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

  The father of my child never came to see me. There was no communication with him at all. He knew that I was going away and he knew the phone number. I wrote to him and I think I called him once or twice when I first got there. He never responded, so I just let it alone. That’s what I do, I get invisible. I just got invisible from his life.

  So I’m at this home and I make friends. There’s the fourteen-year-old girl—she’s a white girl and a wicked tomboy. She was really fun. Then there was a black girl from Massachusetts who was about my age and who was very pretty—really nice hair with a bouffant like the Supremes. We became very fast and good friends. Then there was this girl from upstate New York. She was brilliant. She reminded me of my best friend from home. She had long, straight strawberry-blond hair, and those Ben Franklin glasses. I always thought that girls my age who wore those kind of glasses were Mensa potential. The four of us really connected. I was also friendly with some of the other people and with the retarded lady who would go from room to room and talk to everybody.

  The home had three levels of marble stairs, so there was a lot of exercise involved in going from the classroom to your room, or to the lunchroom. The retarded woman threw herself down those stairs to try to kill her baby. She was only mildly retarded, but that was a time when if you had a freakin’ learning disability you were labeled retarded. I think that was the case with her. She really could have been anything. It was also that time period of a lot of meanness—if you looked different, if you had curly hair like I did, if you were anything but a stupid blond, no offense, blue-eyed, tall, slim cheerleader. The beach-girl thing was happening then. If you looked different, you were ostracized. If you were retarded on top of that, you were really ostracized. So she wasn’t getting much warmth or compassion from the other girls. She was treated badly and she threw herself down the stairs to try to kill the baby because she was so bad. Because she was so bad.

  During this time my dad would come to visit me alone, without my mother. It was the only time in my life I was ever with my dad alone. He came to visit me a lot. We weren’t supposed to have any sweets at all. It was off-limits, against the rules. He’d bring dozens and dozens of Dunkin’ Donuts for us. He’d sneak them in, in a big brown paper bag with a handle and he would take me and my three pregnant roommates out. He would sign the four of us out.

  So he is going out in the community with a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl, the black girl, the eccentric intellectual, and me his daughter, and we’re all hugely pregnant. He took us to movies. We’d go to Chinatown for dinner. He took us to museums. He wasn’t ashamed. The only glimmer of any happiness that we had was when we knew he was coming. And when he would leave he’d give me a really big hug—the really tight kind where you don’t have to say anything. My mom would always give me that nervous hug. She’d be crying and it was a weird kind of hug, you know? But he was actually there for me.

  The day I went into labor my water broke and I thought I had wet my pants. They took me down to the hospital. I was alone there and nobody was friendly. Nobody was nice. Nobody said, “Don’t worry, you’re going be okay.” It wasn’t overt meanness but it was total clinical indifference: “Turn over. Roll over. We’re going to shave you. You’re going to get an enema.” I just felt like I was being led by this invisible rope. Then they gave me a spinal and within minutes I’m numb from the waist down. They tell you that you cannot move. I remember them saying that if I moved there was a chance that I’d have some kind of permanent damage. So I also have this fear that I might be paralyzed for my whole life. You go through this whole process without anybody who is supposed to care about you being there.

  I didn’t know it, because I can’t feel anything from the waist down, but I had shit the bed. And that’s just humiliating. I mean, there’s another big shame ball right there—no pun intended. Then my arms were strapped down to the side of the table like in The Cuckoo’s Nest and they wheel me into another room and put my feet in the stirrups, and all of a sudden I’m giving birth to a baby. I remember, vaguely, a suctiony kind of emptying out, and a baby is born and I see this unbelievable mass of black hair on this incredibly beautiful reddish-brown baby. The first thing I saw was this really long, sticking-out, crazy, wild black hair like that boxing promoter guy, Don King. That was my baby. Then after I give birth I’m really, really sore because, you know, they gave me an episiotomy. I’m surprised they don’t sew it completely up on teenage Catholic girls, you know? Just sew the whole damn thing up.

