The Girls Who Went Away (41 page)

After I met my daughter, I was getting major dental work done. My dentist is an American-born Chinese woman who is also an adoptive mother. One day I was holding a magazine that had an article on adoption, and I said, “Oh, another thing on adoption.” And she said, “Are you adopted?” And for the first time in my life, in this kind of situation, I said, “No. But I’m a birth mother.” And we both started crying. She said, “How old is your daughter?” I said, “She’s thirty-seven.” She gave me a hug when I left.

I had to go back a few days later and, having told her, it felt scary. When people have asked me if I have children, I’ve always said no. At the end of our session, she gave me this wrapped present. I went out to the car and I opened it up and it was a book about birth mothers. At first, it was like it wasn’t real that I was getting this from her. And then all of a sudden I started to feel her kindness and I started to really cry. I cried for the next three days. I went to work. I functioned. I saw my patients. But I was a wreck.

All of a sudden it really hit. What did I do? I had been this robot and I gave up this child. I just fell apart. I started getting flashbacks of being with my parents and then being in the hospital and not walking down the hall to the nursery. All this came back in wave after wave after wave. I was out of my mind. I just hurt. I hurt about who I was and what I had done. You just don’t take somebody out of your body and deposit them someplace where you won’t see them or know them. You just don’t do that. I just felt I was so inhuman that I had participated in this. I was just frantic and nobody
got it. Nobody understood the hell that I was in, including my therapist. I was having nightmares, one after another and they were always back then, thirty-five years ago. I told my therapist, “I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder.” The next time I saw him, he said, “You’re right. That’s what you’re describing.”

I began to see how my whole life had developed around this. It had a hell of a lot to do with why I had no children, and why I was so lonely, and why there was no man in my life. There’ve been men, but really inappropriate men who didn’t mean anything to me. There was a certain kind of depression that I’d lived with for years and years. I did everything I could to not feel that attachment. With that wall breaking down, I started to feel just what I had done and what had happened to me, in a way and at a level that I had never felt before. I was no longer numb.

—Judith III

SUSAN II

T
he guy that I had been dating had problems scholastically, and his parents decided to send him to private school. So he came to say good-bye. My parents had a very, very big yard and he parked his car under the trees and we were out there necking and petting and doing the things that boys and girls do. He had been after me for some time to begin a sexual relationship and I had not done it. We hadn’t even really explored. I mean, beyond petting there wasn’t any exploration. And to this day I really have no clue what possessed me to do this, but I decided that this was definitely the night that I needed to give myself to my boyfriend and give up my virginity. And that was the night I got pregnant.

My boyfriend came to see me during winter break. I remember him in the living room of my grandparents saying to me, “Sue, I’ll marry you. I will marry you.” And I said, “What, are you out of your mind? You’re eighteen.” I wasn’t even seventeen, I was sixteen. I said, “We can’t get married.” And it was then that he told me that the year before he moved to our town he had gotten another girl pregnant and he didn’t want to lose another child.

The agreement was for me to go to Florence Crittenton Home in March. From January to March, I went to day school there. My mother drove me every day. My grandmother was enlisted to take care of the two little kids while my mother took me in so that I could keep up my schoolwork. I mean, I graduated from high school at Florence Crittenton, and it’s really thanks to my mother, who insisted I was going to finish school.

In March, I went to live at the Crittenton home and I stayed there until my baby was born in June. When Karen was born the doctor, who was the only female on staff, came out to the waiting room and she said to my mother, “Would you like to come in and see your granddaughter?” Think about that. It’s 1965. That is not what happened for most women. That is not the treatment women were given. But my mother went in and actually
held Karen before I did. My mother was there when they cut her cord. So she saw her first grandchild, and held her even before I did.

At that time, the rule at this Florence Crittenton home was if you chose not to see your baby, then you never saw your baby. But if you chose to see your child, then you lived in for the next seven days. You fed the baby several times a day, changed diapers; they brought the baby to you constantly. And I wanted to be with my baby. So Karen and I spent the next seven days together bonding. I mean, I remember every day, I remember every moment, I remember every feeding—I remember it all.

