Monday, August 22, 2016

My guest today is fellow author and friend Cathy West. Cathy and I met through ACFW, and soon discovered that both our lives had been touched by adoption. When it came time to write my book, I wanted Cathy to be one of those authors to share their adoption reunion story. Below is a short version of the piece she wrote for the book Finding Sarah Finding Me

And now for, YOU DON'T KNOW ME by Cathy West

There was a time I thought I didn’t need to know the truth about where I came from.
Until one day I did. Click HERE to tweet this.
It was an overpowering sense of need, a keening, really, to find answers to the questions I’d secretly been asking all my life. Questions that used to frighten me and stir up confusion and feelings I didn’t know what to do with. Questions I felt guilty for wanting answers to.
Now in my thirties with two children, I had to find the courage to start asking. I also needed to accept that I might not get any answers. Or the ones I wanted.
  It’s said that some adoptees often fantasize about the story of their birth. They create a mythical mother and father, a fairy tale with a happy ending. I never did that, never felt the need to. I had a wonderful life, two loving parents, and I lacked for nothing. Yet deep down, as I soon discovered, there was a side of me I’d been ignoring.
The child who cried herself to sleep on nights when Mom and Dad were out, terrified they wouldn’t come back…the schoolgirl who wore the badge of adoption like a gold star, almost ashamed, not wanting to be different…the young teen who looked in the mirror and wondered whose eyes stared back at her.
  For that girl to ever grow up, I needed to do this. To face down closed doors weathered with age, bolted shut with locks so rusted it would take a miracle to open.
  But that’s exactly what I got. A miracle. I can say without doubt that every detail of my search and reunion was just that¾a God-ordained miracle¾even the painful parts. And there was pain. More than I could have anticipated.
  Once my birth mother was located, (alarmingly easily), I decided to write her a letter. I had all her contact information, including e-mail and phone number, but I had no idea what I was getting into or who I was introducing myself to.
No reply came, and family and friends were understandably cautious. I should have been wary, but I was too consumed, too driven by an inexplicable innate need to know. I had to know. So I threw caution to the wind and fired off an e-mail. Fully justified of course, because if she wasn’t the right person, didn’t I need to know that?
  She was.
  The first e-mail I received from my birth mother was not flowery, not gushing with joy at my having found her. It was a simple statement of the facts. My letter was a shock to her, I had nothing medically to be concerned about, and she was not in a position to acknowledge me.
  But, but… You don’t even know me! I wanted to scream. Tell her I was no threat, I was a good person, a woman of faith, successful, married to a wonderful man with two amazing kids that shared her bloodline. But she was clearly not interested. And I was stunned. Because, in all my agonizing over whether searching was the right thing to do, it never occurred to me that the woman who gave me life might not want to be found. Click HERE to tweet this 
I don’t give up easily. Not when I really want something. And I really wanted to know her. To know her story. To know mine. They say be careful what you wish for. They’re right.
Eventually, we established a somewhat tenuous e-mail relationship. I liken that time now as to being an addict¾so desperate for the next response, longing for that cold exterior to crack, praying for her to move past conversations about the weather. For her to give me the answers I pleaded for.
Through all the pain, confusion and heartache, it was sometimes hard to remember God was in this. Friends carried me along on prayers and hugs and shoulders to cry on. Some days it felt like being rejected all over again. Being held at arm’s length, only allowed a glimpse into the life of this stranger who’d chosen to give me life when she could easily have taken another path.
A year and a half into this strange, surreal relationship, she lowered the shield. I discovered I had a half-sister, nieces and a nephew.
And none of them knew I existed.
My birth mother wanted to keep it that way. Click HERE to tweet this
So I had another choice to make. All my life I’d longed for this, a sister to share secrets and joys and sorrows with. But did I have the right to barge in on her life? Did she have the right to know me? My birth mother thought not.
God disagreed.
In the end, I was given what I did not deserve. Now, eleven years after the fact, my sister and I know we were part of a grander plan. A course set out for us from the beginning, paths that would eventually merge like they’d never been parted.
Perhaps the bigger miracle was the day I stood in my birth mother’s living room, met her eyes, identical to my own, and watched her come toward me, arms outstretched. It was the first and last hug I received from her, as she died five months after our first meeting.
But all things come full circle, and I believe she got the closure she needed. So did I. And I received so much more…inner peace, puzzle pieces that finally fit together, and new family members to call my own.
God is indeed, very, very good

