It had been 3 years since my parents had split up when I opened the drawer of the old German cabinet that stood in the living room of our little home in the city. I had noticed the cardboard for the first time, curious, I gave it a nudge and it moved, lifting it with ease I found some papers underneath.

A birth certificate and a passport and DNA request papers

I looked at them and put them back. My name was on them but I didn’t understand. That day my life changed and I wandered wayward wasting for the next 10 years.  My identity and foundation lost all in a set of papers causing me to be confused and perplexed and torn wide open.

So what does a highly cerebral, deep thinking, 13 year old girl who watched murder mysteries and cop shows do? I began stealthily asking questions to uninhibited family members who were prone to speak out of turn and one day an answer  just flew and flattened me right out.

She said “you should be glad, he is not your dad!”

I was ripped in half on that day as this confirmation suddenly flung two Me’s into a dual, one crushed that I should be glad and the other  liberated from the feeling that I had felt all my life, that I’d felt like I didn’t   quite fit in this family and now I knew why. My mind spun into overdrive, finding understanding for looks and feelings and bits of history that made no sense. They were quick tongued to hide it but my heart was quicker in knowing the truth was not being told.

These papers showed that I had a last name I had never heard before. The DNA papers were a request from “my dad” asking to prove paternity. I felt abandoned and unwanted. I felt lost.

Now the truth was out and my soul had a cave of aching in it. What does a girl with no identity or foundation or father do? When there is no mother who nurtures because her pain is a great cave too, when there is no father to catch you when you fall, when there is not a foundation to stand on that is steady and strong, when there is no identity in your eyes of belonging, when the mirror grows agonizing and empty and cold???

The heart knows what to do? Search for a Savior

But when a young girl knows no Jesus and never heard of the God who loves. The girl searches for a savior, for love in all the wrong places.

It was after 8th grade that summer when we were staying with my mothers cousin a lot. Her neighbors older son was 21. He would come over and hang out with all us teens and preteens while the adults partied. He showed a lot of attention to me that I had long been starving for and It wasn’t long before I had ran away for a month of that summer, to stay with him and gave away myself in the process.

Looking back and being a mom now. It all seems so wrong. He ought to be ashamed of himself taking advantage of a young girl like that. And me… well, I remember faking like I was old enough for that. Behaving like I was whole and in complete control of my mind, when really  I was a broken needy teenage girl. I remember being scared and worried but deeply aware of the fear of rejecting him and this so called “love” he offered and him hating me.

I knew what I felt….My dad rejected me -asked for paternity – and I hated him for it. I didn’t want to do that to someone else. Sadly my young self didn’t understand discernment and wisdom and proper application for such emotions.

One day toward the end of the month I stopped at home. When I called him, he didn’t answer. When I showed up at his house, he didn’t live there anymore. I was so lost and sad. I was broken all over again. Thinking I was unloved and abandoned again.

I found out some 20 years later that my family had intervened and never told me. They just told him he better move and lose my number or he would be in jail.

I know they meant well…and I understand now why they would do that being a parent myself. But they all left me lost and empty 13 year old girl. This is why when I am dealing with situation in life I seek out this stuff….the lies….the background story…the understanding of what is happening….the TRUTH sets us free. We each have our own story of when this world and its troubles come to break us into pieces. 

It would be 10 years after I’d found those papers, after I had met my husband, that God called me to himself in my 7th month of being pregnant and I said “ Yes Lord!”

I haven’t felt Fatherless since! 

I never was for He had been writing my story all along.

What a great Redeemer we have in Jesus!

He is my WHO in the midst of a pile of WHY’s!!!

~Starla

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