A love that keeps on loving

When I was 19 years old I had a child. Since I was unmarried, my pregnancy was a source of great shame and secrecy in my family. I was living at home with my parents at the time, and I moved away to live with my sister and her husband until after the baby was born and arrangements were made for me to give my child up for adoption.

When I first saw my son at the hospital after giving birth, I loved him more deeply than I knew possible. It was excruciating to give him up to his adoptive parents and sign papers stipulating that I would never be allowed to see or contact him again. While I knew I had made the best decision for his well-being and future, I felt a hopeless sense of separation and sadness for the next several years. I grieved daily, as deeply as if my child had passed on. I also struggled with the weight of this huge secret, and I lived with a sense of shame and guilt for having put my family through this experience.

Years later, I brought Christian Science into my life when discussions with a co-worker led to my deep interest in learning more about my relationship with God. My co-worker was a Christian Scientist, and although I had heard of Christian Science before, I had never known anything about its teachings.

As I began to study Christian Science, I learned of God’s unconditional and nonjudgmental love for me and for all of His children. I was so grateful for the understanding that God, divine Love itself, actually loves me and had never condemned me or seen me as anything less than His/Her good child. As a result, I began to forgive myself for the mistakes I’d made.

Although the complete healing of guilt took several years, I was also able to overcome to some degree the daily worry about my son. Was he happy? Was he healthy and safe? Was he loved and adored by his adoptive parents? As my understanding of God’s infinite love grew, I was able to trust that God, the only real Parent, was tenderly loving and caring for my son; that my child could never be separated from divine Love and the tenderness or joy of that Love.

Still, I struggled with wanting to know my son. What did he look like? What made him laugh? Did he hate me for giving him up? Did he understand that I loved him? On his 18th birthday, I hit a new low. I realized that I had missed all the important milestones in his life: his first words, his first steps, his first day of school, his high school graduation, and so on. These moments are gone forever, I thought. I had been cheated out of them all.

Yet, deep down, I knew the answer for my despair was to gain a more selfless sense of love. I began a renewed effort to love my son unconditionally. I remembered Christ Jesus’ experience in the garden of Gethsemane, where his followers fell asleep and failed to keep watch while he prayed. Ultimately Jesus was arrested by Roman soldiers. Yet Jesus continued to love, even his enemies. I thought deeply about Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual definition of Gethsemane: “Patient woe; the human yielding to the divine; love meeting no response, but still remaining love.”

The last part of the definition stood out to me: love meeting no response, but still remaining love. That is true love. I then realized that the greatest gift I could give my son was to simply love him from a distance. It didn’t matter if he didn’t know that I loved him or if he didn’t want to love me in return. I knew that we would both be blessed merely by my loving him. This realization freed me from angst and worry and from the need to feel loved in return. For the first time in years—actually decades—I began to feel a real sense of joy in day-to-day life. I could think of my son without any feelings of sadness.

A couple of years later at the office, a letter that I had hoped would come for 27 years appeared in my mail from the agency that had handled my son’s adoption. The letter asked me to contact them. I knew it meant only one thing: My son had initiated a search for me.

The next day I contacted the agency and spoke with the caseworker. She told me that when my son had initiated the search almost a year earlier, they’d asked him to write me a letter, which she offered to read. It was a beautiful letter in which my son told me about his wonderful family, about his life experiences, and about the things he loved. He had had a full, happy life and he had always been deeply loved. It was everything that I had ever hoped it would be. He closed by thanking me for the gift of life I had given him.

As I listened to my son’s words, I experienced a total, instantaneous healing. All the shame, all the guilt and recrimination and grief disappeared, and I felt the greatest joy I’ve ever experienced.

During the next few weeks and months we exchanged a flurry of letters and emails. Then came long phone calls, and finally his first trip to my city, when I got to see him face to face for the first time since his birth.

As I stood in the baggage claim area of the airport, watching him emerge from the revolving door and walk toward me with his arms open wide, I realized I hadn’t missed out on anything: My son’s first words to me were “thank you,” as I watched him take his first steps toward me. These were milestones I could treasure forever!

Over the next few months, I also corresponded with his mom and dad, who were gracious and loving and had totally supported my son in his search for me. In fact, they had told him about me when he was very young and had always explained to him that I had loved him deeply.

A year and a half after our initial reunion, my son and his family flew me to the city where they live and held an open house so I could meet his parents, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. When I arrived, they welcomed me into their family. Many of them had contributed photos from my son’s childhood for an album they presented to me. The very first photo in the album was taken the day his parents brought him home from the agency. There he was, in the same little outfit he was wearing when I held him for the first time. It was the image of him I had carried in my heart for 27 years.

The collection of photos, covering his infancy through his graduation from college, was priceless to me. When I spent time going through them, I truly understood the words from one of my favorite hymns in the Christian Science Hymnal: “He [the Christ] comes to give thee joy for desolation, / Beauty for ashes of the vanished years” (No. 412).

Everything I thought I had missed about my son’s childhood had been restored to me because the love his parents had for him was boundless and selfless enough to include me in its embrace. I realized that my efforts to love my son unconditionally had been returned to me a hundredfold.

My relationship with my son (now a chiropractor in Chicago) has grown and deepened during the years since we were reunited. We are so close, in fact, that I have almost no sense of ever having been separated from him. And this is the spiritual reality after all: we can never be separated from those whom we love because God is Love, and we are united forever with one another in this Love.

Sharon Sedlacek lives in Dallas, Texas, United States.

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