When I had my first child, I regret not asking my mother for help

Jane

First mothers often ask me "wouldn't your mother help you keep your baby?" The unspoken assumption is that if my mother has offered to help me, I would have kept my daughter.

When my surrendered daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1966 white mothers commonly pressured their daughters to give up their babies. Others flat-out refused to help, threatening "If you bring that baby home, you can't live here." Between World War II and Row v. Wade, adoption was THE solution for unwed pregnancies in white middle-class families. These grandmothers-to-be were not unkind; they had bought into adoption mythology and firmly believed that adoption was the best for all concerned.


"No," I answer, "she didn't know about the pregnancy." I add quickly, "I am sure my mother would have helped me; she would not have wanted her grandchild to go to strangers.

My answer comes as a surprise.  Then the follow up question:  "Did she ever find out?"


"No, she passed away never knowing."

Jane's mother

Why didn't I ask? My mother and I had not been close since I left our home in Chicago six years earlier for Fairbanks, Alaska to attend college. I was in Fairbanks when I became pregnant. I went to San Francisco, where I knew no one, had my baby there, and surrendered her. I didn't want to burden my mother. I rationalized she had enough stress in her life. And in truth, I did not want to admit failure, that my life had become so unraveled that I became pregnant by a man who did not want to marry me. I knew in 1966 that adoption was THE WAY unmarried white women handled pregnancy. I took pride that I handled this difficult matter all by myself.

At my mother's funeral in 1988 a few days before her 82nd birthday, regret that I had worked to suppress for almost 22 years burbled up. I was overwhelmed with guilt and sadness. I had deprived my mother of knowing all her grandchildren. At the same time I was thankful she had never found out that I had relinquished a child; it would have been a terrible blow for her to learn  that I had not gone to her in my time of need.


My mother, Helen Rummons, was no milk-and-cookies mother. Born in the early 20th century, she came of age in the jazz age, when women got the vote and challenged every convention. She never adjusted to being a  post World War II housewife. Cleaning and cooking was left to my grandmother (Granny), Clara Rummons, my mother's mother, who lived with us. My mother read to her five children, played card games with them, took them to church, events, plays, museums, parks--and later, when her second marriage failed, worked as a high school teacher.

Grandmother Clara Rummons

I come from a family of independent women. My grandmother was born in 1871 and lived to be 92, the daughter of German immigrants, she was raised on a farm on the harsh Nebraska prairie. She was denied an education because her local high school did not accept girls. As a young woman, my grandmother moved to Lincoln and was whip-smart enough to became a stenographer--even without a high school education--working in the same building where William Jennings Bryan had his law office. "He was a real gentleman, always took his hat off in the elevator," she told me. She married a lawyer and moved with him and their daughter, my aunt, to Oklahoma, where my mother was born. My grandparents separated when my mother was three and my grandmother took my mother and her sister back to Nebraska, supporting them by running a boarding house. My mother never saw her father after they left Oklahoma. Her reaction to his disappearance from her life was not unlike that of some adoptees I've known, grieving his loss and imagining him as a special human being.

My mother was an excellent student and a determined poet, receiving recognition for her work at a young age. She graduated from the University of Nebraska at 19 and the following year, 1926, she began graduate work in Latin and Greek at the University of Chicago. My grandmother moved with her to Chicago.

 Helen Rummons Schaible

My mother never completed her doctorate, abandoning graduate studies after two bad marriages and five children. My parents divorced when I was 15, and after that I had no relationship with my father, who died five years later. My mother supported us--four kids (my older sister had married by then), herself, and my grandmother--on her teacher's salary and a part-time tutoring job. We lived in a reasonably nice apartment; I shared a room with one of my sisters--having my own room was an unimaginable luxury--and bought our clothes, furniture-- everything but groceries--at Sears. With so much on her plate, my mother gave up writing poetry during these years; by the time I was in high school, she was worn-out, depressed, chain-smoking, struggling to get through each day. When I graduated from high school ( I was the fourth child), there was no money for college so I jumped at the chance when a relative living in Fairbanks offered to put me through college at the University of Alaska.

