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How Gianna forgave her biological mother
By Jason Koshinskie
During the question-and-answer sessions after her talks, Gianna Jessen gets some great questions. While speaking to 600 people, mostly teens and young adults, Nov. 4 at Queen of the World in St. Marys, Jessen got another one.
“How did you learn to forgive your biological mother?”
In 1977, her biological mother was seven-and-a-half months pregnant when she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Southern California for an abortion. She was just 17 years old. Miraculously, Jessen survived and was later adopted.
...then the very last person came up, looked at (Gianna) very strangely and she said, “I’ve waited a long time for this moment.” It was her biological mother. |
“Well, I think it’s a process—forgiveness,” Jessen says. “You choose it all the time. It may not be something that you just decide to do and it’s over. You just say everyday or every six months or whatever your deal is—I forgive this person, I forgive them, I forgive them.” She says she wasn’t completely overcome with trauma when she learned she was aborted. “It was more like, ‘Oh my gosh, maybe there’s some kind of giant purpose for my life,” she says. “I’ve just been rejected all my life up until I was 12 years old when I found out. I had just been experiencing all these different hardships and I was just so excited that God thought enough of me to save me.”
She never took to playing the victim. Her attitude wasn’t “How could she?” It was more, “Yay, I’m here!” What was more difficult for her was a confrontation she experienced two years ago after a speaking engagement. She greeted all the people at the end which is her habit. And then the very last person came up, looked at her very strangely and she said, “I’ve waited a long time for this moment.”
“And I just knew,” Gianna says. “And it was as if the entire world just stopped.” It was her biological mother. “She just proceeded to spew a lot of different things, not a very happy woman at all,” she Gianna says. “She had known that I had not wanted to meet her, she had known of my forgiveness. But she was going to have her way. And she was going to hate me no matter what."
“And I said, ‘You must need to hear me say that I forgive you.’ She did not receive that well. In her mind, she had done nothing wrong. She’s a very broken woman. This went on for a very long time. It was very difficult, one of the most extremely difficult things in my life. But I don’t die easily.” And her process of forgiveness will continue.