by Ellen Powers

Something briefly disturbed my sleep the first night I was home from university for the Christmas holidays. I was never fully awake, didn’t construct meaning. The next morning something about the noise of my sister getting ready for school in the bathroom we shared reminded me that I had woken up in the night. Whatever niggled faded as I heard a car horn beep just before my sister called out goodbye and was out the door, off to school.

That night we sat down for our first dinner together at the small rectangular green and white formica table in the kitchen, my sister and I on one side, Mom and Dad on the other. I was primed for my favorite meal, had smelled the Swedish meat balls slowly simmering on the back of the stove all afternoon. I loved coming back home, fitting myself into the familiar rituals, setting the table, the front door opening when Dad got home, hearing the scratch of claws on the tile floor as the dogs ran to greet him. He was later than usual and Mom said we would forgo his usual pre-dinner cocktail on the screened porch, instead go ahead with dinner right away.

The table was edged by a deeply ridged silver metal strip about an inch or so wide; I remember finding it almost immediately, absently worrying the ridges with my thumb.

We had started eating our dinner, at least I had, when something prompted me to glance over at my sister. Tears were slipping down her face.

“Oh my gosh, dear one, what’s wrong?”

I started to reach out my hand to her when my father said “Ellie,” his voice strained. I turned to look at him, saw that he was struggling to speak, when I heard my mother say so quietly I could barely hear her: “Ellie, Laurie’s pregnant. She said it again, more loudly, almost like she didn’t really believe it, like it needed repetition to be real, “she’s pregnant,” her own tears brimming now too.

I remember something suddenly heavy in my chest.

“Of course she’s not pregnant! She’s only 16!” Did I blurt it out or just think it?

Her picture was just in the local newspaper because she was the leading contestant for Harvest Queen, a school and community pageant that was considered the pinnacle of girlhood achievement. I knew she thought she would win that year.

For a few brief moments, I still remember how it felt like forever, I floundered. How could it have happened? This didn’t happen in nice families, not in our family. My little sister was pregnant? She didn’t even have a boyfriend. She was a good girl. That’s what woke me up last night. She was throwing up. I leaned back into my chair trying to make sense of it all when my sister jumped up and ran from the kitchen. Anguished sobbing trailed her down the hall.

I had no idea what to say or do.

I didn’t get up to go to her.

I looked over at my mother and my father, took in their stricken faces, my father’s so weary, my mother’s sadness, I began to realize that everything I expected about the world was now entirely upended. My mother reached out her hand to cover mine and we sat there together as slowly the gravity of the situation began to take hold in my brain.

It was 1966.

 My father was a big whig, an outsider who had been shipped in to run a sugar business in a small southern town rife with the conventions of status which tightly governed the ups and downs of daily life. It was Christmas. Amongst the prominent, holiday parties were a very big deal. We had a giant family secret hidden underneath our party dresses, behind our smiles, clutching at our hearts. All of those genteel white gloves would be off in a heartbeat if they learned that in their midst was a pregnant but un-married girl, never mind her big whig father or whether she was a Harvest Queen candidate, someone would surely say “well, we didn’t know their people,” and that would be that.

There were rules that governed out-of-wedlock pregnancy in 1966. The first was that my sister was going away. Immediately. Before anyone could suspect that she was pregnant. Initially she was to be a live in mother’s helper. When her body showed enough to reveal her condition she would move to a private home for unwed mothers and remain hidden there until she gave birth, after which her baby would be relinquished for adoption.

The narrative we constructed was that she was going to go away to school. That’s what everyone was told. When her friends came to say goodbye, there was a lot of crying and hugging, wishing she wasn’t going. It looked right. Normal. It was believable. But my mother had to be ready with answers to the questions that inevitably emerged, probably some fueled by suspicions. I can hear the local busy body in my minds eye, imagine her in her fussy and calculated intrusiveness – ”Margie, my goodness, so sudden, I didn’t know you were planning to send Laurie away to school, so far away, isn’t it hard to not have her at home, I thought she loved going to school here, my goodness, she was probably going to be Harvest Queen, it must be so hard for you, everyone is SO surprised!”

Some girls who found themselves pregnant but un-married had the experience my sister had. Others were sent away to ‘help a sick aunt,’ some stayed at home, hidden behind closed curtains, never allowed outside or even out of their bedrooms and if they had to leave their house for some very important reason it would be lying down on the back seat of the car, hidden from prying eyes. Sadly some were disowned, “kicked out.” Stories abound of girls who just disappeared suddenly from their communities, from their lives. Almost everyone remembers someone.

What was it like to be 16 and pregnant? Ripped off everything you understood or expected your life to be? To have your life, practically overnight, become a baby growing inside of you, yours, impossible to deny, reminding you of its reality from that first flutter of life, and then everyday with the ripples on your belly, as your moving and kicking child made its presence known. All the trappings of motherhood, the anticipation, the joy, the community of it, the norms of pregnancy, none of those were available to you. Instead you were haunted by a sense of having done something forbidden, something that made you ‘bad” in the eyes of the world. Shame had become and would be the envelope of your life. It would never be otherwise. What did you do in the lonely quiet of the night with your thoughts, what vestige did you allow yourself of maternal instinct, that fleeting hunger that might tear itself through your defenses to cut deep into your heart?

First person narratives of the experience of delivery are heart breaking. For many, perhaps most, they had no idea of what was coming for their bodies, were not told what to expect, might have been sent to the hospital once their water broke and labor had begun, likely alone, in a cab, with no one who loved them for support. Neither were they prepared for what was to happen to their hearts. Pregnant girls were sent away to give away. There was no baby coming back home to grandma and grandpa, to proudly show off, to coo over. That part. The leaving behind. The relinquishing. That broke something in them. They were told you’ll go back to your life and forget all about this. They did go back to their lives. But forget? No. Not ever. Some not even for a day.

Our phone rang in the middle of the night early in June. “Oh mama, he is so beautiful,” my sister sobbed, and then her baby was gone, taken away. She came back home to us shocked and devastated by grief. We were left to put her back together and to keep her secret for the next 60 years.

Between 1945 and 1972 1,500,000 babies were relinquished for non family adoptions. In 1966 there was no sex education. 28% of first sexual experiences were non-consensual. It wasn’t until 1972 that unmarried individuals were extended the right to use contraceptives. Even married couples were prohibited from using them before 1965.

In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade which for 50 years had given women the right to choose what happened to their bodies, to their lives, and overnight the 1966 landscape for women and girls was in view again.

Are we going back there again? Back to what it was like for my sister?

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