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| Acknowledgments | viii | ||||
| Prologue | x | ||||
| Introduction | 1 | (6) | |||
| PART ONE Weave a Circle Round Him (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) | |||||
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7 | (38) | |||
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45 | (21) | |||
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66 | (33) | |||
| PART TWO Let Us Live in as Small a Circle as We Will (J. von Goethe) | |||||
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99 | (27) | |||
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126 | (31) | |||
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157 | (27) | |||
| PART THREE The Wheel Is Come Full Circle (William Shakespeare) | |||||
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184 | (32) | |||
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216 | (31) | |||
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247 | (30) | |||
| EPILOGUE | |||||
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271 | (6) | |||
| Bibliography | 277 | (6) | |||
| Organizations and Resources | 283 | (2) | |||
| Index | 285 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
CONSUME MY HEART AWAY
The Birth Parents' Farewell
Lullabye Goodbye
One memory sweet
I'll always keep
Though it will make me cry
The day I gave
You life and sang
This lullabye goodbye
Lyrics by Beth Nielsen Chapman
There is a mythology surrounding the first time one makes love. It is an act that holds all the potential and awe of adulthood, the loss of childhood and innocence, and it is the ultimate act of independence from one's family. When I first had sex, it was also considered a sin for a young, unmarried woman to have "carnal relations," a transgression for which she should be ashamed and perhaps pay a price. What I knew and felt during the time I was dating Tom in 1965 was that I was taking part in the great American culture of romance, that I was like most of my peers. I had spent so many childhood years feeling like the outsider, the skinny, self-conscious, shy "army brat" who was somehow not a part of my own American society. We had been stationed in France during my early teen years, and I attended the French lycée . Coming back for my senior year of high school had been tough, and I had been eager to get to college.
My father was often away on military assignments during my early life. While home, he was loving and affectionate but also strict and controlling. This was true when I was a child and continued on through my adolescent and young adult years. We have never talked easily as a family, and we have tended to act out rather than discuss our feelings, allowing them to build up until they spill over. Tom represented a break from the confining discipline, and being with him gave me an opportunity to experiment with a blossoming, but not terribly experienced, side of myself. There was also, I suppose, an element of rebellion to my attraction to him. He was a German national serving in the American Army. My father had served in World War II and was in one of the first groups to enter Dachau when the war ended. We are also Jewish by birth, and although he tried, it was especially hard for my father to extend himself to Tom's German military father. Mostly, however, I think I was drawn to him because of his good looks, and because he was foreign and reminded me of my friends in Europe.
Tom and I were together for over a year, and I spent time visiting him at the base. During the summer of 1965, he was sent to Europe. I had no idea that I was pregnant, and it did not occur to me that anything was wrong until August, when I had the first symptoms of morning sickness. My family was on vacation in Puerto Rico when I started feeling nauseated and had trouble eating. I could barely get through a day's sight-seeing. My mother has a picture on her bureau of me taken during that trip, and every time I look at it I think back on how sick I was. Somehow, in some part of my brain, I managed to push back the truth and to keep anyone from knowing how I was feeling. It was the beginning of my secret life.
I was very thin then, and the fact that I gained little weight--and hid my growing bulge with a girdle--allowed me to hide the truth from everyone for six months. The death of my grandfather in my fourth month stalled my plan to tell my mother. I know that I just wanted this problem to go away, that I wanted to miscarry and pretend that nothing had ever happened. The stress I was feeling must have affected the nascent life growing inside me, but I was not yet thinking about the pregnancy as a baby that might someday be born. When I finally told my mother, she was furious at herself for not catching on earlier. "To say it was a shock is putting it mildly," she says. My father was devastated, and my mother also tells me he could not get over what was happening to his "bright and beautiful" daughter. He did not actually tell me how deeply shattered he felt, but I immediately felt a sense of shame and disappointment from him that I spent much of my adult life trying to overcome.
