The Girls Who Went Away (46 page)

Eventually, I just got on with my life. When I thought of my son, I had to put a positive spin on it because what else could I do? He was gone. I just had to think that he was in a wonderful place. It was sort of a recording. I would say, “It was a wonderful thing I did for my little boy. He has a wonderful family. I’m sure he’s having a great life.” I started believing that, and still there was just something
so
missing. I mean, I was just bereft under all of that. I didn’t
really
understand why it was supposed to be a good thing. I’m still sort of perplexed.

I still don’t know what hit me. It was like an eighteen-wheeler came at me, or a train came at me, and here I am still standing. That’s kind of how I feel. You just keep going, you know, the emotional wreckage aside, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you go through the motions and you look like you’re a normal person among all these normal people. You just go on.

But that young woman in me was always there. There was just a little place set aside somewhere; she was locked away and not allowed to have her voice. People did not want to hear what she had to say. Believe me, she was very angry. I can say that with a second voice that I have. This young woman that they locked away had feelings, she had emotions, she wanted her son and nobody wanted to hear that. So the older woman just took over and that’s how it had to be to survive.

I got married in my early thirties and after that I actually did some interesting advocacy work. I worked for about five or six years for the Romanian orphans who were discovered after Ceauşescu was deposed in 1989. In the early nineties I worked doing direct emergency relief for those children—airlifts with food and medicine and clothing. Looking back, I feel that I was
sort of compelled to work with children in some capacity. I felt I was helping rescue them or something, these little children. I’m sure that has some sort of meaning, you know, because of what I had gone through in losing my son.

After that, I became involved with a very large animal sanctuary in the United States. I coordinated a volunteer corps for them and I helped put together a manual they’ve been disseminating to shelters around the country. I would help put on very big animal-adoption festivals. I kept pretty busy.

Then, I guess it was in 1999, I had gone out to have lunch with my mom and we were sitting in a little restaurant, and she told me that she had gotten a call from a very nice young man who had left his phone number and wanted me to call him. She was still in the same home and had the same number. He had not told her exactly what it was he wanted to speak to me about, but she felt real strongly that it could be my son.

So as it turned out, yes, it was my son. I was just stunned. I had never thought that this would ever come to pass. I went ahead and called his father, we hadn’t talked in years and years and years. I just said, “Are you sitting down?” He says, “I can be,” or something to that effect, and I let him know that our son had found us. He was as elated as I was. We were just so shocked and happy. We both got to speak to our son that evening. When he got on the phone, the voice was familiar because he sounds like his father. I think one of the first things I said to him is “You sound just like your father.” I remember he said no one had ever told him anything like that before.

We had a long talk and just filled each other in, and it was very…it was very emotional. It was happy, and a relief, and everything rolled into one. It was just…I mean, I can’t describe the feelings…to talk to my son for the first time after all those years. We decided that we’d try to see each other as soon as possible. His father wasn’t going to wait. He got on a plane the next morning. Then I flew in, and there he was. I definitely recognized him. I mean, he
had
to be our son.

He’s just very sweet and he’s a very intelligent young man and he’s accomplished all these things. We continued to talk on the phone after that and see each other back and forth. He came down and visited me and met his grandmothers and cousins and brought his wife and everything and it was very, very happy. Through all this, you know, it’s difficult…he’s
known a family that he calls his own all his life. And, of course, that’s his family and he has wonderful memories with them. It is difficult to sort of be added on. So over these last five years it’s been difficult at times and happy at times and sad at times, for both of us, for all of us—trying to figure out where we all fit. We really want to be in each other’s lives in some way and I guess we’re just still working through all that. So at this stage we’re just looking to the future and I’m hoping that we’re going to have a good, productive, loving relationship from here on.

When my son found us, we were all extremely happy and just so relieved that he was with us. We wanted to see one another and talk with one another and that continued for many months. Then I’d say maybe nine or ten months into our reunion it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was as though a trigger had gone off and I started to experience all of the trauma that I wasn’t allowed to experience, or didn’t even know I should be experiencing, when I was much younger. I think I was coming out of denial.

I feel as though I was preyed upon by this system, by these people that I was surrounded by. Not some nebulous thing but real human beings, real people had a hand in taking my son away. I knew this, but to this day I really haven’t been able to express this to my son in such a way that he accepts it or understands it completely. I was not able to ever mourn my loss of him or be able to express how sad I was. Nobody ever said, “Oh, I’m sorry.…”

All of that came to a head when I realized that this wasn’t a good thing. It was in everyone else’s best interests. It was the convenient, expedient thing to do at the time, but it wasn’t really in our best interests. It was not a win-win situation. In my opinion, it was a loss for him, too. He didn’t get to know his mother and father. We didn’t get to know our son, and be with our son, which we should rightfully have been able to do. The winners were the adoptive parents and the social workers who got to do their job in the way that they thought they should do it. We lost and we lost big. I mean, we lost the most precious thing in our lives that ever was or ever will be—our baby. Nothing can ever make up for that.

After my son and I reunited, I experienced what was probably posttraumatic stress. I can only describe this as a sort of out-of-body experience, but at one point I felt like I was not human. I didn’t feel the humanness in me and that was really scary. It was just like a big, ugly, dirty, dark hole. I realized
that I had been used. I wasn’t recognized as a human being. I was a mother. I was not a breeder or an incubator for somebody else. I was a young expectant mother and I was treated like I was this thing used to produce a child for somebody else.

At that point, my marriage started on a downward slope that never stopped and I eventually divorced after a twenty-year marriage. My family couldn’t understand and it was making everyone very uncomfortable. I refused antidepressants. I really felt like I was silenced before and I was not going to cover it up or make everybody around me comfortable by taking a happy pill. I’m sorry, everyone needed to see what this had wrought.

