The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

by Ann Fessler

  In January 1989, which was the year he turned twenty-one, I was ready to search. I finally got the nerve to call the agency and the director said, “I really can’t tell you anything over the phone. If you have any questions, they have to be in writing.” I’m thinking, “Oh, that’s just great. I could barely say the words, now you’re asking me to write them?” I couldn’t. Then one summer evening my husband said, “Why don’t we just sit outside, you tell me what you want to say, and I’ll write the letter.” It seemed much easier that way. On Monday morning, I walked up the granite steps to the old post office and put that letter down on the counter, shaking.

  On Wednesday, my husband called me at work crying. I’ve only heard him cry once, when his father died. He had done something he’d never done before, and has never done since: he opened mail that had my name on it. The letter said, “Dear Nancy, I got your letter and I’ve read it, and nowhere in it did you say you’d like to meet your son. If that’s something you’re interested in, I’d like you to call me because I opened your file and there’s a letter from your son in there.”

  He read this letter to me and the only word I can use to describe it was, I was paralyzed, absolutely paralyzed at the thought that he had tried to make contact and no one told me. His letter had said, “If you’re interested in talking to me, give me a call.” The thought that my son might even entertain the idea that I hadn’t held him close to my heart for twenty years…

  I hung up from the call with my husband, picked up the phone, and called the guy at the agency. I said, “I just got your letter.” He said, “I’m not sure if you know what you want to do…you might need some time to think about it.” I said, “I don’t need one more fuckin’ minute, okay?” He said, “Don’t get mad at me. I wasn’t even here then. I’ve only been here thirteen years.”

  The phone rang at work and someone said, “It’s for you. It’s a young man.” I took it in the back room. He said, “Hi, the man at the agency gave me your phone number.” And I asked him the question I’d asked every single night, 365 days a year, for 21 years: “Where are you?” I’d look up at the stars at night and think, “We’re under the same sky,” and it was the one thing that made me feel close to him. I knew that he was looking at the same stars. I didn’t know where he was. He could have been in Germany, if he was in the service. I was prepared for him to be anywhere in the world. When I said, “Where are you?,” he says, “I’m in my bedroom.” I said, “Okay, where’s your bedroom?” As it turns out, he was right across the river from me. We know a lot of the same people; our paths had crossed many times. We ate at the same restaurants. I had worked in the theater department of a college where he was taking classes.

  I wound up seeing a psychiatrist for about a year to deal with the grief, which I hadn’t fully dealt with. It’s never a good idea to delay that process. It was a difficult year for me, juggling family, a job, our relationship, and dealing with my past at the same time. My son lived near me for about eight years and then he moved to New York City. We started a small business together so we could work together and we became very close during that time.

  Losing him had such a profound influence on me. You know, my siblings all had fancy degrees and very focused careers, and they drew from that in order to define who they were. This is what I had; this is what influenced most of my life decisions, the development of my family, where I lived—I would never have moved out of this state because this is the last place I saw him. It affected the choice of my husband to someone who was accepting immediately and almost passive about it. It’s affected my drive in terms of politics and I think, most of all, my sense of feminism.

  People say to me, “Oh well, it’s not that way anymore.” I say, “It’s still that way for a lot of us. A lot of my sisters are still suffering in silence.” And the more I read about the physiological effect that stress has on your life—you know, I’m not at all convinced that there isn’t a small connection between illness and this trauma. I’ve known some birth mothers who died when they were fifty years old from cancers of one kind or another. I mean, trauma is not a mystery. It really attaches itself to you in a way that’s very hard to undo.

  It’s hard to convince others about the depth of it. You know, a few years after I was married I became pregnant and had an abortion. It was not a wonderful experience, but every time I hear stories or articles or essays about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, “You don’t have a clue.” I’ve experienced both and I’d have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption—or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is. You know your child is out there somewhere, you just don’t know where. It’s bad enough as a mother to know he might need you, but to complicate that they make a law that says even if he does need you we’re not going to tell him where you are.

