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

  I finally realized I had to tell my own mother because I knew she was my only ally. So he and I took my mother out to Carvel’s, which is this little ice-cream place in town. And I remember being really afraid of how she would react. I was the one child of her four who just might make it through school, might make it out of our little town.

  It turned out that I couldn’t tell her. We were sitting in Carvel’s in the parking lot, and he had gone in and bought us all banana splits. As soon as I saw mine, a wave of nausea just swept over me. I had to escape from the Chevy. I ran to the back of the parking lot, and I threw up. My mother was sitting in the back of this car watching me getting sick. And I saw the two of them talking from my vantage point and I realized he was telling her.

  She got out of the back of the car and walked toward me. I felt so afraid and I started crying. I remember thinking, “Please, Mom, you’re all I have. Just stick by me.” And I waited, and I watched her walk to me. And she just put her arms around me and said, “It’s okay, babe. Because no matter what, we’ll get through this together.” We cried in each other’s arms for about ten minutes, I guess. And finally she waved him away. She waved him away. She said, “Just go.”

  And she and I walked home from Carvel’s. We took this road, this detour that was one of our favorite walking spots. It was along the Housatonic River and it was a road that was lined with these wonderful weeping willow trees. It was the most beautiful place I think in our town at that time, at least for me. We walked with our arms around each other’s waist. The willow trees were blowing in the wind and we hardly talked at all. By the time we got home, I knew that she was gonna watch out for me, and that she was gonna make sure that everything was okay.

  I had to start school. I was going to school and throwing up in the bathroom. I was absent chronically during that month of September. By then I was about six or eight weeks pregnant, I guess. It became difficult to go to school at all. I decided to go see my priest and tell him about it. He was the only male authority figure that I trusted.

  I talked to my priest and he said, “You know, there is a way, Dorothy.” And I said, “Well, I can’t imagine what that is because I don’t want to marry him.” And he said, “Well, I wouldn’t advise you to marry him anyway, because he isn’t a Catholic.”

  I didn’t understand a lot of things about the Catholic religion. I was a convert and had only been officially a Catholic for maybe three years by the time I got pregnant. I didn’t understand a lot of the details—things like you can’t marry a non-Catholic. I said, “So you’re saying marriage isn’t even an option for me? Is that what you’re saying?” He said, “Unless you can find a good Catholic man who would be willing to adopt the child, no, we can’t accept your marriage.” On the one hand, I was glad, because this gave me ammunition to tell his mother, “I’m sorry, it’s against my religion,” of all things.

  But the worst part was yet to come. He said, “You know what purgatory is? We’ve talked about that.” And I said, “Yeah, I know what purgatory is.” And he said, “We can’t baptize your baby if you have her out of wedlock. So if you don’t marry a Catholic man there’s only one other option, or your baby’s going to stay in purgatory when she dies. She can never be baptized into the Church.”

  I was devastated. Here I am, fifteen years old, having to deal with the metaphysical complications of what happens to a soul when it passes from this earth if I don’t do the exact right thing at this moment. I said to him, “Well, what would you do?” Like I was six years old. I said, “What would you do?” He said, “I would give the baby to a family who could take care of those things. A Catholic family—a good Catholic family.” I said, “You mean adoption?” And he said, “Yes. I think that’s your only out in this situation. You don’t want to ruin your reputation. We can find a place for you to spend the last few months of your pregnancy. There’s no reason for you to feel embarrassed or go through the pressure that you’re currently facing with your boyfriend’s mother.”

  I was sort of enamored of the idea of running away, sure. He made it sound like this place he was going to send me to was a country club. He said, “There will be other girls like you. You’ll be able to talk and have fun for the last few months of your pregnancy, no one will bother you, and you will be able to make an informed choice.” He said, “Nothing is final till it’s final, but I think you’ll do the right thing.” And that was just the first time I heard “do the right thing” in that whole nine-month period.

