The Girls Who Went Away (29 page)

The judge congratulated me on how courageous I was. I was furious that he would tell me it was about courage. It was about defeat. It was totally about shame and defeat.

—Sue

I stayed in the hospital about two days afterward and then it was this very strange
Twilight Zone
sort of time. I had to go back to the maternity home to collect my things, knowing what I knew. I couldn’t say anything. They’re all happy, happy, happy, chatter, chatter, chatter, and I’ve just experienced this loss. How could you tell people that? So I just became voiceless. I couldn’t speak it. I really just kind of shut down.

I went back to Penn State. I started school again in four days. I finished school and then I was on to happily ever after. But I wasn’t happy anymore. I mean, I realized there was something really wrong.

—Ann

There is a general sense that all mothers who consider relinquishing a child for adoption today have myriad options and are much more empowered than the mothers I interviewed. To a great extent, this is true. The social
stigma of single motherhood has lessened. In fact, an increasing number of single women now
adopt
children. Families are less likely to condemn their daughters, and agencies point to the ability of women to pick parents for their child from snapshot albums made by hopeful adoptive parents, whom the surrendering mother often meets. Through “open adoptions,” mothers are able to either remain in contact with their child or receive periodic updates from the adoptive parents—though the mother’s continued participation is not always guaranteed by law. Certainly these changes are improvements over the lack of options and the social stigma experienced by many of the mothers I interviewed. But on the other side, surrendering mothers have lost significant ground in one important aspect of the process.

In many states, the two time spans most critical to surrendering mothers have been drastically shortened. The first is the duration between birth and signing consent, and the second is the period of time after signing during which the mother may revoke her consent. In nineteen states a mother can sign a consent to relinquish the rights to her child within twenty-four hours of birth, and in six of those states the consent is irrevocable upon signing.
³
If the stories herein are any indication, this seems hardly enough time for a mother to come to grips with the reality of the life she has created—something that is impossible to do beforehand—and to make a deliberate and irreversible decision to relinquish her child.

MARGARET

I
had a fairly normal life. I had nice parents who loved me. My uncle lived with us and my grandmother was around a lot. I had good friends. It was a normal Catholic high school girl’s life. When I came home from school, I would take care of my four younger brothers and sisters and cook their dinner. I had been going with my boyfriend for a little over two years and he would come over rather frequently. He had ideas what we should do in that time period. I wasn’t always as thrilled as he was, but you know, I always said, “Five minutes of bad sex changed my life.”

I don’t remember my father finding out. I do remember him coming upstairs. Now, my father was very Catholic. My mother was not Catholic. He didn’t use birth control. We went to church if there was a blizzard or if there was snow up to our waists, we went to church. And he said, “Is it too late for us to do something about this?” I was just shocked and horrified that my father, this
Catholic,
was willing to bend the rules. And I said, “That is not something I’m willing to do.”

So the next thing I knew my father came to me and said, “You will be going to St. Anne’s infant and maternity home and you will be giving your baby up for adoption.” There was no room for discussion. I wasn’t in any position to argue with them about what I was going to do and not do.

Many other birth mothers will talk about the maternity home as this evil place, but really and truly St. Anne’s was a place where I was given a home, a shelter. I had freedom. I mean, there were lots of other girls like me. We could go out; we just had to let people know where we were going. We would sign out and sign back in. We went to the movies. We went shopping. The only thing they wanted you to do was to get up and go to Mass. But I was asking God to help me, so I didn’t mind getting up at five-thirty to go to Mass.

One morning I woke at two o’clock with this horrible stomachache. I went to the bathroom, you know, kind of drowsy, and all of a sudden it
dawned on me this wasn’t a stomachache; I was in labor. The nun came and she put my girlfriend and me in a station wagon. We went tearing through the streets in the middle of the night. Nobody called my parents. We got to the emergency room and they examined me, and they said, “The head’s down, you’re four centimeters dilated, so we’re going to admit you.” And the nun said, “Okay. Well, we are leaving now.” I turned around and thought, “What do you mean, you’re leaving and taking my girlfriend with you?” But they did. They left.

