Secrets and Lemons
ISBN
Description
“Barbara Docherty’s life is one of light and shadow: loss and resilience, silence and truth. In Secrets and Lemons, she tells it all, with clarity and courage. ”~ Paula Penfold
Lemons may make lemonade, their blossoms may smell sweet, but bite beneath their raw skins and they're impossible to eat. Such is Barbara Docherty’s memoir.
"My father said I'd talk to anything, even a cornflake..." And indeed, Barbara strongly conveys her zest for living and adventure, her ability to connect with people, and talent for recognising opportunity when it knocks. But, there were times when the trauma in her life was great, and unable to unravel this, she buried the anguish only for it to manifest later as post-traumatic stress.
Key among those experiences was the forced adoption of her babies - twice. Many forced-adoption birth mothers of the notorious 'baby scoop era' will viscerally feel the systematic dehumanisation of Barbara's childbirth experiences and the illegal kidnapping of her infants. And for decades she persistently hounded authorities for information about her children, which fell on deaf ears. It was not until 2024 that New Zealand politicians offered brief apologies for the abuse, but, "...we still [await] a much wider acknowledgement and redress."
This is an unfinished story... but a plethora of women who were there too, who work in health care services, and who care about the lives of women are fighting to redress this history. This is a must-read book for all women, health professionals, government officials and religious leaders.
“Barbara’s story is woven into a backdrop of some of the most fundamental social issues New Zealand faced. She writes of them not in an abstract way but as blows that landed squarely on her own life …
In these pages you will encounter honesty of a rare and affecting kind. The kind that exposes things most of us would keep buried. This is how it was, and this is what it was like to live it.”
About the author
Barbara Docherty is a retired registered nurse with a Masters degree (First Class Honours) in Behavioural Health Communication and a Post Graduate Diploma in Health Science. She was an honorary clinical lecturer at the University of Auckland and from 1998 to 2007 led the TADS (tobacco, alcohol and other drugs) behavioural health training programme initiated from the World Health Organization.
Barbara’s writings on health professional–patient communication have been extensively published in a wide range of medical and nursing journals, including her weekly column in the national journal NZ Doctor for 28 years. She was Canterbury Newstalk ZB’s talkback health nurse for eight years, provided regular newspaper health columns, and community and national radio commentaries, and was editor of the New Ethicals Primary Health Care Journal.
Previously working in the field of general practice and primary health care nursing and research, she was an invited on-line lecturer for students at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, and is the author of the primary health care nursing resource Nursing in General Practice: a NZ Perspective, which remains a key library reference.
Barbara was a founding member of the Practice Nurse Accreditation Board and co-authored the Standards of Practice for Practice Nursing. In 1997 she received a New Zealand Nurses Organisation award for services to nursing and midwifery. Her New Zealand board-appointed memberships have included the Alcohol Liquor Advisory Council, the Health Promotion Agency, and the Lotteries Health Research Committee.