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God has been extraordinarily good to me.

Some may not understand how I can make that statement. My life has certainly not been easy. Given up for adoption at four days old, I never knew my birth family or any details about them. My adoptive family was great with babies but not so much with real children. As products of their own dysfunctional upbringing, they lacked many of the character-building and nurturing emotional tools required to help the next generation cope. I grew up in a world of rejection--rejection of my own individuality and goals, rejection of empathy toward others, rejection of social mores that define us as a culture, rejection of risk, rejection of success. I was in my thirties when I first came to understand these things. By that time, so much damage had been done that my own marriage and family unit self-destructed, but not without the direct influence of those I had called mother and father.

The day my adoptive parents aided and abetted the interstate kidnapping of my two children was the day I became someone else at the cellular level. Nothing about me was ever the same. As recently as two years ago, my adoptive mother told me that she does not, after all this time, regret what she did, regardless of the devastation it wreaked on the lives and psyches of both my children. Despite her abject failure as a parent to me, it seemed she still believed she and my adoptive father had more to offer my kids. It was then that I decided I could not continue being a target for so much toxicity so I severed all ties. I have not spoken to either her or my adoptive father since.

Even if it seems like I may have offered “too much information” with this short introduction, let’s just say I’ve left many gaping holes in the narrative. I haven’t written about the harm caused by my ex-husband or the deviant lifestyle he exposed our children to. I don’t refer to the fact that he was gay, but to the openly sexual environment he exposed them to at the ages of eight and ten. I also haven’t delved into the cult-religious background of his parents, who played a role in the kidnapping, or an even earlier betrayal by my adoptive family that sent me into bankruptcy. At every step of the way I could have made different decisions that led to different outcomes. So it’s hard to say who’s truly at fault for any cascading series of events, only that we will never know if handling things another way would have produced better results or just more carnage.

I don’t feel it’s prudent to go into any more detail than I already have. This is enough to give clear understanding about the circumstances I emerged from. Not that the next few years were any better...I ended up living alone in Appalachia, in a shack without a flushing toilet or heat in the winter. By that time I was financially devastated, disabled, and staggering under the burden of a nonprofit animal rescue that “everyone” had begged me to start, yet no one truly wanted to support. Perspectives on success or failure belong to the individual; some call my rescue years a failure because I could not sustain the momentum and save every animal in the county, but if one should ask the hundreds of dogs and cats who are alive today because of those efforts, I imagine their opinion would be a bit more favorable.

What came up to prompt this bit of writing was me learning of some misfortune that struck “back home,” involving people who have harbored ill wishes toward me for a while. It’s a strange feeling, watching bitterness backfire. For me there’s no satisfaction in it. It’s no fun being hated, but I haven’t wasted much energy hoping karma would intervene on my behalf. I have moved on. 

Yet I do think there are scales of justice at work in the world, and while they don’t necessarily measure a punishment to fit every crime, sometimes they do seem to favor the merciful. I spent a lot of years pouring my heart and soul into the damaged and broken creatures afflicted by Appalachian society. At this point in my life I am so convinced that God saw me for exactly what I was during those hard times that I no longer care what those who despise me have to think or say. All that matters is the mindbending mercy that has been shown to me in the years since, the beautiful relationships that have bloomed all around me and the love I feel every single moment of every single day.

I was an unwanted baby. I think my personal connection with that bewildering loss, being cast aside before one could do anything worthy of being rejected, is what makes me identify so keenly with abandoned animals, unloved animals, unwanted animals. I can’t imagine the coldness of heart it takes to just walk away. Yet for the entire first half of my life, coldness of heart surrounded me. Childhood experiences informed adult choices that were not always in my own best interest. And in true generational fashion, these decisions impacted others in ways I couldn’t understand at the time. My children had the wrong father. I can’t change that now. They had the wrong grandparents. I can’t change that, either. But I can absolutely make sure that nothing else in my life is affected by the poison that strangled my family and strangled me for so many years. And I don’t feel that I owe anyone an apology for escaping it.

