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Exchanging palm trees for stately oaks, I deposited my firstborn child at a respected evangelical college this summer. It was an outcome nestled in the farthest reaches of my imagination when I was a pregnant college student 20 years ago. Dark, hopeless thoughts assaulted me throughout that pregnancy. I envisioned myself impoverished and alone or, in rare sunnier moments, as a bohemian heroine of sorts, dragging my grateful child along on my adventures. Still, I decided to keep my biracial baby after the counselor at the home for unwed mothers advised me to put him up for adoption. She said, "You're going to marry a doctor or lawyer someday, and what will his friends think?"

Though I was completely inadequate to the task before me, I didn't ever want my child to think I had given him up for adoption because of the color of his skin. So I determined to become the parent he deserved.

When he was a month old, I was accepted, at my interview, into Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. As the admissions officer urged me never to stop painting, I glimpsed my mother across the street walking the baby in the stroller, and I knew instinctively that I didn't have it in me to both be a mother and pursue a dream in a distant city. These experiences were the seedbed of authentic faith as I began to surrender to love.

Not long after, an unlikely prince rode into our lives. I find it nearly impossible to separate the Lord's redemptive work from my husband's powerful love. He didn't make the mess, but he also didn't shrink from entering into the fray the way some men do—those who, despite their own sins, run from the consequences inflicted upon the women and children they leave. His lavish devotion ministered healing year after year until the past largely disappeared. With my mother's help and his support, I earned a bachelor's degree a dozen years after leaving Eastern Mennonite University.

And yet the scar is still there. When my black son explains his white brother to his college dorm mates, it's with the shorthand, "Same mom; different dads." A perfect introduction to another generation's world of woe, and to my family's experience of periodically having my 20-year-old sin laid bare before strangers. The shorthand makes such moments easier for my children as surely as it inflicts a deep lash into both their parents. But as they remind us, they can't pretend our history isn't what it is. In some ways that's a blessing; it forces us out of the shadows.

I have always seen the decision not to terminate my pregnancy as the one courageous moment of my life. I acted with self-abandon for the benefit of the innocent. But lately, I've begun to think it curious that I should have seen not killing my own child as heroic. I could spin a sad tale to make myself look better, but the fact is I failed in my duty to my family, my community, and my Savior. Accepting the consequences of that failure was not heroism. Only in a culture where sex is divorced from meaning and where self-interest trumps everything could such a narrative be produced. Courage would have been to decline that offer of illicit comfort in the first place.

William Blake said of moral insurrectionists, "Mock on, mock on Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on: 'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, and the wind blows it back again." Perhaps my foolishness can be traced back to their brood, but I sometimes wonder when the baby boomers who sold me such a wretched bill of goods will at least sweep up the sand.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2