By Page H. Gifford
Writer Tracy Mayo will discuss her memoir, “Motherless Child: A Search for Self and Her Son,” at 2 p.m. June 29 at the Fluvanna County Library.
“Motherless Child” explores a family saga of secrets and shame in the pre-Roe v. Wade era, when pregnant teens were often sent to homes for unwed mothers, and their babies were placed for adoption.
Mayo was one of those girls. At 15, she became pregnant, relinquished her son for adoption and began a decades-long search shaped by secrecy, identity and motherhood.
She grew up in a military family, moving every year or two, and that nomadic childhood left her feeling rootless. When she became pregnant in 1970, her parents were desperate to keep it hidden.
“They enrolled me in the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in Norfolk, Va., and told the world I had gone to Seattle to take care of my grandmother, who had supposedly broken her hip. At FC, we were given fake names to help with the charade,” Mayo said. “Instead of Tracy, I became ‘Susie.’”
Mayo described life at Florence Crittenton as reminiscent of a strict Victorian institution.
“We were only allowed to gain 1/4 lb./week, or we were sent to the notorious Diet Table. The only exercise we could get was walking in endless circles around the 2-acre property,” she said.
“Girls whose parents had resources, like mine, were able to stay in school via tutors. Other girls were like indentured servants, paying for their room and board through the labor required to clean and maintain the institution.”
Once girls went into labor, Mayo said, they were driven to the back door of Norfolk General Hospital, where they were registered under a number instead of a name.
“We left our babies at the hospital, most of us never to see them again. The babies went to foster homes until they could be placed with our adoptive families. We were told to ‘forget it ever happened.’ I was expected to return to school and resume my life as if nothing had changed, but I was forever changed.”
A product of her generation, Mayo said she tuned out and got high. She eventually went to college, where she experimented with LSD and Transcendental Meditation, which she said proved to be helpful coping strategies.
“I had a revelation after one particular meditation in which I realized that I could chart a course that might lead me to my son. I decided to wait for him to possibly search for me between the ages of 18 and 21. If by age 21 he hadn’t knocked at my door, I permitted myself to search for him,” she said.
On his 21st birthday, there was no knock at the door, and Mayo began her search.
Mayo will discuss the trauma she carried as a teenager, her first contact with her son, David, her relationship with his adoptive parents, and whether David ever met his birth father.
She said she wrote the memoir, in part, to assure adoptive families that reunions with birth mothers need not be something to fear.
“I wanted to educate young women who have grown up with reproductive freedom that the world wasn’t always that way, and I wanted to remind women of my generation that we may well be slipping back to 1970.”
