The weight of it
If you tell, everyone will know how bad you are. And stupid. And worthless. They will reject you.
Tired of the weight, you tell anyway. No one thinks you are bad. Or stupid. Or worthless. Sometimes they treat you with empathy. Others ignore what you tell them, but you come to understand that they don't know what to do with it, that it's their problem, not yours.
You start to feel better, like maybe you didn't cause your abandonment by being bad or being too smart-assed or being too you. Your abandonment was your parent's problem and not yours, even though now you are left to deal with the lifelong aftermath.
You think of her, the other girl, your biological grandmother, sixteen and pregnant in New Castle, Delaware in 1950, how she carried also carried a baby -- your mother -- probably in secret until almost the end. You think of her secret pregnancy, the secret father, the secret baby going off to live with a new family. Your birth grandmother grew up, got married and had two additional children. She held fast to the secrets.
You are angry with her for keeping these secrets, for denying information and empathy. You identify with her, remembering what it was like to be young, alone, and terrified. You want to tell her "I understand" (as much as you can). You want to punch her in the face. The legacy of suppression is a foul one and you need to blame someone for what happened to you. Someone distant and easy. But you can't. The people to blame, your mother, your father, other adults in your life at the time . . . oh, you're afraid of the mess your anger would make and you know now how hopeless they were.
You try to write about secrets, but it just feels like an emotional morass.
That's the problem with secrets.
Image: My mother, summer 1952.
The raw and the cooked
The good news: when I read it, I feel calm. Less ashamed. Still so sorry for the girl I was, for the child I couldn't love, still affected by the time in ways that some future therapist will help me work out. But the actual story reads and feels like something that happened a long time ago to the person I used to be. Her experiences are mine, of course, are a part of me, but they are long ago and I've dealt with them -- to some extent.
The bad news: when I write about it, my writing is still highly controlled and almost immediately edited. I'm so concerned about making it into a coherent story with some sort of transcendent message that it's hard to just write about it freely and with raw (versus over-metaphorized) emotion. At this point, the transcendent message is that I survived, that writing about it and removing the secrecy has been healing. I'm torn between just writing it out and out and out, in private, and coming up with something that opens up the experience by broadening it, writing three separate stories (my grandmother's, my mother's, and mine) with background on accidental teenage pregnancy in the early 1950s, the late 1960s, and the mid-1980s.
This is probably the best way to go about it, to escape from my self-obsession and to broaden the topic. Of course, this requires my mother's consent to tell her story, which I strangely ignored in early drafts, outside of saying that she decided to marry my father. Ideally I would be able to track down her biological mother or at least get the woman's name (she may be dead), which also requires my mother's permission.
Writing it out and expanding it aren't mutually exclusive. I can write something raw and loose that can be tightened up later and also write about my mother and grandmother's experiences and the experiences of the many, many others who have been in our position. Maybe I can finally turn this into something worth reading. Something that makes it more than just tragic.
Image: Fifteen and a little bit pregnant: me in my grandfather's front yard, summer 1985.
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around
me that week. I walk right through them. Who
needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s
name to his father: “She said it was the
first thing that popped into her head.”
“Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my
stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an
aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and
hide behind the blast of televised football
and the scraping of forks, my paternal
grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing
sounding a note of general disapproval. Six
days after the birth I try the nightgown
trick again, tighten it over my empty
abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps
of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad
drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up
to be done. He drags the stained twin
mattress to the end of the driveway, props it
against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very
tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later,
with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents
share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered
Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they
only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden
in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad
gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from
the car. I open the door to the Little House.
Smells become part of the background of a
place, as invisible as the color of the
ceiling or the punctuation of electrical
outlets against wallboard. You forget how a
house smells, forget it practically the
moment you close the door. The stale air of
the Little House hits me like a slap in the
face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew,
of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell
of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and
scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray
the walls and floor until they are damp. Over
the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the
place, moving furniture and taking down
photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly
into the main house. From my grandfather’s
room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the
jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop
sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped
bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the
dishwasher, I kneel to open the china
cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on
the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little
House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke
between both hands, taking careful,
deliberate steps on every slate stepping
stone, as though one misstep onto grass means
bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I
take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter,
cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to
numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to
cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I
walk to my mother’s for our ride to school
and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil
crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas
gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on
the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I
hop in, open the Wilmington
News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom
puts the car into gear and backs out of the
driveway.
Everything around me remains the
same.
"When are you due?"
I was not going to be that
girl. I was not that girl, marked by
pregnancy, announcing my mistake and
stupidity to everyone. Most of my friends
didn’t know about it. Even my new boyfriend
was clueless, in more ways than one: all that
direct contact with my ever-rounding form and
he never asked a question. I was going to
spend my last trimester in hiding, living
with my father and stepmother. Everyone
swallowed the story, my need for a little
time away.
It seemed to be working,
the baggy clothes campaign, the stony denial,
but one incident brought doubt. A friend,
Lynne, and I were out skipping school at the
usual place, a shopping mall near school. We
stopped in a boutique where Lynne bought a
pair of earrings. As she was ringing up the
sale, the salesclerk gave me a friendly
glance.
“When are you due?” she
asked.
I blushed. She blushed. We
were both briefly, awkwardly silent, before
the clerk quickly covered for me. “Oh, no!
You’re too young! I’m so sorry!”
Thank you,
lady.
Later, at the food court, I
asked Lynne “Am I getting fat? Do I look
pregnant to you?” gently patting my belly,
camouflaged by loose-fitting clothing. Lynne
dipped a French fry in ketchup, gave me a
quick once over. “You look fine,” she said,
and shoved the fry in her mouth. That was
that.
Another existence to be denied
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.
This is where my power of
description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I
don’t want to rehash the past in angry
diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst
of the never-ending stillbirth story,
attempting to write about my time in the
Little House, a companion piece to my
biological grandmother’s experiences and as I
try to get my mind around it I find myself
asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS
THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy
became apparent and ended a month later in a
stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in
the Little House, when it became clear that I
needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the
underlying feelings have changed. My anger
before was mainly self-directed, anger at my
family turned inward: what evil in me brought
on their rejection? But now I am reaching a
different conclusion: my mother and father
had so little respect for themselves, for
their power as parents, that they gave up,
figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even
assumed that they would only make things
worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father
never even started. They deserve my
compassion. It's no use getting angry at
those who don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings,
unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense
with suppressed emotion, so much a part of
who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out
of most other versions of the stillbirth
story because it feels like an emotional
bomb. As I try to get back into that time of
isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger,
my self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through
language, to capture the shards of the
experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the
experience controls me.
The dammed
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
Dead on arrival
There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.
Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."
Does that leave me off the hook?
About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.
"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.
"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."
He was so kind, as if we were in this together.
I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.
For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
The Girls Who Went Away
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
Lacunae and mortar
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.