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 didn’t tell my family I got fired. I had the guys who took me to work take me to the employment office every day. I would sit in the Catholic church in the morning and draw pictures and write morbid poetry and then go to the employment office. I called the social worker to find out how my baby was doing. He wasn’t adopted yet. She said, “He’s probably too old. We don’t know if anybody’s going to want him.” She said, “Do you have any deafness in your family, do you have ear problems?” I said, “My sister had a bad left ear and infections when she was little and had to be hospitalized. Why?” “Well, we think he’s deaf. We don’t think he’s adoptable.” I said, “I want him back.” And she said, “No. I don’t care if he grows up as a ward of the state, you will never get him back.”

  I got another job washing dishes in the kitchen at the TB sanatorium. I had to wear a little mask so I wouldn’t get TB. God forbid I should die, with a life like that. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me, this thing about “If you have other kids, you’re gonna forget this.” I’m thinking, “I’m going to have to have another baby,” but I knew that I would never be pregnant again and unmarried. I would find a way to kill myself first. There is absolutely no way in hell I would ever go through that again.

  I hadn’t seen the guy who I thought, “Hmm, if I’m gonna get married someday it will be to him,” since January. In April I wrote him a little letter telling him I had something to tell him. He wrote back and said he’d be home from college that weekend. He showed up and I had nothing to tell him. I just wanted to see him again. We go out and by then I’m able to talk, unlike when I saw him right after my son was born. When the evening ended he said, “What was it you wanted to tell me?” And I said, “Nothing, I just wanted to see you.” We’ve been together ever since. We’ve been married thirty-five years.

  On my son’s twenty-first birthday I dug papers out from the back of my underwear drawer where I kept them. I filled out some paperwork and sent it to the state of Wisconsin but I never really let myself hope. I didn’t let myself get my hopes up that he would find me.

  One day I’m at my studio and I get a phone call from Catholic Social Services asking me if I still want to know my son. I said, “Of course.” “Well, do you want him to write you a letter or would you like him to call you?” I said, “Listen, I didn’t wait twenty-three years to wait even longer for a letter. He can call me.” I hung up the phone, burst into tears, ran across the hall to tell one of my very best friends, whom I’d never told about my son. I called my husband and said, “Guess what? The chickens have come home to roost”—our farm background here. “This will never be a secret again, from here on out.”

  I packed up my stuff, went home, picked up my fifteen-year-old, and said, “I have something to tell you: you have a brother.” This is my A+ student. She said, “No way, dude! Cool, Mom!” That was it. No questions. We had supper and I hadn’t told the two other girls. They were watching something on TV and the phone rang and it was my son. I cannot describe…hearing your child’s voice for the first time when he’s twenty-three is just, just indescribable. He sounded so much like my brother and my favorite first cousin. We exchanged statistics and covered all that basic stuff and then it was, “Well, now what do we do?” I had never read anything about adoption in all those years, so I said, “Well, I don’t know what we should do next, but I’ll tell you one thing: I want to know absolutely everything I missed if you’re willing to tell me. I want to hear everything.”

  He took me at my word and we talked for four hours. I got off the phone and everybody says, “Mom, who were you talking to?” I said, “Well, it’s a really long story. I’ll tell you as soon as that show is over.” And when it was, I told them, “When I was nineteen I had a baby. He is your brother and that was him on the phone. He wants to know us.” One daughter says, “That’s cool!” And the other says, “Yeah, that’s great!” And they all went to bed. I didn’t sleep. I got up and started writing and I have continued to write, all in longhand with old ink pens.

  I had never stopped to think. I had been just running through life. I had gone from my childhood, which was a matter of just survival, to a major trauma. When the lid came off, when I reunited with him, I really think I was clinically nuts. I sobbed—I swear, it took every bit of power I had not to be sobbing when I was with my daughters. Thank God they were in school so I had some time alone. I would just sob and sob and write. I never slept more than three hours at a time and I think the lack of sleep made me crazier. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. Poor guy—I wrote my son a letter every day and they must have been six pages long. He said, “I’ve never read this much before in my life, Mom.”

  When I look back at my life, the only thing I would change would be to find a way to keep from losing my son. I wouldn’t even change getting pregnant in the first place. After he found me, I found myself sitting out in my garage smoking and writing and sobbing and thinking, “If only I had a handgun, I would make it stop.” But then I thought of my youngest, who was only eight, and I would cork the wine. Regardless of how much hell I was in, I could not do that because I could never, ever hurt my kids like that. So I am still here.

  It is the loss of that baby. When he came to see us, maybe a month into the reunion, I just remember standing there hugging him and just wanting to somehow have the power to crank the clock back twenty-three years. To do it over and get it right. It’s just a horrible, horrible, horrible loss. I have this week-old granddaughter and I look at her and I just think of my son when he was that age. How could society think that was all right? He was not even entitled to be held by his own mother. It’s just…it’s all so wrong. It’s wrong! There was no reason he should have been removed from his mother, none. I had never harmed a child and I haven’t harmed one since. It was all about what people would think.

