Ann Fessler to speak on “the girls who went away” 
By Gerard Helferich, Jan 19, 2007

San Miguel PEN talk By Ann Fessler Tuesday, January 23, 6pm Bellas Artes, Hernández Macías 75 50 pesos

Everyone who grew up in the fifties or sixties remembers a girl who disappeared from school. She was supposedly confined to bed with a sudden “illness” or gone to “take care of relatives” in a distant city. In fact, many of these young women found themselves in homes for unwed mothers.

Between the end of World War II and 1973, 1.5 million babies were given up for non-family adoptions in the United States. Most stories from these years have focused on the children who were surrendered. In her powerful, critically acclaimed book The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin, 2006), Ann Fessler tells the other side of the story.

An artist and a professor of photography at Rhode Island School of Design, Fessler herself was given up for adoption in the 1950s. To research this book, she spent years traveling the US, talking to more than 100 mothers who had surrendered children between the late 40s and early 70s. In San Miguel, she will read from her work and play audio clips from her interviews of birth mothers. She will also tell how, as a result of her work on this book, she came to meet her own birth mother for the first time.

Fessler’s book explodes several misconceptions about adoption during those years. One myth, she says, is that the unwed mothers were promiscuous. Actually, most became pregnant with their first love, and some the first time they had intercourse. In those days before sex education and birth control, most of the girls were hopelessly naïve. “He kept saying, ‘It's OK. It's OK. It’s really hard to get pregnant,’” one woman told Fessler. “What did I know? I didn't see a lot of pregnant people, so I figured, I guess it really is hard.” Another girl, 16 years old and nine months pregnant, had to ask her mother how babies were born.

For many, marriage wasn’t an option, and these young women were forced to hide their pregnancies from neighbors, employers and even relatives. Some girls were hidden in their rooms for the duration of their pregnancy and made to duck down in cars when they absolutely had to leave the house. Others went on long “vacations,” and accomplices even mailed postcards from selected destinations.

After the babies were born, the young women were compelled to relinquish them. “The big myth,” Fessler says, “was that they had weighed all the options and that their decision was based on not wanting the child.” In reality, the girls were subjected to what one of the mothers described as “tearing you down and breaking your spirit.” They were told they were unfit to be mothers and didn’t deserve to keep their babies, that no man would want to marry them, that their children would be called “bastards” on the playground. The responsible and loving thing, they were assured, was to give the baby to a deserving couple who could provide all the advantages that they could not.

If the mothers still resisted surrendering their babies, harsher methods were employed. Penniless girls were told they would have to pay for all expenses in the maternity home and hospital. When one young woman asked a judge what would happen if she refused to surrender her child, “he got very angry and said if I didn’t sign the papers he would declare me incompetent, and how would I like my son to know that about me?”

“Another myth,” Fessler says, “is that the mothers got over it.” Parents, social workers and clergy all encouraged them to forget their experience and get on with their lives. But haunted by guilt, depression and feelings of emptiness, the mothers found it hard to go back to being normal teenage girls.

For many, the guilt at giving up the baby was worse than that for having it. “It’s as if I was the unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child,” explains one woman. Says another, “Every single night, 365 days a year for 21 years, I’d look up at the stars at night and think: ‘We’re under the same sky,’ and it was the one thing that made me feel close to him. I knew that he was looking at the same stars.”

This longing caused many of the mothers to search for their children as soon as they legally could. Many of the children also began looking for their birth mothers. And it is the stories of these belated reunions that are perhaps the most moving. One woman says after meeting her daughter, “When I lay my head down at night now, I’m thankful. I know where my baby is. She’s all grown up. She’s a beautiful woman. I’m blessed, and I feel healed.”

Reviewers have called The Girls Who Went Away “amazing,” “compelling,” “riveting,” “powerful,” “mesmerizing,” “wrenching” and “wonderful.” Says the Detroit News, “Thanks to Fessler’s book, the girls who went away finally have a voice and, hopefully, a path that leads to healing.”

Fessler's talk is part of the PEN winter lecture series. A contribution of 50 pesos goes to help writers around the world in trouble for what they have written. Copies of Fessler’s book will be available for sale after the lecture (US$25). For more information write lucina@unisono.net.mx or call 152-0614.

Authors’ Sala presents first readings of 2007
By Linda Sorin 

Authors’ Sala readings By Leonarda Reyes and Sue McKinney Friday, January 19, 5–7pm Posada de San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2 50 pesos

In its first program of 2007, the Authors’ Sala is pleased to present two outstanding writers, Leonarda Reyes and Susan McKinney.

Leonarda Reyes 

Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world in which to be a journalist. In 2005, four journalists were murdered and one disappeared, mostly near the northern border. In 2006, that number doubled. Mexico has an exemplary constitution that supports freedom of speech, yet conditions here remain dangerous. Longtime investigative journalist Leonarda Reyes is the founder and director of the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics, which promotes independent journalism, transparency, and initiatives to combat corruption (www.cepet.org). The national organization is based here in San Miguel. Before she founded this organization, her investigations with El Norte and the related Mexico City newspaper Reforma revealed widespread fraud in elections and in public contracts, which in turn led to her winning a John S. Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University in 1991. Now she is a member of the Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington, DC. 

In an overview of the news situation in Mexico, Reyes will talk about the role of her organization and the whole network of courageous organizations springing up today to protect reporters and freedom of speech in Mexico. 

