Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (8 page)

More than a year went by before I finally went into remission. When the doctor called my mother and me into his office after the last chemotherapy treatment, we didn’t know what to expect. Somehow, though, we knew we didn’t need to expect the worst. He went through a longwinded dissertation about shrunken tumors and good cell counts before he told us, essentially, that I was in remission.

My mother and I didn’t cry tears of joy. We didn’t get swept up in a whirl of happiness and giddiness, hugging the stuffing out of each other. We just smiled and squeezed each other’s hands. The doctor was really only telling us something that we already knew: that I was not going to die.

Patricia Jones

Learning to Say Hello

E
ach handicap is like a hurdle in a steeplechase,
and when you ride up to it, if you throw
your heart over, the horse will go along too.

Lawrence Bixby

It was December 1986. As I looked out the window of Chicago’s O’Hare International terminal, the sunlight seemed unusually bright and warm. This helped to soothe me and remove some of my anxiety. The precious passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 517, Korean babies who had been adopted by American couples, had just begun to deplane. I watched with awe and anticipation as, one by one, blanketed bundles with little black tufts of hair peeking out were carried closer and closer to the door. I knew that one of those little bundles was mine—my daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Hee-Jin. Sarah had spent ten of her eleven months of life in an orphanage. When I heard my name called, I panicked.
What right do I have to mother this little girl?
What can I, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian, offer this
orphaned Asian child? Dear God, what was I thinking when I
decided to adopt Sarah?
I wanted to hide, but people were crowding around me. And then I saw her. She was pathetically thin, dehydrated and obviously frightened and confused, but there was something about her that was beautiful. I fell in love with her as she laid her tiny head against my breast, closed her black eyes and fell asleep in my arms.

A full year passed, during which time I poured my entire being into this little girl’s emaciated body and neglected soul. I adored each of my other children, yet my love for this little one was a new experience, far beyond anything I had felt before. It was inexplicable. But my love was not blind. I could see something was not right. She was not developing: Her eyes did not connect with people or with things in her environment, her motor skills were minimal for a two-year-old, and she wasn’t babbling or making any attempt to speak.

We took trips to doctors’ offices. There were referrals to new doctors, which led to further referrals to still more doctors with strange titles who lived far away. One day, as we sat in one of those doctor’s offices, our hearts pounding, a tired Sarah fussing and crying, the doctor explained to us in a patronizing tone and in words of twenty syllables, that Sarah was retarded, “microcephalic.”

“Micro—what?” We made the five-hour trip home in stunned silence, but in my head, the roar of “NO!” echoed over and over again.

Every day for the next week, I went to the library and read all that I could find on microcephalia. Something about this diagnosis was not right. What they described was not my Sarah. After so much study, it was I who discovered what was really wrong with my heart-child. I told the doctors that Sarah was not microcephalic, but had a chromosome disorder. They didn’t believe me. They said grief did terrible things to a mother’s mind. But I had found a new courage inside, and I finally persuaded a doctor, a woman doctor who was also a mother, to do the simple test to find out. We took blood and we counted the chromosomes. Sarah had one too many.

But being right brought no reward, only a new kind of nothingness. My child might never walk, might never talk. I was told, with compassion, just to love her and enjoy her as much as possible.

For the following week or two, I was numb. I ate, I slept, I packed lunches for my school-aged children. I went to work, leaving Sarah with a sitter. I drove to a nearby lake and stared at its vastness. I tried to feel grief, or anger, or anything at all. I looked around me hoping to see something black or white or even gray, but there was no color in my life, only a gaping abyss into which my soul had fallen. I wanted my friends and family to take all of their well-intentioned words and hang them on the pieces of someone else’s broken heart.

Even in my shattered condition, I knew I was a good mother—but was I the kind of mother this little girl needed? I didn’t know how to be a retarded girl’s mother. But I loved Sarah; I loved her in a way that was beyond my understanding and I wanted to keep loving her for as long as she lived. So I decided that I would love her and love her well. It was then that my courage surfaced again, and I found a new word to define it.
Yes!
I told myself.
Yes,
she will walk. Yes, she will talk. Yes, she will, she will, she will.

That spring Sarah and I went to the library every day to learn together. I worked her muscles and taught her limbs to move correctly. We licked spoonfuls of peanut butter to make her tongue move more accurately. We played with a flashlight in a dark room to make her eyes focus properly. Minor achievements became major miracles. My courage was contagious: Daddy did the physical therapy; big brother liked to eat peanut butter; big sister dug out her old Dr. Seuss books and read aloud to Sarah. I claimed “dark-room duty.” It was my place of refuge. It was my place of prayer. Sarah stared at the flashlight in silence, and there was peace in the silence.

See Sarah. See Sarah run. Run, Sarah, run!

Hear Sarah laugh and sing the ABC song. Sing, Sarah, sing!

Listen, Sarah, listen. Your teacher is calling your name.

She is saying, “Welcome to kindergarten, Sarah.”

It was the first day of school, and as I stood at the door of the classroom, I heard Sarah’s small voice say, “Don’t cry, Mama. Sarah ‘yub’ you.” She thought my tears were saying, “No.” She couldn’t know how much they were saying, “Yes!”

Yes to new dreams and hopes, to new possibilities and simple pleasures. She didn’t know that as she hugged me and said good-bye, I said hello.

Kathi Rose

Pennies from Heaven

I
met a man who picks up pennies he finds on
the ground because he says they’re government
property.

I pick them up because I see them as signs from
angels to let us know they’re around.

Carmen Rutlen

Years ago, when our finances were less than ideal, I took a job vacuuming the halls and carpeted stairwells of our run-down condominium building. Work is work and, I told myself, it was honest work. But it wasn’t what I’d imagined myself doing for employment and it dented my pride.

