Sexual Shame
A young woman enters the labor and delivery unit of Hendrick Hospital alone, only a few hours following her water breaking.
While pregnancy has never been something that’s entirely private, she has done the best that she can to involve as few people as possible in her pregnancy. Her friends and extended family assume that her recent disengagement is connected to the anxiety that comes with having two children under the age of 3. Her husband, with whom she’s recently separated, knows little about her pregnancy—only enough information to know that the child isn’t his. Her mother, a counselor, knows the most of anyone about the pregnancy, but lives far away.
The young woman arrives to the labor and delivery unit alone. She puts a brave smile on her face, but the smile is a thin veil over mounting anxiety. Mounting shame.
The nurse on staff gathers her information—the young woman confirms that the father is a White man that she had a short relationship with, but that information gets shared only because she’s pushed, and recognizes that folks will be able to figure out that her newborn son is biracial. Her husband is Hispanic, as is she. No, she’s Basque—that’s one of the few things that the young woman adamantly defines about herself in an almost too-polite interview.
She tells the nurse that she doesn’t want to keep the child. She’ll give birth—she would experience even more shame than her Catholic upbringing has already bestowed upon her if she aborts the baby. But she describes that she wants to be unconscious for the delivery, and doesn’t want to lay eyes on her newborn. The nurse makes a note to the labor and delivery team to prepare for a C-section.
In 1984, the Child Protective Services system in Texas was incredibly overworked, investigating two times as many child abuse cases as they had just eight years prior. With newborns, CPS asked hospitals to partner with a handful of private adoption agencies to oversee foster care placement, while CPS oversaw foster care with older children. The local option in Abilene is a burgeoning organization called Christian Homes.
Christian Homes has two components to its business. Like most private adoption agencies, they build relationships with prospective families, and connect these families with children who are up for adoption. They also build relationships with pregnant women who communicate, at some point along the pregnancy journey, they don’t want to or are unable to care for their new child. Christian Homes provides medical, financial, and social resources for these women and their families in an attempt to alleviate as much of the in-utero anxiety as possible.
Most pregnant women come into contact with Christian Homes during their second or beginning of their third trimester. Seldom do they initiate communication with Christian Homes hours before delivering their child.
The young woman is introduced to a social worker from Christian Homes, who begins to describe the options for adoption. All adoptions are closed in 1984, which means that prospective parents have no way of contacting the adoptive mother or her family. The young woman goes one step further, revoking Christian Homes’ ability to share identifying information after the child turns 18.
She is rushed into surgery, and fortunately, delivers a 7.5 pound baby boy with no immediate health complications, other than recovering from the C-section. She stays in the hospital for a few days after surgery, long enough to get additional information from her mother , who has since given a bit more information about family background to the Christian Homes social worker, and 4-year-old daughter.
In the few days that the newborn was in the hospital, Christian Homes contacted a number of families to see who could take the baby home while they oversaw long-term adoption possibilities. The Cash family, who had already fostered eight children, offered their home and took home the baby boy, who they named Ian, a name that was changed seven months later upon long-term adoption.
Different parts of my origin story have stood out through my 36 years.
For starters, I’m grateful for the information that I do have about my birth family and my first seven months of life.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have parents who incorporated my birth and adoption story into their larger family narrative. Whenever I do trainings and panels about adoption, I strongly encourage families to incorporate some variation of the “Jeremiah story” in their dialogue and formation with their adopted child. The Jeremiah story was a bedtime story told by my mom and dad, consisting of a combination of information they received from the Cash’s and Christian Homes about me, and their own emotional experiences—the grief, anxiety, and joy—that accompanied them during the adoption process.
I’m also incredibly thankful for the Cash’s and the folks at Christian Homes for their immense amount of kindness and love. I received the letters that the Cash’s wrote to me when I was a baby about eight years ago; I still read through from time to time. My social worker at Christian Homes just retired a few months ago after at least 36 years with the company, and we’ve chatted periodically about the process of seeking out my birthmother in the last couple of years. Last year, she emailed me a declassified picture of my birthmother for the first time—we have really similar jawlines, noses, and wavy hair. However, there have always been questions without answers. Gaps in my story, sometimes that get filled with made-up information. (The piece about identifying as Basque is something that my caseworker remembers from her interview and told my parents, although that information doesn’t appear in Christian Homes’ paperwork.)
More often than not, these gaps get addressed with more questions.
When I was in high school, I had a lot of anxiety about racial identity—I’ll write about that in a different blogpost.
I went to college in Abilene, so I daydreamed about possible scenarios in which I ran into my birthmother unknowingly, either at church or any of the number of events I was a part of at Abilene Christian University. Abilene is a really small town for having over 100,000 people.
I would drive around different neighborhoods in Abilene and imagine what it would be like to grow up in each of Abilene’s diverse socioeconomic classes.
But recently, I’ve found myself experiencing more anger. Not at my birthmother—I’m immensely grateful for her courage and desire to give me life, even if she decided that she couldn’t be a part of it. Rather, the anger gets directed at the systems of sexual shame that forced her into this closeted pregnancy.
I don’t know what criticisms or sex-shaming comments were hurled in her direction by her ex-husband or her family, regardless of how justified these folks felt their anger was. I don’t know who knows that she had an affair, and if they did, how they treated her differently. I don’t know how she specifically internalized messages about sexuality and family formation from her church (Catholic) or her community.
I do know, based on conversations I’ve had with my social worker at Christian Homes, that her behavior exhibited two of the classic hallmarks of shame: avoidance and secrecy. Her decision to not tell the father. Her arrival at the hospital by herself; while her mother lived away, she did stay with her older sister for some time during the pregnancy, and is unclear why her sister did not accompany her to the hospital. The smile that powered her through the interview with hospital staff
Her decision to not keep me.
That sentence doesn’t come from a place of anger. I’ve justified her decision throughout my life; single motherhood is no joke, especially when you’re just exiting a marriage, and when you have two children. My childhood would have been radically different had a grown up with my birthmother; I get the sense that my life probably would have been a lot harder. Sometimes the step toward avoidance, saying no to something, is the bravest decision that you can make, even if it comes in the context of shame.