The 1960s, “The Girls Who Went Away”, and me.

Okay. So I ‘m totally up to my eyeballs in work right now. Deadlines be pressin’, speeches need writin’, duties need doin’. Not to mention kids that need feedin’ and changin’ and readin’ to and supervisin’ and a husband that needs luvin’, and …

… enough with the hokey bit. I’m tired.

But I have a bee in my bonnet, or my butt, or somewhere really annoying and I have to start dealing with it now or face a world of nasty, festering stings later.

At this moment … or to be more accurate, at the last moment I had a spare moment to sit down, crack a book open and luxuriate in a good read, which happens to be when I finally shut down the computer and went to bed last night … page 261 of Ann Fessler’s book, “The Girls who Went Away: The hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade” … has me in its grip.

I ordered the book from Amazon after hearing about it here on the blogs. I immediately knew I needed to read it, as it not only hails from my era, but deals with real life situations I knew in real life.

(Yes, I know everyone interested in this angle of adoption read the book ages ago, but it takes a while for things to get to this side of the planet. I don’t complain if they get here at all.)

The year I turned seventeen and got pregnant, 1968, saw thousands of girls all over America in exactly the same condition … knocked up and out of luck. A few of them were my friends, and weren’t we just the sinking ship?

In the early stages, we traded thoughts and rumors about how to dislodge our tiny lodgers, none of which worked, and wondered only aloud enough for detection in our circle just how in hell we were going to get out of our very individual, but somehow shared predicaments.

Our boyfriends were about equally unhelpful, and for a herd of dudes who’d been darned sure of themselves and what was good for all of us just weeks before, they abandoned possession of the driver’s seat were jumping into the well-used and slightly sticky back without missing a beat, leaving us girls to negotiate where and how to get around the next curve and determine directions.

Continued …

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