An Invitation to Walk a Path of Healing Again

To My Dearest Fellow Birth Mothers,

I haven’t written to you since the end of 2019. I tried to push myself to keep writing, but life became what seemed like all too much for me.

By the end of that year, I had been through a cancer diagnosis and treatment resulting in a loss that has prevented me from bringing life into the world again, and the end of a marriage in a difficult divorce. After these experiences, I couldn’t access the hope in my heart in the same way I had been able to previously when I would bear my soul for you. So, I made what was a very humbling decision for me: I decided to take a break from writing.

Stepping away from writing, for me, meant much more than not writing articles about hope for healing for birth mothers who have chosen adoption like me. It meant closing my heart off for a while to process a lot of anger, disappointment, pain, trauma, and basically for me to fall completely apart as a human being.

Looking back now, it was the best choice I could have made for myself and my own journey of healing. Sometimes, you need time to process the broken pieces before you begin to put it all back together. If you are a birth mother, too, then you may know what I mean.

It is so very important to me that when I write, I share my heart with others and not just fill pages with words that I can’t even relate to because I’m too shut down to reach the love that swells within my soul. It is from my depths of experience that I have written; then and now I speak to you again from my heart. I have missed writing but, often, self-care means knowing our limitations and honoring those weaknesses that are what makes us delicate, yet lovely, human beings.

Having weaknesses and flaws is what makes us human, and there is no greater self-care technique than honoring the frail yet resilient beings that we are. We also all have strengths in our own unique ways that make us human as well. This is why it is so vital that we come to a place of truly knowing ourselves and not focus on comparing who we are to others.

Only you can be the special you that the world needs. I have had to come to this place over the past few years. But, it was not an easy journey.

The hardships I had ensured seemed like too much, and I started stuffing all the bad feelings deep down into the depths of my soul in unhealthy habits. Where I had once found hope, I stored up pain and could no longer see or touch that hope beyond my own anguish.

It wasn’t until the end of 2021 that I realized I had crawled deep into a rabbit hole of darkness and self-loathing. Through a personal faith journey, I realized that only God Himself could pull me out of. When I finally surrendered to the end of myself; He did.

I have spent over a year on a new level of the journey of healing that my life has been called to. I have met and married my soulmate. I have sought faith in God to a wondrous depth that I can barely begin to convey. I completely removed myself from toxic relationships that I had held on to for dear life before.

I deleted all my social media profiles and have yet to return to that landscape. I have been learning to sit in peace and quiet to deal with myself. I have begun to allow myself to feel and talk about the pain that I had stored and protected so tightly deep inside of me to begin to make room for the hope within me to be found once again. I have been brought to a whole new space of appreciating the life I have today.

If you are reading this today and wondering if healing is possible, know this: Although the road is long, there can be a brighter future ahead for you.

My tagline from the start of writing about spiritual healing for birth mothers has been, “Healing is a journey, not a destination.”

Sometimes, we move backwards before we can begin to move forward again. And I took quite a few steps in the wrong direction before I was able to get back on my own healing path. However, I truly see now the value in admitting that we are only human. Our lives are not meant to be fortresses that we build out of fear or pride. We are not meant to fortify towers of pain within ourselves, only to mortar walls that end up keeping others out and trapping any hope of love in a place that not even we can find.

Knowing our limitations and honoring them is the beginning of wisdom. Whether I would have been lost for so long if I had honored that or not is irrelevant. It is what it is. The truth for me is that once I allowed the pain of difficulties to overcome my good heart, I couldn’t share the hope of healing with you anymore because, for a while, I couldn’t find it for myself.

My life can be a testimony if I choose to live it as such, and so can yours.

My name is Lindsay Arielle. I am a birth mother. There is more to my story than pain. I hold hope that no matter what challenges we may face in this lifetime, there can always be healing in the journey. Will you walk with me again?

-Lindsay Arielle

Lindsay Arielle is a guest blogger for Considering Adoption. She placed her son for adoption more than a decade ago. Over the years, Lindsay has chronicled her post-placement healing walk via her writing to share her experience, strength and hope with other birth mothers on their own paths of healing. Lindsay’s blogs boldly reflect that, “Healing is a journey, not a destination.”