The Girl Who Lived--a blog tribute

(I'll work on fixing the orientation of the picture later!)

Well, today is Dec 8, the birthday of Joy Cherene, who died about 2o days later, in 1976. Premies didn't live in those days and I don't even know if men were allowed in the delivery room--but five year olds were definately not allowed in the Neonatal Unit. So I never saw her--just the grave, which is now flanked by the one for Peter (I don't remember his middle name) who died shortly after he was born, two years later. But this post is about Beppe, the Girl Who Lived. She was born at home, somewhere outside Tegucigalpa, and we think the home birth is why she lived. We were unaware of her birth...my mother always talks about how if she knew she was having a baby that day, she would have been happier--we all had colds and were trying to ski with them in Vermont.

Everyone has favorite stories and favorite pictures--this is my favorite story and my favorite picture. My life was never the same after March 31, 1982.

I knew my parents were looking into adoption--we had social workers come in and do "home studies" where they ask you questions about your family situation. But adoption and babies was the last thing on my mind when our maid Bertilia met me at the bus stop in our hill-side neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, which was called Las Professionales. It was a sub-set of Las Lomas, a larger "colonia" which was what the neighborhoods were called. Bertilia said to me, as I got off the bus, "There's a surprise for you at home." A bike, I thought? (even though at the ripe age of 34 I still have to teach myself how to ride every time I get back on a bike--at that time, I didn't know at all how to ride one.) We walked down Calle Guaymura (Yes, I am using all real names today--I got permission from my sister.) to the very end, where our white modern house was the second to the last house on the left.

When I got into the house, and up to the kitchen, I noticed that everybody was in the kitchen cleaning baby bottles and such. Something told me the surprise was not a bike. (Now, you have to know at this time in my life, I was not crazy about children, babies especially. I thought I might adopt a ten year old girl someday, sort of like Mandy or Anne Shirley.) I went up the four stairs to my room, dropped off my books and went across the hall to the spare room, where there seemed to be something (or someone) nestled in a dresser drawer, surrounded by blankets. I think I was not the one most surprised when I peeked in and saw the girl you see in the picture. I sealed my fate with those now-famous words, "Oh, she's the most beautiful baby I've ever seen. Can we keep her?" Not the response my mother expected, I imagine.

The whole story is a mess of details, from how my mother happened to have a baby in the house, a baby my father had not yet seen, to the exact day the girl was born. (Honduras uses the European style of dating, so 3/1/82 seemed to us about right--March 1st. She was less than 5 pounds when we got her, so 3 weeks old made sense. No--weeks later, in court, it came out that her birthday was January 3rd--which makes her living even more miraculous--to be less than 5 pounds and almost 4 months old!)

Our story is not the typical adoption tale, so I can't fill you in on how it happens in the normal world. How it happened for us was that Beppe was brought to the hospital for jaundice and never reclaimed. Somehow she got into the hands of the judge my parents were working with for adoptions and the morning of March 31st, my mother got a phone call from this judge, who from my memory was a woman. (Our family, parental units at least, are not good storytellers, so this is pieced together.) Anyways, she called my mom and said, "There's a baby here, would you like to come see her?" My mom was having lunch with a friend and said, "Sure, I'll stop by." When she did, the judge handed my sister to her and said, "Here, take her home, see if your husband likes her." My mother balked--she couldn't just take a baby without talking to my dad first!! But the judge had some urgency, and my mother finally relented. So my mom and Donna went to the grocery store with my sister, bought diapers and things, and brought her home.

All afternoon, I couldn't do my homework--I kept peeking in on our little treasure. Finally, I just set up camp by her, looking at her more than the math problems I was supposed to be solving. I don't know when my mother had the idea to take the picture above, but whenever I look at it, I think, (forgive me Beppe), she looks like ET! I think the hat makes her look like a Roman Centurian. I don't remember exactly what happened when my dad came home, but after dinner, we sat at the dining room table and thought up names. I wanted Laura or Mary or Caroline (Little House on the Prairie was my favorite TV show--I watched it dubbed over in Spanish). We finally settled on Elizabeth, since it offered the most amount of nicknames.

The rest is history...we soon got her to five pounds. I remember that because my dad would call her his five pound bag of sugar. The next surprise happened when, upon locating a duplicate baby book that I liked (the one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), I asked if I could have it for a journal and my parents gave each other a glance and said, there's something we have to tell you. But that is a story for another day...he's now 23.