The Girls Who Went Away (15 page)

I called the social worker. This was just the happiest day. I was calling to find out when we could pick him up. She sounded really mean, “I’ll call you back tomorrow and let you know.” So my mother was actually getting excited about it and was saying, “We can get the crib down from the attic,” and all this kind of stuff. Then, the next day I go to work and I get laid off. When the social worker called back, she said, “You can pick your baby up, but before you do, you have to pay me for your hospital, his hospital, your doctor, his doctor, my counseling, the maternity home, and the foster home.” She was going to keep the meter running at the foster home until that was paid in full. I couldn’t have him until then.

I still can’t remember the exact amount she told me but it was thousands. I’m thinking that even if I got called back to work at $1.57 an hour I just could not imagine how I would ever be able to get that much money. So I said, “Fine, I’ll sign your f’ing paper because I’ll never have that kind of money.” She called me to tell me when I would be signing the papers and she wanted to know if I wanted to see him before and, of course, I did. I had one more glimmer of hope. I asked my mom to go with me to see him because I
thought, “She can’t let this happen if she sees him.” But she said no. I found out after he found me that that was exactly why she said no.

On February 14 my dad drove me so I could sign. He parked six blocks away because he didn’t want anyone to think that he had anything to do with this. I went into the social worker’s office and she led me to some cold little institutional room. There was no light on, but there was light shining through Venetian blinds and it was kind of a hazy winter day. I sat in a chair and she brought my baby in. He was all bundled up. He was sleeping and she handed him to me and left. I just sat and held him and cried. I was dropping big tears on him and trying so hard to memorize his little face. He was just so, so cute, except he had some scratches and kind of a rash. I’m thinking, “Professional people are taking care of him and this is how he looks? How did I ever think I could do it?” Half an hour later she came back and said, “Okay, your time’s up.” He didn’t see me because he slept through the whole thing.

I gave him back. It didn’t even cross my mind not to give him back. I was just at rock bottom, totally hopeless. Instead of me making her break my goddamn arms to get him, like I should have, I just did it. I left and walked the six blocks to my dad’s car. He drove me to the lawyer’s office. I went in and the lawyer asked me, “Are you doing this because you want to?” And I just mumbled, “Yes.” And he said, “Okay, I’ll see you in court tomorrow.”

I walked back to my dad’s car and we went home and said nothing. The next day we drove to the courthouse and I think it was a judge’s chambers. It was this big wood-paneled courthouse room. This time it was kind of warm, yellow sunlight. It always seemed like nobody had bright lights on. I had to go in there and the judge asked me if I was doing this because I wanted to, if anybody was forcing me to, and I answered, “Yes, because I want to. Nobody is forcing me to.” I signed my name to I have no idea what and I turned around and left. I didn’t shed a tear. I showed nothing. I went to my dad’s car, and from there he took me to a job interview at some savings and loan. I did pretty bad. This time my dad parked right out front. Then I got back in the car and went home and we never once mentioned it again. You’d think we just dumped clothes off at the Salvation Army. The next day I went out with my friends and I drank until I puked.

I was unemployed for about six weeks, then I got a job at another factory.
This one was a piston-ring factory. I didn’t know what piston rings were. I had to ride to work with these creepy guys from my hometown because they drove past our house. I had an iron bar and the piston rings were in stacks of one hundred and I had to stick the bar in the rings, tilt it, dip it in this tank of solvent, pick it up, drain it off, and then put the rings on these metal trees with arms that looked like Christmas trees. I did that for eight hours a day. Occasionally, I would be sent to this little room and have to dip stuff in tar. I still have scars on my arm where the tar splashed. I did this for six weeks. It was mind numbing but I’m trying to be a good girl.

