The doctors confirmed JP had lost all hearing in his right ear. It turned out his whole face was paralyzed on the right side, but no one realized that until the swelling went down. He couldn’t close his right eyelid, so they gave him a black eye patch, which he thought was pretty cool. The right side of his mouth just drooped, like half a frown. But the worst thing was how much pain he was in from his broken arm and mangled leg. Every movement caused him to seize up and moan. A physical therapist came by every day, but JP hated his therapy. He’d be alert when it was just me in the room, but as soon as he saw the therapist in the hall he’d pretend to be fast asleep.
My sweet little boy, my fidgety little rascal of a son, could now barely move without terrible pain. I had to pick him up just to get him to the bathroom. ‘Mama, carry me,’ he’d say in a soft murmur. It filled me with shame and sadness to see him this way.
As soon as I realized JP was in for a long recovery, I dropped out of my college classes so I could be with him. He spent ten days in the hospital, and in that time the doctors never gave us a good diagnosis of what was wrong with him. They wanted to wait six months and run more tests before they reached a conclusion. I brought JP home, and over time his swelling went down and his paralysis went away. But he still couldn’t hear out of his right ear, and walking was still a major challenge.
Because of his injuries, I had to keep JP out of kindergarten for several weeks. But not long after he got out of the hospital I took him back to his classroom so he could grab his books and say hi to his friends. I was getting ready to carry him down the long hallway to his classroom, but JP wouldn’t let me near him – he didn’t want anyone to see me carrying him. Instead, he limped his way down the hall all on his own. Had I carried him it would have been a thirty-second walk; it took JP thirty-five agonizing minutes. It was all I could do not to sweep him up and cradle him in my arms.
Finally we got to his room, and JP proudly showed off his cast to his little buddies. Once we were back in the hallway and the door to his classroom was safely closed, JP looked at me with his sad eyes and said, ‘Mama, will you carry me?’ I picked him up and kissed him gently and carried him to the car.
Most of the time, JP couldn’t do much more than sit around the house with his leg propped up. Even taking baths was a nightmare, since he couldn’t get his right arm or his left leg wet. It was like playing a cruel game of Twister in two feet of water. But, you know, we actually laughed a lot during bath time. Keeping different sides of his body out of the tub was so ridiculously hard we had to laugh. And I know JP got a kick out of how I usually ended up more sopping wet than he was. Seeing him laugh at his own predicament was, for me, a great sign. That’s when I realized he’d inherited my ability to laugh during even the hardest times. I’d passed something on to my son that was good and useful. It made me feel like JP was going to be okay.
However, something even scarier was going on. In the months after the accident, JP’s behavior started to change. He’d go from extremely happy one minute to angry and irritated the next. He’d wake up in a great mood, then suddenly start acting as if his dog had died. He’d always been a little hyper – when he was five he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder – but his outbursts now were something completely different. He’d throw horrible tantrums, hurling himself to the floor kicking and screaming. He would lash out and punch and kick at me, too.
He’d also get strangely fixated on things. Sometimes he’d tell me the same thing over and over – forty or fifty times. I’d say, ‘Yes, honey, I know,’ and he’d say, ‘No, you’re not listening!’ and tell me again. Or he’d remember seeing a particular sign at Wal-Mart and talk about it non-stop and demand to see it again. He’d be so upset I’d have to get up in the middle of the night and drive him to Wal-Mart so he could see the sign and come back home and finally fall asleep.
For two years after the accident we bounced from doctor to doctor, searching for something that would make JP better. That was a really frustrating time. One doctor insisted the tantrums were caused by JP’s attention deficit disorder. I said, ‘No, this is not that. This is totally different.’
The doctor replied, ‘Well, how would you act if you got hit by a truck?’
It was like I was fighting the whole world. JP was supposed to be listed on his father’s insurance, but of course he wasn’t yet. Even though his dad knew how important it was for JP to have good insurance, he kept putting it off, month after month. As a result, I only had state-sponsored insurance, which wouldn’t pay for JP to see the specialists he needed. It took two whole years before we finally got in to see a doctor who gave me a good explanation of what had happened to my son.
