by Laura Engel
I lied and wore a false veneer for fifty years. Disenfranchised grief and shame colored my life and you never would have known it.
In 1966, I was a senior in high school, a girl with a bright future. I was popular, an honor student, active in our school’s journalism and thespian club. I worked on the school newspaper and had dreams of going away to college, of moving away from the south and becoming a journalist and writing for magazines. I attended church every Sunday dressed properly with a hat and gloves. I loved my family.
My innocent and simple life screeched to a halt when I found myself pregnant and discovered the teenage boy who had told me he loved me for two years had no desire to be a father. He dropped me immediately as did his parents, disgusted that I expected their young son to throw away his brilliant future and become tied down to a wife and child.
Then my own mother discovered that I was pregnant, our dysfunctional family was thrown into overdrive.
“You stupid girl. Look what you have done. How could you do this to us?”
Those words were burned into my heart and brain, and I can still see my mother’s ravaged face as she sobbed and ranted that I had not only destroyed my reputation but the family’s as well.
It was the Baby Scoop Era, and one of the worst things a teenage girl could do was become pregnant with no ring on her finger. At the advice of our minister, I was secretly shuttled to an unwed mothers’ maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana and hidden away. My parents, our minister, and the staff at the maternity home, along with the social mores of the day drilled into me that this was for the best.
As I grew more hysterical and afraid I pleaded to please, please let me keep my baby and promise I would do whatever it took and that I would be a good mother. My cries fell on deaf ears and I was admonished and repeatedly told that no I could not keep this baby.
They asked what was wrong with me? Didn’t I know that I was providing a child for a good Christian family?
I also constantly heard that after the baby was born, I would go on with my life and I would forget this ever happened.
That is when the First Mask covered my sad, shamed face.
Like most girls in the 1950s and early 60s I was taught to be compliant, to follow rules, to honor my parents, to accommodate, and do as I was told. I had disappointed my parents in the worst way. Now I had to become the daughter they expected me to be, even though I was a distraught grieving mother whose first-born son had been ripped away from her.
My first mask was that of a young woman who could still laugh even though she cried in private. I was told not to speak about that secret son or that time in the maternity home ever.
This is when the lies began.
The Second Mask was one a contented Mother and Wife.
That mask was bright and cheerful, loving and kind. The mask of a people pleaser, a perfectionist. The mask hid the true face of a young woman who lived with the secret of deep grief after having committed the unthinkable act of leaving her newborn son to a closed adoption.
I was told it was better for all of us if I never thought about that baby and never spoke about it so I pushed down all of my anger and grief and poured love and adoration over my 3 other baby boys all born within 8 years of my first secret son. No one knew I was a mother who secretly hated herself, so she stayed in a loveless marriage, another lie I lived.
The mask hid the young mother who wept for her missing son every holiday, every year on his birthday, and wondered where in the world he was. Who was raising this child? This child, who like her other sons, was as much a part of her as her own arms, her own legs, her own heart.
Still, she kept her secret, after all she was a rule follower, an obedient daughter.
As the years went on, divorce happened, single motherhood happened, a career happened and a new love that was this time, the right love, happened.
The Third Mask I wore was one of a woman in love, an accomplished woman with a successful career, an amazing husband and a houseful of beautiful children.
I was all those things, but I was more too.
Our children grew up, success happened in my career, I was busy. I married my second husband. The light of my life. My NorthStar. I told him about my secret son and asked him to keep the secret. For me he did, and he offered to try to find my first son.
I was a fortunate woman and I knew it. So, I straightened my smiling mask and continued to live with my secret.
This mask hid the fact that no matter how successful or fulfilled I was there was always a stone wedged in my wounded heart. This huge burden of a secret ate at me, still I continued to suffer in private.
“What would my friends, my clients, my children think of me if they knew the truth?” was a fear I lived with. The shame that had been layered on me just hardened over the years and I didn’t even know it.
Watching my beloved sons who I had raised, I wondered if my first son was like them? Did he wonder where I was? Did he long for me, the way I longed for him? Did he hate me for surrendering him to a closed adoption? Would we ever find each other?
Decades flew by.
Mask number Four was that of a fulfilled and happy matriarch of my family.
That mask was colored as the mom, the grammy and the woman who sailed through life, older and wiser. Grey hair, wrinkles, and filled with crone wisdom.
Now that I had time to breathe, I found myself obsessed and continuously wondering about my secret son. I searched on websites, I joined a secret page for the alumni of that maternity home on Facebook, I spoke to search Angels. I submitted my DNA to ancestry 23 and Me.
For the first time I wrote the name I had given him “Jamie” in my journal.
In my warped world it was still 1967.
In 2016 a miracle happened. My son found me through Ancestry DNA. All four masks dissolved and melted away.
I wanted to shout to the world that my son had found me! I was giddy with relief and joy. Our reunion was one for the books, so I wrote a book about it. Meeting and hugging my son for the first time was magical. I described it as when a new mother holds her newborn and is filled to the brim with a love that is almost undefinable, but at the same time I now knew him as the grown man he had become.
Finally after those hard forty-nine years with all the secrets it involved, I could finally be me. I began to learn how to be the real me. I could claim that part of me, the young birth mother, who had begged to keep her son, who had yearned for him for decades, and loved him as a mother the entire time.
***
Four and a half years is not a long time in the scheme of things, but we crammed a lifetime into those short years. Our families welcomed each other. My other son, his half-brothers,
opened their arms to him. Joyous discoveries were made. We laughed a lot. Heartfelt conversations and long visits made for beautiful memories. We told each other now, we are complete. My son and I agreed we were both healthier in body, mind, and spirit for having found each other, and we both cherished this time.
Then the unthinkable happened. My son took his own life.
Is there a more complicated grief? Is there a more unbearable loss than that of one’s child, regardless of their age or circumstances? I had now lost my son twice and this time it was completely final. First the stigma of unwed pregnancy and adoption had damaged me and now decades later the stigma of suicide colored my life.
Right after my son died by suicide, I came close to hiding behind a new mask again. I believed I would never speak of his death. I doubted I would recover from being the woman who had tragically lost her son twice.
Slowly I realized all the times during our reunion I questioned why I had hidden that part of my life, and him, from family, friends, even myself. I had been schooled repeatedly for years not to talk about him, or to say aloud what had happened to me or all the millions of other mothers who were forced to leave their secret babies behind during that era. Speaking the truth would have helped both of us. Maybe I would have found him sooner. Maybe, just maybe the outcome would have been different. I’ll never know.
One day I woke up and thought NO MORE.
I will speak of that time; I will speak openly about my son and his death. I will speak openly about what closed adoptions did to so many of us wounded mothers and conflicted, hurt adoptees.
The more I researched and learned, the more I lived my own experience, the wiser I became about what had happened to all of us during the Baby Scoop era.
I learned the final stage of healing is when we can openly and truthfully speak our stories, hoping to educate and help heal others. I honor myself and my beloved son when I speak the truth. I honor all my sons and my loved ones when I embrace our history.
I am healthier and stronger now and true to my authentic self. That painful chapter in my life, when I was made to leave my newborn son, is no longer a secret. No more masks for me. I can be honest about all the parts that make up the me who I had been all along.
Laura L. Engel is the author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened, secrets, shame, and adoption in the 1960s.
Laura loves hearing from adoptees and birth mothers.
Find her at https:// www. lauralengel.com
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