The Girls Who Went Away (30 page)

I had to be with people giving birth. After finding my son, that has kind of diminished. I left OB five years ago to become a case manager. And now I’m director of case management and it’s funny because I often feel I’m an impostor. I’ve got this position and I’m thinking, “One day they’re going to find out I don’t really belong here.” It’s really funny to be like that, so there’s still something inside that makes me feel I’m not good enough. But it’s changing, slowly.

Those social workers kept telling me I wasn’t good enough to parent my son, and made me believe I wasn’t good enough to parent anybody. I’ve held my children way too tight and that’s why they’ve struggled as teenagers. My daughter is going to be thirty-five and she lives on my street. They’ve all had trouble separating. I cannot let anybody go. I mean, I’m still sending Christmas cards to people I’ve met on the street or something. I cannot lose anybody.

Self-confidence is an issue, self-esteem, I should say, rather than confidence. And I think the reason I’m heavy is because I was portrayed as a loose girl, so I’m always making sure that no man will want me. For me, it’s always been: God didn’t let me keep my baby. God took my son, because he didn’t stop it.

When I found my son, I very much wanted him to be my baby again, and I went through a very difficult emotional period of trying to go back and get the part of me that was seventeen and incorporate it into my forty-two-year-old self, now fifty-four—to make that part of me old.

We make decisions for people that we really shouldn’t make because we feel they’re not living as we think they should live. Social workers made the decision that I wasn’t good enough to parent my son, because I wouldn’t have been parenting up to their standards. Maybe I wouldn’t, but I could have done it. I could have parented my son. I was parenting within two years, anyway, and did a decent job of it.

To look at the surrender papers now is shocking. It’s just like you’re handing over your car or something, you know. To see your own signature thirty
years later is just very, very painful. I loved him, and I would have sacrificed some of the things that I wanted in order to be his mother. They had no right to make that decision for me and for him. They robbed us of twenty-five years together.

You know, my mom became ill the last years of her life. But Mom didn’t want to go to the nursing home. She was completely bedridden and lived alone until she died. And the way she did it was she lived on my street, and my brother lives on my street. And I have another brother and another sister and we all took turns taking care of her. It was a sacrifice for all of us, but we did it because we’re family and that’s what families do. Well, we were a family then, too, and they should have done it. They owed it to me because I was a member of their family. Not because I was good, bad, or whatever, but because I belonged to them.

LESLIE

M
y boyfriend had his first sexual experience the summer before we started going out. He kept telling me stories about Sheila, who had put out the summer before, and how wonderful it was when you finally had sex. I managed to stay a virgin all the way through my senior year. I was dangerously close, I might add, but I stayed a virgin until the night of my senior prom.

So the summer after graduation was my summer of being sexual. We had sex—and I use that term loosely—maybe six to ten times. In August of 1965, I had gotten tickets to the Beatles’ concert in Atlanta and we went out parking afterward and had sex and when we came back to the house I said, “Something’s happening in my stomach. I feel like it’s the Fourth of July in there. What if I’m pregnant?” I’m not even sure I thought of it before that—denial is a wonderful thing when you’re seventeen years old.

He went off to college, and I went to a local junior college and within six weeks I was throwing up in the morning. We were talking back and forth on the phone: “What are we going to do?” “I don’t know. What are we going to do?” Finally he said, “I’ll come home next weekend and tell my dad and we’ll get married.” I was madly in love with him and it was a huge relief that he wanted to marry me, but I also felt this tremendous ambivalence. I’m thinking, “I’m only seventeen years old. How am I going to get married and raise a baby?” So, to be honest, I really had a mixed reaction.

I told my parents and it was horrific. I remember being so scared and shaking because I had always been the good girl. Of course, in that day, everything had to look right for the neighbors. It was such a huge thing. When we pulled up in the driveway after a date, if we sat in the car more than two or three minutes the front-porch light started to flick on and off because “What would the neighbors think you were doing out there in the car?”