The doctor, an ear, nose and throat specialist, explained that the impact of the crash had jarred JP’s brain stem. At the base of that stem there are bundles of nerves that control different functions. One of them controls facial movements, while another controls the ability to hear. The crash had damaged those two nerves, which explained JP’s paralysis and his loss of hearing. One of them had healed, and JP got his facial movements back. But the other wasn’t healing, which is why JP still couldn’t hear out of one ear.
There was nothing wrong with my son’s ear; there was something wrong with his brain. Now I was on a mission to find someone who could fix it.
In the end JP’s diagnosis was much more serious than a closed-head injury. He had what they call a traumatic brain injury, which can mean all kinds of brain damage. I read everything I could about traumatic brain injuries, including a book by a woman who was an expert in the field and charged $20,000 to evaluate a patient. Well, I barely had $20 to give her, but I called her anyway and told her about JP. She was kind enough to let me read his medical records to her over the phone and to tell me what questions I should be asking his doctors. She helped me understand what was happening and what kind of tests JP needed. She was an angel who came out of nowhere and made me feel like I wasn’t fighting this fight by myself after all.
Through all that research I learned the doctor JP really needed to see was a neuropsychologist, but my insurance wouldn’t pay for that kind of specialist. A neuropsychologist became my personal Wizard of Oz – someone I had to find at any cost, no matter the hardship – in order to save my son. But try as I might, I was never able to get JP in to see one. All I could do was manage JP’s outbursts and fixations as best I could and keep searching for the elusive Wizard.
Finally, nearly two years after the accident, things came to a head.
One day when I picked JP up from the day care where he stayed after school, one of his teachers came over to talk. From the anguished look on her face I could tell it wasn’t going to be idle chitchat. She said she’d tried her best to be patient, but she just couldn’t watch JP anymore. His outbursts were getting worse: he was throwing himself to the ground and punching himself, hard. His mood swings were getting more and more extreme. She was exhausted from trying to help him, and she was afraid he was going to really hurt himself. I begged her to give me a couple more weeks while I figured out what to do. Reluctantly, she agreed.
By then, however, I was pretty much at the end of my rope, too. It was killing me to see JP struggle with himself so much and to see how he couldn’t understand what was happening inside him. We both felt so powerless and frustrated and angry. And, like his teacher, I was worried JP was going to harm himself. He was getting bigger and stronger, and his outbursts were getting more violent. Every day was another opportunity for something tragic to happen.
Finally, someone told me about a psychiatric clinic about forty miles from where we lived. It was a hospital that specialized in children with behavioral problems, and to me it sounded like my very best chance of getting JP the help he needed. The downside, of course, was that I would have to commit JP for four or five months. He was still just a baby to me, and the thought of him locked inside a dreary hospital was horrifying – especially since I felt so responsible for what had happened to him.
Yet at the same time I knew I had to do something, and I just didn’t see any other option. JP needed help – that was clear. If getting that help meant sending him away to an institution for four months, what choice did I have but to do it? Just a few months before JP’s ninth birthday, I arranged for him to go in for treatment at the clinic.
The day I dropped him off is one I will never forget. I stayed with him while a nurse drew blood, and I held his hand as we made our way to the children’s wing. After a few minutes, a staffer made it clear it was time for me to go. I bent down and squeezed JP as tightly as I could, and I kissed him and told him over and over, ‘I love you.’ I don’t think he understood what was happening, because he didn’t say much – and that only made me hug him harder. Finally, a nurse looked at me and mouthed the words, ‘Just go.’ I got up and walked away from my baby boy.
I told myself, Don’t turn around; just keep going. Then I heard JP start to cry for me. ‘Come back, Mama!’ he screamed through sobs. I knew I couldn’t turn around, because that would only make it worse. Instead, with JP’s cries echoing through the hall, I just kept walking. As soon as I turned the corner, I burst into tears.
That night in my suddenly quiet house I talked to a God I didn’t know was listening.
‘How long?’ I asked Him. ‘How long is my son going have to pay for my sins?’
