La otra madre

The search for the child she gave up for adoption also became a spiritual quest to regain her own lost self. In 1965, Carol Schaefer was nineteen years old, a freshman in college, deeply in love with her partner, and became pregnant. Her parents took her to a Catholic home for single mothers, where she felt alone and lost. All she had to do was give up her baby so her sin would be forgiven and it would soon be forgotten, they told her. The child, in turn, would be handed over to a "good" family, instead of being marked by the stigma of illegitimacy. Carol tried to find the strength to oppose this decision, but she felt ashamed, she was very young and accepted as the best option what everyone was proposing to her. For years, she struggled to forget and lead the promised "normal" life, to no avail, and decided to search for her son. She found it and found that, in many ways, they had never really been apart.