A little over a year ago my parents gave each of us a DNA test through Ancestry.com for Christmas. At the time, I wondered, why now? Our family history is mired in secrets and things you just don’t talk about. However, my older brother had a keen desire to know and had long been digging into whatever past he could find; he and I had several conversations where I thought he was pushing too hard and too fast and our mom might have some pretty big feelings about the family he was discovering and the cousins and half-aunties he was suddenly reaching out to.
However, feelings aside, his research and efforts slowly started unlocking our mom’s willingness to do some of this exploration and we all suddenly had Ancestry accounts. I think, for the most part, we’ve treated our more distant past as a matter of curiosity; uncovering the stories that none of knew. When you come from generations of broken families, and a very strong willed mother who intuitively knew to cut toxic people out of her life, history often becomes a murky and mercurial thing, based more on rumours and the happy stories you tell your children at bedtime, then actual fact or real people you know and invite to supper.
Then there’s my own emotional roller coaster with my own history. My brothers and I each share a different father, but my youngest brother’s father raised me and is the most amazing dad a person could ever hope for; and he adopted me once I was legally old enough to decide for myself (so, yay, for happy stories!), so I had little reason to spend time wondering about the father who shares my DNA. My mother never really speaks about my biological father; just enough for me to know he wasn’t a good guy and he treated her very badly. For most of my life, that was enough information for me. I have always admired her for her strength to get away, walk away, to protect me and my older brother to the best of her abilities (even though it meant allowing my older brother to be raised primarily by his biological dad until he was into his teenage years).
While I have always known that history; known that he was abusive, an alcoholic, an individual who tried to kidnap me after hurting my mother badly enough to prevent her from stopping him walking out the door with me as a child, what was never said out loud was that I was a mistake and all of that history happened likely because of one night of passion.
This morning, Ancestry invited me to ‘listen to an audio’ of their most recently discovered piece of evidence of my past. I clicked without thinking, hoping for something lovely about my grandfather to enjoy over coffee… to find instead it was my mother’s marriage record. The timing of which clearly showing that she was pregnant with me already.
In the 1970s a woman couldn’t have a child out of wedlock; I mean she could… but even today a pregnant single woman is socially frowned upon. So what is she to do? My mother sacrificed her future for the sake of her unborn child and marry a man she perhaps didn’t really know. I’ve seen a few pictures of that time in her life, and even on the day of her wedding, she is not smiling but looks more pensive. A wedding of necessity and not of love to a man who likely was starting to show his violent and mean side.
What does that say, then about my own mental health, when I ultimately grew up to be unknowingly attracted to more toxic or dangerous men? Men who were very intelligent and always funny and kind and suave at first, but ultimately were emotionally unstable, manipulative, and outright abusive. That I married and stayed with someone so abusive for two decades that our local courthouse knows me by name and our divorce trial is more ridiculous than any movie plot?
Some years ago when I began attending the Catholic church; I went only for the sake of the ‘discount’ you receive on school tuition if you can prove you are a regular Mass goer. At first I was extraordinarily suspicious and uncomfortable. Wondering always, “How could someone like me ever be accepted here?” Awkwardly kneeling, standing, mumbling my way through prayers that felt harder to voice aloud than that one-time-in-college I tried to learn Mandarin. Slowly, through the grace of God I found a sense of peace and of welcome at Mass, but still always feeling like a fraud. None of these lovely, welcoming people knew my actual story, and my (now ex) husband would use that against me. He was keen to see me continue to get the ‘discount’ on the boys education, but he worked hard to undermine any sense of welcome or belonging by reminding me again, and again, that I wasn’t good enough for these people, that if they really knew who I was, they would shun me.
Eventually I found my way to RCIA and small group faith studies, and observed my children displaying a natural and true faith and connection to God. The question always on the back of my mind, however, was if all of this love is true and real, where was God through all the hurts of this life?
Where was He when my mother was being so hurt? If I am just an accident, how could God have wanted me to live? Where was He when my nanny set me down to nap in her own bed so that her husband could do unspeakable things in that darkened room? Where was God when I was hungry and stealing food because I chose my education over safety? How can God love me, when I wasn’t sure that any people here on earth truly cared for me?
The truth that I have come to appreciate and understand is that there were loving people, helpers and carers all along; and that when I cried from being hurt, God was crying with me. It’s a tricky thing to navigate, mentally, the idea of being wholly loved, without question, if that is not your lived experience among people. And, I was loved and cared for and cherished by my mother, by my step father, and even now as I struggle to raise my boys on my own, I am cared for and cherished and protected by my family and my friends.
It’s an easy trap to think and believe that God must not care for you because your life hasn’t been easy or perfect; or that there are times you don’t feel wanted or loved or cherished. But, it’s a trap to think that way, and it’s what the Devil wants. In spite of every person’s best efforts to care for and love their children, or even in those cases where parents didn’t care for their children, God is still there protecting, sending his angels to guide and protect. Every time a child is conceived there is a flash of light in the mother’s womb. A tiny miracle sparked to life and to existence; a soul wanted, and a person cherished by God.
We are all of us born into a world of pain; I share my story because I understand that my story and my life has been a pathway to who I am now, today. That I have a role to play in bringing other wounded hearts back to God, showing that God loves us all in spite of our backgrounds, in spite of our history. That it’s not about how you came to be or by whom, but the fact that you simply are here is enough for God to love you.
Through God and faith and love, I pray to raise a generation of men for whom our collective trauma begins to heal; who find loving wives and I pray are able to raise a generation of children who don’t know abuse in the home. I think we all pray that in a world that sometimes feels it’s completely off-kilter and spinning rapidly into madness and chaos and war, that somehow people start to come to their senses and stop harming one another. We do that through God, through living peacefully, through taking the time to look at ourselves individually and as a whole and making an intentional choice to turn to God and live as He would want us to.
In closing this meandering post, I pray you see what I had hoped to share. That though I may have been born an accident, and though I come from generations of broken homes, that I know I was intentionally made and formed and loved. If I am, then so are you. You are wanted and loved by God, no matter your circumstances, no matter your past, no matter how you have lived your life to this day, God still chooses you and loves you. When you see someone crumpled on the street, perhaps lost in a cloud of narcotic bliss because that feels easier to them then living life, don’t look away, and don’t think of yourself as better-than; but instead say a prayer and remember that could be any of us if circumstances had pivoted only slightly. If, at each fork in our individual paths, we were to turn left instead of right, we also could be that individual burying their trauma and their pain in drugs, crumpled on the street.
Please know that you are ever in my prayers. Please keep me in yours.
May God Bless you and keep you. May your day be one of peace and calm. I pray that your worries and fears, the thoughts that keep you awake at night, that for today they be set aside and you see the beauty that God is trying to show you. That today you see the smile from a stranger meant only for you. That you know you are loved. You are wanted. You belong.