  So I went home after that long meeting and tried to explain to my non-religious mother what purgatory was, and how my child would end up there if I didn’t give her away. She finally just gave up on trying to understand, and said she respected this priest. She said, “If the priest says you should go away to this place, then I think you should go. ’Cause I don’t have an answer for you, babe. I’ll help you if you want to stay here, but I don’t have an answer for you.”

  So for me the easiest thing to do was to go away. It was a running away; it was a place where I really thought I could go and think. But before I could go there a social worker had to get involved. And it was explained to me that the state of Connecticut would be paying my tuition at this home for unwed mothers called St. Agnes. I was told it was located in West Hartford, and that they would take care of bringing me there. I could stay until my baby was born and then come home. They would take care of the adoption and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Sounded wonderful, but it was very hard for me to say good-bye to my mother. I had never been away from home except for an overnight visit to a friend’s house. I was devastated to be away from her.

  She had said, “Write me letters. You won’t feel as lonely.” So I did. And that started my little pattern. Every night before I went to bed, I would write my mother a love letter. I think she kept them for most of her life. And it kept me in touch with the one person who really loved me.

  And I just, to this day, cannot get over that feeling of loneliness and abandonment and being in that place with so many young people. Everybody I saw was just a kid. I noticed one thing very quickly at St. Agnes, and that was that nobody wanted to talk about what was going to happen to them at the end of their pregnancy. They really wanted to live in the moment. They didn’t want to talk about “going over”—that became a metaphor for the birth. We would come to breakfast in the morning and we would look around to see who wasn’t there. “Oh, she went over last night. She went over.” That meant she had gone to St. Francis Hospital and had her baby. We would envy that person because she was out of jail, so to speak. But we were a little afraid, because we didn’t know what this was all about.

  I remember that one of my best friends at St. Agnes was a girl named Brenda, who was like a movie star. She just was very glamorous and had long blond hair. She was one of those people who didn’t really look pregnant. She just had a little belly and she looked great. We were all so envious of her. When she went over, we were all very interested to know what she had. After Brenda’s four days, she came back to say good-bye to all of us. Being so popular, she almost had to. She held court in one of the rooms on the second floor, and we were all allowed to go in. We asked her all kinds of questions. “What was it like? What was it like?”

  She had changed. In just those four days. She was very mature in a way that frightened me. She was not the same person. She looked fabulous, but she looked about four years older. She didn’t want to talk about the details and we thought that was kind of curious. If Brenda didn’t want to talk about it, it must not be good. She said she had a little boy, and she had said good-bye to him, and she hoped he had a better life. But that’s all she would say. She said good-bye to us all, and we were a bit chastened after that. We all went upstairs. And that night I remember not many of us had dinner. We were just very, very worried. There were a group of us that were all due around the same time, and we kind of bonded. One by one, we went over.

  By the time I was in my third false labor, they decided to
induce me. I had no one there to hold my hand. I had no one. I didn’t even know who was going to deliver me. It was the loneliest thing I’ve ever gone through in my whole life. The loneliest.

  The baby was born at seven o’clock. I had only been in labor maybe seven hours, I guess. And most of it I don’t remember. I woke up at about seven-thirty, maybe seven-forty-five, and I was in the recovery room. There was this nurse changing my sanitary napkin. I looked down and my stomach had caved in. I no longer had a child in there. I looked at the nurse and I said, “What happened?” She said, “You’ve had your baby,” in a very kind of businesslike, matter-of-fact way. She wouldn’t look at me. And I tried to get her to meet my eyes, because I wanted to ask her all these questions. It was a very important moment for me. “I had the baby?” And she was just very—she was doing her job, and I said, “Well, what was it?” And she said, flatly, “It was a girl.” I said, “Oh, it was a girl.”