INSPY Award-winning author Catherine West writes stories of hope and healing from her island home in Bermuda. When she’s not at the computer working on her next story, you can find her taking her Border Collie for long walks or reading books by her favorite authors. She and her husband have two grown children. Catherine’s novel, Bridge of Faith, won the 2015 Grace Award. Her new novel, The Things We Knew, releases July 12th, 2016, through Harper Collins Christian Publishing.
Catherine loves to connect with her readers and can be reached at Catherine@catherinejwest.com





Monday, August 15, 2016

Release of my Non-Fiction book Finding Sarah Finding Me

A Birthmother's Story--Did you know that 100% of all author royalties will be donated to the Mukti Mission in India. Scroll way down after Chapter One to read the details on this. 






FORWARD and CHAPTER ONE

Foreword

In the years between, after relinquishing Sarah at three days old and before our reunion many years later, if I just happen to attend a women’s conference or a ladies’ church function around her birthday, and as happens so often, the organizers of the event just happen to hand out carnations at the door…and as they randomly give out a variety of colors to the ladies leaving…as I inch my way slowly toward the exit in a long lineup of women, I watch with mounting expectation.
The flowers arrive every year around her birthday, those silly blooms that started on the day I got out of the hospital. Sometimes just a card with flowers on it, and always from someone who has no clue what February 24th means to me. Sometimes a friend might send a potted plant—always pink—just because they’re thinking of me.
So as I shuffle forward in each lineup at any ladies’ function I happen to attend, while the last strains of the last song float over the venue, and as the women in front of me smile and with thanks receive their red carnation—or yellow or white—as a gift for coming, without ever asking, mine is always, always pink.
I lift my bloom to my face and breathe in the sweetness. Yes, Lord, you want me to find Sarah.

