Melissa Ohden - You Carried Me: A Daughters Memoir

A Daughters Memoir

Melissa Ohden

Published by Plough Publishing House
Walden, New York
Robertsbridge, England
Elsmore, Australia
www.plough.com

Copyright 2020 Melissa Ohden
All rights reserved.

print isbn: 978-0-87486-298-0
epub isbn: 978-087486-789-3

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A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Ohden, Melissa, author.

Title: You carried me : a daughters memoir / Melissa Ohden.

Description: [Second edition] | Walden, New York : Plough Publishing House, [2020] | Summary: Melissa Ohden is fourteen when she learns she is the survivor of a botched abortion. In this intimate memoir she details for the first time her search for her biological parents, and her own journey from anger and shame to faith and empowerment-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046070 | ISBN 9780874862980 (paperback) | ISBN 9780874867893 (epub) | ISBN 9780874867909 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Abortion--Psychological aspects. | Daughters--Psychological aspects. | Mother and child.

Classification: LCC HQ767 .O33 2020 | DDC 306.874/3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046070

Printed in the United States of America

A Daughters Memoir

Melissa Ohden

To the woman who carried me,
and to Ron and Linda Cross, who carry me
in their hearts

The tale of someones life begins before they are born.

Michael Wood, Shakespeare

A THICK MANILA ENVELOPE arrived at my home in Sioux City with the afternoon mail one sunny day in May 2007. I knew without even looking at the return address that it came from the University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City and contained the medical records that would answer some of the questions I had been agonizing over most of my life.

Who am I? Where did I come from? Whose blood runs through my veins? And why was I given away? These are questions that most people who, like me, were adopted as infants want answered. But what I needed to know was more fundamental, and less innocent: Why did you try to kill me? And how is it possible that I survived?

I felt a clutch of panic in the pit of my stomach. Now that I had the information I had sought for so many years, my body, and spirit, rebelled. But as the Irish poet James Stephens another adoptee once wrote, Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will. So with trembling fingers, I peeled back the sealed flap of the envelope and faced the facts of my improbable life.

As I read through my tears the blandly rendered details of my narrow escape from death On August 24, saline infusion for abortion was done but was unsuccessful I discovered something I hadnt expected: the full names of my biological parents.

Their names were clearly written in the record of my birth, but I was left unnamed.

As I fought for my life in St. Lukes neonatal intensive care unit, it became clear to the doctors and nurses on hand that my birth mother had been pregnant for far longer than the eighteen to twenty weeks reported at the time of the abortion. The pediatrician who examined me a couple of days after I was delivered estimated that my gestational age at birth was about thirty-one weeks well into the third trimester. The discrepancy hinted at something still unknown: How could any abortionist, much less one affiliated with one of the most prestigious hospitals in the region, have made such a mistake? What doctor or nurse would believe that a woman more than seven months pregnant was less than five months along?

Like other babies born prematurely, I had a host of serious medical problems including low birth weight (I weighed 2 pounds 14.5 ounces), jaundice, and respiratory distress. But my troubles were complicated by the aftereffects of the poisonous saline solution I had endured in my mothers womb. No one knew the long-term consequences of surviving an abortion. Developmental delays are routine for preterm babies, but I also had seizures; and the list of potential complications grew to include mental retardation, blindness, and chronic poor health.

Three weeks after my birth I was transferred three hundred miles east, to the university hospital in Iowa City. The nurses who cared for me, a nameless baby, made me tiny clothes and colorful booties. One nurse, Mary, decided I needed a name and dubbed me Katie Rose. For years after I left the NICU, my adoptive parents and Mary kept in touch, exchanging Christmas cards and letters with pictures of me and updates on my progress. When I got older, I wrote the letters myself; Mary and I began a friendship that would endure for decades. It made me feel so special that this nurse who had cared for me when no one else did still cared about me.

Among the records I received were these prints of my feet.

Meanwhile, the social services agency that had taken custody of me searched for a family willing to adopt a fragile newborn. This was no easy task because of my grim medical prognosis.

The search led to a small town, Curlew, Iowa, just one hundred miles from where I had been born. There a young couple who had adopted one child waited for another.

They were told that the baby would have needs that went far beyond food and shelter. Love they had in abundance; money for specialized medical care and services they did not. They drove five hours east to meet the tiny baby who needed a home. Unintimidated by the IV lines and the monitors attached to the skull of the baby whose head had been shaved from temple to temple, they made their choice. Thats the day I first experienced a mothers love, in the arms of the woman who looked into my eyes and said, You are mine.

Her name was Linda Cross, and although she wanted to bring me home right away, she had to wait another month to hold me in her arms again. In late October 1977, a social worker delivered all five pounds of me to the farmhouse Linda shared with her husband Ron and their four-year-old daughter Tammy. They named me Melissa Ann, after a friend who had become a quadriplegic after an accident. They admired her strength and her tenacious fight for life. They hoped for the same qualities in me.

Ron and Linda had grown up on the prairies of western Iowa. Palo Alto County had a population of about sixteen thousand people when they were born as part of the baby boom that followed the world war their fathers had fought in. They came from close families with deep roots. Ron was born in 1948 in Mallard, where four generations of his family had farmed the land for a hundred years. They grew corn and soybeans, and raised cattle and pigs. Linda was born a year later in Estherville, the seventh of nine children. Farming was part of her birthright as well: her father farmed and worked as an auto mechanic; her mom was a seamstress.

They met after they graduated from high school, at a drag race on the wide-open roads nearby. When I heard the story years later, it sounded like something straight out of the movie Grease. Fast cars, however, were the extent of their teenage rebellion. While their peers elsewhere in the country were engaging in the summer of love, they carried on a traditional courtship in their Iowa hometowns. In April 1969, as their generation protested the Vietnam War and prepared to gather at the Woodstock Festival to celebrate sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, they married in front of their families and friends at the Lutheran Church in Estherville, and began a life together.