  I remember thinking I wished it was a boy, because boys can’t have children. I thought, “I gave birth to a little girl who’s going to have to go through this, that poor little thing.” I had always thought boys had it better than women. All my life, you know? And that whole experience made me feel even more so—that it’s the girls who get punished, the girls who suffer through all of this stuff, and the girls who can’t talk about it.

  But, of course, once I got used to the idea that it was a girl—which took me all of twenty seconds—I wanted to see her immediately. And they said, “You can’t. We have to take you back to your room, and in the morning when they bring the children around for feeding time, you can see her.” I said, “What’s feeding time?” Because it sounded like the zoo. And she said, “Well, the hospital is on a feeding schedule, and they bring the children at ten and two,” and something else—I forget. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have to wait until ten in the morning to see my child?” And they said, “Well, that’s the way we do things here.” I said, “Well, where is she now?” “Well, she’s in the nursery. They’re taking good care of her.”

  They took me upstairs to this room. It was a room with four beds. Two of the beds were empty and one had one of my friends in it. She had delivered three days earlier. The next day would have been her last day. When I came in, she was awake. By then it was maybe eight-thirty, nine o’clock, ’cause it was dark outside. She said to me, “Dottie, is it you?” I said, “Yeah! How are you?” I was all happy. I was in the euphoria that—right after birth you have this euphoria, “I’m done, I’m done!” She was in the throes of postpartum depression already. I could sense that this was a serious down that she was on. She said she had had a boy, and she said, “Tomorrow’s my last day of seeing him, and then I gotta go home.”

  I couldn’t even relate to that sadness at that moment. I felt bad, but at the same time I couldn’t relate. I said, “Oh, I can’t wait till the morning, because I’m going to see my daughter. I had a little girl!” We were at opposite ends of this spectrum of grief. I hadn’t seen it yet, she had already and it was very hard. She said to me, “Dottie, I have one bit of advice for you before they bring her: don’t get attached.” I said, “Oh, I won’t. I just wanna see her and count her toes and make sure she’s okay.” I was always a kind of brave kid, and thought, “I can do this.”

  Well, when they brought her I wasn’t prepared. All that pain and all those months of waiting were nothing compared to what I felt when they put her in my arms. When I saw her for the first time, I knew what real love really was. And I’ve never been the same since that moment. I remember her cuddling up against my neck, and I held her as close as I could, and the feeling of her little face just nuzzling my neck, and I thought, “Oh my God, it’s a real, live person.” And I loved her so much. I thought I loved my mother, I thought I loved my friends, I thought I loved Mick Jagger, but this was something else. This was like looking at another version of myself. I never thought you could feel like that in the whole world. And then I wondered, “What am I supposed to do now?”

  I held her, and the first thing I did was unwrap her. I wanted to see her entire body. She was very tiny. She had the most beautiful, perfect little toes. I remember counting them, and I thought, “Well, this is what everybody said I would do.” I did exactly what everybody said. I looked at her little fingers, and I remember caressing every single inch of the fingers and toes, and saying, “This is really her. This is really Tracy.” And I started to talk to her, and to say, “I love you. You’re just so beautiful.” I started talking baby talk. And I remember her turning her face into my neck and nuzzling. I just knew it was her way of recognizing me. I thought, “She knows me!” And I called across to my friend, who was seeing her son for the last time—at the same time that I was seeing my daughter for the first. She was in grief and in tears. I said, “She knows me! She knows me!” And she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even be glad for me. And I just looked back at my child, and I thought, “In three days, I’m gonna be her.”

  Finally, on the third day, I had to say good-bye. I remember being very out of it, and not being able to come up with the right words. I felt somehow that whatever I said to her was really significant—that if I didn’t say the exact words that it would somehow curse her. And I have no reason for this except for, possibly, it was the influence of the medication. But I told her to be a good girl. That I would never forget her. And to understand that I just did what I thought was best. And to forgive me.

