Photo courtesy of John Moore
It was the fifties and I was one of the bad girls. I'd gotten myself in a "family way" and had a baby without a husband. I could have ruined the football star's life. What was I thinking? (As if I'd made this baby all by myself.)
A girl didn't have babies without husbands then. We were sent away to have our children, to love them and then to let them go.
Let them go?
As if we had a choice. Nobody in their right mind would give away such a sweet, tiny, needy part of oneself. Would they? Gave them away? Please - it was NOT voluntary.
The plan was that we'd come home after spending a few months helping a fictitious sick aunt. I stuck to that story for thirty years.
Girls like me returned wearing our flat stomachs as if nothing at all had occurred.We came home, many of us, and finished school and went to college or to nice, safe jobs behind some cosmetics counter. Nobody was the wiser. Yet everyone knew the truth.
The precious boys, our partners in crime, no longer spoke to us. And families with whom we'd shared church pews for our entire lives, changed their seats. How our parents, shunned, endured the whispers I don't know.
I married, had more children and became the best mother I could be. I doted every scrap of attention and love I could muster on my "new" children as if in apology to the lost first.
We bad girls were told that in time we would forget the ones we "gave away". And we hoped that was true. But those babies - they had other ideas. They made sure we would never forget them.
Like a cancer within each of us, the lie grew. Those children we were made to give away - demanded our attention. Our betrayal manifested itself in illness, in suicide, in depression and a myriad of other awful ways.
The day we said goodbye to them was the day we said hello to a deep unnamed longing seared forever in our very souls...
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Story by Pamela Tyree Griffin
Story by Pamela Tyree Griffin
Photo/Art by John Wisbey
Inspired By The Book The Girls Who Went Away (c) by Ann Fessler
