A Birth Mother's Lament: Giving up my baby was like dying

Copyright Lorraine Dusky (c) 2009

When I tried keeping a journal what came out was either a daily dose of woe-is-me or perfunctory notes about the books I was reading. Instead I wrote a long letter to my baby, typing it out at my small wooden desk. It was a real antique I’d picked up cheap in Saginaw and moved cross country. Now it sat beneath a western window where the sun went down through fragments of colored glass hanging there.

…You kick me, you cause hard bulges in my stomach, you do not let me sleep for more than a few hours at a time. Sometimes I think you are standing on your hands kicking your feet against the wall of my stomach….Now that you have announced your presence, I cannot help but love you, because you are me and you are him….You’ll look around sometimes and you’ll see that other lives seem easier, a little gentler on the mind: Why am I adopted? You’ll ask. Try to think only that you have got to learn more than others because you have more to do passing through. Don’t ask why. Such things just are.

But I have to admit that being philosophical doesn’t help much when you’re hurting. I guess I am trying to say that since we can not do anything about the pain, we might as well try to make some good of it.

Our separation is not going to be easy on either of us. I have to give you away and you have to be given away. Oh, baby I wish it didn’t have to be that way. Afterward, both of us will always be different from most of the rest. There will be a mark deep inside that only you and I know about. Only you and I will know how it feels. I know you didn’t ask to be born a bastard, and if I could have chosen, I wouldn’t have been born female. All we can do is make do.

…there is so much I want to tell you, so much love I want to encircle you with, so much I can not do for you, so much that must go unsaid. I tried to kill you, but do not hate me. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I did not dwell anymore about wishing I had been born a man; those thoughts fled as my body and mind were flooded by female hormones overwhelming all earlier considerations. Nonetheless, yin/yang conversations played in my head.

The part of me that leaned male, XY: Someday, when this is over, you’ll see, you’ll have your career back. It’s the only way. The only way.

XX: But will that be worth it? I will have lost my baby. I want my baby. I want to be with Brian and our baby.

XY: Grow up. You got yourself into this mess. If that’s what you thought, that you wanted a baby to keep, your timing is off. By the way, why didn’t you use some kind of contraception, sweetie?

XX: That’s a long story, and you don’t have to be condescending, hon. Brian—he was impotent at first, and then he wasn’t—

XY: So?

XX: So that’s how it happened. Come on, don’t you have any pity—

XY: I am not interested in that anymore. That’s done. Now you must buck up and give away this baby. Tomorrow is another day.

XX: But my baby, don't you see, my baby, not someone else’s. I want to keep him, nurse him, watch him grow up, be his mother….

XY: Too effin’ bad. You made your bed, now lie in it.

Every three weeks or so, I went to see the social worker at Northaven Terrace, the adoption agency. Mrs. Mura, who had become a confident, friend, therapist. Until the day everything changed.

“But we’ll be able to—find each other when he’s eighteen, right—or twenty-one?” I said matter-of-factly one afternoon. It’s half a statement, half a question. She is already looking at me with a kind of shock on her face. “Right?” I add. “Right?”

“NO.” Mrs. Mura shakes her head back and forth slowly.

“What do you mean?” Surely she does not mean what I already know she must mean. Yet she can not mean that. That is unbearable, cruel and unusual, nobody would make that kind of law, nobody with a heart…. A quick hot layer of sweat swept over me.

“But that’s inhumane—that can’t be right, that we never—” I could not even raise my voice, I did not have the strength to do that. She was The Man. She was in charge. I was—nothing. A baby bearer, the woman shamed, someone without rights. Of any sort.

“Lorraine, I thought you knew, once you sign the papers it’s over. I mean, for good. The records are sealed. For good. You can’t find him and he—”

“That is the most horrible thing I ever heard of, what would be the harm? I mean when—when he’s older. Surely that’s what this secrecy is about—why I can’t meet the parents—so that I don't interfere when he’s growing up.” My voice has taken on a plaintive whining tone, tears are welling up.

