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After I came home from signing those papers, my family pretended the whole thing never happened. My parents never mentioned my son again, except one time (which I'll explain later). I tried to go back to being a "normal" high school girl starting her senior year. I tried to forget, like I'd been told would happen. For the first semester of my senior year, it seemed to be working.
About 9 months had passed when I finally couldn't pretend anymore. But, instead of confronting my parents about how I felt, I kept it inside. My grades started falling, and I started skipping classes occassionally. I started dating again, and the first guy I met, I fell for hard. His name was Danny. Is it a coincidence that I've dated a number of men named Danny since that time? I don't think so. We were both high school seniors. By February of that year, we announced to my parents our engagement. My parents were mortified... all their dreams of me going to college would be destroyed. But the engagement didn't last very long, and we broke up shortly after.
A few months after that, before graduation, I met my youngest son's father, Randy Tate. He was my age, but already married and separated from his wife, who was pregnant (it was a "shotgun" wedding). We moved in together, and I continued to go to high school. We lived together for a year, then got married (his divorce was final after the first 6 months).
Five months after we were married, I got pregnant. It had been about 2 years since my oldest son's birth. Since my first son was a deep, dark secret, I had to pretend to my husband's family and our friends that this was my first pregnancy. I felt like I was betraying "D.J.", as I called my oldest son to myself. However, I was relieved to know that I would finally have a baby that no one could take from me.
Randal was born July 24, 1981, at 1:18 p.m. As I went through labor and delivery, with my glasses staying on this time, I was thinking of my first son's birth. Everything was so totally different. I wasn't treated like a "non-mother" -- on the contrary, I was treated wonderfully by the hospital staff, and made to feel that I was going to be a wonderful mother. How much three short years and a marriage will change society's perspective of a pregnant woman!
Ironically, when Randal was a year old, my husband and I separated. I was now a single parent! My husband and his parents sued for custody, and we went through 2 years of court proceedings culminating in a week long jury trial. This is the only other time my son was brought up by my family or others since his relinquishment. My husband's lawyers tried to portray me as abandoning my first son, as an unfit mother, because of my oldest son's adoption. I submitted the photo I had of my son, the letter from his adoptive parents' friend, and my birth letter to him as evidence, to show the jury that what his lawyer was saying was not true. I answered all their questions about my oldest son, and my lawyer read my birth letter to the jury.
After a week of testimony that I will never forget as long as I live, the jury only took 20 minutes to decide custody. I got full custody of Randal. I've raised him as a single parent ever since.
I've thought about my oldest son every day. I wondered if he was dead or alive, what he looked like, what his interests were, what his family was like. Mother's Day and his birthday were very hard on me. After Randal's birth, I had to keep pretending Randal was my only child. I grieved for my oldest child for 13 1/2 years before I did anything about it.
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