The Girls Who Went Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

think you’ll do the right thing.” And that was just the first time I heard “do the right thing” in that whole nine-month period.
    So I went home after that long meeting and tried to explain to my non-religious mother what purgatory was, and how my child would end up there if I didn’t give her away. She finally just gave up on trying to understand,and said she respected this priest. She said, “If the priest says you should go away to this place, then I think you should go. ’Cause I don’t have an answer for you, babe. I’ll help you if you want to stay here, but I don’t have an answer for you.”
    So for me the easiest thing to do was to go away. It was a running away; it was a place where I really thought I could go and think. But before I could go there a social worker had to get involved. And it was explained to me that the state of Connecticut would be paying my tuition at this home for unwed mothers called St. Agnes. I was told it was located in West Hartford, and that they would take care of bringing me there. I could stay until my baby was born and then come home. They would take care of the adoption and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Sounded wonderful, but it was very hard for me to say good-bye to my mother. I had never been away from home except for an overnight visit to a friend’s house. I was devastated to be away from her.
    She had said, “Write me letters. You won’t feel as lonely.” So I did. And that started my little pattern. Every night before I went to bed, I would write my mother a love letter. I think she kept them for most of her life. And it kept me in touch with the one person who really loved me.
    And I just, to this day, cannot get over that feeling of loneliness and abandonment and being in that place with so many young people. Everybody I saw was just a kid. I noticed one thing very quickly at St. Agnes, and that was that nobody wanted to talk about what was going to happen to them at the end of their pregnancy. They really wanted to live in the moment. They didn’t want to talk about “going over”—that became a metaphor for the birth. We would come to breakfast in the morning and we would look around to see who wasn’t there. “Oh, she went over last night. She went over.” That meant she had gone to St. Francis Hospital and had her baby. We would envy that person because she was out of jail, so to speak. But we were a little afraid, because we didn’t know what this was all about.
    I remember that one of my best friends at St. Agnes was a girl named Brenda, who was like a movie star. She just was very glamorous and had long blond hair. She was one of those people who didn’t really look pregnant. She just had a little belly and she looked
great.
We were all so envious of her. When she went over, we were all very interested to know what she had. AfterBrenda’s four days, she came back to say good-bye to all of us. Being so popular, she almost had to. She held court in one of the rooms on the second floor, and we were all allowed to go in. We asked her all kinds of questions. “What was it like? What was it like?”
    She had changed. In just those four days. She was very mature in a way that frightened me. She was not the same person. She looked fabulous, but she looked about four years older. She didn’t want to talk about the details and we thought that was kind of curious. If Brenda didn’t want to talk about it, it must not be good. She said she had a little boy, and she had said good-bye to him, and she hoped he had a better life. But that’s all she would say. She said good-bye to us all, and we were a bit chastened after that. We all went upstairs. And that night I remember not many of us had dinner. We were just very, very worried. There were a group of us that were all due around the same time, and we kind of bonded. One by one, we went over.
    By the time I was in my third false labor, they decided to induce me. I had no one there to hold