A few months before I took JP to the psychiatric clinic I’d resumed my college classes and entered the Teacher Education Program at a local university. My life had become a blur of appointments, classes, pick-ups and drop-offs. Take the kids to day care, go to school, get the kids, go to work, get home, study, sleep, rise and repeat. I’ll never forget the frantic feeling of being two hours late to pick up my children at day care one afternoon. I found them with a saintly teacher who bought them ice cream and stayed with them until I showed up. To this day, JP and Sabyre like to tease me about it. ‘Way to forget about us, Mom,’ they’ll say.
Money, to say the least, was tight. I was only a step or two ahead of the bill collectors, and I’d usually have to drive down to the electric company to pay a bill just hours before my power got shut off. On one of those trips – when all I had to my name was $75 in the bank, enough to cover the bill I was paying – my trusty little red Eagle Talon went and exploded on me.
That’s right, the engine literally exploded as I sat in the utility company drive-through, paying my bill. There was a crack in the engine, apparently, and I guess I was lucky I didn’t crash. What did I do? What else? I laughed my head off. I certainly couldn’t afford to get the car towed, much less fixed, so I had some nice people help me push it out of the drive-through. Then I called a scrap place and sold the smoldering wreck for $100. I remember taking all of my things out of the car and holding them while I waited for my mom to pick me up in the parking lot. My extra shoes and children’s toys and books and dolls – you know, all the stuff of my life.
But life, as it does, went on, and eventually I did graduate. That was one of the proudest days of my entire life. No one had given me that diploma. I earned it with a lot of sweat and tears.
Right around the time my car exploded, I’d applied for a job at an insurance office in town out of desperation. I’d quit working at the country-western bar, because I couldn’t stand being away from my kids at night. But I had to make money somehow, so when I heard about the insurance job I jumped. I’d never learned to type, but my Grandma Ernie had encouraged me to take piano lessons. I guess my fingers were limber enough to bang out seventy words a minute on my typing test. My would-be boss David and I wound up being a perfect match: he was in desperate need of a secretary, and I was in desperate need of a job. He offered me the position, which came with a salary, steady income and the chance to earn bonuses. Also, a normal schedule – no nights or weekends. It felt like I’d hit the jackpot.
I went to work in David’s office, which was connected on one side to a donut shop. For the first couple of days, I loved the sweet smell of donuts in the air. By day three, and from then on, it made me kind of sick. A constant sugar rush, though, seemed like a small price to pay for a good, steady job.
But there was another problem. My first week at work was also the week I had to take JP to the clinic. I was allowed to see him three days a week – two visits and one day of family counseling – but in order to see him I’d have to find a way to leave work early. And how could I ask my boss for time off from a job I’d only just started? But since I had no choice, I screwed up my courage and asked David if I could work through lunch so I could leave at 4:00 p.m. and drive up to see my son. I was terrified he was going to fire me on the spot.
He didn’t. He agreed to let me leave early three days a week. It turned out David was going through something similar. His wife was battling her own demons and was in a rehab clinic several hours away. David was raising their three young sons by himself, and his work at the office was the only thing holding his family together. That’s why he was so kind to me – he knew I needed a helping hand, same as he did. Once I learned what he was going through, it made me want to work even harder for him and for the business. It was just the two of us, but we became a really effective little team. During my time at David’s agency he won several awards, and I even won one myself for my work with children in the community.
But even better than the awards was the friendship we developed. We helped each other through a really tough time for both of us. David became one of my dearest friends, and though he moved away I still speak with him every now and then. I wonder if he knows that when he hired me, he basically saved my life.
Thanks to David, I went to see JP every chance I could (we also got to talk on the phone ten minutes a night, not nearly enough time for either of us). In my visits, I could tell his condition was slowly improving. They’d given him different mood stabilizers, and it seemed to be working. He was still having problems with many of his frontal lobe functions – inhibitions, emotions, impulse control – but at least we were getting some tools to help us handle it.
In the middle of this whirlwind called my life, a person appeared who changed everything. He wasn’t someone I ever expected or even wanted to meet, and I fought as hard as I could to make him go away. But he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. And so my crazy little life took an amazing new turn.
Believe me, by then I was all but finished with men. I just didn’t have time for games and drama, and after what had happened with Steven and JP I was even more careful about who I brought into their lives. Only many years later would I realize you aren’t the only one in control of who enters your life. Sometimes greater forces are at work putting people in your path.
