The Girls Who Went Away (3 page)

As soon as the time was near and we were going to do this interview, all these physical things started happening. My jaw doesn’t want to open and my lungs are all tight. I thought, “I wonder why I can’t open my mouth.” Then I realized, I’m supposed to be silent. I’m not supposed to tell this story. The secrecy has dominated everything. It’s so powerful and pervasive and the longer you keep a secret, the more power it takes on.

—Diane IV

I’ve never really felt like I could talk to anybody about it. You know, society has this picture—you hear about people giving their babies away. That whole terminology is just so misleading. I didn’t
give him away. I think one of the reasons I don’t talk to some people about it is because they are so judgmental. Quite frankly, it’s not that society can’t understand, it’s that they won’t understand. People choose to not understand.

—Carole II

Afterward I never told, unless it was somebody I was very, very close to. I never opened up to anyone unless I felt that they would accept me. I felt like I lived a lie because people didn’t really know me. I was afraid that people would not accept me if they knew the truth. It was something that I carried with me for thirty-five, thirty-six years.

—Carol I

The secrecy has, in part, allowed some of the old myths about women who surrendered babies to survive. One assumption was that they were women who were having a lot of sex with a lot of different young men. In fact, a majority of the women I interviewed became pregnant with their first sexual partner, some from their first sexual experience.

I’m being very honest with you by saying I was a very late bloomer. When I got pregnant, it was the very first time I had ever had sex. Very first time. I’m sure I probably didn’t even like it. I went all through high school and never had sex.

My parents’ generation, that greatest generation, thought it didn’t happen to nice girls. You just have to know that’s what society and parents felt: nice girls didn’t get pregnant. But nice girls do get pregnant, and nice girls get pregnant now. People saw us as loose women. Well, I wasn’t a loose woman! It wasn’t that way for me. I didn’t sleep around. But that’s the label. That is absolutely the label. Oh, well. I could be called worse things. I could be called a liar. I could be called a cheat.

—Cathy II

Another prevailing myth is that these women were all eager to surrender their child and be free of their problem. The assumption that these babies
were unwanted by their mothers is ubiquitous. The act of relinquishment seemed to confirm this, since it is commonly believed to be a personal decision made by the mother based on her lack of interest or desire to parent—a decision that is independent of social, family, and economic pressures. This misguided and simplistic notion has been hurtful not only to the mothers but also to many adoptees who believe that they were thrown away. Over the years, I have had many conversations with adult adoptees who say, “She didn’t want me. Why should I want to know her?” They clearly have no idea how infinitely more complicated their mother’s circumstances were and a short conversation could not possibly explain it. This book is partly a response to their comments. It is a story best told by the mothers themselves, and best understood within the context of the time period.

Chances are the baby wasn’t unwanted. It was a baby unwanted by society, not by mom. You couldn’t be an unwed mother. Motherhood was synonymous with marriage. If you weren’t married, your child was a bastard and those terms were used. I think I’m like many other women who thought, “It may kill me to do this, but my baby is going to have what everybody keeps saying is best for him.” It’s not because the child wasn’t wanted. There would have been nothing more wonderful than to come home with my baby.

—Glory

Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options. I went to the maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not
allowed
to keep the baby. I would have been disowned. I don’t even know if they had programs to help women and children back then. I don’t know what was available. I was made to feel very ashamed of the situation that “I had created for myself” and for my mother and for my family and friends, so I felt all those avenues were closed. I guess maybe I had to convince myself that I didn’t give him
away
; I gave him a way to have two parents, a way
to have a home. Maybe that’s a cop-out on my part. I don’t know, but that’s the only way I can live with it.

—Joyce I

I never felt like I gave my baby away. I always felt like my daughter was taken from me.

—Pollie

Yet another myth in common currency is that these women did move on and forget. In truth, none of the mothers I interviewed was able to forget. Rather, they describe the surrender of their child as the most significant and defining event of their lives. Given the enormous number of women involved and the impact the surrender had on their lives, not to mention the lives of their parents, their subsequent partners and children, the fathers of their babies, and the surrendered children, it is remarkable that so little is known about these mothers’ experiences even now, decades later. This silence has also kept many of these women from learning about one another and understanding that their feelings of loss were normal and consistent with thousands of other mothers who had surrendered children.

I am shocked at how much it has impacted my life. I really tried to move on and forget, I tried to do what they said, but it didn’t work. I was convinced that there was something wrong with me. There
must
be something wrong with me. It was supposed to work; everybody said so. But it didn’t. No matter how many degrees I got, how many credits I had, how many years I worked, I was empty.

—Glory

The surrender was the beginning of a long cycle that colored my entire life. Your identity is formed in your teen years and if you take on this identity of a worthless, horrible, guilty person, then that’s going to affect you your whole life. Guilt was always such a pervasive part for me. Not that I was sexual, or not that I was pregnant, but that I let somebody take my child. That’s the guilt.

People talk about the worst thing that could happen to you is to lose a child. And no one talks about that in terms of a birth mother. What do they think that is for her? Why would it be any different? It’s in your cells, and in your guts, and in your consciousness, and in your heart.

—Diane IV

As I listened to story after story, what impressed me so powerfully was the commonalities in the women’s experiences. How the surrender was not only a deeply personal experience that affected the life of each woman but also a profound collective experience. Taken together, these experiences offer evidence of the lack of individual choice and the pervasiveness of surrender as a social phenomenon. For most of the women I interviewed, it was not a question of choice but of doing what society demanded—a demand that society has never fully acknowledged.

