Leaving Cloud 9

by Ericka Andersen

  Rick pulled out his iPhone to show her photos of his sister, the daughter she hadn’t seen or interacted with in close to twenty years. The disconnect wasn’t just emotional. Sylvia had no internet, no Facebook, no e-mail—no connection to the outside world beyond a physical address. Her life was just the town where she lived—in a reality that felt thirty years old. She did have a flip phone, though. She pulled it out with pride and snapped a photo of Rick and me that she promised to have printed.

  “I always worried about you more than Jenny because you didn’t have family,” she said in the most motherly way.

  The whole scene was surreal. All the things I’d heard about Sylvia were buzzing in my head, and it was difficult to piece them together with the woman sitting in front of me. But what I thought was beside the point. I was only there to love and embrace the woman as Rick wanted to.

  Sylvia called up a few friends to brag that her son was sitting in front of her right that very second. She joked that people thought she had made him up because he had been gone so long.

  “Have you met your dad?” she asked Rick. “Did he tell you about your twin brother that died at birth?”

  That was a strange one. The comment triggered a memory that Rick would tell me about later. Sometimes Sylvia would get drunk and lie on the floor pretending—he hoped—to be possessed by the Devil. She would tell the kids to stand over her and command the Devil out. She would say that Satan was inserting her dead twin sister Josephine into her body and shake and shudder until the kids cried.

  She told us about how people often come by to yell obscenities at her and try to sell her drugs. She claimed to be clean at the time, but she alluded to having been on and off the wagon over the years.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I’m still here. I’m really just waiting to die,” she said. “My therapist won’t let me kill myself, and that used to be my thing.”

  Two hours into our conversation, we told Sylvia we had to leave to catch a plane. There was no plane. We simply couldn’t take anymore. After a tearful goodbye, we left her with one hand on her hip, another protecting her eyes from the sun. Rick knew he would probably never see her again.

  The emotion of the afternoon was buzzing in the car as I took the wheel to head back to our hotel room just a few miles down the road. Rick broke down, sobbing into his hands in the passenger seat, his heart awash with bitterness and love, grieving the loss again of this mother who did love him but had failed him on so many counts.

  In the immediate aftermath of seeing her, he was consumed with a desire and a prayer that she find some happiness. He wanted to ensure that her needs were met and that she didn’t die alone. Seeing her had lit a fire of compassion in him.

  Those two hours in the little garbage-adorned trailer had also been a balm to him. He had needed to soothe his heart, accosted by guilt for abandoning her a decade earlier and wounded from the many years of neglect and agonizing love that caused him to care so much about someone who cared so little.

  Things were different after our trip to Arizona. Rick and his mother had exchanged phone numbers and began texting each other regularly, with a phone call tossed in here and there. Both Rick and Sylvia seemed profoundly influenced by their reunion.

  No longer did Rick break down at the thought that he might have left his mother for dead out of his selfishness. There was no more guilt that he’d simply given up on her. Peace abided in his heart just from knowing she was okay.

  It was clear that Sylvia felt privileged to have been gifted this new relationship with her son. Though she still struggled mightily, and probably always would, Rick’s visit had been an undeserved gift of joy for a woman with little left to live for.

  It was all so incredibly reminiscent of the kind of compassionate, forgiving, gracious love our Father in heaven has for us. Rick had been living that out all his life, often without even knowing it.

  As for the death record that started this journey—the location and arrest record a spot-on match—it doesn’t appear to exist anymore. Sometimes a note from heaven, a whispered word from God, is all it takes to begin a trek toward healing. We just have to heed it and follow where He leads us.

  A weight had now been lifted from Rick’s heart, mind, and soul. He hadn’t left his mom to die—and he’d found a peace in that beautiful embrace they shared the moment she recognized him.

  She began sending sweet, sloppily written cards with messages conveying how happy she was that Rick and I had come into her life. She often addressed notes just to me, saying she was so thankful Rick had found such a wonderful woman to make his life complete. Her notes to Rick were apologetic and a bit timid, as if she wasn’t sure she should be reaching out like this but was hoping he would continue to accept a relationship with her.

  Even with this renewed communication, something was obviously still amiss. Sometimes the cards would start off chatting normally about life with her dogs at the trailer, then trail off into an unreadable mess of scribbles that started to look like gibberish. As much as Rick didn’t want to think she was still on drugs, he couldn’t help wondering.

  Occasionally Sylvia would call or text him in the middle of the night, and when he would respond the next day, she wouldn’t answer. She mentioned again that she had cancer and claimed that someone had stolen money from her.

  Once Rick got a call from a credit card company about an account he hadn’t opened or known about. But aside from that one instance, it never felt like she was trying to take advantage of his kindness. We wanted to help her if she needed food or basic necessities but were wary of sending money, so we never did. To our surprise, Sylvia started sending us ten dollar bills in her cards from time to time. Where she got the cash, we weren’t sure, but it seemed she was trying in her own small way to make amends.

