EXCERPT

I have spent no small amount of time considering how being adopted impacted me, how it defined the course of my life and shaped my personality. But I haven’t spent nearly enough time considering how having a baby as a young teenager impacted and changed Benny’s personality. How it must have shaped the course of her life. The depth of the experience for her is, in many ways, unfathomable. She had to be silent for all those years, to pretend it didn’t happen—that she didn’t go through a pregnancy, childbirth, and apprehension—and go home to her parents, her mother and father, her siblings, her friends, her school, her life, and never speak of it again.

There was no acceptance of her grief, of the grief of separation and the loss of the child. When my birthday came each year, who acknowledged it for Benny? Who celebrated? Who offered cake or presents or cards? Benny was allowed none of it. Her baby was never spoken about again. Instead, Benny had to be silent in order to make it comfortable for them, for others, regardless of what it did to her. She had to protect their sensitivities; her own feelings and emotions didn’t matter, were of secondary importance. She had to act as if her pregnancy and my birth never happened in the first place. And yet, they were defining experiences.

Pregnant at 15 years old, Benny was told unequivocally that she was bad, immoral, shameful, disgusting, rotten, a terrible human being, unfit to be a mother, without recourse and with nothing to offer. The same story stands for the majority of white teenaged girls at the time—late 60s-early 70s—who were in similar circumstances. Benny was told of her inadequacies by her parents, her family, medical personnel, social workers, those at the home for unwed mothers, the judge, the legal apparatus, and anyone else engaged in the process of helping to solve the “problem” she had caused by her unsanctioned teenage pregnancy and sexual behavior. She was abandoned by her family at a time of extreme vulnerability, a time when she needed them most. Sent away to wait out her pregnancy alone. A developing fifteen-year-old’s self-esteem was not even an overt consideration at that time, and yet her sense of self was somehow expected to withstand such an onslaught. The impact was brutal and life-changing. At fifteen a child is just discovering who they are, who they might be, trying on different identities, weighing the different options—anything is possible, the possibilities, at fifteen, are limitless. But for Benny, she was defined by this one gargantuan thing, as were most teen birth mothers of that time.

She was forced to go into hiding. The lengths to which her family went to hide her, the shame her family felt at having a pregnant teenaged daughter, are astounding and in retrospect, all so unnecessary. All based on the social norms of the time, standards stemming from a society that viewed a family’s status as threatened by “out-of-control” teens, out of wedlock teen pregnancies. The prevailing sentiment, in hushed tones: “What will the neighbours think?” That the family’s status could be so easily threatened, and the pressure to maintain their status, or aspirations, was not unique to Benny’s family. A pregnant (immoral, promiscuous) daughter threatened a family’s status, reputation, and standing in the community and reflected the idea that she was from a “bad home.”

I can only imagine the trauma of being rejected and sent away by your parents from your home, your school, your friends, and your boyfriend. Sequestered in an institution with strangers under disapproving eyes. With her contact with the outside world regulated by the institution, her freedom limited, unable to come and go as she pleased, the institution resembled a prison more than a home or place of refuge.

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In the moment of her abandonment, I imagine Benny’s confusion and fear that her parents would leave her alone in that strange place with strangers. It was her first time away from home and she was institutionalized for four months. I don’t even know if her parents visited. I don’t know what her two younger brothers thought, if they knew where she was, or if they were fed the lie about a sick relative and told to mind their own business. How disconcerting to have a sister literally disappear and no one speak of it. When Benny returned home the story about the sick aunt was the story Benny was supposed to uphold.

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The dysfunctional relationship between Benny and her mother is still there in the background, wrapped up and intertwined in our relationship, Benny’s and mine, to this day. Intertwined in this pivotal time in Benny’s life and development. Benny’s mother was an invisible ghost that I was not aware of for a long time. “She should never have been a mother,” Benny tells me flatly. I turn those words over and over. It was Benny’s mother who was the most cruel, the most uncaring, during this time. “You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it.” 

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Benny was instructed to take on a fake name and use it while at the home for unwed mothers. This practice was intended to protect all the girls’ identities so that when “all this” was over they could go back to their old lives and live as if nothing had happened. It was also a handy means for each girl to dissociate from their pregnant selves and maintain a separation from their “real” identities. The theory that they would forget, go home and pick up where they left off, is one of the biggest gaslighting movements of modern time. Betrayal at every turn.

Benny exists for me on two levels. One is the complex human being that I know her to be currently, with all of her history and life and personality that informs her being. The other is the doppelganger Benny, frozen in time, a 15-year-old kid who finds herself pregnant and no idea what to do about it.