Their voices carry a lifetime of sorrow, of questions about what could have been, of anger at having been betrayed by those they loved.
The weight lifts for a moment when they recall life before they got pregnant, the joy of being young and free, maybe in love. Naive. Looking back, they laugh.
But when they talk about finding out, and having to tell their parents, the old fear can still make their voices tremble. And the rage, bitterness and pain about what happened next -- it comes through in every word.
Ann Fessler, an installation artist and a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, has set out to record the voices of women across the country who gave up their babies a generation ago.
She cares deeply about the subject because it is part of her own life: Fessler, 53, was adopted as an infant and has never met the woman who brought her into this world.
For many years, Fessler assumed that her mother -- and women like her -- had not wanted to raise a baby, "that they were, if anything, eager to move on with their lives."
A chance encounter in 1989 changed that. She was at a gallery opening for one of her students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, where she taught at the time.
A stranger walked up to her and said, "You could be my long-lost daughter."
"I started to have a physical reaction," Fessler says. The woman looked familiar somehow, and she came from Pennsylvania, not far from Fessler's Ohio hometown. But they compared dates, and it turned out they didn't match.
Still, they talked for the rest of the night. It was the first time Fessler had spoken to a birth mother of that generation.
The woman told her how shameful a single woman's pregnancy was considered, how it could ruin a family's reputation, and how much pressure was put on the women to hide their condition, and then give up their babies. There was a huge demand for healthy white babies.
For all she knew, Fessler's mother might have wanted to keep her.
"I was shocked," Fessler says. "She said, 'She probably worries about you every day, and wonders if she did the right thing.' "
AS AN ARTIST, Fessler has always favored real-life subjects, especially women's stories. After that encounter, "I realized I had a story of my own I had to tell."
She began doing research on adoption, and in 1990, she produced "Genetics Lesson," an installation piece about old-time sex education, family and adoption that was shown at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, in New York.
As part of the project, she invited birth mothers and adopted children to tell their stories. Fessler had wondered how typical the Baltimore woman's experience had been; scores of women, she found, shared her pain.
The stories cut across class, religion and geography. But among African-Americans, Fessler later found, unwed mothers' babies weren't given away, but raised within the extended family -- belying the notion that only a two-parent home would do.
RAISED IN a happy, loving family, Fessler had never felt the urge many adopted children feel to find their birth parents. Knowing the turmoil some mothers had experienced, she was even less inclined to find her own.
"I knew it could really turn her life upside down," she says.
But when Fessler found out that the woman in the gallery had moved nearby, she started wondering if she really was her mother, and had lied to protect her. She had to know.
She got a copy of her original birth certificate, to which she was entitled under Ohio law -- a rare privilege among adoptees. The woman wasn't her mother, but now she knew who was. While on a business trip to Dayton, she visited her birth mother's hometown, hoping to find her high school yearbook.
She wouldn't find one until years later, but she did learn that someone by that name had a farm down the road. She drove over, and before she knew it, she was talking to her uncle.
Unaware of Fessler's identity, he told her all about his sister's life -- everything but that time in 1949 when she gave birth to a girl she did not keep.
When Fessler returned home, "I thought, either I have to contact her right away, because she might put this together on her own, or think about it a little.
"I've been thinking about it ever since."
THROUGH HER ART, meanwhile, Fessler kept connecting her own experience with those of people across the country.
In 1997, Fessler collaborated with Carol Flax, a photographer who is also adopted, to produce an exhibition called "Ex/Changing Families," which opened at the California Museum of Photography, at the University of California-Riverside. Once again, the artists invited people to share their stories. Fessler was fascinated and saddened.
Last year, at the Bell Gallery at Brown University, Fessler shared her own story in an installation called "Close to Home." With three large corncribs as her centerpieces, she replicated the sights, smells and sounds of rural Ohio. An eight-minute video told of her visit to her mother's hometown, and black-and-white pictures flashing on a screen showed the kind of world she had come from.
In January, Fessler will be showing "Close to Home" again, at the Maryland Institute. But this time, she is pairing it with a new project she has just begun.
The voices.
Its name will be "Everlasting," and like all of Fessler's work, it will be austere.
The first thing visitors will see is a series of newsreels and educational films from the 1940s through the early 1970s, showing the culture that rejected unwed mothers. Then, at the end of a long corridor, they will enter a darkened room with chairs arranged in a circle, as if for a group conversation. Spotlights will point at their faces.
From eight speakers on the edges of the room, they will hear the women's voices -- sometimes individually, sometimes together, in a cacophony of sorrow, confusion and anger.
FESSLER BEGAN to tape interviews with women in June, starting in the Baltimore and Washington area, finding her subjects through support groups and Internet sites. She asked each one to take her back to about a month before they found out they were pregnant. The stories are chilling.
Karen Wilson Buterbaugh was starting her senior year at Annandale High School, in Virginia. It was 1965, and her boyfriend, whom she adored, had moved to far-away Norfolk.
One November weekend, she went to visit him. He took her to a Lovin' Spoonful show, her first rock concert. "It was great. 'Do You Believe in Magic,' and 'Summer in the City' . . ."