But she did not send any mitigating signal. She is trying to be kind, I can tell that, but that’s like offering me a smoke on the way to the gallows. Yet I could not give up.

“Can’t we do this another way? Can’t we have an agreement that when he is older, that at least he can find out, and me too? There has to be another way, there must be some parents who….”

“I know you can’t see it now, but you will make another life for yourself. The pain will lessen in time.”

I stared at her blankly, so this is how this will end, my life in an abyss of not knowing. Who dreamt up this vile law? Who was the monster?

“You’ll see, you will make a new life for yourself,” she repeated.

I looked out the window, it is high up and all I can see is the sky—the better to keep away prying eyes from the parking lot—it was a sunny day and a patch of clear bright blue filled the window. How can it be sunny today? How can today be a sunny day? I want to scream and rail against this injustice, I want to roll on the floor and moan in misery.

“What about if we—ask the adoptive parents? Or can’t we find a couple who—”

“Lorraine, if you won’t agree to this, we can’t help you. There is no other way.”

We can’t help you. There is no other way.

“This is the law. Once you sign the papers, you have to walk away. You will never forget her, but there is no going back. The records are sealed for good. It’s best for everyone this way. For you, for her…. ”

Are you out of your mind? Best for me? This will never be best for me. I want to grab my purse and run. To where? I can not go home to my family. Brian hasn’t made a move.

And I have no Plan B.

I slunk down into my chair, inspected the tiled floor, the pale green of vomit. This is so much worse than I thought it would be. This is going to be a living death. I have no say so about how this happens. I am a woman without rights. Of any sort. They think I am garbage, to be disposed of, once I hand over the baby.

This is not right. This is wrong. Every part of my being is screaming: this is wrong.

I remembered what the Chinese palmist said the time she read my hand: You have one child but something is wrong. Like he's adopted.

I did not know what she meant at the time. Yet I may have been already pregnant. I just did not know it. --lorraine

Birth Mother's Lament: The Pain of Giving Away My Baby

From the upcoming memoir, A Hole in My Heart
by Lorraine Dusky
Copyright (c) (2009 Lorraine Dusky

Juno, the 2007 movie, made the title character’s learning she was pregnant into one long hip joke. Juno, the teenage character, takes a pregnancy test at a convenience store, and wisecracks with the store owner who responds with a rhyming couplet when it comes back positive, pre-go rhyming with eggo. Ha ha. To Juno, and the storekeeper, her pregnancy will be seen as a minor inconvenience, that’s all, the storekeeper and he knows she will deal with it in her usual wise-ass manner.

If that is the normal reaction today, how can I expect young people, say, my granddaughter, to comprehend what it was like back when her mother was born? When abortion was illegal and having a child “out-of-wedlock”—the phrase even sounds archaic, does anyone even use it anymore?—was a major scandal? Reviewers and the public loved both Juno, the character, and Juno, the movie, which played for months at a nearby theater. Or maybe it seemed like months, I wanted it so to go away. Because I couldn’t bear to sit through what I knew would be emotionally wrenching in a theater, I saw the movie on DVD, alone in my bedroom, tissue box at hand. It made me alternately livid and tearfully upset, as oh-so-clever dialog made light of one of life’s most traumatic experiences. Or at least, my most horrific experience. It made giving up the child on a par with learning one has not gotten into the college of one’s choice. I wanted to throw up, yell at the writer, shoot a missile at the television. The next day I came down with a cold. Compounding the distress the movie caused every single birth mother I know, the writer, a young woman and former stripper who took the uber cool name of Diablo Cody, won the Oscar for best original screenplay the following year. She said she wrote it imagining what it would have been like if she had gotten pregnant in high school. No comment.