Events continued to unfold without my having much control over them, but I followed, trying to be the dutiful daughter making her way back into the family's heart. I wrote to Tom in Europe, and to the surprise of those around me, he came back on emergency leave, prepared to marry me. I remember feeling pleased by his response and excited that we would get married. Nobody in my family wanted the marriage, although this was what society expected of middle- and upper-middle-class white girls circa 1965 who stepped over the line of acceptable behavior and found themselves in my situation. My father never really liked Tom and wanted nothing to do with him when he came back. My mother says, "He thought he was a very cocky young man, and he felt that the relationship was based on a physical attraction, that it wasn't a real love." She reluctantly went along with plans for a private wedding, which Dad refused to attend. Everything was happening so fast, that I did not know what to do exactly. I was as much afraid my parents would reject me if I married Tom, as if I did not. He was a good guy, but I had never really thought about marriage, and when I did, I realized we had very different dreams and aspirations.
Our family friend Presbyterian minister Henry Baumann and our wonderful next-door neighbor Jane Elliot begged me to think through what I was doing. This was the first time in my life I knew my actions had real consequences. At the time, however, we were only focused on whether or not to marry. It had not yet registered that not marrying meant giving up the baby. One evening, Tom and I went to a party organized by friends of his. When I grew tired and wanted to leave, Tom resisted and remarked sarcastically, "So this is the way it's going to be." He did not seem to care that I was pregnant and only wanted to stay with his friends. I had an epiphany of sorts and somehow knew that the marriage would result in an even greater disaster than the one I was already in. I know he had returned to the States to do what he thought was right, but ultimately, I think he also knew it would be a mistake. I realize now how difficult it must have been for him to handle what was happening, and that he must have been terrified of a marriage with someone he was not sure he loved. He was also trying to cope in a clearly hostile environment, and in a sense it is no wonder he needed to party with his friends.
Tom did not seem bitter when my family and I saw him off at the military airport. He even seemed cheerful. Later when I was alone at the maternity home, I wondered about that and was upset that he was able to get on a plane without any indication he was thinking about the baby. I know now that birth fathers do not readily connect to their unborn child, and his reaction makes more sense to me. He was off the hook, and more than anything, he must have been relieved. I also think my family gave him permission to drop out, as we preferred to take matters into our own hands.
I spoke to Tom once more, a month after Andrew was born, and he seemed surprised about the adoption. I was surprised too by his response, because I was certain I had told him that is what I would do. It obviously had not registered. Now I sometimes wonder what in fact I had told him. In Europe, it is not as common as here for people to relinquish a child for adoption, and I can appreciate that it might not have been clear to him under the stressful circumstances. In any case, it was the last time we spoke.
After Tom left we moved quickly to finalize our plans. With the baby due in March, there was little time. I felt that so much was out of my control; my parents discussed options and exchanged information without consulting me. I found out many years later, for example, that when Tom's parents learned I had relinquished the baby, they were outraged, for they had expected me to keep Andrew. They sent my parents a telegram, which I never saw.
To this day I sometimes ask myself if we had talked more openly as a family whether we might have decided to raise Andrew ourselves. I do not remember much about my conversations with my family, but my mother says, "We talked about how we felt that the child would be better off having a father and a mother to bring him up." She adds, "But the separation was traumatic for everybody. None of us ever got over it, especially you, my dear, but none of us did." In retrospect, I see that we had no place to turn, no support group to attend, no books to read that would guide us through this lonely journey that at any other time in life, and under other circumstances, would be such a joyous experience. My mother has told me recently about how she and my father deliberated and considered the various options. They were especially concerned about my education, because my mother had not been able to go to college, and my father had left after only one year:
You were nineteen and we wanted you to go back to school and get your degree. If we kept him, I would have brought him up and we didn't think that was a good idea. He would have been pulled this way and that, and there would have been times when we disagreed about how he was to be raised, and you could have taken him away at any moment. Your father felt that I would have been brokenhearted and that since we had raised our family, it would be better if the child were with someone younger, someone who couldn't have children of their own, who could give the child a good home.
