The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

The Girl I Was

I was eighteen in the summer of 1977, a few months out of the consolidated high school twelve miles from where I live now, working the counter at the creamery in town, and I was in love with a boy named Weldon Secrest in the careless, breathless way you are in love at eighteen when you have never once been disappointed by anybody yet.

Weldon shipped out in August of 1977 for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, ten weeks of it. I found out I was pregnant in September, a few weeks after he was gone.

I want to be fair to that time, because it is easy now to make the people in it sound cruel, and none of them were, not really. It was simply a different world. A girl who turned up pregnant and unmarried in a small Iowa town in 1977 did not have the choices a girl has now. There was shame attached to it that had nothing to do with whether you had done anything worse than anyone else your age, and the shame did not only touch you, it touched your whole family, your mother at the beauty shop, your father at the feed store, your younger sisters at school.

My mother cried for two days straight when I told her. Not angry crying. Grief crying, like somebody had died, though nobody had. My father did not speak to me for a week, and when he finally did, it was only to say that we would handle this quietly and that was the end of the conversation, as far as he was concerned, forever.

What quietly meant was a home outside Des Moines run by a Lutheran family service agency, a place where girls in my situation went, from January on, to finish out a pregnancy away from whatever town had known them as a child. I was not locked in. Nobody chained me to a bed. It was simply understood, by everyone including me, that this was the arrangement, and I went along with it the way you go along with the only door anyone has shown you.

There were eleven of us there that winter and spring, in a big converted farmhouse with bunk beds and a housemother named Mrs. Alsop who was not unkind, only tired, the way a person gets tired running a place like that year after year. We went to a makeshift school in the mornings and sewing circle in the afternoons and nobody used the word adoption out loud much, because nobody needed to. It hung over every single day like weather.

I was allowed to hold him for eleven minutes after he was born. I know it was eleven because I counted every single one of them, the way you count change you know you are about to hand over and never see again. He had a head of dark hair, more than most babies, and he made one small sound, not quite a cry, more like a question, and I have heard that sound in my own head for forty eight years.

The social worker, a kind woman named Mrs. Dunlevy who I believe truly did care, told me the family chosen for him were good people, a teacher and a man who worked at a tool and die plant, settled, steady, already approved and waiting. She told me this was the best thing I could do for him. I believed her. I think she believed it too. I am not sure, all these years later, that either of us was wrong.