by Ann Fessler
Then I thought about my own children and how I had no medical background to share with them. That’s when I decided to search for my birth mother. I found her just about a year ago and we have been exchanging e-mails about once a week. I have never met her, or heard her voice, but am enjoying getting to know her slowly. Her story is very similar to those in your article—the unaccepting parents, inhumane unwed mothers home, etc. She actually had a nervous breakdown and subsequent long-term therapy after she gave me up. She was so glad to hear that nothing awful happened to me after I was adopted. She had reoccurring nightmares of my abuse and mistreatment. We are taking our relationship very slow. My parents have been supportive but hesitant. My dad is the one who actually cut out your article and gave it to me. I couldn’t have asked for more wonderful parents. It has given my birth mother such relief to know that.
I’m not sure why I just wrote all of those details. I think these women have suffered in guilty silence for so long.6
Debbi
Simple acknowledgment on the part of the public, professionals, family, and friends that these women have, in fact, suffered a loss and that grief is a normal reaction to their loss would be an enormous step forward, not just for those women who have shared their secret but for all who have been unable to come forward because of fear of further recrimination. Perhaps the example set by Australian social workers and the Tasmanian Parliament could serve as a model. The social stigma of single pregnancy and the treatment of unwed mothers in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s were virtually identical to the situation in the United States. In 1998, urged on by organizations composed of triad members—Adoption Jigsaw and Origins—the Parliament of Tasmania held hearings to determine whether the practices of the 1950s–1980s were “unethical and/or unlawful, or practices that denied birth parents access to non-adoption alternatives for their child.”7 It stated, “The main purpose of this inquiry was to provide those birth mothers that believe they were not treated fairly or appropriately in adoption practices between 1950 and 1988 with an opportunity to put their case forward.”8 The committee listened to the testimony of mothers and professionals and concluded that due to the lack of records, the death of some potential witnesses, conflicting or insufficient evidence, it could not make definitive findings regarding unethical or unlawful practices, but it stated:
In hindsight, it is believed that if knowledge of the emotional effects on people was available during the period concerned, then parents may not have pushed for adoption to take place and birthmothers may not have, willingly or unwillingly, relinquished their children. Witnesses and respondents, who include some adopted children, would not therefore be experiencing the pain and suffering, which continues to influence their lives.9
The report also cited the statement below, with the comment, “Perhaps the statement by the Australian Association of Social Workers Ltd on 12 June 1997 has already made the wisest conclusion to this report.” The statement reads:
The Australian Association of Social Workers Ltd (AASW) expresses its extreme regret at the lifelong pain experienced by many women who have relinquished their children for adoption. In doing this, we recognize that decisions taken in the past, although based on the best knowledge of the time, and made with the best of intentions, may nevertheless have been fundamentally flawed. Many individuals and professionals, social workers included, were in the past involved in the process that led mothers to give up their children for adoption. With the wisdom of hindsight, and with an awareness of the knowledge, resource, and support now available, we believe that in the same situations today, the same individuals and professionals would give very different advice. This in no way diminishes the pain felt by the mothers and children who were separated at birth.10
Acknowledgments by professionals that they, too, were the products of the social forces of the time, such as the one above, can go a long way toward facilitating conversations within families about the pressures that parents felt. But within most families there has been silence. They were unable to talk about it at the time, and perhaps time has only made it more difficult to broach the subject. It is clear from the interviews that women who have finally been able to have an honest and frank conversation with their own mothers have experienced a tremendous sense of healing. Although these women cannot retrieve what they have lost, some were finally able to mend the relationship with their families. The exchange was cathartic and healing but, unfortunately, often took place thirty or more years after it should have.
My mom got struck down by cancer. We were told it was terminal, so my husband and I took her into our home and, with Hospice, we saw her through her last two months. Hospice told us that we’re supposed to go to the dying person and tell them how much we loved them and thank them for raising us and apologize to them for things we have done wrong. So, of course, what did I apologize for? I apologized for being such a problem when I was a kid. She said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “You know, the baby.” She had only three weeks to live then. She grabbed my hand and looked at me and she said, “Are you kidding?” She said, “Joyce, I am sorry.”
After she died, we were going through her things and she has a scrapbook that started out with her oldest child—that was me. We each had a page, then there was an empty page. Then the page after that started with my sister’s children, all in order of their births down to the last baby born. Everybody had their page and there was an empty page where my son would have gone. I opened that book and I started crying. I said, “Thank you, Mom.”
