Memories of Love

Two of my favorites

My dad and me. I was 19 days old. This picture is 73 years old.

Two years later: The two women who were my mothers. I miss them more than I have words for.

My biological mother had a nervous breakdown (her first was about three years before) four days after I was born. Fathers back then were incapable of taking care of tiny babies on their own, so I was lucky enough to be left in the care of those two wonderful women in the second picture, my mother’s mother and sister. I never saw my mother for nine months; by then, the bond with my grandmother and aunt was made, and that new woman who showed up on the scene was a total stranger.

She smelled funny, and her skin felt different. I was 9 months old, and I can still remember that. I was probably about 11 months old when my father came to get us and take us “home.” I have carried the emotional scar of my mothers “giving me away” to strangers for nearly 73 years. I had no concept of them “giving me back” to my parents.

I was lucky enough to still have a close relationship with those women until their deaths, my grandmother, 80 years old, a month after my son was born in 1977 when I was 25, and my aunt for another 6 years, when she died at the age of 63. I never realized how lucky I was until I read stories where families refused to take a family baby in, being “too busy.”…