CHILDLESS MOTHER

In this memoir, a teenage mother forced to give up her son for adoption never breaks her emotional connection to him.

In 1968, Mayo was the 13-year-old daughter of a career Navy officer who recently moved the family to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia. There, she met Kenny Locke, who also came from a military family; he was 16 and seemed a kindred spirit. Over the next year, the teens enjoyed independence within the base, and she writes, “The time Kenny and I spent unaccompanied was becoming, increasingly, an exploration of each other.” Mayo, then 14, became pregnant, and her parents checked her into Norfolk’s Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers under a false name. She was only allowed to hold her newborn son for 10 minutes before he was taken away for adoption, but she made a silent promise to him: “We will meet again someday.” While attending Duke University, and later in life, she experimented with drugs, including LSD, and took up transcendental meditation: “All the TM and LSD that I turned to in crisis, the ways I tried to find a unity of Being, a still point of connection in the world: it was all about discovering and holding on to the connection to my son.” In the early 1990s,she finally reconnected with him. Writing in first-, second-, and third-person points of view, Mayo creates a compelling nonfiction narrative that effectively conveys her feelings as a child and as an adult dealing with the fallout of choices her parents made, and the inclusion of excerpts of letters written by her son and by her mother and father add additional perspective. Her account of life in the Florence Crittenton Home, and her research into its history, provides readers with plenty of insight into past attitudes toward unwed pregnant women. The author also examines the complexities of reuniting with children given up for adoption—including birth parents’ acceptance of, and by, the families that raised their children—in a nuanced and insightful manner.

A compelling remembrance that skillfully explores the cost of family secrets.