—Joyce II
If readers scratch beneath the surface of their own family history, they may find a story of unwed pregnancy. Many stories, of course, have been lost to history because mothers carried their secrets to the grave. In some cases, women have not been able to talk about their experience until their own death is imminent and the fear of earthly judgment no longer matters. Deathbed confessions about long-lost nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, or grandchildren are not uncommon. Two of my oldest and dearest friends each had family members who were unable to talk about their secret until they thought it was their last opportunity. One friend’s seventy-nine-year-old mother confessed to her daughter—as the mother lay on a gurney about to be wheeled into surgery—that the person the daughter knew as her uncle was really her half brother. The mother had a baby just before she married, and the baby was raised by her parents as their own. My friend’s father would not allow his wife to bring “that bastard” into their home. The mother had been asked to choose between her child and her future husband.
In the other instance, a girlfriend’s sister had become pregnant by her high-school sweetheart. They later married, but the baby had already been relinquished. The sister would not talk about the surrender until the week leading up to her death from cancer at age fifty-one. In both cases, the effects of the ongoing secrecy and silence strained relationships between family members, who could not speak of the elephant in the room that had affected all of them.
In all my training in social work and family therapy, the phrase is, “Secrets keep families sick.” You never keep secrets in families, because even if the child doesn’t know what the secret is, they will always know there is a secret.
—Leslie
Certainly, a recurring theme in the interviews is just how damaging secrets and withholding information can be, and not just to families. If parents—and society in general—had been more realistic about the likelihood of young people engaging in sexual relations before marriage and had provided them with adequate information about pregnancy prevention and access to birth control, perhaps fewer unplanned pregnancies would have occurred in the first place. Obviously, no one would want to advocate early sexual activity among teenagers, but leaving young people uninformed only postpones and complicates the problem—a problem that ultimately becomes one of unplanned pregnancy. With each stage, the problem becomes more complex and the solutions more difficult and life altering.
In spite of the long-t
erm negative consequences of surrender for those I interviewed, there are many examples of mothers using their painful experiences to a positive end. One example is the importance that many of these women placed on sex education for their own children.
I really am very thankful that I had that experience, because I would never want my girls to go through that. Never! Nobody should look down on anybody who’s using birth control. In these times there isn’t a high-school girl who should not have birth control available to her, and good birth control.
Knowledge about birth control to young girls is the most important knowledge you can give them, because if they don’t have that knowledge and they get pregnant, it’s going to be a struggle from that day on. If they go for an abortion, it’s still a struggle because 80 percent of abortions are never followed up with counseling.
Women are the future of this country. If they’re not screwed up in some way, they’ll get an education and they’ll be good teachers to the next generation. If they’re going to do away with Roe v. Wade, I’m afraid I’m going to have to get on a train. I’ll be in Washington to protest, because I can’t even imagine the injustice of it for every girl who follows behind me. It’s such a knife in the heart of the women of this country. And that comes from a Catholic!
—Maureen II
Part of telling my boys about my pregnancy was also to say, “When you love somebody, no matter what your age, you have a responsibility to that female to not put her in the position I was in.” I was very honest with my boys. I didn’t want them to put another woman through that loss, because it is a loss. You feel like a part of your soul has been taken away from you. I told them, “I’m not telling you this because your life would be destroyed. I’m telling you because it impacts that mother, it impacts that baby.” Men don’t suffer this the same way a woman does. I don’t care what anybody tries to tell me. I understand that it’s painful, but it’s not the same. They didn’t carry that baby for nine months.
—Pam
Another positive outcome was that many women chose to work in fields where they could help others because their experience underscored the importance of empowerment, communication, and tolerance. And though it is not uncommon for women to enter the “helping fields,” quite a few women arrived at their chosen profession as a result of the lack of communication they experienced in their own family or the powerlessness they felt at the time of their surrender. They understood the importance of advocacy and of open and honest communication. Many felt that a positive outcome of their experience was that it made them less judgmental than they might otherwise have been.
I was a Women’s Day speaker at a church one time and I had all these little index cards written out with what I was going to say. I put the cards up there, but I was just led to go ahead and talk from the heart. I had worked in excess of ten years in the court system. I worked several years in administration and probation/parole before I worked in protective services. And I talked about how when I sit across the table from a person in the courtroom I try and deal with that person the way I would want my loved ones to be dealt with. For all I know, I could have been thinking subconsciously about the fact that I had a son out there and I didn’t know who was dealing with him, and in what manner. I want everyone to be treated with dignity. That’s how I’ve tried to give back.
—Carole II
People in my family didn’t talk about things. I think that’s probably part of the reason why I’ve been drawn to working with people and talking about the hardest things, because we never did that in my family. So I’ve always found myself working with people and talking about the things nobody else wants to talk about.
When I returned to college after going through the pregnancy, I chose sociology. Later I went back to get my master’s in marriage and family therapy, because I wanted more knowledge and training about families and how families work, how families cope with things and negotiate things.
