Hidden Girls (eBook)

A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion & Reckoning

Julia MacDonnell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
198 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-5668-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Julia MacDonnell's Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning brings readers into the emotional heart of adoption loss, showing how the secrets and silence of closed adoption permanently twist kinship histories and undermine the compassion of those involved in it. Writing about her experience, MacDonnell soon realized that the secret about her bastard son contained a host of other secrets evasions, and equivocations in her family and the culture at large. Hence her story was not only hers. Rather, it reflected the stories of countless other girls and women who'd lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II.

Julia MacDonnell's long and varied writing career includes journalism and essays; book reviews; a short story collection and two novels in addition to her hybrid memoir, Hidden Girls, for which she was award a 2024 artist's fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. MacDonnell's 2021 story collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories, won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award. The author and critic Joan Mellen called it, 'a triumph of imaginative grace worthy of Alice Munro. I love this book.' Her second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, published by Picador in 2014, was chosen as an 'Indie Next' selection by the ABA. People Magazine called it, 'Cathartic, suspenseful and droll...Mimi offers a hopeful take on both old age and bad blood.' Her first, A Year of Favor, based loosely on the murders of the four churchwomen in El Salvador in 1979, was published in 1994 by William Morrow & Co. Kirkus praised it as 'Powerful first fiction...A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country...and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine.' Her journalism and literary writing have been recognized with three fiction fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, two Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowships for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and two Pushcart nominations. MacDonnell is professor emeritus in the Writing Arts department at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. where she taught undergraduate and graduate writing classes, and developed the creative writing curriculum for its Master of Arts in Writing program. She is a former nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, a couple of miles from her daughter Suzanne's family.

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When Julia MacDonnell's relinquished son found her just a few years after Massachusetts opened its sealed adoption records to adult adoptees, she was jubilant. Not only would he forgive her for signing away her parental rights to him nearly a half century before, he'd join his much younger half-siblings in a big happy blended family. She'd be able, at long last, to emerge from the secret that had controlled more than two thirds of her life. But that is not what happened. Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning brings readers into the emotional heart of adoption loss, showing how the secrets and silence of closed adoption permanently twist kinship histories and undermine the compassion of those involved in it. MacDonnell, the award-winning author of two novels and a collection of short stories, was astounded when the son she'd relinquished as a teenager reached out to her via email after nearly 50 years. Mad with grief when they took him away, she'd kept the secret required by her parents in order to come back home. She'd accepted this humiliation and degradation as a kind of penance, a necessary offering. That is, until her son's sudden and unexpected reappearance in her life. Writing about her experience, MacDonnell soon realized that the secret about her bastard son contained a host of other secrets, evasions, and equivocations in her family and the culture at large. Hence, her story was not only hers. Rather, it reflected the stories of countless other girls and women who'd lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II. Her story reflects the century's feminist battles for reproductive rights and healthcare. In answering the questions about what had happened to her, MacDonnell also shows what happened to as many as four million unmarried females during the years surrounding World War II and which may happen again with the overturning of Roe v Wade and the seemingly endless to struggle to hold onto reproductive choice. Julia MacDonnell puts flesh on the bones of one of the most shameful parts of recent U.S. history: the Baby Scoop Era, when untold numbers of women were shamed, coerced and forced into relinquishing children born out of wedlock for secretive adoptions, then ordered to return to their lives as though nothing had happened. For far too long, our society has pretended nothing did. Hidden Girl is an important, beautifully-told accounting of that terrible history, and a timely warning that we not repeat its mistakes. Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption A beautiful, powerful, and truth-telling story I was struck by how it is both every birth mother's story and a story that is completely unique to the author. --Marylee MacDonald, Surrender: A Memoir of Nature, Nurture and Love

Textauszug

The Past Breaks In

One winter morning about ten years ago, a mug of coffee within reach, I opened my laptop and scanned through my email, looking the way I always did for the ones I could delete and those demanding immediate attention. My desk was actually my daughter’s desk from high school, in the home I’d owned for many years, a small rancher in a southern New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia. My office was still my daughter’s bedroom even though she was well launched, living and working in Manhattan.

One subject line caught my eye and then my breath: Angus John MacDonnell. The world around me lurched and tilted. Angus John MacDonnell. What I’d named my first child, the son I’d surrendered to adoption soon after I turned 19 and wasn’t married. Whose birth and loss forever changed the trajectory of my life. My secret son, the son I’d grieved and loved and longed to know for almost half a century. Angus John MacDonnell. A name never spoken again by anyone I knew, except once by me to my husband.

Ms. MacDonnell,

My name is █████████████ but I was born Angus John MacDonnell on January 3rd 1967 to one Julia MacDonnell then living at 94 Pleasant St, Plainville, MA and born in Island Falls, ME. Having googled “julia macdonnell, island falls, maine” and found your website which says that your father’s name was John and his father’s name Angus I suspect I have found the correct person. I do not in any way wish to intrude upon you and your life other than to say thank you for having me in the first place. I am doing well and my adoptive parents, ██████████████ took very good care of me. I would love to hear from you at least to confirm you are my birth mother but again your life is your own. Please feel free to contact me or not.

Respectfully,

█████████

Attached to this email was a photocopy of a photocopy of a document, “Non-Certified Copy of Record of Birth Prior to Adoption.” Up until that moment, I believed my surrendered son’s original birth record had been sealed forever by the courts in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, the county of his birth. Catholic Charities had made that promise to my family and me half a century before when they brokered his adoption: all records pertaining to it would be off limits to everyone forever. It would be as if his birth and adoption had never happened, a secret essential to my mother and father, one they maintained for the rest of their lives. (What had happened had not happened.) And yet, there it was on my laptop screen, a bedraggled photocopy of my secret first child’s birth record.

