The Girls Who Went Away (24 page)

—Lynne

The practice of telling young women that they would be able to give birth, surrender their child, and move on as if it never happened caused many irreparable harm. Rather than being prepared during their residency either for mothering or for the feelings that would follow relinquishment, the women were made to feel like something was wrong with them for loving and mourning the loss of their child. Not only did this practice not acknowledge their motherhood, it did not respect their dignity.

Throughout my pregnancy I always thought that I could put this behind me. I thought, “I am growing a baby for a family that could not have children. They will be the best parents in the world. They will love him and take care of him.” And I always thought my purpose of getting pregnant was to give a child to a family that could not have one. I thought, “I’m going to put it behind me, like it didn’t happen.” Like I had a lobotomy and I could cut off the memory. That didn’t happen.

I had moments when I wanted to cancel this interview because I’m reliving this. Why do I want to bring this up fresh in my mind? I thought, “Okay, I’m going to do my two, three hours and then I’m going to push it back again and go ahead.” But I’m lying to myself now, just like I lied to myself then. I didn’t deal with my pregnancy. I
never
dealt with the fact that I was growing a baby that I would have to relinquish.

—Sheryl

KAREN I

I
t was 1965 and I was just beginning my senior year of high school. This was the beginning of our second year together. I found out that his family was moving. His dad was in the Navy, and they were moving to Norfolk, Virginia. I was devastated. We were very close.

His family did move. We had kept in touch by phone, but two months later he called and said, “We got tickets to a Lovin’ Spoonful concert.” He was missing me as much as I was missing him. So his brother’s girlfriend and I got on the Greyhound bus, all dressed up in our suits and miniheels, and traveled four hours to Norfolk. They picked us up at the bus station and we went to the Lovin’ Spoonful concert, which was my first-ever music concert, and it was great. “Do You Believe in Magic” and “Summer in the City”—it was great.

So two kids caring very deeply about each other—it was just the right environment for something like sex and pregnancy to occur, and it did. Everything seemed fine until a month later, when I missed my period. I never had before. I thought it was just the stress of being without my boyfriend and trying to adjust to being a senior. But then I started gaining weight and I missed my second period. I still tried to deny it. I couldn’t fit into my clothes. I was wearing Villager dresses at the time, and those penny loafers that were called Weejuns. You know, back then you couldn’t wear anything but dresses or skirts to school and they had to be at the middle of your knee or you got sent home.

So I would wear my dresses unzipped in the back, with the same cardigan sweater over my dress, to school every day. And I could remember being so terrified. I mean just stark terror, knowing that I can’t keep doing this—trying to fit into my clothes, using safety pins whenever I could. And I was seeing the change in the mirror of just getting bigger and bigger. And thinking, “Oh my God, I have to address this.” I was terrified to tell my mom.

My dad and I were very close; he’s always been my best friend. I had never called him at work; he worked at the Pentagon. I went to the pay phone and I called my dad and I said, “I’m in trouble,” which of course, you know what those three words mean. That phrase is all you have to say. And he said, “That’s okay, we will figure it out. I’ll be home and we will talk.”

So I came home and he came into my bedroom and he sat down on the side of my bed and said, “How far are you?” and I said, “Probably four or five months.” And he said, “I wish you had told me sooner. We could have given you a pill.” I don’t know what kind of pill, but I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m so glad I don’t get a pill.” And then he said, “That’s okay, I’ll talk to your mom and I’ll let you know what we decide. I love you. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

I got up the next morning and I’m listening to the AM station on my transistor radio and I’ll never forget—“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” by B. J. Thomas, was playing. I mean, to this day that song stops me in my tracks. I’m lying in bed and I’m hearing my mother sobbing outside my door, and I’m thinking, “Oh God, the shit has hit the fan. Now I have to face my mom.”