And I also remember, and this is really hard to say, but I also remember wanting to get home. I wanted it over with. And that’s hard. Because the memory I would much rather have had was that I didn’t want to let her go. But I was so conditioned by that point—so many people telling me that I couldn’t do this, there weren’t any options, it was a fait accompli. So I just wanted it over. And I didn’t realize how precious those days would be later on.

When I look back, the social worker who had worked with me was wonderful. There was never any question this baby was going to be given up for adoption, so there was never any discussion about keeping her. Never. But I think it was either on day two or day three I decided I wanted to go home. I was done. And I called over to Florence Crittenton and I left a message for this social worker and I told her, “I want to go home. Please take the baby, I want to go home.” And she wrote me a letter and had it delivered and said, “No. You’ll want these days later. You have to do this. You have to go through this experience, Susan. You wanted to be with your baby and, believe me, in the years to come you’ll be glad that you did this.” And she was right. I needed to spend those days with my baby.

My parents and my boyfriend’s parents had spent a lot of money on my incarceration, so my future was very different than all of my other friends’. Going to college was out of the question. I went to work and I went to night school. But one thing I can say unequivocally: my daughter drove me all my life. I never ever wanted her to find me and to find somebody less than the most successful woman on this earth. Karen was my beacon; Karen was my beacon all through those years. I was driven to be the very best that I could be for her. I knew the day I kissed her goodbye that we would see each other again. I never doubted that she would be back in my life ever. Ever.

And knowing that she’d be back in my life, I wanted her to be proud of me. I wanted her to find a woman that she could really be proud to call mother. Whenever my life went crazy, and it did, I was very self-destructive for the first five years after her birth. Every time I would start to self-destruct, I would remember that little girl. So Karen was my beacon.

The first year after Karen was born, my mother sent me a Mother’s Day card, and she sent me a Mother’s Day card every year. My mother always was very empathetic to me on her birthday. She so,
so
deeply regretted her decision and it haunted her for years before it haunted me. My mother never forgot that baby, ever.

Interestingly, when Karen turned thirteen, my mother went bananas. I don’t know how to describe it any other way than that. My mother was absolutely convinced that Karen was living in the neighborhood. In truth, Karen had moved from Georgia to New Hampshire, to a town just up the road from where my mother lived. She was working as a lifeguard. She was a swimmer, like I had been, and was a lifeguard at a place where my older brother taught diving and where her two cousins were in the pool as often as she was. That’s how close we were to her as a teenager. My mother has always been a woman who has had a sense. She’s got that gift.

When Karen was twenty-five, my next-door neighbor at that time, unbeknownst to me, was the child psychologist at the agency where I surrendered her. And she and I were planting tulips that spring on either side of our borders. She was well into her seventies then. I asked her, I said, “You go off somewhere a couple of days a week. You can’t still be working. Where do you go?” And she told me who she was and where she worked. I looked up and she looked at me and she said, “Let me think, you don’t have kids so you must be one of our birth mothers.” We talked about it, and she said, “So why aren’t you searching?” And I said, “I don’t really have a right to search.” And she said, “Oh, yes, you do. Start the search now.” So I have her to thank. She was an incredible woman. Everybody at the agency loved her. She died that December. Before the search could even happen, she was dead.

Karen was found in six weeks, on the day that her first child was born. And she and I were reunited a month later. There are no coincidences in life. Years back, my husband and I would have dinner on about a quarterly basis with two of the other executives in the company we worked for. One of
them had a daughter Karen’s age. Every time we would have dinner with them, I would leave the house and I would sob.
Sob.
And my husband would say, “Okay, princess, what’s the problem?” And I would say, “I’m absolutely convinced that their daughter is my Karen.” He would say, “Cut it out, she looks just like them.” I would say, “But I don’t care, it’s a feeling I have. Honest to God, that’s my kid.” She didn’t look a bit like me, didn’t act like me, but I was convinced she was my kid.