  So I’m in my room and my roommates from the home came to see me. It was very weird because it’s not something you should be celebrating, but it was like the end of this whole crazy time. The girls gave me flowers and I remember the retarded girl had her baby and she came in the room and talked to me and she brought me a gift. The girls were really very compassionate. I named my baby Raina Elizabeth—Elizabeth after my girlfriend. I did get to hold her for three days. She was beautiful. She had a little tiny heart-shaped mouth, big dark eyes, beautiful reddish-brown skin, and tons and tons of black hair. I held and fed Raina as much as I could. And then on the third day my parents came. I had everything packed. I knew it was the day that I was leaving the hospital and I was leaving the baby in the nursery.

  We walked out of the hospital. My dad got in the driver’s seat and my mom got in on the passenger side. I got in the backseat. We always had Chryslers because they were safe cars—they were like boats, you know, huge. So my dad’s way up there driving, totally white-knuckled, and I’m looking out that back window at the hospital. And seeing the view of the hospital getting smaller and smaller and smaller, I flipped out—it was total, 100 percent, ripped terror, wailing, screaming, crying—and nobody said a word. My mother didn’t even turn around. I could tell she was crying because I could see her shoulders going up and down. My dad was white. He was like a statue driving the car. I just had that kind of cry that was a giant, wailing, screaming, weeping, until you just are totally crumpled in and your whole body is crying.

  It was the beginning of it being invisible. It was never, ever, brought up again. It was never talked about—not once, not ever. I was never asked, “How are you? How are you feeling?” I don’t even remember the ride home. I must have gone unconscious inside.

  I went back and graduated from school. Then a friend of mine had a 1950 Pontiac Chief, one of those fat cars that had the Indian chief on the hood, and he was going to Aspen, Colorado. He was taking five friends and there was room for one more person in the car. This was the summer of ’69 and there was this rumor that the Beatles were gonna be in Aspen, so I said, “Definitely, sign me up.” I stayed away thirty years.

  When I was forty years old, I initiated a search and when I was forty-six I met Raina. When I initiated the search, my daughter from a subsequent marriage was part of the whole thing. I told her the story when she was about thirteen or fourteen in the sex talk. I said, “There’s another reason I want you to be really well informed, because this is my story.…” I shared the whole thing with her. So I got the nonidentifying information about Raina and did the registry thing. I called my mother and I said, “Look, I have to talk to you about something that we’ve never talked about. It’s important to me. I have decided I am going to initiate a search for my daughter.” She doesn’t say anything. I say, “Do you have any documents, anything?” Nobody’s ever mentioned this in all these years. My mom says, “I don’t think I do.” She was very open to it. As a matter of fact, I think it was healing for her, because it gave her a chance to be part of something, and to say that she was really sorry.

  Raina was adopted by a family sort of like my family. They’re conservative Catholic, Italian. Raina was light-skinned, and she could pass for Italian. Her parents were told the truth, but they were encouraged to lie. They were dark-skinned Italian like my dad, who’s Sicilian. I grew up with Italians who were darker than my black friend from the home. Catholic Charities told the couple who adopted Raina Elizabeth that there’s no need to t
ell her that her father was black. I didn’t know they were gonna tell them this. I was just told, “We have a young couple that want her. They know she’s biracial, and they want her.” They never said to me, “We have a biracial couple,” because…who knew biracial couples in 1968? Actually, I did, but my parents certainly didn’t, and Catholic Charities probably wouldn’t let them in the freakin’ door. So maybe it was a naïve assumption, but I assumed that they had somehow found a biracial couple. I remember feeling relieved because they said over and over, “Who’s gonna want this biracial baby? They’re hard to place.”

