The Girls Who Went Away (16 page)

From everything I see, I think the general public believes that mothers who give their babies away are glad to be rid of them, they’re glad to be rid of the problem. They think, “She didn’t care about that kid. She just wanted him out of the way so that she could go on having a good time.” I’ve heard people say that. It’s like if you have a child and you’re not married, you don’t have those same maternal feelings that other mothers have? I have never, ever met a mother who felt that way. Never.

My father-in-law and I had the same birthday and we were quite tight. He told me that the week before my husband and I were married the priest had called to tell them that their son was marrying a woman who was a sinner, who had lived with another man and borne his child. They had also gotten an anonymous letter in the mail when our engagement was in the newspaper, telling them that their son was marrying a whore who had a kid. I said, “I want to see that letter.” I figured I’d spot the handwriting. He said, “We read it, tore it up, and burned it in this ashtray.” To me, they are quality people. I mean, never once did they ever mention a word to their son about who he was marrying. I mean, really, you can’t meet better people than that.
If there’s a silver lining in this, I think it’s made my children a whole lot more compassionate than they would have been. None of them are ever quick to judge anyone.

But there is this dichotomy that I have because I shouldn’t have been left in the care of my mother. I remember sitting at the table with my mom and my grandma telling her, “You have to stop beating her or I’m gonna find a way to get her away from you.” Everyone knew it was bad, but nobody could quite stop it. My grandmother wanted to send me off to a private boarding school for high school. She raised chickens, sold the chickens, butchered them, sold eggs, and she was going to pay for it. My dad said, “Hell no, she’s my kid and she’s living with me.” Now and then he would make an effort to make my mother stop: “Damn it, leave that kid alone!” And then he’d go out to the barn and do his chores and she’d beat the crap out of me. So when he would speak up, I would just cringe. When I was ten, I went outside and sat in the snow. I just decided I was going to sit outside until I was dead because I didn’t want to live with her anymore. Somehow my dad noticed I was missing and came out there. “Get in the house, you moron!” he said. I said, “Okay,” and I went back in.

She was just nuts. When I was in third grade she came in to tuck my sister in and tripped over one of her high-heeled shoes that my sister had been playing with. She picked it up and started beating me with it because it was my fault. In the morning I’m brushing my hair for school and it’s all stuck together because it’s bloody. So I wore my little cowboy scarf with a little horse on the back that I got from my uncle Louie, who lived in Arizona. I get to school and I’m supposed to take my scarf off and I said, “Oh no, I have a head cold. I have to keep it on.” I didn’t want my teacher to see the caked-on blood.

The abuse from my mother certainly prepared me to be a birth mother. Get out there and live that lie—“Life is okay”—when it isn’t. So I was in basic training until the time came when I could enlist. And you know what? I really miss my mom. My brother and sister-in-law had her put in the nut ward of an Alzheimer’s unit. She is in there with people who make noises that a lot of people have never heard. I can’t get her out because I have power of nothing. I can’t save her but I miss her—I really, really miss her. After my son found me she was very, very nice. We talked all about my childhood.
She kept me up until four in the morning wanting to talk about it, and how sorry she was for being so horrible.

I just feel so strongly that our stories need to be told, most importantly to our babies. They had no choice whatsoever in this. I’m thrilled that the one choice my son did have—to find me—he made. I mean, both he and I agree that there will never—regardless of how long we live and how wonderful life is—there will never be anything in either of our lives that will top finding each other.

You asked about the pain of the reunion. My son didn’t cause the pain when he came back. He has never been the cause of any of my pain. The pain was always there—it just came out in the reunion. I was still burying that. If it hadn’t been the reunion, there could have been something else in my life that would have broken it loose. I’ve always thought from the instant I knew I was pregnant that he was innocent in all of this. He didn’t choose to be born and he didn’t cause my pain. Actually, by tripping it loose he’s the reason that I have been able to heal as much as I have. I’m very grateful for that.

The Family’s Fears

My mother and my father were both one of eight or nine children, and each of them came from very poor families. But by the time I was in high school they were very affluent. My father was a banker and my mother played bridge, and they went on nice vacations and we had drapes that somebody came to our house and designed. You know, things like that which in my town were quite hoity-toity. I had nice clothes and proper dental care and all that stuff.

But when I got pregnant it was like slipping back a generation somehow. It was like slipping back in time. The climbing that they had done and their aspirations were suddenly under threat.
They
were going to be those people they looked down on. There was a clear social category for unwed mothers and that was the “you must not come from a very good home” category. I think it was impossible for my parents to get past those feelings and to see me as somebody who needed some help from them. They had no choice. They had to find a place for me to go where they didn’t have to deal with the questions and the funny looks. It was just more than they could take.

—Deborah

W
HEN I HEARD
THE WOMEN
recount their stories, one of the most shocking aspects of their experience was the way they were treated by their families. It’s hard to imagine how the families could have been so harsh.

In order to understand the actions of these families and the intensity of the pressure to relinquish, it is helpful to take into account the enormous social pressure to conform that followed World War II. The 1950s are notorious as a decade of mass conformity, but it’s revealing to look more closely at the social forces at work during those years. The postwar period was a time of remarkable new prosperity in which a significant number of American families joined the middle class—though that was true disproportionately for white families because of continuing racial discrimination. For those families who were moving up, whether white or black, there was a tremendous fear of losing the ground they had gained. Conforming to the middle-class values of the time was paramount. Many of the women I interviewed spoke about their parents’ fears of being ruined if anyone learned they had an unmarried pregnant daughter. The parents’ fears of being ostracized from their community or church ultimately led them to treat their daughters in precisely the same manner that they feared their neighbors would treat them.