  It overshadows my life. People can’t believe it has had such influence. Or they don’t believe that it is relevant anymore because I know my son now. But that little wet ink across a piece of paper made me not a mother in the eyes of society. That’s all it took was the stroke of a pen. They felt they could erase it, but we just aren’t made that way. It’s unnatural to be separated from your child that way. And if it happens when you’re fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, and it’s your first experience of motherhood, it makes you a little crazy. Sometimes I wonder how any of us survived it and are as successful as we are in our interpersonal relationships. Not that I consider myself to be completely successful. I’ve sequestered myself out here in the woods for most of my life to be away from people.

  It’s changed my personality. I feel like I was in a car accident. You know how sometimes when people have a head trauma their personality changes? Well, it changed my personality. I don’t really care if I have the popular view. I suffered this alone for twenty-one years so everyone around me would be comfortable: “Don’t talk about it, because it makes us uncomfortable.” And I didn’t.

  I think if anything good came from my pain it has been to encourage other women in my situation to understand that they have as much right to put their opinion out there as I do. I tell them their story is as important as the next person’s story. They all have to be heard. For twenty-one years I wasn’t allowed to speak about it, but I have my own voice now.

  CLAUDIA

  I got pregnant on my seventeenth birthday, so 1967. I was living at home. I was a junior at…well, nowadays it would be called an alternative high school, but it was a private prep school. I hated public school. I did okay, I just hated the social aspect of it. I went to a high school in a new suburban area where if you weren’t a cheerleader you weren’t anything, and I was an artist weirdo.

  During that time, the most important thing in my life was my art. I was always drawing, always, always. My life mostly revolved around a few friends, music, and drawing. I went to life drawing classes all the time and there was a man in that drawing class that I thought was the most handsome man I had ever seen in my whole entire life. He was also an amazing artist. He was Cape Verdean Portuguese and he was quite a bit older than me: he was thirty-one to my seventeen. His paintings were beautiful. Those were the kind of men I would be attracted to, the hippie or artist type.

  I didn’t abuse any substances—I don’t consider smoking a little pot abusing substances. I wasn’t a big drinker, and I was not promiscuous. At that point, I had only had sex with my first boyfriend and I only had sex with him once, then he moved on to somebody with bigger breasts. That’s the truth. So, anyway, it’s the night of my seventeenth birthday, I was with my friend, and we’re excited. We’re going to hang out and maybe meet some cute university guys. I had on a polyester stretch iridescent paisley psychedelic minidress and those Indian sandals that everybody wore where your toe goes through the one thing. My friend had on a white peasant blouse with a little string and the puckering, cutoffs, and the Indian sandals.

  So we’re off for the evening to celebrate my birthday. We had taken the
bus downtown from the suburb where we both lived and we’re walking up the street and there, sitting on the front stoop of a house, was that gorgeous man from the art class. He sees us and says, “What are you girls doing?” And my girlfriend says, “It’s Claudia’s birthday so we’re out for the night, we’re going to celebrate.” He says, “If you girls want to come back here at nine-thirty tonight, I’m having a party and it can be a birthday party for you, too.” Well, my heart dropped down into my lower abdomen. I could not believe he was talking to us, never mind inviting us to a party. My heart was pounding. I’m dying, I just couldn’t believe this, because he was so handsome and he was this wonderful artist.