I married a man in 2011 who, in retrospect, has been one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We couldn’t co-exist in the same house together--by 2014 I was living in my own home across town and we no longer had a marriage relationship. But we kept talking to each other. We talked past the disappointment and the pain, and now in 2021 with our divorce finally pending, we’re closer than we’ve been in a long time. No, there is no possibility of reconciliation. We will not get back together. But we did not part with even a trace of the vitriol and condemnation so familiar to me from past family entanglements. In fact, while I haven’t kept every friendship I’ve made over the past decade, none have ended with anything close to the degree of animosity I experienced with the people I knew from my life in Georgia. This tells me that, despite all the faultfinding, recrimination, and blame flung my way from those who were supposed to love me, the source of the vicious behaviors was not me, was never me, and will never be me. What’s more, I live in a world of peace. From every indication, my accusers have none.

So how has God been good to me? The answer is devastatingly simple. He has provided for me even when it seemed the entire world wanted me dead. I lived the first half of my life trying to satisfy the expectations of people. When I finally recognized that all the things I thought I knew were in fact the bars of my own prison, God picked all the locks on my behalf and I walked out through the front door in full view of everyone who’d been waiting for me to fail. 

In 2018, I traveled to Poland for a conference. The first night I was there, I met a fresh-faced fella from France who left such an impression on me that I couldn’t get him out of my thoughts. One unplanned encounter after another led to us spending our last day in Krakow together and finally exchanging email addresses before we parted ways. There was nothing romantic at all about the experience and certainly nothing inappropriate. We had similar ideas about utilizing the blockchain and I knew I wanted a sharp mind like his in my orbit. We corresponded for months and finally met up again in the States when he was on his way back from yet another conference in Mexico. In 2019, I flew across the ocean with a dear friend of mine named Martia. She and I joined Michel in Paris, and the three of us traveled around the south of France for a few weeks before she returned to the States.

What about me? What did I do? I took one last look at the prison doors standing open, smiled at the locks God had picked on my behalf, and I stayed right where I was in Europe.

I’ll stop the story here to make a very significant point. I am the last person on earth anyone would have expected to become a world traveler. My fear of airplanes was legendary. I was middle-aged, half-crippled by autoimmune disease, and had no resources for this kind of lifestyle. But when God picks a lock, he picks it to the uttermost. I spent the next year traveling through the UK and then got locked in Morocco with Michel when the pandemic hit. The stresses of that should have blown us apart, but the trauma only solidified our connection to each other. We came out of Morocco with the mutual understanding that, despite every piece of logic that portended otherwise, we might just be soulmates.

These days I wake every morning in what is arguably the most beautiful rainforest on Earth, marvel at the fact that I will never have to sleep with ice on my bedroom walls again, and greet the sunrise alongside a herd of animals we somehow, despite all odds, kept with us all the way from Africa. It’s important, this last detail. When I say I don’t understand how anyone could “just walk away,” I mean under any circumstances. I was an unwanted baby. I will not perpetuate that sadness in the life of any other living creature, ever. Everyone and everything in my life is the opposite of unwanted. God has made me understand that I am the opposite of unwanted in His eyes, and I will pass it on.

I won’t often share painful details about my life in such a public way. There is nothing to be gained by holding any of the people in my past accountable. Instead, I want to share the goodness that has come to my life, the peace, and the great increase that God has given to every one of the humble loaves and fishes I’ve brought over the course of time. Michel and I are starting a new chapter in Costa Rica that, as few as four years ago, I would have declared impossible. I think it’s important to have a record of where I came from, so the “where I am” has more impact. My future posts, articles, videos, and pictures will be about settling into a life very close to nature in the mountains of Esperanza, how Michel and I work with the land and find our peace with the world. I hope everyone who reads this will follow along. We’re going to have some interesting days ahead!

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