I am eight years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s mini van. The engine is running even though we are parked. My mother jiggles her leg nervously in the passenger seat. We are parked outside the Biddeford city hall, about a hundred miles from home. My father is here to find his birthday.

In the aftermath of my grandmother’s devastating death from cancer, even this one, once certain fact has been thrown into upheaval. My father had been cleaning out her personal effects.

He came away with two copies of his birth certificate, each marked with a different day and year.

“Why?” he’d asked my grandfather. My grandfather is an illiterate, polio survivor, marked by a shriveled hand and a horde of secrets. He couldn’t read the paper my father waved in front of his face. He wouldn’t answer him, even if he could decipher it. This search for my father’s birthday opened up a cavern in my life that I hadn’t realized was there before. It was a little like walking on ice you thought was safe, only to have your feet crunch through. Without my grandmother, we had no stable footing.

My father emerges from the Biddeford city hall, clutching an official looking paper.

“It was 69, not 71,” he calls through the open window. “The other one was forged.”

“What does that mean?” I ask as he settles himself back into the driver’s seat.

“It means someone faked it,” he says. “To make everything look ok.” “Were things not ok?” I ask. He never answers me.

It is the Spring of 1969 and my grandmother is pregnant with the wrong man’s baby. The man’s name is Patrick. He ran away from home a few years ago, slipping across the Canadian border with barely a backward glance. He is one of nine siblings. His mother is in an institution recovering from what we would now call lingering postpartum depression. He is hardly missed.

My grandmother is from a large Catholic family. She is wide-eyed and innocent. She laughs when she is nervous, which is around Patrick almost all the time. He could have gone on being her dollar store Elvis, if it hadn’t been for the car accident.

“The baby is fine,” the nurse at the emergency room made a point of telling her. “Don’t worry.”

“What baby?” my grandmother asks. She is twenty years old. Everything she knows about the world is falling out from under her feet. When she is discharged Patrick is gone, her Thunderbird is totaled and her parents won’t look at her. She isn’t Yvette anymore, she is a problem.

I am nine years old. My father has a photo frame on his dresser. It resembles an oversized, heart shaped locket. On one side was a baby picture of me, on the other is one of him from around the same age. Although his is black and white, it still looks like the same child; high cheekbones, grey eyes, a shock of dark hair. No matter where I run in life, I can’t leave my father behind, I see him every time I look in a mirror. I pick up the picture frame, trying to study that old photograph of my father. There are so few artifacts of his childhood. I want to know the person he had been then, before he became dad.

“Who took this photo?” I ask him.

“My adoptive parents,” my father says, like this is something everyone has. “I spent my first Christmas with them. Before your grandmother came to get me.”

I shiver. My father had been one heartbeat away from a completely different life.

It is 1935. In response to an overwhelming amount of unwed mothers in the state of

Maine, brothers Reverend Zenon Decary and monsignor Arthur Decary of St. Andre’s parish in

Biddeford see a solution. They will open a home to shelter young women. They offer the Good Shepherd Sisters $5,000 to buy 70 acres of farmland.

It is March 3, 1940. Saint Andre’s home is dedicated. On Easter Sunday their first unwed mother is welcomed through their doors.

It is the summer of 1969 and my grandmother finds herself on that same doorstep. 20 women are admitted at a time. The staff consists of 17 nuns to care for them. By 1973, the home will have been home to 2,537 unmarried mothers. 1,030 babies will have been legally adopted. I read these statistics and I try to see my grandmother, my father in them. It sounds so black and white on paper, cut and dry. But what could it have been like for my grandmother, hours away from home, alone and in trouble? I can picture her, making jokes to hide her distress. That’s how I remember her best.

“Her family just shipped her off?” my husband asks when I tell him this story. “Biddeford is really far from Aroostook.”

“It was their only choice,” I say. But that wasn’t really true. My grandmother could have stayed at home. But that’s not how this equation usually goes. A girl plus a baby minus an engagement ring meant shame. Shame. So many lives, too many, have been destroyed by that intangible word.

I am twenty years old and I know what it’s like to lose a baby. I am sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car as she pulls out of the parking lot of Planned Parenthood. I find myself cracking jokes to make her feel more comfortable. There is a fake smile pasted on my face but I am dying on the inside. I glance at the protestors standing outside the clinic. I force myself to look at each one of their signs, to take it all in, even though it is ugly. This morning I was pregnant with the wrong man’s baby. Now I am not. It’s as simple and heartbreaking as that.

My grandmother’s situation could’ve been worse. There were similar homes in Ireland, where babies were taken away without their mothers’ consent. The records were secret, the children became irretrievable. St. Andre’s home was not an adoption machine. My grandmother got engaged to the wrong man, she came back for my dad. She couldn’t live without her baby.

Their home would always be a place built on fear. I loved my great grandparents desperately, but I can’t help feeling that they were somehow responsible. You turned her out, I think, what choice did she have left?

I am twenty-seven years old. I am a mother of two. I am away for the weekend at a friend’s wedding in Massachusetts. My husband and I are alone for the first time since our sons were born. We had plans of bar hopping, of exploring the sides of New Bedford unencumbered. Those plans have gone straight down the toilet. I lock myself in the hotel lobby bathroom. I am sobbing so uncontrollably that my mascara is carving rivers down the sides of my face. The entire bar can hear me. I can’t stop.

“Do you regret that you guys never had a daughter?” a friend had asked me earlier at the reception. It was small talk, a thoughtless conversation starter as the flower girls had spun out onto the dance floor. There are stretches when I don’t think about her at all, months, maybe a year goes by. But at those words, it all came rushing back.

I did have one, I wanted to say. There is no heartbreak in the world quite like loving a child that you know you can’t keep. You find yourself making crazy bargains with god; if I get my life together in two years, in five, in ten, will you send her back to me? There is a desperation to these conversations that defies sense. I think maybe my grandmother would have understood something about that.

There are details about my grandmother’s story that I will never understand. I need her stories, but she’s not here, I can’t ask her. I won’t ever know how she spent her days during those six months she was in Biddeford. I won’t know the people she met, the other stories that brushed against hers. I can retrace her steps, I can stare up at the brick maternity ward where my father came into the world, but it won’t make it any clearer. There are things about her situation that I understand better now. We unwed mothers, we’re a sad kind of club. No matter how old you get, your membership never expires. You never forget how quickly the whole world can be ripped out from under you. So much of history is shaped by our experiences, but we are footnotes. For centuries, unwed mothers have disappeared into unhappy marriages. They have bled out on butcher’s tables. They have disappeared for months, with no one raising an eyebrow. Our experiences have been overlooked and mistreated. Our stories are everywhere. It’s time they were told.

About the Author

Aliza Dube is currently a student of University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. She is the author of “The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare” through Running Wild Press. She is currently searching for a literary agent to represent her work.

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