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

  My mom found this Park Avenue gynecologist where all the nice, Waspy unwed girls go to be taken care of and give their babies away. So I go to see him every couple of weeks. There’s no question that as soon as I deliver this baby, this baby is gone. I mean, there’s no question about whether I can keep this baby. No way. I mean it’s not even considered. It’s just, “You have done the worst thing possible and you’d better be quiet.” My mom said, “This is the closest your father and I have ever come to having problems; you’re killing your father. He’s got to requalify on the jets now and he can’t handle it because of you.” It was horrible. It was really horrible.

  Of course, nobody tells me a damn thing about what to expect or what giving birth is like. Nothing, there’s no preparation whatsoever. And the night that I went into labor we had the worst snowstorm that had ever happened in the history of New York. My mother has to call 911 and an ambulance comes and of course all the neighbors are looking out their windows. It’s her worst nightmare. They carry me out on a stretcher. My mother is making up something about my liver or my kidney or some kind of organ failure or something like that. I was supposed to deliver in New York at this fancy hospital. But instead I’m taken to Mineola Hospital. There’s no power. They’re on generators and they’re very short-staffed. I can’t describe it. I mean, still when I think about what it was like…they were so cruel to me. I can’t tell you how they treated me, those nurses. It was so terrible. They tied me to a bed. They abused me verbally. After I delivered my baby, they left me lying in this bed with bloodstained sheets for a day and a half. I mean still, even talking about it…I can’t understand how somebody who was supposed to be in a profession where you have compassion, and care about suffering, could do that. It was like I was fair game for them.

  So I had my daughter. I remember very clearly the doctor in the delivery room holding her up and saying, “This is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. She’s not going to want to give this baby up,” and the nurse just grabbing the baby and wrapping her up so I couldn’t see her. I kept asking to see her, and they wouldn’t let me until it was time for my mother and father to come and take the baby to the agency. They let me come into the room where they were dressing her. It was the same nurses. They wouldn’t let me hold her and they wouldn’t let me touch her. I was across one of those metal tables from them and they said, “I bet you’d like to hold this baby, wouldn’t you? This baby doesn’t belong to you. This baby is going to a good home.” It was just horrible. It was like a terrible, terrible nightmare.

  The only time I got to hold her was when they let me take her out to the car. I carried her down these steps, concrete steps, with this kind of chrome railing, down to my parents’ car. Then my mother took her and I got into the backseat. They dropped me off at the house and they took the baby into the city. I remember the only one I could talk to, and cry to, was our dog.

  My mom and dad came back and they never spoke about it. My mom destroyed the papers from the adoption agency right away, all the papers having to do with my daughter. She burned everything, supposedly to protect me. It was never spoken about again. I really wanted to talk about it, but my mom treated it like it was her personal tragedy. I would try to broach the subject and she would say, “You’ll just never know what your father and I went through. You’ll never know. We came very close to separating at that time. Your father could have had a heart attack so easily.” It was always her tragedy.

  My daughter was born on February 4, and I spent that spring studying so I could go back to take my exams at the University of Colorado. I took my exams and then I came back and I went to school at Hofstra University, which was within driving distance. My parents weren’t going to let me go anywhere again.

  What I did after that…I mean, I’m amazed I’m still alive. It was in the middle of the whole folk period. Bob Dylan made his first album. The whole hippie thing was starting. I was supposed to be a poet and an English teacher; that’s what the women in my family did. You taught English for security and you wrote poetry. I was a really good writer but I took this art class and that was it. I had to lie to my parents. I couldn’t tell them I changed my major to art.

  I was going into the city all the time with my art friends, wandering around the Lower East Side. If anybody wanted to sleep with me, I would sleep with them. I had no boundaries—no sexual boundaries, no personal boundaries, nothing. I would just put myself in these incredibly dangerous situations and it was almost like I wanted to be destroyed. I just wanted it to be over. I was filled with the most incredible rage that lasted until I was reunited with my daughter. I was fueled by rage all those years. That was a time when you could channel it into political protests and the women’s movement and so many other things. But it was really just this unbelievable rage at what had happened and this feeling of being totally powerless.

  I met this guy at school and we wound up married to each other for a year. He was a poet. He got me to see someone who could help me. And it’s a good thing he did, because I was really losing it. I mean, I really was very, very disturbed. My parents had no idea that anything was wrong. When my mother found out I was in therapy she was furious at me because I was telling my business to these people.

  I think that on a core level I felt so worthless for giving my baby away. I was so beyond redemption that I just deserved nothing. Though I appeared to be very successful, I lived a life of complete lack inside. I couldn’t have what regular people had. I could not have a home, for instance. I could not have something like a washing machine, anything that would make my life easier. That wasn’t for me. I could not have anything, because I really didn’t deserve anything. I never had other children.

