Book Talk: Without a Map by Meredith Hall

Meredith Hall tells of being a sixteen-year-old girl, in 1965, forced to give up a baby and how she lives so much of her remaining life in emotional (and sometimes physical) exile.

She writes: Shunning is supposed to keep bad things from happening in a community. But it doesn't correct the life gone wrong. It can only expose the transgression to a very raw light, use it as a measurement, a warning to others that says, See? That didn't happen in our home. Because we are good. We're better than that. The price I paid seems still to be extreme.

The story begins in 1964 when Hall meets a boy who gets her pregnant. She is the youngest child of a divorced mother who is distracted with a new career and a new lover. The story carries forward through Hall having her son, isolated from the life she once knew and then (post relinquishment) how she attempts to go on as a college student, a wanderer, a mother, a caregiver for her ailing mother and finally a mother in reunion with her relinquished son.

The aspect of this book that haunted most was the relationship between Hall and her mother.

In the prologue and then in the second chapter, Hall decribes the scene where her mother says, "Well, you can't stay here," in response to the pregnancy.

The mother doesn't even hesitate. She doesn't say, "oh, hey, this is complicated," or "whoa, didn't see that coming," and later, she never says, "wow, big mistake with my initial response. What I meant to say is…okay, you are my child, this is a sticky situation, let's figure it out." No, the response is and remains, "Well, you cannot stay here."

Hall writes, My sister will say later, "It was just the times." But this is not true. There was something more, something I should have known, a capacity for this betrayal I should have sensed was coming. I should have prepared myself, kept my feet under me better, not spent a lifetime wondering how this could happen, and, always, wondering at my own lack of worth. I wish I had been able to see my mother—my two mothers—more clearly, to predict her capacity to judge me so fiercely, to withdraw so abruptly her love and protection of me.

Eventually Hall's mother declines due to MS and Hall is able to step over the line that marks the betrayal and take tender care of her for many years. They never speak of the wound between them. Hall writes: And then she is gone. On the bed lies a pure and perfect—sublime—casting of a woman's form, my mother's body. Finally, here is peace, for her and for me. God seems to move in the room, incomprehensible, brutal, embracing.

….There was no atonement. My mother died with our past laced between us, love and its failures, love and its gravity.

It seems absolutely stunning that the sacred covenant of unconditional love for ones own child could be broken and never restored and yet, I must look inward to understand my own reaction. Aren't I also struggling, still, with the fact of my own relinquishment—that impossible decision made by my very own caring mother, who went on to have more children, to keep them close and to nurture them with great love—which resulted in my own lifelong exile from the world and myself? I find myself asking again and again: How could she have abandoned me? Me? Why me?

No answer makes lasting sense to my heart and it seems to be the same for Hall.

[image error] Hall is, in my opinion, a truly exquisite writer. She wholly captures the inclination of mankind at this ruinous time, which has evolved it's social morays to such a degree that it is acceptable to annihilate any mother who has the audacity to become pregnant prior to the arrangement of acceptable conditions, ie: being married, of a certain age and within certain economic conditions. In China, you cannot keep your baby if she is a girl. In Ethiopia, you cannot keep your child because you are starving to death. In many other countries, you cannot keep your baby because you simply do not have enough money for medical care.

And around the world, it goes.

Humans are not in the habit of empowering a mother to keep her children. Rather, we take the children away and exile the mother to her unfortunate situation (which often leads to death). We adopt these children and call them "miracles" and "gifts from God." Don't we wonder about about the results of our actions? What do these morays say about us and our capacity to love and to teach love? What will be our future with a such past?

I hear people say, "adoption is a way of life, it is a historic fact." I would like to note that similar rhetoric circled through conversation during the times of slavery. These are not times to be complacent and make excuses based on what has transpired through history. This is a time to awaken and to take action in a way that reflects our goodness.

Meredith Hall's book is a beat of sanity, during an insane time, primarily because she has been willing to be honest. That she does so with such glorious craft is a testimony indeed.