Sunlight on My Shadow (26 page)

Dave and I raised our children together. It was mostly a happy marriage full of adventure, yet laced with struggle and poverty. In the final five years, our values and aspirations pulled us in opposite directions: twenty-eight years after we married in the mountain meadow, we went our separate ways. Although painful, the divorce was the best solution for both of us and we were able to split up our assets without involving lawyers, for which I am grateful. Afterward, some said they were surprised we lasted as long as we did because Dave and I were such opposites. I was humbled by the divorce, because I always thought people who split just gave up too easily. That wasn’t true with me. I had tried desperately. In the end I see that it was best, as I am better able to align myself with people who nurture my spirit.

After I found Karen, I told Mick and he wanted to meet her. Karen was also curious to meet her birth father. So the following spring, Mick and I traveled to Milwaukee to meet with Karen and her husband for lunch. Mick, like me, was proud of her beauty and sweet spirit. We all seemed a bit nervous, but Karen asked Mick some questions about his family, and he has kept in touch with her over the years.

After Dave and I split up, I spent eight years longing and looking for a new life partner. It was a good lesson in patience: you can’t pluck a tulip before it emerges. The years I spent alone prepared me to recognize the gem I found in Joe, and I give thanks every day that he is in my life. My dear Joseph is solid, true, hardworking, astoundingly intelligent, and the main champion of my writing life; most important, I like who I am when I am with Joe.

When Joe and I married in 2006, Karen and Brian attended our wedding and were able to meet my relatives. Some of them found out on the wedding day for the first time that I had a child when I was seventeen. Everyone was curious and gathered around Karen and Brian like they were the main attraction. I hope they were not overwhelmed. It was an outpouring of love, really. My family wanted to swallow Karen right into the fold. Who wouldn’t? She is darling and sweet. We wanted to claim her as ours.

A couple years after the wedding, I sent this e-mail to Karen on her birthday:

June 30, 2008

Dear Karen,

You can’t be forty-one, can you? I am so blessed to have met you after all the years of thinking about you and wondering if you were having a good life and if you were okay. The first time I saw you when you were an adult, I wanted to hug you and cry. I felt like my baby had died and God said, “Just kidding.” It was so healing to find you happy and healthy.

You know when you were born I wanted to hold you so badly, but I was afraid that if I did I would never be able to give you away. I was in a fog, just following the choices that were made for me. I never imagined I had a choice in your adoption. I figured I had messed up and now I had to atone for my sins.

When we met again, what was it? Twenty-six years later? I was sorry I had not been a part of your life and had missed your childhood. Hardly a day went by that I did not think of you. Now you have your own babies and a successful career in nursing. If I had the right, I would be so proud of you. I still am proud. I hope someday, when it is right for you, that we can have a closer relationship and that I can get to know you and your family and spend time together. I have always loved you so.

Happy Birthday,

Judy

Karen wrote back on the same day:

Hi Judy,

Thanks for the nice thoughts on this day; I don’t feel a day over thirty! It was nice to see you. At first I felt an instant connection, like I had known you before. I tell a lot of people about you and how I became me. I tell them about your time with midwifery and making books for kids, and how talented, smart, and in good shape you are—and that you drive a Harley, and how down-to-earth you are and sweet. I also tell them how talented you and your family are, from seeing them at your wedding—there are also a lot of medical people in your family. It was so nice to meet them; I am glad that I went. It helped me to meet you, to fill a void, a hole—of where I came from. I feel privileged to have come from such a lovely family as yours. I wish my mom could be more open to talking about you, but I don’t bring it up. Someday there may be a time to see each other more. Time will tell, and I would love for my mom to meet you someday.

My life is so busy and full right now with school, I’m telling
everybody that I have to be a hermit this summer to get through school. It is a lot of work, more than I had ever imagined. I just take a day at a time and go forward, I persist, and I won’t quit, although I would like to at times. My mom taught me never to quit anything, keep going no matter what.

Judy, you did what you had to do when you were sixteen—it was what you needed to do at that time in your life. I have such a wonderful life, and meeting you helped me to understand where my roots started. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me in yours.

Love,

Karen

The following Christmas I asked Karen if it was okay if I sent this letter to her mother. She agreed, so I sent it off. It read:

December 22, 2008

Dear Mark and Stella,

When I gave Karen up for adoption, I didn’t know much about the family that received her. All I knew was that they were Catholic. I prayed that she had gone to a good family. For many years, I worried about the time when I would find out about her life.