It started when a friend invited me for a glass of wine at the Air Force base. I was way too tired to go, but my friend was persistent. ‘Come on, one glass,’ she said. Sabyre was staying with my mom, and JP was still in the clinic. Reluctantly, I went to meet my friend.
At the main gate, a guard stopped us and sent us into an office to get a pass. This guard, an older guy, started hitting on my friend and me in a really obnoxious way. You know, leering at us and trying to act like Mr. Smooth. I had zero tolerance for big-mouthed men anymore, and I was just about to lay into him when another guard in the office suddenly spoke up.
‘You going on a date or something?’ he asked me.
I looked over at this other guard. He was sitting at a back desk eating Girl Scout cookies – Thin Mints, to be exact. He was a lightskinned black man about my age and he had a beautiful smile and warm, friendly eyes. Right away I sensed there was nothing mean or threatening about him. He was the kind of guy who would have turned my head in years past, but I’d had more than enough of men clumsily hitting on me. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘That’s none of your business,’ I snapped. ‘You don’t need to know that to give me a pass, do you?’
The guard looked wounded. ‘I’m sorry, Miss, I didn’t mean it that way,’ he said. ‘I just think you look beautiful.’
I didn’t say anything else; I just took my pass and stormed out. A few hours later, in my friend’s room, I began to feel bad about how rude I’d been. It wasn’t like me to snap like that – well, not for no reason, anyway – and I wanted to apologize to the guard. I had my friend call the gate and tell him I was sorry. Instead, she invited him over. I was surprised an hour later when he showed up in full uniform.
I apologized for my rudeness, and we wound up sitting and talking for about four hours that night. If nothing else, this guy was a great listener. For some reason, I felt okay telling him about my kids and JP’s accident and all that – not every detail, of course, but a pretty good overview. And he sat there with those warm, friendly eyes and let me tell my tale of woe. He didn’t make a move on me or even try to kiss me, and at the end of the night he just gave me a peck on the cheek and said he hoped he’d see me again.
‘You’re going to marry him,’ my friend said as soon as he left.
‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘I’m probably never going to see him again.’
Only much later would he tell me that he fell in love with me that night.
His name was Virgil, and he was a US Army Security Forces Officer stationed at the base. He was born in Texas, but as a youngster the searing heat gave him skin rashes so his parents moved him north to Oklahoma. His dad was a truck driver who steered giant rigs strapped with huge drums of dangerous chemicals, and Virgil knew him to be as tough a man as there was. One winter, the roads iced over, and his dad’s truck slid into a deep ditch and toppled over. Luckily, he didn’t seem too badly hurt, but he refused to go to the hospital to get an X-ray. He just went home all sore and bruised and spent the next few days picking tiny bits of the windshield out of his clothes.
Virgil’s mother met his father in college, where she was earning a psychology degree; family lore has it she did a lot of his homework for him. They were in their early twenties when Virgil was born, and they took him to their Baptist church every Sunday. After a while, though, they stopped going to church, and young Virgil stopped going, too.
But when Virgil was fourteen, his basketball coach, a deeply religious man, started talking to him about salvation – how it was possible for him to be saved in the eyes of God. Something about the concept of salvation really stuck with Virgil, and that year he entered into a relationship with God. There was no elaborate ceremony or ritual – Virgil just went off on his own somewhere and spoke a few words to God. ‘Lord, I am a sinner, and I ask you to forgive me my sins,’ he said. ‘I believe that you died on the cross for my sins, and I ask you now to enter my heart as my Savior.’
As Virgil would later explain it to me, that was the start of a long and beautiful process. From that day on, Virgil has never looked back. He has never doubted, not even for a moment, that God is real and lives in his heart. ‘I can trust God,’ he will say. ‘I know He will help and protect me.’ In a nutshell, Virgil had the very certainty about God that I had always craved but never could feel. Where I went back and forth about God’s existence and His goodness, Virgil never wavered. The presence of God was a plain and simple fact of his life, like the air he breathed and the food he ate and grass that grew beneath his feet.
