Book Review: Without a Map

Hall, Meredith. Without a Map. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. 220 pages.

Meredith Hall is an English professor at the University of New Hampshire. She is a birthmother who placed her son for adoption in the 1960s when she was just sixteen years old.

This book is a memoir of Meredith’s life, focusing primarily on how her life changed because of the pregnancy and adoption. Like most birthmothers from the 1960s, Meredith was not looked well upon by society once she was pregnant, and she felt she had no choice but to give up her child. Her story tells of the hardships she faced throughout the years as a result, and discusses the reunion with her son.
Rating: 1) I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in adoption, especially those interested in birthmother stories.

Clemens Library already owns this book.
        “This is an ordinary story, the story of a search for a steady course. Love, its sustenance and its costs” (220). Though Meredith Hall chooses to end her story with these words, I have to disagree; there is nothing ordinary about her story. It is a gut-wrenching, painful story of loss and the search for love and belonging. Her story as a birthmother is powerful and reveals the harsh reality of the treatment of birthmothers in the 1960s, and offers an inside look at the pain from losing a child that never leaves. Brilliantly written, Meredith Hall has shared her personal story and given us a deeper understanding of truths behind adoption.

        One of the main ideas in the memoir is that birthmothers in the 1960s were ostracized and felt they had no choice in regard to adoption.  Meredith was sixteen when she became pregnant in 1965, and quickly learned she had no one to rely on. She was promptly expelled from school, and her friends stopped talking to her. Meredith was suddenly an outsider in the community. She writes, “Shunning is as precise as a scalpel, an absolute excision, leaving, miraculously, not a trace of a scar on the community body. The scarring is left for the girl, an intense, debilitating wound that weeps for the rest of her life” (xxv). 

        Meredith’s parents were anything but supportive.  Without asking Meredith what she wanted to do, they made the decision that the baby would be given up for adoption; Meredith had no choice in the matter. Her mother refused to let her stay in the home, and so she was forced to go hide away in her father’s house. Living in the shadows, Meredith was not allowed to so much as step a toe outside; no one was to know she was there, let alone pregnant. On her seventeenth birthday, Meredith excitedly headed to dinner at home with her mom, who she had not seen in weeks. However, any hopes of returning to normalcy were crushed when her mother forced her to squeeze her seven-months-pregnant self onto the floor of the car so that no one in town would see her. Meredith found herself relieved to go back into hiding at her father’s after that; her life at home was forever in the past (xx). 

        Even the doctors treated Meredith poorly. When Meredith went in for a check-up, the doctor told her, “Don’t try to tell me you know who the father of this baby is. I know you have no idea. Girls like you never do” (181). This is congruent with what we learned in class about the treatment of birthmothers in the 1960s; the birthmothers were given very low social status and were looked down upon. Just like Meredith, they were cut off from society, and often had little or no support from their family – the people who are supposed to love them unconditionally. Like many other birthmothers, Meredith was anesthetized during labor so that she would not see her baby; the decision was already made for her that she would be giving the child up for adoption. She writes, “no one spoke to me as they cleaned me up, a slutty girl who had just dropped an illegitimate baby” (173).  Consistent with what we learned in class, only the birthmother was stereotyped in this way; no one judged or even cared much about the birth father.

      Overall, this memoir does a good job of supporting the idea that birthmothers in the 1960s experienced choicelessness in regard to adoption and had little or no support as they were ostracized from society. The only weakness is that her story doesn’t contain any information about the adoption agency or the social workers in connection to the choicelessness she felt. In the 1960s, social workers often played an influential role in the decision to place a child for adoption, and that was missing from this story. Even so, the memoir is powerful in portraying how birthmothers were viewed in the 1960s.

            The second main idea found in Without a Map is that the pain of losing a child really never leaves. Though many people believed birthmothers could simply have the child and move on with their lives, birthmothers felt very differently. After the birth of her son, Meredith spent years wandering around, searching for her identity. Not a day went by that she didn’t think about the son she had given up. Though she would not meet him until he was 21, she felt a part of him in her heart every day.