I think part of the reason why I do the work that I do with sexual abuse is when I work with families who have experienced sexual abuse, there’s a victim and there’s an offender. And I’ve always felt like both. I could relate to the offender, because I was the bad guy. But then on the other hand, I can really feel like the victim because of the times, because there were no alternatives, and because nobody ever explained to me what I would experience when I went through an adoption. That was never explained. I don’t know that I would have been able to do anything different, but I wouldn’t have felt so much like a victim if I had been given more information about what that experience was really going to be like.
With this experience, there’s a lot of shame. Birth mothers are kind of the shame receptacle. They quietly carry it around and nobody really knows about it. And nobody wants to hear it. I mean, nobody…because that’s too scary. It’s too uncomfortable. People don’t really know how to listen. When you really listen, you have to take in all those feelings, and some people have a hard time tolerating the pain, the hurt, the shame, or the sadness. Those are the hard feelings.
One of the things that I’ve often said to people is that one of the greatest gifts, really, that you can give to somebody else is to just listen to who they are, and what they have to say, what their experience is. Just to be able to talk and feel like somebody is really hearing what you have to say. Sometimes that’s all you need. If you think that somebody else really hears you, and understands you, that can be very healing. That’s a wonderful gift that people can give.
—Sandy I
The public’s lack of understanding of these women’s experiences—and the notion that they did not suffer a loss—is a result of the women’s lack of voice, not their lack of feelings.
Ann,
I am writing to you in response to the article I read in The Boston Globe about adoption. I would like to share my experience with you because, like your article, it gave me a different perspective regarding the birth mother. However this experience took place in 2003 and not 1966.
I always felt adoption was a win, win, win situation. I often thought of the birth mother as unfit, or really not wanting her baby for whatever reason. What could be better for a child than to go from an unwanted situation into a loving situation?
Then, really good friends of mine had one child and wanted a second. After so many unsuccessful attempts, they decided to pursue adoption. After extensive research on their part, they put ads in several newspapers in the Midwest. Mostly they were contacted by young unwed women who were pregnant. They finally connected with one, who was as interested in them as they were in her.
No one knew the woman was pregnant, and wanting to keep it that way, she moved closer to them. They brought her to the East Coast and even provided her with a therapist to help her cope with her decision to give up her child.
The birth mother was young, not college educated, and did not come from an affluent family. The father of the baby did not want the child. My friends are a good family. He is successful and she is a stay-at-home mom.
After the baby was born, the birth mother had a hard time signing the papers. My friends were traumatized at the reality of not being able to keep the baby. In speaking with them, they felt betrayed; after all they did for her along with the relationship they developed. She finally signed the papers after several weeks. My friends were of course delighted. The baby is now part of a wonderful family.
I was saddened by this story, and to my surprise, I felt for the birth mother. I didn’t see this woman as unfit, or not really wanting her baby. I saw her as someone who could not give her child the same life that my friends could. It seemed to be a “timing” issue and because of her mistake, my friends will raise her baby as their own. I also couldn’t help wondering what if she had support financially and emotionally?
So when I read your article, I wasn’t sure how far we have come regarding adoption or what the truth about adoption is. Too bad we can’t adopt mothers.11
Patricia
The vo
ices of surrendering mothers need to be included in ongoing debates regarding adoption policy and law, women’s reproductive rights, and sex education. The double standard is still very much a part of our cultural psyche. It is still tolerated within institutions and families and ultimately damages generations of men and women alike. These women were made to carry the full emotional weight of circumstances that were the inevitable consequence of a society that denied teenage sexuality, failed to hold young men equally responsible, withheld sex education and birth control from unmarried women, allowed few options if pregnancy occurred, and considered unmarried women unfit to be mothers. Asking the women to keep their secret and deny their child may have worked out well for others, but not for many of the mothers. Their experience and their motherhood have been silenced and denied for too long.
I feel lucky. I feel lucky because I know my daughter is out there and she’s fine, and healthy, and productive, and beautiful. I feel lucky that she says she loves me. I feel lucky that my children love me and understand what happened. I feel lucky that I survived cancer. And I feel lucky that I now have a voice. I didn’t for so long, but you’re not going to shut me up now. Keeping things inside kills you. You rot from the inside out. I did a great job of punishing myself for thirty-two years. But you just have to set yourself free, and that’s what talking about it does.
—Ruth
LYDIA
I was sixteen and lived in Southern California with my parents. I did things that girls in Southern California do: I went to the beach and had a good time. I liked school. I met a very nice young man, a musician, and we started hanging out together. He went to the other school in our valley and he would come up to see me. We became very, very close and very devoted to one another. I had never been intimate with anyone before because I was pretty young. At one point we did find out that we were pregnant and we were both shocked…I mean, I don’t know why we were shocked, but we were.
