There is an old song called Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking. People who suffer from depression often hide their feelings with a smile and that was what I did. I just smiled at everyone and they thought I was okay. I wasn’t. My heart was broken, because I had to give up a baby for adoption in 1966. In those days if you entered a maternity hospital as an unmarried woman, you were considered unfit to be a mother. The authorities had the right to take your child from you. There was an archaic idea that only married women were fit to be mothers.

Today, the baby I gave up for adoption in 1966 is forty-nine years old. Her birthday has always been a sad day for me, a hard day, in fact I used to fight with my husband every year on her birthday.  I blamed him, because he was wanted by police at the time of her birth and that was the catalyst for my having to give up the baby I so dearly wanted to keep.

I write about my story in my memoir “I Was Only Nineteen.”

It was hard to write the book and I did have to put the manuscript aside when I was half way to finishing it. It had become too painful bringing up old memories.  Eventually I did finish the memoir – it was a mission I had to complete so I could finally tell the whole story, warts and all, for my relinquished daughter.

In one of the last conversations I had with my late husband,  he said, “The one good thing that came out of all your physical and emotional pain is that two people who could not have their own children, were able to become the parents of our beautiful daughter. What a pleasure it must have been for them.”

That is a good thought, that a childless couple were able to adopt my baby, who grew into a beautiful woman.

I hope that one day she will have compassion for the unforseen circumstances that befell me, and forgive me.

“Unforseen circumstances befall us all.”