  So, we go up the street but, of course, nothing is gonna compare with what we’ve got to look forward to. We walked back down later and, sure enough, he was having a big party. The people at the party were older, probably in their late twenties or early thirties—an interesting, artsy, eccentric crowd. My girlfriend hooked up pretty damn fast. She was adventurous and already sexually active and liberated, and I really wasn’t. I was pretty naïve in that whole realm. I mean, my mother told me about periods and that was it, you know. I never got anything except what I learned from friends, so I really was very naïve. I remember the older women kind of eyeballing us but I was so honored and overwhelmed just being there, and having fun. He totally focused on me, gave me tons of attention, and clearly led me to believe that he was interested in me, so I couldn’t think of anything else. I was in one of those states where you’re really just so joyful that you can’t believe it. That was on a Friday night and before I left he asked me, very gently and respectfully, if he could have my phone number and would I like to get together sometime? I was dying, I gave him my phone number and said, “Absolutely.” Now, I didn’t know it, but at the time he did have a girlfriend. She wasn’t at that party.

  Only a couple of days passed and he called me and said he wanted to see me. And this is what we did a lot of the time: I would cut school and go to his apartment, he would get out of work, and we basically just had sex. I don’t remember the sex being particularly…it wasn’t like I liked sex or didn’t like sex; I just wanted to be with him. He never said anything about birth control and I don’t know what I was thinking. I got pregnant probably the first or second time I ever had sex with him. I got pregnant almost immediately.

  So here I am, at this private school, wearing this uniform—the gray flannel skirt, white shirt, and cranberry blazer—and I’m taking Humphreys 11 [a homeopathic preparation for irregular or delayed periods] by the bottleful. There was this legend that Humphreys 11 would make you have your period. Nothing was happening. I wasn’t getting a period. So I go to Planned Parenthood and get a pregnancy test and it’s positive. But my denial was pretty huge. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. I kind of created this fantasy in my head that something would happen that would fix this.

  I didn’t even think of abortion. Abortion wasn’t legal. I had known friends who had had private abortions. If you had money, you could always get an abortion. Their mothers’ gynecologists did D and Cs, but I was terrified of telling my mother. So, little by little, my waistline is expanding and I’m trying to hold my skirt together with pins. I started off with safety pins, then bigger and bigger, and then diaper pins. The biggest pin I got to was…at that time kilts were very popular, remember those plaid, pleated kilts that had the giant pin? That was the last frontier, the kilt pin.

  I knew I had to tell him but in the meantime it had become real apparent that I had become the other woman. I’m sneaking around behind someone else’s back. I kinda know her and I feel guilty, but I’m addicted to being with this man because he kind of embodies everything that I think is spectacular about men. So that’s what the relationship had evolved into. He was having an open relationship with her and I was sneaking around. I didn’t feel good about it, but I continued to do it.

  Anyway, I’m getting very big and I feel I have to tell him. So one night I’m babysitting. My parents are out and I go into my mother’s room, shut the door, pick up the phone, and I call him. I say, “I have to talk to you. I’m pregnant.” He says, “Get outta here. What are you talking about?” I said, “It’s true, I am. I didn’t say anything to you before, but now I’m sure. I’ve done the test, and I’m really starting to show. I’m almost four months pregnant.” He says, “You’re crazy, you can’t be. There’s no way.” He keeps saying what I’m telling him isn’t true and I’m trying to be discreet and quiet on the phone and finally I scream, “You have to believe me. I am pregnant. You are the only guy I’m having sex with. I’m pregnant!” My sister has been sitting outside the bedroom door and I hear her run down the hallway. I walk out and she looks at me and says, “I’m telling Mommy.” I immediately call my other girlfriend who has a car. I pack a bag and I run away. I run away to a hippie flophouse apartment where I knew some people—you know, with the bare mattresses and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison posters on the walls?

  My girlfriend who was at the party with me knew where I was, but you could have put cigarettes out in her arms and she would never have told my mother; she never did. My mother went to her house and threatened her mother, she was hysterical, of course. I would have done the same if it was my daughter. My girlfriend reported to me daily. She was the most loyal friend, and she still is now. But I had another friend who lived with her fiancé, who knew where I was. She didn’t have the same amount of backbone. My mom got to her and broke her down. I’m not judging because I understand now, as a mom, the terror of not knowing where your kid is.

