Mother Love

by Laura L. Engel

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I would bluntly announce to anyone who would listen that I wasn’t going to have children. I was going to move to New York City and become a journalist and write books.

I must have said that a hundred times to my mother, who was a housewife and mother of four who never seemed that happy about keeping house and raising a daughter and three sons. I just knew that there had to be more to life than my mother had. Plus, it seemed like I was mothering my little brothers from the time they were born. I was the big sister who stepped in when Mama wasn’t emotionally there, which was at least half the time I was growing up. 

So I decided to make plans to get away, but life had different plans for me.

I found myself  pregnant while a senior in high school. Being pregnant in high school was considered close to criminal but “I had done this to myself and my family.” I don’t know how many times I heard that. 

Instantly my life changed when I realized I was going to become a mother. Although I would have no support from my family or the father of my child, I assumed I would have my baby and keep it. I was determined I could do this. I imagined bringing my infant home from the hospital wrapped in a yellow and blue crocheted blanket and a little yellow cap from the moment I knew I was pregnant.

But as soon as I began to show  my parents whisked me away to an unwed mother’s home. I was told I was not fit to be a mother, not ready, and there was no way I would be able to keep my baby. I was told this child would always have to be a secret. I was supposed to give birth and forget it ever happened. I was told “this is for the best” by my parents, grandmother, our minister, staff at the Home, and by the 1960’s society we lived in. I never bought into that logic. Somehow, my chaotic teenage brain and heart knew that the decision to leave my child was the wrong one. I begged, I pleaded, I went a bit berserk and no one listened.

The first time I experienced my baby fluttering, I felt an overpowering desire to be his mother. When my newborn son was forced out of my arms, I felt my baby was stolen. It was the worst pain, the worst agony not only to have him taken, but to be told I would never know where he was or even who he was for the rest of my life.

My grief made my heart ache and my soul die. Mama, who never had been useful at comforting me, never spoke of my baby again once I was home. Nobody did. The subject of my invisible son was taboo. I was told never to speak about him or the Home. It was as if he had never happened. No one thought of me as a mother, except me. And it didn’t matter what I thought.

After going back to my hometown, I married far too young and far too soon for all the wrong reasons. I could not wait to hold a baby in my arms. After all, I was a mother even though no one else would acknowledge it. Within a year and a half, I had another son and within eight years after leaving the unwed mother’s home, I became the mother of three more sons. Mothering my sons as they grew up into adulthood was the most important and rewarding part of my life. I lived for the love I gave and received back from my sons, and simultaneously I grieved for the son who was a secret, a son I could not speak about but thought of each day.

I immersed myself in the fact that mothering came easy for me.  Even though I had boasted I would never have children, I realized I had always been a mother. First to my three brothers and now as a young mother to my sons. During my career my colleagues and customers often joked that they wished I was their mother. I embraced my mother-role, still never forgetting that first son, who had woken the mother in me with such an explosion of love and grief.

Forty-nine years flew by. Life was busy, challenging, and rewarding. I married a second and beloved husband, and was now the mother of five treasured children. Shortly after retiring my secret son found me through the miracle of DNA and life’s trajectory changed once again. After an extraordinary reunion my son and I began making up for all those lost years. 

My son’s adoptive mother had died 18 years before he and I reunited and he fully embraced having me in his life. I was head over heels in love with my new role as his mother, one I had missed terribly and been denied for so long. My husband and other sons welcomed him with open arms. At last, our story was complete, no longer a secret. My son had found me and I pinched myself and thanked God that I now knew where all my children were each night. There is nothing a mother longs for more than that.

But once again, life had other plans. Our miraculous, loving reunion lasted a short four and half years, and then for reasons that had nothing to do with our relationship, tragedy struck when my son took his own life.     

It stopped me and our family in our tracks and it came close to destroying me.

The son I had longed to mother for all those decades, and finally had the chance to know, to hug, to laugh with, and to spend hours talking with was gone forever. Compounded grief left me distraught and questioning myself. If I had been able to keep him would this have happened? If I had been a better mother once we found each other would this have happened? Did I not do enough?

I now belonged to not only the club of birthmothers who had been forced to relinquish their newborns during the Baby Scoop era. I was now in another club no mother wants to be part of – the club reserved for mothers who have lost their child a second and final time to suicide.

After months and months of interrogating myself relentlessly, I came to the realization that although my husband was my rock, my sons were tender, and my friends wonderfully supportive, no one could really help me. Unless a person has lived through being a birthmother and finally had the chance to mother their adopted child only to have that child die – how could anyone possibly understand? I was struggling to understand the tragic double loss myself.

Close to a year after crying for so long I was sure my eyes would never be the same. I woke one morning remembering something all of my sons and even some friends had said to me during times of stress and depression in their lives. I had made it easier for them to see more clearly just by listening and holding their hand. I had helped them by mothering them. 

I decided that I needed to be the same person for myself. I needed to love myself, comfort myself the way I had loved and comforted others. I stopped hating myself for letting myself be talked into leaving my firstborn son. I came to terms with the fact he had died. I decided not to become the bitter old lady who could not see past her pain. The mother who felt she had failed and couldn’t forgive herself.

I began to Mother Myself. 

I began to love myself unconditionally, like any good mother should.

I joined a support group of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents who had dealt with suicidality which is what I would have advised my children to do. I began to educate myself on how to get through this incredibly hard loss just like I would have done for any of my children if they had to go through this.

Best yet, I began to laugh and fully love again without guilt. The realization that my son would have wanted me to enjoy my life, my other children, and my grandchildren was powerful. I could cherish his memory and be grateful for the fact we had had four and a half years. After all, suicide was not his only story. His life was his story, and I had been part of that life.

I could once again love myself because the mother in me was mothering me.

May 2026

WC 1439

Author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened – secrets, shame, and adoption in the 1960s