Shame

Taking it Public

I am a decisive person so, when I decided to tell, I told the town's gossip first, sure in the knowledge that everyone would soon know. As it turned out, I found out the lines of friendship and gossip in this town very reliably. I discovered who told, and who, out of respect perhaps, kept my 'secret' so that I could choose whom to tell. I learned that I had chosen well in my friends, and I learned where people were more shallow.

In the end, only two people have shunned me. One co-worker left the staff room whenever I was talking about my son. Her disapproval was clear and initially supercilious. Interestingly, no one else supported her, and so she isolated herself through this. There is another person who I know would rather I never talk about 'my' son. He is an adoptive father who's discouraged 'his' son from searching for his natural family. He wants to pretend that natural families don't exist, or at least don't rejoice in the joy of knowing and loving their lost children. I find that professional men of a certain age, shall we say, are confused that I would admit 'my shame' out loud. They are not impolite, just confused. It's not even that they disapprove; they just don't know what the protocol is for reaction, that's all.

Most people, though, have been simply happy for me at one extreme, or shared fully my exuberant joy at the other extreme. They ask about Tony and want to know how it's going. They love to hear that our relationship is complex, evolving and deepening. A group of women friends threw me a 'baby' shower, that first Christmas. Knowing I was going to see my son just after Christmas, they gifted me with a pewter picture frame, to keep a memory, and enough money to take Tony to a live musical, the first he'd ever experienced. I brought pictures of 'my baby,' and they oohed and aahed, and exclaimed how much he looked like me. A year later, I hosted a brunch where they were invited to meet my baby in person. It was great fun. In the end, I got one promotion, and not the next one after that. Did my son have something to do with that? Perhaps, and perhaps it wasn't to be anyway. I am not sorry - Tony means more to me than the job.

It takes some courage to face how life will change when you bring your lost child back into it. For us older mothers, the burden of years, even decades, of shame is not lightly set aside. Few of us were allowed the choice of raising our children by parents or circumstances. Yet we were stereotyped as those very few mothers who might not have wanted their children, and who abandoned them. Nowadays, because most children available for adoption are those removed from their own parents for reasons of neglect or abuse, we are identified with those parents who are not capable of raising anyone's children, even their own. And so new shame is piled on old, and we worry how people will judge us. Those who give up newborns today are hailed as unselfish until they sign the papers, and then they too experience their shaming as mothers who 'don't care enough to keep their children.'

Reunion is harder yet for those mothers who didn't tell their husbands about their earlier children. They may wonder how to explain 'keeping that secret' from someone so close to them. They may think, "What will my children think of me?" Since no one knows how ingrained the shame of 'unwed' motherhood was, how can others understand how little choice we really had? Yet I found that when my young daughter was told about her lost brother, it was easy for her to accept the situation. Some mothers with older children have found them as supportive. Some have found them also wishing they'd known sooner.

Next page: It Means Change

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