You'll Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame, and Adoption in the 1960s

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Mississippi, 1967. Its the Summer of Love, yet unwed mothers maternity homes are flourishing, secret closed adoptions are routine, and many young women still have no voice.

In Youll Forget This Ever Happened, Laura Engel takes us back to the Deep South during the turbulent 1960s to explore the oppression of young women who have committed the socially unacceptable crime of becoming pregnant without a ring on their finger. After being forced to give up her newborn son for adoption, Engel lives inside a fortress of silent shame for fifty yearsbut when her secret son finds her and her safe world is cracked open, those walls crumble.

Are you still a mother even if you have not raised your child Can the mother/child bond survive years of separation How deep is the damage caused by buried family secrets and shame Engel asks herself these and many other questions as she becomes acquainted with the son she never knew, and seeks the acceptance and forgiveness she has long denied herself. Full of both aching sadness and soaring joy, Youll Forget This Ever Happened is a shocking expos of a shameful part of our countrys recent pastand a poignant tale of a mothers enduring love.

Reviews

Laura Engel tells her emotional and compelling story of becoming a pregnant, unwed teen in the Deep South in the 1960s, being shut away in a home for wayward women, and being forced to give up her first son to adoption. Then, after years of shame and guilt, she tells the heartwarming and inspiring story of reuniting with her long-lost son after forty-nine years. A powerful true story of historical, societal, and cultural stigmas against women, the complicated but strong bonds of family, the difficult road to self-acceptance and forgiveness, and the fierce love between a mother and her lost, but never forgotten, child.
Nina Neilson Little, author of Spirit Baby: Travels Through China on the Long Road to Motherhood

You'll Forget This Ever Happened will break your heart and exhilarate your spirit. Honest and vulnerable while offering hope and love, Engel speaks to and for many young women of a generation that had little choice on how to cope with teen pregnancy at a time when shame was buried deep and heartbreak was never to be spoken of. Engel's prose is lyrical, and her storytelling is filled with rich and imaginative details. Endearing and heartwarming, this book is a treasure.
Madonna Treadway, award-winning author of Six Healing Questions: A Gentle Path to Facing Loss of a Parent

Youll Forget This Ever Happened is a deeply moving, heart-wrenching, and visually alive memoir exposing the pain Engel experienced after becoming pregnant at a young age and being forced by her southern parents to give up her child. Ultimately the story is one of resilience, forgiveness, and acceptance, with an ending made for a movie.
Roberta S. Kuriloff, author of Everything Special, Living Joy

When seventeen-year-old Laura finds herself pregnant, she hopes to find a way to keep the babyeven if it means raising him as an unmarried single mother. Unbeknownst to her, her parents have other plans, and Laura is forced to relinquish her son shortly after his birth. Fifty years later, thanks to DNA technology no one in the 60s could have imagined, Laura and her son are reunited. Youll Forget This Ever Happened is a triumph of the human spirit and a mothers enduring love.
Lauren Cross, writer and reproductive rights advocate

You'll Forget This Ever Happened is a powerful, gripping memoir that grabs a hold of you from the first few words and keeps you turning pages to find out what will happen next. Engel travels back in time to when she was a young teen in the Deep South and was all but forced to give up a baby she wanted. She deftly captures her heartbreaking struggleand explores the way she faced down shame and buried secrets to find herself and her long-lost son. Told with heart and grit, honesty and wisdom, You'll Forget This Ever Happened is a poignant read about a mother's unending love that will stay with you long after you have read the last page.
Marni Freedman, author of 7 Essential Tools, and Permission To Roar and cofounder of San Diego Writers Festival

Laura Engels Youll Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame and Adoption in the 1960s is a gripping and ultimately redemptive story about a teenage girl forced to relinquish her newborn son in a New Orleans home for unwed mothers in the 1960s. With beautiful descriptions and poetic, engaging writing, Engel breathes new life into a long-gone time in the South. This memoir is hard to put down in the best of ways. Full of surprises, plot twists, and you-cant-believe-it's-true moments, this book is a testament to a mother's enduring love. Grab a glass of sweet tea and prepare to fall in love with this moving and uplifting memoir.
Tracy J. Jones, content writer, editor, and writing coach

I can remember when young girls, classmates, would disappear from school. They were usually helping take care of an elderly relative in another state. They would reappear in a few months and resume their lives. Laura Engel was this girl, and she may have resumed her life, but with a painful memory of a firstborn that would grow up to never know or be known by his mother. At times this is a painful, difficult book to read, but the voice of the author gets you through the sadness to the complete joy of the reunion between mother and son. This is so much more than a woman's book. It deals with universal questions and truths for all readers. An important read.
Jim Edwards, former English and journalism teacher