  At that point we knew we’d soon be trying to have a child, and we’d told Sylvia about our plans to move forward with in vitro fertilization in the near future. Rick began setting aside any money she sent in a fund for our future child.

  All these interactions—the cards, the texts, the phone calls—continued to heal the scars in Rick’s heart. Sylvia’s cards conveyed the sweet person that she likely was without drugs or mental illness or alcohol. It was clear where Rick’s sensitive, kind spirit came from. Everything about her sobered personality conveyed similar emotions. It was difficult to imagine what kind of person she would have been, what kind of life she might have had, if she had managed to stay healthy and sober. Remembering her rough skin, her toothless smile, and her lifeless hair, a sadness rained over us because we could envision the beautiful woman that might have been.

  Several years after that meeting in Arizona, the two were still in touch, though sadly their relationship eventually soured. One day Rick received a sloppily written four-page letter in pencil documenting a piece of Rick’s writing that Sylvia had found in one of her many stacks of papers. It was an essay about his early life that he’d written in college. It documented the traumatic childhood he endured, including the mention of Sylvia’s drug habits and other neglectful behaviors.

  We have no idea how Sylvia managed to get a copy of that essay. But we do know it infuriated her. She wrote four pages lambasting Rick for being “disrespectful” to her in that long-ago essay. Her mind didn’t seem to let her grasp the wounds she had inflicted on her children growing up—or the grace and grit it had taken Rick to fully forgive and love her in spite of it. He had never expected her to, but the reality of her obliviousness was still rough.

  To Rick, receiving the letter felt a bit like being stabbed in the chest. He wasn’t really surprised, but he was deeply hurt—especially having gone out of his way to love and forgive her. Rick knew his mother had mental problems, but his mom’s not recognizing what she had done to her own child and attacking him for simply describing it was hard to take.

  We threw the letter away, but it had already done its damage. It only inflamed old wounds and halted the healing a bit. Even today, that
healing is still an ongoing process. But meeting Sylvia in Arizona was what Rick needed to move on with his life. It was the perfect event to happen before the most important, life-changing development ever would start coming into play for Rick.

  CHAPTER 36

  LOOKING AT LIFE AHEAD

  Rick had known for a while that he might never become a father. He had discovered his fertility issues back when he was married to Sabrina, and he had more or less come to terms with that reality.

  Had he been able to father children, he probably would have had them earlier, and his life might have taken a different turn. But his life had already been hard, he reasoned, so if he couldn’t be a father, why make that one more thing to be upset about? Maybe it just wasn’t God’s plan.

  But now, after reuniting with his mother and repairing their relationship in such a significant way, he found himself rethinking the whole issue. He was thankful he’d never accidentally gotten anyone pregnant when he was a careless teenager and young man. But now he began to think about what it might be like to have children of his own.

  He had told me about his problem early on in our relationship, knowing it could be a deal breaker. He knew that could be scary for a woman who wanted to have children.

  “I may not be able to have kids, so if you can’t handle that . . .”

  It didn’t even cross my mind to break up with him for this reason. He wanted to have kids with me someday, and that was all that mattered. There were other ways to become a parent outside of the traditional means, and I had always been interested in adoption. I also knew there were fertility treatments available and had met a couple of people who’d had successful pregnancies using them.

  After we were married, we were both eager to learn more about both adoption and fertility treatments. We waited six months or so before moving forward—because a low sperm count doesn’t mean you can’t get pregnant. But it didn’t happen. So we had a couple of meetings with an adoption agency and began filling out paperwork while I set up an informational meeting with a fertility clinic.

  We were excited, of course, and the hope and possibility of bringing a life into the world were almost too much for Rick. Hope is a strange thing—you want to hold on to it, but you are afraid to because you know you could be disappointed.

  This is so true when you are desperate to be parents but aren’t sure it will work out. It’s one of those situations where you truly have no control and can do nothing but give it up to God. It’s His plan, His child, His move . . . and we knew we didn’t deserve any more than the next person. Trusting in His promise that “all things work together for good to them that love God,” we faithfully moved forward with our plans to start a family.

  And honestly, life felt solid—and good—for both of us at that time. He had a real foundation, and things were moving in the right direction.

  We went back and forth about whether or not to try adoption or fertility treatments. I felt at peace about not experiencing pregnancy if adoption was what God called us to do. But I also felt something tugging at my heart, telling me that Rick needed someone from his own bloodline.

  I knew that blood is not what’s important when it comes to family, but he had come from such a painful background, with no real family aside from his sister. I imagined the particular joy and redemption he might find in a fathering a child who came from him and maybe even looked like him.

  I felt this message from God so strongly that we decided we’d go in that direction, even though I didn’t necessarily give Rick the whole explanation. I wasn’t sure he’d agree or understand until he held his baby in his arms. At that point, to be honest, he didn’t hold out too much hope because he was afraid of disappointment.

