Love Forms by Claire Adam begins with a 16-year-old in Trinidad impulsively having sex and becoming pregnant by a partner she does not know. As the pregnancy becomes obvious, her parents act quickly - sending Dawn away until the child is born and can be put up for adoption. Her parents take rapid-fire control, without considering the emotional consequences, and making arrangements to smuggle her to a convent in Venezuela where she waits out the pregnancy, immediately giving up the baby girl after birth.
Communication is strained, and her parents pretend the pregnancy never happened. Dawn relocates to Great Britain to study medicine, yet the memories and pain linger throughout her medical career, marriage, raising two sons, divorce, and regular visits to Trinidad. A sense of loss develops with age, and Dawn regrets that she and her mother never spoke about the daughter “properly.” Her mother advised keeping the unwanted pregnancy a secret from her husband, but he later reads her medical chart when she gives birth to their son. .
As her son grows, she imagines her daughter as a student, comfortable and productive. “It was that happy vision that made it possible for me to live, most of the time, like an ordinary person. But then, of course, there were other times when the realization of her absence returned. It always arrived somewhere in my abdomen, the sudden shock….”
The husband's career takes priority over Dawn's and eventually the two divorce. Decades later, she begins searching for the daughter, pleading for details from her family, writing letters and taking DNA tests. But the convent, the town, and the family who adopted the baby are unknowns. She no longer cares about the secret and realizes how little she understands herself, imagining how family members and neighbors in Trinidad might have gossiped about her.
Dawn's parents are impatient with her curiosity, refusing to discuss the matter, and Dawn impulsively tries the opposite approach with her own sons, telling them about their half sister when they are young, ages 7 and 5. Yet all she can share is the mystery of what she doesn’t know. She cannot answer their questions, instead replying that she would “explain it better one day, when they could understand.”
Longing to know the child's whereabouts becomes a lifelong obsession. Dawn had only a few moments with the child, holding her to her chest, after a sympathetic nurse breaks the rules. Despite such limited time and details, the bond of love remained strong.
