We have already said our father was a missionary/minister (he never left the USA but was missionary to some groupings in the USA).
I was 7 years old when we moved the third time in our lifetime. I suppose that was the easiest of all the moves for us. We made friends in the neighborhood easily. I had a favorite tree I liked to climb for personal space. It had a place just above the telephone lines where the main branch extending from the tree broke into three separate branches, and I could sit there for hours, sometimes even take naps or read books, with no fear of falling. I called it the queen’s chair. We were in a little hamlet of sorts – too small to have a store of any kind but in a grouping of three churches and a cluster of houses. Farmland surrounded us all around. Parishioners even “paid” us with milk and eggs as a supplement to a very low salary.
While we lived there we took two young girls from the State Institution for Mentally Retarded Children in a foster care type arrangement. The first girl was thrown in a trash bin when she was three days old. She was two when she came to our home. She made no human sounds except to laugh and cry. We were told she would never talk. She had been one of 30 children in her room in the basement and the first time she ever saw the sky or grass was when she came to our house. She was ecstatic with excitement when she saw our cat on the sidewalk going up to our house. She spent a lot of time clinging to the center pedestal of our dining room table. I used to crawl in under there with her and hold her in my lap. We connected on a very deep level. Words can’t express how dearly we loved her. She did grow and mature in every way after arriving in our home. She said “uh oh” and “meow” just a month after her arrival.
The second girl came a year later from a very different situation. She had downs syndrome and she was dearly loved by her family of origin. It was only after years of coaxing from the family doctor that they agreed to surrender her to the state institution. The doctor said it was inevitable and the longer they postponed it, the harder it would be on everyone. No sooner was she institutionalized than she came to us in the foster program. Her family would come every Sunday to take her to McDonalds and be together as a family. I never understood why it had to happen at all; but though we loved her dearly, she never needed us like the first girl did.
When we moved to a different state about three years after the first girl came to our home, the institution told us to find good homes for them, but we were not permitted to take them with us. Devastation doesn’t even come close to describing what that did to me/us. We kept our goldfish but gave my sisters away – that’s how I saw it. I had always had nightmares about going to school one day and my family moving away and forgetting me & leaving me behind. My father came to my bed one time and asked me to tell him about the nightmare. After I did, he said they loved me and would never leave me behind or forget me. I had taken great comfort in his words at the time; but when we moved and left the two girls behind, it destroyed the fragile trust I had put in my father’s words. I ran away from home and tried to kill myself more than once during the first two years at the new location.
