"I wasn't in a position to be anybody's mother. "My mother was still cleaning up my room for me once a week," she says. With her parents' blessing, Briggs had decided that when the child was born, she would put him up for adoption. I think I may have felt that I kind of got myself in this, I'm gonna do what I need to do to work my way through it." Only when she was preparing to sign the adoption papers did Briggs consider sharing the news with the father, a teenage fling who had gone off to college before she discovered she was pregnant. No one outside of her immediate family and her cousin Robin knew about the baby. After cleaning out her room at the maternity home and signing some papers, she was back in Ohio the next day, ready to resume her life as a 16-year-old high schooler and National Honor Society member. Her parents and older brother drove the hour from her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, to be with her at the hospital. She woke up in labor around 2 a.m., and just 32 minutes later, she was a mother. Briggs had gone sledding with some of the other girls the night before, dragging a cardboard box up and down a big hill that emptied out right at the Zoar Home for Mothers, Babies and Convalescents in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. 1, 1972, and a big snowstorm had hit the greater Pittsburgh area that week. "In my mind," Briggs says, "that was probably going to be the last time I ever saw him." She looked him up and down, making a mental note of each of his 10 tiny toes, chubby legs, puffy belly and two little arms reaching up at her. She tried to find herself in his face, searching his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Carol Briggs placed her newborn son on the bed and removed all of his clothes.
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