The Girls Who Went Away (33 page)

I was married for three years and I told him it wasn’t working, that I didn’t want to be married anymore, probably because I couldn’t get pregnant with him. I had to go find someone else, which I did do in short order. An old high-school boyfriend was home from the army. He was kind and nice. I thought I was madly in love. We met up and lickety-split, we got married. About a month after we were married, I got pregnant.

I was the happiest person in the whole world. It was unbelievable. I savored every little ounce of that pregnancy. I was in absolute heaven. When it came time to have this baby, I was in such heaven that I had no labor pain. My endorphins were so active from my psychological state that I didn’t feel a thing. They put that baby on my chest and…this is the one that I could keep. The whole thing was ecstasy for me. It was joyous. It was heaven. It was totally, totally, totally wonderful, absolutely, spectacularly wonderful, and filled up that hole inside me a tiny bit, but not completely.

My level of devotion to this baby, I think, sealed the fate of my marriage. I loved my husband, everything was fine, but way down deep inside of me, I needed that baby, I didn’t need a husband. He must have sensed that on some level. We were married for eleven years and then he found somebody else. I remember him asking me early on who was more important to me, the baby or him, and of course I said, “The baby.” I made some lousy decisions about men, that’s for sure. I should have just gone the turkey-baster route—had artificial insemination and gotten my baby that way. And that’s the truth.

—Pamela I

Although many women were anxious to get pregnant again, others were decidedly not. For about 30 percent of the women I interviewed, the child they surrendered was their only child. A similar high percentage has been found in other studies of surrendering mothers.
⁷
Four of the mothers I interviewed resorted to extreme measures to avoid having more babies: they surgically ended their ability to have children before they were in their mid-thirties.

I couldn’t stand to be around children, couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to look at babies or be around babies. If my friends had babies, I vanished. It was too painful. It was just too much. I would pooh-pooh it, you know, like it was an undesirable thing to do. That was my self-defense.

After I left my ex-husband, there was a thirteen-year period before I lived with another man and that’s the man I’m married to now. During that time, they wanted me to go off birth control, so I had my tubes tied. I couldn’t allow myself to have a normal relationship and have a family of my own. So there’s a huge thing that is irretrievably gone. I will never have that experience of being a mother. I gave that up when I gave her up.

—Nancy III

The women cited a variety of other reasons for not giving birth again, such as early menopause or cervical cancer. Still others did not form the stable relationships that might have increased their chances of parenting. Some women did try to get pregnant again but experienced secondary infertility, which is defined as “the inability to become pregnant, or to carry a pregnancy to term, following the birth of one or more biological children.”
⁸
Secondary infertility is a condition thought to be common among surrendering mothers and it is often mentioned anecdotally as the primary reason that such a high percentage of these mothers never had other children. However, among those I interviewed, unexplained infertility was no more prevalent than the conscious decision to remain childless. Some women did not have other children because they felt they would be dishonoring the baby they relinquished
if they raised another child. Of those I interviewed, five who did not give birth to other children either adopted a child or raised a foster child.

When I was around twenty-nine, I met my first husband. I wanted a family, I think that was the number-one reason I got married. I found out I couldn’t have any more children. I went through whatever was available for fertility testing at the time and they could never find a reason. There was nothing medically wrong. I did find out in therapy later that oftentimes that happens as a result of trauma.

—Kathi

After I gave up my baby girl, I don’t know how to explain it but it’s almost like you go about your business day after day, and you do what you have to do, but your heart is so broken. I never had any other children. I know this isn’t going to make sense to a lot of people, but in my mind I
had
my baby and I gave her up. I really wasn’t…worthy. Maybe it’s because I gave her away, I don’t know—I just felt I should not have any other children. That’s the way I looked at it. I had my chance.

—Karen II

Most of the women who did have subsequent children described themselves as overprotective mothers. They worried constantly that something was going to happen to their children. Some of the women talked about the difficulty they had in forming strong attachments because they feared their children would be taken from them or would die. They stayed emotionally distant in order to protect themselves from another loss.

My three children from my marriage suffered because I didn’t allow them to do anything. I kind of broke their spirits because I was so overprotective. I didn’t allow them to do so many things, because I was just so sure they would die.

When my first child from my marriage was born, I was terribly afraid. I was a nervous wreck. I was just so uptight…just the fear.
I was calling the doctor almost every day. I just
knew
this baby was going to die because God was going to punish me for what I did. As a human being, it is wrong to give your flesh and blood away. I never, ever felt relinquishment was the right thing. So I knew God was going to punish me and he was going to do it with my secondborn. I was a little more relaxed with my third, and then more so with my fourth child. But with all three of the kids I raised I was never really affectionate. I just felt somehow somebody was going to take them from me or something was going to happen to them.

—Christine

It did affect my relationship with my subsequent children in this way. When I had the first child that I raised, five years later—I don’t know, it’s like because you’ve learned this pattern of keeping yourself distanced it’s not so easy to break that pattern. So part of me always held myself away. Part of me always holds some part of myself away in every intimate relationship. I’ve really had a pretty hard time with intimacy, because it doesn’t feel safe. I really have to force myself to be intimate with people I love. I really have to make a conscious decision. It doesn’t come naturally.

—Ann

Quite a few women reported that they had problems with intimacy in general. Some women felt they were afraid of closeness in all of their personal relationships. A few described going through their entire lives feeling somewhat numb.

For a long time afterward, I was really emotionally closed down. I definitely got a life going, but it took me a long time to do it. I really didn’t want to be too involved with anybody. For one thing, it just leaves you too vulnerable and so in a kind of self-protective way I vowed that I would never get in that position again. I would never be that dependent on anybody again for my emotional happiness or for my direction.

