The Girls Who Went Away (42 page)

Birth mothers do not forget. I know a lot of birth mothers have drilled it down, but they don’t ever forget. My shame came afterward, because I couldn’t talk about the experience. I had an incredible fear that if I revealed who I was I’d lose everything. For a woman, I attained incredible stature in my career in the business community. And for all but the last twelve years of it nobody ever knew who I really was.

When I came home from meeting my daughter at the agency, I brought home all of these Polaroid pictures of her and in the morning my husband picked out a couple of the pictures. I said, “What are you doing with those pictures?” And he said, “I’m a father, I’m a grandfather, I can’t wait to show everybody at work.” And I said, “You can’t
show anybody
. Oh, my God.” He said, “What do you mean, I can’t show anybody? Sue, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

I was still trying to preserve the status quo of this persona that I had created for myself. I was terrified that it would destroy my career. Thank God, he said, “Pfft, get out of here. This is a joyous moment, this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” I often wonder if he hadn’t been here what would have happened. It was my husband who absolutely blew my cover. And by revealing who I was, I was destroying the person I had created.

I hope that my story helps other women heal. I do feel healed. That closet of shame is huge. There are a lot of us in it. I had my moments of sadness but, truly, when I lay my head down at night now, I’m thankful. I know where my baby is. She’s all grown up. She’s a beautiful woman. I’m blessed and I feel healed. It kills me to think that there are women who are not out. I hope talking about this allows women who have not been out of the closet to get out and, hopefully, change their lives—by getting them on the Internet, getting them to join the groups, and letting them hear their own voices for the first time.

JENNIFER

I
grew up in a small town on the east coast of Florida. My father was an attorney and we were big churchgoers. At thirteen, fourteen, people started dating. At fifteen, it got a little more serious. Some of the boys were driving. That’s when I started dating my first real boyfriend. I’d had a puppy love before, but this was what I considered to be my first real love.

He was a lifeguard at the country club and he was just this gorgeous man, strong, and a few years older than me. I was pretty astonished when he asked me to go out. We started dating and I had decided that virginity was a burden. It had lost its glamour. I wanted to get past it. I wanted to be a woman and I just wanted to get in the game and I wanted to get it over with. So we started having sex on a regular basis. I just felt completely protected and insulated from anything bad. I grew up in a very nice home with nice friends, nice family.

He had used condoms a few times and fumbled with them and I just did not have a good experience with them, either. I just still didn’t get that I could get pregnant. I thought, “Well, if I have sex when I’m close to my period, or right after my period, then I won’t get pregnant.” Then that next cycle didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come. We were both terrified. Three weeks later, I got my period: “Phew, we’re fine.” So, feeling invincible, I went ahead and continued to have unprotected sex. Then the next month my cycle didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come. I thought, “Well, it’s happened before. This is no big deal. I couldn’t be pregnant.”

Then the signs became very evident. I was rushing around the house before school, and I ran back upstairs to brush my teeth and all of a sudden I just threw up. I thought, “Wow, that’s weird.” Then probably about two weeks later at church we stood up to sing the last hymn and I felt really woozy, like I was going to pass out. I looked down at the pew and I can remember the musty smell of the hymnal, and the organ going, and the
Reverend, and I’m in my Easter clothes, with my shoes, and I all of a sudden I just went down.

From that day on, my boyfriend and I knew I was pregnant. I can’t get in touch with the person that I was then. I was in a dreamworld. We were not doing anything about it. We just sort of continued, biding our time, waiting for something to happen. I tried to imagine how I would tell my parents if it ever came to that, and I just couldn’t even imagine.

Then one Sunday my boyfriend and I came home from the beach and we were in our family room having sex on the carpet. My parents were supposed to be out on the boat. Well, they had boat trouble and had docked near our house. My father and my uncle came in the back door with the little jalousie windows. I heard the door opening and there we were. I had been wearing a bikini and there’s no way you can quickly put on a bikini. It was a nightmare; it was an absolute nightmare. I can’t imagine how I looked. I know that my boyfriend looked as white as a sheet. He got behind the draperies and I threw him his bathing suit and picked up a towel. My father just looked at me and said, “Go upstairs. Go upstairs and get dressed.” Poor Daddy. So I’m upstairs in my beautifully decorated room, trembling, with the towel still around me, and my father came in and said, “Let me see your stomach.” He looked at my breasts. He looked at my stomach and he said, “You’re pregnant.” I thought, “How in the hell could he know?” Thinking back on it, of course, he had four children with my mother. He knows what a pregnant woman looks like. Later that evening before dinner, I heard my father crying. I heard him sob in his room and I’d never heard that before. It was just gut wrenching and I figured, “Whatever they want to do, I’m going to do.”

