How a Story Made a Difference

[The Story Teller]

How a Story Made a Difference

By Gail Ringelberg
Grand Haven, Michigan

After reading Linda Kline’s article The Secret They Kept (March 2003) about giving up her baby for adoption, I want to share the other side of the story—the adoptive mother’s. My two children are adopted. Every day I say a prayer of thanks to the two birth mothers who gave up their babies because circumstances prevented them from being able to raise them. What an act of love! I can only imagine the pain Linda felt all those years, wondering if she’d done the right thing. I can never thank women like Linda enough. Because of their sacrifice, couples like my husband and me are able to have a family.

THEY WERE HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEARTS MARRIED 20 YEARS. THEY DIDN’T SEEM LIKE THE KIND OF COUPLE WHO HAD A HIDDEN PAST
THE SECRET THEY KEPT
by Linda Kline, Louisville, Colorado
I did not want to wake up that Thanksgiving morning. From bed I could see the sun catching the snow-covered peaks of the distant mountains. Bettie, a good friend from work, was coming over with her husband later. There was a turkey to put in the oven and a hundred other things that needed to get done.

Greg stirred next to me. “Big day ahead, hon. We’d better get moving.”

“In a minute,” I said.

An hour later, I was still lying there. I ignored the sound of Kelley, 17, and Steve, 15, thumping downstairs to help their dad. Around ten o’clock Greg stuck his head in the door. “Honey, are you feeling okay? Can I get you something?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I’ll be down soon.”

But I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—budge. After almost 20 years, the secret that had haunted my marriage had finally overwhelmed me.

Greg and I had been steadies years ago in high school, sitting next to each other in class, studying together in the library and going to school socials arm in arm. No one doubted we were madly in love.

In the fall of our senior year, I got pregnant. Our families handled it quietly. I gave the baby—a boy—up for adoption. At my request, the nurses whisked him away before I even laid eyes on him. This is for the best, I told myself. Life will go back to normal now. Greg and I still loved each other. A year later, I got pregnant again. This time we married. Kelley came along and Steve soon after.

Yet even with marriage and a family there were moments when I found myself preoccupied with thoughts of my first baby—how I’d sent him off without so much as a kiss. I need to put this in the past, I tried to convince myself. Time will heal this awful emptiness.

But it didn’t. I’d read an adoption story in the paper and start crying. At Thanksgiving dinners, I’d look around at the family I’d been blessed with and think about the one who was missing. At Christmas, I watched the kids open their presents and pictured the mitt or the toy truck I wished I could give Kelley and Steve’s older brother. What was his name? Did he know that he had a mother who still loved him with all her heart? How could he believe that after what I’d done?

One Christmas, I glanced up over the chaos of ribbons and wrapping paper and caught Greg’s eye. He knows it’s on my mind, I thought. He has to.

“Greg,” I said later, when the kids were out of earshot, “you feel it too, don’t you?”

“Feel what?”

“That things aren’t right with our first baby gone.”

A pained, awkward look came over his face. He looked like he wanted to run away. “I don’t know, hon. I guess I’ve just put it behind me. I’m sure he has a good life.”

I tried several more times to share how I felt with Greg and finally gave up. Whenever feelings of sadness popped up, I stuffed them down. I wouldn’t share them with anyone—not even God. I kept a lid on my sorrow. Lord, bless our son, wherever he is, I prayed, never asking God to heal me, never saying how much I hurt and how empty I felt. How could I ask God to heal a pain that I shouldn’t have been feeling in the first place? That I had no one to blame for except myself?

Invisible, unmentioned, the secret I kept buried deep inside me grew, until it crowded everything else out of my life. Greg got used to me lingering in bed on weekends. Late one Saturday morning I felt his arms encircle me and heard his voice in my ear.

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I’m okay.” I got out of bed and got on with the day, going through the motions of being a wife, a mother, a worker, yet every step was a struggle.