My mother resumed her poetry after her children left home. With the assistance of one of my sisters, she self-published four books of poetry and prose.

First Mother Ceres

She may not have been a warm and fuzzy mom, but she was rare for her time.Very few women got Master's Degrees then, especially from a prestigious school like the University of Chicago. What she did instill in us was a love of the arts. She read us the children's classics, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh (the real one, not the Disney version), all the Oz books, many others. She amused us on long walks telling us about the Trojan War, Ceres who lost her daughter through abduction, many other timeless stories. Although money was tight, she took us to plays at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, Riverview Amusement Park, the Indiana Dunes, a walk down State Street at Christmas time to see the decorated department store windows. She taught us values through example, speaking against segregation and racism, donating to the poor, championing those treated unjustly. She checked the arithmetic on restaurant bills and called the waitress' attention to errors. She taught us to say "please" and "thank you" and corrected our grammar. (Good grammar was important to my mother. She wrote notes to the nurses during her long hospital stay before her death, chiding them for telling her to "lay" down. "It's lie down," she wrote. "I'm not a hen." She could not talk because of a tube in her throat.)

Like most children, I suppose, growing-up I did not appreciate my mother. At times, I desperately wanted to be in a "normal" family  like I saw on the TV at the neighbor's. (We didn't get a TV until 1957; they cost too much and my mother thought the quality of the programs was poor). Even without a TV, I watched too many family sit-coms.  One of the reasons for giving up my daughter was so that she would have a "normal" family like on TV-- two parents, a successful dad and a stay-at-home mom.

Over the years, though, I've come to realize that I was fortunate in the growing up that I did have. Unlike many women of my generation, I did not have to struggle against being trapped in the life of a 1950's household because I had never been in one. Of course I would go to college; of course I could have a profession. Of course I could discuss something other than fashion or make-up or how to get stains out of clothes.

More deeply, I realized that no matter how difficult it was for my mother, she was always there for us. Her commitment created an unbreakable bond in our family. My siblings and I have had reunions since 1975; we get together--all of us, spouses, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, every three years for a week. We began at one of our homes, but now that our family is greatly enlarged we stay in hotels or camp in national parks. Everyone looks forward to these reunions. Reunions like ours are rare I've learned. While many families have reunions, it is often an obligatory, one day affair.

My grief for my lost daughter was acute during these get togethers; I was painfully aware that I was living a lie, that someone was missing. Since our reunion Rebecca has come to a couple of our reunions. I hope she comes to more.

In the summer of 1997, I was helping Amy, the oldest daughter of the three I raised, plan her wedding.  I opened my mother's books, thinking I might find a poem suitable for the wedding. As I read the poems, I was consumed with sadness at the thought that Rebecca might never know of her grandmother's poems. Rebecca and I reunited several months later and I shared the books with her. In the fall of 1998, my sisters and I endowed a sonnet contest named for my mother run by Poets and Patrons of Chicago. Rebecca lived near Chicago and came to the ceremony honoring my mother, the only one of my children to do so.

I regret not asking my mother for help. I think though that perhaps in a perverse way it was the tough-mindedness I inherited from her--or learned by her example--that caused me not to ask.

A poem my mother wrote shortly before her death in 1988.

               AFTERWORD

There will be a time for remembrance, a
          time for being forgotten.

My children will remember--those dear
                  five!

Perhaps they'll get together as we did when
               I was alive.

Perhaps they'll speak of me, with smiles,
               I hope, not tears.

They must go on into the unguessed years.

May the bright bird of joy, with
          shimmering wings,
Fly ever before them, flashing into the sun.

Let foolish things I said and careless
          thoughtless things
I did sometimes, mellow in their
          rememberings.

Do not ask whether the race was lost or
                won.
Say only, if you can, "it was well run."

Helen Lacy Rummons Schaible
1906 - 1988

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Poets and Patrons

FROM FMF:
Family Reunions: Distorted by Adoption
Can feminism be hereditary?
To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from
Normal in one family may be seen as abnormal in another