The Girls Who Went Away (19 page)

—Cathy II

The intense social pressures that families felt during the 1950s and 1960s and the stigma associated with unwed pregnancy have waned dramatically over the last forty years. In fact, young women who place children for adoption
now are more likely to be viewed by their peers as “selfish” and their actions thought of as “incomprehensible”
⁴⁴
—the very same language used against young mothers who did
not
want to surrender their children forty years ago. For mothers who surrendered in the fifties and sixties, a more tolerant society today offers little solace. Instead, the change in views underscores the flexible nature of societal attitudes and the degree to which the women’s lives were governed by the attitudes of their time. They are well aware that many who have grown up in subsequent generations—including their surrendered sons and daughters—cannot understand how mothers could have “given away” their own flesh and blood.

Three years later and my life would have had a different outcome. Three years later, the first girls in the area were pregnant and staying in school. I mean, think about that—twelve hundred days later. You didn’t have to go to an unwed mothers’ home. You didn’t have to give your baby up, and you didn’t have to hide in shame. Twelve hundred days later.

I was scared for my baby all those years. I never slept through the night. I never made it through a night without wondering how she was.

—Susan II

JEANETTE

I
was a senior in high school in a small town in Washington State. I’d had a boyfriend since the previous summer. He was captain of the football team and very athletic and, you know, I was one of the cute girls. I was Roman Catholic, and absolutely believed that I would burn in hell if I didn’t lead a good life. However, we started having sex in the fall. The first time was after a football game where he had done very, very well, and after that it continued. I really cared for him. I liked his family and my family liked him. I told him I had missed my period, and we went to a doctor who I assume other football players took their girlfriends to. He gave me this little white pill and said that I should have my period soon. Well, I didn’t. My boyfriend and I talked about it. He had a really good football scholarship to Washington State University and, of course, he couldn’t be married. This was 1952.

I started wearing a girdle because I had to keep my stomach in. I was so sick that spring. I had a sister who lived in San Francisco and I wrote her a letter and said I was “in trouble.” She knew exactly what I was talking about. The day after I graduated from high school, I went to live with her. I never told my mother, I never told my father, I never told anyone. Both of my parents died without knowing.

The previous year, in my little town of five thousand, there was a girl who had a baby and wasn’t married. She kept that baby and it was a scandal. Their house was about five blocks from the high school. One morning we were sitting in class and we heard this terrible explosion. Their house had blown up. The baby was fine, but she was terribly burned on her legs and her arms. We all thought it was God’s way of disapproving. I don’t know if he disapproved of her getting pregnant or of her keeping the baby, but I thought about that incident constantly when I was pregnant.

Single people got pregnant, but almost everyone married. There’s a saying the Irish have—something about six-month babies, I forget—but it was
very common. We couldn’t even say the word
pregnant.
My mother became pregnant when I was nine or ten years old. No one told me until she brought the baby home. The first time I heard the word
pregnant
out loud was when I was in nursing school.

While I was at my sister’s I had one maternity dress and I remember it to this day. It was a yellow checked smock with a matching yellow skirt. I wore it every day. We didn’t wear pants much in those days. I would write to my parents and say I was looking for a job. My boyfriend would write and he would send me a dollar bill once in a while. It was the only money I ever had. The apartment house had these little mailboxes. I didn’t have a key, but I would peer in there to see if there was a letter from him. If there ever was, I would sit by that mailbox until my sister came home. Toward the end, he wasn’t writing at all. I thought it was strange because the plan was that we were going to get together afterward.

The entire time I was pregnant, I actually separated myself from this baby. I had been told repeatedly, “Don’t see that baby and it won’t hurt. If you ever hold him, it will be very painful for you.” But they brought him to my room. The nurse was standing in the doorway holding this baby and I screamed at her, “Get that baby out of here.” That’s a hard, hard memory—that I rejected him. They never brought him back again.

I was isolated from the other mothers at the hospital. Let me tell you how naïve I was. I had been in labor for so long and they kept doing rectals to see how dilated I was. And I was so sore that afterward I asked my sister, “Where does that baby come out anyhow?” I thought it must have come through the rectum.

