The Son I Gave Up Writes Home

“Why didn’t you ever tell me,” she said finally, not sharp, just quiet.

“Because I didn’t know how,” I told her, as plainly as I could. “I didn’t tell your father either. I’m not proud of that. I was eighteen and scared and everyone around me agreed the kindest thing was to never speak of it again, and I was young enough to believe them, and then I was old enough that the silence had its own weight and I did not know how to set it down.”

She sat with that a while. Then she asked the only question that mattered to her. “Do you want to meet him.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I think I do. I’m terrified.”

“Of what,” she asked.

“That he’ll look at me and see the eighteen year old who gave him away,” I said, “and not whatever I’ve become since.”

Kim reached across the table and took my hand, the laundry still half folded between us, and she said something I have thought of every day since. “Mama, you didn’t give him away because you didn’t want him. You gave him up because you loved him enough to think he’d have a better chance without you, in a world that didn’t give you any other choice. That’s not the same thing. I’d like a brother. I always wanted one.”

I cried then, finally, two days after the letter came, at my own kitchen table with my grown daughter’s hand over mine, and it was not only grief. There was relief in it too, the strange light feeling of a weight that has been carried so long you forgot it was separate from your own body, starting, just barely, to lift.

Reverend Tice

I went to see our pastor, Reverend Tice, that Sunday after service, and told him everything, the way I would tell very few other people in this town, because I trusted him to hear it without flinching and without turning it into gossip by Wednesday prayer meeting.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting, which is a rarer gift in a pastor than people think. When I finished, he was quiet a moment, and then he said something I have held onto.

“Arlene, the Lord does not ask us to carry shame for the rest of our lives over a choice we made as frightened children, in a world that gave us no better one,” he said. “He has a fondness for doors people thought were closed forever. What you do about this one is the only part still yours to decide.”

He asked if I wanted him to pray with me right there in his office, and I said yes, and he did, a short plain prayer, nothing fancy, just asking that I would be given courage for what was coming and grace for whatever I found when I got there. I left his office lighter than I had felt in a month.

I called the number on Michael’s letter two days later, on a Tuesday, the same day of the week the letter itself had arrived, which struck me as the kind of small coincidence that feels like more than coincidence when you are in the middle of something this large.