Category Archives: forgiving yourself

Grace to Mothers (and Fathers) Grieving Aborted Babies

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by in emotional needs, forgiving yourself, Free to Love, God's healing love, grief and loss, healing after abortion, Mother's Day, Regret transformed, the healing journey, The power of honest sharing

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Sunset sky

Mother’s Day is painful for many people, for the bereaved, the childless, and those who suffer from post-abortion grief.

A few years ago I found my mother’s birth family, including three cousins, living not far from me. Recently I visited one male cousin the same age as me (he’s a Baby Boomer and Vietnam Vet, if that gives you an idea of our age).

Though he’s been married more than once, he has no children. Speaking of that fact, he got a little misty-eyed. Then he pointed to a memento sitting atop his TV: a ceramic baby booty. He said it represents a baby he fathered that the mother didn’t allow to come to birth. I know there’s always more to the story, and it’s true I don’t really know much about this “new” cousin’s past. I don’t know what that young woman years ago was going through, either.

I saw the tear in my cousin’s eye, though. And I heard the wistfulness in his voice when he told me he believed there was a child of his that he would meet in Heaven.

I was touched by the emotions of this man, over something that happened several decades ago.

A huge number of abortions have occurred in the years since abortion was legalized in America. If you believe as most Christians do, that babies and young children who die before the age of accountability go to Heaven; and if you believe that unborn babies are persons with eternal souls; then you believe as I do that all those aborted babies will be in Heaven. Perhaps they’ve been growing and developing in the nurture of Jesus and loving saints. Then, what a host of beloved children are waiting there.

My cousin obviously believes and hopes to meet his one child someday in the heavenly realms.

One of our Journeys to Mother Love contributors, Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton, has written movingly about her post-abortion experiences and healing. To my cousin and to Kyleen and to the many women and men who chose abortion when they felt trapped, hopeless, and helpless … the Lord of mercy and grace has healing, hope, and restoration for you. And He is taking care of your child. May that thought give you comfort this Mother’s Day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This video and the book it is based on, express the emotions that lead to and result from the choice of an abortion:

Forgiving Yourself — and Your Children

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, forgiving yourself, generational patterns, Guest Post, Parenting, Regret transformed, The power of honest sharing

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Woman-at-gas-pump

istock photo

At a gas station many years ago, my preteen daughter ducked her head out of the car window and popped me a question.

“What would you say if I came home pregnant?”

I was glad for the pump to hang on to and the exercise of filling the tank to divert my eyes. Since she was too young to be sexually active, I didn’t faint at that prospect. However, this was a moment I knew would eventually come, so I said, “Well, my darling, not much … because that’s exactly what I did.”

You see, that pubescent girl was once the precious baby I had carried as an unwed mother.

It was time for me to share a major mistake I had made in my youth, which she accepted without comment. (Later we could talk about the deeper ramifications.) There is never a text book time or place to share these kinds of things; but when the question is asked, it should be answered appropriately, according to the child’s level of understanding.

At the gas pump, I had a choice to deny the truth, dodge the question, or in terror of the same thing happening to her, lay down the law. I’m so glad I did not lose the opportunity to show the grace and goodness of a God who redeems every circumstance, because …

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28*).

God’s ability to turn our darkest moments into good tells me that He is God and I am not. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic wrote, “Though the soul’s wounds heal, the scars remain. God sees them not as blemishes but as honors.”

After years of hiding my soul’s scars, it was such an utter relief and joy to relinquish the protection of my own reputation. In all the years I ministered to women, I only rarely and selectively offered full disclosure, for fear that others would think less of me. (My righteousness was in my works, not in Christ.)

A close friend shared with me a few years ago that when her son was getting married and would then gain possession of his birth certificate, her husband, the father, wanted to somehow have the young man’s birth certificate changed to reflect a full nine months from the wedding until the date of the boy’s birth. This saddened her for it spoke much more about her husband’s lack of confidence in a God of forgiveness and restoration than about hiding timelines from a son conceived out of wedlock. Chances are pretty high that their son had already figured it out, anyway.

So long as we mothers have not forgiven ourselves for our past misdeeds and sins, we’ll certainly never be able to fully forgive our children for their blunders. At times, our children’s choices may leave us stunned. When your children mess up, don’t reach for the hair shirt or beat yourself up for failing. Our children are free agents and must make choices of their own. But God is there when we can’t be. And while it is appropriate that we pray for God to keep our children from evil, or at the very least take them out of the circumstances, He often permits them to travel through the storms. But remember, He also is able to deliver them—safe, though scarred; secure, though shaken; and wiser, though wounded.

Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture” (Romans 8*).

Mothers, both you and your children will make mistakes. Bring them to our heavenly Parent, who is in the business of forgiveness and restoration. He makes no mistakes!

