by Alana Terry
“How many kids do you guys have?” Kennedy asked. When Carl led her parents’ church back in New York, she remembered the Lindgrens having a large family, but she could never keep track of how many there were.
Carl and Sandy exchanged frowns and both gave different answers at the same time.
“Thirteen.”
“Six.”
They chuckled, and Sandy reached over to pat Kennedy’s arm. “We did foster care, and then we adopted some at different ages.”
“The correct answer,” Carl answered with his mouth stuffed with cinnamon roll, “is three biological, three adopted, and a whole lot of other sons and daughters of the heart, even if the state doesn’t recognize them.”
“Well, and some of them wouldn’t claim us anymore, either,” Sandy added, taking a sip of tea.
Kennedy looked from one to the other but could only guess at the chaos, the heartache, the drama, the fullness, the joy that had been the Lindgrens’ family life. She wondered if either one would say any more, but they were both staring at their plates quietly. Had Kennedy said something wrong? Had she opened old wounds?
“And how many grandkids?” she finally asked. Wasn’t that a subject grandparents loved to talk about? She remembered Pastor Carl’s office, all the hand-drawn pictures and professional portraits he had up of his grandchildren.
“Five,” he mumbled into his mug.
Sandy raised her eyes to meet Kennedy’s. “Six,” she corrected softly. “Five here with us, and one little one with the angels in heaven.”
Carl took a loud gulp of coffee and clunked his mug on the table. “That was delicious, dear.” He scooted his chair back noisily and kissed Sandy on top of her head. “It’s been a long night.”
Kennedy frowned. Why was he leaving so abruptly?
Sandy took his hand in hers, and a tender look passed between them. “You sure?”
His face softened. “You know me, baby. I get grumpy without my beauty rest.” He gave a little wink and kissed his wife once more. “Love you.”
Sandy pecked his hand before letting it go. “I won’t be long.”
“Yes, you will,” he laughed. “Just don’t keep Kennedy up. Remember, she’s had the hardest day of all of us.”
“I’ll behave myself,” Sandy promised and blew him a kiss.
The floorboards creaked under Carl’s weight as he shuffled down the hall.
Kennedy stared into her plate, uncertain what she had done to make Carl leave. “I’m really sorry.” She kept her voice low so he wouldn’t overhear. “I didn’t realize …”
“Of course you didn’t, sweetie.” Sandy stood up and brought the platter of cookies over to the table. She set two more in front of Kennedy without asking. “Of course you didn’t.” Sandy swept her hair over her shoulder and sat down with a loud sigh. “Have I ever told you about our daughter, Blessing?”
CHAPTER 21
“Carl was doing campus ministry when we met,” Sandy began. “Anyway, we got married and knew right away we would have a big family. We just figured between us and the Lord we had plenty of love to share, and that’s what we wanted to do.
“So our first two kids were born while Carl was serving as a campus minister, and our youngest came when his daddy was just starting seminary. Well, like I said, we thought we’d keep on having more and more, but I had some complications delivering Justice. Pretty major ones, actually. So we knew we God had closed the door for us, at least biologically speaking.
“Well, it was right around that time when I read a report about Romania and the orphans there, and I showed it to Carl, and we both decided that was the next step for our family. We wanted to do everything just right. I talked with some folks who had adopted from overseas, read up on the subject. Prayed our heads off. I still remember the day I walked the kids to the post office to mail out our application packet. I was more nervous than I had been on my wedding day. And I was talking to the kids — they were still little, but we talked about it all the time. Talked to them about how we could open our home to a new brother or a new sister, and they had so many questions, and our little girl Bridget wanted to know what orphanage she had come from, which of course led to all kinds of interesting discussions.”
Sandy smiled at the memory. “And then we waited.”
Kennedy remembered how hard it was waiting to hear back from all the colleges she applied to. That had been torturous enough.
“Three weeks later, we got our notice in the mail.” Sandy glanced down at the table and ran her napkin over an imaginary smudge. “The adoption agency declined our application. Romania wasn’t open for interracial couples to adopt.”
Kennedy leaned forward in her seat. “What? That’s ridiculous.”
Sandy shook her head slowly. “The sad thing was, after all we had been through already, neither of us were that surprised. Disappointed … absolutely. Felt like one of our children was stolen. But surprised? Well, let’s just say Carl and I had seen a lot worse by then.”
“Like what?” Kennedy had studied the American Civil Rights movement in high school, but it always felt like any other period of history — long-ago events that only historians and a few great-grandparents remembered or cared about. She counted back the decades. Had Carl and Sandy lived through that tumultuous mess?
Sandy sighed loudly. “Oh, it’s no secret what we’ve been through. But it’s not necessarily the happiest of subjects.”
Kennedy took the hint and tried to remember how the conversation had turned down this depressing rabbit-trail in the first place. “Well, what about your daughter?” she asked. “Blessing, you said her name was?”
A smile shined through the darkness that had obscured Sandy’s face. “That’s right. Blessing. See, after the whole Romania incident, we stopped thinking about formal adoptions. We figured until the world was ready to give us the same parental rights they gave any other adoptive family, well, we weren’t going to put ourselves out there to get hurt dozens of times all over again.” She chuckled. “So we became foster parents.”