  When I got married for that one year, everyone started asking me when I was going to have a baby. If I had had a machine gun, I would have just gone out and killed an entire city block full of people. I was so enraged, because that’s when it hit me that it was just a social convention. It had nothing to do with anything. Then later, when people like Madonna were having babies and keeping them and it was trendy, it made me so angry because it was just a matter of years. Now it’s okay. Then it was the worst thing imaginable. I have been very angry for a long, long time. I didn’t start out that way as a child. I feel like I lost my soul, in a funny kind of way.

  My mom got Alzheimer’s toward the end of her life and she died in 1998. Five days after she died, my daughter called me on the phone. I had been looking for her for years. I contacted the agency in New York and they said all of the paperwork from that era had burned. The records were all destroyed in a fire. I had no information, except I knew her birth date, where she had been born, and the name that had been put on her birth certificate. Then I saw something on television about adoption reunions and the Soundex Registry, so I registered.

  As it turns out, my daughter had also seen that program on the Soundex Registry and she sent for the paperwork. But she hadn’t sent the papers in because she thought she didn’t have enough information. She just held on to them and held on to them. Then she said she woke up one morning and said, “I’ve got to go fill those papers out.” She put all the information that she had on the papers and mailed them. I think they called her the day my mom died.

  So five days later I was teaching and I came home and I was really, really tired. I came in the door and my husband said, “Sit down. I have some news for you.” And I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, can’t you just let me get in the door? I’m so tired.” He said, “No. You’re really going to want to hear this.” And I said, “Look, just give me a chance to take my coat off at least.” He said, “Your daughter called.” And I felt like I was going to throw up.

  I just had all these mixed emotions. I had thought about it for so long, but then when it happened I was just terrified and excited. These two parts of me were coming into collision. The part of me that felt like this horrible slug underneath a rock that didn’t deserve to peek up into the sunlight, and the part of me
that was just, “Oh boy!” were kind of coming up against each other. He said, “You should call her back.” And I said, “I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t call her back.” And he said, “You should call her.” And I said, “I don’t think I can. I don’t think I can. Tell me everything she said.”

  He said she had called and had asked for me and he had said, “She’s not home right now. She’s teaching a class.” And my daughter had said, “What is she teaching?” And my husband said, “She’s teaching painting.” And he said she got so excited because she had been raised by two scientists. She was this very creative child in a family of scientists. So she was very excited to find out her mother was an artist. Later, she told me she had never heard anybody speak about somebody with as much love as my husband did about me, which was really sweet.

  The first time I drove over to meet her, it was really a shock to see how close she had been all those years. We found out that we both used to jog at the same reservoir. And we both took classes at the same college at the same time. I mean, it’s just so strange.

  I think that there’s a thread running through my life that I probably came into this life with, which is the issue of betrayal. That’s something that I feel is a big issue for me. I feel like my parents betrayed me, and then I betrayed my daughter by not being strong enough to keep her. So many of the decisions I made in my life involved not betraying her again. I would never have other children because that would be a betrayal of my daughter. Because I betrayed her, I really did not deserve to have too much. I should work very, very hard. I should do a lot of things for other people. I should be this force of compassion and protection, especially for other women. For many years I taught courses for women in creativity, in writing, in meditation, and in visual art. I would nurture other women, especially women who didn’t have a voice. I felt a real sense of responsibility to nurture at my own expense, at my own creative expense. I let people take things from me.

  I always felt like there was a huge scale and that I could never balance it. I held myself responsible. I had so many mixed feelings. I wanted to keep this baby. I felt powerless to keep this baby. I wanted it to be over. I wanted to go back to being a normal person. I wanted the baby out of my life. I wanted the baby. I didn’t want the baby. I think it’s that ambivalence that is so hard for people to look at and admit. Most people will say, “Oh, I wanted my baby with all my heart, and they took the baby from me.” And they turn themselves into a victim. Anytime you get yourself into a situation like this, you have to see where you are partially responsible for it. It’s a two-way thing. I’ve been in a lot of situations like that. I’ve been in situations where it seems as though I’m the victim but in reality I’m a part of the equation.

  I think a lot of it started with that terrible betrayal that I felt by not wanting my daughter so much that I would have done anything to keep her—like run away, run out of the hospital, take the baby. It’s like I let them take her. I let those nurses take her. I let my parents drive away with her. I let them do it, because part of me wanted them to take responsibility for making a decision that I couldn’t make myself. I think that’s where the horrible guilt comes from. It’s not so much the act of surrendering, it’s the passivity. It’s allowing somebody else to take control. And when they take control they are also taking responsibility. You can slide so easily into the victim role and just say, “This terrible thing was done to me.”

  But the fact is that there is a complicity there that you have to look at. And that’s been another theme that runs through my life. It’s been really hard for me to face that. That’s the hardest thing for me. And, you know, it’s a really rough lesson to learn. It’s really hard to be very, very honest with yourself and look at yourself and see things that are not so nice. I think that’s something that is really important.

