The Girls Who Went Away (32 page)

Afterward I was very introverted. I could not have a close friend because I felt like such a fraud. How could I consider myself a close friend without them knowing about this? And, of course, I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. I was a good girl and was going to
do what I was told. It just makes you feel like a lesser person, because you’ve done this horrible thing, this unspeakable thing. I just kind of withdrew. It’s like the person that you are was put on hold and you’re somebody else, you’re flawed.

—Connie III

Anger, guilt, and depression are normal grief responses to a major loss. And though grief may never go away, it generally subsides with time. For relinquishing mothers, however, the grief may actually intensify over time.
³
One study has shown that high levels of unresolved grief in women were found to correlate with the “lack of opportunity to express feelings about the loss, the lack of finality of the loss (the child continues to exist), the perception of coercion, and the resulting guilt and shame over the surrender.”
⁴

Before I went into that place I was always very happy, liked everybody, would talk to everybody, was a class officer in high school, a cheerleader. I was
that
kind of a person. I came out of there a different person. It changed me. It really changed my personality. I got very sad. I was very withdrawn.

I went back to school after that happened and everybody would say to me, “What’s your problem? What’s the matter with you? Did someone die in your family?” Well, having a child, giving it up for adoption is like having a death in the family. The only difference is you can’t publicly be sad; you gotta be sad by yourself. I think it hardened me. I was really nasty to people. I was mad at the world. I was mad at my parents, I was mad at everybody, even if they had nothing to do with it.

—Cathy II

The National Mental Health Association has issued a list of the best ways to cope with a major loss, like the death of a loved one.
⁵
The list suggests that the grieving person should “seek out people who understand your feelings of loss; tell others how you feel; take care of your physical health and be aware of the danger of developing a dependence on medication or alcohol; make an effort to live in the present and not dwell on the past; try to take time to
adjust to your loss by waiting to make major changes such as moving, remarrying, changing jobs or having another child; seek outside help when grief seems like it is too much to bear; and be patient because it can take months or years to absorb a major loss.” Without proper guidance or counseling, most of the women I interviewed took action that was precisely the opposite of these recommendations, some of it on the advice of professionals.

I got married. I thought, “I better get myself off the streets. This is not going well.” I was just living this lie, this lie, this lie. “Do you have children?” “No.” It’s like being Judas every time. You’re denouncing who you are, who they are. You just feel terrible. I married this man under false pretenses. Did he ever know I had children? Absolutely not. I didn’t tell him.

I had a wedding, the wedding that my sister wanted. Everything was a lie. I didn’t want a wedding, but he was Italian and Catholic, and you had to have a wedding. Oh, God. Then he says, “We can have children.” I looked at him, like, “Are you insane?” The last thing I ever wanted to be was pregnant. I said, “I’m too young to get pregnant.” That’s what I told him. I was twenty, twenty-one at the time. He was an airline pilot, I was a stewardess. I said, “Well, maybe in five years, I don’t know.” But the whole idea was so repellent to me. It was all mixed up with this grief and this guilt. No, I just couldn’t.

So I’m married and everything is so perfect. We go on a Hawaiian honeymoon—everything is just so, so, nice. We lived on forty acres of land, we built this beautiful house, we had so much money. Every weekend we were going over to my parents’ house and having steak dinners and barbecues. I remember one of these Sundays as we pulled into my parents’ suburban neighborhood I just started hitting my head against the seat of the car. I was just going a little crazy. It was all the things I couldn’t say. It was July. The birth month. So July was always horrible, horrible, horrible. Even if my mind didn’t remember, my body remembered. This really lives in your body.

—Diane IV

The symptoms described by the women I interviewed are precisely the same as those of the surrendering mothers chronicled in professional studies of their grief. Many women had experienced several—and some nearly all—of the following symptoms: depression; damaged self-esteem; persistent guilt, shame, and self-loathing over “giving away” their child; an enduring sense of emptiness and loss that is not erased by having other children; persistent loneliness or sadness; difficulty with intimacy, attachment, or emotional closeness; lack of trust; anger; severe headaches or physical illnesses that cannot be explained or diagnosed; and occasionally posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by extreme anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks, and nightmares.
⁶

After I surrendered my child, I had a conviction that I was a horrible person. I was a horrible, horrible person and I acted like one for many years, too. I know people from that time told me that they were actually afraid of me because I was so bitchy and sarcastic and kind of radiating hostility and anger. I have a very cutting tongue. Over the years, it’s been much modified. I’m a much kinder, gentler person than I was then. I wasn’t worth much for a long time. My husband was a huge dose of reality. He was a good friend. He knew everything about me. I mean, he knew
everything
and he still liked me. I lost a lot of my bitchiness with him.

I thought I made the intelligent decision. I made a
rational
decision that I’m still convinced was the best thing for her. I can’t imagine what our lives would have been like. In some ways, it was probably pretty frigging self-serving. I wasn’t strong enough to face the idea of raising a child on my own. I came from middle-class, normal, suburban Americana. It was not acceptable under any circumstances to be a single mother, and I wasn’t tough enough to face all that. But the pain never goes away. It just never does.

My identity somehow got wrapped up in having the longest hair and the coolest guitar player in town. I was so frigging proud of that hair. Yeah, I was way cool. I dressed really well and supported an entire band on my salary. People wrote songs about me. That was my identity. I didn’t have any sense of myself at all. So whatever I attached myself to, that was my worth. I didn’t know
who the hell I was. I knew that I was not a good person, though.
That,
I
knew.

—Nancy III

Although these women were released from the hospital without any documents related to the birth of their baby, some did manage to hang on to artifacts from their days in the hospital, or to acquire pictures that provided a tangible link to their child.