*Scriptures quoted from The Message

Alice Scott-Ferguson is a Scottish-born freelance writer, author, and motivational speaker who lives in Arizona. She writes from her heart as a wife, mother, grandmother, and Christ-follower. Among other books, she is the author of Mothers Can’t Be Everywhere, But God Is : A Liberating Look at Motherhood, from which this post is extracted.

The Power of Sharing Your Deepest Secrets 

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in confessing our need, family gatherings, forgiving yourself, Free to Love, healing after abortion, the healing journey, The power of honest sharing

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Sad and lonely woman's face

Secret shame keeps us isolated

My parents and I were in Las Vegas the first time I shared my abortion story with them. We were there for some fun and cheering up. I had just returned from South Korea, having traveled there with my husband to teach English as a second language after we graduated from college. But now I was home from that year, my husband was still in Pusan, and we were getting a divorce. I was feeling like a failure and hurting because I suspected my husband of infidelity. I felt abandoned—just like I had felt when my unborn child’s father had told me he wanted to break off our relationship six months after we had chosen abortion for our baby.

My parents and I sat in our hotel room, talking about my failed marriage and how I felt about it. The conversation trailed off and my mom filled the silence. “Honey, I just don’t understand what happened to you. You left our home with all kinds of self confidence, but somewhere between then and now, you seem to have lost it all.”

I looked down, not really knowing what to say. I knew what had happened to me, but I had never shared it with my parents. Abortion had happened to me. I had gotten pregnant, chosen abortion, and decided I was damaged goods. The baby’s father and I had broken off our relationship, and I had met and married a man who didn’t always exhibit the highest moral character. Now, a year later, I was getting a divorce.

“I never told you guys this, but….” my voiced cracked as the flood of emotion swelled. “I got pregnant when I was a freshman in college and I had an abortion.” My silent tears began to fall. Never once meeting their eyes, I continued, “I thought I didn’t deserve anyone better, so I married Sam.”

My parents both sat in stunned silence. When I finally mustered the courage to look up again, my mom said, “You know we don’t think any less of you for making that choice, right? I probably would have suggested the same solution. But you should have told us. You shouldn’t have had to go through that alone.”

“I was so scared to disappoint you.” I said. “You were so proud of me for going to college. I didn’t want to ruin all my chances at a bright future.”

“We are proud of you,” my dad said, “and this doesn’t change that.”

My tears fell freely now. All I could manage to say was, “Thank you.” I got up from where I was sitting and hugged them both. I had imagined this conversation in my mind so many times, and this was the best scenario I could imagine. There was no judgement, only concern and love.

We talked more about what had happened. Sharing details with them was uncomfortable, but it was freeing to no longer carry such a big secret. At least they could understand now why I had seemed to lose myself.

Since then, for the past 15 years, I’ve been finding myself again. One thing I’ve discovered is telling those you love your secrets has an amazing power to free you. We keep secrets because we are afraid of rejection and judgement. But the truth is our secrets imprison us more than someone’s rejection ever could. At the end of the day, if a loved one can’t overlook a bad decision we’ve made, that is their choice,  but we don’t have to allow that to control how we feel about ourselves. Their choice does not define who I am.

Keeping a secret could, however, prevent me from being honest with the ones I love, thereby limiting the intimacy in the relationship. If you never share your whole self, both good and bad, how can you ever fully open your heart? You might not be able to count on a loved one not judging you for your past mistakes, such as an abortion. Free yourself from the secret-keeping anyway.

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

Honesty about Our Struggles is the Best Way to Help Each Other

01 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, encouraging each other, forgiving yourself, healing after abortion, Parenting, the healing journey

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KATIE cover photo

It has been too long since I posted a blog, but I was encouraged recently by an anonymous reader. She thanked me for helping her understand how her past abortion was still impacting her life. Like me, she’d spent years thinking something was wrong with her, never connecting her emotional struggles to her abortion. It saddens me how often that is the case. In the name of women’s rights, we have tried to convince women that there are no negative consequences to abortion. For some, this is true. But for others, it is not.

Strength to you, my friend, and thank God you can finally start putting the pieces together! For true healing to take place, we must first understand what needs to be healed. In post-abortion stress the pain gets camouflaged in so many other things. It’s easy to miss the connections.

For instance, I struggled with insecurities about my motherhood for years. It took a crisis in the life of one of my children for me to finally realize that no matter how hard I tried to be a great mother, I couldn’t protect my children from every pain, accident, or evil person out there. The process nearly sank me because I had been trying so hard to prove to myself that I was a good mother. Admitting that I couldn’t protect my children from evil meant admitting, in my mind, to another failure as a mother.

I know it sounds trite and naive, but I really believed I needed to do everything right. It finally occurred to me that my struggle wasn’t about the crisis in my child’s life. My struggle was about how it made me perceive myself as a mother and how my past abortion affected that. When I finally put all this together, I was able to work through my feelings much more effectively. Looking back now, I can see how irrational trying to be perfect was; but at the time, I didn’t understand the underlying motivations for my behavior.