I’d taken my high-school annual with me. There was one very nice nurse’s aide. She was the kindest person I’ll ever meet in my life because she never looked down on me for being pregnant. She would sit with me and I’d go through the annual and I’d show her my boyfriend, and me at the ball games cheerleading.

Immediately after I had that baby, I was angry—I got angry at everything. I was angry at my sister and we got into a terrible fight. I just wanted to go home. She kept telling me, “If you go home now, they’re all going to know. Your stomach’s all out of shape.” My mother obviously suspected. When I went home, she had new clothes for me that were two sizes larger. My
mother would have loved that little boy. But my mother was a blind-faith Catholic and sex was something that was never talked about. Never. It was like everything was the immaculate conception. Last year, my sister said she heard a rumor that Mom was pregnant when she got married. It kept gnawing at me, so I sent for a copy of her wedding license. Not only was she pregnant, she was seven months pregnant. She could have told me that. We would have loved her just as much.

I went home. I needed a job. I had been a fairly talented writer in school. I had won some contests. As a matter of fact, I won the state “I Speak for Democracy” contest. I got twenty-five dollars, which was huge in 1952. The whole basis of my essay was something like “Communism is like a cancer. It has its little claws and tentacles that reach out everywhere.” My mother loved that. She said, “It was the line about the cancer that made you win.” We absolutely thought that if we didn’t kill the Russians first, they would drop a bomb on us. We were terrified of the bomb.

People who worked on the farms were getting jobs with General Electric, the government subcontractor for the Hanford Project, which was just thirty miles from my home. They extracted radioactive plutonium to make the atomic bomb, which, of course, was used to wipe out Nagasaki. I applied and got a job there. It was very isolated, way out in the sage brush. The workers would go out to these top-secret fields and do something with radiation. They had little badges they wore to see if they got too much exposure. My job was to put these badges in a machine to see how much radiation they’d received.

I’d been in the job for about four months and I was putting badges in the machine and my supervisor came in and said, “Jeanette, I don’t know what this is about, but they want you down at AEC.” That’s Atomic Energy Commission. “You’re to go now.” In order to get to the job site, you took these shuttle buses that drove about forty-five minutes to an hour out to these Quonset huts. He said, “Take the shuttle bus into town and go to the office.” I had no idea what this is about. I’m eighteen years old. There was an outer office with a gray-haired woman receptionist. I gave her my name and she said, “Have a seat. He will be right with you.”

Shortly after, this young man—twenty-four, twenty-five years old, very handsome man with coal-black hair, white, white teeth, impeccably dressed
in a blue suit—called me in and told me to sit down. He said, “Do you know why you’re here?” I told him no. He said, “You weren’t honest with us.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “In your application…” He said, “Do you know what we do here? This is top-secret work. We have to be very careful who we hire.” And I’m trying to think, “What did I do?” He says, “On your job application you were asked if you’ve ever lived anywhere else for over four months? You have, haven’t you?” And I said yes. And he said, “You went to San Francisco for five months and had a baby, didn’t you?” And I said yes. “And you didn’t tell us, did you?” I said no. He said, “You thought you could sneak away, have a baby, come back and lie about it on your application.” He said, “Have you ever considered that if the Communists found that out, in order for you to keep that secret you would have to give them secrets about your job?” I was just sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. He convinced me that I could be coerced into giving up information so that the Communists would keep my secret. I put badges in a hole and wrote down numbers. I had a security clearance, but I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even understand what they were doing. But at the time, it made all the sense in the world to me. I thought, “My God, I could have overthrown the free world.”

When I left through the outer office, the gray-haired woman wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to do that.” I was sobbing all the way back on the bus. I knew right then that I would not be going around telling anyone about this baby, and I didn’t for forty-three years. If I had not separated that baby from me when I was pregnant, I really separated him then.

I became a registered nurse. I got into a terrible marriage a few years later and had other children, but I never even mentioned this incident ever, ever, ever. I had visions, though. I had visions of a knock on the door and it would be him.

