“I knew right away this baby was destined to be ours. Mike and I had settled into a routine of pinching pennies, sharing domestic duties, and bonding with our little guy, when my world was shattered once again. For reasons of which I’m still not entirely sure, my loving husband, Brenden’s father, took his own life.”
‘A woman had just given birth and wanted my husband and I to raise him. She didn’t even give the baby a name before she left. This tiny little boy had absolutely no one.’
‘I excused the thought something was actually wrong. I blamed my husband’s ignorance. What do dad’s know anyway? I just held her earlier.’
“I’ll never forget. It was a breezy April afternoon. I can’t erase it from my memory– the phone call or the panicked voice on the other end. ‘There is something wrong with Avery… You need to get home.’ I had left to run a couple errands. It had been only minutes since I had last seen her.”
‘I see you as an attractive woman, not my daughter.’ Then he said, ‘You’re the kind of woman I always wanted. If you weren’t my daughter I would marry you.’
“My father made me feel guilty about it. He said I would destroy our family. That he would get deported to Mexico and my family would lose everything we worked so hard for. He told me to say I made it up because I was a rebelling teenager angry at my father. So I lied to them, I told them exactly what he told me to say.”
‘This is how her ‘boyfriend’ shows her he loves her. He is on the run. Her children are in CPS custody. Our family is devastated.’
“This is my middle daughter, Jessica. She is on life support as a result of Domestic Violence. Her body is covered with bruises, her head has large knots, and she was strangled to death. We are waiting to see if we will have our beautiful lady back.”
‘My sister whispered during one of those many hours, ‘Dad is teaching us how to die.’ The man who named the project suddenly became the subject.’
“We watched him go from a life-loving, bike-riding, wine-drinking, book-writing, word-weaving, soul-enriching mensch, to ashes in a box on my mother’s mantle in some of the shortest, yet longest weeks of my life.”
‘I thought, ‘How is THIS nothing to worry about?’ The walls were closing in. Everything turned black and I couldn’t move my body. ‘It’s common for college students to be under a lot of stress.’
“I decided to request one specific blood test; one that was much harder to receive than it should have been. I had to basically force my doctor to test me. One week later, I was finally given the answer I had been longing so badly for.”
‘I’ll forever remember that moment. The doctor told me to get my camera out and take a picture. And then everything became quiet. The world stopped, right before chaos erupted.’
“Doctors had never seen anything like it. Harper was encased in a hard, thick skin, much like armor, all over her body. It was like we were sleeping walking. We needed to do something quickly.”
‘She was born with her umbilical chord around her neck, her face blue from lack of oxygen. She came into the world feet first. She always goes about things her own way, birth was no exception.’
“I had no idea what was happening, but I knew my mom was behind a cold, closed door that I wasn’t allowed to go through. I wish I could’ve held her hand – she needed it.”
‘There are police officers in the hall. ‘I want them to hurt me, mommy! I want them to kill me with their guns!’ He started crying and hitting himself in the head.’
“‘I think he’s manic,’ I say. ‘His moods are rally erratic and I’m worried.’ The nurse looks at me skeptically. Who am I to know about ‘mania?’ It was stupid to bring him here. He has been through hell.”
‘There’s good news and there’s bad news,’ my dad told me. ‘The good news is they found out what’s wrong with Mom.’ I didn’t know how much longer I could hang on.’
“After 2 years of troubling behavior with my mom, and doctors assuring us there was nothing wrong, we finally had concrete answers. Dad’s voice caught in his throat and tears welled in his eyes. He said the word we most feared.”