Chapter One
Do Not Be Afraid

Christine, February 1999 Two months before the reunion The clandestine nature of my trip paints a picture of me I don’t want to look at too closely. As I drive from Maple Ridge to Abbotsford twenty miles away, I wonder if I am one heartbeat away from being a stalker.
I find the high school after several wrong turns. Squelching down the fear of getting caught, I park in the school lot and drum up the nerve to walk in the front doors. I repeat under my breath, “It’s no different than walking into Lana’s high school at home in Maple Ridge. It’s no different at all.”
I’m an ordinary person just like any ordinary parent in the Fraser Valley, the Bible Belt of British Columbia. I’m a Sunday school teacher, a bonded bank teller, a woman of forty-one, hair lightened blond, dressed like any nice mom in jeans, casual shirt, running shoes, my bag slung over my shoulder. I am David’s wife, mom to seventeen-year-old Lana, fifteen-year-old Kyle, and ten-year-old Robert.
I am also the woman who wrote in her journal last night, “For twenty years I’ve comforted myself that this time would come, that my birth-daughter and I could legally be reunited. And now I am afraid of her.”
I, I, I, yes I am all of the above. I hate my self-centered focus. Am I also obsessive? And dear God—am I stalking my firstborn?
There’s still time to turn around, get back in my car, forget this whole crazy escapade. Instead, coldness grips my spine as I stride past the office, praying none of the staff will stop me and ask why I’m here, like a criminal.
I’m only coming to Sarah’s former school just this once, not driving past her house like a real stalker, although I have the address. At least I’ve held myself back from that temptation. This one look—in a public place—I’ll allow myself. But I shudder.
Who can understand my hunger to know, to see? My husband and my mother understand, but do I deserve their pity? Close friends can relate yet aren’t able to hold back their trepidation. Those in any adoption triad who search for that missing biological connection will understand. I’ve heard plenty of their wild stories at the adoption support group. Certainly the militant ones with agendas of their own, if they knew what I was up to today, would urge me to barge forward despite my qualms. The average person though? Would they understand this slipping over the edge into a gray area that frightens the daylights out of me?
But time now stops. Not far from the office I find what I’m looking for. This moment I’ve waited for twenty years. A hectic school hall with teenagers rushing to their next class drifts away. Bell sounds recede to a muffled hush. A desperate quiet roars in my head. It’s the same in every school—a wall displays mounted photos of each graduating class. Portraits of each graduate. Being this close to something tangible emphasizes the growing fragility I’ve battled the past two years. My soul stretches paper-thin as I search the pictures. They’re easy enough to follow, in alphabetical order, and I search for students’ names starting with the letter V.
I’ve waited so long. Far longer than I ever anticipated the search to be. Disappointment after disappointment, lost letters, lost files, that awful sense of being forgotten. The past few weeks as her twentieth birthday looms, my emotional pain has built to a mushroom cloud. I hardly recognize myself anymore.
And then there it is. Sarah VandenBos. Her grad picture. Her face.
A wall of air slams into the core of my being, pushing me backward. It’s hard to catch my breath, and I freeze. After all these years of Sarah being a shadowy picture in my imagination, at last I see her features.
Her long hair falls slightly wavy in that dark blond shade, the exact color as mine at her age. Her eyes hold something of me too, the shape of her head, her neck showing above her grad gown, even something about her teeth. For a moment, my own college graduation picture superimposes itself over Sarah’s. A ghost from the past, what I looked like shortly before I became pregnant with her. Yet there’s something else in Sarah’s face, something I didn’t expect, though I should have.
Her birth father Jim surfaces through her features too. Her mouth is the same shape as his, her nose has that crazy blending of parental genes. Thank God she’s got the tip of my nose and the bridge of Jim’s and not the other way around. For the past twenty years I’ve imagined her as a younger version of me, but now seeing the real Sarah, flesh and blood and no longer a phantom of my imagination, the foundation of my life rumbles and shifts.
As I study every visible facet of her face, a few more pencil lines in the mental portrait of me are erased. She’s beautiful, just as I’ve always imagined…as beautiful as Lana. And there’s such confidence in Sarah’s smile. Sure, this is a professional grad photo and is supposed to exude that balance of poise and assurance, but even while my pride in her and thankfulness soar, I want to shrink away and hide. There’s nothing lacking in this lovely face, nothing to show there’s even an ounce of need. This is what a young woman looks like whose cup of love has been filled to the brim.
How could such a girl ever need me? Sarah isn’t the needy one. I am. I’m the one who hurts because I am not her mother.
I’ve stood staring at the grad photos long enough. No one seems to notice me, but I have no right to be here, and it’s time to go. On the drive home I grip the steering wheel. Tears slide down to soak my shirt collar. Now that I’ve seen her, my fears of meeting her escalate. She has her own life, her own family. At the same time, every atom in my body continues to shove me forward, to keep hoping for the eventual relationship with Sarah that I crave. These constant extremes of emotion drain the life out of me, and I want to just run away, disappear.
A particular psalm has given me strange comfort these past months. “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me,” resonates within me. But it’s not the poetic phrases of King David in Psalm three that bring comfort—rather, the facts surrounding the psalmist’s situation soothe like a salve on a raw wound. The psalmist wrote those words as he looked back on the time he fled from his son Absalom.
Certainly Absalom was one wicked man out to murder his father and steal the throne. Those melodramatic circumstances are vastly different from my search for my birth-daughter, a nice ordinary girl in the Fraser Valley. But sensational tabloid accounts of messy lives fill the Bible and give me this peculiar peace.
At this moment, driving home with my emotions rocking off their base, I’m consoled by King David’s stewing in a similar emotional quagmire. He too loved his child, wanted his child with all his heart, yet ran to mountain caves to cower from his own flesh and blood. I’m not proud of my feelings, but they spill out in a bitter stream from my journals each night. December 29, 1998—“I look back now, and for my sake wish I had not given Sarah up. She is my flesh and blood, yet she loves another couple as her parents. I struggle day and night about meeting her. Why do I torture myself with this compulsion to be reunited?”
Terrible words to flow from a mother’s heart. What kind of a mother am I? A mother to only three of her children, but not to her firstborn. A fractured mother. In spite of this, my husband and I are happily married, a happiness attained by hard work and moving past our failures with forgiveness. Our three kids are our unmitigated joy. Yet I hunger for Sarah, whom I search for. And fear.
It was all so different from twenty years earlier. At seven months pregnant, I’d written in my journal in 1979 my longings that the pregnancy would never end. During those last four months I’d not wanted the day to come that I’d arranged to give up my baby. Heavy with child then, I’d layered the relinquishment of my little one with as much peace and love as I layered the layette—of soft undershirts, fluffy sleepers, the little white Bible—all to be given to her adoptive parents so that they and Sarah would know how deeply I loved her, how much I wanted to see her again one day.
I had the strength to do all that back then because I was sure God had promised me a special relationship for Sarah and me when she was grown. So I’d given Sarah up in 1979, banking on that promise. God simply couldn’t let me down.
But then, King David had banked on God too, only to have his heart broken by his child.
Remembering back to June, 1978