Kennedy didn’t know what was so funny about the remark but offered a little smile.
“Well, that first year I forget just how many kids we had. See, some were through the system, but then others heard we had an open-door policy, and boy, did we see some beautiful children those first years. Our own kids loved it. They were all little social bugs. All loved having temporary brothers and sisters to live and play with. Always cried when they left. All of us did.”
She glanced down the hallway at the long rows of photographs before continuing. “Anyway, like I said, at that point we weren’t looking into formal adoption. We just figured the Lord would send us the kids that needed a home, and we’d take care of them for however long God needed us to. Well, it wasn’t as easy as all that. Politics, CPS, ugly custody battles …”
Her voice trailed off. Kennedy didn’t know much about the foster system but sensed it must be trying to bring in kids like that, never knowing how long they’d stay, never knowing what kind of baggage they carried with them.
“Anyway, we got Blessing when she was twelve years old. We had just started the Redemption Temple church plant in New York at that point. Times weren’t easy, and money was especially tight that year, but we got the call and knew we had to take her in. Her mom had been out of the picture for years. Dad had never been in the picture from as far as we knew. Wasn’t even listed on the birth certificate. She had been living with her grandma somewhere upstate, and from what we could gather, her grandma was a decent, God-fearing sort. Well, when she died, Blessing got passed from one relative to the next. Happens so often. And let’s just say that being someone’s aunt or uncle or step-dad’s ex-sister-in-law doesn’t make you qualified to be a guardian. By the time we got Blessing, she was so broken. So broken, so hurt …”
Sandy stuck out her finger to touch a cinnamon roll. She made a comment about them getting cold and would have gotten up to reheat them if Kennedy hadn’t declined
multiple offers for seconds.
“Anyway,” Sandy went on after Kennedy finally convinced her she was full, “she came to us, and we knew she was ours. Not that we didn’t love the other foster kids who came to us. We did, and even if I say so myself, I think we did right by most of them. But Blessing was different. We knew — just as sure as we knew Bridget and Jordan and Justice were ours — that Blessing belonged in our family.
“It didn’t happen right away, and later we realized how lucky we were that it happened at all, but we adopted Blessing when she was fourteen. She was a lively little thing. Lively and headstrong and stubborn, and we loved her to death. She had some problems with the church youth group. Said she thought the people there treated her like a charity project instead of a person, and looking back, I think she was probably right. I think there were things we could have done differently for her if we had really known. But none of us understand these things going into it, right?”
Kennedy nodded even though she had never been in an even remotely similar situation. The closest experience she had with guardianship was when her friend in high school asked her to watch over her fruit fly specimens in the lab while her family went on vacation to Germany for a week.
Sandy poured more tea into both their mugs before continuing. “Well, when she was sixteen, she ran away. We hadn’t been fighting. There weren’t any boyfriends, not that we knew of. She just had the heart of a runaway. We looked and looked. Redemption Temple even gave Carl a three-month sabbatical. We went everywhere. When we finished searching the city, we went up and down the East Coast, following leads, not finding anything. It was Carl who did most of the travelling, actually. I had to stay home with the other kids. We had adopted another little boy by then from the foster system as well, and we just couldn’t uproot everyone to go looking in crack holes, if you’ll pardon my language.”
Kennedy had to take a sip of tea to hide her bemused smile.
“We finally found her right under our noses in Manhattan. With the exact same uncle who was the reason she finally ended up in foster care in the first place. They were both homeless, living in some kind of tent neighborhood somewhere near Alphabet City. Carl never told me all the details. They were too gruesome. He knew as her mom I just couldn’t handle them all.
“She was strung out. Addicted to all kinds of street drugs. God knows how she and that uncle of hers were supporting their habits. I have my guesses, of course, but there are some things better not asked. So Carl found her, but he didn’t drag her home. He didn’t beat up the uncle, but God knows he deserved it. He just asked her, ‘Sweetie, d’you wanna come home?’ Simple as that. He’d been a pastor for quite some time now, and he knew a thing or two about those kind of addictions and how they work. You don’t just save someone who’s not ready to be saved.”
Sandy stirred her tea while she spoke. “And Blessing told him no. No, she didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to go back to the rules and the snobby youth group kids and the stuffy church where she was expected to act like a perfect pastor’s kid. Redemption Temple was like that back then. I don’t know if you remember very well. Really, I would have felt the same way probably if I had been in her shoes. So Carl told her, ‘We love you, we’re glad to know you’re safe, and would you mind giving us a call maybe once a month or so just so we don’t get too worried?’
“So he came home, and I have to tell you I wasn’t as level-headed about the whole thing as my husband. I resented him, truth be told. Back then I didn’t understand why he didn’t just drag her home. She was our daughter. She belonged with us. It wasn’t a pretty time in our marriage.”
Kennedy had a hard time picturing the Lindgrens really struggling in that area. For as long as she had known them, they were affectionate and doting, much more romantic than her own parents ever were.
