It's Been Worth It, Every Single Moment

It was mid-morning on a Sunday when my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number and almost didn't answer it. Telemarketers. Some instinct prompted me so I scooped it up and spoke a wary hello. The words didn't make sense at first. Our son had arrived at the hospital by ambulance. He had been kicked repeatedly in the head. In the HEAD? He was unconscious, vomiting, twitching, having trouble breathing. They were putting him in a medically induced coma, intubating him. I heard the words but they didn't make sense. I tried to discipline my mind to hear the words in the right order, to put them in context. Our SON. HEAD TRAUMA. HOSPITAL.

As we drove to the hospital, my mind kept turning back to early summer 2008 when we'd raced to the hospital, following the Life Flight helicopter that held our daughter until it disappeared far out in front of us. Our daughter who had been covered in a torrent of blood, dragged by a horse, slammed into fence posts, kicked repeatedly by a 1,200 pound horse... So much blood. The scared look of the EMTs. The coldness of her skin. The shaking. A fear so raw and deep I had to fight to keep from losing myself in the vortex of it. I was so afraid when we walked into the ER. Miraculously, she made a full recovery. I remember the word "miracle" as it slipped from the doctor's lips.

Another flash. Waking up to a noise, something we couldn't identify, my husband and I. We had only been in Papua New Guinea for a week and everything was strange and new so the unidentifiable noise shouldn't have frightened us so, but it did. Immediately we went to our kid's tiny rooms that flanked ours. Our son was sound asleep but our daughter was gone. GONE. We looked everywhere. The front door was wide open. WHY? Time expanded and contracted. I remember screaming for my daughter, holding my son. Our compound was fenced in chain link topped with barbed wire. She was GONE. But out of the darkest night devoid of ambient light, our daughter came running, screaming for her father. She had been abducted but she got away. She came back to us. Thank God. Thank God.

Surely our luck would not hold out. It was unthinkable, monstrous. After everything our family had been through, there couldn't be another trauma. There just couldn't be. But there we were racing ever closer to the hospital and the unknown. Kicked in the head. Brain trauma. Coma. My mind stuttered. An absurd thought: It's nearly Christmas. As if that could somehow protect us. My father had been buried days before Christmas. There's no protection in Christmas, in the holiday season. People live and die and laugh and cry and love and hate and the world spins on its axis the same as any other day. I needed magic. I needed something to hold onto. Some reason to hope for another miracle, another saved child. Please God.

Our son called last night. He said he couldn't remember what happened very well. He had been singing, he said. A bigger boy had told him to shut up but he'd wanted to sing. He remembered, he said, the hand over his mouth, biting it, trying to get free, then nothing. No, he didn't remember the ambulance, the three different hospitals, the days that turned into weeks. He was doing better he said. His mind skipped on to random thoughts of basketball, Christmas... What's the name of our little dog? I have a bigger sister don't I? Three sisters or two? Were you just here? When did I last see you? Today? Yesterday? I can't remember. The miracle of his voice on the phone. He's a boy with many challenges, a life story that's utterly horrifying, and we'd thought to protect him when we adopted him. We'd done our best. We cared for him in our home for ten years and then we entrusted him to a residential program, thinking he would be safe…

We thought when we adopted the kids that we would make everything better for them. We thought traveling the world, working for Habitat for Humanity, would be a good experience. We didn't expect our daughter to be abducted. We thought living in the country, having horses, would be a great experience for our children. We hadn't expected the awful accident. We worked tirelessly to find the right residential program for our son. It’s exhausting, the endless advocating, the advocating that will never end because he'll never be able to live independently. He has so many challenges. Despite our best efforts, our children have been hurt; we have not always been able to protect them.

When our oldest child was born, I remembering thinking that I would never allow him to be hurt, that I would protect him always. I remember thinking as we brought our adopted children home that the hardships in their lives were over. They were coming HOME and home was a safe place.

The truth is that the world isn't a safe place. It's a hard place but it's also full of goodness and light and love. Somebody recently said that our boy had to recover fully, that the universe owed him that much. The words while well meant, made me tired. The universe doesn't owe us anything. One tragedy doesn't exempt us from another. There's no "pass" that comes with Christmas or any other time of year. Life happens.

Occasionally someone will ask about our adopted children, will mention their "real" mothers and fathers. I have to bite my tongue. My husband and I are as real as it gets. Blood doesn't make a family, love does, love and endurance and caring. I never thought it would be this hard. I didn't imagine everything that could go wrong when we created one child and adopted four others. It's a good thing, too. Had I known, I likely wouldn't have had the courage to make this family that I so love.

All that being said, I simply want to say that it's been worth it, every single moment.

©Just Kate, 2009