Susan Mc Kinney 

Philadelphia-born Susan McKinney de Ortega is a former award-winning television news reporter and daughter of an ex-National Basketball Association coach. Her stories have been published in Mexico: A Love Story by Seal Press, 2006; Philadelphia Stories; 

Salonmagazine; The San Miguel Writer and Literary Bulls website. A selection of her work was published in the anthology Not What We Expected,The Road From Womanhood to Motherhood, from Paycock Press. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, Fodor's travel publications and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She lives in San Miguel de Allende with her husband and their two bilingual daughters. She will be reading her short story entitled “Maestra” from a collection of short stories entitled Mexico: A Love Story, an anthology of stories about Mexico by women from Seal Press.

The following selection appears in Not What I Expected, an anthology of birth stories published in November 2006 by Paycock Press. 

Mexican Baby

There is a photo of me wandering the hospital hall, which didn’t have a door, only an open entryway, in a green gown and socks, and another of me lifting my gown to show I am wearing a diaper, ha ha. And there is Carlos on a couch in the lounge, wearing olive pants and a black button down shirt, arms folded over his chest and looking as if someone just put a gun to his head. After the pitocin kicked in, there weren’t any more pictures. 

The doctor brought in a back-up team of two doctors and two nurses to say I needed a cesarean. “You are quite old,” they each said. I was thirty-six and already convinced, after five hours of laboring on my knees and vomiting into a bucket, that I did not want my baby inside of me one second longer. 

“Saquenlo ya,” I said, waving an arm from the bedside, where I was bent over, cheek on the sheet, before the next contraction hit me like a wave on a stormy day at the Jersey shore. Take it out already! The doctors raised their eyebrows and hurried off to prepare the surgery salon. 

I was out in space and there were angels all around me. One was holding my hand and she looked like Alice. Then a happy angel with a mustache said, “Do you want to see your baby?” and a tiny space creature zoomed over my head, bloody and blinking big brown eyes. How nice, somebody clean that thing up and give me a blanket. Did I think it or say it? If I didn’t get a blanket soon, somebody was going to pay. I had never been so cold in my life. Somebody had better stop that woodpecker noise in my head too. I tried to touch my face where my jaw hurt, but my arm seemed to belong to someone else; I couldn’t make it move. 

“They’re stitching you up now. You’ll be warm soon,” Alice the angel soothed. She stroked the side of my cheek and I realized my teeth were chattering so rapidly my face hurt. “Did you see? She’s beautiful,” Alice murmured. She? I hadn’t noticed that part. I would check all the features as soon as they let me out of the block of ice they had me trapped in. 

Blankets were piled on top of me and I was being wheeled through more space. All I could feel was grateful, grateful to be warm. I thought of toast and soup and hot chocolate and standing by the hot water heater in the basement of our house on Anderson Avenue in my snowsuit as my mother peeled off my mittens. It was nice here in space. I didn’t have to think about anything. They were taking me somewhere, but as long as I was warm along the way, I didn’t care where it was. My ship must have had wheels—I heard them clackety-clacking underneath me. Then my blankets were being disturbed and a hand was grabbing and squeezing mine and I dropped from space, opening my eyes. Everything came into focus. Some closed doors passed. A wall clock read five to midnight. My husband’s face appeared above me, wet, rapturous, trying to say many things. I could see there were a lot of words there, stuck behind his wide, flat cheekbones. Tears came out in their place, until some words broke through. 

“Gracias por darme mi hija. Gracias por darme mi hija,” my husband said, smiling a vulnerable, proud and frightened smile as if he had just realized the pregnancy had produced a living creature that would require his love and care. Then his face folded again and the words turned to rain. He wiped his cheek with the back of the hand that still held mine, our fingers interlaced, like some crazy bleached-out brown and white zebra or faded piano keys. He held my hand to his chest now and kissed my forehead, my cheek. 

The gurney came to a stop and a man in white pants and turtleneck lifted me from my wheeled ship. My husband slipped his arms under my legs and my back and together they moved me to the bed. “Blankets,” I said before I drifted into my first grade classroom where I was sitting next to the pinging radiator, the overhead lights bright because it was gray outside, almost like dinner time, and snowing. 

There were two babies in cradles shrouded in white mosquito netting in the nursery. One had deep brown skin like my father’s wing-tips and a huge head of midnight black hair like my husband’s. There was black hair growing down his cheeks like Elvis sideburns and I saw hair on his arms too, when I peeked under the blankets. Maybe that’s what Carlos looked like when he was a baby, I reasoned. He turned out handsome. 

The other baby was the color of cafe-con-leche. It had a lovely round face and hardly any hair at all. She looked at me from enormous brown eyes laced with long, graceful eyelashes like my sister’s. I looked at the bassinets’ nameplates, hoping for the pretty baby, already telling myself I could love the hairy one. Morales Baby it said in black magic marker at the feet of the cow-eyed, coffee-and-cream-colored girl. She was mine. 

The final photo is off-color. Carlos didn’t want to startle the baby with the flash so it is taken in natural light. I am wearing the same wide smock-top I wore into the hospital. I am half-lying on the bench where Carlos slept, looking at the bundle next to me. A perfectly formed face shows from the blankets, the delicate, translucent eyelids closed. “Look here,” Carlos commanded, camera to his face, but I can’t. Only the side of my face is visible in the photo, and my arm around the bundle. I can’t stop looking at her. 

The Authors’ Sala Special Series presents short works by local authors. The San Miguel Authors’ Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com