Unwed
A Summary
Logline: After 35 years of private anguish, Ruth Kilmer summons the courage to share her long kept secret and track down the son she was forced to give up for adoption.
As a divorced single mother in the early 1960s, Ruth Kilmer is already living on the fringe of society’s accepted norms when she finds herself pregnant out of wedlock. Being a school teacher and the daughter of a Methodist minister in a small town near Jackson, Mississippi, Ruth is held to the higher standards of that era, leaving her with an enormously difficult decision with far reaching implications. Understanding that revealing her pregnancy will surely cost her a career and inflict untold damage on her father’s stature in the local and state religious communities, Ruth accepts she must do as so many young women in that situation have been forced to do before her - she has to “disappear”. The first of many lives are torn apart as Ruth leaves behind her young daughter and her parents to have the child in New Orleans under the cover of an elaborate lie.
Thirty five years later, consumed with guilt and never ending wonder, Ruth decides to tell all and find the baby boy she was forced to give up for adoption. The crucible of our story lies in her anguish and the effect her decision to find him has on her, her family, and on the boy who is now a grown man.
Unwed is a portrait of adoption in America in the early sixties as the country faced the dawn of its biggest social revolution. It is a critical tale from a bygone era, one of unexpected circumstances, anguish and loneliness that showcases the effect of secrets, openness, growth, closure and change over the four decades that follow. The undergirding message is the presence of God in the lives of the main characters and how prayer, faith, and love can see God’s people through the most complicated of circumstances.