Forced to surrender her baby at 16, this is an emotional story of how a mother’s 19-year journey from shame to healing happened with a life-changing phone call
Dr. Zoe Shaw still remembers the last kiss she gave her newborn daughter.
It was May 1991. She was 16 years old, alone in a hospital room, and had just given birth without pain medication. Hours later, a counselor told her:
“You don’t need to spend time with her and make it harder on you.”
Courtesy Dr. Zoe Shaw; Credit: Elinor Carucci
She kissed the infant she had named Kaiya. Then she walked out of the hospital, numb, and never returned.
For nearly two decades after that moment, Shaw lived with an emptiness she could never quite fill. She got married. She had other children. She earned a doctorate in clinical psychology and started her own practice. But the ache remained.
“I spent years fantasizing about her,” Shaw, now 51, recalls, “and how I was going to go kidnap her and raise her.”
A Teenager’s Nightmare
Shaw was a high school honors student when she learned she was pregnant in 1990.
All she could focus on was “the disappointment that I’d let my family and God down,” she says.
Her mother, Miranda, had previously donated to the Liberty Godparent Home, a maternity facility in Lynchburg, Virginia, associated with Liberty University and founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Upon learning her daughter was five months pregnant, Miranda made it clear: “This is where you’re going, and you’re going to come back without the baby,” according to Shaw.
The Godparent Home, which operated for 40 years as one of nearly 500 maternity homes across the nation, offered itself as a safe haven for girls in crisis. But Shaw says it felt like a prison. Locks were on the windows and doors. Communication with the outside world was closely monitored.
Two days a week, Shaw says she and other pregnant teens were “paraded” before Falwell’s congregation.
“It felt like we were on display to get people to donate,” she says.
The “most disturbing” moment, she says, was being asked to choose her baby’s adoptive parents from a book of photos and brief bios.
“I remember thinking that my mother wouldn’t even pick out a babysitter for me by looking at some pictures and a paragraph about them,” Shaw says, “and I’m supposed to choose the parents of my child based on this?”
When she went into labor two weeks early, the pattern repeated. She was driven to a hospital and never returned to the home. Giving birth without pain medication was “traumatic,” she says. Then came the instruction not to bond with her baby.
She left the hospital with nothing but a name for a daughter she would not see again for nearly two decades.
A College Freshman’s Determination
Eight hundred miles away, a little girl named Sara Valentine grew up in a happy home with loving parents and twin brothers. She knew she was adopted, but never felt anything was missing.
Then, at 19, she found an old letter her biological father had written to her, passed on by the adoption agency, with his contact information redacted. Valentine held the note up to the light, peering through the obscuring markings to glean clues about her birth family.
Using Facebook and sheer determination, the college freshman tracked down Vinnie, Shaw’s former boyfriend. He took her to lunch. Then he connected her with Shaw.
The Call
“I literally dropped to the floor,” Shaw says of that phone call in 2010. “All I could think was, ‘I missed my chance to go back and get her.'”
Later that year, mother and daughter reunited in person at the Las Vegas airport.
“We both locked eyes and we were just looking at each other smiling,” says Valentine of seeing Shaw for the first time as she came down the escalator. Tears and hugs ensued.
Finding Freedom From Shame
Shaw, now a mother of five and grandmother of four, says being reunited with her first child helped her find something she had been searching for since she was 16: freedom from shame.
“I had so much shame,” she says. “I still grieve over the fact that I lost her childhood.”
But last year, she published a memoir, “Stronger in the Difficult Places,” chronicling her journey from forced adoption to reunion. And in February, she celebrated her 50th birthday surrounded by family in a Greek villa—including Valentine and her grandchildren.
“The smell of cooking in the kitchen filled the home,” Shaw recalls. “Everyone was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. It was really beautiful to be able to have some closure like that. It was very healing.”
Valentine, now a substitute teacher in Maryland and mother of four, including a daughter named Kaiya, in honor of the name Shaw originally gave her, puts it simply:
“I act like Zoe, and I act like Vinnie. And it’s amazing to be able to see myself in them.”
For Shaw, the journey that began with a forced goodbye ended with a second chance.
“I’m so thankful,” she says, “that I get to know her as a woman and be part of her life.”
This story was culled from a report by PEOPLE
