A Mother’s Secret

Tracy Clark-Flory went looking for her lost sister. She found a system that thrived on women’s shame.

In 1965, Tracy Clark-Flory’s mother, then a pregnant eighteen-year-old college student in Indiana, was sent to a home for unwed mothers by her father and forced to place her baby for adoption. Years later, when Clark-Flory was a teenager, her mother sat her down at their kitchen table in California and shared the secret she had been carrying for decades: that she had another daughter out there, somewhere.

Clark-Flory’s new memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, follows her eventual search for that sister. What she uncovers along the way is a story about the systemic misogyny and racism that shaped her mother’s—and ultimately her own—life. “Maternity homes were part of a broader racist effort at the time, but they were also part of a centuries-old history of using women’s bodies for white supremacist aims in the United States,” she writes. Almost ten years after her mother’s death, from lung cancer, a DNA test ultimately leads Clark-Flory to her lost half sister, Kathy. Together, the two women reckon with what really happened to their mother and what it actually means to be family.