Saving Lee, Finding Grace

Conception and Misconceptions
On a cloudy Saturday morning in March 2009, I put my car in reverse and began to back out of my driveway. I stopped halfway down to look in the back at my son Lee, who was strapped in his car seat next to Big Teddy, his life-sized stuffed bear.
I lingered to take in my blond-haired, blue-eyed five-year-old. I was fully aware that this tiny, pale boy who had failed to thrive might never return to our home. I was fully aware that he and his older sister might never see one another again.
I also knew I might return to that very spot with him cured, healthy, and whole. In my mind, I looked even further into the future to the day I might catch my breath at the sight of the beautiful young man who had defied the odds. I planted the vision in my mind of that day ten or more years in the future when I would stand face-to-face with him and look up to him because he was taller than me.
“We’ll be back,” I murmured to Lee, to the empty house in front of me, and to my heart. I took my foot off the brake and let the car begin rolling backward again.
Moments earlier, I had sent my seven-year-old daughter on a 120-mile trip north to live with my parents in my hometown for an unknown number of months. My son and I were heading nearly 350 miles south to Cincinnati, where he was scheduled to receive a full bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor to cure him of a rare, deadly autoimmune condition that I had unknowingly passed to him through a mutated gene. I still shake my head when I look back on all Lee and I would experience in the months that would follow. I remain in disbelief that I, of all mothers, would face this journey. After all, I had been ambivalent about becoming a mother in the first place. I had come so incredibly close to not having this boy at all.
My life with Lee began when I awoke wet and cold the day of his birth. I awoke at four thirty that January morning in 2004, and I knew immediately that my water had broken, even though it was three weeks before my due date. Heavy with fatigue, I heaved myself from my side to my back and looked wide-eyed at the ceiling.
“I’m having a baby … today,” I said.
I spoke to the ceiling because my husband was sleeping at the other end of the house in the spare bedroom. Five nights earlier, he had called me at work to say he was leaving. He would stay until a few weeks after the baby was born, but that was it, he said. Strangely, I still wanted him with me when Lee was born. I wanted him to look at our son and realize he was being a fool to walk away. But how would I make it through labor with a man who had turned on me? And on only four hours of sleep?
It was hard to imagine I was bringing a second baby into that kind of marriage; it was tough to believe I was in that kind of marriage at all. Most of my life before Lee had been quite uneventful, and while I can’t say I was always happy, I wasn’t miserable. As a newspaper journalist, I could almost step back from my distress and feel I was watching another woman’s life—not mine—because it didn’t add up. I was a smart, well-educated, hardworking woman with a career. I had pluck. And I came from a peaceful family where people didn’t argue. I was a sincere woman who valued sticking with a marriage for life though it all. I thought my own hard work would get me through damn near any challenge, and I honestly thought my background and choices made me immune to being left alone with two babies. Boy, was I wrong.
As I look back, I can see that Lee’s very existence was based on wishful thinking disguised as hope. It was the hope that my roller-coaster marriage would turn into a slow, scenic train ride through the park, and we would raise two beautiful children in a stable home. I simply refused to accept that it wasn’t going to work out that way, so I ignored many signs to the contrary. And as skeptical as I was that the conventional path of two kids, a marriage, and a nice home was as satisfying as people made it out to be, deep down it had become what I really wanted.