THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505120255
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines
Diana Strelow's son was eight days old when she last saw him.
The young woman said goodbye to her newborn infant Dec. 21, 1963, as he lay in a white iron crib in her room at Western State Hospital in Staunton. She was 28 years old and a graduate of the College of William and Mary.
``He had black hair,'' she remembers sadly. ``He looked like my father.''
The paths of mother and child were about to diverge. Strelow was going home to Arlington with her own mother, and the nameless baby would soon leave with his new adoptive parents.
The loss of her child threw the former fifth-grade teacher into a 20-year depression during which she was in and out of mental institutions across the country and was sometimes homeless. For months, she wandered the streets of Denver, begging money for food.
Thanks to her faith in God and a doctor who eventually recognized that she was not mentally ill, Strelow's prognosis for her life changed. Today, she is happily married and lives in Portsmouth.
But Strelow, now 60, is still haunted by the memory of the child who was taken from her against her will and, two years ago, she began searching for him. She has not yet found her son but has not given up hope.
Strelow's mother put her unmarried daughter in the state mental institution in July 1963 after learning that her daughter was pregnant. The affair that had resulted in the pregnancy had been brief. The young woman had turned to her mother for help, but her mother's furious reaction led to ``crying jags'' on Strelow's part, which resulted in her institutionalization.
Strelow vividly remembers the day her mother had her committed. Her mother told the Arlington County court judges that her daughter was driving her crazy, that she would lose her job, Strelow recalls.
One of the judges told Strelow that they would commit her, that she'd get help at Western State, she says.
The pregnant young woman was handcuffed and driven 250 miles to the Staunton facility. She didn't object.
``I was afraid,'' she explains. ``I wanted help.''
At Staunton, Strelow was to find little or no help. Her memories of the state hospital provide a unique perspective on care of the mentally ill and disabled before deinstitutionalization began in the 1970s.
The facility was crowded and dirty, Strelow remembers. About 4,000 patients lived there. They were all dressed in state clothing - print dresses made of cheap cotton for the women, light blue cotton shirts and trousers for the men.
``They always seemed to be loping along somewhere in groups, in single file, all men or all women,'' she recalls. ``It hurt me terribly that life had come to this for so many.''
Strelow says that attendants walked the crowded aisles of the state hospital all night, loudly complaining of having to carry bedpans to the bedsides of patients. Lights burned brightly all night, and on the wards in the newer part of the hospital, where she awaited the birth of her baby, Strelow's ``therapy'' consisted of being forced to wash already-clean cement brick walls.
The baby was taken legally from Strelow before his birth. She didn't want her baby to be born in the facility nor did she want him to be given out for adoption. But the baby was taken from her based on social workers' testimony that she was an unfit, single mother, she says.
When Strelow's mother visited her during the fall of 1963, Strelow would say to her, ``It's going to be a boy, and I want to bring him home.''
But her mother would only reply by reminding her to think of the baby, Strelow says.
``In my heart I never did give him up,'' she says now.
``He looked to me like a great man in miniature,'' she remembers. ``I don't know what he looks like now, or whether he's a college professor, a stockbroker or in prison for dealing drugs or armed robbery. I would like to know how he is faring in life and help him along if I could.
``It's too late for me to be a mother, but it's not too late for me to be a friend,'' she says.
Within months of the birth, Strelow was back at Western State. She had become convinced, she says now, that her mother and the doctors were right: she was mentally ill and unable to continue teaching.
``The baby was the only thing I did love, and I thought that there must be something horribly wrong with me if I couldn't keep the one thing I loved. My baby had been taken away from me. There was not much left to hope for,'' she says now.
Though the pain of her loss subsided, it never went away entirely. In fact, Strelow says that pain turned to rage, leading her to enter one state hospital after another, searching for explanation.
She sought help from Episcopal and Catholic priests, asking them what her experiences meant. Finally, an Episcopal priest in Colorado Springs told her that no one on earth could answer that, not even the Pope.
Strelow accepted the inexplicability of God's greater purpose and was healed by the way God works through people, she says now.
But Strelow remained convinced that she was indeed mentally ill until, one day in 1981, a psychiatrist at Denver General Hospital told her otherwise.
``He told me that I was not mentally ill nor had I ever been,'' Strelow recalls. The new diagnosis turned her life around. She had hope, though still a long road back to living a normal life.
For the next two years, Strelow was homeless, but eventually, she returned to Virginia and met the man she would soon marry.
Strelow has many things she would like to share with her son if and when she locates him. She would like to tell him that he comes from a musical family, that his ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, that his maternal grandfather was a Washington, D.C., newsman who covered the Senate for a wire service.
She thinks that things are better today for unwed mothers. ``They don't have to apologize for being single mothers, and their children aren't called `illegitimate,' '' she says.
Strelow has registered with a number of organizations that help adoptees and their birthparents find each other. She doesn't plan to give up her search.
``When he was small, I'd close my eyes and try to conjure him up,'' she says. ``Maybe now he can become a reality for me. I hope that I can be a good reality for him.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo by NANCY LEWIS
Diana Strelow hopes to locate the son she had to give up in 1963.
by CNB