The only thing I remember after that is going to Sears and her buying me two maternity dresses and then she took me to a doctor who gave me my first internal exam, which was absolutely mortifying. And the next thing that I remember is that my mom is telling me to pack my suitcase, that I’m going to live with
people
in D.C. I had no idea this was coming. Apparently, this was a wage home. The maternity home didn’t have enough room in it for the numbers of girls who were pregnant. So they had to farm out girls somewhere else to hide their pregnancy until they were seven months. Then we could be admitted.

So she drove me down to D.C. and pulled up in front of this brownstone. And she walked me in and I remember it being very dark. I don’t remember meeting the people who lived there. My mother walked me up the steep stairs to the attic. My head brushed the ceiling of the room that was to be my bedroom. All there was up there was a single bed with just a mattress and the frame, a small four-drawer plain dresser, and an old bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a shower curtain that went around it in an oval. It scared me, because I wasn’t used to anything like that.

I was to live there and answer to these people every day as to what they
wanted me to do for them. I very much remember being asked to serve cocktails to their friends when they had their parties, and feeling like I was the conversation piece. I was their little unwed mother, serving them cocktails. I was seventeen years old. I was so depressed. I mean, I remember crying every night—it seemed like all night—listening to my radio. That was the only friend I had—my radio and all those songs that were out then. You know, like “Monday Monday,” by the Mamas and the Papas. There is this one part in “Monday Monday”—“How could you leave and not take me?”—that just gives me chills to hear that verse because that’s exactly how I felt. They just took me and dumped me off. I didn’t know where I was, how long I’d be there, who these people were, or what they were going to make me do. I felt totally abandoned and rejected and defective and just lived in terror every day.

I told my mom in a phone call, “I’m going to leave and run away and you’re never going to see me again if you don’t come and get me out of here.” They almost immediately took me out of there and put me in Virginia with a family that was much younger. I think the man worked on Capitol Hill as a representative. But they were very good to me in comparison, that was like going from hell to heaven overnight. They had two small children and I was to be the nanny to their children. I remember her sewing very simple shift dresses for me to wear.

Both of these families took me to the maternity home on a daily basis so that I could finish my senior year of school. They had a classroom at the maternity home. Then I was admitted when I began my seventh month. My mom came and got me from the house in Virginia and drove me to the maternity facility. It had three floors. I was on the second floor. The elevator door opened into the living-room area, which they called the congregation room, and it had green vinyl furniture with metal, cold metal arms.

I remember in the mornings going down to the bathroom in my slippers and it would just echo. Carrying my toothbrush in my hand. Early in the morning or late at night, you could hear girls crying in their rooms. We were only allowed to use our first name and last initial. We were not allowed to ask any questions of each other, like where did you go to school, are you from this area, tell us about your experience. We were strictly told, “Mind your own business. Don’t ask questions. Don’t get to know the other girls. You’re here for a reason. Keep to yourself.” So we did.

When we did hang out together, we would go down to the main office and sign out and put on our fake wedding rings and walk down the hill. We would either go to a movie or we would walk down another block to a little grocery store. I remember only seeing one movie while I was there and that was
Born Free,
which I find very ironic.

Those of us who were nearing the time of giving birth would go down on a weekly basis to see the doctor, whoever was there. We would see a different one every time we went. I don’t know if they were interns from a local hospital or what the situation was. We were never given any information on what it was like to be pregnant, what to expect from month to month. We were given no instruction or classes regarding childbirth or labor and delivery. The only thing I remember hearing from some of the girls were the signs of labor coming, like your water breaking.

And of course therapy—which was really nonexistent—was just meeting with a caseworker once a week, if that. The whole time we would spend with them they would be talking about, “Well, are you going to arts-and-crafts class? What did you do there? Did you make any ceramics? Have you taken any classes on knitting? Are you feeling okay?”