My sister, Laurie, who was fourteen at the time, knew I was pregnant, but true to family form, we did not talk much about it. "I was not part of the decision-making process," she says. "It was pretty much all up to my parents."
In the midst of everything, I was trying to finish the semester at college, and I still hid the pregnancy from everyone I could by wearing large coats and oversize shirts. I do not know who I really fooled. Our next-door neighbor Jane, herself the mother of seven, was a great comfort to me. I was able to discuss with her many of the fears and concerns I had that I could not or would not talk to my parents about. In my mind, I longed for the problem to go away, for the situation to be resolved. I wanted to get on with my young life.
First, I needed to have the baby. Shortly after Tom left, I went to New York for the last weeks of my pregnancy. The doctor at the army clinic in Virginia where I was examined told my parents about a maternity residence in the city, and from the residence, we learned of Spence-Chapin, an adoption agency that would find suitable parents for my child.
My memories of this time are vague. I wrapped myself in a tight cocoon and got through each day. I had the support of my parents, but I knew that they too wanted the bad dream to end and for their innocent Lynn to return to her "virginal" state. Somehow, I walled off my feelings to prepare for what lay ahead.
The maternity residence did nothing to foster my or anyone else's maternal senses, but they did try to engage us in activities suited to "proper" young women, like sewing (I made two skirts), and trips to museums. It all seemed rather beside the point considering "our condition," but it did pass the time. My sense is that none of us, at least none of us where I was staying, wanted to create any more trouble. We wanted to make right our wrongs and go home. I do not remember talking to anyone about whether or not they wanted to keep their babies, but I am sure some of us were thinking about it.
In her book The Other Mother , Carol Schaefer describes how she and the other women at Seton House maternity residence had to confess regularly their "mortal sin." Although the nuns and priest of Seton House, and society in general, considered Carol and the other women at her residence sinners, she knew she desperately wanted to keep her baby, and unlike me and the teens and women I knew in my maternity home, tried to find a way. She tells of meeting with one of the nuns to try to persuade her to help her:
The last time I had sat opposite her I had been a naive teenager accompanied by my mother. Now I felt I had matured almost to the point of becoming an old woman. Boldly I leaned forward and rested my folded hands on the edge of the desk. "I can't go through with this," I stated, looking her square in the eyes. Since I had lived such a sheltered life, I didn't know exactly what to ask for in the way of assistance. I had known no one who was raising a baby as a single mother.
There was no guidance for Carol on how to keep her baby, nor was there any for many others who hoped and prayed in silent darkness for someone to show them a place where they and their babies could live together.
Cynthia Beals also spent time in a Catholic maternity residence while she was pregnant, but for her it was a safe haven away from the turmoil of her family life:
I was protected from society's and my family's judgments, and I was able to continue my senior year of high school. The nuns were very non-judgmental and gave me a completely new perspective on Catholic nuns. I felt more love there than anywhere else and support for the schoolwork I wanted to do. They also told me while I was there, that it was my choice whether I wanted to keep the baby or not. I think that's what got me through the six months I was there, the love that I had for my child and that I would be able to take her home.
Cynthia ultimately surrendered her baby, but the intensity with which she connected to her infant during pregnancy left a lifelong impression on both mother and child.
The stories of these women impress me because they have clear memories of their experiences and had strong feelings about wanting to keep their babies. I, on the other hand, was still basically operating on automatic, following only semiconsciously the program set by my parents, and I remember very little from my time at the residence. I was numb to what was happening to me, as if it were someone else's life. I do know that we were not prepared in any way for the experience of labor and delivery. My labor began on a weekend when my parents happened to be visiting from Washington, D.C. The twenty-seven-hour ordeal was complete with water breaking, vomiting, moaning, and pain like I had never known before. My mother and father staggered their time with me in the labor room, and I remember Dad staying with me as I threw up and tried to keep breathing. We did not say much to each other. I was terrified and yearned for someone to care for me. Without ever being able to say anything directly, I think he sensed that. I know he needed to be sure his daughter was all right. We were perhaps closest that day in the tacit understanding of our needs.
