In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.

Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups. The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name. The e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail account. The few blogging awards that went to Jennifer Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.

My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an e-mail to my ex-husband from the writing to survive account and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a sneaking suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited at least once. A friend from elementary school found me here. For a while the first hit on a Google search of my name (yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the only one, right?) was the blog, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious. Until today, the two weren't directly connected.

It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's quite another to realize that people who may be a part of my story are reading. Or that casual friends might come upon this and find out more than they ever wanted to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the door ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed it. What's there to hide? Just me.

So.



Here I am.

Jennifer Trinkle.

All other names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Tags: openness, anonymity, secrets

There was a girl from the health clinic, tall and black, doe-eyed and silent, that I kept seeing around town. She was seventeen and pregnant again. Twins. Sometimes she would appear at my hangout, the Wilmington Public Library, supporting her belly in both hands as she lumbered to the ladies room, staring at the carpet in front of her.

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.

Tags: teen pregnancy, school, secrets, the stillbirth

Late on Friday night, my mother arrived in town. We’re having a great time – when it’s good, it really is wonderful. She’s smart, funny, and well-read, a person who is always thinking and analyzing. My husband has always gotten along with her and C is enjoying having her around, too.

In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.

Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.

I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...

Tags: secrets, forgiveness, Mom, family, depression

I'm up early this morning, enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee before anyone else is awake, cherishing my time alone, time to think before the day begins in earnest, before I have to answer to the needs of the kid.

When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.

I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.

Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.

Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.

I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.

Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008

As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.

I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.

Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.

H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.

What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.

But I can't worry about that now, can I?

Tags: writing, secrets, storytelling

I got out the autopsy and hospital records again recently, a way to remind myself of the sequence of events, background for the next version of my stillbirth story. In a thick stack of photocopies from microfiche, I can read about my hospital stay, see the medical advice they gave me about postpartum care. There is a "Certificate of Emergency Baptism," which seems especially antiquated and a little presumptuous, especially when I've never been baptized myself. I probably ok'ed it, though. It wasn't my soul who was being saved.

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.

Tags: teen pregnancy, guilt, secrets, the stillbirth

The Roe v. Wade decision came down over a decade before I was a pregnant sixteen-year-old, but I completely identify with the experiences of the women interviewed in Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.

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??

Tags: adoption, the stillbirth, teen pregnancy, secrets