The closest maternity home was in Mobile, Alabama, about a hundred
miles away. My mother couldn’t get me out of town fast enough. But before I left she told me that my grandmother had to get married. I was so grateful that she told me. That was a little present she gave me: “You’re not alone.”

I don’t really remember the drive over. I know it was just my mother who took me. The maternity home was this huge old brick, three-story building that looked very institutional. I was terrified. I thought it was going to be like reform school. I was so scared the other girls would be hoods—that’s what we called kids with their sleeves rolled up and a pack of cigarettes, and possibly a switchblade, in their bobby socks. But when we walked in I could hear giggling. I was totally stunned when I started meeting the girls. They looked just like me—they were college students, high-school students, cheerleaders—the nicest of the nice girls. I was put in a room with four or five others and one of them was a little girl the nuns called Little Bit. She was thirteen years old and she wasn’t any bigger than a minute. The whole time that I was in that room she cried herself to sleep every night; she was homesick.

At the maternity home the party line was: “If you really love your baby, you will give it up. You’re doing a wonderful thing for a couple who can’t have children. The baby would be called a bastard on the playground. It would be so selfish of you to keep your baby.” And as long as you were going along with the party line, then you were with the group. But if you ever wavered or had second thoughts that you weren’t going to be able to go through with the adoption, you immediately got separated from the pack so you wouldn’t contaminate the thinking of the rest of the girls.

I look back now and think, “Oh my God, that’s mind control, that’s brainwashing.” But at the time it just seemed normal, like if someone did something wrong they got put into solitary confinement. I would do anything they said. If they had told me “Go to the third floor and jump off the roof and that’s how you’ll regain your parents’ approval,” then that’s exactly what I would have done. I had to get their approval back.

My mother gave me her wedding band from her first marriage so I could wear it when I went out in public, which she basically wished I would never do unless I put a bag over my head. We’d go out in little clumpets. I’m sure everybody in the world knew we were from the maternity home but we’d all walk around with our wedding bands on like we were just as normal as could be. My favorite nun was a big, tomboyish woman from the Midwest. We all
loved her and you knew that she loved you. On one of our outings, we went to the Humane Society and got Sister two puppies. I don’t know how she managed, but she convinced the nunnery that we needed the puppies on the premises and they kept them.

There was another nun who was the counseling nun and she wasn’t more than twenty-five years old and she would come once a week. She was a social-worker nun. That was my first inkling that maybe if I survived this I could help somebody else. Maybe I could be a social worker and be a compassionate ear to somebody else who was going through difficulties.

I was terrified to give birth. I’d never been in a hospital. The sister took me over and pulled up in front of the hospital and let me out. At seventeen, I went in and admitted myself. They wouldn’t allow your parents to come until the baby was born; I don’t know why. I had to labor in the hall. I couldn’t be in the labor room because all the women in that room were married. Finally, they pulled the gurney into a room and gave me something and the lights went out. I remember absolutely nothing about his birth. The next thing I remember was my parents standing over the side of my bed. They were smiling and crying and I said, “What did I have?” And they said, “A little boy.”

When I came back to the maternity home I got to visit with my baby every day. I would feed him and rock him and when I would look at him…there in my lap, staring back at me, was the birth father and me. I could see both of us in that child, plain as day. Losing my relationship with the father was hard, too, because, seventeen or not, that was my first love, and when you have a child with someone you have a connection for life.

I remember little snippets of having to go to the courthouse to sign the papers to relinquish my son. My mom says she went along, but I don’t have any recollection of that. I had to sit in what was like a witness stand and the judge was behind the big desk with this gavel. I remember him saying over and over, “Do you understand you can never go back on this? This is irrevocable. Once you sign these papers, you can never see your child or have any contact with your child, do you understand that?” He reiterated it in two or three different ways but I was so scared. I was in the frozen, good-girl mode. I’m sure I signed the papers, but I don’t remember. I got to visit with him one last time and when I was holding him his little eyelids were flickering and he was smiling and Sister said he was dreaming of angels.