The pain became too excruciating to bear, and the anesthesiologist began giving me Demerol. I was completely knocked out for the birth. When I came to, I remember being told it was a boy. I asked if he was okay, and then I looked at the clock to check the time of birth. Later, one of the first things the doctor said to me was how lucky I was to have a father who would come to the hospital with me. Most parents would have nothing to do with their daughter's hospital stay, but I was too traumatized at the time to appreciate that my mother and father were the exception.
Andrew was taken to the nursery, and my father left the hospital, unable to bring himself to see the grandson he would never know. I think he just expected I would have a girl, since we did not have a boy in our family, and he was overcome. My mother stayed with me and remained a constant presence. I only recently realized how painful it was for her to bear both my pain and the loss of her first grandchild.
Hospital staff have never been overly sensitive with birth mothers, or `out-of-wedlock' mothers, as they referred to us back then. Doctors and nurses lacked, and still do in many cases, training with adoption issues and are generally prone to the same misconceptions regarding birth parents as the rest of society. My experience with the staff at New York Hospital, however, was not overtly negative. Nor was anyone particularly hostile to me. I was on a ward, and I can recall the doctors on rounds going by my bed commenting that I was "o/w" (out-of-wedlock), but I was allowed to see and care for my baby boy.
When I first saw him, feelings poured over me that I never could have anticipated while I was pregnant, never truly believing that a perfect person in miniature would miraculously appear from inside my womb. There was another teen in the bed next to me, and she and I sat together in our beds, holding the infants that would soon go home with someone else. We talked about their toes, their eyelashes, and their button mouths hollering for food. My mother and I both thought Andrew looked like my father.
When the nurses brought the babies back each morning, I continued to marvel at this new life. I held him close, I talked to him and told him how much I loved him. I tried to memorize his features and looked for distinguishing marks that I might recognize later. In the course of the five days I spent with Andrew, I did make one decision that made me, even for the briefest of moments, indisputably his mother. It was routine in the hospital to ask parents if they wanted their sons circumcised, and when I made this decision for Andrew, I began to realize the enormity of the loss that lay ahead for me.
Andrew was nestled in my arms one afternoon when my ward mate pulled a camera out of her bag and took a picture of us. I still wonder what became of that photograph, that single memento of a time that has long been etched in my memory. I would give a great deal to have that snapshot of the two of us, child and mother together, before time put so many years between us. With that picture went my youthful spark and some of my trust and hope for the future.
Our Final Days Together
Only what I have lost is what I possess forever.
Rachel
I had five days in the hospital to shower upon my baby all the maternal love I would be allowed for the next twenty-seven years. I knew that we would soon be parted, and I was shattered. Perhaps it was then that I began to draw on my experience as a military child, one who was always having to let go, never able to hold on to anyone for too long before saying good-bye. Already conditioned to these feelings, I summoned my strength to bid Andrew farewell.
My mother and I left the hospital with Andrew and took a taxi to the agency's door. I was conscious as we drove through the city streets of looking out at people involved in their everyday lives. As we arrived in front of the agency, I struggled to get out of the taxi, holding the baby in one arm and formula in the other. A casual passerby would not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, whereas I have never forgotten that image of myself as a nineteen-year-old teenager at the doors of the adoption agency, where within the hour I would say good-bye to my baby.
We were escorted into the agency and shown to a small room where we were given a few minutes to be with Andrew. I felt rushed and pressed by the social worker who took charge of us. I clearly remember my anger and thinking that I was in enemy territory. Gretchen Viederman, the current director of domestic adoptions, remembers, "We had two elevators, one carried the birth mothers, and the other the adoptive parents. We stopped that practice of keeping things hidden and apart long ago."
As my mother held my free hand, I signed the papers that officially terminated my parental rights to Andrew. My mother says, "I don't think the terrible sadness about what we were doing actually came about until you had the child and you were signing those papers." When it was over, and we had said good-bye to the tiny, swaddled bundle, we walked down Fifth Avenue back to the maternity home. I could not fully absorb then everything I was feeling. I liken it to looking out over the Grand Canyon. Being overpowered by its vastness, I was able to experience very little. A feeling of nothingness hung over me. Apparently this sensation is not unusual, because I have since heard many birth mothers speak of how they shut down to cope with the trauma of relinquishment.
