The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers by Angela Patrick Read Free Book Online Page B

reception of some of the local businesses fresh in my mind, I resolved to learn to accept my situation. I was incarcerated in the
convent – if not physically, at least emotionally – until my baby was born and I’d given it away. Then I would be allowed to slip quietly back into the life I’d led before,
reintegrating into ‘polite’ society without anyone knowing why I’d been away.
    That there was no alternative available to me was clear. I had come to accept that keeping my baby – always a dream – was something that wasn’t going to happen. In fact,
nothing could have been made more clear to me by my mother. As a good Catholic girl, I must do the good Catholic thing: accept the kindness of the nuns who deigned to care for us both and leave
them to sort out the mess I had got myself into. Then – another thing for which I knew I must be grateful – I must give my poor child to a good Catholic family, who could care for it
and bring it up properly.
    Like many a girl in my situation at that time, I didn’t dare question this. How could I? To mention keeping the baby as an option would have been unthinkable. As an unmarried mother I
would be shunned and unable to find employment; I would therefore compound my sin by committing an innocent child to life as a destitute bastard.
    So I accepted it, but it made communication with my mother difficult, because while, on the outside, I did accept that this was best option for my unborn infant, every fibre of my being
was opposed to it. I’d spoken to my mother on the phone only sporadically since I’d gone to stay with June, and I continued to have strained and pointless conversations with her from
the convent’s phone at the end of the hallway.
    If I was sad to be having bland conversations with a mother who knew all too well where I was, other girls had much harder circumstances to bear. Like Mary, several of the girls were living even
more of a lie than I was. These were girls who’d fled situations in which no one in their families had found out what had happened, and who’d had to construct big complicated lies for
their loved ones about the reason for their often sudden departure. Like Mary, they would have to write letters home, chattily talking about jobs they weren’t doing, people they weren’t
meeting and a social life that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
    It was understandable, then, that thrown together as fellow outcasts, we banded together for support. And at least we had one period every day when we were left to our own devices and could
relax together, away from the nuns’ relentless displeasure at our very existence.
    There was a common room on the ground floor, a big shabby place with a large number of lumpy mismatched chairs and an old sofa; a flickering old black and white television stood in a corner.
Every evening after tea a number of us would congregate there – mostly pregnant girls rather than new mums, because the latter were generally too exhausted – to swap stories about our
other lives, the ones we’d been forced to leave, and to support each other through the inevitable admissions of distress.
    A lot of the conversations were about our bumps. We would discuss how big we were and how big our unborn babies might be, and we would put our hands on each other’s stomachs to feel them
moving. We also speculated about where we might be when our waters broke and, ignorant as most of us were about such matters, what the business of giving birth might be like.
    ‘Did you hear about Zena?’ Mary asked me one evening, a couple of weeks into my stay. Zena was one of the other pregnant girls who, unlike the rest of us, seemed more bored and fed
up than distressed by her plight. There was a lot of muttering, too, about how little work she had to do and how the nuns didn’t treat her like they did us. She was a model, Mary had told us,
and was visited regularly by her unborn child’s father. He was a wealthy