a touching essay

[Guest guest]

Just wanted to share this with all my clubfoot parent friends. I'm a sucker for

these things. I added the lines in bold.

Carol and

Some Mothers Get Babies With Something More

written by: Lori Borgman

Columnist and Speaker

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 pages 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, satin skin and straight feet. 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, a palette that didn't close

or a tiny crooked foot or two. 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. Every body 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.

ly, 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

yammering 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.