After a few more days in New York City, my mother and I traveled back to Virginia to begin life over again, each of us accompanied by the ghosts we had both helped to create. Adoptee and author Betty Jean Lifton talks extensively of the spirits that inhabit the "Ghost Kingdom" of people touched by adoption. In her book, Journey of the Adopted Self , she says the birth mother "is accompanied by a retinue of ghosts. The ghost of the baby she gave up. The ghost of her lost lover, whom she connects with the baby. The ghost of the mother she might have been. And the ghosts of the baby's adoptive parents." These ghosts accompany us for a lifetime.
I was encouraged to put the past behind me by the few people who knew what had happened. I was expected to get my life back on track. I worked for several months before returning to school, moving forward in a daze of supposed normalcy, while on the inside I cried out to hold the infant who was no longer in my arms. I longed to embrace a baby, feel the tiny, precious weight of a new body, and nuzzle my face in the smooth down that rests atop an infant's head. Whenever I could, I would visit my neighbor Jane and spend time with her six-month-old baby boy. That is how I connected with my own pain and managed to feel during those stolen moments the deep well of grief I held within me. I held that baby much as Andrew must have been held by his adoptive mother, and I whispered to him about my baby boy. Margaret Moorman, birth mother and author of Waiting to Forget , writes of a similar experience after baby-sitting one night: "How was this night different from all other nights? It was the only time I had thought of the child I had relinquished as `my baby.' It was the only moment when simple grief broke through my protective shell."
I had to be with and hold a baby even if it could not be my own. That was the only way I could keep going and begin to heal. Instinctively I knew, as Lao-tzu says, "A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one's feet." My feet, while bruised and battered from months of trauma, would move haltingly toward the redemptive power of healing in the decades before me.
How Society Set the Stage
Adoption forces people to embrace a certain set of beliefs.... Without those beliefs, adoption would probably not take place.
Marlou Russell
In the 1960s in the United States, society looked upon few things with such shaming judgment as a woman with an unwanted pregnancy. The message from the prevailing culture was quite clear, as plainly as is written in Corinthians 5:4--"Ye are fallen from Grace." The threat of the fall did not, nor will it ever, prevent a pregnancy. When actually faced with one, most family members, religious advisors, medical practitioners, and educational professionals put their collective heads together and tried to determine the swiftest and most clandestine cure for the condition. Prior to World War II, a child born out-of-wedlock was usually considered a child of sin, the fruit of an obviously mentally deranged woman. After the war, the tainted mother was offered a redemptive option by society: adoption. Until 1972, however, school officials could legally expel her from an educational institution.
In 1957, the official number of children born to mothers who were not married rose for the first time above 200,000, and many considered it an undercount of gross proportions. Abortions were not legal until Roe v. Wade in 1973, but doctors did perform the procedure if you knew where to find them and if you had enough money to pay their fees. Even if money was available, doctors very often insisted on sterilizing the woman. Bonnie Bis, who is currently the national president of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), remembers what it was like when abortion was not legal. "I was typically naive for those days," she says, "and I certainly didn't know any abortionists or anyone who had had an abortion. I feel strongly pro-choice now, but at the time, I don't know what I would have done if I had had the chance to have an abortion."
An unwed pregnant woman was always a fertile subject for gossip. In The Other Mother , Carol Schaefer says, "out-of-wedlock pregnancies were an intriguing topic of conversation, but never discussed except in whispers and innuendoes. To the whole community, as well as my parents, secrecy was easier. I did not feel `unwed' or `out of wedlock.' I felt pregnant with a baby for whom I already had a great deal of love. But I accepted the situation. This was how it was done."
