Sometimes it is only through giving up our hearts that we learn to trust the Lord.
Adoption. It’s something that touches one in three people today, a word that will conjure different emotions in those people touched by it. A word that might represent the greatest hope…the greatest question…the greatest sacrifice. But most of all, it’s a word that represents God’s immense love for his people.
Join birth mother Christine Lindsay as she shares
the heartaches, hopes, and epiphanies of her journey to reunion with the
daughter she gave up...and to understanding her true identity in Christ along
the way.
Through her story and glimpses into the lives of
other families in the adoption triad, readers will see the beauty of our broken
families, broken hearts, and broken dreams when we entrust them to our loving
God.
Foreword to FindingSarah Finding Me
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 OF FINDING SARAH FINDING ME
Do Not Be AfraidChristine, 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 awaited 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 oil rig. 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.”?
GO HERE FOR YOUR COPY OF FINDING SARAH FINDING ME
100% of all author royalties from Finding Sarah Finding Me will be donated to Global Aid Network Women and Children's Initiative. This is the mission that my birth-daughter Sarah is involved with.
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