by Ann Fessler
God, I can see it, like a videotape in my head. They are looking at me, saying, “Listen, we know you’re pregnant. You’ve been exposed to the German measles. You have to tell your parents. We will give you this weekend. Either you tell them before you return to school on Monday or we will tell them.” I don’t think I’ve ever felt more trapped, more frightened, in my life—ever. I’ve got to go home and deal with my parents. My father was in the air force and he was also an educator. I had a lot of respect for my father, but I was very afraid of him. I think more than anything else, I didn’t want to disappoint my parents.
My dad worked late hours and was going for his doctorate at UCLA, so my mom and my sister and I would have dinner alone a lot. That evening, my mother was sitting on the couch watching the news and my sister and I were doing dishes. I said to my sister, “I have a problem. I think I’m pregnant.” My sister got a huge smile on her face, turned on her heels, walked out of the kitchen, barely got through the door, and hollers to Mom, “Pam’s pregnant!” And I heard my mother start to sob.
I stood in that kitchen looking at the back door and trying to decide whether I was going to run. Then my mother said, “Pam, come here.” I went in and she had that look that I never wanted to see. She was devastated, absolutely devastated. She said, “Is this true?” I said, “Yes.” And she started to cry. She said, “I asked you. I asked you, why didn’t you tell me?” And I couldn’t answer the question. My mom was just destroyed. I destroyed my mother.
My sister was quite pleased with herself. I felt horribly betrayed—probably about the way my mother felt, to be honest with you. My mother felt betrayed by me, and I felt betrayed by my sister. But the longest wait was waiting for my father to return home. I lay in bed with the covers across me. I heard his car drive up and then I heard him come in the front door and say hello to my mother, very cheerful. My mother said, “We have to talk.” My father had a routine of getting orange juice and vanilla ice cream when he came home and that’s what he did. Then he sat down in his chair and it had these leather straps underneath that made a certain sound, and I knew as soon as he was in that chair the discussion was going to take place. My father said, “It can’t be that bad. What’s the matter?” And my mother said, “Pam’s pregnant.” There was absolute silence. Just absolute silence. My dad got up and I don’t know where he went. I was expecting him to come in my room but he didn’t.
The next morning, I could tell my mother had cried all night—her eyes were very red and tired and gaunt looking. My father had the kind of look on his face—I mean, it would have been easier to have someone just take a gun and shoot me. The afternoon comes and we hold a big discussion. They are discussing what we are going to do, me not being part of the we. I was to see the doctor and then we would have another meeting. I thought, “Well, they don’t know I have a job lined up and all this money saved. They don’t know that I bought a television and baby clothes, and that my boyfriend and I love each other and we’re going to get married.” So I wrote out a plan and felt very prepared for the next discussion, but nobody ever asked for my opinion. I never got to open my mouth. The decision was made. It was so surreal to have people talking about you like you’re not even in the room, like your life doesn’t matter, like the baby was a mistake. He didn’t feel like a mistake to me; he never felt like a mistake.
I continued going to school for a period of time until it became more difficult to hide it. The faculty decided that I was becoming disruptive to the schooling process and a bad example. It was determined that I would leave school. “I was not welcome there” was what I was told.
My parents decided that the best thing for me was to be sent away to a Florence Crittenton Home. They packed my suitcase and late one night they took me away. I’d never been away from home, never spent a night over at anybody’s house, never gone to camp, never anything. They walked me up the steps to this place that was not in a very good neighborhood, my dad handed me my suitcase, and they turned around and left. I’m sure my parents thought they were doing the right thing because there was this booklet that talked about the wonderful meals, and the education, and the beautiful dayroom with its bright colors. I know what my parents thought they were bringing me to, but that’s not where my parents left me.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but in the military they do a thing where they train you to comply with the rules by tearing you down and breaking your spirit so you will conform, and then little by little they build you into what they want you to be. That’s what they did there. I was gonna try and get through this and get out. That was my goal. I wasn’t gonna let anybody there know me.
The next day I had to have my physical—kind of like an entry physical, I guess. I go to the infirmary, where there is a nurse and a doctor and I am told to take my clothes off. Nobody hands you a gown, nothing. I mean, my father didn’t even see me without my clothes on and they wanted me to undress in front of this strange man. It was the first time I ever had a speculum used on me, and it hurt. I kept trying to move back and the nurse was holding me down by the shoulders and telling me to relax. I wasn’t relaxing. Finally, the doctor said, “Listen, you got yourself into this. If you would have kept your legs together, we wouldn’t be doing this now.” I remember our eyes locked and he was smiling. I don’t think he liked women, I really don’t, but I’m sure he looked good in his community because he was volunteering his time with all these bad girls.
And it’s funny. While I was locked up, I would call the father and he was going on with his life. He was having his summer and was, you know, worried about whether he would get a new tape or album. People had gossiped about him but they were still allowed to hang out with him. Before I left home, nobody was allowed to be around me.