I continue to share my story because of women like this. And, here’s to more women being honest about their struggles after abortion. It’s the best help we can give each other.

~Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT

26 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in challenges of motherhood, childhood memories, emotional needs, expectations, forgiving mom, forgiving yourself, generational patterns, God's healing love, Jesus on the cross, letting go of anger, rejecting lies, the healing journey

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flowers, mountain sillouette, and sunset

flowers, mountain silhouette, and sunset

The four of us sat in the dining room of the nursing home. Two of us had cars in the parking lot; we were free to leave any time. The other two occupied wheelchairs because their legs would not support the weight of their bodies and their minds would not support a plan as simple as how to exit the building.

I was one of the ones who would be leaving. Usually I am the only non-resident who is sitting at my mother’s table in the dining hall, but this day the daughter of another lady had come to visit. The two of us carried on a conversation between the bits and pieces of attention that we gave our mothers, those bits and pieces being all our mothers could receive.

Then, out of the blue, the other daughter made a statement. “This one,” she said, as she gestured with a sideways nod toward her mother. (“This one”! Had she just called her mother “this one”? I thought.) “Kept a perfect house,” the other daughter continued. “Beds had to be made every morning. Twice a year we had to clean everything from the ceilings to the floors.”

I looked at the woman’s mother. She is younger than my mother by 15-20 years, but oxygen tubes trailed from her nostrils. My mother, who is now 99 years old, was going strong 15-20 years ago. The lady with the oxygen tubes was oblivious to her daughter’s comment. My mind scanned its reservoir of information, searching for an appropriate response to the other daughter’s comment. (My knee-jerk reaction was, I wish my childhood home had been tidier; but I did not tell her that. My next thought was, I wonder if my children think I cared too much about the cleanliness and order? But, of course, I didn’t air that question either.) The moment passed for lack of feedback, and the conversation moved in another direction.

Soon the visit ended. It was time for my mother’s nap. I exited the building to my car in the parking lot. In the car on the way back to accomplish the rest of my list of errands, my thoughts were drawn back to the table in the dining hall. Is there anybody who wishes his or her childhood was different, and therefore, better?

It is impossible to make a perfect home, to be a perfect mother, or to be a perfect child. But that’s what our minds seem to be set on: Perfect. We really think we can accomplish perfect, or we can go through life “bent out of shape” because our childhood home was not the version of perfect we were longing to have. I know there are varying degrees of imperfection, and some people have huge hurdles to overcome.

However, we have a heavenly Father who covers us in grace. After Adam and Eve sinned, God covered them with the skins of animals. Those animals were the first creatures to know death. That act of love was a foreshadowing of the supreme act of covering with grace by the death of God’s Son, Jesus, on a cross.

God’s grace is the only way we can break the cycle of hurt—anger—hurt—anger—hurt. We might not be able to control very much in our lives, or accomplish a long list of achievements. But, we can accomplish—I believe—the greatest achievement. We can be the generation in our family that chooses to break those negative cycles for our family. We do this by forgiving and “covering each other with grace.”

~A.R. (Alice) Cecil

Relationships Can Be Complicated

07 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in challenges of motherhood, expectations, forgiving mom, forgiving yourself, generational patterns, generations coming together, Learning to appreciate Mom, the healing journey

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Catherine and her mother

That’s me and Mother (a few years ago!)

In her review on Amazon.com of Journeys to Mother Love, Judy Pex* wrote, “I would recommend this book to any woman because even if we don’t all have daughters, we do all have mothers, and from my personal experience as well as women I speak with, those relationships can often be complicated.”

When it comes to complicated relationships, Judy knows of what she speaks. Growing up Jewish in America, living most of her adult life as a Messianic believer in Israel, raising her children to believe in Yeshua (Jesus) while they attended Israeli schools and then served in the Israeli army, hosting travelers from all over the world in the hostel she and her husband, John, run. Worshiping with and caring for people from many different cultural and language backgrounds. Working with refugees. All kinds of opportunities for complicated relationships (which she navigates with grace)!

Especially fraught with opportunities for complications is the mother/child relationship, and most especially the mother/daughter relationship. Why is that?

I’m going to list some thoughts off the top of my head about what might cause those complications:

1. Perhaps mothers try to re-live their lives through their daughters. And perhaps daughters see themselves or their potential selves in their mothers, and they may or may not like what they see.

2. Unrealistic expectations.

3. Emotional dependence.

4. The need to (and not always managing to) really listen and view your daughter – or mother – as a unique individual in her own right.

I’m sure there are many more contributing factors. Maybe our readers can add their thoughts about why this mother/daughter relationship can – and often does – become so complicated.

