The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

Author:Ann Fessler [Fessler, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Family & Relationships, Adoption & Fostering
ISBN: 9781101644294
Google: AjC4qfF8G9YC
Amazon: B008RMF4GS
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2007-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

MARGARET

I had a fairly normal life. I had nice parents who loved me. My uncle lived with us and my grandmother was around a lot. I had good friends. It was a normal Catholic high school girl’s life. When I came home from school, I would take care of my four younger brothers and sisters and cook their dinner. I had been going with my boyfriend for a little over two years and he would come over rather frequently. He had ideas what we should do in that time period. I wasn’t always as thrilled as he was, but you know, I always said, “Five minutes of bad sex changed my life.”

I don’t remember my father finding out. I do remember him coming upstairs. Now, my father was very Catholic. My mother was not Catholic. He didn’t use birth control. We went to church if there was a blizzard or if there was snow up to our waists, we went to church. And he said, “Is it too late for us to do something about this?” I was just shocked and horrified that my father, this Catholic, was willing to bend the rules. And I said, “That is not something I’m willing to do.”

So the next thing I knew my father came to me and said, “You will be going to St. Anne’s infant and maternity home and you will be giving your baby up for adoption.” There was no room for discussion. I wasn’t in any position to argue with them about what I was going to do and not do.

Many other birth mothers will talk about the maternity home as this evil place, but really and truly St. Anne’s was a place where I was given a home, a shelter. I had freedom. I mean, there were lots of other girls like me. We could go out; we just had to let people know where we were going. We would sign out and sign back in. We went to the movies. We went shopping. The only thing they wanted you to do was to get up and go to Mass. But I was asking God to help me, so I didn’t mind getting up at five-thirty to go to Mass.

One morning I woke at two o’clock with this horrible stomachache. I went to the bathroom, you know, kind of drowsy, and all of a sudden it dawned on me this wasn’t a stomachache; I was in labor. The nun came and she put my girlfriend and me in a station wagon. We went tearing through the streets in the middle of the night. Nobody called my parents. We got to the emergency room and they examined me, and they said, “The head’s down, you’re four centimeters dilated, so we’re going to admit you.” And the nun said, “Okay. Well, we are leaving now.” I turned around and thought, “What do you mean, you’re leaving and taking my girlfriend with you?” But they did. They left.

In those days being prepped to have a baby, especially for a girl who was seventeen years old, was humiliating.

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