  I don’t see people talking about that. I don’t think people want to look at that. I think it’s so much easier to just say, “I thought the best thing for my child would be to do this.” You know, I’m sorry. I have to say, I respect people who say that, but I find it hard to believe that anybody in that circumstance is so mature that they are thinking of what is best for their child. I think most people are surviving, and that’s the thing they’re so ashamed of. They’re so ashamed that they’re thinking of their own survival. The rock-bottom reality is you were thinking of your own survival more than your child’s.

  Once you realize that, it does something to you. It’s like you’ve been put to a kind of test and you failed. You failed. So you punish yourself for a long time until you can get to a place where you can’t go any lower. And there’s something very liberating about that, because then you start coming back up out of it. You begin to see who and what you are. And you begin to see the importance of dharma and the importance of acting according to your principles and the importance of doing what you know is right.

  I know in my heart I would never betray a trust again. Never. If someone said to me, “Your life will end right this minute and your daughter will be well, she’ll be over her myasthenia,” I wouldn’t even hesitate for a minute. It’s not because I’m some great soul or some highly advanced being; it’s just that I know what’s important now. And I will never compromise again.

  In some ways, I wonder what kind of person I would have been if I had never lost my daughter. I would not have been the person I am now. I don’t like to see people with power abusing other people. I don’t like to see cruelty toward people or animals. I really hate cynicism and academic nastiness and all those little cruelties that people perpetrate on each other. I just have no tolerance for it.

  I think this whole experience has made me incredibly strong. But if I had not been reunited with my daughter, I don’t think it would have made me strong. I think I would have continued to be very, very, very angry until I died of a heart attack.

  After my daughter and I were reunited, she and her husband came to our loft. I showed her pictures of my Abyssinian cat, Gatey, who had died. This cat was so beautiful. And she said, “Oh, I just love these cats. You should get another.” And I said, “I’m saving up because I want to get two and they’re expensive.” So she and my husband, from November through Christmas, were doing all this stuff to locate breeders to get me Abyssinian cats. It comes time for my birthday and she calls and says she’s got this present for me, and it’s in Newton, a woman there is making it. It’s something handmade and I should go and pick it up. I hung up and I’m thinking, “Newton, and it’s handmade.” What if she got me something like a Kitchen Witch or something like that, something really horrible. What am I going to do if it’s really ugly?

  We drive into this development of split-level houses and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, what kind of thing is this woman making?” We come up to the house and I see these two little heads sticking up, and it’s cats. And I said to my husband, “Oh my God, look, she’s got cats! Look, they’re Abyssinians. This is so exciting!” So we go in and she says, “I’m finishing your present upstairs.” And I said, “You just take your time. I’ll play with your cats.” There are all these Abyssinian cats and I’m so excited I’m playing with them, and my husband looks at me, like, “What’s wrong with you?” And I’m just so happy hoping she’s going to take her time making her Kitchen Witch upstairs and I can play with her cats.

  Then the phone rings and it’s my daughter calling from L.A. and she says, “How do you like your present?” And I said, “Well, she’s upstairs finishing it right now, so I haven’t seen it yet.” She says, “Don’t you see your present?” And I said, “Well, it’s handmade, isn’t it?” She said, “Yes. It’s made by God.” And then I got it. She said, “It’s cats, two cats.” She couldn’t believe that I would go there and be sitting there with these cats all over me and not think that she had gotten them for me.

  She asked me about it later. She said, “How could you not know that they were for you?” And I said, “Listen, you know, I’ve gotten to the point in my life that w
hen I see something that I really long for, I know it’s not for me.” That’s when I realized what losing her had done. My expectation was…that what I wanted was going to be held up in front of me and I was going to look at it but I could never have it. Just like the nurses holding her up. That’s what it does.

  9

  Search and Reunion

  When I found my daughter and we started our relationship, I finally forgave that seventeen-year-old girl. It was a mending. I finally started doing things the way I had done them before. I regained the peacefulness that I used to have. I hadn’t been able to stop the turmoil in me or outside of me. Then all of a sudden it was like…“It’s okay, you don’t deserve to be punished. You’re not a screw-up.” It was an amazing moment for me to feel like I got put back together. And that has helped my relationship with my children and with everybody from that point on. My husband and I have an amazing relationship now. I accept things. I make decisions. I have comfort with things. I’m my own person again.

  —Barbara

  OF THE WOMEN I INTERVIEWED, more than half have had contact with the child they surrendered for adoption. This percentage is no doubt higher than for the general population of relinquishing mothers because in many cases it was the reunion that brought women out of the closet. Mothers who are out are naturally more willing to tell their stories than those who are still keeping their secret. Of the mothers represented here who have been reunited, most all expressed great relief at knowing their child. They felt the reunion was the beginning of their healing process. However, a reunion is an emotionally complex process that is often fraught with anxieties for the many parties involved: the surrendering mother and father; their parents; their subsequent spouses and children; the adoptee, his or her spouse and subsequent children; and their adoptive parents.