           One day a few years after the birth, a young woman walked into the copy shop where Meredith worked. As they made eye contact, Meredith knew that she, too, was a birth mother. Meredith writes, “I feel an odd connection between us, a sense that we are each seeing our own sorrow written on someone else’s face” (57).  Suddenly, Meredith has someone to talk to, someone who understands exactly what she is going through. The two become friends, but it only lasts for a few weeks; they are unable to take the pain they see mirrored in each other’s eyes.

            Meredith begins to travel the world; she is all alone and has no reason to stay in one place. She doesn’t know what she is searching for, but only knows she must keep moving. She spent a large amount of time walking through the countries of the Middle East; the walking was like a drug to her. The whole trip, she was keenly aware of the growing hole inside of her. She writes, “I am becoming more and more isolated and recognize that I am walking my way into perfect disconnection. I think of my baby, a boy now, every single day . . .He is shaped liked this hole in me” (101).  Meredith realizes that walking away from her past has done nothing; she must go home. She writes, “I want to go home, home to my adult life, with its losses carved forever in my path, with its possibilities, like unformed clouds, calling me forward” (116).

            Meredith went on to marry (and later divorce) and have two more children. Yet, the spot in her heart for her firstborn never left. In 1987, when her son was 21 years old, Meredith was reunited with him. When she saw Paul for the first time, she felt something change deep inside. “I think I am breaking,” she writes, “breaking with joy, with love, with grief because here he is a grown young man, here I am middle-aged, all the years gone forever and we know it in this moment more than ever before” (163).  Slowly but surely, they became a part of one another’s lives, and the hole in Meredith’s heart began to fill. Paul told her, “No more sorrow, Meredith. We are done with sorrow” (170).

            I think that the message in this memoir that the child never truly leaves the mother is abundantly clear. Throughout the different stages of her life, the longing for her child doesn’t leave, but remains a permanent part of her. Meredith sums up well the connection between a mother and child: “Mother and child do not fully separate at birth. We do not lose each other at that moment of severance. Every day we spend preparing our young children to love apart from us, independently, we do not have to feel the sharp pain of separation. And incredibly, every day I spent longing for my lost child, he was roaming with me still, part of me, unknown but there. . . We are joined in an us, past, present and future” (177). I do not see any specific weaknesses in regard to this main idea. Meredith writes very clearly of the pain she felt over losing Paul, from the days following the birth to twenty years after; the bond between mother and child continued even with the physical separation. However, one weakness of the book as a whole is that it tells just one story; it cannot necessarily be generalized to other adoption stories. I think, however, that since it is labeled as a ‘memoir,’ that is to be expected.

         One final connection between this book and our class deals is that Meredith’s relationship with her mother reminded me a great deal of the relationship our first speaker, the birthmother from CUB, had with her mother. In both situations, their relationships suffered because the mothers did not support their daughters. The parallel extends further, as both our speaker and Meredith chose to spend years of their lives taking care of their ill mothers, despite the strained relationships and past issues. They felt an ethical pull to do what was right, and for them, that meant looking past the issues and caring for their mothers. Meredith writes, “She is suddenly vulnerable, and I want to protect her. . .I cannot fix our past, make it different, erase it. . . I spend the next eighteen years caring for my mother in a complicated dance of love and forbidden anger, of compassion and unspeakable resentment, of tender respect and the old, silenced betrayal” (153). Despite the way her mother treated her in regard to the pregnancy, Meredith felt compelled to take care of her, just as our speaker felt toward her own mother.

        Without a Map is a phenomenal story about a birthmother from the 1960s. It clearly demonstrates the prejudice and isolation felt by the birthmothers and the choicelessness they felt in regard to adoption. More importantly, in my opinion, it shows that the pain of losing a child doesn’t go away. Regardless of where they are, a mother and child have a certain bond that doesn’t break. Without a Map is a gripping memoir that I would highly recommend for anyone interested in adoption, especially those interested in the stories of birthmothers from the 1960s. The story is real and gives the reader an inside perspective on the life of a birthmother. From the struggles Meredith felt when she first announced her pregnancy, to the excitement of the reunion with her son, you are sure to feel Meredith’s emotions alongside her. Without a Map is a story worth reading!


-Rachel