I'll Take the Baby Now: A Birth Mother's Amazing Story

3:5-6

Prologue

I am a 74-year-old woman—wife, daughter, mother, and grandmother—embarking on a journey to relay the story of my life. My hope is that it may serve as an inspiration to others. In the nearly eight decades which the Lord has blessed me with life, I have learned that failing is a prerequisite to succeeding. Tremendous personal struggle oftentimes supersedes happiness. Through my own share of sinking to murky depths and of falling to the ground numerous times, I have humbly learned that through the doorway of intense heartache is the threshold to inner-peace. Praise God!

My life’s story is any mother’s story; it is universal to all mothers. Through a series of personal vignettes, I entail the pathway of my motherhood and the struggles I have faced. The people and circumstances described may be unique, but the emotional journey is not. (In some cases I have altered names and other details to protect privacy.)

When we come into this world as baby girls, we don’t arrive pre-programmed with a how-to manual for later years. We watch our mothers and learn by their instincts and examples, but even that doesn’t prepare us adequately. We learn by doing: Sink or swim, fly or fall.

The beauty of motherhood is experienced not only in those special moments of holding your smiling infant close to your heart, of wiping away your toddler’s tears, or of seeing your adult child graduate from college. It also encompasses hitting those deepest depths, when life is pulling you apart and you don’t know why. It is in those moments of darkest despair, when you don’t know how to go on, but somehow through prayer and the grace of God you salvage enough grit, enough tinsel strength, enough staying power to take that next step, for that next step is—at times—your greatest triumph.

By wringing out one last drop of inspiration from a weary heart, that’s how you go on. By acting on that one last idea from a tired mind, that’s how you win. By blindly facing down your fears even when you want to run the other way, that’s how you grow. The winning is in the shadow of losing. All it takes is faith the size of a mustard seed. All it takes is a single, fleeting instant of genuine belief.

The pages herein contain, by necessity, a spiritual thread. I cannot relay these things in any other way. Prior to 1987, I had always believed in God and knew about his Son but never took the added step of committing my life to Christ, nor of finding a true church home. It wasn’t until I was mid-way through a five-year Bible study that the Holy Spirit (as I found out later) moved me to find a church and accept Jesus as my Savior. Three years later, I traveled to Israel and was baptized in the Jordan River.

In looking back on the years that have passed since that calling, I know the Spirit moved me at that time for a reason. My life, already with its challenges, afterward turned excruciatingly difficult. Surely He knew what lay ahead. Because He knocked and stirred my heart to listen, I must exclaim, Thank you, Jesus. Without having Him in my life, I would have most certainly succumbed to the tremendous physical and emotional tsunamis that shook my body, my life and my being to its absolute core.

It is only through Him that I have endured, and it is by His glory that I have a message to share. The sum of my travails has wreaked havoc upon my health, yet through it all—in the quiet midst of my hurt—a wisp of transcendence has often visited me: The next breath we take, the next blink of our eyes, the next beat of our hearts, holds within it the promise of a new day and a new beginning. Thank you, Lord.

I didn’t always know that. I didn’t know it as a little girl in Lawrence, Kansas, when a stranger in a darkened movie theater came over and put his hand on my knee. I didn’t know this as a teenager in Raytown, Missouri, when I was quickly stripped of the first of my four children, never to see him again.

Nor had I discovered it by the early 1970s, when as a mother of the last three and married to a diabolical drunkard in rural Johnson County, Kansas, I would shake at night with fear and hatred for that man next to me in bed, always stinking of booze and snoring like a buzz saw. Drunks never remember the night before, but their spouses can never forget.

It did not happen in the last decades of the twentieth century, either, when I began battling the cancer that would visit me three times; the first time in the form of melanoma and later as breast cancer that would eventually require a double-mastectomy. Nor did I realize it by the late 1990s, when my eldest of the three became but a cranky, hollowed shell of himself, slowly losing his battle with diabetes. He lost his eyesight, his kidneys, half a leg and a hand to the ravages of that disease. He had injections scars all over his body from the insulin port. When he ultimately succumbed, I thanked God.

Not long after the first of my three had died, and for separate reasons, my other son’s life unraveled to the point that he felt it necessary to end his misery permanently. It is ironic that such an exquisitely sensitive soul as his failed to consider what his suicide would do to those nearest him. How insensitive of him to take his own life! The shock is never really overcome, the adjustment is never really completed, the tears never really stop.

During the same period of time, my daughter was discovered as having arteriovenous malformation in the brain, which is a mass of twisted arteries and blood vessels that requires surgery to untangle and reconnect. Two surgeries successfully corrected the problem, but afterward she no longer had the same level of cognition as before. Aware of her own impairments and still able to recall her previous abilities, she became an angry and depressed woman, addicted to drugs and alcohol. I don’t need to explain the rest.

In the first few years of the new millennium, I watched as my three grown children, in their different ways, at their different times, suffered indignant and untimely deaths. None of them had yet reached forty-five years of age. In the space of just six years, I went from being a proud mother of three to being a sad and lonely mother of none.

