Love and Heartache: An Unfathomable Separation of Mother and Child

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

A mother recounts the devastating removal of her son at birth, but her undying love eventually leads to their reunion decades later

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1970 in pre-Choice America. The lonely only child of a high-ranking naval officer and a socially ambitious mother, after our eighth move in thirteen years, I longed for a normal adolescence — to have lasting friends, to feel rooted.

What I got was a pregnancy at fourteen and exile to a “home for unwed mothers,” where I was given a fake name, my identity erased.

I had done the worst possible thing for an officer’s daughter: disobeyed orders and shown no discipline. So I was given a new order: give up my baby at birth and never speak of him again. I was told it would be “best” if I could forget, but that only made me more determined to remember.

Twenty-two years later, my longing undiminished, pre-internet, pre-DNA testing, and without even knowing his adoptive name, I set out to find him — and perhaps, through my search, to regain myself.

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After I found my son and felt his compassion, I forgave myself for having lost him. He was able to embrace both the mother who had given birth to him and the parents who had raised him.

I sit at my desk now, more than fifty years later, in a writing loft built for me, watching my birds and feeling the morning sun warm the early spring chill. What is memoir but memories? We write not just to tell a story or publish a book, but to find out something about ourselves.

Excavating my history through writing allowed my frightened memories to be out in the open after decades of carrying them in isolation. The process included recalling the vivid details of an acid trip in 1974…

September 1974

Let me say I am not even surprised to be having a truly bad trip. I knew it could only end poorly when college boyfriend Sean suggested we do one and a half dots of acid, not one. He’s one hundred and seventy pounds to my one hundred and ten and he’s cool, but I’m freaking…

God, my baby. Nothing seemed to matter that much after I relinquished him. I was smoking pot every day, dropping out for a semester. Donning blue jean overalls, purple T-shirt, moccasins, and a turkey feather in my hair for an interview as a pharmacy assistant. Being not-so-politely escorted out. Trying to escape my trauma but not knowing how, and not connecting my silent tears at night with my frequent daylight vitriol.

And now, I am tripping. Maybe I have always been tripping, if tripping is a journey not self-directed but induced by forces external to oneself. Aha, yes. Crowded out of my own self by the agendas first of my parents and later of other significants in my life.

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But let me start again with what I am sensing at this moment.

Duke Forest. Lush, cool, fragrant, usually comfortable and familiar. Today, enigmatic and dark. What sun there is, is weak. A black form builds steadily from the west. A storm? An eclipse? Whatever its nature, it seems determined to overtake us. I shudder and my heart races.

Geometric patterns, like a mesh, imprinted on everything, including the inside of my eyelids.

Normally a comfort, a sense of order and harmony, but now they’re rigid, domineering. I can’t blink my eyes and shake it off. The universe asserting its unyielding authority — I sob with this new understanding. God help us, I wanted it to be chaos, or at least flexibility, not geometry.

And the trees. It’s only safe near the pines. The deciduous leaves are huge, reaching toward me, as if they will fold themselves around me and swallow. Stay away from the Catalpas and Basswoods. They have more secrets than leaves. As they stare at me, I realize they know mine: how I gave away my child; how I failed to fight for him; hung my head, surrendered.

Such shame. My face wet, I touch the water and put it to my lips. Salt. Salt of the earth, but the earth is raw. My hair stands on end and I tip over, spilling into the sky and down into the dirt.

Where is Sean? Lost in the forest, I’ve misplaced my mind.

It’s the acid…it’s the acid…it’s the acid…

Gone for so long I can’t figure out the time. Everything is anything. Falling deep into flow, deep into know. So much to think about, so much to feel for, so much to fear. So easy to lose one’s way. All I want to do is to catch words like butterflies in nets, but they escape me.

Voice disappearing, consciousness fragmenting, crystal shards laying on the forest floor, scattered about, lost in the wash, a creek flowing beneath my soul.

A fly, ferocious, hovers with the wop-wop-wop of helicopter blades. The pulsing climbs up inside until I want to fly out of my skin. Dive bomb. . . Run! Escape to the water. Why did it attack in peacetime? Vibrations vibrating, pupils dilating. Black orbs look back at me as I scan the liquid patterns, merging, morphing. A creek of egg-rocks… The music smells like sassafras. Dawn to dusk, drawn to musk, too dosed to focus.

The past is non-existent, yet I climb out of it. The future is imaginary, yet I dive head first into it… I see the trajectories, both backward and forward. Towheaded infant, his eyes meet mine. The covenant we make to withstand time. The tablets of time spin slowly through space.

But oh. An epiphany! It is Universal Geometry that generates the threads that connect us all — past, present and future! Not domineering or unyielding after all, it simply is. A silver latticework of interconnections, patterns that repeat themselves in nature and give rise to infinite symmetry. The spider’s geometric silken web, the snowflake’s fractal structure, remind me that these designs thrive on a celestial scale.

Universal Geometry propagates the cosmos with patterns that symbolize the promise of connection. This is the mesh I see! And now I understand that my heart is one endpoint and my son another, a silver thread our tether.

My god, the universe will help me after all… We are of the same continuum, and I am greater than my pain.

The tablets will turn, and we will know to follow the silver thread to one another, when he will look into my eyes and see his own.

Thank God for the acid…thank God for the acid…thank God for the acid…

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You may also enjoy reading Rooted in Nature: Planting the Seeds for a Relationship with My Autistic Son Through Our Love of Trees, by Clemens G. Arvay.