  So maybe something short of a week had gone by and my mother is absolutely hysterical. She’s on Valium and diet pills, going absolutely mental. She’s telling my friends I just need to come home. She eventually breaks my weaker girlfriend down. One morning there’s a knock on the door. I open the door and there’s my girlfriend with my mother standing behind her peering into this room with the bare mattresses. My mother is crying and freaking out and my friend is saying, “I didn’t want to tell her, don’t be mad. She made me tell her.”

  My mother grabs me and hugs me and says, “I don’t care what’s going on in your life. I know you’re pregnant. You need to come home. We’re gonna take care of this. We’re going to do whatever we need to do.” She sounded like a mother. So I pack my things and I go home. Within a day or so, I’m getting shipped off to Dorchester, Massachusetts, to St. Mary’s home for unwed mothers. In 1968, Dorchester and Roxbury, Massachusetts, were literally burning from race riots. It was like being sent to a war zone.

  At the time I went to the maternity home, my dad was commuting to Boston for work. My dad was kind of shut down, but I liked him. I felt a connection with him. He was really smart. He used to help me with my homework and we talked about politics, and he supported me going to art school. My mom didn’t really respect me being an artist, but my dad respected it. He would give me art books—the really big coffee-table kind—on Picasso and on surrealism and Dalí. He didn’t really like or know anything about art, but he supported and respected my interests. So those tiny little things my dad had done for me cemented our relationship, and I identified with him. My mom used to always say, “Oh, it’s all fine and dandy that you’re an artist, but you’re never going to be able to do anything with it. You need to learn something to fall back on. You need a job with the city.” That was my mother’s mantra: “Get a job with the city.”

  The maternity home had really dark woodwork everywhere, dark woodwork railings, and lots and lots of marble stairs. It was attached to the hospital, but it looked more like a house than a hospital. It looked like an old lady’s house in England or something. It had that weird, disapproving grandmother feel to it. They had big dorm rooms where four girls slept in a room. You had a little twin bed with a dresser. Then there was a lunchroom, and they always had stewed tomatoes. They gave us water pills every day so we wouldn’t retain fluids, yet they were feeding us all this high-sodium hospital food.


  So, anyway, this is where I am. I’m seventeen, I’m at least five months pregnant, and I’m in this really weird place run by nuns. Their disapproval was palpable. They gave me the name Marsha; everybody was given a fake name. I bonded with my three roommates and, of course, we knew each other’s real names. There were probably about twenty-five girls in the home at that time. The youngest was fourteen and she was one of my roommates. The oldest was in her middle thirties. She was mildly retarded and had been raped. She had been raped and left on the side of the road.

  The intake nun was this really hard-looking woman. They all had mustaches. The nuns where I grew up were from this order from Sicily that had lots of facial hair, too. Nuns do not get rid of facial hair. I felt like I was plopped in an environment and given no choices whatsoever. You know, I’ve done the ultimate shameful thing and this is the only answer to my problem, or the problem I’ve caused in my family. There was really never any counseling or therapy, but there was a dialogue and this is what it was: “You’ve done a really bad thing. You have really sinned. You’ve committed the ultimate mortal sin.” There’s a big difference between mortal sins and venial sins. Mortal sins are the really bad sins that you’ve got to really, really make amends for.

  I don’t remember any dialogue around having choices. You were here, you were gonna be fed, and you’re going to get your schooling. You were going to be taken care of, but you were gonna have that baby and you are gonna do the only thing that is right. You’re gonna give that baby to good people, decent people, people who can take care of it because you are so bad and so flawed for just having this happen, that there’s no way you could possibly provide what a child would need. And if you were ever gonna redeem yourself in God’s eyes, you were gonna give this baby to a good Catholic family. I never believed that only a Catholic family was good, but I definitely believed I was flawed. I already believed that from the time I was about five. So it didn’t take a lot to really drill that home.