Waiting to forget

In 1964, the author was a pregnant fifteen-year-old. Compelled to give up her child, a son, for adoption, she returned to high-school life as if nothing had happened. In the harrowing years just before the Pill and Roe v. Wade made reproductive freedom possible, record numbers of girls and women in crisis pregnancies came to the same decision. After giving birth to the babies many never even saw, they were expected to get on with their lives. To disappear. Not until her second pregnancy, twenty-five years later, at age forty, did the author realize the toll her experience - and the surrounding secrecy - had taken. Pregnant, she was sure she would lose the baby. After the birth, she was unable to let the child out of her sight. Slowly, she began to see how "losing" her first profoundly affected the way she mothered her second. Watching her beloved daughter grow, she began to understand the importance, and the permanence, of her long-ago decision to give up her son. With remarkable candor and bravery, the author looks back on her loss and explores the pain she tried for so long to ignore. As she delves more deeply into her heartbreak - and her anger - she finds the courage to try to connect to her first child, now a grown man. She is always aware that she is searching for another mother's son.