~ Catherine Lawton

*Judy (Judith Galblum Pex) is the author of Walk the Land: A Journey on Foot through Israel and A People Tall and Smooth: Stories of Escape from Sudan to Israel.

Is Mother’s Day Painful for You?

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in encouraging each other, feeling inadequate, forgiving mom, forgiving yourself, God as our parent, the healing journey

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flowers

How many of us, if we were really honest, would admit that we don’t look forward to Mother’s Day? We dread this day devoted to celebrating mothers. It conjures up feelings of inadequacies in our own parenting or maybe how we didn’t live up to the expectations our parents had for us. Maybe it even reminds us of the shame or condemnation we felt at the hands of our parents—especially our mothers.

Mother’s Day isn’t always about bouquets of flowers or a box of chocolates for mom. Sometimes it is filled with bitter memories of a childhood loss due to abusive parents, a longing for the birth mother we never knew, or regrets from things we said or did that can’t be taken back. Maybe your mother has died and you miss her presence in your life.

Those kinds of painful memories can also leave us questioning God or turning our back on him. Ultimately, I think, Mother’s Day can leave us yearning for something more.

What is that something more? It is the filling of the hole in our heart left by unforgiveness and broken dreams. How do we fill it? Maybe we turn to alcohol, drugs or sexual fantasizing; or maybe it is to acceptable forms of addictions like busyness and people pleasing—whatever it takes to make the ache go away. Haven’t we all done it or experienced it to some degree?

To all of you daughters and mothers who are in a painful place this Mother’s Day, I empathize with you; for I used to be there too. Don’t give up hope. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV).

We can choose how we want to react to all of these circumstances. We can choose to walk in the light and hope of Christ, or we can choose to walk in the doom and gloom of the past. The past doesn’t need to define us. We have a choice.

As believers, we belong to the family of God, the body of Christ. If we don’t have a mother who bonded with us or nurtured us in loving ways, we can still get that kind of nurturing from our spiritual family and friends. Our family of birth does not have to define us. It is Christ and the family of God that define our identity.

Every day can be a day to celebrate mothers, if we view it from God’s perspective. Choose joy.

Dear brothers and sisters, I close my letter with these last words: Be joyful. Grow to maturity. Encourage each other. Live in harmony and peace. Then the God of love and peace will be with you (2 Corinthians 13:11, NLT).

~ Ardis A. Nelson

The Law of Love

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Adopted children, forgiving yourself, God's healing love, healing after abortion, losing mom too soon, stepmom relationship, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

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"Death Was Cheated" - newspaper clipping

Ellen Cardwell, a “miracle” baby “born” after her mother died

Is the pre-born baby a “person” created by God with a soul that will live forever? Two of the stories in Journeys to Mother Love touch on this subject.

Ellen Cardwell shares the story of how her mother died suddenly while taking a Sunday afternoon stroll when she was pregnant full-term with Ellen. A popular attitude of the times was that the unborn baby should be left to die with the mother. A caring doctor, though, performed an emergency operation on the deceased mother and took the baby out, resuscitating her to life. The story appeared on the front page of the Oakland Tribune (see photo above).

For Ellen, the mother/child relational healing she experienced later, had to do with relating to and forgiving her stepmother, who had led Ellen to believe she was her birth mother.

In another memoir included in Journeys to Mother Love, Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton tells how, as a frightened, pregnant college student, she chose abortion—and then the resulting emotional pain, cancer, and barrenness she experienced when, in a loving marriage, she longed for children.

The mother/child healing aspect of Kyleen’s story had to do with her “relationship” with the unborn, aborted child who she came to think of as a person with a name; with her relationship with her stepchild; and with her own need to forgive herself.

These are both powerful stories. They show how important to God is every person he creates. And though we are called “mortal beings” because our bodies will die, there is a part of us that will not die. These stories also show that we are each individuals but tied together with bonds stronger than death.

When it comes to personhood and abortion, I believe we should vote and work for just and biblical laws. But I also believe that man’s law and God’s law are not the same. It is a worthy goal to want man’s laws to be based on God’s laws. But it is not the main goal. Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law. And he said that the greatest commandment was to love (see Matthew 22:37-39). When we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, we also love what he has created.

I’m thankful the doctor in Oakland, California honored God and the life he created when he allowed Ellen to be “born”; and I’m thankful for the love and forgiveness the Lord has given Ellen for her mother and stepmother, and for the hope she has of fellowship with them in Heaven.

I’m also thankful that God the Father welcomes into his presence the babies aborted and robbed of a life on earth. And he has shown his love for Kyleen by giving to her children to adopt and love as well as peace concerning the child conceived in her own body, whom she anticipates meeting face to face in Heaven.

The second part of Jesus’ great commandment is that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” When we live by that law of love — and see our mothers and our children as our “neighbors” — our stories are transformed.

~Catherine Lawton