type of thing never should have happened. It did. We can’t change that.”
For Ruth Lush that’s not enough.
“It may be a long time ago for him but it’s new for me. If he was in my shoes, I don’t think he’d think like that. First they have to acknowledge that there was a wrong done and apologize for it,” she said.
Weir-Greene also wants more to be done.
“It was big. I mean it was life-changing,” she said. “I lived somebody else’s life. I’ve lived a lie. I haven’t come to terms with it because we are not be given any answers and we are not being given any help.”
Not an isolated case
Ruth said she has learned what happened to her family is not an isolated case. She said several other people in Triton have approached her with similar stories of children mixed up in hospital.
In 2019, CBC reported on two other men, Craig Avery and Clarence Hynes, who were switched at the Come by Chance cottage hospital in 1962.
Months later CBC also reported on another family who went home from the same hospital with the wrong child but soon recognized the mistake.
Avery and Hynes and members of their families have filed a statement of claim in court seeking compensation from Newfoundland and Labrador for what happened to them.
CBC asked for an interview with Osborne but was told he couldn’t speak because the situation is before the courts.