  I’ve met her now, so I know the story. She always knew she was different. She always knew that her skin was darker and her hair was kinkier. She knew she was adopted but she was led to believe that she was Italian. She was adopted by a family who lived maybe a mile down the street from where I had lived and where my mother still lives now. What happened was, when Raina was about nineteen, she had a boyfriend who was Cape Verdean Portuguese and her parents were absolutely ballistic. They said, “Can’t you go out with boys that are your kind, Italian boys?” They were giving her a really hard time, but she’s got this rebel spirit in her—I know where that comes from—and she’s gonna be who she’s gonna be. So they’re having this huge fight because Raina is totally in love with this boy. He’s smart, he’s nice—there’s nothing wrong with him. She can’t understand why her mother doesn’t want her to go out with him. They get into the fight of fights and Raina screams, “What do you have against Portuguese people?” And her mom says, “I don’t have anything against them. You’re Portuguese and I adopted you, didn’t I?” Silence. Raina said, “What?” She got into her car and went to Catholic Charities and said, “I want to know my history. I want to know who I am,” and it was all in her file.

  She went back three times. The second time she got the letter that I wrote. The social worker called and said, “I’m calling to let you know that your daughter came in again and we gave her your letter.” She said, “She isn’t ready to meet you and, to be quite honest, she doesn’t know if she ever would be.” I could barely breathe. I could barely freakin’ breathe. I felt rejected, but I thought, “Okay, she’s only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.” The social worker said something that led me to believe it might be a loyalty conflict with her mother, and I understood that. I thought, “Okay, I’ve gotta just let her, hopefully, grow beyond this.” The social worker said, “What you can do is write another letter.” The first letter I wrote was basically “I want to meet you.” It was probably just a couple of pages. But when the social worker said to me, “If I were you, I’d write another letter, and I’ll put it in the file,” I sat down and I wrote a novel. And, sure enough, within six months Raina went back and wanted more information and she got that second letter. When she read it, she said to the social worker, “I’m not sure, but I think I might want to go through with this.”

  What she was supposed to do was write a letter and take it to the agency and then they would send it to me. But she’s smart. She had all of the first names of my family members from my nonidentifying letter and she went to the public library, got on microfiche, and goes through all the death notices for July of 1978 until she found my father’s first name, address, and the names of the survivors. She gets into her car and goes right to my mother’s house.

  I’m in Colorado working at this boutique when she knocks on my mother’s door. My mother’s making macaroni—what’s new? She comes to the door in her apron and my daughter says, “Are you Claudia’s mother?” She says yes. And she says, “I’m Raina. I’m Claudia’s daughter.” My mother just grabbed her and smothered her with a big hug. Then she immediately calls my sister and says, “You gotta get over here right away. Claudia’s daughter is here. Drop whatever you’re doing. I need you here.”

  So I’m closing up the register at work and the phone rings. I pick it up and I hear this voice, “Hello, is this Claudia?” “Yeah.” “This is Raina.” I said, “Oh my God, it’s you, it’s you!” She said, “I’m at your mother’s house.” I said, “You’re what?” She said, “I’m at your mother’s house.” And I say, “Are you okay?” And she starts laughing. In the background, I hear my mother screaming, “Oh my God. She looks just like you did at that age.” And there’s crying and screaming and laughing, and Raina laughs and says, “I’m fine. I grew up just like this.”

  We talked for two hours, right then. I couldn’t even think straight; I was mental. I hung up that phone. I closed up that store. I went home and told my daughter what happened. We were both mental. Then I called my friend the travel agent. I said, “I don’t know where I’m gonna get the money, but my daughter and I are flying home within the next two days.”

  She met me at the airport. All of a sudden, here comes this beautiful woman. She’s got on Levi’s and a pair of black Doc Martens and a little black leather jacket, and she has hair like mine, really long curly hair down to her waist. She’s got these really big eyebrows and this beautiful smile, which I saw her father in right away, and she’s carrying one rose. We went up to a restaurant and ordered all this food but we didn’t eat anything. We were looking at each other’s fingers. I was looking at her ears. She’s looking at my eyebrows. We’re looking and we’re talking and it was just amazing. It was so amazing. She said, “You know, if we’re gonna have a relationship I want you to know who I am. I’m gay.” I said, “I don’t care.” And I really don’t care because, oh God, if you can find love you’re lucky.