In those days being prepped to have a baby, especially for a girl who was seventeen years old, was humiliating. There was an enema and the shaving. They weren’t very compassionate to St. Anne’s girls, I don’t think. And, you know, you just labored by yourself.

The last thing I remember was the mask coming down on my face. I woke up and I said, “Where’s my baby?” And I started feeling for my stomach. I started screaming that they’d taken my baby and screaming and screaming, trying to climb out over the railing, fighting. They said, “No, no, no. If you promise to stay here, within five minutes we’ll have your baby to you.” And they brought him in to me in a gray warming box, and I can remember falling asleep with my hand around the gray box. When I saw him, I fell absolutely in love. I can remember what he felt like, what he looked like, what he smelled like.

I wasn’t supposed to see him at all. They said, “You shouldn’t see him, because you’re going to forget and have other children.” They said, “Write down on this side of the paper what you can give your baby. Write down on the other side what the adoptive parents have to offer.” So you had to write that down. I said, “I don’t know.” And they said, “Well, just picture what he’s going to look like. You know, he’ll not have the nice clothes that the other children are going to have and on the playground, they’ll call him a bastard.” And I believed that. I remember writing down they had money, they had a father, they had a house, and they had clothes and food. And on my side I only put down love. That’s all I did have.

What’s shocking to me is sitting with other birth mothers and hearing them tell the same story. I thought, “My God, there must have been a textbook.” You looked up how to get babies away from the mother, and this is how to do it. There must have been, because we were all told the same thing.
Even the story about the playground. I’ve heard it from other people and I’m thinking, “Oh my God. It was a script. It affected me so much, and here it was just a script.”

So while I’m in the hospital I’m saying to God, “Please let me keep this baby.” And I can remember, it was a Saturday, my parents coming to the doorway and I said, “Have you seen him? Isn’t he beautiful?” My mom said, “You can’t see him. You’re not allowed.” And there was a nurse standing on the other side of me at the head of the bed and I can remember her saying, “She can see him whenever she wants. She’s that baby’s mother.” That nurse didn’t give me enough self-confidence to keep my child, but with those two sentences she gave me the foundation on which to rebuild my sense of self. She probably didn’t remember me after that shift, but she became one of the most important women in my life. Just by her compassion and two sentences, you know?

When I returned to the maternity home they said, “You’ve only been gone from school five weeks, so you can go back to your school and say you had appendicitis, or if you’re uncomfortable you may continue to come to school at St. Anne’s, but your son will be here in the nursery and you have to agree not to see him.” And I said, “I’ll agree to that. I’d like to continue at St. Anne’s. I’m too embarrassed to go back,” which wasn’t quite true. So I got to spend six weeks with him.

Because I was being individually tutored, my school hours were nine to one. So I got there at seven and I’d see him until nine. Then I’d see him after school from one to five. I went to Mass every morning, and I never truly believed my mother or grandmother or God would let him go away from me. On Saturdays I never saw him but Sundays from two to four they put all the babies by the window and the potential adoptive parents could go and look at the different babies. And I would go to look at my own child.

Somewhere in there I had to go sign the papers. I walked to Catholic Charities and they put the papers in front of me, and I said, “Can I have some more time? I’m trying to find a way.” They said, “You can’t have any more time. He’s costing your family six dollars a day in the nursery,” which sounds like a little bit of money today, but then it was a lot of money. And they said, “Haven’t you caused enough trouble? If you sign the papers, the bills will be done.” So I had to sign because I had already caused enough trouble.

I signed the papers and they never told me I had thirty days to change my mind. Thursday was Holy Thursday, and when I came back Monday he was gone. I finished school and that was the end of it for a few years. My parents wanted me to come back and just be their little girl again, like it had never happened.