The climate of the 1960s was such that women like me felt we had no choice. The social stigma of our situation was considered untenable, and our parents assumed authority over us. We were for the most part quite young and often emotionally immature, and without financial resources we acquiesced and did what we were told. Even today, many young women find themselves in similar situations. Whether it be the 1960s or the 1990s, the decision to relinquish is traumatic. It is made when women are extremely vulnerable, during a crisis pregnancy or after the birth of a baby when hormones are fluctuating wildly. It is made within the frame of a set of circumstances that cause them to feel they cannot, or are simply not ready to, parent their child. When the decision to relinquish is made with the benefit of good counseling, it may in fact be the best decision for mother --and child--given the circumstances of that woman at that time. Those of us who have relinquished might say with hindsight that we would not surrender our children again even if faced with the same difficulties, but we do not know that.
Youth certainly played a large role in my relinquishment of Andrew. My parents' concern about my education and the difficulties they foresaw if they took on the responsibility for the baby caused them to opt for adoption. The decision was made in isolation, because there were no support networks or role models to help us more fully consider all our options. Had there been, I might still have made the decision to relinquish, but I believe I would have done so feeling I had made a conscious positive choice for me and my child.
The Difference Was Race
It is striking how the black community organized itself to accommodate mother and child while the white community was totally unwilling and unable to do sc.
Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie
In researching this book, I have learned that what was happening in white middle-class America was not duplicated in the black and ethnic communities. Is this coincidence, or is it because the societal divisions between black and white during the tumultuous 1960s spread far enough to reach the issues surrounding the relinquishment of children? Even now, adoption in the African-American community is not as accepted as it is in the white population. In their book Birth Bond , Judith S. Gediman and Linda P. Brown say that "Babies born to black women unable to raise them are more likely to be `informally' adopted--that is, raised by relatives, friends, neighbors--than placed for formal adoption with strangers." Recently, the margins have narrowed, largely because of fewer placements overall. Between 1982 and 1988 only 3 percent of pregnant unmarried white women placed at least one child compared to 1 percent of unmarried black women.
How were the extended families of young black American women able to embrace and accept children born out of wedlock, while largely middle-and upper-middle-class white girls were ferried off to maternity residences before they showed enough to draw attention to themselves and their families? According to Rickie Solinger, "The good and protective intentions of parents notwithstanding, society and complicit mothers and fathers insisted that pregnant, broadly middle-class white girls be institutionalized and rendered invisible." By making their daughters disappear (many of whom were sent away from home for the first time), parents hoped that their own precarious status in post-World War II America would remain untarnished.
Another factor in the predominance of white placements versus black was the business of baby brokering. Certain agencies and institutions abused their power and fostered illegal and lucrative adoption practices. But it was individual baby brokers--generally lawyers, doctors, and other unaffiliated intermediaries--who committed the worst abuses. Vulnerable and needy women were easy prey, and marketeers offered them money and support in order to ensure that they would relinquish their babies. White babies were, and still are, a premium in the adoption market. As Solinger points out, "Some proponents of the adoption of white illegitimate babies promoted, wittingly or not, a basic disregard for the individual unwed girl or woman. While many agency workers did serve the mothers well, enthusiasm about the baby sometimes eclipsed focus on the mother's human predicament." The large numbers of available white infants during the 1950s and 1960s extended the leverage and power of adoptive parents, and simultaneously increased the disregard for the birth mother.
A Scared and Lonely State
I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.
Dylan Thomas
We know how society viewed birth mothers during the 1960s, but how did it feel to be on the receiving end of this perception? How did it feel to be so harshly judged and then punished by being hidden away? How, quite honestly, did women cope in such a scared and lonely state at a time before society allowed them to make choices about their bodies and their pregnancies? For many of us our truth was whispered in the dark hours of the night. During the light of day, keeping our secret was paramount, and pretending not to remember exacted a heavy toll. I never felt free to talk of my loss, and I have since been told that there was always a sense of hidden sadness about me.