Occasionally, the house got to go out as a gaggle of pregnant females. The neighborhood we were in, like I said, was not a good neighborhood. When we would take the van to go places, the neighbor’s kids would throw things at us—rotten fruit, eggs—and eggs hurt. When you get hit in the face with an egg, that hurts, and sometimes it would actually break the skin. They would never let us go back in the house to change. I remember one time they took us to the beach to walk the boardwalk and we had gotten pelted pretty good. So here we are, a gaggle of pregnant girls marked with this stuff, and it smelled. I was thinking to myself, “You know, they tell us not to make a spectacle of ourselves, to maintain our dignity, but they go out of their way to make sure we’re humiliated.”
We had to write thank-you notes to whoever dared to drive the van. One time we couldn’t even get out the front door, there was so much being thrown, so everybody retreated, including the person who was going to drive the van. I remember the driver crying; it had never happened to him before. The lady who was with him just kept saying, “Oh, this is normal, this is normal.” And he kept saying, “These poor girls, these poor girls.” She said, “Well, they just have to accept it.” She wasn’t trying to be hateful, she really wasn’t; she was being matter-of-fact. A lot of the treatment there was matter-of-fact. That driver never came back, by the way.
We had different volunteers all the time. I called them do-gooders. There were those who wanted to elevate themselves in the community, and those who cared. I avoided all of them, especially the ones who cared. Looking back, I was becoming extremely hard. You couldn’t afford to have somebody care about you because you weren’t really allowed to care about yourself. I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me. I just wanted to survive.
I have to say they fed us very well. They took excellent care of us from the food standpoint. The lady who worked in the kitchen was an African American woman. She used to call us marshmallows on toothpicks. Her jokes were always about being a Negro. She didn’t like the term “black.” I blush very easily, I’m very fair, and when she would say that, my ears and my face would light up, she just loved getting that kind of a reaction from me. I learned to like to cook as a result of watching her. When she cooked she was taking care
of us, she was loving us all. It didn’t matter if you were a twenty-five-year-old woman having a baby or you were a girl as young as fourteen, she congratulated each and every one of us after we had had our babies. Nobody else did that. She’d tell us what a good job we did. I’ve always thought of hearth and home as being such a positive thing. That comes from her. I don’t know if I ever told her—hopefully, she knows—but that was the best part of my day, being in the kitchen with her.
When they wheeled me into the delivery room, my mom and dad were standing in the hallway. My dad was giving me a kind of pep talk and my mom had a smile on her face, but she just looked like she wanted to cry. She’s looking at this little girl holding a stuffed animal on her way to deliver a baby. I can’t even begin to imagine. My baby was born and he was perfect, he was beautiful. My doctor gave me a blue badge that said “It’s a Boy,” so I had my stuffed dog and this badge. I asked my parents, “Have you seen him? Have you seen him?” My father wouldn’t answer, but my mom went to see him and she told me that he was tiny and had very long sideburns.
It was funny because this was in Los Angeles and a famous movie star’s wife delivered that same day. Her room was directly across from mine and there were flowers…I’ve never seen so many flowers in my life. All these people were going in and out, and there were photographers, and it was like watching a fairy tale. I’m across the hall and there is nothing. My room is very sterile, very green, no flowers, no pictures, no congratulations. I would watch what was happening and my mom said, “Well, you know, when you get married and have a baby you’ll have your turn, too.” Everybody was talking about this brand-new life, and I thought, “My son’s a brand-new life.”
They made the mistake of bringing my baby to me; I wasn’t supposed to see him. When the nurse came in, I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I’m bringing your baby so you can feed him.” I struggled with what the right thing to do was, and I thought, “I’m not gonna tell her.” I thought it would be the only time that I would ever see him. I unwrapped him and counted his toes, and I looked at his belly. When he would breathe his whole tummy would move. His little face was so tiny and he had the tiniest little fingernails, but his feet were just like his dad’s. I said, “You’ve got Fred Flintstone feet, just like your daddy.”
I got to see him every day, three or four times a day. When I was able to start walking, I would go and sit outside the nursery. All the fathers were going, “That’s my boy, that’s my boy,” and they had my baby and another one way off in a corner, like they were diseased or something. There was no name tag, nothing at the foot like the other ones. I felt so horrible, like I had done this to him. I had caused him to be ostracized. That’s when it sank in that I didn’t deserve him. I couldn’t do this to him for the rest of his life. He didn’t do anything wrong, I did.
It came time to sign the papers. I hadn’t seen him for weeks and weeks and they brought him in. He was so little. He had a preemie outfit on with a short-sleeved shirt and his fingers barely stuck out past the edge of the sleeves. I was ecstatic seeing him, but my heart was breaking because I knew it was going to be the last time. I kept thinking, “If he is in trouble, how am I going to know? How will I help him?” It’s very hard to explain—part of me had enough indoctrination to believe I was not a mother. They make that very clear: “You’re not a mother. You are too young. You are a bad person. You got pregnant and you aren’t married. You are not entitled to this baby. You’re gonna give this baby a chance in life.” Part of me accepted that wisdom, but then there was the other part of me that had feelings that I wasn’t supposed to have.