I think it was a necessary position to take up and it certainly got me through. But, you know, it also becomes a little dysfunctional after a while. So eventually I did, you know,
need
people. That was hard, to sort of come back to the center again.

—Deborah

I think one way that it’s been detrimental to me is that the things I should feel very excited about I can’t really feel them. I know I’m excited but I’m not in touch with my feelings. I’m detached from a lot of things that I know I should be closer to. I just can’t respond the way I’d like to because, I don’t know…maybe I feel I was nullified, or just not considered a person. I wasn’t considered a person worthy of receiving help to keep her child.

—Carole II

I got my bachelor’s degree, I got married, I got a job, we moved, I got a master’s degree. I kept going to school and I worked with emotionally disturbed children. It’s like I had to work with the hardest kids, put in the most hours, and just keep doing and doing and doing, which is what I did for most of my life. I just kept doing, but something was missing.

There was a whole part of me, the emotional, compassionate part of me, that was just simply dead. I lacked a real, deep ability to feel and have compassion for people. I just couldn’t. I had closed it off entirely. It was easy to be compassionate with strangers. It doesn’t require the ongoing, deep intimacy. Especially if it’s a stranger you do something for once and walk away. But an ongoing kind of compassion and intimacy, that’s the kind I would close out, because it could hurt. There was nothing I could do except blame myself for not being a good enough person. Something was wrong with me. And that’s how it went for thirty years.

—Glory

Many women became very successful in their careers but in retrospect felt that their drive to overachieve was an attempt to keep themselves too
busy to think deeply. Others felt they needed to excel in order to prove to their family, or to themselves, that they were not the failures they had been made to feel they were.

I did go on, but I kind of went on by myself. There’s always this kind of depression, this sadness, but I never addressed it. I never paid much attention to it. I was always able to just be pretty functional, in fact, overly functional. I would be overly busy and I would juggle. I didn’t just want to go to school, I wanted to go to Cal Poly. I didn’t just want to get a degree, I wanted to get an engineering degree. I started running, I had to run marathons. It was, like, “Look at me. I’m really good. I’m spectacular. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. There’s nothing wrong with me.” I was just out to prove that constantly, over and over and over again and I still do that.

—Suzanne

Some women thought they had coped fairly well, but they developed recurring dreams or physical ailments that could not be suppressed. In some cases, they did not connect their symptoms to their surrender experience until they were reunited with their child years later and the symptoms disappeared.

I developed a nightmare that stayed with me until I found her. The dream is: I’m at the hospital on the freight elevator. I’m trying to find her. I’m going up and down the floors. I get off but there’s nothing there—no people, no nothing—so I get back on. Over and over, I’m trying to find her. Up and down and never any relief, just searching and frantic, always frantic. That dream went on for years. I found her when she was twenty-two, and we met when she was twenty-five. The dream started subsiding somewhere in that time period.

—Barbara

About a year and a half ago, I started having this dream about a baby in a grave, and I don’t dream, or if I do I don’t remember. I could see this coffin. It was just this little white box and I’m standing looking
down and I just got this haunting feeling. And at that point I didn’t think about the child that I had so many years ago. But I knew something was bothering me. I decided to go into therapy, which kind of surprised me. But I just didn’t understand why I’d been having this dream, and this sense of just missing something.

—Sheila

I gave my baby up when I was seventeen. When I was eighteen, I had my first migraine headache. I had them steadily until reunion. I ended up in the hospital on IVs because I had had a migraine for three months straight that would not go away. I’ve been in reunion for three and a half years now, and I cannot remember the last time I had a migraine. I think it was from holding everything in, you know, it all has to go somewhere.

—Connie III

Some of the women I interviewed turned to therapists for help with their relationship problems or intimacy issues, or for answers to unexplained physical ailments. Unfortunately, they did not always receive the help they needed. Many professionals were unaware that these symptoms were characteristic of women who had surrendered a child for adoption. Indeed, since many of the women did not attribute their problems to the loss of their child they did not always reveal their secret to the therapist, nor did the therapist ask.

Despite the fact that numerous small studies in the fields of clinical social work, nursing, family studies, psychology, and psychiatry carried out in the United States
⁹
and much larger studies completed in Australia
¹⁰
concur that “relinquishing mothers are at risk for long-term physical, psychological, and social repercussions,”
¹¹
and even though millions of women have surrendered, there is still no widely accepted therapeutic model for counseling mothers who have lost their children to adoption.
¹²
Many women are still not able to find adequate therapy. In one study, 50 percent of the mothers participating reported ongoing pain and suffering as a result of their loss.
¹³
If this percentage holds true for the entire population of relinquishing mothers, millions of women today may be experiencing long-term problems resulting from their relinquishment, a great many undiagnosed and untreated.
¹⁴

Some women spent years self-medicating with alcohol, drugs, or food, or years medicated by psychiatrists, before they found a knowledgeable therapist or learned through a support group that their symptoms were consistent with those of other women who had surrendered. Relinquishing mothers are not the only members of the adoption triad—comprised of the surrendering parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents—who seek counseling for adoption-related issues. Yet in one survey only 27 percent of practicing clinical psychologists felt either “well prepared” or “very well prepared” to work with adoption issues, even though 8 percent of their patients were triad members.
¹⁵
About half of these professionals had no graduate coursework that included adoption content. A similar absence of adoption research and study has been found in the fields of sociology and anthropology,
¹⁶
and in studies of marriage and the family.
¹⁷