…And so I began writing about a family secret. It became a memoir, JOURNEY GIRL: Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary. Every family has secrets. Some might be told; some might not. I had called the invisibility of my birth mother a secret for the very long time that I lived it as something not to be spoken about.
But something began to change as I organized my thoughts, felt my feelings, and kept a faithful practice to putting these down on paper as best I could. What changed? My understanding expanded to amplify the difference between the words, secrets and silence. And I came to feel that my parents were not intentionally focused on my birth mother being kept a secret from the three of us children, particularly me. I came to believe they actually felt that silence about her would be more protective and loving to us than living with her presence. I am not sure that is true for me, but in terms of intention — it was a loving one for my parents. That is a whole lot different than what I felt as I discovered bits and pieces of my birth mother’s identity and truth.
A parent is always about protection. I know that to be true for me. Even though total and forever protection is impossible, it is the first and lasting thing I know as a parent myself. As babies and growing children, my top anxiety was that I care, love, and protect them into adulthood. That nothing would happen to our daughters before they reached adult age. But then, I discovered it didn’t stop there. I wanted to protect them from growing pains, from tough decision-making, from hurts of the heart, from disappointments and failures, — knowing full well these are a part of all human life. I want to protect them from losses, from losing their parents through death. It will happen and this protection desire never stops.
This quote caught my eye while I was writing JOURNEY GIRL. I had a sense that in the silence of writing my story, my ancestors were a silent, protecting presence encouraging and enabling me to go into the places I feared and felt I would judge harshly and yet when I took a deep breath and trusted and wrote into those spaces, what resulted was an overwhelming feeling of love going back through the generations from me and a sure outpouring of love coming back from the silence from them to me. For this experience, I am grateful. And from this experience came the realization that this protection truly does keep happening from parents back through the ages. What they have to give is — LOVE — and that is the ultimate protection.
Napkinwriter 
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