Tag Archives: secret pregnancy

Lady Edith’s Secret Child and More

Lady Edith and her secret daughter Marigold

Lady Edith and Marigold at Downton Abbey

Lady Edith has a secret child! I’m not much of a TV watcher or a movie goer these days. I missed the boat that left for Game of Thrones, and it seems like I’d just be late to the party–or regatta–if I want to avoid mixing metaphors. I’ve tried to get into Big Bang Theory, Burn Notice, the Family Guy, and Modern Family. While I’ve enjoyed these shows I don’t need to watch them.

In fact, I’d grown weary of the upper crust goings on at Downton Abbey. That is, until Edith got pregnant and had to keep it a secret after her beau disappeared without a trace. That’s all it took to reel me back in. Will Edith manage to keep her secret child a secret? Will she pine away grieving for the loss of little Marigold while the local tenant farmer and his family pass the child off as their own?

For those of you who are not in the know, Edith gave the baby up and suffered profoundly from the separation. Eventually she “adopted” her daughter as a ward, bringing the child to live as her own amidst all the upper crust splendor that is Downton. The Marigold plot continues to captivate me this season. Edith’s parents know Marigold’s true origins, but Edith’s uppity sister, Lady Mary, does not. Yet. I’m guessing the secret will be revealed to Mary in the next episode.

Horace and Pete

Last week I watched the first episode of comedian Louis C.K’s new show, Horace and Pete. It’s set in a bar (I love bars). Alan Alda is in it (I love Alan Alda). And it’s staged more like a play than a TV show. (I love the theatre.)

The show is both comic and tragic, very nicely written and performed. And I’m hooked. There’s a big reveal toward the end of the premiere episode. Three supposed siblings find out that one of them is not like the others. He’s not a sibling at all. He’s a cousin. “I don’t like kids,” the Allan Alda character says, justifying why he gave his son to his brother to raise. He goes on to reveal that his son’s mother died when the boy was two. The siblings are all well into middle age now.This revelation is a bomb dropped in their midst, shattering the foundation of what they believed to be the basic truth of their family

So the secret child has been revealed in Horace and Pete. But at Downton Abbey the secret is still under wraps. Either way it makes for compelling drama.

Adoption in real life

This is the world of adoption. And even in the usual modern version of adoption, wherein the adoptee knows he/she is adopted, unless the adoptee can meet and speak, and hopefully get to know the biological parents, that cloak of secrecy is a weighty thing to drag through life.

Edith from Downton and Me

Binge watching Downton Abbey

I binge-watched the first season of Downton Abbey after coming down with a horrible flu. I’d heard about it ad nauseum, and finally succumbed while feeling a bit nauseated myself. The show hooked me, and I avidly watched the next couple of seasons until I grew weary of the problems of the English upper class. This year, well, here I am, grieving the loss of the man who loved me. Why not sit on the couch for an hour and escape? And then Lady Edith gets unexpectedly gets pregnant and gives birth to her secret child.

How Lady Edith and I are alike

Edith and me, we have things in common. Edith got pregnant after her first (so it seems) tryst with her boyfriend Michael. The same thing happened to me with my high school boyfriend. She had to keep her pregnancy secret and went away with her aunt as her confidant. (Somehow Granny finds out, but I missed that part.) In my case, only my parents and boyfriend knew, and I went away to live with a foster family in the Iowa countryside. My siblings were in the dark just like Edith’s.

Secrets and shame

Shame and ruination figured mightily in English society in 1924, just as it did in my small Catholic town in Iowa in1970. Edith manages to keep her secret, as did I, and returns home with her reputation in tact. Life goes on, right? Well, no. Sadness overtakes everything. My son was adopted by stranger in a closed records adoption. And though Edith can see her little girl occasionally since she’s been a adopted by a couple who work on Downton Abbey’s farm, she’s beset with grief. Giving one’s child away to someone else whether they are known or not, close or far, is impossible to bear.

