“My child’s a stranger”: How Joni Mitchell found her daughter
One of the most defining things in Joni Mitchell’s life inspired one of her saddest songs. “Little Green, have a happy ending,” she sings, addressing the child she had to say goodbye to.
It was a tragic tale, but one that appeared to Mitchell as utterly necessary. This was long before she was a folk star, long before she had any level of notoriety. Instead, this was when she was a struggling nobody in Canada. She’s barely even started playing music and was only just beginning to appear with her guitar at local cafes and dive bars, being paid little to nothing to do so and growing anxious as the harsh winter was drawing in.
And that’s when she found out she was pregnant. The ex-boyfriend who’s child it was swiftly abandoned her as she said, “[He] left me three months pregnant in an attic room with no money and winter coming on and only a fireplace for heat. The spindles of the banister were gap-toothed—fuel for last winter’s occupants.”
It was not the life she had envisioned for herself, nor was it the life she wanted to bring a child into. So the decision was made that she’d give the baby up for adoption, and then she would give her all to turning her own life around and making things work.
‘Little Green’ chronicles that period, from her false hope in the father through to her devastated well-wishes to the child she had to send away, hoping for nothing but total happiness for them.
That was that. Mitchell met her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, soon after that and moved to the US with him. When they divorced, she met David Crosby, who would believe in her so intensely that it changed her life when he agreed to make her debut album. From then on, the rest was really history as the singer became the queen of the new folk scene and one of the most admired and respected musicians around in the eyes of both her peers and fans alike. But still, the thought of her daughter stayed with her as she sang in 1982, “My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.”
Then, in 1993, the news leaked. Clearly in need of some money and willing to get it at her old friend’s expense, Mitchell’s old roommate sold the story of her pregnancy and unknown child to a tabloid. Little did they know that at the same time, her daughter had begun to be curious about who her biological mother might be. With the ad in the papers, it started to align. Kilauren Gibb realised her mother was Joni Mitchell.
In 1997, the estranged mother and daughter met for the first time. It was an emotionally exhausting moment, inevitably, but what was fascinating was the way it impacted Mitchell’s writing. Soon after their meeting, she wrote ‘Stay In Touch’, singing “Our roles aren’t clear / So we mustn’t rush… I’m grinning like a fool”, sharing her complex joy at finally knowing her child.
But then after that, there was a drought where she couldn’t seem to write anything at all. She chalked it all up to the meeting, wondering if perhaps her entire career and all the inspiration that fueled it was merely powered by the desire to make things right and make a life worthy of giving up her child, to make her daughter proud. Now they’d reunited, that panicked drive could slow a little.