I had no idea that Massachusetts had, in 2008, opened its sealed birth records to adult adoptees born before 1974. Birth parents were not informed. Nor did I know that this stunning change in adoption law happened after a long and bitter legal battle pitting adult adoptees against adoptive parents, adoption providers, and the religious organizations that sought to keep such records sealed.

The copy of my son’s non-certified pre-adoption birth record, his first birth certificate, glimmered on the screen in shades of gray. It connected my current life as a university professor, published novelist, and mother of three, to the troubled teenager I’d been. Scapegoated, hidden, unable to escape the winding cloths of shame and guilt.

The document was blurred by reproduction, its travels through cyberspace, and the decades it had spent in a vault somewhere in Massachusetts. I printed it and held it in my shaking hands, a piece of paper that confirmed the facts of my lost history: the man reaching out to me was my first son, the one I’d relinquished to closed adoption when I was still a teenager. This stunning reconnection was a moment I’d always longed for but hadn’t dared to hope for. It would, I believed, provide the missing piece to the unsolved puzzle at the very heart of my life.

I read and reread the document on my screen, the first time I’d seen documentary evidence of my having given up a child to adoption. I was thrilled but also dizzied, spinning backward to my nearly lifelong secret. In my euphoria, I had no idea that I was heading into danger. ‘Thank you for having me.’ I had no idea that reunion in adoption is shattering; that it often shoves an unprepared first mother (me) back into the skin of the terrified girl she’d been when she got pregnant, a girl without resources who paid dearly, and continued to pay, for her transgressions. The last time I’d seen my baby, named for my loved paternal grandfather, he was sweet and warm and wrapped in a soft baby blanket. Then my caseworker took him from my arms and disappeared with him into a hospital elevator. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.

Minutes after opening my son’s email, I called the cell phone number he included. He answered on the first ring, as if he had been waiting. His was a booming voice, a resonant tenor like my father’s and my brothers’. The sound rippled through me: a MacDonnell voice from a man who was no longer a MacDonnell. The tilted world began to spin. I tried to slow my pounding heart, to breathe steadily and deeply, to listen. We kept it superficial, safe, sharing facts. The area code of his cell phone number indicated Boston, where he was born, but he hadn’t lived there since before his adoption was finalized. He couldn’t quite explain why he used that area code for his cell phone, perhaps as a connection, however insignificant, to the place of his birth. Rather than in the Boston area, as I’d always believed, he’d grown up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. His new father, a lawyer, had served as general counsel, occupying the C-suite, of a major American conglomerate.

Other facts tumbled out, faster than I could absorb them. My son, himself in middle age, was a divorced IT specialist for a national restaurant chain. He lived in a major southern city. He did not have children. He was a combat veteran, a marine who’d survived two deployments during the Gulf Wars. He was the third of four adopted children. He’d grown up in a religious Irish Catholic family, one able to provide him with comforts, even luxuries: lovely homes, sleepaway camps, splendid family vacations. (I recalled my caseworker’s glee as she described his family to me: a perfect ethnic and religious match! They’d even matched hair and eye color! And my own wild jealousy that I could not, as she reminded me over and over again, provide such things for him. )

Rambunctious, rebellious by his own description, he’d flunked out of two colleges before joining the military. (Just as, unbeknownst to him, his biological father had, heading off to Vietnam, never looking back, at least not at me.) After leaving the military, my son put himself through college on the GI Bill, and embarked upon his own corporate career.

We made a plan to have lunch in Philadelphia the next time he was in town for business. Waiting those weeks, I toggled between happiness, anxiety, curiosity and disquiet. I made my excruciating revelation to my other children, among the most difficult conversations I have ever had. They accepted the existence of their older half brother with more love and equanimity than I’d believed was possible.

After that, a vision of happy family took root and shimmered in my imagination: all of us together at the Thanksgiving table or hanging out together at the Jersey Shore, scorching ourselves in the sun, leaping in the waves. In my fantasies, my first son became a vital part of my family, a new addition, albeit fully grown. I’d be able to put the devastation of his surrender behind me, and heal from the deceptions that had been imposed upon me when I was too young and fragile to fight back, or to understand their lifelong consequences.

When the day came for us to meet I was nervous and as giddy as if being spun in an unstoppable revolving door. Who would he be? Would we like each other? Would he look like me?

It was a quick drive from my Camden County, N.J., home over the Ben Franklin Bridge and into Philadelphia and Penn’s Landing, our designated meeting place. I was a wreck, but I managed to park and get out. It was a cold but sunny early spring day. I recognized him right away, among the nearby urban throngs: big and hearty and white-haired, my son! He was crossing a vast parking lot, the Delaware River on one side and Penn’s Landings’ shops and restaurants on the other. My breath caught. He was no longer that swaddled newborn I’d handed off to the caseworker. He was a big man, with a big voice! He wore glasses and was prematurely white-haired, as his namesake had been! We hugged, the first time we’d touched in 50 years. We walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant. We stumbled through our lunch. Between us on that small Formica table, with its caddy of ketchup and Cholula hot sauce, an unexpected canyon gaped open between us. Like so many men in my family, my son was garrulous, and, I thought, accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room. Even so, I sensed a layer of something else beneath his bright surface. Nothing seemed quite real.

We reached as best we could across the canyon, but had trouble moving our conversation forward. It kept stalling out. I don’t remember what we said. I was overwhelmed. We must have talked about our jobs and our families, a safe conversation that tiptoed around the big hole between us, the life we had not shared though we were mother and son....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.8.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-5668-9 / 9798350956689