So they walked off with the papers and the baby. I walked off believing that my son was going to go to the kind of environment I had asked for and that he would have his history. They had asked me to write out in longhand what my requests were and I gave it a lot of thought. My son was a mixed-heritage baby: he was half Swedish and half Mexican. I wanted him, if possible, to have a combination family, and if not, a Hispanic family. I can still remember the lady sitting at the desk and nodding her head as if she was listening and understood what I wanted and taking me seriously. I wrote down my information and the father’s information, my Social Security number, where I lived, my parents’ names, and I was secure in the knowledge that if he needed anything—if he needed a kidney or blood or anything—I’d be there for him. I put it all in the envelope and sealed it. She took that envelope and was very careful with it. The agreement was they were going to give that piece of paper to my child. It would become part of his file and on his eighteenth birthday it would be made available to him. When people make promises to you and you don’t have a way of verifying, it gives people a lot of latitude to do or not do what they’ve promised. She promised me, and that was my promise to my child: “You get to know your history—you’re not someone that I’m ashamed of, you’re not bad, you did nothing wrong.” I told him I loved him with all my heart, I did the best I could, I wished I could be with him, and I would think about him every day that I drew breath.
I came home and no one ever said a word. Not “Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it? Do you miss your son? Are you heartbroken? Do you worry? Do you wonder if he is alive?” They never asked, probably because they were afraid of the answer. When I would think about him, I felt like I was violating the trust, the deal. He wasn’t mine anymore; I didn’t have that right.
I went back to school, but I never fit in again with the kids. I was never a teenager, never went to a prom, never went to a dance, never went to a football game, never had counseling, never got out of line. I worked about sixty hours a week. I went to school full time. I was an adult.
I married at eighteen and I had a son. I did it the right way but I was petrified when it came time to go home from the hospital. I was afraid they were gonna take him from me. My husband knew I had given a child up, but he still couldn’t understand what was the matter with me. I didn’t want anybody to see me walking out of the hospital with this baby. We got into the car and my mom said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m afraid that someone’s gonna come take the baby.” I was waiting for the police to come. Giving up my first son had left such an imprint. It was trapped in my brain…I was not allowed to be a mother.
Society expects you to continue with your life, be a productive human being, don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t feel sorry for yourself. You did it to yourself. But you are conscious every single day that there is a little person out there. They are trapped as a little person in your head because the last picture that you have of them is of a helpless baby. I can’t tell you how many times my next son would have a first—his first tooth, the first time he rode a tricycle, the first anything—and my mind would go to my other son. What were his firsts like? Is he happy? Did I do the right thing? I must have done the right thing. Everybody said I was doing the right thing.
I’ve spent thirty-four years thinking, “If I had a choice, would I have done it differently?” I wanted college for him, I wanted him to have a mother and a father, I wanted him to have all the things that normal kids have, and it was very clear to me that society and the people around me would make that impossible. As an adult, you find out you did have a choice: you could have kept that baby. Would I have done it differently? I don’t know. I wish I could have done it differently. That’s what my heart says. I would have given anything to have been able to do it differently.
My sons from my marriage are the absolute apple of my eye—my whole world, everything. I became a school nurse so I could be at their school when they were there, and off when they were off. I mean, it was a little bit neurotic, to be honest with you. My boys grew up knowing my first son’s father. He was a part of their lives for about twelve years, so they always knew about their older brother. I would say, “I don’t have the right to look for this baby but he has the information, so don’t be surprised if someday he shows up on the front porch. He’s as welcome in my home and my heart as y
ou guys are. We are a family.”
I’m sure there are women who suppress the experience, but I don’t think it ever goes away. There is not a day since I was fifteen years old that I haven’t thought about him. I will live with this for the rest of my life. Criminals sometimes get a life sentence and that’s what I feel like I got. I think that’s what people don’t understand. The expectation is that you will get over it. I will never have peace. I will never have peace.
7
Birth and Surrender
Many times I’ve thought about the difference between the labors and deliveries of my two daughters. Such a difference, and it was only because I had “Mrs.” in front of my name. That’s all. I was the same person. I was still with the same jerk guy. I was not rich. I still did not have a degree. The only thing that had changed was “Mrs.” That was it, and they treated me like a human being.
After the birth of my first child I had nothing, not even a piece of paper. You walked out of the hospital with whatever memories you had and the stretch marks on you body, that’s it. There was no piece of paper. Nothing. It was as if it never happened.
—Christine
WHEN A YOUNG WOMAN in a maternity home went into labor, she was often sent to the hospital in a cab. Sometimes a housemother or a nun accompanied her as far as the hospital door but they rarely stayed. There was little hand-holding through labor and certainly no family celebration after the birth of the baby. Most of the girls labored alone. The majority knew little about what to expect physically or emotionally from childbirth. They had no idea what labor or delivery would be like and were stunned when nurses came to prep them by shaving their pubic hair and giving them an enema, a common practice at the time. It was an incredibly frightening and lonely experience and in some cases cruel and dehumanizing.