It’s my 57th Birthday! I talked with my biological mother this year for the first time, shortly before Mother’s day. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m celebrating another year of living knowing the story of how and where I was conceived and the story of my birth… that against all the misguided 1950’s wisdom and rules about “what’s best for theses mother and their babies,” she insisted on holding me before surrendered me to the care of unmet strangers with the benediction, “I love you.”

In those first blessed and fragile movements of this life, where grief and love mingled in all tenderness and hope, the course of my living was set. This past half-century-plus, I’ve surrendered time and time, a thousand times again, to moments as heavy laden as my first. I have been called time and time again to learn that, faith and hope are all that abide, and that there is no stronger force, none in life or in death, greater than the arms of that same Love which, long awaited, held me for what could never be time enough, relinquishing me, in all sadness and uncertainty to all the precariousness that is living.

Faith, hope and that same Love have nurtured me into a heart of grace for the patients that we serve: My birthday wish for year 57 is prayer and meaningful action. Too many times, we must surrender lives struggling with addiction, mental and physical illnesses to a society’s system (healthcare, mental health, social services) were no real help is available. We cannot say things like, “go here and they will help you try to end your unrelenting physical or emotional pain, or with a place to live, or food to eat, money for car insurance or gas so you can know the simple human dignity of paying for those thing with money you earn from the job that small bridge of financial assistance afforded.” Or things like, “go here and you will be able to get the best possible treatment for your normal human reaction to growing up in a family where those who ought to have cared for you betrayed that sacred trust.”

A kind PCB friend said to me, not all that long ago, “you could have chosen to do horses or anything, but you chose this (things religious).” What she didn’t know is that, I could not, cannot, choose anything less than living the Love of my mother’s benediction of my life; to pray and try to live as if the Word has a bit of flesh on it and to pray and try to act Compassion’s love in the world…

Please spend some time today praying and acting for a more just, compassionate system for the least among us….

Prayer Grieving My Mother in Adoption

THE MOTHER CONNECTION

The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 17, 1997

Hope Edelman

It rained the day of my grandmother’s funeral, a fine drizzle that clung to our dark coats like a silver veil. She died this past December, a few weeks short of her 90th birthday. We buried her in the family plot just behind my mother, who died at 42. The official documents listed my grandmother’s cause of death as acute respiratory and coronary failure, backed up by advanced breast cancer – an absolute calamity of the chest – but I believe otherwise: that despite all her ailments, she died of loneliness and quite possibly a broken heart. She kept asking for my mother until the very end.


The bonds between mothers and daughters have always been tight in my family – too tight, most of us have complained. It’s as if the women believe that the harder they cling, the more they can protect. If only that were true. Our stories are marked by departure and longings, by frustration and despair. My great-grandmother, Ida, leaving Russia at 36 with three children, saying goodbye to the mother she would never see again. My grandmother, Faye, a stubborn, willful woman with a love so enduring and irrational that it often drove my mother to slam down the telephone or retreat into her bedroom to scream at the walls. My own mother, whose early death from breast cancer left behind two angry teen-age daughters and a mother who walked around for months refusing to accept – was never able to accept – the truth.


In the full Bonwit Teller shopping bags my grandmother used to carry wherever she went, she kept a framed photograph of her mother, a serious woman in a dark print dress who died before I was born. I used to laugh at her for this, teasing her for dragging around a picture of an old woman in the bottom of a tattered paper bag. My mother would hush me, telling me to leave Grandma alone. Only later did I realize the poignancy of this act, how important those bags were to my grandmother’s feelings of safety and well-being, and how the image of her mother must have provided the same: how my mother understood this and how, by gently quieting her daughter, she showed loyalty to an aging mother who at other times nearly drove her mad.


I treasure these memories now, along with the stories these women told me about their lives. As we sat around the kitchen table or took long drives in the car, they handed down women’s culture, replete with all its tales of hardship and triumph, loss and rebirth. My grandmother spoke of her mother’s ability to stretch a piece of meat far enough to feed seven, and about how she herself studied to become a lawyer only to find she didn’t have enough money for the exam fee. My mother told stories about maturing faster that her peers, about how her mother hadn’t prepared her for her menstruation and how she swore, at age 9, that she would tell her daughter in advance. (She did, when I was 8).


