The foundlings had been rebranded as servants and soldiers—the essential building blocks for England’s burgeoning empire.
Coram’s new approach was a success. On July 21, 1739, he submitted three petitions to King George II: one with his own signature; a second with the signatures of dozens of dukes, earls, and knights, the entire Privy Council, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the prime minister; and the last with signatures from justices of the peace. Less than a month later, on August 14, 1739, the king granted a royal charter officially opening the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children.
On November 20, 1739, Coram proudly presented the charter to the Duke of Bedford, who served as the hospital’s first president, thereby opening what became England’s first secular charity. Over the next two centuries the Foundling Hospital, as it quickly came to be known, went on to care for thousands of children who likely would have otherwise perished or been consigned to London’s rough streets.
Coram’s achievement would secure him a place as one of the greatest philanthropists in England’s history, but his success came with a price, one that would be paid for generations to come. While he’d saved these children, he had made a devil’s bargain, committing them to a hard life of scrubbing floors and changing chamber pots, or being sent to war to defend a nation that viewed foundlings as disposable.
And so a foundling was to begin life disgraced by the illicit union between his mother and father. His parents would be spared the shame of their actions, the child safely tucked away out of society’s notice. But there would be little hope for the foundling, no chance of a better life, only the one already laid out before him in which he would serve the needs of England’s ruling class.
Two centuries later, a woman with dark brown hair and a pale complexion would abandon her child at the Foundling Hospital to protect the honor of her family. That child would be scorned and belittled for the shame of her birth, her fate as a servant to society’s elite forever sealed, it seemed. She would not even be allowed to keep her own name.
Instead, she was known as Dorothy Soames.
6
Running
I had no mental image of my grandmother, the color of her hair, whether she was plump or wiry, how her eyes creased when she smiled—or if she smiled at all. As a child, my mind was a sponge, porous, ready to be filled with even the smallest bit of information about her. A passing comment would have been enough to fill my imagination. But the subject was off-limits. My mother never spoke of her. There were no photos on the mantel or stories around the dinner table. I didn’t even know her name.
Combing through the Foundling Hospital files, holding Lena’s letters in my hand, I felt a growing sense of our kinship. The files contained no photographs of her, but Lena’s spirit, tenacious and determined, had acquired a shape and heft of its own.
Would I have had the strength to do what Lena did? I wasn’t sure. She had committed one of society’s greatest taboos—bearing a child out of wedlock. But she had also gone against another equally powerful societal norm in abandoning her own flesh and bone, leaving her daughter in the hands of strangers. Our libraries are filled with books that revere women who make sacrifices for their children, and revile those who do not. The artwork on the walls of the world’s most venerated museums deifies the mother as an ethereal, saintly figure, her love able to transform and redeem. The lesson of history is unequivocal—nothing is more sacred than the bond between a mother and her child.
Lena had abdicated her role as a mother, yet I felt no judgment toward her. She had been shunned by her family and would have been unable to access government resources reserved for mothers whose husbands had died or abandoned them. Had she kept her child, her only certainty would have been a lifetime of hardship and scorn.
My own decision to break the sacred bond between mother and child, to repeatedly ignore and reject my mother in the name of self-preservation, seemed almost petulant in comparison. While my family wasn’t particularly religious, a biblical verse had been a constant refrain in my head in the years since I sought distance from my mother:
HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER: THAT THY DAYS MAY BE LONG UPON THE LAND WHICH THE LORD THY GOD GIVETH THEE.
It wasn’t just any Bible verse. It was one of the Ten Commandments, given the same weight as prohibitions against lying, cheating on your spouse, and murder.
As a daughter, I had only one job—to honor the woman who’d brought me into this world. She’d kept up her end of the bargain, after all, performing all of her motherly duties. She bore me, she disciplined me without ever raising a hand to me, she clothed me and fed me and tucked me in each night.
In return, I shunned her.
I never cut off all contact, and we were never estranged in the typical sense of the word. But we may as well have been—when I finally left, I’d logged five thousand miles by my first stop.
I was working as a temp for a financial firm in San Francisco shortly after college graduation when I ran into a friend who mentioned his plans to move to Japan. He gave me the name of a company that was hiring Americans to teach English to business professionals and schoolchildren. Less than a month later, I arrived at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.
My new employer set me up in a small apartment in the city of Kasukabe, just north of Tokyo. I was instantly spellbound by Japan’s distinctive culture, its sights, smells, and tastes so different from anything I had ever before encountered. A trip to the supermarket was an adventure. I would wander up and down the aisles, examining row after row of canned goods adorned with kanji characters and unfamiliar images. The fruits and vegetables in the produce section were strange and wonderful, and the massive bags of rice weighing fifty pounds or more posed an insurmountable engineering challenge for my bicycle ride home (solved when I learned that the mini-mart sold “small” five-pound bags). I boldly sampled street food that I had never heard of before—donburi, zaru soba, sesame snacks with tiny whole dried fish in every handful, or natto, gooey fermented soybeans that even the Japanese considered an acquired taste. When I wasn’t teaching, I spent my days exploring nearby Tokyo. At night I would drift off to sleep to the wails of the yakisoba man as he drove through the streets, selling his traditional stir-fried buckwheat noodles to drunken “salarymen.”
I ate rice and dried fish for breakfast, learned to read and speak Japanese (at least enough to get by), and after a few weeks could navigate the complicated public transportation system like a native. Home was thousands of miles away, and I gave it little thought. It was the late 1980s, and there was no email to keep me connected to family. The phone in my tiny apartment couldn’t receive international calls. My connection to my parents was limited to the occasional letter, and that suited me just fine.
When I returned to the United States a year later, I brought back a valuable lesson. My happiness increased exponentially with the number of miles between me and my mother. I experienced no guilt at my discovery. That would come later. All I knew was that being away just felt . . . better.
Then, to make sure the universe got the message, I kept on moving.
My next plane ticket took me to Washington, DC, for a fellowship with the National Wildlife Federation. Each day I wandered the halls of the Capitol Building, dropping off letters for congressional staffers or taking notes at hearings on environmental legislation. My experience working to protect the environment at the centers of power lit a fire in my belly, and I took the next logical step, applying to law school. Though I was accepted at universities in California, I chose Duke in North Carolina, conveniently located across the country from my family. My mother’s relentless training paid off through the grueling three-year experience. Hard work came naturally to me. I was selected for law review and, after graduating with honors, landed a prestigious clerkship with a federal judge in Nashville, Tennessee.