I was very determined that I was going to make it through and it wasn’t going to be on pills. I did reach out and go to some pretty good psychologists who understood adoption issues. Unfortunately, it’s not recognized as a loss, so no one has worked up a nice psychological model to treat us and to get us healthy again. I knew that I needed to vent or at least talk about this, but I would not take pills. I wanted to be able to mourn and grieve the loss of my child, and I wanted to be coherent when I did that. I had a right to be sad and angry and I didn’t want to be shut up again. That had already been done to me for thirty years and it was not going to happen again.

It makes everybody real uncomfortable to think that they took a mother’s baby away, that she didn’t give it up happily and voluntarily and as a gift. Nobody wants to face the fact that this is very traumatic. Even back in the sixties, it was a matter of finding a child for a family instead of finding a family for the child. It leaves a lot of emotional wreckage and it usually goes unaddressed because it’s not even seen as a problem.

It always comes to mind whenever I see somebody on the news who, God forbid, has their child kidnapped. Or you see in a magazine that a child anywhere in the world has been killed, and the mother is just grieving inconsolably, hysterically. We have all the same feelings but the public doesn’t know that. They don’t want to acknowledge it because it is so unpleasant. It makes everybody so uncomfortable to think that in this civilized society anybody could actually take a baby away from a young woman and expect her to not cry or be sad, or not want that to happen. We have those same hysterical, out-of-control, inconsolable, never-goes-away grief, you know, “Please, where’s my baby?” sort of feelings. It’s just that no one recognizes it
and they don’t want to hear it. We have those feelings and they’re all bottled up. I mean, talk about people raging inside.…When you have your child taken away and nobody cares and nobody wants to help you or even recognize that you might be sad, that’s rage.

Before my son found me, if I would share that I had had a son and that he had been taken into adoption, people would not have sensed any kind of rage in me. They would have thought that I was very much at peace with what they thought was my decision. I actually had to think it was my decision because otherwise I would have been enraged for thirty years and I probably wouldn’t be here now.

I came to really resent the language that was used to describe me and my experience. Everyone who would talk about adoption in general, or about adopted people or mothers who had lost their children, seemed to all use the same sort of jargon, what I would call “loaded language,” that’s emotionally charged. It’s very judgmental and biased to one side of an issue. Calling young expectant mothers “birth mothers” or any kind of mother other than just simply
the mother
simply serves to put distance between that mother and her baby. That serves a real purpose. It makes everybody comfortable with the fact that she’s not a “real” mother. You have terms such as “first mother,” “life mother,” “birth mother,” “natural mother,” “biological mother,” like she was just this surrogate receptacle that carried this child to the real family. So there is a lot of language surrounding adoption which is very disentitling, disenfranchising, marginalizing to both the child and the mother, and in favor of the industry and the potential adoptive parents.

Every mother is inexperienced the first time she is pregnant. Somehow, whether they’re married or unmarried, thirty or eighteen, they learn to be a mother. I can only speak from my experience, but as a seventeen-year-old woman I was educable, I was trainable, I was looking for guidance in every facet of my life. I was very resourceful. I was very loving and gentle. I would have made, I believe, an excellent mother. Unfortunately, that opportunity was taken away from me. If I’d had support and mentoring, I would have made a wonderful mother for my son.

I think there should be opportunities to mentor young expectant mothers in established homes, to see how parents act in a healthy home, to learn from that. A mentoring experience and classes in parenting—all of these
things could help a young woman who is single at the time of giving birth. She may eventually get married and maybe have more children. But I think that these young women just need some guidance and education. They have all the natural inclinations to be the mother to their child and most want to be, and would be, if given the opportunity.

LINDA I

I
grew up in Waco, Texas, and we were raised very strict Baptist. There was right and wrong and you didn’t stray. That’s more or less the way I’d lived my life. Then right after I graduated from high school, things were getting bad in Vietnam. We lived just outside of James Connolly Air Force Base. A lot of the boys in my high-school class were drafted. My cousin was drafted and my other cousin was killed there in 1968. I was a fairly good nursing assistant and I wanted to be a nurse but didn’t have the money for school. So I joined the army. I thought this would be a way I could help the army and our country and also get a good education.

I went to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where I was on the receiving end when they brought the wounded in. So many men were being killed. We were told to never tell how many men were brought in, because the U.S. didn’t want to alarm the general public. We weren’t to talk of the wounds or anything we saw. I worked with the men who were brought back with contagion due to their wounds, or jungle diseases that there was no cure for—things of that sort.

They trained us to be combat medics. We learned how to crawl on our tummies and pull the stretchers. We were sent out in the field with little plastic things to make tents out of. The Air Force tried to kill us. They would drop bombs on us. They were teaching us not to get shell-shocked. Only one person in my class had a nervous breakdown. They sent her back home, but all the rest of us went right on through that. We were trained and ready in case they needed us. As far as I understand, no woman ever went to the lines; they were at the field hospitals. A friend of mine went and she came back and committed suicide. She couldn’t deal with what she saw.

I had lived, I guess, a fairly sheltered life. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was typical of the sixties, but I guess I wasn’t. I hadn’t ever had sex or anything like that. Like I said, I grew up in Waco and the Baptist headquarters
is there. But during the war everything was going fast. A day then was like a month now. It was terrible pressure, taking care of the wounded. Men died in my arms. I was their mother, I was their priest, I was their sister, whatever they needed. I would talk to them and I’d pray with them. I’d hold them in my arms and tell them that they were a hero and that I’d never forget them, and I haven’t. I still dream of that. They say that’s post-traumatic stress syndrome and I should go to the VA. No, what that is, is just caring for people.