Susan Kent - Baby Girl

 

Hi. So, it was right before Christmas 1990, when I first told my mother that I was pregnant. And I remember walking down the hallway and seeing her asleep on the sofa in the light of the Christmas tree before I woke her up and said, "I need you to take me to the hospital right now. I'm having a baby." And she woke up to find me standing there in her pink nightgown, covered in blood from my waist down. And she said, "No, you're not. You just have cramps." And I was like, "Actually, yes, I'm having a baby, and we need to go now." And she said, "No, no, it's fine. Come on, let me take you to the bedroom. Let me check it out." So, she checks it out in the way that you would imagine that you would check it out. And she was like, "Oh, my God, we have to go right now." I said, "Okay, great.” 

 

We leave. My sister is coming out of the bedroom saying, "What's happening?" She said, "We have to go. We'll be back later." She throws me in the car and starts screaming at me, "Why didn't you tell me this earlier?" Well, I was 19 and had gotten pregnant at a keg party, as you do, [audience laughter] and so I didn't want to tell her. And so, I woke her up, and she gets me in the car, and we are only two miles away from our hospital. And her main concern, because I'm a girl from South Georgia, is my reputation. We can't go to the local hospital. So instead, we go to the gas station, and I sit in the passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard. And wait for her to pump gas and then go inside and pay. And then she comes back, and she drives me to the hospital like a maniac. I've never driven so fast in my life through the backwoods of South Georgia. 

 

We get to the hospital, we run in. "My daughter's having a baby." They throw me into a wheelchair. I go straight to a hospital room, and there this nurse is like, "You have to get into your gown." And I start freaking out, and I sit on a toilet, and she's like, "Don't do that." I was like, "Oh, sorry. It's my first time.” [audience laughter] Yeah, I didn't know. And so finally, they get me onto a gurney, and they're taking me into the delivery room, and I look up at the doctor, and I was like, "I don't want to see it." I had my whole plan the entire time since the morning I woke up after the keg party and thought, "Oh, my God, my head hurts. Oh, my God, I'm pregnant." And I just knew. And in that moment, I thought, "I'm not having this baby, 19, I'm in South Georgia. I'm getting hell out of here, nobody's stopping me." So, I told the doctor I wanted to give the baby up for adoption. And he wheeled me in. I had the baby. I woke up the next morning, and we had a meeting with the doctor where we had to go in and discuss what we were going to do. I said, "I want to give the baby up for adoption." He said, "Well, what about the father?" I said, "Well, I wasn't planning on telling the father, because I had lied to my mother about who the boy was because I didn't want to admit to her the keg party part.” So, I had said it was this boyfriend I had. 

 

And then the doctor said I had to tell the name so that we could get confirmation from the guy. And I thought, "Oh, well, he's going to be surprised, because we never even slept together." [audience laughter] And I was like, "Well, wait, how about this? I also had a boyfriend circa, you know, impregnation that ended up committing suicide." And I was like, "What if we say it was his baby?" And the doctor said, "No, we have to talk to his parents." I was like, "Okay, hold on. Oh what if I don't know?" He was like, "Thank you. That's what I've been waiting for." [audience laughter] I was like, "Awesome." So that's what we went with. And then he was like, "Okay, actually, I happen to know a nice family. They're Christians, and they've been looking for a baby, and let me give them a call. “All right, work it out. I don't care." 

 

And so that afternoon, an attorney's secretary comes into my bedroom-- in my hospital room and brings in papers. And she hands them over to me, and I sign away my rights to what they listed as a "Baby girl." And up until that moment, I had not connected with this lump in my body. I had just kind of pretended that it wasn't happening. I prayed for some miscarriages, just kind of separated, somehow your brain just can ignore everything that's happening underneath. And so, when I read that phrase, "Baby girl," on the paper, it was the first moment that I made the connection to it being a human being that I was passing along to some family I had never met, had no idea about, Christian family, just saying. [audience cheering]

 

And so I signed the papers. I remember my mother giving the secretary a firm talking-to about, "That's really inappropriate. You shouldn't have done that." She didn't even know she was trying to give it up. And that afternoon, we drove 30 miles back and went home, and we never spoke of it again. And "Baby girl" turned 22 this past December, and I still have not heard from her, but I feel like it's not my right to look for her. So, I left my records open and we'll see what happens. Thank you.