An elaborate plan

Edith concocts an elaborate plan to be her daughter Marigold’s special guardian and bring her to the Abbey to be with the other grandchildren in the household. And then she runs away to London with her. At the 11th hour before I signed the papers relinquishing my son, I concocted my own plan to adopt my son.

I asked for a special meeting with my social worker. One evening after supper, with a thunderstorm brewing, he drove out to the farm where I was staying with a foster family. My boyfriend comes to the meeting too, and the three of us sit at the kitchen table while I tell them my latest plan. “I want to keep the baby with a foster family instead of doing a permanent adoption,” I say. “I’m staying with a foster family, and I get to go home in a week or so. The baby can do the same thing; it’ll just take longer. We’ll go to college at the end of August, just like we planned,” I say, looking at my boyfriend. “We’ll get engaged at Christmas and get married next summer.” I’m thinking we’ll be ready to be parents when we’re just a little older. “Then we’ll tell everyone that we can’t have our own kids,” I say, feeling my idea is pretty smart, “and we want to adopt.”

None of that worked out.

I hope Edith makes it work. That she keeps her little girl as her own.

And I’m not the only birthmother breathlessly praying for Edith and Marigold. There are probably thousands of us. Here’s one.

A Birthmother in a Novel

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One of my granddaughters–the one my mother called “that little girl.”
When you give away a child, you also give away your grandchildren.

Izzie in Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life”

The baby would be adopted as swiftly as possible. “A respectable German couple, unable to have their own child,” Adelaide said. Sylvie tried to imagine giving away a child. (“And will we never hear of it again?” she puzzled. “I certainly hope not,” Adelaide said.) Izzie was now packed off to a finishing school in Switzerland, even though it seemed she was already finished, in more ways than one.
from “Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson

Reading from the birthmother’s perspective

Izzie, the shamed pregnant girl, in Atkinson’s book seemed to be a minor character in the beginning. She’s the sister-in-law of Sylvie, one of the main characters. Now I’m a quarter of the way through the book, and Izzie has reappeared, years later after giving up her child. I can’t wait to see how she is. Will people speak of the baby and her past? Will she? And is Adelaide, Izzie’s mother still alive? Has her attitude about Izzie and her baby changed? Will we meet the lost baby?

I always read from the birth mother’s perspective. It’s impossible not to.

My real-life story

In my own story, with my own parents, the baby was never mentioned again. After the birth of two subsequent children I couldn’t stand the silence. I couldn’t stand living my big lie–that I had two children, not three. I couldn’t stand my unacknowledged grief.

When I called my mother and told her I was going to search for my son, who was by then 20 years old. “You’re going to get hurt,” she said.

“I’m already hurt,” I said.

So I searched. And I found him. Many things have happened since then. My mom lives with me now. She’s gotten to know my son and his family. She’s still talking about how much she enjoyed “that little girl” who came to stay for a week this summer. My son’s daughter. To think we might never have known her. But that’s how adoption works. Grandmothers lose grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Babies are handed off to new parents and are never heard of again.

Adoptive Parents

Adoptive parents are educated!

“Adopted children are more likely to live in educated homes,” the headline says. The news has been making the rounds in publications large and small. Adoptive parents are educated!

For me, it was a *smacks self in forehead* moment. When I was trying to finish high school in the spring of 1970 while keeping my secret pregnancy, uh…welll…secret, the last thing I could imagine was somehow keeping my baby and going off to college. Adoptive parents have also been found to have higher incomes. That usually has something to do with education, right? Another forehead smack.

Of course the intent of this report is not to surprise us. Nor is it to overwhelm us with the obvious. It’s to gather data. If you’d like to read more adoption stats, you can see the full report here.

Mostly, I think of the personal angle rather than the statistics when I see headlines like the one above. I think of a woman reading the paper over her morning coffee. A woman who gave away a child, believing that someone else could provide a better life. I think of the ache she might have in the pit of her stomach or the pull in her heart.

Denise Emanuel Clemen

Author, Artist, Advocate for adoption reform