I remember going home and then trying to start my life over, with all the secrets and hush-hush and all that. I cried every night with the diaper I took. I had this diaper and I could still smell her. They took pictures of my daughter and I couldn’t wait to get them because I just wanted to have
something.
I cried and I waited for the pictures to come from the hospital, but they never came.

—Carolyn I

I got a picture of him in the mail. You know, they have photographers that go to the nurseries and take pictures of the newborns. Well, I got the picture. I kept it for probably ten years. I had it in a little brown frame in my drawer, hidden away. Every once in a while, I’d take it out. I always cried and cried. Finally, when we lived on the farm in the seventies, I burned it. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t. I thought it would somehow get rid of the pain, but it didn’t.

—Glory

I had a little black-and-white photograph of my daughter, and on the front of the little folder it said “First Picture of Life,” and it had little gold stars and little angels on it. I would only allow myself to look at the photograph on her birthday every year. I would take it out and it would take me quite a while before I could even open the little cover, so I knew the cover with the little stars very well. I would study that cover and try to compose myself enough to look at the picture.

You go on with your life but you know out there in the world is a piece of you floating around. I’m not a religious person, but I would pray to trees or stars, or the moon, or whoever is in control, to please make her safe.

—Pamela I

Women often experienced extreme sadness on the anniversary of their baby’s birth. The birth of subsequent children was also a powerful reminder, triggering not only memories of the earlier birth but also fears that this new baby might also be taken from them.

For a while I was abusing alcohol, especially during the month of June, because my daughter was born in June and I couldn’t face any part of that month. I would cry most of the month and feel miserable. My youngest daughter had no idea what bad, bad thing happened to me in June, but she knew that June was the month you couldn’t talk to me. When she got a little older, I told her about her sister and she understood. Out of all of my kids, my youngest girl is very, very sensitive to other people’s feelings.

—Bonnie

I always wondered where my little girl was, if she was being fed and loved and held and cuddled. Every birthday I would say to myself, “Happy birthday, Kelly Maureen. Mommy loves you.” My calendars were always marked in really, really tiny print. I always thought that maybe when she turned eighteen she might want to find her mother. Or maybe when she was twenty-one or twenty-five. Those were the years I figured. Nothing happened, but you never stop thinking.

I remember after she turned eighteen I started going through the brides’ section in the newspaper every Sunday. She could have been anywhere in the world, but I’m checking every Sunday. Eight years, I’m looking in the newspaper for anyone that looks like me. Anybody that happened to have the name Kelly—because I didn’t know they changed the name—and every blonde, I’ve got to read
the whole thing and check it out with a magnifying glass. That’s just what I did on Sundays.

—Karen II

I wanted more children so bad. I got pregnant and that’s when it all started coming back to me. That’s when everything started. That’s when I couldn’t run away from it anymore. She was due almost the exact same time of the year that my first one was born. It was, like, I had my baby back. I just held on to her. I was in heaven for a month, but then I had to go back to work because my husband didn’t have a job. I couldn’t handle it. That was the beginning of the end of my marriage. That was the beginning of me becoming aware of what I’d gone through. I had to put her in day care and it was devastating for me. It felt like I had given her up. It felt like I had abandoned her. It was terrible.

I knew nothing. I’ve never met another birth mom in my life. I still know nothing except that when my baby was three days old they took her away. That’s all I know. It’s like my blood runs cold when I think about it.

—Suzanne

One of the most common consequences of relinquishment for the women I interviewed was difficulty in forming healthy relationships with men. The low self-esteem, anger, resentment, and lack of trust they felt made it difficult. Some women dated, and some married men who treated them badly. They felt so worthless that they believed they didn’t deserve a decent guy. Others married the first man who showed any interest in them because they were eager to normalize their life and, in some cases, have another baby as soon as possible.

I never told my husband about my experience with having a baby and giving him up for adoption. We were married for fourteen years. We had two children—two girls. The only thing that was wrong with the marriage was he drank and it got worse as the years
went on. He lost a couple of jobs, cracked up a lot of cars. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “My God, I can’t believe I live with this.” But also, “Well, this is what I deserve.” I’d say to myself, “You know, you’re no great shakes. Look at your past.” It was always, “Well, this is what I deserve.” I mean, how could I even expect to have anything better than this?

—Maureen II

The only other relationship I ever had with anybody that I was serious about turned out to be a bad person. I didn’t think I deserved a nice guy. That relationship was my last opportunity to be with somebody that I loved enough to have a child with. So I decided I was never going to have kids and I found a doctor and went in and had a tubal ligation when I was thirty.

You feel different than everybody else. That never went away. I mean, if you’re normal, at some point you meet the right guy, your parents plan this big wedding and you have a family. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to have a “normal” relationship. Most guys want to have kids at some point. Maybe that gave me permission to do what I did, I don’t know. But the men that I was meeting were not appropriate husband material at all. I worked for a halfway house and met real criminals; I dated real criminals. It didn’t occur to me that I should be dating a banker or a lawyer or somebody like that. You can’t expect anything from a drug addict, so they never disappointed me. All the other men in my life were big disappointments. The semiserious types, who had regular jobs, always disappointed me. Only afterward did I realize that this is a self-esteem issue.

—Diane II

Another profound impact of surrender was evident in the women’s subsequent response to babies. There seemed to be no middle ground. Some women had a very strong desire to have another child immediately and were conscious of trying to replace the baby they had lost. Others said they could not stand to be around babies.

I met a young man when I rented a television set. He was working part time as the television-rental person, so we went out. I suppose I would have dated anybody at that point—a frog, a hamster, whatever, anything breathing and warm. We ended up having a very quick romance and marriage. I married this guy after knowing him for four or five months. Looking back, I wanted another baby. That was all it was, that was the focus of my life.