My first face-to-face meeting with Lynette seems like a good place to bring my adoption tale in for a landing. That is not to say this event marked the end of the story, however.
Much has transpired between us since that day in June 2022. Debi and I have cruised the Caribbean with Lynette, spent vacation time with my half-brother Cain and his family, and attended a big Rigel reunion in Springfield, Ohio. Lynette and Vince came to Beaufort, SC, for my stepson Tommy’s wedding. She also has visited Dad’s home in Lugoff, SC, and talks on the phone with my sister, Jennifer, nearly as often as she talks with me. In fact, Lynette is in town with me today for a pretty big event — Jennifer is getting remarried!
My family is melding. Blessings abound.
This experience has reinforced every notion that my first adoption was the most formative event of my life … at least until my second adoption on Sept. 9, 2023. When a St. Helena’s Anglican Church deacon — my old newspaper boss, Jim Cato — lifted me from the waters of the Port Royal Sound that hazy Saturday morning, I was reborn in Christ and made a child of God.
And Lynette was there on the shore, waiting with the rest of my family to congratulate me. I imagine Mom was smiling down from above, too.
I cannot say that my search for Lynette propelled me to search for God, as well — in many ways, the latter venture began much earlier — but those quests were indeed intertwined. In pursuing her and in recollecting Mom, I saw His hand at work in my life from its very beginning. Further, reunion and baptism inaugurated relationships that were possible only after I recognized — and disavowed — my soul-rotting self-absorption.
My search for Lynette and this blog should not be conflated, either, although they also are intertwined. I sought Lynette to bring her peace of mind. We proceeded with this separate project only because she, like me, believes it might bring the same peace to other adoptees, and to their adoptive and biological families. But I also intended a broader message, for an audience far wider than this adoption triad.
After all, you don’t have to be an adoptee to take stock, face fears and give thanks for being here, even in the midst of tribulation.
I learned a lot from Mom about gratitude and hope. She exuded both. And both sustained her through stern challenges – fears of infertility, the premature loss of her sister, the ravages of a disease that wormed its way through her father’s brain and then her own.
Gratitude and hope helped me through the uncertain portions of my search for Lynette, too. This was particularly the case during the four weeks in which I believed I was the byproduct of a statutory rape. Despite that grim possibility, I remained happy to be here.
Indeed, Lynette’s story and mine abound with joy that arose from decidedly unhappy circumstances. Often, the difference between triumph and ruin is the ability to fix focus beyond the immediate peril, and on someone other than yourself.
True, you can bet that when Lynette was an eighth-grader sneaking to a hospital nursery to steal a glimpse of her newborn son, she did not envision our reunion 53 years later. She probably did not even foresee the fulfillment my adoption would bring to my parents just a few months later. Nonetheless, even at Lynette’s tender age, she knew allowing her son to be raised in the emotionless void of her mother’s house was not in my best interest. So she made the painful decision to place me for adoption, even at the risk of never seeing me again.
Similarly, Mom and Dad took the long view when their inability to conceive stymied their plans for a family. Adoption became the analgesic for infertility’s pain, a way to fulfill their longing for parenthood while coming to the aid of a child who needed help.
Again, good sprang from despair.
So it was when my sister stood firm against the anxiety and fear of single motherhood. Our culture might regard children conceived under such circumstances as life-wrecking burdens, but Jacob was life-ordering for Jennifer. Motherhood did not preclude her from college degrees or homeownership; rather, it motivated her to achieve them. My Aunt Vada’s crisis pregnancy brought a concern yet more grave — would she even live through her daughter’s delivery? But Vada survived, and Kelli thrived. My cousin is now an award-winning software engineer.
Jen and Vada triumphed because they refused to bow to the nihilism of our age by expecting ruin into being. Instead, they chose hope by choosing life for their children.
Let’s face it, most people — myself included — would rather take a shortcut than responsibility when confronted with crises of such magnitude. But the path that makes things easy on us often makes life awfully hard — or downright impossible — for someone else. Unfortunately, our culture not only facilitates the shortcut; it tricks many into believing the easy path is their birthright.
In reality, that belief is Satan whispering bleakness into your ear. And it breeds the ultimate moral conceit: That obliterating a life to preserve a lifestyle is not merely acceptable; it is practically a civic virtue.
Defenders of such sophistry seem not to realize the tenuous position from which they argue: That is to say, they would not be here to argue at all had their mothers exercised the very “birthright” they espouse. Are they really OK with that?
Because I realize full well that I was once a tiny, insentient and unviable collection of cells in the womb of a 13-year-old. Had I been conceived today, rather than pre-Roe 1969, millions of people would advise Lynette to abort her son. Pregnancies like hers are precisely what “choice” advocates have in mind when they argue the procedure should be available on demand, never mind that the choices and demands of all involved are not up for consideration.
Simply put, abortion would have been the end of me. I would not have popped up at some other time or in someone else’s belly. I had one chance.
And praise God, Lynette gave it to me.
You were once a tiny, insentient and unviable collection of cells in your mother’s belly, too. So was your mother, and your mother’s mother before her. Surely, I’m not the only one among us who is happy to be here.
So although my adoption story is finished, this blog is not. I won’t necessarily be posting twice a week anymore, but from time to time, I’ll have something to add on behalf of the 65 million voiceless and choiceless who would have been happy to be here, too, if only they’d been given the chance.
I know this is where some of you will part company with me. Abortion is a divisive issue, and there are kind-hearted people who disagree with me about it. But if you have read this far, I can only assume that something I’ve shared over the past several weeks resonated with you. If that is so, I ask you to consider that thing … and whether you are truly comfortable holding a belief that might have prevented me from sharing it with you.
If that doesn’t sway you, either, consider that your belief fulfilled could just as easily have prevented you from being here to receive it.
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I loved your story that ends with such a happy ending, especially with you being baptized. Praise God and praise God for His divine intervention in guiding you and Lynette to your happy ending. I can relate to your Mom in not being able to have children and adopting our beautiful daughter Jody. I am so appreciative of her birth mother for giving her baby up for adoption instead of abortion which is what her mother demanded her to do.
My late younger sister was raped and went to a home for unwed mothers. She also had a baby boy who was put up for adoption. She never ever talked about it even to her husband or son later…
Amen. I love you. Thanks for sharing. You are a wonderful friend.