The supervisor who taught me how to do all this stuff was a balding, not very nice woman. She walked up to me one day and said, “What are you doing?” “I’m doing exactly what you told me to, ma’am.” She said, “That’s not how I told you to do it! Gimme that thing!” She does some kind of backhanded little maneuver and then she said, “Now do it the way I told you.” I tried to do it that way and a hundred piston rings fell all over the floor. She says, “Now pick them up.” And I took the iron bar and I said, “F— you!” and I threw it at her. Thank God I missed. It bounced off the wall behind her. I just started screaming at the top of my lungs and ran to the bathroom and just sat in there screaming and screaming. Not even sobbing, just screaming. They got the personnel manager—and he’s a man—to come in the ladies’ bathroom and try to talk me down. I can’t even explain it, you know—it was like I had tried and tried and tried to do what all these f’ing adults want me to do and it still wasn’t right.

He finally convinced me to stop screaming and led me out to his car and took me back to my family. When my dad and brother found out why I was home before I was supposed to be, wow, all hell broke loose: “You useless piece of no-good shit, can’t even hold a goddamn job,” and on and on and on. “If you don’t get back to that goddamn job…” So the next morning the guys from my hometown picked me up and I went back to work. I no longer had to dip rings in solvent; I got to sort them. God knows how many bad piston rings got sold. There was a little old lady there that I talked to and she’d been doing that for twenty-five years. I said, “So how do you know the good from the bad?” I had no idea what I was doing and I don’t know that she did, either. The personnel guy called me into his office and told me that he didn’t think I was factory material and they were going to have to permanently
lay me off at the end of two weeks. He said that I really should think about going to college.

I didn’t tell my family I got fired. I had the guys who took me to work take me to the employment office every day. I would sit in the Catholic church in the morning and draw pictures and write morbid poetry and then go to the employment office. I called the social worker to find out how my baby was doing. He wasn’t adopted yet. She said, “He’s probably too old. We don’t know if anybody’s going to want him.” She said, “Do you have any deafness in your family, do you have ear problems?” I said, “My sister had a bad left ear and infections when she was little and had to be hospitalized. Why?” “Well, we think he’s deaf. We don’t think he’s adoptable.” I said, “I want him back.” And she said, “No. I don’t care if he grows up as a ward of the state, you will never get him back.”

I got another job washing dishes in the kitchen at the TB sanatorium. I had to wear a little mask so I wouldn’t get TB. God forbid I should die, with a life like that. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me, this thing about “If you have other kids, you’re gonna forget this.” I’m thinking, “I’m going to have to have another baby,” but I knew that I would never be pregnant again and unmarried. I would find a way to kill myself first. There is absolutely no way in hell I would ever go through that again.

I hadn’t seen the guy who I thought, “Hmm, if I’m gonna get married someday it will be to him,” since January. In April I wrote him a little letter telling him I had something to tell him. He wrote back and said he’d be home from college that weekend. He showed up and I had nothing to tell him. I just wanted to see him again. We go out and by then I’m able to talk, unlike when I saw him right after my son was born. When the evening ended he said, “What was it you wanted to tell me?” And I said, “Nothing, I just wanted to see you.” We’ve been together ever since. We’ve been married thirty-five years.

On my son’s twenty-first birthday I dug papers out from the back of my underwear drawer where I kept them. I filled out some paperwork and sent it to the state of Wisconsin but I never really let myself hope. I didn’t let myself get my hopes up that he would find me.

One day I’m at my studio and I get a phone call from Catholic Social Services asking me if I still want to know my son. I said, “Of course.” “Well,
do you want him to write you a letter or would you like him to call you?” I said, “Listen, I didn’t wait twenty-three years to wait even longer for a letter. He can call me.” I hung up the phone, burst into tears, ran across the hall to tell one of my very best friends, whom I’d never told about my son. I called my husband and said, “Guess what? The chickens have come home to roost”—our farm background here. “This will never be a secret again, from here on out.”

I packed up my stuff, went home, picked up my fifteen-year-old, and said, “I have something to tell you: you have a brother.” This is my A+ student. She said, “No way, dude! Cool, Mom!” That was it. No questions. We had supper and I hadn’t told the two other girls. They were watching something on TV and the phone rang and it was my son. I cannot describe…hearing your child’s voice for the first time when he’s twenty-three is just, just indescribable. He sounded so much like my brother and my favorite first cousin. We exchanged statistics and covered all that basic stuff and then it was, “Well, now what do we do?” I had never read anything about adoption in all those years, so I said, “Well, I don’t know what we should do next, but I’ll tell you one thing: I want to know absolutely everything I missed if you’re willing to tell me. I want to hear everything.”