  I remember telling the social worker that I just really loved him and that’s why I wanted to keep him, and she said, “How can you be so selfish?” And I was raised…oh God, don’t be selfish. The reality was I really wasn’t being selfish, I was being a mother. To have her tell me that my natural feelings as a mother were selfish was just, my God, it was just wrong.

  It really wasn’t until maybe the last two years that I’ve been starting to put it back together. I remember standing in the kitchen at suppertime and just sobbing and my thirteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters put their arms around me and said, “Mom, you have to get help.” It was just the most difficult thing I ever had to do because for me to ask for help was just incredibly difficult. But because they told me I needed to, I did. I called my doctor and it turns out his wife is a licensed psychologist, so I went to her for fifteen months. She insisted that my problem was my childhood, not losing my son. I insisted that it was losing him, but I think it was a combination of both. She just wanted to go on and on about my childhood. She insisted that it was about my mother, so her idea was I needed to draw a picture of my mother in a phone book and then beat the phone book with pieces of rubber hose she had. I really thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard and I refused. I had no urge to hit my mother.

  But she did help me see that I actually had only one choice, which means there was no choice. She also helped me see that my boyfriend made his decision when he took a hike. I mean, she helped me see the reality of it. I was really, really blaming myself: “How could I possibly have given away my own child?” So I have no regrets that I went to the psychologist. I guess it’s helped me think, “Maybe I’m okay. It’s maybe okay to be me.”

  It’s just…my whole life has just been based on shame. I’m probably over halfway through it. I can’t go through my life crying. I mean, it was so bad in the nineties I had scabs under my eyes from wiping them. You hear about people’s lives being touched by adoption. It’s no damn touch. I mean, that just drives me nuts. You’re smashed by adoption. I mean, it alters the mothers’ lives forever.

  From everything I see, I think the general public believes that mothers who
give their babies away are glad to be rid of them, they’re glad to be rid of the problem. They think, “She didn’t care about that kid. She just wanted him out of the way so that she could go on having a good time.” I’ve heard people say that. It’s like if you have a child and you’re not married, you don’t have those same maternal feelings that other mothers have? I have never, ever met a mother who felt that way. Never.

  My father-in-law and I had the same birthday and we were quite tight. He told me that the week before my husband and I were married the priest had called to tell them that their son was marrying a woman who was a sinner, who had lived with another man and borne his child. They had also gotten an anonymous letter in the mail when our engagement was in the newspaper, telling them that their son was marrying a whore who had a kid. I said, “I want to see that letter.” I figured I’d spot the handwriting. He said, “We read it, tore it up, and burned it in this ashtray.” To me, they are quality people. I mean, never once did they ever mention a word to their son about who he was marrying. I mean, really, you can’t meet better people than that. If there’s a silver lining in this, I think it’s made my children a whole lot more compassionate than they would have been. None of them are ever quick to judge anyone.

  But there is this dichotomy that I have because I shouldn’t have been left in the care of my mother. I remember sitting at the table with my mom and my grandma telling her, “You have to stop beating her or I’m gonna find a way to get her away from you.” Everyone knew it was bad, but nobody could quite stop it. My grandmother wanted to send me off to a private boarding school for high school. She raised chickens, sold the chickens, butchered them, sold eggs, and she was going to pay for it. My dad said, “Hell no, she’s my kid and she’s living with me.” Now and then he would make an effort to make my mother stop: “Damn it, leave that kid alone!” And then he’d go out to the barn and do his chores and she’d beat the crap out of me. So when he would speak up, I would just cringe. When I was ten, I went outside and sat in the snow. I just decided I was going to sit outside until I was dead because I didn’t want to live with her anymore. Somehow my dad noticed I was missing and came out there. “Get in the house, you moron!” he said. I said, “Okay,” and I went back in.

  She was just nuts. When I was in third grade she came in to tuck my sister in and tripped over one of her high-heeled shoes that my sister had been playing with. She picked it up and started beating me with it because it was my fault. In the morning I’m brushing my hair for school and it’s all stuck together because it’s bloody. So I wore my little cowboy scarf with a little horse on the back that I got from my uncle Louie, who lived in Arizona. I get to school and I’m supposed to take my scarf off and I said, “Oh no, I have a head cold. I have to keep it on.” I didn’t want my teacher to see the caked-on blood.

  The abuse from my mother certainly prepared me to be a birth mother. Get out there and live that lie—“Life is okay”—when it isn’t. So I was in basic training until the time came when I could enlist. And you know what? I really miss my mom. My brother and sister-in-law had her put in the nut ward of an Alzheimer’s unit. She is in there with people who make noises that a lot of people have never heard. I can’t get her out because I have power of nothing. I can’t save her but I miss her—I really, really miss her. After my son found me she was very, very nice. We talked all about my childhood. She kept me up until four in the morning wanting to talk about it, and how sorry she was for being so horrible.

