Book Summary
Korean War widow’s difficult mother dies before revealing the identity of her daughter’s father and his cultural heritage. As Dee sorts through what little her mother left, she unearths puzzling clues that raise more questions. The Sheep Walker’s Daughter pairs a colorful immigrant history of loss, survival, and tough choices with one woman’s search for spiritual identity and personal fulfillment. Dee’s journey will take her through the Northern and Central California valleys of the 1950s and reach across the world to the obscure Basque region of Spain. She will begin to discover who she is and why family history matters.
Korean War widow’s difficult mother dies before revealing the identity of her daughter’s father and his cultural heritage. As Dee sorts through what little her mother left, she unearths puzzling clues that raise more questions. The Sheep Walker’s Daughter pairs a colorful immigrant history of loss, survival, and tough choices with one woman’s search for spiritual identity and personal fulfillment. Dee’s journey will take her through the Northern and Central California valleys of the 1950s and reach across the world to the obscure Basque region of Spain. She will begin to discover who she is and why family history matters.
Making Peace
By Sydney Avey
My mother kept
secrets. As she lay dying, eyes firmly closed, mouth set in stoic acceptance,
my sister and I sat close by working a jigsaw puzzle at a table in her
room. Looking back now, I realize that
Mom was a puzzle we had been working all our lives.
I wrote The Sheep Walker’s Daughter to explore
the theme of why parents keep secrets from their children. Not guilty secrets
that children have no need to know, but secrets about family heritage. Does
knowing your ethnic identity and cultural background matter?
My main character, Dee,
benefits from the spiritual guidance of an Anglican priest, Father Mike. As I
worked on the scenes that took place in Father Mike’s office, I found myself
bringing some of my own concerns to this wise counselor, and getting answers!
When Dee tells
Father Mike that Leora was not a good mother, he replies that she wasn’t a bad
mother either. He tells her:
“Dee. You have a litany of
grievances against your mother. You tick them off religiously as if you were
saying the rosary, but it brings you no peace. Ask your question.”
“What do you mean? What question?”
“Just assume there is a God. What is the one question you would
like to ask Him?
“Why did my mother…”
He
stops me right there. “Not a question about your mother, a question about you.”
I think about that for a minute. What is it
I really want to know?
Dee wants to know who she is. But only God
can tell her that. In Ephesians 2:10 Paul explains “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good
works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
In His wisdom, God placed us in families.
Sometimes (not always) our work is to make peace with our family members,
living or dead.
Once Father Mike gets Dee refocused, her
spiritual journey begins. As her heart softens, she becomes more receptive to
the truth and willing to receive the blessing that God has planned for her.
Once I stopped fretting about why my mother
hid her father’s Jewish heritage from her daughters, I was able to take that
journey with Dee and make peace with my mother’s decision.
Are you puzzled by family secrets? Ask God to
reveal what is good for you to know and to give you peace about what remains
hidden.
Bio:
Sydney Avey earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of
California, Berkeley, and did postgraduate work in mass communications at San
Jose State University. She lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of
Yosemite, California, and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, and has a
lifetime of experience writing news for non profits and corporations. She speaks on spiritual maturity at Christian
Women’s Conferences and blogs at sydneyavey.com about the themes she explores in her
writing: relationships, legacy, faith and wanderlust.
The book is preorder
The audiobook is on sale now
Both here:
Sydney blogs here
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