Motherhood Impossible

The Porter Home – Leath Orphanage

My heart breaks for my young grandmother. I’ve been delving back into the record of my mother’s adoption in the late 1930s that the state of Tennessee delivered to me in October of 2017. I’m trying to remember how I felt as I first read through these pages now, as I attempt to craft the story of how I finally found out who all 4 of my original grandparents were, for a book I hope to someday publish.

While the adoption file brought a generous amount of detail into our story, it left me with a lot of questions I’ll never be able to answer. What caused my grandfather leave my grandmother after they had actually married when she was 4 months pregnant ? Why did she go from Memphis to McLean Virginia to give birth to my mother ?

It is clear she returned to Memphis with a very young infant of about 6 weeks in age and attempted to reach her husband, my mom’s father, via the Juvenile Court in Memphis that was under the direction of a somewhat controversial and yet highly respected Judge Camille Kelley.

It seemed no one much wanted to help my grandmother – not her baby’s father – nor her cousins who appear to have helped her initially but complained about spending $50 on the young mother and her baby’s needs. Her own cousin told Georgia Tann that my grandmother lacked sufficient skills to financially support the two of them.

My grandmother turned to Porter-Leath, who started caring for children in 1850, for TEMPORARY CARE of her baby while she looked for employment and a means of making a life for the two of them. It’s not clear when she left my mother in the orphanage, though within a month or two, the superintendent there alerted Georgia Tann to the cute blond white baby who she believed would soon be available for adoption.

Since Miss Tann had a paying customer that had been waiting for 6 months or longer for just such a baby, she went into high gear to pressure and exploit my grandmother’s circumstances and take the baby away from her. An effort that she succeeded in as my mother was adopted at Memphis and transported by train far away to Nogales Arizona. It appears my mom was inconsolable during that trip.

She had been placed in an orphanage for at least a couple of months. Was briefly reunited with her mother to her obvious joy and then taken away by a complete stranger. My adoptive grandmother noted in a followup letter to the agency that a doctor had my mom calmed down. Phenobarbital, most likely.

Unidentified nurse holding
my mom at Porter-Leath

Finding Out About One’s Self

My mom’s search for her natural mother could be explained this way – it had something to do with finding out about herself, and it had something to do with trying to explain to herself what had happened to her. I’m certain at some deep level she just wanted to know why.

My mother believed she had been inappropriately adopted. She made a need for her medical history the excuse for her search and certainly she had some chronic health issues, including one very mysterious and unexplained issue. It is also possible another mysterious unexplained reason was why she had been separated from her mother. Only her mother could tell her the truth about that. It was not to be. Her mother had already died when the state of Tennessee denied her attempt to be given her adoption records.

Fast forward almost 30 years, my mom has died but now I am able to receive those records that had been denied her. Through reading between the lines of all the considerable amount of information the state of Tennessee released to me – my mother was not wrong.

She had been inappropriately adopted, just not in the manner she had tried to explain it all to her own self (that her supposed illiterate parents signed papers without knowing what they actually were – surrender papers – at the hospital in Virginia). The actual truth that became abundantly clear was that my grandmother had become trapped and then exploited by Georgia Tann – the notorious baby seller.

My grandmother never had another child. I believe she was devastated to have lost the child that might have kept her marriage to my mom’s father intact. I believe my grandmother died of a broken heart.

After Losing Frances Irene

Frances Irene Moore at 6 months

I don’t really know what happened to my grandmother after she lost custody of my mom. I do know she was forced into the situation by economic conditions, by the general chaos that accompanied the end of a super flood at Memphis and by a conniving and exploitative Georgia Tann who needed the perfect baby sister for my adoptive grandmother’s little boy.

So I imagine how my grandmother coped –

Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer,
yet that is how I coped, I didn’t talk about the pain, it didn’t go away.

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died, or that you
lost custody of your child, it is that you can’t talk about it.

You just want to run away, but you don’t know where you can run to.
There isn’t any where to go.

My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air.
It leaves no room for anyone else.

After 3 years, Lizzie’s husband, JC Moore divorced her with no contest from her. My guess is that she couldn’t face him again after losing their child. She did remarry but she didn’t ever have another child. He remarried too but he was past fathering more children by then.

At least neither of them died alone. Such a sad and romantic and tragic story.