In the small town where I attended nursing school, the newspaper would list all of the births in the paper. The reporters would call every night. We had two boards—the real births and the “no information” births, which would not be listed in the paper. I thought those were terrible, terrible women. They were tramps. I never connected my pregnancy with anything that happened in my life, ever. The social structure at that time was so rigid
that I couldn’t acknowledge it. Eisenhower was president and we were in an ultraconservative era. The boys had just come home from the war and they were building houses, they were going to school on the GI Bill, and we were getting America back together again. I never really knew that the adoption movement was opening up, never paid any attention to it. It had nothing to do with me because I had never had a child. I never had a child.

In 1995, my kids are grown, they’re out of the house, and my neighbor came over one evening. She was divorced and had two adult sons that she was having difficulty with. She started crying, and to make her feel less bad I told her about my son. I thought, “Oh, my God. I’m talking about it for the first time ever.” She said, “Why don’t you find him?” And I said, “I can’t. What are you talking about?” And she said, “Just go find him.”

She came back with a phone number for the Oregon Adoption Rights Association and I listened to their message. I’m thinking, “This is crazy,” but I went to their meeting. I was sitting there with my mouth open. This woman is talking about her search. She said she knew that her daughter was in Iowa and she was going to see if she could find a yearbook picture. I said, “Why?” and she said, “Because I yearn for her.” That was so alien to me. She said, “Why are you here?” And I said, “Because I’m curious. He might have died in Vietnam.” I’m thinking, “What’s this concept of yearning?”

When the searcher called me and said, “I’ve found your son,” I wanted to argue with her: “That’s not my
son
. No, no, no, no. It’s
the baby.
It was always
that baby.
” It was just the most remarkable thing to think, “This is my
son
.”

I called him and said, “I have something very personal to talk to you about.” He said, “You’re my mother,” and he started crying. We talked for about forty-five minutes and he said, “It wasn’t good, you know, it wasn’t good. My mother started drinking right away.” He said, “I’m coming to see you on Thursday.”

I fell in love with him instantly. Absolutely instantly. He stayed the weekend. He was planning to leave on Monday, but he left on Sunday and I’m glad he did. It was too much. It was more than I could bear. I didn’t hear from him for two months and I went into an incredible depression. Then he called and said, “Well, I need to tell you something. When I saw you, I drove as far as Roseburg, pulled over at the rest stop, called my wife, and asked her
for a divorce.” He said, “It was a terrible marriage, but it was so liberating to meet you, I was able to do it.”

The first two years of our relationship were very rocky. I’ve never figured out why, then one day it all came together. He asked me to come down and visit him and he asked if he could call me Mom. We’ve had the best reunion. I fell totally in love with him—every part of being in love. I was obsessed for four years; ten minutes didn’t go by that I didn’t think about him. He’s a really nice guy. He was a commander with the county sheriff’s department and he left to become the chief of police in another town. He just retired.

He had a terrible, terrible childhood. His adoptive mother drank herself to death when he was fourteen or fifteen. His father traveled and left him in charge. At eleven years old, he was buying the groceries and raising his younger siblings. I was just outraged at them. I thought adoption was wonderful. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t. Why didn’t they help me keep him, rather than help me give him away?

This is kind of unfair to my other children, but I think my life began at sixty when I found my son. For the first time ever, I was able to love someone in a way that I was not able to before. I started loving my raised children more—I
could
love them. The most shameful thing in my life was now sitting in front of me, talking to me. I never had to be ashamed of anything I did again. I went to my fiftieth high-school class reunion and I told them the story of having my son because I didn’t ever want to hide him again. If there was anything shameful about it, it was giving my baby away to strangers, not having my baby. It was by far the biggest event in my life. It shaped my adulthood because I was a child when I had him. I couldn’t get close to anyone, ever. I had self-esteem issues that were just incredible. I married down. I never stood up for myself. At one point, I probably drank too much and I could have been a better mother. I think I spent a lot of my life being unhappy.