Maribeth’s pregnancy

Maribeth’s pregnancy is the crisis that abruptly remakes her adolescence: at sixteen, she must contend with family exile, financial and educational uncertainty, and the prospect of giving up a child she has not yet met. What first appears to be a secret to conceal and a birth to endure becomes a series of choices about where she can live, what future she can pursue, and who will raise the baby. Her eventual request that Liz and John adopt the child turns the pregnancy into the point at which two families’ lives become joined, while leaving Maribeth with a real and lasting loss.

Background and Family Pressure

Maribeth has only just turned sixteen when she begins to grasp that her encounter with Paul Browne may have left her pregnant. The difference between her age and the consequences she faces becomes central to her predicament: she is a schoolgirl, yet is suddenly trying to understand the possibility of motherhood and the choices available to her.

Her father, Bert Robertson, sees her pregnancy and earlier independence through a rigid view of women’s roles. He accepts a limited education for girls but dismisses Maribeth’s ambitions beyond it, expecting women to marry, raise children, and manage a home. When her pregnancy becomes known, he sends her away to the Sisters of Charity and forbids her to tell her younger sister Noelle the truth. He instructs her to say she is going away to school and tells her she will return in six months. The arrangement removes her from her family at the moment she most needs support, making the pregnancy inseparable from estrangement and enforced secrecy.

Convent and Departure

At the convent, Maribeth sees how the institution handles other pregnant girls: one gives birth and never sees her daughter before the baby is taken to adoptive parents; another, fifteen and expecting a child fathered by her uncle, is taken to a hospital after a difficult labor and does not return. These experiences make the anticipated separation concrete to Maribeth. The girls’ restricted routine, the convent’s atmosphere, and the babies’ immediate removal leave her feeling isolated and treated as though her situation must be hidden.

Maribeth has paid the convent one hundred dollars and has seven hundred dollars left, with almost six months before the baby is due. Rather than remain there waiting for the birth and an arranged separation, she decides to leave and try to live independently. At dawn she takes her money and a small bag to the bus station, buys an open-ended ticket to Chicago by way of Omaha, and writes postcards to her mother and Noelle promising to send an address when she has one. Leaving does not restore her family or settle the baby’s future, but it gives her a chance to find work, companionship, and a life beyond the convent’s walls.

Pregnancy, Work, and Education

In Chicago, Maribeth meets Tommy Whittaker. They are both sixteen, with birthdays only weeks apart, but their circumstances are sharply different: he has a home and expects to return to school, while she has left her family, works at Jimmy D’s, and is carrying the child of a man who did not love her. To avoid suspicion at work, she has told the restaurant staff that she is a widow whose husband was killed in Korea. She tells Tommy that Paul wanted her to disappear and suggested that she could end the pregnancy; she had no reliable understanding of what that would involve and had heard that it was dangerous and expensive.

Maribeth is unsure whether she can or should raise the baby. She has seen the convent’s adoption process, but giving the child away feels difficult to imagine; keeping the baby feels equally daunting because she doubts she can support and care for it. She worries that something is wrong with her for not wanting motherhood, then fears that meeting the baby might change her mind without resolving how she could provide for it. Tommy listens and offers support, while Dr. Avery MacLean discusses pregnancy and delivery with them. The appointment makes the approaching birth more real to her, and she considers the doctor’s offer of medication to help her through labor.

Her pregnancy does not end her education. After Tommy returns to school on September 1, he brings her the curriculum, lends her books, and works through assignments with her at her room or the restaurant. Maribeth completes the same work as his class, keeping the papers she has done, and proves to be an even stronger student than Tommy. Their arrangement gives her a way to continue learning while she works and waits for the birth, and preserves an educational future her father had treated as unnecessary for a girl.

Choosing an Adoption and Going into Labor

A baby shower on Maribeth’s last day at the restaurant changes the emotional weight of the decision before her. Julie organizes it, and the staff give her baby clothes, knitted items, a blanket, toys, diapers, and a high chair Jimmy has bought. The gifts make the child more than an approaching event: Maribeth can picture a baby who would use these things, and realizes with new force that she may never see that child use them. She calls Dr. MacLean to ask about adoptive parents. He has three possibilities in mind, but one prospective father has a drinking problem, another couple have just learned they are expecting a child themselves, and the third family has not yet agreed to adopt.

Instead of proceeding with the convent’s plan for strangers to take the baby, Maribeth eventually makes a different request. Sitting with Liz beside the Christmas tree and Annie’s decorations, she tells her that she wants to give her baby to Liz and John. Liz is surprised by the proposal, but Maribeth states it firmly: she wants the Whittakers to adopt the child. The decision brings the pregnancy into the Whittakers’ bereaved home and makes the adoption a relationship formed between people who know one another, rather than an arrangement carried out at a distance.

Soon afterward, Maribeth goes for a walk with Tommy to the skating pond and back. On returning to the house, she experiences a contraction and goes into labor unexpectedly. Liz helps her inside, John is summoned, and the family calls the doctor. The birth arrives before the family has much time to prepare, turning the decision about adoption into an immediate emotional reality.

Birth, Separation, and Future

After the baby is born, Liz and John tell Maribeth that they will understand if she has changed her mind. She remains certain that she does not want to raise the child, even as she grieves the separation. John contacts an attorney, and the adoption papers are explained to Maribeth. Three days after the birth, she signs them with a shaking hand and waives the waiting period. She then embraces Liz and asks that the nurse not bring the baby to her that day, because she needs time to mourn.

When Maribeth leaves the hospital on New Year’s Day, she does so with the baby and the Whittakers. At home, Liz responds when the baby cries, while Maribeth tries not to go to her. She understands that she must create distance if she is not to become the child’s mother in practice, although she knows the baby will always have a place in her heart. The Whittakers agree that the child will know Maribeth as their friend, not as her birth mother; they may tell her the truth when she is older if she needs to know. The arrangement gives the baby a place in the Whittaker family but makes secrecy part of the family’s account of her origins.

The Whittakers also offer Maribeth a route toward a life beyond the pregnancy. They give her the education fund they had set aside for Annie, so she can attend college, and arrange for her to return home, finish school in the spring, and later choose where to study. They invite her to stay with them if she wishes. Their support answers, in practical terms, the future her father had narrowed to marriage and childcare; it does not erase the difficulty of returning home or the grief of leaving the baby. Maribeth still hates the thought of going back, while Tommy promises to visit. The pregnancy thus ends not in a simple resolution but in a separation she believes is right for the child, accompanied by a new possibility for her own education and independence.