Waiting to Forget - Hardcover

When Margaret Moorman was 16 she became pregnant, endured the stigma of teenage pregnancy, and was essentially forced by her parents and society into first a cover-up and then the giving up of her son for adoption. She was told to get over it and forget. As Moorman reveals in this stark memoir, forgetting was not possible. At age 40, with a daughter whom she could not bear to be separated from without anxiety, she confronted the past, began searching for her son, and wrote this searing condemnation of the social prejudice that had trapped her as a 16-year-old. She writes with angry clarity of the strangling embrace of cultural mores, and of the "climates of approval or disapproval" that remove the possibility of choice and create feelings of guilt.

The poignant but familiar story of a teenage mother and the lingering pain and shame she suffered after giving up her baby for adoption. Born in 1949, Moorman (My Sister's Keeper, 1992) hit puberty on the cusp of the sexual revolution. Girls were still wearing white gloves to church on Sunday and debating whether to be a ``good'' girl or a ``bad'' girl in the back seat of the family Plymouth on Saturday night. Moorman tipped into the bad-girl category by getting pregnant when she was 15, not long after her father's sudden death. She hid the news from her mother until it was too late to get an abortion (then illegal), carried her baby to term, and surrendered him for adoption. Nearly 30 years later, happily married, she gave birth to a little girl. Her extreme difficulty in parting from her daughter, even for a few hours, brought to the surface all the fear and confusion that she had buried in ``abandoning'' her first baby. In this volume, she recounts not only the story of her first pregnancy, but the muddled attitudes surrounding adoption today. Hidden away through most of her pregnancy (friends and neighbors were told that she was living with an aunt), she never saw her son after his birth. Her search for him was carried out in fits and starts, through books, phone calls, letters, and a network of support groups that served variously the needs of adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth parents. She did locate her son, and although they have not yet met in person, Moorman has allowed her young daughter a longer leash because of what she's learned about herself. An honest, heartfelt account of one woman's feelings, along with a look at the mixture of guilt, judgment, and recrimination that cloud adoptions. Others, however, have examined the same issues more cogently and more eloquently. (First serial to Washington Post Sunday Magazine) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.