Then came that Thanksgiving morning. By eleven o’clock Greg realized he was going to have to dress the bird and get it in the oven himself. The smell of the turkey cooking just made me angry at myself. Linda, get down there and help out. What’s the matter with you? Stop being so selfish!

I heard the sound of tires on the gravel outside. Greg came into the bedroom again. “They’re here, honey. Are you feeling up to saying hello?”

I pulled on a robe and went downstairs. “Linda’s really under the weather,” Greg said, doing his best to cover for me. Bettie stared at me as if she’d seen a ghost. I managed to pull myself together for dinner, but for the rest of the weekend, Greg and the kids were on their own. I retreated to the bedroom. Monday I called in sick. When I didn’t show up at work Tuesday, Bettie phoned.

“Let me stop by this afternoon,” she said. I didn’t have the energy to refuse.

We sat together in the living room. I could barely put two sentences together, but Bettie didn’t seem to expect me to. “Linda, I don’t see the point of beating around the bush,” she said. “I came over because I think you’re depressed and you need professional help.”

“I’ll think about it,” I told her. But I knew she was right. A week later, I was in a psychiatrist’s office, answering a series of questions about my appetite, my health, my medical history.

Then the doctor put his pad down and asked another question.

“Linda, is there anything in your past— a problem, an unresolved issue—that you feel you haven’t fully dealt with?”

Did I dare tell him? Would he think I was making too much of something buried in my past? Would he just tell me I needed to move on with things? At that moment every single thing in my life seemed to stand still, like a freeze-frame or a snapshot. The question hung in the air: Was there something in my past I hadn’t dealt with? Could I be completely honest? With the doctor? With God? With myself?

“Yes,” I said finally. “There is something that’s troubling me.”

I described the guilt, the sadness, the emptiness, the million ways I’d tried to deny my feelings about giving away my firstborn, the sense of paralysis that had finally overtaken me. Once I started talking about my feelings—honestly, openly—the words just flowed. My hurt poured out of me like a river, and it felt good. It felt cleansing.

On the way home from my doctor’s appointment, my hands tight on the steering wheel and my eyes squinting against the good tears that wouldn’t stop, I talked to God. Lord, I should have turned to you from the very beginning. Please help me with the pain. Help me heal. In a great rush, the dead weight of so many years fell away.

“I don’t know how this is going to sound,” I said to Greg when he got home that night, “but I need to tell you something. I’m through with secrets. I’m still sad about having to give our first baby up for adoption. I know that it’s all in the past and I should have healed from it by now. But I haven’t and I never will unless I’m totally honest with you about what’s going on inside me.”

Greg was silent. A look crossed his face. Not anger. Not puzzlement. Relief.

“I can’t say I feel everything you feel,” he said, taking me in his arms. “But I know you need to heal.”

During a retreat high in the Rockies, with Greg by my side, I told Kelley and Steve about their brother. Again, I had that almost physical sensation of lightness, of a burden falling away.

After some diligent investigating, I learned that it was possible to find out who my first son’s adoptive parents were and where he was living now. I wasn’t sure what I would do with the information though. I was taking it a step at a time.

One spring morning, I picked up the phone in our kitchen, said a prayer and dialed a number I’d been given.

“Hi, this is Bryan,” a voice said into the phone. The voice was gentle, soft, still youthful. It resonated throughout me as if seeking that empty space inside.

“Bryan. This is Linda, your birth mother.”

I wanted to ask him something simple, even mundane, like what the weather was like or what make of car he drove. But I started crying. Good tears, though. From the phone in the living room, Greg covered for me. “Hi, Bryan,” he said. “This is Greg, your birth father.” That’s how we started getting to know our son. He had a wonderful wife and four kids. His adoptive parents had been missionaries in Latin America. The more I learned the more grateful I felt. God’s hand had been on Bryan’s life even when mine couldn’t be.

One day Bryan and I were having lunch. He looked at me and said, “I always knew you loved me.”

I’d always wondered if he knew. Now I believed it, and it filled me with joy.
The above article originally appeared in the March 2003 issue of Guideposts.
Submitted by Richard