Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Planting the Seed

  Chapter 2: Seeking

  Chapter 3: The Girl in the Photo

  Chapter 4: The Feral Child

  Chapter 5: Meeting Danielle

  Chapter 6: Falling through the Cracks

  Chapter 7: Nowhere Child

  Chapter 8: Into the System

  Chapter 9: Truth and Consequences

  Chapter 10: Butterflies Are Free

  Chapter 11: All in Good Time

  Chapter 12: Step by Step

  Chapter 13: Meet the Family

  Chapter 14: Hello Kitty

  Chapter 15: Ready, Set, Go

  Chapter 16: One Step Backward

  Chapter 17: Two Steps Ahead

  Chapter 18: T.J. Bearytales

  Chapter 19: Pedal, Pedal, Pedal!

  Chapter 20: Dani

  Chapter 21: Baby’s First Christmas

  Chapter 22: Tennessee

  Chapter 23: The Public Eye

  Chapter 24: Big Brother

  Chapter 25: Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2011 by Diane Lierow and Bernie Lierow. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Photo credits: Pages 122, 128, 177, 190, 200, & 212 courtesy of Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times/Zuma Press. Page 264 courtesy of Empower Me Day Camp. All other photos are from the Lierow family collection.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lierow, Diane, date.

  Dani’s story : a journey from neglect to love / Daine Lierow, Bernie Lierow, Kay West

  p. cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-470-59133-8 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-04365-3 (ebk);

  ISBN 978-1-118-04366-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-04367-7 (ebk)

  1. Lierow, Daine, 1962- 2. Lierow, Bernie, 1959- 3. Adoptive parents—United States—Biography. 4. Adopted children—United States—Biography. 5. Children with disabilities—United States—Biography. I. Lierow, Bernie, 1959- II. West, Kay, 1955- III. Title.

  HV874.82.L54A3 2011

  362.734092—dc22

  [B]

  2011010966

  For Dani and William

  Introduction

  Five minutes before the arrival of the school bus that carries my children over three miles of rolling, winding, narrow two-lane road, I walk with a posse of excited, yelping dogs from our ninety-year-old Tennessee farmhouse down the long drive to the gate at the end. The bus lumbers to a stop, the door wheezes open, and there is our twelve-year-old daughter, Dani, ready to deboard. Very briefly, she considers the steps, but quick as a blink she instead slides down the smooth steel hand rail on her bottom. I grab her up in a hug as she reaches the ground, she smiles, and after her older brother William latches the gate behind us, we walk together back to the house, navigating a path through the dozens of chickens that assemble in the pecked-bare ground outside their coop like pigeons on a piazza in Italy.

  Dani opens the back door, drops her backpack on the floor in the mud room, and pats the inside dogs on their heads. She smiles when William’s parrot squawks a greeting, and after a quick pit stop in the bathroom, she goes to the kitchen to refuel after a long day of lessons and classrooms. As the cat weaves its way between her legs, Dani opens the refrigerator door and contemplates the contents but doesn’t see anything that interests her, so she grabs a package of peanut butter crackers from the pantry. She chooses a plastic cup from the cupboard, swivels to the sink, turns on the tap, and fills the cup with water. Then she sits down at the table and digs into her snack. It is an after-school ritual being performed at that moment in that sequence in millions of households across America.

  After the kids’ snack, we go to the barn to check on our ever-reproducing herd of goats. While William and I begin the ritual of setting out food and clean water for the goats in the yard, Dani goes inside the barn to check on the new mamas and their babies in the area that serves as the nursery.

  Once those chores are done, we go back to the house so the kids can settle down with homework at the kitchen counter while I start dinner. When Bernie comes home from work, he ruffles William’s hair, tickles Dani till she squeals, and then takes a quick shower before we all sit down to eat. After dinner, if it’s still light outside, Bernie likes to run around with the kids in the yard—he’s an overgrown kid himself—and hike out to the back pasture to check on our four miniature horses. Baths, pajamas, bedtime stories, prayers, goodnight kisses, lights out, and the kids are finally in bed. Bernie and I collapse on the sofa in the family room, catch up with each other, watch the news if we can stay awake that long, and take one last peek in on William and Dani before calling it another very long day. The next morning, the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. and we start all over again.

