Minka Disbrow is well into her 90s now, but you can still hear the distress in her voice as she tells the story of a nightmarish day that happened to her at just 16 years old. It was 1928, and the young teen was out for a lovely picnic in the woods with a friend.
But a group of men had followed them, and suddenly two of them were upon her and her girlfriend, as another acted as “lookout” for the horrific rape that ensued.
Still naïve – it was a very different time from today, after all – Minka was too ashamed to even tell her parents. But it was just a matter of months before she realized something strange was happening to her body, and had to tell her mother the awful facts of what had transpired.
Such a situation would have caused enormous social shame nearly 100 years ago, and young Minka was shuffled off to a “home,” as they used to be called, for unwed mothers. Her baby daughter, who she named Betty Jane, was born, and Minka did care for her for the first month of her life.
But between her own youth and the terrible way Betty Jane had been conceived, Minka knew she had to give the little girl up. An adoptive family was found, and in those days, children of adoption had their birth records sealed by the court, often making it all but impossible for a birth mother to find her child, or vice versa, even if they both wanted to meet in later years.
But as Minka said in a late-life interview, following the publication of her granddaughter Cathy LaGrow’s retelling of the family saga in her book The Waiting, she never, ever gave up hope of meeting the daughter she had had to give up as a teen.
“I promise I won’t bother her or interrupt her life. I just want to lay eyes on her,” Disbrow told interviewers she had prayed over and over, after the publication of her granddaughter’s book about it all came out.
Times had changed since Betty Jane – renamed “Ruth” by her adoptive parents – had been born. A judge unsealed those adoption records at last, and it turned out that Disbrow’s daughter, now 77 to her birth mother’s 93 years old, wanted to meet just as much as Minka had prayed for all her life.
A wonderful rebonding ensued, making Disbrow’s dream of connecting with the child she’d never gotten to know more than a dream come true.
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