A month later, she missed her period. She chalked it off to stress. Then she missed another period, and started gaining weight. "I still tried to deny it." She wore loose dresses, unzipped, covered by a cardigan.
Four or five months into her pregnancy, she called her father at his office in the Pentagon.
"I said, 'I'm in trouble,' " she recalled. "And he said, 'That's OK. We will figure it out. I'll be home, and we will talk.' "
They had always been close; she considered him her best friend. At home, he assured her that everything would be OK. He told her mother, who took her to a doctor and confirmed that she was pregnant.
The next thing she remembers was being told to pack. She was going to a "wage home," a place where the Florence Crittenton maternity home in Washington, D.C., sent its overflow of pregnant girls. She moved in with a family that enlisted her to serve cocktails at parties.
"I felt totally abandoned and rejected and defective," she told Fessler.
After she threatened to run away, she was moved to a kinder family's home in McLean, Va. Then, in May 1966, as she was entering her seventh month of pregnancy, she was admitted into the maternity home.
"You could hear, early in the morning or late at night, girls crying in their rooms," she recalled. "Very rarely would you lift your eyes up. We really walked around like zombies, just staring at the floor a lot, because we were only allowed to use our first name and last initial. We were not allowed to ask questions of each other, like, 'Where did you go to school?' . . . We were strictly told, 'Mind your own business. Don't ask questions. Don't get to know the other girls. You're here for a reason. Keep to yourself.' "
Every week, the girls saw a doctor, and also a case worker.
"This experience will end," she remembers being told. "You will forget that you were here. You will forget that you went through this. It will all be in the past, and given time, it will fade. You will get over it."
The home's staff also reminded the women of why they had to give up their babies: "You can't provide anything that child needs. That child needs a mother and a father, and the things that they can give that child." She understood -- "I don't have the right to be a mom."
Buterbaugh's daughter was born on July 22. When the time came, she was put in a taxi cab and sent to the hospital. When she returned, she was given a bed in the "postpartum ward," and she stayed with her baby, Michelle Renee.
On the 10th day, she took her to be baptized at a nearby chapel. When they returned to the home, a girl gave her a camera she had smuggled in, against the rules. She took a picture of Karen and Michelle Renee, and then Karen took more photos of the baby in her white baptism gown.
Soon after, a nurse came in, told her to undress the baby, then took her away. Buterbaugh remembers hiding the baptism gown quickly, lest it be taken from her. And she stole the card from her bassinet.
About an hour later, the nurse took her into a room that was empty except for a rocking chair. She told her to sit down, and gave her the baby.
"You have an hour to say goodbye," she said.
"I put her on my lap, and kind of unwrapped her blanket to look at her, and kissed her feet, and put her up on my shoulder. I can still feel her there. I can feel her there, and her head. I told her all about her dad, and how much I loved him, and how much he loved me. And that he had been a good guy. I told her I loved her, and I hoped that she would understand and forgive me, because I didn't have any choice. I had to do what they told me to do. I had nowhere to go. I had no one to help me. I just begged her to forgive me."
BUTERBAUGH DID see her daughter again, briefly, and she brought her boyfriend to see her. The home kept asking her to sign the adoption papers, and she stalled for weeks. She hoped he would ask her to marry him, and rescue her and the baby. He didn't. She finally signed her rights away.
She married two years later -- another man -- and soon had a second daughter, and then a third. Outwardly, her life went back to normal, just as the case worker had predicted. But inside, she was shattered.
"Nobody ever dealt with the loss or the grief," says Fessler. "They weren't allowed to talk about it. They never had any help with it, and it stayed with them."
Buterbaugh found her daughter in February 1998. Her name is now Maria; she had been searching for her mother for years. They stay in touch, and yet despite Buterbaugh's longing to be a full-fledged mother to her, she knows she can't -- not after all these years.
She has made a Web site with her story, and is active in efforts to bring together "exiled mothers" like herself, and set the record straight about who they are, and how they came to give up their babies.
She calls Fessler's work "wonderful," because it's as much art as public education.
FESSLER continues to look for women's stories, hoping to find not only those who, like Buterbaugh, have spoken out over the years, but also some who are still, perhaps, keeping their secrets. She's willing to protect their privacy; what she wants is a record of their experiences.
So far, Fessler's project has received little publicity, and yet already it is gaining recognition. Last month, Fessler found out that the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, which has the largest archive of women's history in the United States, wants to take the tapes of her interviews after she has completed her project, so they can be made available to future researchers.
"I'm really excited about that," she says.
As she gathers material, Fessler hopes to take "Everlasting" around the country, organizing community outreach programs in each place she visits. She also plans to make a film, and has gotten a grant to begin preparing it.
"The stories are unbelievable, and they are not widely known," she says. "People don't realize how many women have suffered."
"And these things are affecting communities, families, half-brothers and sisters. It's not just about a woman who got pregnant accidentally; what happened to her has ripples."
Ann Fessler can be reached by e-mail at afessler@risd.edu
Karen Wilson Buterbaugh's Web site is at http://www.geocities.com/karenwb2001/main.htm