When Karen and I reunited, I asked her where she grew up. Well, in her thirteenth year she came to live in New Hampshire. That was the year that my mother went mental. She lived right next door to the house where my husband and I had dinners. My daughter and their daughter went to school together and were best friends. And it was very likely that my daughter was in the house the nights they had dinner parties. My daughter was right there under my nose. It just wasn’t for us to see at that time.

So we make plans to meet at the agency. I really didn’t know how it was all going to work out. I gathered up family photos and put together an album. I found all the poetry I had written in the years that we were separated. My attitude was if this was our only meeting I wanted her to walk away with something genetically connected to her. If she chose not to have a relationship, it was okay. I just wanted her to have that information.

The Wednesday we were scheduled to meet, I was training a group of about three hundred salespeople, one of whom was my niece, and she could not believe that I could work and then get in my car and go for my meeting with my daughter. I just shut it off.

I got to the agency and they put me in this little room, an interview room, and the social worker said, “It will probably be about ten minutes and then I’ll come to the door and I’ll knock and I’ll let her in.” So I sat there waiting. And I was totally shut down. I mean, devoid of any worry, of any fear, of anything. And I remember thinking to myself, “You know what, this is it.
This is it.
You get one shot at feeling this feeling. You can put it away, you can shut it down, but you know what, this moment will never come again and if you stay shut down you’re not going to show your daughter who you really are and what you’re really all about.” It was a physical thing I had to do. I mean, I physically had to get in the moment. And I did. I mean, when the knock on the door came my daughter got to see who I really
am. Not a fake, not a phony, but somebody who really was in that moment for her. The social worker opened the door and she said, “I want you to meet your mom. This is Sue. Sue, this is your daughter.” And this beautiful young woman walked through the door.

We looked at each other. I mean, we were both stunned, because she looks just like me. We were totally stunned. We hugged each other, that wonderful sustaining hug, and then we leaned back and the tears were streaming and we started to laugh. I mean, how could you not laugh? It was like looking at yourself.

I tell people about that moment and I tell them that the rest was this blur; it was like my life in fast forward. We could not get enough. It was as though she had gone away to college and she was back and she had to tell me all about what had happened. We were there for three hours by ourselves. All of a sudden I looked down and she had started to leak. She had been nursing her daughter and she said, “Oh, the baby.” I said, “Where’s the baby?” It was six at night. Her stepmom had been sitting out in the lobby with the baby for three hours.

So we asked her to come in and here was this baby. Here was this
baby.
I shut down. I saw that baby and I shut down. She nursed the baby. She sat there and nursed this child and I totally shut down. I mean, I held my granddaughter, but I can honestly tell you I don’t remember it. There are pictures of it, but I didn’t feel that baby. I could not. It was too close.

You know, it’s twelve years now that we’re reunited and twelve years we’ve been back in each other’s lives. It’s not been easy for either one of us. In the early years she would say to me, “You know, you can’t ever be my mother.” And I’d say, “I understand that but you will always be my daughter and that’s the way it will be for life.” I think about three to four years into the reunion I started receiving birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards. She doesn’t call me mom. That’s okay. I’m Grammy Sue to the girls. I’ve been totally integrated into both of my grandchildren’s lives. The years that I missed with her I’ve been able to make up with her two daughters. I’m very blessed.

But I never knew until after the reunion how angry I was. It’s hard to even describe it, but it interlaced my being. I was angry at everybody. The world. I was cheated. I was screwed. I mean, I was
had.
I was had by society, by people who were bigger than me, who were more educated than me. Certainly some
of them were well meaning. I mean, some of them were very well intentioned. But I should have had the right to parent my child. I didn’t realize how the anger permeated my life until we were reunited and until I was able to finally articulate who I really was, until I was able to come out of the closet of shame. It really was a closet of shame that we were all put in. We were all locked into it. And they did it so beautifully that if you ever revealed what happened to you,
you
would pay the price.