Some Mothers Get Babies With Something More
Lori Borgman | Monday, May 12, 2002
My friend is expecting her first child. People keep asking
what she wants. She smiles demurely, shakes her head and gives the answer
mothers have given throughout the ages of time. She says it doesn't matter
whether it's a boy or a girl. She just wants it to have ten fingers and ten
toes. Of course, that's what she says. That's what mothers have always said.
Mothers lie.
Truth be told, every mother wants a whole lot more. Every mother
wants a perfectly healthy baby with a round head, rosebud lips, button nose,
beautiful eyes and satin skin.
Every mother wants a baby so gorgeous that people will pity the Gerber baby
for being flat-out ugly.
Every mother wants a baby that will roll over, sit up and take those first
steps right on schedule (according to the baby development chart on page 57,
column two).
Every mother wants a baby that can see, hear, run, jump and fire neurons by
the billions. She wants a kid that can smack the ball out of the park and do toe
points that are the envy of the entire ballet class.
Call it greed if you want, but we mothers want what we want. Some mothers get
babies with something more.
Some mothers get babies with conditions they can't pronounce, a spine that
didn't fuse, a missing chromosome or a palette that didn't close.
Most of those mothers can remember the time, the place, the shoes they were
wearing and the color of the walls in the small, suffocating room where the
doctor uttered the words that took their breath away. It felt like recess in the
fourth grade when you didn't see the kick ball coming and it knocked the wind
clean out of you.
Some mothers leave the hospital with a healthy bundle, then, months, even
years later, take him in for a routine visit, or schedule her for a well check,
and crash head first into a brick wall as they bear the brunt of devastating
news. It can't be possible! That doesn't run in our family. Can this really be
happening in our lifetime? I am a woman who watches the Olympics for the sheer
thrill of seeing finely sculpted bodies. It's not a lust thing; it's a wondrous
thing. The athletes appear as specimens without flaw - rippling muscles with
nary an ounce of flab or fat, virtual powerhouses of strength with lungs and
limbs working in perfect harmony. Then the athlete walks over to a tote bag,
rustles through the contents and pulls out an inhaler.
As I've told my own kids, be it on the way to physical therapy after a third
knee surgery, or on a trip home from an echo cardiogram, there's no such thing
as a perfect body.
Everybody will bear something at some time or another. Maybe the affliction
will be apparent to curious eyes, or maybe it will be unseen, quietly treated
with trips to the doctor, medication or surgery. The health problems our
children have experienced have been minimal and manageable, so I watch with keen
interest and great admiration the mothers of children with serious disabilities,
and wonder how they do it. Frankly, sometimes you mothers scare me. How you lift
that child in and out of a wheelchair 20 times a day.
How you monitor tests, track medications, regulate diet and serve as the
gatekeeper to a hundred specialists hammering in your ear.
I wonder how you endure the clichés and the platitudes, well-intentioned
souls explaining how God is at work when you've occasionally questioned if God
is on strike.
I even wonder how you endure schmaltzy pieces like this one -- saluting you,
painting you as hero and saint, when you know you're ordinary. You snap, you
bark, you bite. You didn't volunteer for this. You didn't jump up and down in
the motherhood line yelling, "Choose me, God! Choose me! I've got what it
takes." You're a woman who doesn't have time to step back and put things in
perspective, so, please, let me do it for you.
From where I sit, you're way ahead of the pack. You've developed the strength
of a draft horse while holding onto the delicacy of a daffodil. You have a heart
that melts like chocolate in a glove box in July, carefully counter-balanced
against the stubbornness of an Ozark mule.
You can be warm and tender one minute, and when circumstances require intense
and aggressive the next. You are the mother, advocate and protector of a child
with a disability.
You're a neighbor, a friend, a stranger I pass at the mall. You're the woman
I sit next to at church, my cousin and my sister-in-law.
You're a woman who wanted ten fingers and ten toes, and got something more.
You're a wonder.