That same night they went down to my boyfriend’s house and spoke with his parents. I was still holding out hope that we would get married. I really wanted the baby. It just felt like love to me. They came back and my father called me into his den and we had a conversation without my mother, which was kind of unusual. He told me that my boyfriend’s parents felt that the best thing would be for me to have the baby and give it up for adoption. I must have looked horrified at that suggestion, because he said, “It’s hard for me, too. It’s my flesh and blood, too.” We were both crying and he was comforting me and he said, “You know, Jenny, you’ve got your whole life
ahead of you. If you can just get through this, you’re going to have a wonderful life. It will all be like a bad dream. You’ll get through it, and you’ll have fun again, and you’ll have a full life. You’re still Daddy’s little angel.” It just broke my heart. It totally broke my heart. It didn’t occur to me to protest. The main feeling I had was just to not make any more problems, do whatever they wanted me to do, just basically be invisible.

I was whisked off to Texas to live with my sister. My mother went to my high school and cleared out my locker. She told me that I shouldn’t talk to anybody, that she was going to tell everybody that I had rheumatic fever. I didn’t even know what rheumatic fever was—it sounded like “romantic” fever to me. All I knew was it was some sort of disease. I got set up in the extra bedroom in my sister’s house. I never looked more beautiful. My hair was glossy. My skin was clear and beautiful. I had roses in my cheeks. My breasts were full. I would just look at myself in the mirror and wish so much that my boyfriend could see me and we could share this.

I didn’t have a sense of shame, ever, during the time that I was pregnant, even when they found out. Maybe when my father walked in on us having sex I felt embarrassed or ashamed, but shame was never part of my pregnancy. It was either sadness or love and wonderment, nothing in between. I would go to bed early and my baby would start kicking. I would talk to him. I would tell him how perfect he was, and that I would always love him. It was our time, and our space, and nobody else got into that bubble. I felt like I was feeding him little bits of love, and nurturing and taking care of him, just like if I was holding him in my arms.

I was, allegedly, meeting with this caseworker throughout my pregnancy and discussing my adoption plan. I met with a woman once. She jotted down all my vital information and asked me to please obtain baby pictures of myself and my boyfriend. She basically just gave me assignments to gather information, like list any special talents that ran in my family or in his family. There was never any discussion about how I felt about giving my child up for adoption. I never thought there was supposed to be. It was never explained that it was an option. I was basically just going through the motions. I was being told what to do, and I did it. They asked me if I wanted to see my baby when I delivered and my mother piped up and said, “Oh no, that would be too difficult. You should say no.” So of course I said, “Well,
no. I don’t want to make things difficult.” I couldn’t imagine seeing, or not seeing, my baby. I couldn’t imagine delivering. It still wasn’t me that this was happening to.

One Saturday I did my exercises and went to bed and later that night I couldn’t get comfortable. They walked me over to the hospital and I was already dilated. This was it. I sort of felt this shade being drawn down on my life, like one of those old window shades. It just came down. I’m thinking, “Oh no, oh no, I’m not ready for this. This is good-bye.” I just couldn’t bear it. They gave me something to knock me out and I was in la-la land. I don’t remember much of anything, just some stainless steel and some tile and some voices. It seemed like about a minute later a nurse was saying, “Well, you did just fine. You did just fine.”

I have very few memories of being in recovery. The rule was that you had to stay there for eight days. They said it was eight days to fully recover, but later I put it together that it’s eight days before you can sign the adoption papers. Every time the door would open into the room, I’d hear the nursery. I picked out my baby’s cry. I said, “Do they just let them cry?” And the nurse said, “Oh no, there are nurses in there. They’re holding the babies and talking to them. They’re cared for.” But they were crying.