  It is totally routine and absolutely ordinary.

  Yet in our family, even the routine is unpredictable, the ordinary is extraordinary, and the most mundane tasks are milestone achievements for our pretty, brown-eyed, blond pony-tailed, long-limbed daughter.

  When Bernie and I first met Dani in the profound needs classroom of an elementary school in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, she had just turned eight years old. She drooled, her tongue stuck o
ut one side of her mouth, her head lolled to one side, she wore a diaper, and she drank—sort of—from a sippy cup tied to the leg of a table so that when she dropped or threw the cup, it would not roll away. She bit her own arms and hands, pulled at her hair, and hit the sides of her head with her balled-up fists. She did not make eye contact, engage with others, or like to be touched; she did not smile, laugh, or talk. She did have a repertoire of pretty impressive noises: a sustained guttural moan, a higher-pitched wail, an occasional piercing shriek, and a yelping repetitive “woo woo woo woo” that sounded so much like a European ambulance it made Bernie remark that in an emergency, she could be her own siren.

  She had been in foster care since being discharged from Tampa General Hospital some fifteen months earlier, where she had spent four weeks after being removed from the rundown shack where she lived with her mother and two grown stepbrothers. She had been confined day and night like an animal in a tiny, filthy, dark room, alone and naked except for her diaper, uncovered on a cockroach-infested, soiled bare mattress. She was intermittently fed solid food from a can and was infrequently bathed, but she was never held, never kissed, never talked, read, or sung to, and never played with. She was never taken outside to feel the sunlight on her face. At nearly seven years old, she had never been taken to a doctor, had never been immunized, had never seen a dentist, and had never been to school. She was covered with thousands of bug bites, her arms looked like sticks, her ribs were clearly visible under pale skin, and her scalp crawled with lice under her matted and dirty hair.

  Yet that day in the classroom, Bernie and I didn’t know any of this. All we knew was that we had been so powerfully drawn to this little girl, whom we had seen only in her photograph in a gallery of children available for adoption, that we could not get her out of our minds. We had been told by the agency that we should do ourselves a favor and choose another child. Her primary social worker had strongly suggested that before we went any further, we see the movie Nell starring Jodie Foster as a “wild child” who was discovered living in the backwoods of North Carolina. She spoke a language no one could understand and lashed out at anyone who tried to come close to her. We watched it with William and one of our older sons, Paul. At one point, as we all sat transfixed by the story, Paul turned to us and asked, “Are you nuts?” When the movie was over, Bernie and I looked at each other and, as we so often do, read each other’s thoughts.

  We both knew we had to meet this little girl whose image had already embedded itself in our hearts, minds, and souls. The connection we felt with her before we even met her was so powerful that we never questioned it. It was as if we already knew her, and although we didn’t know what lay ahead, we had no choice but to follow whatever or whoever was leading us to her.

  As crazy as it sounded, somewhere in the back of our minds Bernie and I believed that if this inexplicable, mysterious calling was so undeniable, maybe she had been waiting for us all along.

  Chapter 1

  Planting the Seed

  The first time I brought up adoption to Bernie was about three years after we got married. We were still living in Tennessee, renovating a huge old house we had felt compelled to buy, working days at our jobs and nights and weekends on our home. I didn’t have a specific child in mind or even a gender or an age. I was just testing the waters. Bernie’s response was not exactly enthusiastic, so I put it in the back of my mind.

  The next time I brought it up was after we moved to Florida and were living in our first house there. Our youngest, Willie, was not in school yet, and Paul and Steven still lived with us. Yet we were down to only three kids from five, and the thought had worked its way forward in my head enough for me to bring it up to Bernie again. I think I just casually mentioned it, kind of like, “How was your day, what do you want for dinner, can you take Steven to get a new pair of board shorts later, have you thought any more about adopting a child?”

  As best as I can recall, his answers were, “Good. I can grill something. Okay. No.”