“Well,” Sandy continued, “I finally decided all I could do was pray. We needed Carl back home, and the church needed its pastor again. So that’s what I did. I prayed. I know it never came close to what Christ suffered, but I think I’ve got a little more appreciation for what Jesus went through in Gethsemane after that season. A few months later, there she was, there on our doorstep, looking sad and timid and scared. Just like the prodigal, only I hadn’t seen her coming at a distance or I would have hitched up my skirt and ran to her just like in the story.
“She didn’t say much. We didn’t ask much, not at first, at least. We were just glad to be a family again. She had to detox. I’ve never seen a soul suffer like that, not in my entire life. There’s no explaining it, especially when it’s your own daughter there, fighting her demons. And when I say demons, I mean demons. ’Course I could pray for her, help the battle that way, but the struggle really was hers. I couldn’t go there with her. I would have, though. Carl and I both, we both would have traded spots with her in a heartbeat had God allowed it. But he has his reasons.
“She stayed clean the first time about four months, if I remember right. And then it was just repeat, the whole thing all over again. The disappearing. The looking, except this time Carl couldn’t take time off work. The waiting. Each time the phone rings, we think it’s the police calling to ask us to identify our baby girl’s body in a morgue.”
Sandy’s voice caught, and she inhaled the steam from her tea.
“And then she’d come home, always more broken than the last time. The detoxes were just as awful, just as soul-wrenching to watch, but it was easier now for her to go back. Easier to relapse. But it was easier to find her, too. She always ended up with the same crowd. Same bad-news uncle. Same sad story all over again.”
Kennedy didn’t know what to say. It made everything she suffered during her first semester of college sound like a carousel ride.
“Well, I’m probably making it out a lot more awful than it was, but really there were good times, too. When she was clean, she was great to be with. Good company for me. We were taking in a lot of medically-fragile babies back then, and I honestly don’t know how I could have survived without her smiles. She’d get up early to make my morning tea, and we’d have a few minutes together quiet before the babies woke up. But all it took was one trigger, one bad day, one phone call from an old friend, and she’d be out of our lives for months.
“We did everything we could think of. We tackled the problem from every angle. Took her to counseling. Took her to a deliverance ministry team from a church in Waltham. Sent her for eight months to a Christian girls’ home in Vermont. That’s probably the longest she stayed clean.
“It was when she was in Vermont that she wrote to tell us the real reason she ran away that first time. She was pregnant, just some boy at school Carl had warned her to stay away from, but she hadn’t listened. And she was scared of what those church ladies would say, and looking back at how the women of Redemption Temple used to be, well, I don’t blame her. And so instead of taking the problem to Carl and me, she ran off and took care of it herself. Thought she found the easy fix, but she was scarred. So scarred.
“That’s how Carl and I got involved in pro-life ministry, actually. We wanted to understand what Blessing was going through. We really did. Back then, people didn’t talk about things like post-abortive syndrome. I had never heard the phrase. But we realized if Blessing was suffering something that awful, how many other girls were, too? And then, we got to thinking, we were really grieving that baby we lost. It wasn’t just Blessing who lost a child. We lost a grandbaby, too. Our first grandbaby. A grandbaby we would have loved and cared for and even helped raise if Blessing had just asked us. And we were grieving, which got us thinking that other moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas were probably going through the same thing.
“That girls’ home in Vermont was really good for her. Taught her to take responsibility for her own actions, but they also helped her find healing from some of the things in her past. Things that had happened to her early on that no child made in God’s image should ever have to endure. Really good folks. We still support th
e ministry there. That’s how highly we think of them. Anyway, she almost made a whole year in Vermont before she crashed, but when she finally did, it was worse than all the other times combined. Reminds me of that story of the demon who leaves a house and then returns with seven other friends, all stronger than the first. We went a few years not even knowing if she was alive. She was twenty before we heard from her again.”
Kennedy shook her head. No wonder her own dad freaked out so much at the thought of sending her off to college alone. “What’s she doing now?”
Sandy smiled. “She’s living in Boston. Got a job at a bank. Been working steady there for four or five years now. Just got promoted last fall. She’s the assistant branch manager, or something like that. She’s dating a nice young man. They’re living together, but I told Carl after all she’s gone through, we’re not going to make a big deal about that. She’s got a little boy. He’s five. I watch him three days a week.” Sandy leaned over and pointed down the hall. “That’s his picture right there. First one in the middle row.”
Kennedy smiled at the portrait of a precocious-looking youngster in a three-piece suit. He had his hand on his hip and a smirk on his face that yelled mischief. Kennedy guessed he kept Sandy’s hands plenty full when he was over.
“He’s a sassy one,” Sandy mused. “Spoiled, too, but bright as a lightbulb.”
Kennedy looked down the long hallway of photos, wondering how many other stories lay behind each one. She was about to ask how many foster kids they had taken in all together when Carl’s voice boomed from the back room. “Princess, you need to let that poor, exhausted child get her sleep.”
Sandy pouted. “I suppose he’s right. You’re probably tired, aren’t you? Ready for bed?”
“I think that sounds like a good idea.”
Sandy scooted her chair back. “You know where the guest room is. I left a nightgown in there if you want and a dress you can wear in the morning. It’s loose. It shouldn’t bother your bandage one bit.”