  Raina says to me, “Tell me about my father.” So I tell her. I tell her how magnificently beautiful he was and how I was so in love with him and what an amazing artist he is and she says to me, “I really, really want to meet him but I don’t want to interrupt his life. Even if I could just see him, I don’t want anything from him.” Well, I hadn’t seen him since I was nineteen years old. I contacted a friend of mine who knows him and he says, “I don’t have his phone number, but I know where he works. I’ll take you there, and then you’re on your own.” So my friend picks me up and I’m shaking like a leaf. I’m more nervous about this than I was about meeting my daughter.

  It’s about eleven in the morning. I go to the main door and it’s locked. I go to a side door, locked. I go to the back door, locked. So I’m standing in the yard and I see a man with a baseball cap on. I’m way up on the steps and he’s down in the yard. He sees me and he points to a door under the stairs. He says, “That door is open if you want to get in.” I’m thinking, “Maybe he knows him.” So I walk toward him and I go, “Excuse me, sir,” and he looks up from what he’s doing and takes a couple of steps forward and I say, “Maybe you can help me? I’m looking for…” He takes his baseball cap off and he says, “Claudia?” And it’s him. He’s sixty years old. When I knew him he was this gorgeous thirty-one-year-old man. He’s still handsome. He’s still a beautiful man.

  He says, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Do you have a minute? We need to talk.” And he says, “You know, I always knew that I would see you again someday.” He says, “I’ve thought about you over the years and I always thought, “One day I’m gonna see Claudia walking down the street.” I said, “Remember when I had the baby in 1968?” And he nods his head, “Yeah,” and his eyes are getting kind of big. I said, “Well, I met her.” He doesn’t say anything. He kind of just leans forward. I said, “She’s an amazing girl. She’s a beautiful, smart, articulate, amazing girl, and she doesn’t want anything from you, but she would love to meet you. Is there any chance that you would be willing to meet her, just meet her?” His eyes fill up with tears and he says, “She’s my family, of course I’m gonna meet her.” Then the very next thing he says is “I have to tell my wife.” He had never told her.

  He went home and he told his wife. She called me. Oh yeah, she called me, she’s an amazing woman. They’re amazing people. She was definitely taken aback. She told me that every April she used to think of me and would always say a prayer for me. She told me that sh
e used to even say to him, “Remember Claudia? Remember your friend Claudia, who went to that home for unwed mothers? That was so sad.” He had twenty-nine years to tell her, and he had opportunities, but he never did. Maybe he thought she would leave him. She told me it took a couple of days of praying and being alone and sitting with her rage, and then she said, “Okay, I have another daughter.” And that’s when she called me. When she called me and said, “Claudia?” I just got hysterical. I just started crying. I couldn’t believe the courage. She said, “Look, let me just say right up front, I’m very glad that you came forward. We have a daughter now. We are family. I don’t want you to feel bad about this, because we share a daughter now.”

  I’m in the process of some big-time healing now. I moved back here five years ago to help my mom. She’s eighty now. You know, in Italian families there’s usually one who stays home. Now I’m that person. She needs me. She had complete knee replacement five years ago but she’s up and running now. We’re taking Italian lessons together and we’re gonna go back to Italy because she wants to go one more time before she dies.

  4

  Discovery and Shame

  I called my folks from college in Madison to tell them I was pregnant and my dad said, “Don’t come home.” And my mom would not buck my dad. At the time, my dad was a sheriff. He would be up for reelection and he did not want a daughter like me around. It was fine while I was class valedictorian and the shining star, but not while I was pregnant, no.

  —Glory

  FOR SINGLE GIRLS who became pregnant during these decades, the most common solution was a hasty trip to the altar and the claim that the baby’s birth was premature. One reason that the high number of pregnancies wasn’t socially acknowledged was that so many premarital conceptions were effectively covered up through marriage. On average, 50 percent of these young women were married before the baby was born, leaving only half to be recorded as illegitimate births.1 Since the average age of marriage had dropped after the war, it was not at all unusual for young people to get married in their late teens or very early twenties. Throughout the war years and until about 1972, the median age at first marriage for women remained below twenty-one.2 Those who did not plan to attend college often got married shortly after graduating from high school.