Jim and I watched the movie The Goodbye Girl on one of our first dates. With just a hint of the drama queen that sadly still surfaces in me, I remember thinking, Yeah that’s me, the goodbye girl. I counted up my goodbyes—at five years old to my entire extended family in Ireland when we immigrated to Canada. At twelve, my goodbye to my father when my parents divorced. At nineteen, goodbye to all my old friends in Ontario when my mother, sister, and little brother and I ran away to start over again in British Columbia. And now a year later, the goodbye I’d just said to Jim a few weeks ago when he went up north to work on an oilrig. I missed him.
I thought about Jim as I sat at my desk in the little island of reception in the Woodward’s China Buying Office, my first fulltime job. I wondered if we had a chance as a couple. If our going together would ever amount to marriage. Still, while the heat outside blanketed Vancouver, I worried more about what was happening inside me.
I missed my period—so what? But I knew. Miss-Regular-as-Clockwork does not miss her period.
Half the staff left the office, walking past glass cases filled with Waterford crystal and English bone china. Their laughter dwindled as they rose as a gaggle up the escalator, heading for the cafeteria. The main extension rang, and I answered.
With hardly any preamble, the clinical voice on the other end said, “Miss Lindsay, your pregnancy test has returned positive.”
My mouth went dry, and I no longer heard the clacking of calculators but of blood whooshing through my temple. Positive? Negative?
With the naiveté of a twenty-year-old, I asked, “Does this mean I’m going to have a baby?”
“Yes.”
Deep inside me, the tinkling sound of breaking crystal. Everything receded, including the voice of the doctor’s receptionist.
I hung up the phone and swayed forward on my chair. Below me lay the beige linoleum tiles of the floor. Oh, God, let me fall through the floor. Let it swallow me up. Let me be invisible. Unmarried pregnancies didn’t happen to nice Christian girls. But then, I wasn’t a nice Christian. I was a lousy Christian.
The other office girls must have returned from their coffee break. The work day must have ended. Somehow, I boarded a bus. Blinded by tears, I sat on the aisle seat, halfway down, and stared at the dirty floor beneath my feet. I was pregnant. No husband. Jim circled in and out of my life like a revolving door. What good could Jim do anyway? Would he clean up his life, give up the drugs? Would he suddenly become a responsible adult and marry me? Take care of this…this tiny thing growing inside me?
I swallowed through a tight throat. I would not cry, at least not until I was alone. But before I went home to my empty, single apartment, I needed my mother. At the very least, there was always Mum.
I got off the bus close to her place. When she opened the door, with one glance at me her chin shifted upward. Her eyes darkened with worry. She put an arm around my shoulders and led me inside. “What’s wrong?”
The words tumbled out. “I’m pregnant.”
I wasn’t afraid to tell her, but I hated to. My world had shattered. As her eldest child, the one who had always done well at school, gone to college, she and I had planned a different life for me. A better life waited for me out there, with a satisfying career, someday a devoted husband, and a home. Not the vicious cycle of single-motherhood and poverty.
She held me.
There wasn’t much else to say. She knew about Jim, and from her own life she knew the story well. A foolish girl takes the risk of unprotected sex with a guy whose love is for something other than her. In my mother’s case, my father loved alcohol. As for me, my competition for Jim’s love was a bag of weed or a white line of cocaine.
My mother sat with me on the couch, her arms around me, and together we cried. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll get through this together.”
My mum, sister, little brother, and I had learned long ago to be a tight unit. After talking for a while, being with Mum gave me the strength to go home. A soft summer evening tried to cradle me as I walked the two miles to my own apartment. I’d taken such pride in decorating my little place, my first stride toward independence, and I’d blown it. I’d probably conceived my baby within these walls. I shut the door behind me. Dropping my purse at the open balcony window, I took in the bachelor suite. So quiet. Loneliness closed in around me, and I slumped to my knees.
All the while I’d been with my mother, though I’d cried with her, wiped hot tears from my face, I’d been able to hold back the torrent. Now the volatile storm gathered, rising up inside me in heaps. My mouth spread wide in silent sobs, my arms clutched my stomach, and I bent over, my head swaying back and forth only inches from the carpet. This can’t be true. This can’t be true.
But it was. How could I have been such a fool? At twenty years old I should have known better. Even though I loved Jim, in my heart I referred to him as my walk-on-the-wild-side. The skim-milk love he had for me wouldn’t be enough now that I was going to have his baby.
I wrapped my arms around my middle and rocked on my knees, bawling until nothing remained. My face stung with drying salt, and my hand crept to my abdomen.
Deep inside me slept a tiny bit of flesh. At eight weeks, how big or small did this scrap of humanity measure? Did its heart beat? I’d seen pictures of fetuses in the womb, sucking their thumbs. Did mine have a face yet, a spine? If I left it alone to grow, how soon would it become a boy or a girl? But I’m so scared, dear God, I’m so scared.
Twilight snuffed out the last of the day, and I tried to remember what I knew about God. I knew his Son from Sunday school—a gentle, kind man in a white robe, his feet covered in dust, who I’d been told didn’t shoo people away when they’d blown it, especially tainted women, like I was now.
But God? The heavenly Father? What on earth did a father’s love feel like? Who needed a father anyway?
One of the clearest memories of my dad stole back into my mind, a memory I’d tried to bury over the years. But the memory kept slinking back like a mangy cat steals under the porch no matter how many times you scare it away. As a child of seven and in the hospital for pneumonia, I’d waited for my dad. It was his evening to visit, and my mother had made that possible by staying home with my sister. From my hospital bed I peered out the window to the street below, looking for his figure to walk up the pavement.
Daddy never showed up. Ten minutes after visiting hours ended, he sheepishly staggered in. A frowning nurse allowed him five minutes with me. The beer on his breath wafted over me as he leaned over to kiss my forehead. How rarely he kissed me. Nonetheless, his smelly kiss filled the cold emptiness that had bunched up in my chest as I’d waited for him. When he left me minutes later, even as a kid of seven, I knew my dad spent the time he should have been visiting me down at the pub. I also knew he was on his way back to the pub to order another beer.
The only parental love I’d known came from my mother. Now at twenty I was going to be a mother. Maybe God would be there for me as my mum had always been.
Did God’s voice echo in my own when I protectively wrapped my arms around my abdomen and said, “I love you, little one. I’ll take care of you. Don’t be afraid.”