While I anesthetized myself emotionally before and after the relinquishment, others vividly recall how desperate they felt. Jane Leeds, divorced and embroiled in a custody battle for her two children when she became pregnant, knew she could not ask her family for help. She was struggling to survive, and the man she was dating did not want to support the child she was carrying. He had recently lost his wife in childbirth and had one son, whom he was raising by himself. Jane and her son's father eventually married and had another child, but not before they relinquished this baby in 1961. Neither the father nor Jane wanted an abortion, and Jane says, "I didn't think there was any other option other than to place Michael." She found her way to Spence-Chapin and after the fourth month of her pregnancy lived in a residency hotel courtesy of the agency in a county north of New York City. At the age of twenty-six, she sent her two children to live with her parents while she "traveled" on business for a few months. Jane remembers feeling mortified about anyone discovering her condition and says there was an air of secrecy around the whole thing:
As I walked along the street toward the agency, I had such an awful, awful feeling. I was afraid of being caught, afraid of having the baby alone, afraid of being in this big city by myself. I was truly intimidated by the whole process, and yet I was very strong in knowing what I needed to do and that I was going to do it so I could take care of my other children. I had to sacrifice one for the others. I never questioned while I was pregnant what I was going to do because I had made my decision that the adoption was the best thing for him and the rest of us. It was an unfortunate and very sad thing for me to have to do.
Two great myths surround adoption: birth mothers do not care about their babies so they give them away, and they (and the birth fathers, if they are involved) will forget about their children. Neither Jane nor I stopped caring for our children, and we certainly did not forget about them. Jane believed, as did many other birth mothers who were counseled by family members, clergy, and social workers, that relinquishing her child was best for his welfare. At the same time she was also accused of abandoning her child. These "caretakers" of ours somehow expected us to reconcile this paradox when neither they nor we could even acknowledge it.
Jane left the hospital after twenty-four hours, never having seen her baby:
I was afraid to even consider holding him because I knew I could never give him up if I did. I decided not to see him; that was the only way I could see dealing with it. I left the hospital by myself and I was scared to death. Was I doing the right thing? How could I face other people? I had a terrible sadness, but at least the fear that someone would find out was over. I went back home and saw my children. It turns out my mother was in the hospital, one of my good friends had just died of cancer, and my sister had just had a baby, all at the same time. I tried not to think about Michael. I tried to just let it be in the past. It's hard to even think of how I felt then. I swallowed it for so long.
It is difficult now to imagine how I and other birth parents, and by extension our families, managed to keep silent, swallowing our grief for so many years. We had to postpone our mourning for decades, by which time the unexpressed grief had wreaked havoc on our lives. Historically, the reported incidence of birth mothers suffering depression after relinquishment has been low. This, however, is primarily due to their silence surrounding the subject, not their lack of pain and loss. I also suspect that until recently there was little interest in research about the birth mother's state of mind.
Bonnie Bis became pregnant with her first child in 1962 when she was sixteen years old, and another pregnancy followed just a few years later. Her Catholic upbringing dictated the tenor of her parents' reactions, and she feels that in getting pregnant twice she was continuing the pattern of her "shame-based" childhood. In both cases, like me, she shut down emotionally and "got through" the pregnancies and relinquishment of her children. She does, however, remember the terror of going through labor and delivery alone, cursorily attended to by a staff that understood nothing about a birth mother's situation:
I was isolated with my first delivery, kept alone, in pain, and bleeding all over the place. The staff was doing the most despicable acts to me, poking and prodding without one kind word. There was no such thing as modesty and I couldn't wait for it to be over. It was just like torture. Looking back now, I don't think I allowed myself to think that I had given birth to a human being, a baby, because that would have been more than I could have handled. It was all I could do to get through the delivery. All I wanted to do was get out of there. When it was over, I remember a sense of feeling completely alone.
The only way Bonnie could cope was to dissociate herself from the pain --and more importantly from her baby. In more extreme cases of denial, we see young women today throwing their babies in Dumpsters, killing them, because they cannot be allowed to exist. This is the psychology that infects the minds of young women when they are desperate and feel they have nowhere to go. Somehow we have to reach them and their families to help them understand that there are options, that they do not have to be isolated in their crisis.