I dated a couple of boys in between and then met the man who’s now my husband, and ended up getting pregnant again. I know I was trying to replace my baby. When I had my first child with my husband, she was a girl. I was thrilled because I didn’t want another boy at that time. I ended up having another baby a year later. Then we used some birth control for a couple of years and then I had a son and then two more daughters. And it never dawned on me why I was having these children, so many of them so quickly. So my husband and I had five children and somewhere along there I said, “Forget it. Having these kids isn’t filling up this hole.”

I thought about him every day. He was just mine, a part of me that I didn’t share with anyone else. The part of me that was his mother remained seventeen and the rest of me continued to grow, to be a wife and mother, eventually a nursing student. I was in therapy for a while for a little bit of depression, and they said, “You have an overactive maternal instinct. You need to become a nurse,” so that’s what I did. I never mentioned, in this depression and everything, that I’d given a baby up for adoption—never mentioned it.

I went on with my life. In 1976, I saw a little ad for Concerned United Birthparents. I cut it out and carried it in my wallet. We didn’t have the, whatever it was, thirty dollars, it cost to join, but for five dollars you could join a registry. So I joined the registry. Every birthday my mother gave me twenty dollars and my grandmother gave me twenty dollars, and I combined it for my ALMA [Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association] membership so I’d get the newsletter with all the stories of reunion in it. And that went on for quite a few years, just using the birthday money for that. My husband knew and every birthday I’d get very quiet, every March 6, very quiet. He was very nice to me on that day, no matter what else was going on in our life. If he was ticked off about something else, he was nice on March 6.

On my son’s twenty-fifth birthday, I drove home from work crying the whole way because I knew I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I sent in
money for my CUB membership and a woman called me right away and said, “Hi, I’m from Concerned United Birthparents.” And I sat down and cried. I couldn’t stop crying because I was talking to somebody who understood my seventeen-year-old self. She knew. She knew what my life was like. I know her well now and she’s very different from me, but I will never forget her because she was there during that time period.

Finally, I went and asked Catholic Charities to help me find him. They sent me to their lawyer. He told me, “You’re the first person that’s ever done this. I don’t understand what you want.” I said, “I want to have contact with my son.” And he said, “Well, we have to protect the baby.” I said, “What baby? There isn’t a baby. He’s twenty-five now.” He kept insisting there was this
baby
and they had to protect this
baby.
And I said, “He’s older now than I was when you took him from me.”

They had me fill out this whole form, this legal-size paper with questions, to prove I was fit to know him before they would search for him. Then they said they would look for him and they would contact his adoptive parents and ask their permission to see if I could contact him. And I said, “He’s an adult, he’s not a baby. There
is
no baby.” Well, I was getting more and more frustrated, and they were going to charge me fifteen hundred dollars. A professional searcher was going to cost me two thousand dollars. We’re talking about a time when my husband and I didn’t have much money. But I just couldn’t give them the power. They were making me feel like I did back then. The Catholic Charities social worker was incredibly nasty, telling me, “You didn’t even want to see him then, why do you want to contact him now?” I said, “Obviously, you don’t know what happened.”

I decided to go with a searcher. My mother gave me a thousand dollars. Today, I realize she was really struggling financially at that time and couldn’t afford it. And I borrowed a thousand dollars from the hospital. I gave my information to a contact person for the searcher. The next day I was walking down the hallway in Labor and Delivery, and they called me to the phone. I was the childbirth educator, so I had been answering the phone multiple times and I can remember thinking, “I’m on my way to lunch, I’ll call them back after lunch,” but I thought, “No, just go get it done.” So I said hello and the searcher said, “His name is——.” And I fell apart.

I had gone back to work at the hospital in Labor and Delivery as a ward
clerk. I had to be where my son was. And later I worked as a nurse in Labor and Delivery and as the assistant head nurse there. After they tore the hospital down and changed it, I no longer wanted to be there because I couldn’t go to the room where he was born.