  So I dropped it again. Although Bernie had been an equal partner in adopting stray dogs and rundown houses, a child required quite a bit more than a pat on the head and a fresh coat of paint.

  For as long as I can remember, adoption was something I felt that I was called to do. As an only child, I longed for siblings and a big boisterous family like the ones I saw on television. When I was born, my parents were quite a bit older than most parents of that day; my father was in his early fifties and my mom was forty-two. I was their fourth child, but the previous three did not survive infancy. I never knew that until later, and even then, it was not a subject either of my parents talked about. I know I asked them about having a brother or a sister and that they had looked into adopting, but in that era, they were considered too old.

  I can’t fathom the pain my mother had suffered when one baby after another died. Losing one baby would be a tragedy, but three? It’s unimaginable to me. I’ve been known to cry for days over losing a baby goat. Maybe she became so worn down by her grief that she couldn’t allow herself to feel anymore or become attached to a child when three had been taken away from her. Our relationship was always distant and cold. My mother was not in the least affectionate, and I longed for her to hug me, rub my back, stroke my hair. She took care of all of my standard needs—food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education—but she could never bring herself to tell or show me that she loved me. My father was different. I was his little girl, and I spent as much time with him as I could.

  Mother didn’t have any friends I knew of. She had worked for years in the accounting department at General Motors but quit when I was born. She didn’t see her own family. Although they lived nearby, the only time I saw relatives was when her parents picked me up for the weekend, and we’d go places. A relative of ours had a horse farm and going to visit him and his family there was the best thing ever. I loved the horses, the sense of family, and being away from my house, which was as quiet, still, and lifeless as a mausoleum.

  My father worked for GM, too. Everybody in Michigan worked in the auto industry at that time. He started on the line, then got a dress-up-to-go-to-work job, but he didn’t like dressing up, so he asked to go back to the line. They made him the shop foreman, which he wasn’t crazy about either, but it was better than an office job.

  We lived in a lake house, and almost everyone who lived near us was retired. There wasn’t anybody nearby who had kids. I kind of grew up like a mini-adult, because I was only around adults.

  My father raised beagles when I was little, and they were my only and best friends. I loved playing with them, letting them jump all over me and lick my face. Right about the time I started school I developed allergies, and because my parents thought the dogs were the cause, the dogs had to go. I tried to suggest that maybe it was something to do with school, but my mother wasn’t buying it. I was heartbroken. I felt as if it was my fault, and I was very lonely without the dogs.

  My parents were not role models for a happy, healthy marriage, either. They lived separate lives. My father loved hunting, fishing, yard work, and animals. My mother stayed in the house. I’m not sure what she loved or even what she did with herself all day. How dirty could a house get with only three people—and no animals—in it? How long did it take to cook dinner for three?

  My parents didn’t go anywhere together socially. They both drank, but they didn’t even drink together. My father drank outside the house and with his buddies, and my mother drank secretly alone at home.

  I was a good student in everything but math. I read constantly. I think lots of only children did, at least before computers came along. I loved animals so much that I wanted to be a veterinarian, but my mother discouraged it because of my allergies and my struggles with math.

  When I was eighteen and close to graduating from high school, my father died in a hospital in Arizona following scheduled heart surgery with a specialist. My mother had not gone with him, which kind of tells the story of their marri
age and the type of person she was. He was in a hospital room by himself miles away from us when he died. I had talked to him on the phone that evening, so it was even more of a shock to me when the call came in the middle of the night. His body was flown back home for the funeral. I was devastated and had nowhere to turn for comfort, certainly not to my mother. The funeral, my graduation—it was all a blur. I can barely remember any of it.

  Then it was just my mother and me, and we were like strangers. She read magazines and watched soap operas. All I wanted was to be gone.

  I had earned some scholarship money and intended to go away to a state school, but my mother told me I couldn’t leave—that I needed to stay home with her and enroll in the community college to be a dental hygienist. She said I would be finished in two years, and I suppose she assumed that because the most teeth anyone can have is thirty-two, I could manage the math.