  When it was over, the last thing I remember was that little pink blanket. That little shred of pink blanket that I could see over the nurse’s white shoulder, going out the door. And that’s the last time I saw my daughter.

  The next couple of weeks were horrifying. I got sick. They didn’t know what was wrong. They wanted to do an emergency exploratory laparoscopy. I guess at one point I was in critical condition. So during that couple of weeks of recovering from the surgery, that’s when the real loss of my daughter hit me. I was able to think at that point. It was then that I felt seriously depressed.

  The person who drove me home from the hospital happened to be the social worker. Again, me trying to think the best of people, I thought she was just being kind. Then I remembered she wanted me to sign that piece of paper. And, sure enough, halfway home, she pulls over by this little lake. She had taken the scenic route. I guess she thought that would make it easier. She pulls over and brings out her little briefcase. My mother was in the backseat. I think she had picked up my mother before she had come to get me. And again I thought this was so kind of her, but it turns out she needed my mother’s signature. That’s why. It wasn’t anything altruistic at all.

  So I’m in the front seat with the social worker. My mother’s in the backseat. And out come the papers. She said, “We need you to sign these so we can place your baby.” I said, “You know, I really don’t think that I can sign these papers. I really don’t think I can do this. I really don’t want to do it now—I’m just coming out of this surgery.” And she said, “Well, look. The baby’s been in foster care this whole time. You haven’t bonded with her at all.” She said, “As far as we’re concerned, she’s only known the foster mother at this point. The adoptive family is waiting for her. And why would you want to just do this to them? They’ve been waiting all this time while you were sick to get this done.” On the one hand, I was outraged that I should care that they were waiting, and on the other hand, that was the deal I had made. As young as I was, I understood what making a deal with the devil means: you just can’t win.

  So my mind is racing, trying to think up ways to get out of this. And I said, “Well, I really need to see her one last time because then I’ll know for sure.” And, of course, I was planning on making a break for it. She refused to tell me where the baby was. She said, “I’m not at liberty to disclose that.” And I said, “Well, have you seen her? How do you even know she’s all right?” She said, “Oh, she giggles and coos and she’s happy as heck.” She didn’t say “heck.” She said, “She’s very happy.
She’s a happy baby, and she’s ready to go with her new family.”

  I said to myself, “Well, she’s got it all sewn up good and proper, doesn’t she?” Everything I could think of, she had an answer for. And as things got a little tense, and I was about to say, “No. I’m not gonna sign these,” she said, “You know, the state paid for you to go to St. Agnes. That’s quite a bit of money that we put out in good faith. Do you have the money to pay for that?” I said, “No.” I looked at my mother, and I said, “Mommy, what am I going to do?” And she said, “Babe, I don’t know. We don’t have any money.” I wanted to know from an attorney—I wanted to know from somebody what my rights were. But for every question I asked this woman I got the answer that I didn’t want to hear: that I had no rights. That I had already given her away. That it was the best thing. And that it was all my fault. Somehow, it was all my fault that things weren’t going well. And that I needed to just go home and I would forget about it and I would be fine.

  We sat there for a long time, wrangling back and forth, and she wore me down. I was still sick, I still had not recovered. I was very weak and needed to lie down. She wasn’t moving that car until I signed those papers. I remember almost grabbing them from her at one point and saying, “All right, I’ll sign them.” I remember just scrawling my name and handing them back to my mother and my mother signed. The social worker took the papers, put them in her briefcase and we drove to my house without saying one more word. And life for me was never the same.

  That fall I went back to school. I was a junior in high school but all I cared about was escaping. I couldn’t concentrate—it was very difficult. I realized that I could find escape in drugs and, later, in alcohol. And that began a lifelong problem, with trying to realize you can’t bury your emotions. You just have to talk about them. So for about fifteen years, I smoked pot really heavily. I drank. I couldn’t hold a job. I didn’t know what I wanted. I remember just being really wild and not caring about anything. I was courting death, certainly. This went on for years.