I never got any copies of the papers that I signed. I asked my mom years later if she had any papers put away, but she didn’t get copies, either. I do remember coming back from the court hearing and squeezing myself into one of the beautiful dresses that I had made at the home. I remember being all mixed up, being sad, but kind of excited to get out, and terrified to see my friends—all those emotions were mixed in there together.

The first few weeks at home, I cried all the time. I’d lock myself in the bathroom or go to my room. I cried all night but I didn’t let anybody hear me because I felt like I was being bad. I wasn’t doing what they said I was supposed to do, which was “Get over it. Move on with your life and put it behind you.” I thought, “Crap, I can’t even do
this
right.” I remember standing at my bedroom window at night, looking for my boyfriend’s car to drive by. I would just stand and look out that window.

Finally, I talked my parents into letting me see my boyfriend one last time so I could tell him about the baby. We went out and oh, it was heaven on earth. I could
talk
about it. We cried together, and I told him what the baby looked like. He said, “We can go get him back,” and I had to keep telling him, “You don’t get it. There’s nothing we can do. I signed him away.”

I had a much lower profile once I was back home. I made preparations to go away to college. My mother found this little Catholic all girls’ school for me in northern Alabama. I wouldn’t have to worry about who knew and who didn’t, so there was some relief in that. I had been gregarious in high school and had lots of friends. But when I went to this school and tried going to a few mixers with the boys I was just all in knots inside. I couldn’t make conversation and I couldn’t wait for the bus to come and take the boys back to their school.

Then in January I got a phone call from a fellow I hadn’t heard from in probably two years. He was my boyfriend from the ninth grade until my junior year. He was getting shipped to Vietnam. He and another friend from high school had enlisted in the buddy system. They were going to ’Nam and they wanted to blow it out before they left, before they got their hair cut off, so they came for the weekend. I fixed his friend up with my best friend and we drove to Birmingham and got two rooms in the seediest motel you ever saw. The idea was the two girls were staying in one room and the two guys in the other. We were going to get drunk, but we were going to go to bed in our respective rooms, which I think, in fact, we did.

I remember drinking Rebel Yell and Coke and I got so drunk I didn’t know my name. I have snippets of memory, but I don’t remember a whole lot of the evening. I was with people I really enjoyed but I was anxious, so I got drunk. That voice in my head was going, “Do they know? Do they know?” One of the snippets I remember is being on the floor of the motel room with him on top of me, making out. I think the other couple had gone off to the other room. I remember thinking, “The only reason he came to see me is because he heard about me. I’m sure that’s it. He heard I put out.” Then thinking, “What does it matter, I’m not a virgin anyway? What does it matter?” I woke up in the morning in my room with my girlfriend in the next bed. We were all hung-over to beat the band and they took us back up to school and left. I hoped I hadn’t had sex with him, but six weeks later I got up one morning and I threw up. I knew immediately I was pregnant again. I just felt frozen. I literally started shutting down.

When my mom came to pick me up at the end of the semester, I slept on and off in the backseat of the car. I remember lying back there thinking, “What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What is wrong with me?” I mean, you could forgive someone a first pregnancy. How in the world could you ever tell anybody you did this again? You can’t. So I ate like a mad woman. I gained seventy pounds. Lucky for me, it was the era of tent dresses and muumuus, so I made myself dresses and I ate everything that wasn’t nailed down. Mother would lecture me, “You’re gaining weight. You used to be such a pretty girl.”

I drank a whole bottle of castor oil to induce labor. And a few times when my mother and grandmother went out together I stood at the top of the stairs and threw myself down. All that happened was I got black and blue. Over the course of the summer, I would go out to visit my sister, who lived a few miles away, and there was a really sharp curve in the road and I remember thinking, “I really have to kill myself because I can’t tell anybody and I can’t go through this again.” One time I got up to about a hundred and twenty on that curve and then it occurred to me, “They’ll do an autopsy and they’ll know I’m pregnant. God, I can’t even get out of this life without anybody knowing.”