I told my mother and she started screaming at me. It was horrific. I was told to leave the house and not return. I was not allowed to make a phone call. I was not allowed to take any clothes, pack a suitcase, nothing. I don’t remember where I went to use a phone, but I called the doctor I had babysat for and I went to their house. I stayed with them. I guess he pleaded with my mother and father to let me come home. He told them that I needed my family and that was where I belonged, and he was right. But they refused to take me back.

—Mary III

Studies of relinquishment patterns suggest that unmarried pregnant women who chose to make their children available for adoption were generally from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and had higher educational aspirations than those who chose to parent.
¹
Another characteristic cited was that women who surrendered their children were more likely to have parents who were “supportive of the placement decision.”
²
The backgrounds of most of the women I interviewed are consistent with these findings, though I would use different language to describe the parents’ sentiments. In most cases, especially
those involving high-school or college students, parents not only supported the placement decision but
made
the decision. The vast majority of these parents
insisted
that their daughter surrender her child.

I told my parents, “I can’t do this.” And they said, “You can’t come here. You can’t bring her here.” My father said, “You’ll have other children.” People have asked me how I got through it, and I say, “I turned myself into a stone.”

—Edith

Most of the women I interviewed did not refer to the surrender of their child as a choice at all. Choice implies making a decision between at least two viable options, and, with few exceptions, these women felt they had no other option. Many were in their twenties but still would have needed some family support, either with babysitting while they worked or with an offer to live at home until they could get on their feet. Rather than offering help, many families threatened to ostracize their daughter if she kept her child. Most parents simply took over when they discovered their daughter was pregnant, and made arrangements for her to go away and relinquish the child. The women often likened their experience to being moved along a conveyor belt, with no discussion, no weighing of options, and no say in the decision. They felt that they were in no position to object, since they had already brought shame upon the family by becoming pregnant.

My father took me to the family doctor and when we came back to the house and my father told my mother she fainted. They conferred with my boyfriend’s parents as to what to do and the decision was made to send me to a home, because I was from a very middle-class type of family and my mother didn’t want anybody to know about it. I had to drop out of school, because the schools didn’t allow you to attend school pregnant in those days.

We had to make up a story and I couldn’t go anywhere. If my mother had to take me shopping we’d go out of town, someplace where we wouldn’t run into anybody. My mother was always worried about what people would think and that was probably the
worst part of it for me. She was more worried about what people would think and specifically about what they would think about her. That affected all the decisions that were made. My mother decided that I was going to give the baby up; I didn’t decide that.

—Diane II

One of the sentiments that was expressed by many of the women I interviewed was that their mothers felt betrayed by them, and that sense of betrayal seems to have fueled the intensity of the disgust and anger that so many parents, especially mothers, inflicted on their daughters.

In all those months I was sent away, my mother did not visit me. My father would drive an hour and take me out for the afternoon. We went for ice cream, we went for walks. He never looked at my belly and we never talked about it at all. I don’t know what we talked about, but he was there for me.

—Sheryl

My mother was horrified. She called me a slut, a whore. “No wonder he followed you around like a dog in heat all the time.” My dad looked at me and said, “Have you been with a man?,” which was the terminology of the day. I could only nod my head: yes, daddy’s little girl had been with a man. That was hard.

And it seemed like just a day or so after that, my mother came in and had me go to the bathroom, disrobe, and get into the bathtub, which was very humiliating in itself. She administered a douche, which was very painful. I didn’t know anything about a douche. I found out later that what she had used was Lysol from the brown bottle, and I blocked that out of my mind for twenty-something years. One day my husband was cleaning and I smelled the Lysol and it took me back.

—Pollie

The rise in social status for so many families after the war and the concomitant pressures on these families to conform to middle-class standards were
unprecedented. By the mid-1950s, almost 60 percent of the population enjoyed a middle-class income, as compared with 31 percent in the years before the Great Depression.
³
Government-guaranteed loans had allowed returning veterans to purchase single-family homes by financing up to 90 percent of their mortgage at low interest rates.
⁴
In 1947 alone, 800,000 GI’s received home loans.
⁵
The difficulty was building homes fast enough to meet the demand. For sixteen consecutive years, from 1929 to 1945, new construction had not kept pace with the need for housing, and as GI’s returned from the war and married, the demand intensified.
⁶
Private developers were poised to meet this need with assistance from the government. Developers received tax incentives and government guarantees that allowed them to build enormous suburban developments like Levittown, the Long Island community of seventeen thousand homes built by Levitt and Sons between 1947 and 1951.
⁷
Before the war about one third of homes had been built by their owners and another third by small contractors who built a handful of homes every year. But by the late 1950s two thirds of all houses built in the United States were erected by big builders who primarily created uniform suburban developments that were monotonous but affordable.
⁸
Mortgages on these new suburban homes often cost less per month than the cost of renting an apartment.
⁹
Housing starts went from 114,000 in 1944 to 1,692,000 in 1950.
¹⁰
Whereas only 40 percent of families had owned their own homes at the end of World War II, 60 percent were homeowners by 1960. Between 1950 and 1960, 18 million people moved to the suburbs.
¹¹
All of these new homes needed furniture, appliances, a television, and often two cars, and all of that purchasing furthered the economic boom. Americans bought 20 million refrigerators, 11.6 million televisions, and 21.4 million cars in the four years that followed the end of the war.
¹²