I had never met anyone like him.
So, naturally, his first impression of me was, ‘Wow, what a really rude person.’
Actually, Virgil didn’t think that at all. He didn’t let my rudeness bother him in the least. He wasn’t a pushover or anything like that – far from it. He was a former boxer, and he was plenty tough, like his dad. But he was also kind and soft-spoken, and he always seemed like the calmest, most secure man in any room. Even so, I had no interest in dating him – I had no interest in dating, period. There was just too much going on in my life – and my track record with men was just too sorry – for me to get involved with anyone new. Virgil and I got together again for coffee a day or two after we met and went on to spend a lot of time talking on the phone, but I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t available. The best he could hope for was to become my friend.
And that is exactly what happened. Virgil seemed so interested in my problems and my struggles, and he always told me how strong I was and how much he admired me. I felt I was getting a very real measure of support from him at a time when I desperately needed it. For three or four weeks we’d sit around and talk and eat and watch movies, and I started to realize I’d never felt this kind of closeness with any other man in my past. Whatever it was that I was feeling, it felt different. It wasn’t the head-over-heels passion and wild romantic yearning I was so used to experiencing. It was something deeper, more substantial – something that felt more real. After a month or so, I even decided to let Virgil meet my kids.
Sabyre met him first. She was only six years old at the time and had trouble pronouncing his last name – McVea – so she took to calling him Max. Well, Max and Sabyre became best pals. As gentle and generous as he was with me, he was even more wonderful with my daughter. Then one day I told Virgil I had to go visit JP in the clinic. He asked if he could come with me, but I didn’t think it was fair to bring him in to meet JP in the institution so I said no. Virgil said, fine, he’d come to keep me company, then sit in the car and wait while I saw JP. I told him the visit could last three hours. He said he didn’t care.
So he drove with me and waited in the car for three hours while I saw JP.
Not long after that, I got a pass to take my son out of the clinic for a weekend. It was his birthday – he was turning nine – and I scheduled a whole day for us at the Omniplex, a gigantic science exhibition hall and zoo in Oklahoma City. Virgil called his parents, who lived in Oklahoma City, and told them his friend Crystal’s son was having his birthday. His mother – demonstrating exactly where Virgil got his kindness from – opened up her house, invited all these friends and cousins, and threw JP his own birthday party, with a special cake and everything. It was just about the happiest I’d seen him in years.
By then, it was clear to me I had real feelings for Virgil. Not those old high school feelings, like I said, but something richer and more powerful. It began to dawn on me that Virgil could be an important part of my life. My partner, my champion, my hero – someone who’d be there for me in a way no one else ever had. Not a day went by without Virgil telling me how beautiful I looked or what a great mother I was, and on some days I even allowed myself to believe him.
But on most days, my feelings for Virgil were overwhelmed by a single, persistent thought: he is too good for you.
The self-hatred that had rooted in me since I was a young girl was, all those years later, part of me still. I wasn’t the kind of woman good men like Virgil fall for. I didn’t love myself, and I knew that God couldn’t love me. So how could I accept someone like Virgil loving me? It couldn’t be possible. It didn’t make sense.
That’s why I did everything in my power to chase Virgil away.
At some point I sat him down and listed every reason why he shouldn’t be with me. I told him about the horrors of my childhood. I told him about the abortion. I told him how I had dated married men. I told him I had two children and how that was something he didn’t want any part of. I gave him every reason under the sun to get up and walk away from me for good.
But Virgil didn’t get up, and he didn’t walk away. As I sat there crying and spilling my guts, he just leaned in and listened. When I was through, he spoke to me in that calm, reasoned way I was starting to get used to.
‘You’ve earned a college degree,’ he said. ‘You work full-time and raise two great kids on your own. You have compassion for people, and your humor and laughter draws them to you. You’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever known. You have so many more good qualities than anything bad you can ever say about yourself.’
And then he went in for the clincher.
‘You survived all of that stuff,’ he said of my past, ‘and you have become the person I love.’
A remarkable thing happened at that point – I stopped running.
But when I stopped running, everything I’d been running away from suddenly found me all at once.
And when that happened, the course of my life took its strangest turn yet.