Thursday morning arrived. I took Zoe over to my parents earlier than normal so I could be home at 9:30 to check my email. Elliott was good on his promise. There was an email in my inbox waiting for me. I was not exactly sure what to expect. All kind of thoughts had been running through my head during the week. I had prepared myself to accept the fact that he was going to tell me not to contact him anymore. Instead, when I opened the email, he told me he had lost my number and asked me to call him.
So I did.
I dialed the number he gave me and as the phone rang, there was a queasy feeling in my stomach. A man answered, and I could quickly tell from the tone of his voice that he was a bit nervous. I asked him about how he was feeling, and he said it was all a bit strange. I agreed with him and we shared a bit of a timid laugh.
He told me that his wife did not want him talking to me, but he did not think that was fair. He had told her this and never promised her that he would not talk to me. He felt it only right that I know my story, so to not be in her face about it, he waited to talk to me until she was gone to her Bible study that she went to weekly.
He again told me that he was not certain that he was my father. I assured him I understood that, and that I was willing to do whatever he needed to help him be certain, but there was no rush.
He then began to tell me a bit about himself. How he grew up and about his college days. He told me about his time in the service.
And then he told me about how he met my birth mother.
It wasn't the romance novel relationship that I had often wondered about. It also wasn't the affair of my birth mom with a married boss that had also crossed my mind. And it definitely was not a rape.
Rather, it was a story of indiscretion as my birth mom had been brought into his home as a friend of the girl his roommate was seeing. Carol had made herself readily available to Elliott that day and he willingly had taken her up on the opportunity. This incident turned into a "convenient understanding," you might say, as Carol and her friend quickly convinced the boys that it would be so much easier if they all just cohabitated. This continued for a few weeks, until one night Carol went to a work party and didn't come home afterwards. She had not stayed in her apartment in town, which was her original plan, as she phoned the next morning asking her friend to bring her the key to the apartment that she had left at the house. When Elliott realized what was going on, he immediately kicked her out. He had hoped that they would become serious about their relationship, but when this happened, he realized that was not the case with her.
Not long afterwards, Carol came to Elliott saying that she was pregnant and that he was the one responsible for this. He felt set up and trapped. She had told him she was on birth control. It just didn't feel right to him and since he knew she had been "friendly" with more than one person, he just couldn't believe the child was his, even though he knew it was a possibility.
He consulted with a lawyer who advised him to give her some of the money she was asking for to take care of the adoption and have her sign an agreement that said he would not be held responsible for the child.
And for forty plus years he had believed that child didn't belong to him.... until he received my letter.
As we both were there on the phone, talking and trying to work through our own emotions of this moment, he said to me, "I may not understand why all this happened, but this one thing I know, God created you to be a gift to your parents."
And with that, tears filled my eyes. Because with that one statement, I knew that he understood, I was not an accident, I was planned.
There was a hole in my heart that was healed that day. A hole that for so long I never realized existed. But God knew, and He being the healer that He is, brought it to be. All praise be to Him.
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