Ten years ago, I was able to find out that you, Mark and Stella, were the parents of Karen. She tells me that she has had a blessed life, full of love and caring, and that she couldn’t have asked for better parents. I am so thankful. It was a healing experience for me to learn of her upbringing and the parents who nurtured Karen into the beautiful woman she is today.

Stella, Karen tells me that you are a retired teacher, but still busy with volunteer work. I, too, am in the education field. I write and publish children’s educational books that teach times tables and addition with cartoons and stories. I hope that someday I can meet you and tell you in person how grateful I am to you.

When I was sixteen and became pregnant, it was the worst thing that could have happened to me. Now, forty-one years later, I realize it was a blessing and a gift to give birth to Karen. Thank you so much for being the mother that I could never be. I know the sacrifices you have made because of the love you have for your children.

Sometimes I wonder if I got pregnant just because you were meant to be the mother of Karen. Some things are beyond our understanding and control and I just believe in my heart that Karen’s life was meant to be just as it is. Thank you both for being the great part of her life and taking such sweet care of her.

Merry Christmas to you,

Judy Liautaud

Although I have not met Karen’s parents, I received their family Christmas letter after Stella received my letter. I can tell they have a close family and there is plenty of love and cheer.

In Sept of 1996, my oldest daughter, Kiona, was accepted to the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. We packed up a U-Haul and headed to the Midwest. Her apartment happened to be in the same town as the Martha Washington Home for Unwed Mothers. Twenty-nine years had passed.

Even though I knew that the home had closed in 1982, I wanted to visit the area. I headed off to the store alone, and took a detour over to 6306 Cedar Street. I parked along the side of the street under some tall elm trees, opened the car windows, and sat in the shade. I smelled the air. I remembered sitting out in the yard, talking to the other girls. I remembered walking down the street going to town, and I remembered the bookstore incident when the owner told us to get out.

The familiar smells activated the nerve endings of my memory. I felt it all: the longing, the loneliness, the fear, the isolation, the grief of my baby’s disappearance, the free feeling of driving home in Jeff’s Mustang when it was all over. The emotions from the past rode in waves that crested with each whiff of the summer air. I sat in the car and wept. It amazed me that I went through all this and had come out the other end, still sane, still hurting.

I became self-conscious sitting in a parked car and worried that a neighbor would wonder why I was hanging around. I started the car and pulled away with a heavy, yet grateful heart that it all was in my past. I felt a yearning to someday write my story.

Being a child of my father’s, I wanted to please him and I wanted to follow his rules. I felt I owed him that much, after breaking his trust and doing things my way—look where that got me. But as the years ticked by, I came to know that I could not hold the secret close any longer. It was like a boiling cauldron, the pressure prodding me to take off the lid, air it out. I would come to know that I did not have to hold that sadness, grief, and shame. I could let it go once I had looked closely.

I see now that the cover-up, although a relief and a seemingly perfect solution to my dilemma at the time, ended up causing a cancerous erosion of self-esteem. Even if others believed I was away because I had a serious disease, it had no lessening effect on the shame and grief I harbored. I learned coping mechanisms that pushed down the rising of intense feelings, capturing me behind a wall of fog.

Then the sunlight came. It came in the form of the Cabbage Patch baby lying on the bedroom floor, longing to be picked up. It came in the form of Lana, the midwife who guided me back in time so I could revisit my baby’s birth day. It came in finally meeting Karen and seeing the starlight in her eyes. It came in the form of writing the memories from my days at the home for unwed mothers. It came in revisiting my story by talking with family and friends, forty years later.

It came in a renewed sense of spirituality. Once the pain and trauma were released from my body, mostly through writing, I was able to see some spiritual light. In my early twenties, I seriously questioned my Catholic religion, and I was bereft. Although I loved nature and was spiritually lifted after a day playing in the waves on Bond Lake, or smelling the pines while walking through the woods looking for mushrooms, or feeling the mountain breeze at my back as I biked the bluffs of Moab, I still longed for a deeper connection.

Over the years, I attended many different churches; St. Joan of Arc’s, an active Catholic church, alive with uplifting guitar and song and members calling themselves recovering Catholics, because they grew up in the church and were putting guilt and the fear of hell into a more healthy perspective. I worshipped with Quakers, who strive to be devoid of ritual and judgment, and believe that God is within each of us. I attended Unitarian and Universalist churches. Although each spoke to my soul, none filled my longing for a deeper spirituality.

It started as a teen but during my early twenties, I aggressively questioned everything I had been taught. I started to think organized religion was for the weak-minded, evidence of an inability to think on your own. My view was myopic, coming from my own experience. Today, my judgmental attitude has softened. People I love dearly have shown me by example how their religion has brought them deep comfort and strength. These are some of my favorite people on the planet, so how could I think they should choose something different just because it is not what I believe? I honor and cherish them for their beliefs, for that is what makes them who they are.