ABOUT THIS BOOK

100 of Author Proceeds will go to the Mukti Mission in India.

100 % of Christine Lindsay royalties for this non-fiction book will be donated to the Mukti mission in India. If you would like to know the reason for this, then you will have to read my book. I promise; there is a beautiful reason for this. 

Pandita Ramabai
But if you would like a sneak peak, then go to this link Global Aid Network gives aid to the Mukti mission, especially to the Women's and Children's Initiative. Here is a little bit about the womanPandita Ramabai who is one of my favorite true-life heroines. 

More will be added to this page in the weeks to come. Photographs of the birth and adoptive families featured in the book are coming soon. 

Come back often. 


Would you join with me in giving to Global Aid Network in the Women's and Children's Initiative.

DONATE HERE TO GLOBAL AID NETWORK  


My birthdaughter Sarah on one of her
many missions trips.













READ SOME BLOG ARTICLES ABOUT FINDING SARAH FINDING ME 

Anticipating the Desire of Your Heart on The Word Guild Blog 


Each chapter (except for the last) follows this pattern:

Section 1, Christine’s story as I begin the search in 1997 for my birthdaughter Sarah, up to and after our reunion to present day.

In the second segment of each chapter I remember back to 1979 to my pregnancy, delivering Sarah, relinquishing her, and after the relinquishment leading up to my search for her.

Each chapter ends with a vignette from a person from one of the other adoption stories, showing the unique perspectives of adoptees, an adoptive father, adoptive mothers, a prospective adoptive mother, and the biological grandfather of an adoptee, including the thoughts and feelings of my own birthdaughter and of her adoptive mom (Anne—her real mom).

As members from all sides of the adoption triad we acknowledge that adoption and adoption reunions are as different as the people in this world. Adoption is born out of loss, and while not all adoptions are happy, many are. We share our stories here for one reason only, to encourage and inspire you in whatever heartache you are experiencing, whether it pertains to adoption or not.


It is the deepest prayer of the contributors to FINDING SARAH, FINDING ME that through our individual stories you will see the face of the heavenly father, that you will feel him lifting up your chin, and that you will grow warm in his smile.