Then they would say things about the baby. It’s always “the baby,” never “your baby.” And they were not talking about adoption except to say, “This experience will end. You will forget that you were here. You will forget that you went through this. It will all be in the past. Given time, it will fade. You will get over it. You know what you did was wrong? You know that you are really not worthy of keeping your own child? You can’t provide a home for that child. You can’t provide anything that child needs. That child needs a mother and a father, and the things that they can give that child.”

I remember feeling almost not deserving of having or keeping my child, but also feeling I don’t have the right to be a mom. I don’t have the right to be a mother. So, we really heard that on almost a daily basis and the other girls were believing them and reinforcing to each other: “You know, they said you will forget about this and it will be okay. We aren’t going to remember and, after all, we are not supposed to think of ourselves, we are supposed to think of
the baby.
You’re supposed to think of what’s best for
the baby.
”

When I went into labor, I was lying on that vinyl couch in the living room, watching
Bewitched
on TV. It was eight o’clock in the evening and my
water broke. I was terrified and I got hysterical. I went to the phone. I called home and talked to my mom. I was crying because I was so terrified. And she said, “I can’t talk right now, stop being a baby,” and she hung up the phone.

I was still crying, and another girl went and got the housemother. She put me in a cab and got in and we went to the hospital. When we got there she said, “All right, go in and give them your first name and last initial and tell them you are from the home.” I went in by myself. The nurse put me in a wheelchair and took me upstairs in an elevator and got me undressed. She gave me an enema, which I never had before. I didn’t know why. She prepped me, which included being shaved. I had no idea why that was being done, either. The nurse came over and gave me some kind of shot, then next thing I remember I was out cold. I don’t remember anything until after my daughter was born at two-thirty in the morning.

I said, “Where is my baby?” And she pulled this bassinet into the room. That’s when I learned I had a girl and that she had been born eight pounds one ounce. I didn’t get to hold her until they released me. They put me in a wheelchair and took me out to the front door. There was a cab waiting for me. I got into the cab and it had a housemother in it and they handed me my baby. We drove back to the maternity home, but this time when they pulled in they went to the building off to the side of the dormitory, which was the hospital building. It was totally off-limits to the girls who had not had their babies. So, once a girl disappeared in the middle of the night, we never saw her again. They were kept strictly in that hospital building.

It was like a ward where they would have, I think, six or eight beds with white iron headboards. I was on the far wall. Next to the bed was a white porcelain table with a drawer and at the end of each bed was a chair with a vinyl seat. It was very institutional. At a certain time, they would have us pull our chairs out into a circle and then they would bring our babies out for us to feed. Then they would take the baby back into the nursery. I stayed there with my baby for ten days, not knowing what day I was leaving or when she was leaving.

On the tenth day, my mom and aunt came in the morning. My aunt brought a baptism gown and the nurse brought my daughter in and I dressed her in the gown. My mom said we were going to take her down the
street and have her baptized. There was a little chapel, a Catholic chapel called Our Lady of Victory. We went back to the maternity home and my mom and my aunt went somewhere.

About an hour later a woman came back and said, “Come with me.” They took me down the hall to this room that was empty except for a rocking chair. Then she came back with my baby and handed her to me and said, “You have an hour to say goodbye.” I put her on my lap and kind of unwrapped her blanket to look at her, and kissed her feet and put her up on my shoulder. I can feel her there. I can still feel her there.

I told her how much I loved her and all about her dad and how much he loved me. I told her that he was a good guy. I told her I hoped she would understand and forgive because I didn’t have any choice. I had to do what they told me to do. I had nowhere to go. I had no one to help me. I just
begged
her to forgive me. And it just seemed like minutes later that woman came back.

I remember thinking, “How often does she do this? How can she do this?” She said, “I have to take her now.” I just sat in there for a long time, rocking and rocking and rocking and rocking. I don’t even know how long I was in there. Then I walked back and packed up my suitcase. The nurse said, “Your mother will be here soon. Go out the front door.” And there was my mom. So I walked down the stairs, got in the car, and drove home.