For myself, I have come to believe that there are many paths to spirituality. I have trudged along to find my own. A few years ago, I visited my daughter, Tessie, who was now married to CJ and living in England with their four children. While driving on the way to catch the train to London, I asked Tessie if she was worried about making the wrong decision. They were buying a home in Omaha, Nebraska, yet lived so far away. Tessie said, “No, I don’t worry about it. I pray to the Holy Spirit and ask for guidance, and I have faith it will work out.” How comforting that must be for her,” I thought, “and how perfect to have the Holy Spirit guiding her.” I asked how she knew what the Holy Spirit was trying to tell her. She said, “There is a still small voice, just a quiet knowing. Nothing like bugle horns or loud speakers, subtle.”

I saw the sparkle and light in her eyes as she told me about this, and I knew the comfort it gave her. Sunlight again, as I began to think about her words and thought maybe, just maybe, long ago, I threw out the noodles with the boiling water. If I didn’t believe in God as the judging Father that I had disappointed, maybe I could reinvent a new version. I believed in intuition and that we humans have spiritual powers beyond our conscious reason—like the feeling that you should go a certain way, and you later find out what a blessing it was. Like the night I attended that speed-dating session where I met my Joseph. I hadn’t planned to go, but was invited at the last minute by the owner of the company. And Joe was going to blow it off, but something told him to give it a try. That was the night we met, and how different and empty my life would have been without that fateful meeting.

So, I stumbled upon the belief that there is a spirit inside of me that knows what is best for me. This could be my Holy Spirit. I don’t think of it as outside of me and inaccessible, but always there within me, my spirit that guides me toward the light. So I started to pray. “Holy Spirit, help me find the words to write my story.” Or, “Holy Spirit, please show me the path to be nonjudgmental and give love.” The minute I started praying like this, I felt a shift and a knowing that my prayers could guide me. It was the spiritual connection I had longed for.

After Karen read this book, she told me that she had watched the same movie that put me in action to search, the movie of the forfeited twins,
The Joy Luck Club
, the night before she received the call from Charlene to tell her that I, her birth mother, had been looking for her. Was this a connection orchestrated by the Holy Spirit within us, preparing her for my contact?

I know my Holy Spirit might not come in the same outward form as Tessie’s Holy Spirit, nor is it likely to follow the same arrangement that my brother Jeff has with his God. But for me, this is a matter of semantics. I believe it is the place where we connect as humans. We each may use different words to describe our path: God, spirituality, Holy Spirit, or intuition. But I believe our earthly journey leads to the same destination, enabling a closeness and connection with the spirit.

I am watching the soft morning light coming through the raindrops on the window and reflecting on my past. My lesson is about blowing up the secret: the part inside of me that wants to hide who I really am, the part of me that walks with my head down and my tail between my legs because of all the shame.

No wonder I acted like that, I realized as I wrote. No wonder I didn’t hold my baby; I thought I would be protecting myself from lingering hurt and pain. No wonder I was caught in the web of guilt and secrecy; I thought I could undo my sins against the church and my culture with secrets. No wonder I gave my baby away; I made the decision before I knew that the lump in my belly was an exquisite child I could not help loving—and then I believed it was too late to question my decision.

In understanding that young person who was me at fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years old, I came to love her and forgive her for all the mistakes she made. I put my arms around that me-child and I weep for her and love her.

The fear of rejection, the fear of standing up for my own feelings by simply expressing them: these have been the ghosts in my closet. Writing my story has opened the door to let the ghosts scatter. It has brought sunlight to the shadows.

No dark secret with spider webs and monsters hidden inside, no smoldering leaves that can’t get enough air for the fire to burn, just pure light of what is. And this is the honesty, the newfound strength within, the newfound strength of acceptance. There is no longer anything to fear, no longer a secret to keep.

I no longer wish for a better past.

I laid down the shame as I laid down each word of my story.

In the talking and writing, sunlight was brought to the shadows. I have no secret to keep, no shame to hide, no regret to mourn. I am no longer Judy L., a truncated version of myself. I am Judy Liautaud, fifth child of Ethel and John, descendant of the family that passed for white in 1911; my nickname is Pood, Goonsfield, or Jude.

It is a fresh start. We all have our secrets, our sorrows, and our regrets. I tell myself, “Embrace them; love yourself for your humanness.”

Let the good light continue to shine on truth and all of who we are. Let there be sunlight in the shadows.