Youll Forget This Ever Happened is the heart-wrenching story of a young, pregnant southern girl sent away by her mortified parents to have her baby, then misled into believing that she would return home with her love child. Laura Engel reveals her inner self with such clarity that we can feel the sadness, remorse, anguish, and guilt that rack her soul daily for decades. She never allows us to forget the love she left behind, even after the births of three additional children. Her secret is uncovered by chance, allowing us to cheer with hopeful tears as she struggles and manages to navigate the gap of those missing years with optimism. This story of life in the 1960s will resonate with some and educate others. We applaud the changes today that allow us to heal the wounds endured during those times.
Suzi Schultz Gold, author of Look at the Moon

This is a story of a bewildered teenager who grows into a loving mother who is blessed during her grandmother years in ways she never dared hope for. It is a story of confusion and shame evolving to hope and joy. It could have happened to anyone.
Kathleen McCabe, Writer, award-winning artist

Youll Forget This Ever Happened is the compelling story of a young woman being told to ignore giving birth and giving up her son, as if its an event easily erasedlike turning off a light switch. Laura shows how living with the secret of her sons birth impacts her world and how releasing the untold secret enabled her to move forward. The story is vulnerable, heartbreaking, and triumphant.
Jeniffer Gasner, writer

This courageous, devastating memoir describes the dark side of the adoption fairy tale: the trauma of forced separation of a mother from her child. Engels story is stark testimony to the failures of an adoption system that is built on coercion, lies, and shame. Highly recommended to those wanting to understand more about the true story of adoption.
Alice Stephens, author ofFamous Adopted People

Youll Forget This Ever Happenedis gripping and well written. Lauras determination, grit, love, and faith are admirable and genuine.Dont miss this important book.
Leslie Johansen Nack, author ofThe Blue Butterfly

Powerful memories wrenched from the soul of one birth mother in the 1960s who was forced by family and society to relinquish her child for adoption. Not only did she never forget what happened, her heart finally healed when she met her adult son, the child she gave away. A true redemption story.
Julia Brewer Daily, author ofNo Names to Be Given

Laura Engel tells a heartbreaking story of a young motherseparated at birth from a child she never knewwho finds the courage to confront her guilt-ridden past and seek redemption. In her moving and deeply personal account, the author makes peace with a long-lost son, and ultimately with herself.
David Sheffield, screenwriter ofComing to America

A searing energy begins on page oneand continues to the unflinching final word ofLaura Engels memoir, Youll Forget This Ever Happened.Engels triumph is in her unwillingness to turn away from the hard stuff.Devastating and stunningalive with attention to the abundance of the heartthis memoir will stay with you.
Julie Maloney, award-winning author of A Matter of Chance

Inher powerful memoir about making peace with the past, Laura Engel brings the hot summer of 1967 to life. That year, seventeen-year-old Laura is sent to live in a New Orleans maternity home with a rotating cast of pregnant teen girls who are assured they will forget this ever happened but of course never can. Losing her firstborn son to adoption changes Engels life but does not crush her spirit. In time, she finds love and a career and creates the family she always wanted, which then welcomes the boy shenamed Jamie when he contacts her decades later. Engels transformation from lost girl to grounded matriarch is deeply moving,a storythat stays with you long after you reach thelast page.
Eileen Drennen, writer and editor

In Laura Engels compelling memoir, we experience the terrible irony framed by the title: she willnotforget this experience of giving up her newborn son at the age of seventeen as an unwed mother. Engelcannotforgetand doesnt want to. And the reader will never forget this finely crafted journey of recovery. Through her narrative, insightful self-revelations, struggles, and willingness to expose her trauma, Engel creates an experience of intimacy for the reader that establishes a soulful friendship.
Kelly DuMar, author ofgirl in tree bark

Heart-wrenching but filled with purpose, this book satisfyingly unreels our emotions to the bright sounds of the 60s. Lauras richly detailed story makes us laugh, cry, gasp, and pray for those caught in that cruel time warp that plunged unwed mothers into the lowest, most loathsome level of proper society.
Linda Bergman, screenwriter, producer, and educator

Exactly ten years apart, two scared eighteen-year-olds were forced to surrender their newborn sons for adop

Author Bio

Laura L. Engel originally hails from Biloxi, Mississippi but moved to San Diego, California over fifty years ago. In 2015 she retired from a thirty-five-year career in the corporate world with plans to quietly catch up on hobbies and travel with her husband, Gene. Within a year an unexpected miracle took: her firstborn sonthe child shed been forced to relinquish to adoption in 1967found her. After that, Laura stopped guarding her painful secret and started telling the world about the miracle of meeting her son. Laura is currently President of the San Diego Memoir Writers Association. She is also an active member of the International Womens Writing Guild and a member of San Diego Writers Ink, San Diego Writers Festival, and SD Writers and Editors Guild. She has five adult children and ten cherished grandchildren. Check out her website at www.lauralengel.com. She lives inEl Cajon, CA.