I Found My Mother

It's been 25+ years since I last saw my mother. The last time I saw her, she was living in a bare apartment with a drug dealer. A 11 year old half brother, I never met before, also lived there. He spent nights digging through apartment dumpsters or begging the neighbors for something to eat. The welfare checks my mother was receiving were being used to buy drugs instead of food. Before that time I hadn't seen my mother since I was four, and the whole scene I found was pretty disappointing. Heart broken I walked away...I didn't look back until about five years ago. I was curious, so I started looking through the internet for any records of her or two other half brothers I knew I had. I found one half brother living in a small city in northern California. After calling him he gave me our mother's telephone number in Idaho. I dialed the number and a man picked up the phone. I explained who I was, and he told me that he was that 11 year old kid that I saw begging for food many years before. I could hear him calling our mother, "Mom there's someone on the phone that wants to talk to you". I heard her reply, "who is it?". Richard, my half brother, answered, "It's your son Keith". She said something I couldn't understand and then I heard her crying. She cried for some ten minutes before she took the phone. Her voice was shaky as she said "hello?". I said, "Hi mom it's Keith". She began to cry even harder, and I wasn't sure if she was going to be able to talk to me. After a moment longer she spoke into the phone again and said, "I'm sorry", "I'm sorry", 'I'm sorry". And then she began to cry some more. I wanted to comfort her, so I told here that I wasn't angry with her, nor did I blame her for her not being there for me. I knew what happened to her, how she and my grandmother were terribly abused at the hands of my grandfather. I knew that her getting pregnant at 15 with me was more than a girl with her life could handle. How could I blame her? I was just happy I found her again. That was in 2009 and I haven't seen her yet. Me living in Europe and her in Idaho, I just can't afford the tickets for me and my family to travel to the States. She has a lung disease, so travel for her is out of the question. But my mother and I talk on the phone often. I'm getting to know her more and more, and I can feel old, festering wounds start to heal.

One more thing...my mother is a Believer. All these years I have been praying for her, and when I found her she explained to me how she had given her life to Jesus. Thank you Jesus...thank you!
 
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