If my mother hadn’t married my father she would have been a young unmarried mother in the late fifties. I have never really understood how hard that decision must have been for her and to what extent she felt like she had a choice.
To recap, my mother was at university when she went on holiday to Paris with my sister’s father. She came back knowing he was an impossible match (and having got to know him, my sister and I would not disagree on that) and pregnant. Not a great combination in any decade.
She regularly visited one of her childhood friends at his university where he happened to be rooming with my father so they naturally got to know each other. My father was emotionally unavailable and hadn’t had a girlfriend. So he offered to sweep away this damsel in distress and not only marry her but adopt my sister. My mother saw this probably as a life saver but did she really know what she was getting into?
The contrast must have been enormous. My mother’s parents may have had their problems but there was romance, compassion, friends, theatre, cinema and life. At the time my mother was close to her brother. My father on the other hand had lost his brother, had a mother who beat him and a father he wasn’t permitted to get close to. She no doubt thought that he would warm up and flourish in his own family without realising how deeply engrained his own hangups were.
[My mother] was 16, she was working for her “O Levels”. [Her mother] heard of a girl of the same age who had a baby. There was nowhere for her to go where she could keep the baby and she was told they would have to separate. [My mother’s mother] decided that she should come to us. A tutor came to prepare her for her exams. Her mother and aunt came once to visit her. She must have stayed for a few months. The man had been imprisoned for “knowing a minor” and did not know about the baby. Late we heard that they had married.
I came across this recently in my mother’s brief memoirs (neither parent has put anything in writing about my mother’s unexpected pregnancy and the decisions that followed) and I wondered what lasting effect this had on my mother. She wasn’t under age when she got pregnant but she surely must have felt the embarrassment if not humiliation of this teenager mother and I wonder if this was at the back of her mind when she made her own decision.
Abortions were illegal then and back street abortions were dangerous. I don’t suppose they had the money for a “safe” one, even if she had wanted it. She could have “gone away” for an extended “holiday” and returned home having given the child up for adoption but I can’t see that happening. Nor did her parents attempt to force her to marry the father in a shot-gun wedding. So even if her parents had been totally supportive and compassionate, did she realistically have any choice but to marry my father?
I don’t think she did although I still struggle to accept that given what I know of her parents. It is important to me as I did become a single mother and it was the appropriate decision for my circumstances and for my children and I have struggled to understand the choices she has made and her ultimate distortion of her truth.
However, the question I am left with is was this the first time my mother felt trapped and unable to exercise free choice or had this been a growing pattern? I ask this because since her marriage my mother has slowly, bit by bit given up her independence, her ability to make free choices and I have always attributed this to her initial pregnancy and then giving in to my father. I can’t ask her this now so it is left as a question to ponder.
Much as I sincerely love my eldest sister and she is the only one in my family with whom I have a good relationship, I always come back to the fact that my mother wouldn’t have married my father if she hadn’t been pregnant and I wouldn’t have been born. And yet, without that pregnancy or with a bit more resilience my mother would have had a different life (possibly better, possibly worse). “What ifs” serve no purpose really, but yet I cannot help wonder.
Fighting For Sanity 