Cynthia Beals was seventeen when she had her daughter. She says the day she went into labor, all she wanted to do was go into the chapel at the maternity home and pray that she would find a way to keep her baby. She felt that as long as she was carrying the baby, no one could take it away:
But it had become a reality, I was truly in labor, and I held off as long as I could before I told anyone because I didn't want to go to the hospital. And all I could remember at the time was God speaking to my heart because I was in so much emotional pain. And God said to me, "You know, Cynthia, it's not your child. It's mine, and I will take care of it." I had a sense of what I had to do and a sense of acceptance, but I did not like it. I didn't want to let go. The baby arrived two weeks early, when my parents happened to be at a funeral and out of contact. Here I was, giving birth for the first time, scared out of my mind and no one was there. Thankfully, I had a very easy delivery. She was such a beautiful girl, and I'm so thankful that I was able to hold her and see her because that memory is etched in my mind for the rest of my life. That's all I had to hold on to, the memory.
After Cynthia relinquished her daughter, she was told to just get on with her life. No one told her that it was natural for her arms to ache for her lost baby and that by facing her pain, she would be better able to move forward. Jim Gritter, the child welfare supervisor for Community, Family and Children's Services in Traverse City, Michigan, says, "Pain and goodness, or pain and health are not always antithetical notions. Sometimes they are very real companions. The pain is there, whether we are going to recognize it or not."
Feelings of emptiness and depression are familiar companions to women who relinquish their babies. Women of my generation especially were made to feel, whether explicit or not, that our maternal instincts were misplaced and that because we had not intended to become pregnant, we could not be mothers. In Primary Maternal Preoccupation , published in 1956, D. W. Winnicott offers a thesis that validates all the women who ached for their babies during their pregnancies and after delivery. "I suggest," he begins, "that sufficient tribute has not yet been paid in our literature, or perhaps anywhere, to a very special psychiatric condition of the mother, of which I would say the following things:
It gradually develops and becomes a state of heightened sensitivity during, and especially towards the end of, pregnancy. It lasts for a few weeks after the birth of the child. It is not easily remembered by mother once they have recovered from it. I would go further and say that the memory mothers have of this state tends to become repressed.
Can a woman ever truly recover from her "heightened preoccupation" if she is never allowed to nurture the child she gave birth to? The answer is yes, but the feelings accompanying her loss will not find resolution until she first faces what happened to her. Polarity therapist and body worker John Beaulieu also contends that the energetic connection to the baby is never lost. He says the body remembers and lies in wait even when the feelings are repressed. Over time, those "stored" feelings affect our physical health.
For years, I regarded the agency that arranged my son's adoption as the enemy. Over time my image of Spence-Chapin has changed, but for many birth mothers of my era it does not matter how we viewed the agency. Adoption agencies seemingly offered us the only path out of our predicament. Jane says she thought of the agency as providing the help she needed, but she never considered that they may have been able to help her consider parenting her child. She says, "I don't think they offered any kind of counseling at the time, and I never dreamed of asking for it."
Another of the great myths of adoption was that secrecy is necessary to protect all members of the triad. Agency workers and state laws placed enormous barriers in the way of birth parents and their children from ever contacting one another by making identifying information inaccessible. When birth mothers signed consenting papers that officially terminated their parental rights, most were made to understand that they would never see their children again, and that this was best for everyone. This "promise" of anonymity may have been intended to reassure adoptive parents that there would be no intrusion on their lives. It may have also consoled birth grandparents concerned with society's perception of them and their wayward daughters. And it may have originally protected adoptees from the shame of illegitimacy. But despite arguments to the contrary from parties interested in maintaining the closed system, there was little interest in or concern for birth mothers, and it was rarely a guarantee wished for or requested by us. The adoptee's birth certificate was, and still is in most cases, sealed by the state. An amended version is made that identifies the adoptive parents as the only parents. It is as if the adoptee is born to them, and the birth mother, once again, is rendered invisible.
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Copyright © 1998 Lynn C. Franklin. All rights reserved.
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