The caseworker presented me with papers. She said, “This will finalize the adoption.” I asked if my baby had been placed in a home yet. She said, “I think we’ve found a wonderful home for him.” I said, “When will he be placed?” And she said, “After you sign the papers he will be placed.” I read through this paper, legally cutting off any connection to him, took a deep breath, and signed my name on the bottom. I put the pen down and I started to get up and go and she said, “You have to sign these, too.” There were about twelve papers to sign. It was the first time I showed anger. I yelled, “Can’t you use carbon or something? Why do I have to sign each one?” I said, “You’ve got my signature. You’ve got my soul. You’ve got my baby, and now I have to sit here and sign twelve pieces of paper for you?”

Before we went home we were at my sister’s house and she and my mother were in the kitchen making dinner and there was some happy chatter going on and I guess I was supposed to be helping them. The house had a screen door leading off the kitchen and I can remember opening it, hearing that screen-door noise, and looking out at the huge Texas sky that I
hadn’t taken in the whole time I was there. I looked up at that big sky and something just lifted out of me. It was like a part of me was flying off, separating, and leaving the other part of me there. Later, when people would ask me what it felt like to give my baby up for adoption, the only words I could find to describe it was it felt like an amputation—like half of my body had been removed. I can still feel that very powerfully.

I went through horrible depression. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t want to have the burden of living, either. It was just too painful. I was feeling so much grief. Ten years later I realized, “This is not going away.” If anything, it was getting worse. So I started therapy. Then I found a little classified ad for a triad support group, which I had never heard of before. So I went to the meeting. Most of the people there had been adopted. I told the woman that I really wanted to find out where my son was. She asked me why and I said, “I just have to know. I don’t know if he got hit by a car when he was on his tricycle or if he broke his leg or has brothers or sisters or if he died. I just want to know how he is.” She gave me the name of a searcher and within twenty-four hours I had his name, his parents’ names, their address, phone number, and a brief description of them. I thought, “Ah…he’s fine, that’s fantastic. I can get on with my life now.”

Another ten years passed. During that time there was lots of therapy, lots of healing, lots of trying to peel back the layers and begin to express what I couldn’t when I was sixteen years old. Then I wrote his parents. I wish now that I hadn’t. I wish I’d just written directly to him, but I wrote about three or four pages explaining who I was. I tried to be completely gracious: “You are his parents, you are his family, you are his history, you are his world, but I’m his birth mother and I will always love him and I want to reach out and make myself available to him should he ever want me for any reason. If he ever wants to talk to me, or see what I look like, anything.” I said I wasn’t trying to intrude or bring problems.

His mother wrote me back: “We showed him the letter and he isn’t interested in contacting you at this point, but he asked us to hold on to the letter should he change his mind in the future.” She said that he was nineteen and he had just moved out of the house. She described him as being healthy, happy, very much his own person, handsome, fun, strong. It was all good. I was relieved that she wrote me. She asked that I let the next contact
come from him. She thanked me for writing. I think I had closed my letter with something like “I was hoping that they could keep their minds and their hearts open…that all that I had, and all I was sending, was love.” She responded to that and said everybody could use more love in their life so she would hold on to the letter for him, and, sure enough, she did.

Another ten years went by. I was getting anxious again and felt like I shouldn’t have written to his parents. I’m thinking, “It should have been between the two of us. He’s not a kid any longer. I’m going to call him. I’m pretty sure I’m going to call him.” Then one night I went to see a movie with a girlfriend of mine. We went to see
Good Will Hunting
and I just lost it during the scene where Matt Damon is backed into a corner by Robin Williams. Williams is trying to get Damon to confront being an abused child and he’s shouting at him, “It’s not your fault! It’s not your fault! It’s not your fault!” And I felt like my son might think that there was something wrong with him, that it was his fault that he was given up for adoption, and I wanted to say to him, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t take care of you. It’s not your fault.” After the movie, I was driving home by myself and it was pouring down rain and I was just sobbing out loud by myself. And I thought, “God damnit, I’m calling him. I’m not going to wait. I’m not going to be a chicken. I’m just going to call him.”