When I think of someone who has been disowned, I picture a drug addict, a murderer, or a prostitute.  Someone who has been disowned must have done something awful to deserve to be cut off by their family. I do not picture a successful career woman, with an MBA, happily married, and a loving mother. Yet behind the smile of my present life, there is the pain of loss of my father, my sister, my brother.

I have likened being disowned to being caught in a rip tide. The ocean waves sparkle with energy in the sunshine. My children and I love to jump the waves together. I only get pulled under when someone asks me about my father.  The pain pulls me to a darkness where I assume the world would be better off without me. It’s logical, right?  if my birth family is better off with me, then my children and husband would be too?

And yet, there is that ocean floor, so solid, my child hood. I used to scoop the baby clams, tiny dots of orange and purple and would wonder at God’s palette. My family had its golden years, a time when we were close. How, then, could my father do this to me?