Can giving up a child ever be so flippant and amusing as Cody/Juno makes it seem? The character Juno stays in school, wears tight t-shirts that show her belly button popping through as her middle expands, flirts with the adoptive father-to-be before he takes off. She picks out the parents of her baby from a penny saver. Drives over and meets them. Tells them, and the lawyer—their lawyer, she doesn’t need one—she wants the adoption, “old school,” no ties, that way, it goes without saying, she won’t have any responsibilities or expectation to visit. But it’s not going to be old school anyway because—hey! She knows who the mother is! She’s picked her out! The flirting father has split by this time. Yes, there is one tearful scene at the hospital after the birth, but mostly it’s all chillingly unemotional, cheeky instead of devastating. The final scene shows Juno and her callow, maybe boyfriend—someone with the emotional depth of a kiddie pool—singing together, lah-de-dah, life goes on as before.

Then, it was so different then, when I got pregnant with Jane. I came back from Puerto Rico and quit my job within a week. Made up a flimsy excuse that I had to return to Michigan because my father was sick. I had to leave the paper before I showed, nobody would have wanted a pregnant woman—single at that!—working at the newspaper. It was too scandalous to contemplate. Besides, for Brian’s sake, I could not be waddling around pregnant.

At first I cried, feeling oh-so-sorry for myself. But ultimately one has to stop and I pulled myself together and slowly but surely the “problem” became a baby. My baby. “It” became “he.” Our baby. Made from our love. We said, What a great kid he will be. In retrospect that sounds like two blowhards congratulating themselves on the great genes they’ve bestowed on their progeny, Hey, this kid’s lucky to be born. We couldn’t imagine anything but a perfect child with a good brain, an inquisitive mind, a long, lean body. A star pupil! An athlete! Surely someone wonderful. And once that bump in my belly become a real live baby—someone not a “mistake” or a “problem,”—I could not fathom how I was going to give him up. How anyone could give up a child.

Brian and I always called the baby a “him,” as if there were no doubt about the sex. For me, it was obviously wishful thinking. I can’t recall the exact moment when I knew I wished I’d been born male; it must have been during that argument with my father about girls and college. If I’d been born male, I told myself, everything would have been easier. I only saw demerits to being female. Boy or girl, if before I had cried and thought about killing myself because I was pregnant—yes that was the easy way out and my mind went there—now I was crying because there seemed no way to keep him.

Brian said: You need to call the adoption agency.

I recoiled. How can anyone do that?

He said: You must.

And eventually, I did.

So by February, I was sitting with a social worker, a fortysomething woman named Mrs. Mura, pouring out my heart and liberally taking tissues from the convenient pop-up box on her desk. I could not see how we could keep him, I could not see how I could give him away to strangers, however nice they might be. Giving away a baby was a deplorable, terrible act. Unforgivable. A sin against nature. You know those documentaries on PBS that show animals who stick by their young after one is injured, downed by a lunging predator but not quite killed, and the mother needs to run with the herd if she is to save herself, but she stays anyway, pawing the ground, nudging her offspring, trying to make it stand and run away with her? Remember how the mother stays long after it is safe for her to be there? I would be the doe who cut and ran. I would be the doe who repudiated her mothering instinct, who left her fawn there to be eaten by the lions. Today when I see such a scene anywhere memory plunges into me like an ice pick wielded by a madman. I say nothing of course, not to anyone. I simply feel.

Then, I wept. Oh, I wept and felt sorry for myself, and for my baby. Yet I went forward, filling out forms on family medical history, his and mine. Going to the pre-natal checkups Mrs. Mura arranged free of charge. Religiously taking the vitamin pills the doctor prescribed. Eating little and not gaining weight—no one told me that I needed to. Like today’s hippest movie stars, my belly grew, my thighs became miraculously thin. As the months passed, I hid under heavy sweaters and sweat shirts when I went to the market. I did not walk baby proud with my belly sticking out. I stooped slightly, all the better to hide the bulge. And everywhere I turned there were women in the street with babies. In their bellies, in strollers, all coming at me like rocket fire.

One day, after I came back from my meeting with Mrs. Mura, I said: I can’t do this. Let’s find a way to keep her. I don’t think I can….

Brian said: No, we can’t do that. You have to do this. Give her away went unsaid.

There was no room for argument.

A daughter was born three days before Easter. More tomorrow.
Easter has always been a difficult time for me.