original story

The Original Story

This is what I didn't talk about for twenty years: what it was like to be pregnant at 15 and then barely 16, living in an unheated, unplumbed summer cottage my family called the Little House. My mother was four houses down the street; my father was in another state; my grandfather lived 20 feet away in the main house. At night he would remove his prosthetic foot and take off his hearing aids. I was invisible, lived life under the radar and hid my pregnancy until I was about six months along.

On a cold night in late November 1985, I awoke to labor pains. Somehow I made it to the main house to call my mother. She rushed to my cottage, arriving right before I gave birth. The boy was stillborn.

After a brief postpartum hospitalization and small funeral for my son, I went back to the Little House, left alone to deal with my grief and guilt. I lived there until I left for college and never looked back.

It was only after my second son’s birth in 2005 that I started to confront the story of my teenage pregnancy. During naptimes and early mornings, I wrote about my experiences in the Little House. When the boy was almost three, I started the writing to survive blog and shared the story, first with friendly strangers, then with friends and acquaintances.

And, slowly, the story changed.

What was once about my shame and guilt, about bone-deep anger and tamped-down grief (the baby’s death, my family’s neglect) became a story of forgiveness and acceptance, first for my family, and then for myself.

The story also became one of connection: I was a third-generation pregnant teenager. My sixteen-year-old biological grandmother gave my mother up for adoption in 1950, my pregnant mother married my father at nineteen.

My biological grandmother rejected all contact with my mother, telling the woman who located her that she had never spoken a word of her first-born with her husband or subsequent children. She remains a mystery, the girl from New Castle, Delaware who never talked.

We shared the secrecy. Perhaps we also shared the burden of shame and submerged grief. Someday I hope to find out more about her story, to write it, to join our stories with the millions of others out there, mothers and daughters separated but forever connected.

Our pasts don't define us. They shape how we live in the world, they give us depth and show our strength. Over time I have learned that we can overcome the past, fight the feelings of inadequacy or guilt that may feel so much a part of us. I've learned this by writing out the pain when I needed to (so melodramatic in the beginning and dripping with regret and self-hatred), by going to therapy, and by confronting myself.

We are strong. We can overcome. And thrive.

revised 9/20/2011