(LifeSiteNews) — In 2006, when he was 12 years old, our son Michael appeared in a movie produced for the Discovery Channel titled Christmas and the Civil War. It told the heart-wrenching true story of a Virginia slave boy, Louis Hughes, who was taken from his mother at age six and marched hundreds of miles away to Mississippi where, upon his arrival on Christmas Eve, he was given as a Christmas gift to his purchaser’s wife.
Twenty years later Hughes escaped northward to freedom, crossing from Michigan into Windsor, Ontario, Canada on Christmas Day.
Our son played the role of Louis Hughes as a boy. Even though it was a reenactment for TV, it was distressing to watch my young son being ripped away from his family and treated as nothing more than a farm animal, a commodified human being.
If you read Hughes’ autobiography Thirty Years a Slave, published in 1897, you’ll see that he often yearned for his mother after being torn away from her, and continued to shed tears into adulthood over their separation.
Memories of watching Christmas and the Civil War being filmed rushed back as I read recently about former slave Harriett Hill, who in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Administration said, “I was sold away from mammy at three years old. I remembers it! It lack [like] selling a calf from the cow.”
Even though she was too little to remember her price when she was three, she recalled being sold for $1,400 at age nine or 10: “I never could forget it,” according to a report in The Conversation by Daina Ramey Berry.
The pain of being torn from their mothers at a young age was excruciatingly etched into the hearts of these child slaves.
Earlier that same year, Michael had played the role of a slave boy named Gabriel in Washington, D.C.’s historic Ford’s Theatre’s production of the civil war musical, Shenandoah. A month after the show’s winter-springtime run had ended, he and Shenandoah’s other young star, Kevin Clay, reprised their duet from the show for Ford’s annual nationally televised July Fourth Presidential Gala with President and Mrs. George Bush sitting front row center and actor Tom Selleck serving as Emcee.
The most significant experience from Shenandoah — for me — occurred not on stage but in the audience, in row seven, stage left. It is a moment permanently etched into my memory.
Act II opened with Shenandoah’s upbeat show-stopping duet “Freedom”, a joyous response to the Emancipation Proclamation. It brought down the house night after night. Seated next to me was Michael’s brother, Christopher, then age 10.
When the song was over and the applause died down, my son, the slave boy, was asked, “Gabriel, you’re free! What are you going to do now?”
Barefoot, ragged-clothed 12 year old Gabriel answered, “Well, I’m pretty sure my Ma is down in Georgia somewhere, and I think my Pa is in Mississippi. I’m gonna go find ‘em.” And with that he takes off over a hill, waving goodbye.
Gabriel’s goodbye was the only time in the show where the audience is clued in to his tragic forced separation from his parents.
I had watched that scene countless times during rehearsals. I loved the music and the choreography, but that was all that registered with me. I always applauded enthusiastically.
I glanced over at Christopher. He wasn’t clapping. I was expecting to see a big smile on his face, but instead there were tears streaming down his cheeks. And in the blink of an eye, I understood.
I wrapped my arm around him.
Michael and Christopher are adopted. Watching his big brother up on stage say that he was going to strike out on his own, travelling barefoot hundreds of miles in search of his mother and father resonated deep within his soul — touching something that had lain dormant his entire life, something that had never before been allowed to bubble up to the surface.
I hadn’t anticipated that, not at all. But the expression on his face communicated an important truth — one that I, his father, desperately needed to comprehend and accept.
It was a teachable — pivotal — moment for me.
On the day he was born, the bond Christopher shared with his biological parents was severed. He had no power to say or do anything about it. It was out of his hands. It was all decided for him. Like the character Gabriel on stage, it suddenly hit him that he didn’t know where his biological parents — the ones with whom he shares facial features, skin color, and other family traits — were or how to find them. He was suddenly faced with the realization that his biological parents were phantoms and that he had been “given up.” Waves of emotions washed over him. He felt a little lost.
That’s the moment I learned about the deprivation that many children in our day and age experience, providing me with one of the first puzzle pieces that would help me understand the supreme importance of intact biological families. It eventually helped me to recognize the danger of third-party reproduction and divorce, where adult desires and actions unfairly trump the best interests of children.
That moment launched me toward becoming a child, family, and marriage activist.
And all it took was a few tears streaming down a little boy’s cheeks — my own son’s — for me to get the message, a message I should have comprehended long before.
Blest be the tie that binds
Over the years, I have become aware of how much hurt and distress has been inflicted on children who are the products of divorce, surrogacy, single parenthood, gay parenting, abandonment, or simply the selfishness of the adults in their lives. Kids deserve so much more.
Even if my kids don’t consciously grieve, I do — for those very precious, blessed, biological bonds forsaken on the days they were born.
There has been a recent uptick in the number of kids born via third-party gamete donation and surrogacy. Even within what once were conservative circles, we’ve watched prominent gay-identifying conservative men obtain children for themselves who are related to them by blood, but ripped away from their mothers in a manner no different from the way my son was as he played the roles of Louis Hughes and Gabriel.
Organizations such as Them Before Us (TBU) have come forward to be a voice for these children, making the child’s perspective central in every conversation about marriage and family including divorce, same-sex parenting, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, and cohabitation. You can read the often tragic stories of many of these now-adult children here.
My impossible dream
Our sons have grown into fine young men, now in their late 20s. I’m exceedingly proud, not just of their accomplishments but especially of their characters. If they were not my sons, they are the type of men I would want to have as best friends.
As I get older, especially when Christmas and the New Year roll around and everyone is making their wish lists and expressing their hopes and prayers for their families and the world, I find I have just one item on my list.
If I could have one audacious Christmas wish come true, it would be this: somehow to be transformed into my adopted sons’ biological father.
I wouldn’t love my sons any more than I do now — that’s utterly impossible. And I know they love me. But it would heal the wound on their hearts from having been given up for adoption as infants. Other than those tears I witnessed in the dark at Ford’s Theatre, neither Michael nor Christopher has ever vocalized a thought, a worry or a resentment about their adoptions. But as their Dad, I know. I know that wound is there and will remain there no matter how old they are or their stations in life. It will still be there when they are my age.
Alternatively, if my boys were to make a wish to have never had those biological bonds broken in the first place, to have had a happy home with the mother and father who gave them life, I think I would reluctantly trade my cherished memories in order for them to be restored to the wholeness every human being deserves. I would hope I could find enough selflessness within to be like the mother who went before King Solomon and begged him not to divide her son in two, and to give him to the other woman who had laid claim to him (1 Kings 3:16-28).
I would freely do it because I love them with all my heart.
