Five minutes before the arrival of the school bus that carries my children over three
miles of rolling, winding, narrow two-lane road, I walk with a posse of excited, yelping
dogs from our ninety-year-old Tennessee farmhouse down the long drive to the gate at the
end. The bus lumbers to a stop, the door wheezes open, and there is our twelve-year-old
daughter, Dani, ready to deboard. Very briefly, she considers the steps, but quick as a
blink she instead slides down the smooth steel hand rail on her bottom. I grab her up in a
hug as she reaches the ground, she smiles, and after her older brother William latches the
gate behind us, we walk together back to the house, navigating a path through the dozens
of chickens that assemble in the pecked-bare ground outside their coop like pigeons on a
piazza in Italy.
Dani opens the back door, drops her backpack on the floor in the mud room, and pats the
inside dogs on their heads. She smiles when William’s parrot squawks a greeting, and after
a quick pit stop in the bathroom, she goes to the kitchen to refuel after a long day of
lessons and classrooms. As the cat weaves its way between her legs, Dani opens the
refrigerator door and contemplates the contents but doesn’t see anything that interests
her, so she grabs a package of peanut butter crackers from the pantry. She chooses a
plastic cup from the cupboard, swivels to the sink, turns on the tap, and fills the cup
with water. Then she sits down at the table and digs into her snack. It is an after-school
ritual being performed at that moment in that sequence in millions of households across
America.
After the kids’ snack, we go to the barn to check on our ever-reproducing herd of
goats. While William and I begin the ritual of setting out food and clean water for the
goats in the yard, Dani goes inside the barn to check on the new mamas and their babies in
the area that serves as the nursery.
Once those chores are done, we go back to the house so the kids can settle down with
homework at the kitchen counter while I start dinner. When Bernie comes home from work, he
ruffles William’s hair, tickles Dani till she squeals, and then takes a quick shower
before we all sit down to eat. After dinner, if it’s still light outside, Bernie likes to
run around with the kids in the yard—he’s an overgrown kid himself—and hike out to the
back pasture to check on our four miniature horses. Baths, pajamas, bedtime stories,
prayers, goodnight kisses, lights out, and the kids are finally in bed. Bernie and I
collapse on the sofa in the family room, catch up with each other, watch the news if we
can stay awake that long, and take one last peek in on William and Dani before calling it
another very long day. The next morning, the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. and we start all
over again.
It is totally routine and absolutely ordinary.
Yet in our family, even the routine is unpredictable, the ordinary is extraordinary,
and the most mundane tasks are milestone achievements for our pretty, brown-eyed, blond
pony-tailed, long-limbed daughter.
When Bernie and I first met Dani in the profound needs classroom of an elementary
school in Land O’Lakes, Florida, she had just turned eight years old. She drooled, her
tongue stuck out one side of her mouth, her head lolled to one side, she wore a diaper,
and she drank—sort of—from a sippy cup tied to the leg of a table so that when she dropped
or threw the cup, it would not roll away. She bit her own arms and hands, pulled at her
hair, and hit the sides of her head with her balled-up fists. She did not make eye
contact, engage with others, or like to be touched; she did not smile, laugh, or talk. She
did have a repertoire of pretty impressive noises: a sustained guttural moan, a higher-
pitched wail, an occasional piercing shriek, and a yelping repetitive “woo woo woo woo”
that sounded so much like a European ambulance it made Bernie remark that in an emergency,
she could be her own siren.
She had been in foster care since being discharged from Tampa General Hospital some
fifteen months earlier, where she had spent four weeks after being removed from the
rundown shack where she lived with her mother and two grown stepbrothers. She had been
confined day and night like an animal in a tiny, filthy, dark room, alone and naked except
for her diaper, uncovered on a cockroach-infested, soiled bare mattress. She was
intermittently fed solid food from a can and was infrequently bathed, but she was never
held, never kissed, never talked, read, or sung to, and never played with. She was never
taken outside to feel the sunlight on her face. At nearly seven years old, she had never
been taken to a doctor, had never been immunized, had never seen a dentist, and had never
been to school. She was covered with thousands of bug bites, her arms looked like sticks,
her ribs were clearly visible under pale skin, and her scalp crawled with lice under her
matted and dirty hair.
Yet that day in the classroom, Bernie and I didn’t know any of this. All we knew was
that we had been so powerfully drawn to this little girl, whom we had seen only in her
photograph in a gallery of children available for adoption, that we could not get her out
of our minds. We had been told by the agency that we should do ourselves a favor and
choose another child. Her primary social worker had strongly suggested that before we went
any further, we see the movie Nell starring Jodie Foster as a “wild child” who was
discovered living in the backwoods of North Carolina. She spoke a language no one could
understand and lashed out at anyone who tried to come close to her. We watched it with
William and one of our older sons, Paul. At one point, as we all sat transfixed by the
story, Paul turned to us and asked, “Are you nuts?” When the movie was over, Bernie and I
looked at each other and, as we so often do, read each other’s thoughts.
We both knew we had to meet this little girl whose image had already embedded itself in
our hearts, minds, and souls. The connection we felt with her before we even met her was
so powerful that we never questioned it. It was as if we already knew her, and although we
didn’t know what lay ahead, we had no choice but to follow whatever or whoever was leading
us to her.
As crazy as it sounded, somewhere in the back of our minds Bernie and I believed that
if this inexplicable, mysterious calling was so undeniable, maybe she had been waiting for
us all along.