Excerpt: 'The Girls Who Went Away'

July 26, 2006 — -- In "The Girls Who Went Away," Ann Fessler interviews dozens of women who were forced to give their babies up for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s.

They were mostly unmarried, middle-class teenagers who had gotten pregnant with their first sexual partner. They were all scared into submission.

Their mortified and humiliated parents sent these women away -- for many it was the first time they'd left their towns -- to maternity houses where they lived with strangers until it was time to deliver their babies.

They were then driven to hospitals where they were dropped off and left to have their babies alone. Many of them never got a chance to hold their babies.

Some didn't even get to see them.

Four days later, they were released from the hospital and sent home to families who told them to never speak of the matter again.

Now, 50 years later, these women describe what it was like to go through that experience as a teenager -- and how it has affected their lives.

Read an excerpt from Fessler's book below.

My Own Story as an Adoptee

My mother told me that on my first three birthdays she lit a special candle on my cake for the young woman who had given birth to me. She never explained why she did this for three years, no more no less. I don't remember this private ceremony but I do remember that there were times in my childhood when she looked at me in a particular way and I knew she was thinking about this young woman, my mother.

Three generations of women from my family have been brought together by adoption. Neither my maternal grandmother, nor my mother, nor I, have given birth to a child. I am the first for whom this was a conscious choice.

My mother was never told that she was adopted. For my grandmother to admit this would have been a public declaration of her own inadequacy, her inability to bear children for her husband. But my mother knew. She had found her birth certificate taped to the back of a painting at her aunt's house. Her name had been Baby Helene before it was Hazel, and when she brought me home she named me Ann Helene.

My mother suffered her own private insecurity over not being able to bring a child to full term. But by the time she and my father turned to adoption, there was no public stigma attaching to those who chose to adopt. In post-World-War-II America, families who wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family, one with a mother and father that really wanted to raise a child.

Although it is doubtful that families vetted through this process were actually any better or worse than other families, I was lucky enough to have parents who were loving and supportive and mindful of my development as an individual. They knew that they could guide me, but they also understood I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who were themselves, perhaps, too young to fully understand the characteristics they had inherited from their own parents and passed on to me.

My adoptive mother and father were offered very little information about my biological parents. She was 19 and from a big farm family of English and German descent. He was athletic, a college football player from a family of means. Their parents felt that this was no way to start a family.

My mother cried whenever she told me this story. She knew it could not be so simple. I did not. The story of that young couple sounded like the plot of a movie to me. I liked being part of this soulful story of ill-fated love, of having a mysterious past, of not being related to my family, of being my own person.

When I became sexually active I imagined that if the worst happened I would do as my mother had done: go off to another town to a home for unwed mothers, and return with a story about a kidney infection, or about an Aunt Betty in Sandusky who needed my care.

This is what young women who got caught in this unfortunate situation did. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared. Everyone knew where she had gone and that she had most likely been told: "If you love your child you must give it up, move on with your life, and forget."

It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy to just move on with your life. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.

Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989 I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of recently having talked to her but I couldn't remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was but no one knew, so I continued to look at the exhibition.

Later this women walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, "You could be my long lost daughter, you look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child." I said, "You don't know what you're saying to me, I could be your daughter. I was adopted." There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, "Are you sure about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed." But I was sure.

We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn't know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, "When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn't expect her to come knocking on your door 40 years later." And she said, "You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you've had a good life." I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty, and empathetic, and naïve, all at once. How could I have never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?

I continued to listen, realizing that this was the first time I had ever heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after 40 years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. And as I listened I finally remembered why this woman seemed so familiar to me. The image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother's worrying had caused the dream.

A year later the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?

My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father's cabinet with "Ann" neatly printed in my mother's hand, that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the 3 month waiting period before my parents could bring me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if this woman was my mother.

The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and they would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.

When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my art work in an exhibition entitled "Parents". I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother's full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.

I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.

When I arrived I couldn't find the public library so I went to the school. The halls were empty, students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far, but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office.

We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a yearbook from 1948 and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions. This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn't find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. It had gone too far. I just wanted to look at a picture.

I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned towards him and said in unison, "Do you have a yearbook from 1948?" And the man said, "Who are you looking for?" And they all turned back towards me.

I had to say a last name. I acted like I was asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, "She doesn't live around here anymore, but there's a house with a business out on route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her."

I cleared out and started driving. I didn't know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn't wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.

As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been, before I was born. Then I saw the house and barn and sign for the business and I thought, "I'll just go in and buy something. I don't know what." I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway but there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I was way too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around. So I rolled down my window and heard myself say, "I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn't happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor would you?" And he said, "Yeah, that's my sister."

Then he started talking. He talked for an hour. He told me about her life, her husband, two boys, and a girl. But what he didn't know was-there was another girl. Two boys and two girls. He talked about growing up on the farm, the old Victorian house and the banister they loved to slide down. Then he talked about her, and how she was different than her sisters. He said, "She would much rather spend time in the barn than help in the house." And he told other stories that sounded familiar.

And finally he asked how I knew her and I told him my mother lived around there when she was young and moved away. She wondered what ever happened to Eleanor. So he went into the house and brought out her address and phone number. And when I left, I drove to the town where she had lived all these years, just to drive by, to make sure she was OK. I always worried that her family had disowned her and she lived in miserable conditions. Maybe I thought I might catch a glimpse of her.

It occurred to me afterwards that she might get suspicious when her brother told her the story of a woman who had been asking about her. Maybe she had not told her children. She might be living in fear that I would show up on her doorstep next. I couldn't decide whether I should contact her right away or wait. I waited 14 years.

Over the years that followed I created several autobiographical installations about adoption. Whenever possible I offered space in my exhibitions for members of the community to display their stories of adoption along with mine. I was overwhelmed by what I read. The writings left behind by women in New York, California, Texas and Maryland were the same. What the mothers had been assured when they signed the papers giving up all rights to their children turned out to be a lie. They did not move on and forget. I think my adoptive mother knew this when she lit those candles. I think three years was all that she could bear. She needed to move on and forget.