Guest Blog by Kimberly Allen
In a way, I began as an intruder, like a grain of sand in a tender oyster, unexpected and uninvited. Pearls from Sand: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and DNA Discovery illustrates God’s very clear hand in my adoption story. My hope is that my story will inspire readers to view their own life circumstances with gratitude and newfound hope. It is a story of faith, redemption, and deliverance.
In the fall of my senior year in high school, a carefree time in a carefree life to that point, I stumbled upon a letter addressed to my parents. Stamped and yellowed with time, it felt mysterious in my hands. I needed to open it.
“Dearest Nelson and Carla,” it read, revelations in elegant cursive, “I cannot express to you enough the joy and gratitude I feel for you for reaching out to me. It has been an answer to many prayers for many years. I am filled with joy to know Kimberly is well.” That was enough. Enough to know I was holding a letter from my birth mother. My birth mother, who was supposed to be a complete enigma to my family, was enshrouded by the legality of a closed adoption.
Mine had been a charmed childhood, snapshot memories looking something like a series of Norman Rockwell vignettes: white-gloved Easters, road-trip summers, dance recitals, Bonnet Ball games, and winding drives up Cottonwood Canyon, hands reaching out windows to capture the silver-dollar-like leaves of quaking aspens rushing by. My home in Hunter, Utah, was a refuge where love was abundant and the Gospel of Jesus Christ was celebrated. Ours was not a wealthy childhood, but was it ever rich. I belonged there. I belonged with my family in that place.
But there were questions. Being the lone blonde, freckled, lanky kid in my family led to wonderings and curiosities about my identity. Who else on this planet looked like me?
Meeting my birth mother and her three daughters in an era of closed adoptions became an answer to prayer, promptings, and deep-seated questions. But in the coming decades, other questions would not rest. Who was my birth father? What is my ethnicity? Are my attributes more nature or nurture? Is my lineage or heritage making me more who I am?
In 2021, DNA testing linked me to six additional half-siblings, leading to the identity of my birth father. The truth is, I was a skeleton in his family’s closet. What would these birth siblings and this birthfather’s reaction be to me, their life-long family secret?Like Moses, I was swept away to a different world, one just across the Jordan River in the Salt Lake Valley from where my birthmother lived. Through her decision and sacrifice, we were delivered. My parents, after the hopelessness of their infertility, were delivered from their grief. I was raised from the bullrushes, spared, chosen by adoring parents, and set on a course for an abundantly blessed life.
Our Father in Heaven and our Savior Jesus Christ take care, through law and love, of all the havoc we, and others, wreak in our lives. Our Deliverer can take the sand that works its way into our existence and, through a stunning restoration, create pearls.
Kimberly Patton Allen is a retired educator and instructional coach, a grateful mom, “Mimi” to her grandkids and one of five million adoptees living in the United States. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Utah and an M. Ed. in Bilingual Education from Boise State University. She and her husband, Shawn, live in Twin Falls, Idaho.
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