I am not looking for pity, though sometimes I grope for understanding in a world that has left me numbed. Was all of this God’s way of punishing me? Was such darkness being delivered unto me by the same entity I worshipped, that one supernatural source from which I sought refuge? In the depths of my being, I knew the answer was no. I don’t believe in an angry God that looks to condemn the world or to curse man. I refuse to diminish the natural value and worthiness of all humanity in the eyes of our Creator. Instead, I take refuge in a God of great love, inconceivable compassion and transcendent wisdom. My faith in His undying benevolence is my greatest salvation.

On good days and bad, I remember to content myself knowing that sometimes life unfolds in mysterious ways; entire lifetimes can unfold in ways we least expect. I believe the answer is to place our trust in something much greater than ourselves and our surrounding circumstances. Faith is the only absolute solace. It is up to us to nurture it, foster it and let it grow from within the heart of our hearts. Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.—Hebrews 11:1, NIV.

In the circumstances of our daily existence, we can’t always perceive the trajectory of an approaching curve ball until we’re all knuckled up by it, swiping at thin air, feeling awkward and inadequate. More than one curve ball might come. In fact, they may come one after another after another … In our being human, we are left standing there feeling stunned, mystified and finally just angered—thinking we knew the game inside and out, but realizing that the sum of our knowledge, skills and experiences may not be enough to adeptly and adroitly handle every situation that life throws at us.

I believe life is meant to teach us lessons, and sometimes we are meant to experience hardship. A seedling must first push its way through the darkness of earth before it can experience the brightness of day. A caterpillar must seal itself in a dark cocoon and lose its identity before it can emerge, born again, as a beautiful butterfly.

It is by virtue of our blindness and our doubts that we learn to place our trust in Him. It is when we are hurting, or when we feel alone and vulnerable, or when we long for achievement and fulfillment, that we learn to rely on faith. If we could see clearly what lies ahead at all times, there would be much less need and incentive for us to place our trust in the Lord. Trusting the Lord is a process, learned through our struggles, maintained through our surrender and perfected through our commitment.

For the majority of my life I had unknowingly suffered from severe attention deficit. Harsh bouts of depression affected me as well. The combination of these conditions made parenting a tremendous challenge at times, and, I openly confess, regularly short-changed my children. In spite of these impairments, I have also been blessed with fleeting moments of lucid knowledge, when the world becomes calm, incredibly clear and the light shines brightly. Storms pass, stillness returns, all is well. I am inclined to believe that even those things about ourselves which we aren’t aware of serve a greater purpose and are meant to be.

I know not what the ultimate lessons are, but I do know that God has a plan for us all. In my older years, through Him, by Him and in Him, I have been brought to the other side of pain and have experienced a blessing as large and transcending as the original break of day, that very first dawn when God ordained, ‘Let there be Light,’ and there was Light. –Genesis 1: 3, NIV. I refer to what had been six decades of emptiness. Suddenly and magically that emptiness was filled the only way it could be; a deep yearning, closer to me than my own shadow, was gloriously satisfied; a life-long thirst miraculously quenched.

Praise the Lord for all things!

Life’s challenges and its glories give us reason to embrace Him, the Shepherd of our lives, our Savior, the one who loves us and protects us and leads us to fertile pastures and to clear, crisp waters. It is not the Shepherd’s fault that a lone sheep may get hurt, tossed about by the wind, or lost in a furious blizzard. But it is by His glory that He rescues each and every lamb that seeks to join or re-join His fold.

So when do wisdom and peace come? When does all the learning that’s harvested alongside the adventures of our lives manifest into something of meaning or significance? Self-illumination does come, but I believe its arrival happens at a unique point in time and space for every living soul. God bless you.

Cheryl Allenbrand

Overland Park, Kansas

Cheryl

Chapter 1

I would never see my baby again.

The nurses had let me hold him just once—barely long enough to sense his sweet smell and take a peek at his tiny toes and his little, jerky arms that were flailing in the air. The only thing I saw in that instant was that he looked like his father. Then they took him away from me, whisked him out of the room and out of my life forever.

I’ll take the baby now, the nurse said and paused.

Once again, Honey, I’ll have to take the baby now.

Those words were seared into my mind. And she did take him away and he was gone forever. Although my family and I believed in what we were doing, the sudden separation of mother and child felt brutal—an invalidation of the nine months that the two of us had spent being a part of each other, growing together, being as one.

There were times when I was sure it was a very large baby, by the way it kept kicking me in the ribs constantly. But, earlier, the first flutter of life was really amazing: It felt like little eyelashes tickling me inside my stomach. I knew the sacrifice that I had to make, but giving birth to the being that I had come to know within me—then to be quickly and deliberately stripped of him—was unbearable.

I had so many mixed feelings. There was the sadness and confusion alternating with a sincere happiness and leap of faith that he would be better off being adopted by loving parents who were older and more economically prepared. Most of all, I just wanted his new parents to love him and give him a perfect life.

That little boy was my first child, born in June of 1954, when Dwight Eisenhower was President, when McCarthyism was fading away, when Sports Illustrated made its debut and when the smash hit, Rock Around the Clock, was first heard on the airwaves. I was all of fifteen years old, which means I conceived when I was fourteen—a mere child. Little did I know what was in store for me.

I was a sophomore at Raytown High School, on the eastern outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. This was when the Raytown High football team often beat much larger schools and Coach Ted Chittwood was on his way toward a legendary career.

Randy, the baby’s father, was three years older than me and smiled every time he