  I just feel so strongly that our stories need to be told, most importantly to our babies. They had no choice whatsoever in this. I’m thrilled that the one choice my son did have—to find me—he made. I mean, both he and I agree that there will never—regardless of how long we live and how wonderful life is—there will never be anything in either of our lives that will top finding each other.

  You asked about the pain of the reunion. My son didn’t cause the pain when he came back. He has never been the cause of any of my pain. The pain was always there—it just came out in the reunion. I was still burying that. If it hadn’t been the reunion, there could have been something else in my life that would have broken it loose. I’ve always thought from the instant I knew I was pregnant that he was innocent in all of this. He didn’t choose to be born and he didn’t cause my pain. Actually, by tripping it loose he’s the reason that I have been able to heal as much as I have. I’m very grateful for that.

  5

  The Family’s Fears

  My mother and my father were both one of eight or nine children, and each of them came from very poor families. But by the time I was in high school they were very affluent. My father was a banker and my mother played bridge, and they went on nice vacations and we had drapes that somebody came to our house and designed. You know, things like that which in my town were quite hoity-toity. I had nice clothes and proper dental care and all that stuff.

  But when I got pregnant it was like slipping back a generation somehow. It was like slipping back in time. The climbing that they had done and their aspirations were suddenly under threat. They were going to be those people they looked down on. There was a clear social category for unwed mothers and that was the “you must not come from a very good home” category. I think it was impossible for my parents to get past those feelings and to see me as somebody who needed some help from them. They had no choice. They had to find a place for me to go where they didn’t have to deal with the questions and the funny looks. It was just more than they could take.

  —Deborah

  WHEN I HEARD THE WOMEN recount their stories, one of the most shocking aspects of their experience was the way they were treated by their families. It’s hard to imagine how the families could have been so harsh.

  In order to understand the actions of these families and the intensity of the pressure to relinquish, it is helpful to take into account the enormous social pressure to conform that followed World War II. The 1950s are notorious as a decade of mass conformity, but it’s revealing to look more closely at the social forces at work during those years. The postwar period was a time of remarkable new prosperity in which a significant number of American families joined the middle class—though that was true disproportionately for white families because of continuing racial discrimination. For those families who were moving up, whether white or black, there was a tremendous fear of losing the ground they had gained. Conforming to the middle-class values of the time was paramount. Many of the women I interviewed spoke about their parents’ fears of being ruined if anyone learned they had an unmarried pregnant daughter. The parents’ fears of being ostracized from their community or church ultimately led them to treat their daughters in precisely the same manner that they feared their neighbors would treat them.

  I told my mother and she started screaming at me. It was horrific. I was told to leave the house and not return. I was not allowed to make a phone call. I was not allowed to take any clothes, pack a suitcase, nothing. I don’t remember where I went to use a phone, but I called the doctor I had babysat for and I went to their house. I stayed with them. I guess he pleaded with my mother and father to let me come home. He told them that I needed my family and that was where I belonged, and he was right. But they refused to take me back.

  —Mary III

  Studies of relinquishment patterns suggest that unmarried pregnant women who chose to make their children available for adoption were generally from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and had higher educational aspirations than those who chose to parent.1 Another characteristic cited was that women who surrendered their children were more likely to have parents who were “supportive of the placement decision.”2 The backgrounds of most of the women I interviewed are consistent with these findings, though I would use different language to describe the parents’ sentiments. In most cases, especially those involving high-school or college students, parents not only supported the placement decision but made the decision. The vast majority of these parents insisted that thei
r daughter surrender her child.

  I told my parents, “I can’t do this.” And they said, “You can’t come here. You can’t bring her here.” My father said, “You’ll have other children.” People have asked me how I got through it, and I say, “I turned myself into a stone.”

  —Edith

  Most of the women I interviewed did not refer to the surrender of their child as a choice at all. Choice implies making a decision between at least two viable options, and, with few exceptions, these women felt they had no other option. Many were in their twenties but still would have needed some family support, either with babysitting while they worked or with an offer to live at home until they could get on their feet. Rather than offering help, many families threatened to ostracize their daughter if she kept her child. Most parents simply took over when they discovered their daughter was pregnant, and made arrangements for her to go away and relinquish the child. The women often likened their experience to being moved along a conveyor belt, with no discussion, no weighing of options, and no say in the decision. They felt that they were in no position to object, since they had already brought shame upon the family by becoming pregnant.

  My father took me to the family doctor and when we came back to the house and my father told my mother she fainted. They conferred with my boyfriend’s parents as to what to do and the decision was made to send me to a home, because I was from a very middle-class type of family and my mother didn’t want anybody to know about it. I had to drop out of school, because the schools didn’t allow you to attend school pregnant in those days.

  We had to make up a story and I couldn’t go anywhere. If my mother had to take me shopping we’d go out of town, someplace where we wouldn’t run into anybody. My mother was always worried about what people would think and that was probably the worst part of it for me. She was more worried about what people would think and specifically about what they would think about her. That affected all the decisions that were made. My mother decided that I was going to give the baby up; I didn’t decide that.