I mean, it’s borderline child abuse not to share this kind of information. How can anyone think that we will just absorb it naturally, or that it’s our responsibility as children to figure it out? It just mystifies me. I had no idea. I mean, we had never had pets. I didn’t live on a farm. We had a very puritanical, Beaver Cleaver lifestyle, and it just wasn’t anything that was ever discussed. I mean, as amazing as it sounds, I was 16 and pregnant and I did not know how babies were born.
At the maternity home there was a roster on a bulletin board, near the stairway, that indicated people’s chores. The chores rotated. They were minor, like cleaning the bathrooms, running a vacuum cleaner, helping out in the kitchen, setting the table, that kind of stuff. As new girls came in, their names went to the bottom. So, over the time you were there, you would watch your name continue to move up that list—that was one indicator of how close you were.
Every day I asked if I could see my baby, and every day they said, “Yes, we’ll come and get you and take you to the nursery.” But they never did. Then the day I was being released, someone took me upstairs and wheeled me in front of the nursery window. She pointed to the one that was mine and said, “That’s him.” I asked if I could hold him, and she said no.
I wound up seeing a psychiatrist for about a year to deal with the grief, which I hadn’t fully dealt with. It’s never a good idea to delay that process. It was a difficult year for me, juggling family, a job, our relationship, and dealing with my past at the same time. My son lived near me for about eight years and then he moved to New York City. We started a small business together so we could work together and we became very close during that time.“Every time I hear about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, ‘You don’t have a clue.’Losing him had such a profound influence on me. You know, my siblings all had fancy degrees and very focused careers, and they drew from that in order to define who they were.
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