[Jackiejdajda]

Susieloo wrote

as much as my parents would have liked me to have played the game and kept my daughters birth secret, it was not in me to do so. Sure there were plenty of people I never told...but that was more about not bothering to go there with them.

Those quotes from Solinger.. and how keeping the secret kept them from feeling the failure was something I never really consciously thought. but its true.. I was a failure and they were a failure.. and pretending it away was the way of it..
And at what cost.. and I think of the leverage that this business of failure gave..

There are women (men) today still in that secrecy mode..

The only person that I agreed to keep it secret from was my paternal grandmother. My parents were both scared of her harsh condeming tongue!
You see my mum was pregnant when she married my dad, and apparently grandma was pretty harsh and jugmental about the whole thing...and mum didnt want to have to listen to it.
But you see, what grandma didnt know that we all knew, was that she was pregnant with my dad when she got married!! She didnt even celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary because we might work things out.Ha...everyone knew anyway....and didnt care.

That was the way out.. wasn’t it.. how to get a husband in five easy lessons.. All wrong again..

I wanted a husband in the early sixties.. I failed and got the life long sorting of how to give a baby up in secrecy and learn how to cope..

So she was the only person I had to break it to. Sitting her down at 89yrs of age was so hard. She had all her faculties at that age! I had a photo and everthing. She was mortified!! But not at the fact I had had a baby, but at the fact that everyone else seemed to know but her!!!!!!

I took my bson to meet my dad in the nursing home.. Dad was good with meeting him but I was not allowed to ‘gossip’ about it with his friends in the home.. Such a thing..

I tried to talk about him with my dad on the phone.. but there was mostly silence when I told him something new that had happened in my reunion..

My bdaughter and her did meet once b4 grandma died. I treasure the memory of watching her help grandma accross the road after we had all been to see a play my other children had been in.

Yes..

As I said at the beginning....I didn't care what any one said, and was protecting my mum by keeping the 'secret' from grandma!! I had to spend my first xmas away from home carrying my secret! She was due a couple of weeks later so I had to make up some story about working!
So Grandma was preggars, mum was preggars and I was preggars!!! They got to keep their babies coz they married the fathers. I didn't. I was proud of my tummy, and proud i had a baby it Was just that I wasn't supposed to be.

We are all so different.. I was hidden away.. in Boca Raton.. I worked till I showed and then we got a motel room and I told everyone that my husband was in Viet Nam..

Jackie