  There were many different treatment options to choose from. After meeting with the doctor at a nationally reputable fertility facility, we were told that we were candidates for IVF, which is more invasive and hardcore than other procedures that couples usually try first, like artificial insemination. In addition to Rick’s low sperm count, we had learned that I had a blocked fallopian tube. This would make it that much harder for sperm and egg to meet, so IVF was the best option.

  Then came the question of cost. Fertility treatments are not cheap. While one round of IVF was doable, our only option was one and done. If that one round didn’t work, that would be it, and we would be out thousands of dollars. But we knew we wanted to go all in—do this thing and make it happen. That required signing on to the much more costly program—a financial guarantee option, as it was called—that would give us four tries at IVF and a money-back guarantee, though we could still lose more than twenty thousand dollars on nonrefundable medications.

  This program would cost more money than we’d ever dreamed of spending. Rick, who had grown up in a trailer, who had always felt he was one step away from homelessness as an adult, and who harbored irrational fears about job loss, knowing there would be no one to turn to if that did happen, simply couldn’t imagine putting up thirty thousand dollars to have a child.

  I wanted to immediately take out a loan and move forward with treatment, but Rick wouldn’t hear of it. We would save the money he said, and that might take several years. He wouldn’t agree to move forward until we had all the money. And it did take a couple of years.

  Being thirty-two, I felt time slipping away. My younger sisters each had two kids already, and many friends were far into the child-raising season. Each month while we waited and saved, I hoped that I would find myself pregnant one day and then it would be obvious why we had waited.

  But no. Like every woman who has ever tried to get pregnant, I cursed my period every time it arrived. Every time it felt like it was maybe a day late, I’d get my hopes up and sometimes, optimistically, buy a pregnancy test. I never saw anything but the one blue line signifying “not pregnant.”

  So we spent the next two years scrimping and saving, dreaming and hoping, and discussing what it might be like to have our own child. It would be a dream come true for both of us. When you asked Rick what he wanted out of life, he’d tell you a family and a home and just enough money to have what he needed. Nothing big, just the basics. He’d never thought he’d have that. But now everything was changing.

  In the back of Rick’s mind loomed fears of what kind of dad he might be. He was terrified of his child having the same kinds of anxieties and fears as he had. He would say he wanted his child to be confident—not awkward—talkative, outgoing, and intelligent. He thought of all the things he hated about himself and wished aloud that they wouldn’t plague his child. I had to remind him that many of those “bad” qualities were the part of his irrational mind talking. I reminded him of his good qualities and assured him that all those parts of him were what made him uniquely who he was.

  Rick knew he didn’t want his son to be afraid to take risks. Rick wanted him to find confidence in everything he did. He spoke passionately about the importance of education, of reading to his son and teaching him math before he started school. He talked about paying attention to his son’s desires and making sure he was encouraging what his son wanted to do, not what he wanted to do. He wanted to give everything to his child that he never had.

  We didn’t have these hypothetical discussions all the time. We sometimes steered away from talking about children altogether because it was scary to think we might not have any. Those two years were full of prayer and faith—and God honored that faith beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  In the meantime, I frequently had pregnancy dreams. I had had them all my life. Carrying a child had just seemed like this magical, beautiful, wonderful experience that I might never get to have. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but I did. Eventually I even started to get jealous of women who were visibly pregnant. When you are trying to get pregnant, it seems like everyone around you is pregnant. Target and church and the grocery store are chock full of gloriously pregnant women. And I would just touch my empty belly in sadness as I watched them go by.

  But G
od’s plan is bigger. God’s plan is better. God is already in the future, so we don’t have to be afraid of it. And I knew that—so I soldiered on.

  I was able to pick up a couple of freelance jobs that offered money we could save each month. Then we both got raises, and the savings began to increase rapidly. Each day we prayed over our finances and for the child we believed God was planning for us.

  It wasn’t long before we realized that with the extra income we would be able to save most of the thirty thousand dollars in one year. And from that time on, we knew everything was going to work out. Sure, we had some moments of doubt, but the signs were all there. This baby was going to happen.

  Oddly enough, the side job I was doing lasted just until we reached our savings goal. It was impeccable timing that we give credit to God for. He completely removed the stress of that aspect of the process for us. Every day, even now, we continue to thank Him for that and for the gift that came after it.

  For Rick, the financial blessing of reaching our goal was the sign he needed. I would have taken out a loan, but we were a team. Both members had to be on board. I didn’t realize then how close we might have come to not pursuing IVF without the additional money that came in.

  The thought of being a dad made Rick happier than anything in the entire world. He felt beyond blessed and divinely placed in this increasingly beautiful life. Though he joked about being a “grandpa dad” because he was so “old,” the jokes were all good-hearted. If things went according to plan, he would be a dad by the age of thirty-nine.

  I, too, had been concerned about my age. I was five years younger than Rick, but still felt my biological clock ticking loudly. I couldn’t help but calculate that if the IVF didn’t work, it might be several years before an adoption could go through. I’m sure Rick had negative thoughts too. But we tried to push them out of our minds and take the money as confirmation that IVF was our God-given destiny.