It was certainly difficult work; the portable vacuum weighed twenty pounds and the condominium hallways were mostly stairs, twelve staircases in all, three flights up each. Six staircases a day was all I could manage. Stirred up dirt and dust clung to my skin, sweaty from hauling the vacuum up and down the airless staircases, and there were days when self-pity and wounded pride made the vacuum weigh even more.

On a day that had been particularly hard, when my pride tweaked with every cigarette butt and piece of trash I picked up, I hauled my portable vacuum up the stairs and asked God, in a tone more rueful than meditative, to give me something,
anything,
to perk up my sagging spirit.

On the third floor, nearly hidden in the crevice where the frayed carpet met the wall, glinted a shiny penny. “This?” I asked God. “This is what you give me?” I sighed, but I pocketed the penny and didn’t give it much thought beyond that.

Curiously, pennies began to turn up each time I vacuumed the halls. They hadn’t been there in the months before as I’d vacuumed up dried-up leaves and crumpled gum wrappers. But now, each time, there was a penny. One penny only. It became a game to me, wondering where and when the lone penny would turn up. Always, before the job was completed, there would be that one coin, as if it were waiting for me. I started to say a thankyou to God each time I retrieved the penny and pocketed it, and began to think of these small, found treasures as my pennies from heaven.

I didn’t tell anyone. There are pennies everywhere, right? Considered outdated, what is a penny but a useless coin that doesn’t buy anything in this expensive age? The condo-cleaning job was the least of the hardships visited upon me in the last few years, and pennies weighed against family misfortunes and ill luck seemed small change, indeed.

Still, it gave me a jolt of renewed hope each time I spotted one—and more often than not, that hope alone was enough for me.

Finances improved and we moved, and my two children blossomed in their new neighborhood. Life uninterrupted by adversity was welcome, if surprising. Occasionally I picked up a penny when I found it, thanking God in what had now become a knee-jerk response.

When I found myself pregnant with twins, I viewed it as the motherlode of rewards for having survived the previous years so well. When the ultrasound revealed them to be healthy baby girls, I named them Anne and Grace. I grew so huge over the next eight months, there was no more bending down to pick up anything, much less a mere penny.

When I was in early labor, the final ultrasound revealed their perfect feet, the sweet curve of their rumps, and the delicate rope of their spines. And then the flat silent discs that proved to be their unbeating hearts. They had died the night before. In the following hours before they were delivered I knew that my thinking of them as a reward had been only a cosmic joke of some sort, or more likely the imagination of a childish heart.

For months afterwards, the only prayers I offered up were enraged shouts at the kitchen ceiling, and finally even those ceased. What good is yelling at a God who doesn’t care, doesn’t hear, or more likely, doesn’t exist.

The numbness that replaced the anger made it nearly impossible to navigate my daily life. I forgot whatever it was I had once cared for and even tried to make lists of what I loved. I’d loved my other children, hadn’t I? Only now their demands and need for comfort seemed overwhelmingly large. I tried smaller lists. Hadn’t I liked old books, flea markets, stolen moments with my husband? Didn’t I once enjoy lunches out with friends? My funny little dog? It didn’t help, and I forgot the lists, forgot my own name once when it was asked, and forgot as well any reason to continue living.

One day, while waiting for my son’s karate class to end, I heard a mother call to her daughter. “Annie,” she said, and a chubby blonde toddler came tumbling into her arms. I fled for the hallway, and as I tried to gain control of myself, I happened to glance down. There on the carpet was a penny. I just stared at it. A penny?

I picked it up.

After that, pennies began to turn up everywhere. Almost every day but always just one. In odd places. In the rooms of my house where I had just walked before, a penny would suddenly be shining up from the middle of the room. In the waiting room of a doctor’s office, outside my mailbox, in the school parking lot as I stepped out of my car. I began to pocket them again, slowly, numbly, and I began again to thank God each time.

My small frequent thanks to God made me question what I was thanking him for—my nine-year-old son slipping his hand into mine, a funny note from my daughter, evening walks with my husband, soup from a friend, even a kind smile from a grocery clerk. I looked up one morning and noticed the blue of the springtime sky. I noticed the rich taste of my morning cup of coffee. I began to be grateful just to be alive.

It occurred to me that maybe God doesn’t always choose to speak in dramatic ways; maybe a burning bush isn’t his calling card to everyone.

Just maybe, for some, a single penny gleaming in an unexpected place is his touch of grace, his gift of hope. And sometimes that hope is just enough.

Susan Clarkson Moorhead

Shoulder to Shoulder

A faint light poked its nose under the family-room door in the hallway of the mission home. Was it Sara? Was she still awake?

Tugging the lightweight blanket from the bed and wrapping it around my shoulders, I tiptoed from my room. Sara huddled beneath a pilled blue blanket on the couch, staring vacantly at pictures flashing on the silent television screen. A scattering of unopened magazines cluttered the floor beneath the dimmed lamp. I sighed.

Great. Just what I needed at a time like this. Another child to see
to, another child to parent.
Well, I’d been at it for years. At least it was a role I was accustomed to.

“Sara, we’ve had a big day. You really should try to get some sleep,” I urged in a whisper across the room.

She sat up and rearranged her covers. “I know I should. But I can’t.”

Sara, long and lean, was beginning to show the week’s strain. Eyes darkened to indigo, puffy from crying. Translucent skin stretched taut across flawless cheekbones.

Too thin! Too thin!
My mind screeched the warning. I’d tried to coax her to eat. She had no appetite. But then, neither did I.

We had shared a long week, bedside in the trauma unit. My son Kyle, engaged to Sara, only recently moved to California to serve a temporary stint as a missionary. Instead, he was in critical condition and comatose, the result of a hit-and-run accident.