The Girls Who Went Away (2 page)

It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy for them to just move on with their lives. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.

Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989, I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Maryland
Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived, I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of having recently talked to her but I couldn’t remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was, but no one did, so I continued to look at the exhibition.

Later, this woman walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, “You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child.” I said, “You don’t know what you’re saying to me. I
could
be your daughter—I was adopted.” There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, “Are you
sure
about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed.” But I was sure.

We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn’t know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, “When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn’t expect her to come knocking on your door forty years later.” And she said, “You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life.” I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty and empathetic and naïve all at once. Why had I never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?

I continued to listen, realizing that I had never heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after forty years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. As I listened I finally understood why this woman seemed so familiar to me: the image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother’s worrying had caused the dream.

A year later, the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?

My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father’s cabinet with “Ann” neatly printed in my mother’s hand that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child, I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the three-month waiting period before my parents could take me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if
this
woman was my mother.

The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and the department would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.

When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived, I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my artwork in an exhibition entitled “Parents.” I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother’s full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.

I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.

When I arrived I couldn’t find the public library, so I went to the school. The halls were empty; students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked, but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office.

We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a yearbook
from 1948, and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions. This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn’t find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. Things had gone too far—I just wanted to look at a picture.

I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned toward him and said in unison, “Do
you
have a yearbook from 1948?” The man said, “Who are you looking for?” And they all turned back toward me.

I had to say a last name. I acted as if I were asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, “She doesn’t live around here anymore, but there’s a house with a business out on Route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her.”

I cleared out and started driving. I didn’t know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn’t wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on Route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.

As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been before I was born. Then I saw the house and the barn and the sign for the business and I thought, I’ll just go in and buy something. I don’t know what. I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway. But there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I had driven too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around, so I rolled down my window and heard myself say, “I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn’t happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor, would you?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s my sister.”

Then he started talking. He talked for an hour. He told me about her life, her husband, two boys, and a girl. But what he didn’t know was—there was
another
girl: two boys and
two
girls. He talked about growing up on the farm, the old Victorian house, and the banister they loved to slide down. Then he talked about her and how she was different from her sisters. He said, “She would much rather spend time in the barn than help in the house.” And he told other stories that sounded familiar.

Finally, he asked how I knew her and I told him my mother had lived around there when she was young and had moved away. She wondered whatever happened to Eleanor. So he went into the house and brought out her address and phone number. And when I left, I drove to the town where she had lived all these years, just to drive by, to make sure she was okay. I had always worried that her family had disowned her and she had lived in miserable conditions. Maybe I thought I might catch a glimpse of her.

It occurred to me afterward that she might get suspicious when her brother told her the story of a woman who had been asking about her. Maybe she had not told her children. She might be living in fear that I would show up on her doorstep next. I couldn’t decide whether I should contact her right away or wait. I waited fourteen years.

During the years that followed, I created several autobiographical installations about adoption. Whenever possible I offered space in my exhibitions for members of the community to display their stories of adoption along with mine. I was overwhelmed by what I read. The writings left behind by women in New York, California, Texas, and Maryland were the same. What the mothers had been assured when they signed the papers giving up all rights to their children turned out to be a lie: they did not move on and forget. I think my adoptive mother knew this when she lit those candles. I think three years was all that she could bear.
She
needed to move on and forget.

Breaking the Silence

You asked me why I agreed to be interviewed and I think it was because you were here, because you came here and it spoke to me—that’s all. There’s still that voice in me that says, “Who would be interested? No one cared then, why would they care now?” I was abandoned when it was right in everybody’s face, so I still believe that nobody cares. My personal struggle is to get beyond thinking I’m not worth caring about. I am here. I do exist. Maybe by adding my two cents I can help other moms who feel the way I do. Maybe they will find someone who cares.

—Suzanne

I
N JUNE OF
2002, I began tape-recording the oral histories of women who surrendered a newborn for adoption between the end of World War II, in 1945, and the 1973 passage of
Roe v. Wade,
which legalized abortion throughout the nation. These years were a time of enormous change for young women as barriers to equality and independence broke down. For the young men and women growing up in the postwar years, especially those of the baby-boom generation, this liberation from the past also applied to sexual behavior. And though premarital sex was certainly not a new phenomenon, it became increasingly common among those who had no plans to marry. For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.
¹

Despite the increase in the number of young people having sex in the 1950s and 1960s, access to birth control and sex education lagged far behind.
Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain. In fact, in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried. The efforts to restrict information and access to birth control did not prevent teens from having sex, however. The result was an explosion in premarital pregnancy and in the numbers of babies surrendered for adoption.

Though sexual norms were changing among the young, the shame associated with single pregnancy remained. The social stigma of being an “unwed mother” was so great that many families—especially middle-class families—felt it was simply unthinkable to have a daughter keep an “illegitimate” child. These women either married quickly or were sent away before their pregnancy could be detected by others in the community. Between 1945 and 1973, one and a half million babies were relinquished for nonfamily or unrelated adoptions.
²

I’ve tried to explain to my kids that it wasn’t like it is today. Nobody knew that much about birth control. What used to bother me a lot was I knew lots of girls who were having sex; they just weren’t caught. If you were caught, somehow you were different, and you needed to be horrified and shamed. I was thinking, “But everybody’s doing it. Why am I a bad person now?”

It was just totally, totally different. You didn’t keep your child. You didn’t. I knew one girl who got married and immediately divorced afterward. At least that would keep the people who talk at bay.

—Laurinda

Just about everyone who lived through this era has a memory of a girl from their high school, college, or neighborhood who disappeared. If she returned, she most likely did not come back with her baby but with a story of a sick aunt or an illness that had kept her out of school. If her peers doubted her story, they probably did not challenge her directly. They simply distanced themselves. According to the prevailing double standard, the young
man who was equally responsible for the pregnancy was not condemned for his actions. It was her fault, not their fault, that she got pregnant.

This was in that period of time when there wasn’t much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something.

—Toni

The girls who went away were told by family members, social-service agencies, and clergy that relinquishing their child for adoption was the only acceptable option. It would preserve their reputation and save both mother and child from a lifetime of shame. Often it was clear to everyone, except the expectant mother, that adoption was the answer. Many of these girls, even those in their twenties, had no other option than to go along with their families or risk being permanently ostracized. For them there was generally little or no discussion before their parents sent them away. Those who went to maternity homes to wait out their pregnancies often received little counseling and were totally unprepared for either childbirth or relinquishment. They were simply told they
must
surrender their child, keep their secret, move on, and forget. Though moving on and forgetting proved impossible, many women were shamed into keeping their secret.