He took me at my word and we talked for four hours. I got off the phone and everybody says, “Mom, who were you talking to?” I said, “Well, it’s a really long story. I’ll tell you as soon as that show is over.” And when it was, I told them, “When I was nineteen I had a baby. He is your brother and that was him on the phone. He wants to know us.” One daughter says, “That’s cool!” And the other says, “Yeah, that’s great!” And they all went to bed. I didn’t sleep. I got up and started writing and I have continued to write, all in longhand with old ink pens.

I had never stopped to think. I had been just running through life. I had gone from my childhood, which was a matter of just survival, to a major trauma. When the lid came off, when I reunited with him, I really think I was clinically nuts. I sobbed—I swear, it took every bit of power I had not to be sobbing when I was with my daughters. Thank God they were in school so I had some time alone. I would just sob and sob and write. I never slept more than three hours at a time and I think the lack of sleep made me crazier. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. Poor guy—I wrote my son a letter every day
and they must have been six pages long. He said, “I’ve never read this much before in my life, Mom.”

When I look back at my life, the only thing I would change would be to find a way to keep from losing my son. I wouldn’t even change getting pregnant in the first place. After he found me, I found myself sitting out in my garage smoking and writing and sobbing and thinking, “If only I had a handgun, I would make it stop.” But then I thought of my youngest, who was only eight, and I would cork the wine. Regardless of how much hell I was in, I could not do that because I could never, ever hurt my kids like that. So I am still here.

It is the loss of that baby. When he came to see us, maybe a month into the reunion, I just remember standing there hugging him and just wanting to somehow have the power to crank the clock back twenty-three years. To do it over and get it right. It’s just a horrible, horrible, horrible loss. I have this week-old granddaughter and I look at her and I just think of my son when he was that age. How could society think that was all right? He was not even entitled to be held by his own mother. It’s just…it’s all so wrong. It’s wrong! There was no reason he should have been removed from his mother, none. I had never harmed a child and I haven’t harmed one since. It was all about what people would think.

I remember telling the social worker that I just really loved him and that’s why I wanted to keep him, and she said, “How can you be so selfish?” And I was raised…oh God, don’t be selfish. The reality was I really wasn’t being selfish, I was being a mother. To have her tell me that my natural feelings as a mother were selfish was just, my God, it was just wrong.

It really wasn’t until maybe the last two years that I’ve been starting to put it back together. I remember standing in the kitchen at suppertime and just sobbing and my thirteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters put their arms around me and said, “Mom, you have to get help.” It was just the most difficult thing I ever had to do because for me to ask for help was just incredibly difficult. But because they told me I needed to, I did. I called my doctor and it turns out his wife is a licensed psychologist, so I went to her for fifteen months. She insisted that my problem was my childhood, not losing my son. I insisted that it was losing him, but I think it was a combination of
both. She just wanted to go on and on about my childhood. She insisted that it was about my mother, so her idea was I needed to draw a picture of my mother in a phone book and then beat the phone book with pieces of rubber hose she had. I really thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard and I refused. I had no urge to hit my mother.

But she did help me see that I actually had only one choice, which means there was no choice. She also helped me see that my boyfriend made his decision when he took a hike. I mean, she helped me see the reality of it. I was really, really blaming myself: “How could I possibly have given away my own child?” So I have no regrets that I went to the psychologist. I guess it’s helped me think, “Maybe I’m okay. It’s maybe okay to be me.”

It’s just…my whole life has just been based on shame. I’m probably over halfway through it. I can’t go through my life crying. I mean, it was so bad in the nineties I had scabs under my eyes from wiping them. You hear about people’s lives being touched by adoption. It’s no damn
touch.
I mean, that just drives me nuts. You’re smashed by adoption. I mean, it alters the mothers’ lives forever.