Neglected beyond belief, rescued by love...

Dani was so severely neglected by her birth mother that she grew up knowing only squalor. She never went to school or the doctor, and rarely glimpsed sunlight. Desperately malnourished, she couldn't talk and had never been toilet-trained. The social worker who took her into care had never heard of a case so horrific. The doctors believed Dani would never recover from such a terrible start in life.

Then she met the Lierows - a unique, blended family who were seeking to adopt a child. Despite being warned that she was way beyond hope of a normal life, they were instantly drawn to her and sensed a bright light behind her pale complexion. When they finally adopted her, they showered Dani with so much affection and encouragement that she came to life for the first time. Proving all the experts wrong, Dani would go on to open up and express herself in a way that no-one could have expected.

Dani's remarkable and heartwarming story is a testament of the power of kindness to overcome even the most seemingly insurmountable challenges.

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Introduction

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.