But now there is no one left who can verify my memories of these women, who heard the exact stories they told me, or can add to them, or tell me which details I’ve got wrong. At 32, I’m the only woman left in my maternal line, and few things I’ve encountered have made me feel quite so alone.


I was acutely aware of this as I stood at my grandmother’s grave in the gentle rain. Damn it! I wanted to cry out. The last one gone! I understood that I represented a symbolic end point, but I did not yet realize that I could represent a beginning, too. So it is perhaps not all that surprising that when I learned I was pregnant less than two months after the funeral, I received the news with uncharacteristic calm. It was a statistical fluke, one of those birth-control failures that pull effective rates down into the 90-odd percentiles, or so the gynecologist said. I didn’t disagree. In the frenzy that followed – planning a wedding, buying a house and all those doctor’s visits – there wasn’t much time to sit and reflect. Which is probably why I didn’t notice for months that this year I’m bridging the gap between death and birth. I’ve lost all my mothers, but I’m in the process of becoming one, and it’s a sweet and healing continuity that added an unexpectedly profound twist to Mother’s Day this year.


I cried when the ultrasound technician told me the baby is a girl. How will I protect her? How will I accept that I can’t? Each time I feel one of her kicks, already signaling her independence, I feel a blend of joy and wonder and fear and grief unlike anything I’ve known before. And this is what I think: that maybe this child wasn’t an accident after all. Maybe in a family where the love between mothers and daughters was always unquestioned and absolute, a vacuum can’t exist for long. Maybe, just maybe, when the last mother dies, a new one must be born.

"Ask any woman whose mother has died and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as profoundly changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life."

~Hope Edelmann

Twenty-eighty years since her death there is integrity, dignity and grace, in the ongoing struggle of grieving my mother. My adopted mother. The only mother I have only known. My Mother's Day prayer asks Jesus to help me find those places within myself which are her bests gifts to me; those places where she can live on.  With Jesus' help, I pray live in ways which offer to those in need of connection and care those gifts which were her gifts to me. Amen. 

Why I Listen

Why Blog

Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eye wastes away from grief,
my soul and body also.
For my life is spent with sorrow,
and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my misery,
and my bones waste away. (Ps. 31: 9-10)

So writes the Psalmist. The wasting of grief, the Hebrew word in both instances here is ashesh. The old King James translates it as consuming—grief so profound it consumes the body and the bones, the soul and the eyes. All human strength fails and only the grace of God offers rescue and relief.

I write because there is nothing left of my own strength, only the grace of God has lifted me above the sorrow and the sighing of a life spent dwelling in the valley of the shadow.

Life’s shadow, its sufferings and its sorrows come in many forms. For many children born into the love of adoption, myself included, there is shadow of an unspoken grief that speaks eloquent testimony to the endurance of our most early bond of love. From there the journey of this shadow came to my father lost, even before his death at all to early of an age, to an illness which slowly sucked his life even before it ceased his breath. And with his illness came the shadow of my mother lost, as well, long before her time to the ravages of alcoholism and its violent speech. Her life too dripped slowly away ending long before it’s due. After my father died all too soon, I their only child, before reaching the age of full majority, became the keeper of her life adrift in alcohol’s squalling seas—her Power of Attorney for health and goods, a mantel which quivers even the most experienced and mature.

All this while finishing an undergraduate degree in Religion and an M. Div. from a seminary a proper distance from her home.

In my marriage our three children die before they even drew a breath. In carrying the second I almost bled to my death upon the bathroom floor and at that same fate nodded with the conception of the third. All my living in those days contained the shadow of this threat as long as we tried to conceive.

