Story by Karen Parr-Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – The actress Marilyn Monroe was born in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital. As a child, she entered foster care due to her mother’s mental illness. Despite becoming an icon, Monroe felt like an unwanted orphan her entire life.
A Clarksville woman was born in that same charity ward. And like Monroe, Barbara “Gigi” Goodall experienced life in the California foster care system, an experience she details in a new book entitled “Do You Love Me?” It is available on www.amazon.com as a Kindle book ($12.99) and in paperback ($14.05).
Goodall long wondered why her parents, in solidarity with her grandparents, sent her away when she was around five years of age.
“If they loved me, why did they get rid of me?” she says. “The reason that I wrote the book was because I never found out. I was searching for the answer, because they were neither rich, nor poor, nor sick. They weren’t alcoholics.”
The closest Goodall got to an answer was what her mother told her: “Their house was not big enough for me.”
The book’s title is based on a letter she found in a box among her mother’s possessions after she died.
“It was a little letter I had written when I was five or six years old,” Goodall says. “In childish scrawl I had written, ‘Dear Mother, I love you. Do you love me? Have you found a home yet so I can come home?’”
After a childhood spent as a state ward, Goodall was brought back to her parents’ home at age 13. But in another bizarre twist, her grandparents farmed her out for various jobs, then took her paycheck. Goodall was left to fend for herself.
“It was a strange situation,” she says.
Goodall eventually found love through getting married and having four children. Goodall also became a foster parent to 25 teenagers over the years.
As a mother, Goodall became even more puzzled about why her parents gave her away.
“I couldn’t have done that to my kids more than anything,” she says.
Despite her childhood, Goodall never become bitter toward her parents.
“I don’t ever remember a time when I blamed them or felt like ‘I don’t want to see them,’” she says. “I never felt like that. It was just that that was the way it was.”
In another a strange twist, Goodall brought her mother to Clarksville for the last 15 years of her life. They became close friends, yet Goodall refused to question her repeatedly about the past.
“I was just careful with her feelings,” Goodall says. “I didn’t want to cause her any more hurt or anything if she hadn’t wanted (Goodall’s being sent to foster care) to happen and it did.”
Goodall hopes her book will give hope to other foster children.
“It didn’t make for a very good young life,” Goodall says of her experience. “But I survived. You can be resilient.”
Barbara “Gigi” Goodall today.
Karen Parr-Moody began a career as a New York journalist, working as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, a beauty editor for Young Miss and a beauty and fashion writer for both In Style and People magazines. Regionally, she has been a writer at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper and currently writes about arts and culture for Nashville Arts magazine each month.