You know, it was such a long time ago and I started thinking, “Just let it go. Just let it go and move on,” yet I couldn’t, and I can’t. It’s a big issue to those who lived it. There are women out there who lost their firstborn child and never got to grieve. I can’t even put it into words. It’s a weird thing, this whole adoption thing where people think that someone could just hand their child over and it will be okay. Obviously it’s not. We’re still alive. We’re still here. We haven’t died. Our issues are every day. We live this every day. Every day.

—Suzanne

DOROTHY II

I
was fifteen that summer. And I was in love with the Rolling Stones. My girlfriend Patty and I spent a lot of time listening to their music. One day my brother came home with his best friend. He introduced me to this guy and I remember being singularly unimpressed. But I noticed he stared at me in a way that no other guy before had. And it frightened and fascinated me all at once.

Meanwhile, I went on with my life as a Rolling Stones fan. And he started calling the house. He would call and ask for my brother. And we began to play this voice game where I would sound more and more seductive and he would sound more and more interested. And so that’s how we began. Then one day when he called, he actually asked me out. It was my first real date. I felt safe because he was my brother’s friend. I don’t even remember what we did that first time—probably drove around in his car. He had a baby-blue ’57 Chevy that was his pride and joy. He spent a lot of time talking about the car and all these little gadgets he had attached. And I kind of liked riding in that car. I felt really important. I’m fifteen years old and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is what dating is like.”

Then one night he decided we should go parking. I thought it was just gonna be a make-out session. But the very first time, he was already pushing me back in the seat and I remember thinking, “Boys are a handful,” then thinking, “Well, he’s nineteen, maybe that has something to do with it.” And I think the very first time we went parking I began to be afraid. That this was going in a direction I was either not ready for or in some way I felt threatened by. And yet something else took over—a kind of fatalistic inability to say no. And I am not sure to this day why this happened. I’ve wrestled a lot with that.

I began to be very secretive with my family, and not tell them I was meeting him. I can’t remember the first time we actually went all the way. I don’t
remember how many dates, in other words, it took. But I do remember feeling betrayed, because he refused to wear a condom. I remember saying, “I don’t wanna do this, because I don’t want to get pregnant.” And he said, “Well, I promise you, you won’t get pregnant.” And I said, “How are you gonna manage this?” He said, “Well, I’m going to pull out,” and he explained what that meant. So he stopped trying to convince me and just took over and sort of pushed me back, and again I felt unable to act. I was stunned, dazed. I could not say no.

It was very quick. I was not even sure that it had happened. It didn’t hurt terribly—it just felt a little uncomfortable. There was this wet feeling between my legs and I said, “Was that it?” He was unable to speak for a few minutes and then he said yes. Then he said, “You’re mine now.” And I think in my whole life that is one of the moments when I was the most afraid. In my whole life. Even now, to this day. That feeling of being
owned
was horrifying. And that’s when I began to think, “I don’t want to see this person ever again.”

I began to make excuses not to see him. He was very possessive. I think we carried on for another month or so, and then I skipped a period. I was terrified. And I was just, I remember feeling like I was falling down this hole. I was just falling and falling and everything was spinning. And I thought, “No, not me. Why me?” My first love, and it wasn’t even a love. Why me?

I didn’t know what to do. I was very ashamed. This was not something that good girls did. Because I came from a very kind of poor family, I was more acutely aware than most people, maybe, about reputations and how easily they are lost. I knew from the experience of living in that small town that girls who got pregnant really lost their ability to have any kind of decent life. It was over for you. Your best hope in those days was to marry the boy and have done with it, and in the years to come hope that people would just forget it. The thing was, I was fifteen. I didn’t love this boy. This was 1966—abortion wasn’t an option. I mean, we didn’t even think about it.

He said, “I’ve told my mother” and his mother wanted to talk to me. Her answer was “You’re gonna get married.” She said, “We’ll help you get through this,
but
you have to marry him.” And I said, “I’m not really ready for marriage.” It’s one thing to deal with being pregnant, and quite another to deal with being someone’s wife. They said I was selfish. They called me some terrible things.

I finally realized I had to tell my own mother because I knew she was my only ally. So he and I took my mother out to Carvel’s, which is this little ice-cream place in town. And I remember being really afraid of how she would react. I was the one child of her four who just might make it through school, might make it out of our little town.

It turned out that I couldn’t tell her. We were sitting in Carvel’s in the parking lot, and he had gone in and bought us all banana splits. As soon as I saw mine, a wave of nausea just swept over me. I had to escape from the Chevy. I ran to the back of the parking lot, and I threw up. My mother was sitting in the back of this car watching me getting sick. And I saw the two of them talking from my vantage point and I realized he was telling her.

She got out of the back of the car and walked toward me. I felt so afraid and I started crying. I remember thinking, “Please, Mom, you’re all I have. Just stick by me.” And I waited, and I watched her walk to me. And she just put her arms around me and said, “It’s okay, babe. Because no matter what, we’ll get through this together.” We cried in each other’s arms for about ten minutes, I guess. And finally she waved him away. She waved him away. She said, “Just
go.
”

And she and I walked home from Carvel’s. We took this road, this detour that was one of our favorite walking spots. It was along the Housatonic River and it was a road that was lined with these wonderful weeping willow trees. It was the most beautiful place I think in our town at that time, at least for me. We walked with our arms around each other’s waist. The willow trees were blowing in the wind and we hardly talked at all. By the time we got home, I knew that she was gonna watch out for me, and that she was gonna make sure that everything was okay.

I had to start school. I was going to school and throwing up in the bathroom. I was absent chronically during that month of September. By then I was about six or eight weeks pregnant, I guess. It became difficult to go to school at all. I decided to go see my priest and tell him about it. He was the only male authority figure that I trusted.