When I was just one year old, my mother wrote me following note:
In 1976, at 19 yrs old, I gave birth to a three-month-premature girl child, weighing less than three pounds. She so wanted to be born that she hid herself and all evidences of herself for four and a half months. In effect, I had a six-week pregnancy, no labor and an extremely easy delivery.
God and I talked the night she was born and He agreed that as she fought so hard to get here and was in such a rush to do it, I could keep her.
A couple months later, she came home to me at four pounds, ten ounces and hardly bigger than a toy baby. In fact, she was wearing doll clothes. Though hardly big as a minute, she was not too far behind her peers in development. Quick to laugh and trusting everyone, she could (and did) sleep anywhere, through anything. A good and easy baby and toddler. The light of my life and keeper of my heart.
My second marriage to The Dutchman was so full of error and terror that it still directs some of the path Isis walks. It is also responsible for some of her strength.
We arrived in the Netherlands to the coldest winter in 20 years. Isis, my sunshine girl, adapted immediately. She played outside in a thin Florida sweat suit, and Oma’s woolen cap. She took to ice skating as though it was her life: I was asked if she was skating for Olympic competition.
She learned Dutch so quickly that she checked MY language homework. She was desperate for a pet, adopting the attic moths to the point we were guilted into getting her a small pet. (She later used this technique on Allen and Mary, to get a ferret). She was the FIRST girl in the Netherlands to be on a baseball team; girls there only played softball.
She came back to the states ahead of me and brought my heart with her.
Hell is over, The Dutchman is gone. Isis and I are on our own.
Life for Isis begins.