I know now, but knew only then in the most hidden parts of me from myself, that for many years my husband carried on serial affairs with women trusted to his care as pastor of their congregations. When finally that knowing came to light one Sunday afternoon as I entered the empty church approaching his office door, there was nothing left to do but save myself, from the dark shadow of our lives and face the even deeper fear, Kierkegaard’s defiant despair at willing not to be myself, alone and suffering all hope of future finally dead. No parents or siblings to comfort me or ease this dark transition into the shadow world of the living of my days in grief of ever sharing heart and breath and life and hope with the child for whom I had so long longed and risked my life for the loving of one as yet untimely born.

In the desperation of my despairing heart, I turned to the pastor of my own church for comfort and support, for hope and help in the living of those dark days. His advice to me was to join another church where I would find more single people. In the dishevelment of my pain, believing I misunderstood his intent, I persisted over many months in pursuit of what I would, in time, come to know was not within him to impart. Unknowingly, I turned for compassion and support trusting my life in some of its deepest and darkest hours to a man whose office door was closed on a darkness which paralleled my own. Clergy sexual misconduct is a vile and evil thing which seeps its tentacles of betrayal and suffering, of abandonment and grief into every nook and cranny of every longing heart it touches.

Though my pastor did not violate my by body, with the help of our denomination’s local officials who knew of the affair he was having during the time I was seeing him for pastoral care and helped him keep our entire congregation in his darkness, his ignoble counsel, and my local denominational leaders violations as fiduciaries of my spiritual and emotional safety and wellbeing within the church, broke within me so many things I could not count the cost.

In the wreckage of this deep despair I journey even further into deaths shadows still and lost so many other things which were dear to me that nothing but my God could save me from the wasting of its consuming grief. And so I write of the grace which finds me on these dark shadows paths and leads into green pastures offering me rest beside still waters. In this blessedness of God my soul finds restore and the journey now within my heart prays seeking always God’s rod and staff, protection and guidance, for the living of my days. So I listen for grace wherever it is spoke. Amen.

Letter to A Dear Little One Loved Into Adoption

Dear Little One,

I just left your room. It was filled with nurses offering you their love and care. You were being rocked in the arms of our Nurse Supervisor. You are beautiful and perfect, and in these moments deeply loved and cared for. It was our Nurse Supervisor who loved you enough to bend the rules to care for you when your mother realized the greatest gift of love she could give you was to give you away.

As you grow up, in the family that will be blessed by your presence, it might be hard for you to understand how your birth mother could love you and still give you away. As strange as that might seem, it takes great love and courage to give the life of your precious child, who was nurtured in your own body and whom you cared for day and night, into the care of others who can give the child what you know you cannot.

I never met your mother, but by this one act, I know she spent many hours searching her heart and mind before she brought you here. I know that on that journey she was guided by one thing and one thing only—her deep and abiding love for you. Only in such deep and abiding love can any woman find the strength to search her own heart and mind and spirit and make the unselfish decision to give over a child of her own body into the care of strangers who can care for the wellbeing of that child in ways she has come to realize she cannot. This and your own life are the two great gifts your birth mother has given to you. You may never know what legacy of hers you have come into as far as temperament, talent, physical characteristic and intellect. What you can know is that in your heart is her heart, for you once shared the same blood, and from her heart on this day has come an act of love and compassion, courage and unselfishness which prays only for you and that you may grow and mature into a adult who can make real in your own life these same great gifts. With her heart you are never alone for she will always be a part of you.

This world can seem a difficult place sometimes, and though I pray it will not be for many, many years, you will at points in your life feel alone and afraid. That is simply the lot of we human beings share. When you face those times with whatever other comforts you may come to know along the way of your life, my prayer for you is that you know your birth mother for her gift of love and that you be comforted by the knowledge that when you could not care for yourself you were delivered into the arms of those who could. Though they did not know you, they loved and cared for you with the same tenderness and devotion as if you had been born to them. With their hearts you are never alone and yours will always be a part of theirs as well.

Know, dear Little One that the hearts and prayers of all who have been called to care for you are with you all your days.

God’s best all the days of your life,