…she was mine.”
The lawyer read Eleanor’s letter aloud. She had been a night nurse in the maternity ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital in March 1972.
On the night of March 14th, a storm knocked out the power. Seven babies were born in one night. In the chaos, a new nurse took all seven out of their bassinets to keep them warm under one heat lamp. Their wristbands were loose. Several fell off. By the time the lights came back, nobody could be certain which baby belonged to which family.
The head nurse made the nurses guess and swear never to mention it. The hospital could not afford a scandal.
But that wasn’t Eleanor’s real secret.
Eleanor had given birth herself, that same week, upstairs in the same hospital. She was nineteen, unmarried and terrified. Her parents had arranged for her baby to be taken to an orphanage. That night, one of the seven babies was very weak. She died in the early hours of the morning, while her mother slept.
Eleanor made a decision she would carry for the rest of her life. She put her own daughter in the empty bassinet and told no one. “I couldn’t give my baby a family,” she wrote. “So I gave her one that was already waiting.”
The seventh child, the one who was never supposed to leave the hospital, was Eleanor’s daughter.
The lawyer handed us each a DNA kit. Eleanor had arranged it before her death. Six weeks later, we gathered in the same room for the results.
Three of us had gone home with the right families. Two had been switched with each other. One, a man named Gregory, had been sent home with a couple whose own son had been handed to someone else.
And I was Eleanor’s daughter.
I sat in my car for an hour afterward. The mother who raised me had died ten years ago. She never knew. She had loved me fiercely and completely, and I had never once doubted that she was mine. I still don’t.
Eleanor’s estate went to me, as she wished. With the agreement of the others, I used half of it to set up a fund to help families affected by hospital errors to get DNA testing. The seven of us meet for dinner every March 14th now. We call it our birthday.
Eleanor is buried in a small cemetery across town. I visit her once a year, on that same day. I don’t know if I’ve forgiven her. But I bring her flowers anyway.
