circle of love

Michael won't look at me. His dark eyes scrunch shut above the white mask and he tenses as I approach. A few minutes and a slit of eye, then a turning of the head. He's furious with me, still, two weeks after I rescued him from certain death and confined him to this lonely room where he must stay until the tuberculosis wracking his lungs is no longer contagious, while he's pumped full of drugs to combat the virus that's destroying him. He hates the mask, he hates the gown, he hates me and this room and he wants his mother and she doesn't want him.

I am angry too. I am angry with this child's mother, a woman dying of AIDS and tuberculosis who refused to give her son the meds he needed to survive. When I took him from her care, it had been 14 months since he'd seen a doctor. His TB was active and he coughed constantly and his T-cells were nonexistent and his viral count sky high. He is five years old and he has AIDS. She says the meds make him feel bad and they do. That's clear in this tiny tiled room on the second floor of a crappy hospital, the only place in the state that would have anything to do with this little boy. Now that he's dosed up, he's lethargic and his tummy hurts and he sleeps all the time.

He doesn't know it, but his mother's in the hospital too. She is refusing treatment and hospice is giving her comfort and care and attention. It's more than her son is getting. I can't be with him all day and the hospital staff can't spare anyone to sit with him all day and this little boy's soul, it seems, is shriveling while his physical health improves and he's watched, but not touched, by the camera in the corner of his room.

I am at my office late that same afternoon when the call comes in from Lisa. That's not her real name; her real name's unique enough that I won't share it here and unique enough that that I am reminded, when I hear it, of a 17 year old permanent foster care child I met in 1989. She was losing her care, her foster parent booting her the day she turned 18. She was an A student, a soft-spoken child who wanted to go to college, to learn to help people as she'd been helped. I spent half a summer with her as I did my practicum in child welfare. We tried to find pre-college housing so she'd have someplace to go. We got her terrible underbite fixed and more work done on her cleft palate. She told me that her mother never wanted her and abandoned her over and over until the state finally kept her. The foster mother's abandonment was just another verse in the tragic song of her life.

I ask this woman on the phone if she's the Lisa I knew from 1989 and she laughs and says yes. She's a social worker now, just finished with her MSW and back from a trip to Africa where she spent two months trying to trace her ancestors. She is full of joy and pride and deservedly so. She tells me she heard about Michael and then she utters words I never imagined hearing: I want him, I want to keep him. I love that child.

Lisa told me that she had provided respite care for Michael through a local agency, then directly, while his mother was in the hospital or was tired of caring for him. She knows about the AIDS, about the TB, and she wants him. Adding to this impossibly good news, she assures me she is an approved foster parent, another gift, as the process of approval takes months. She wants, immediately, to be allowed to see him. I immediately arrange that.

A week later, I am back in Michael's room. Lisa is there. He looks directly at me and smiles. I can see his lips turning up behind the mask and I can see the sparkle in his eyes, the lifting of their corners as the invisible grin rearranges his face. We all look at one another in our hospital gowns with our white masks and we smile and our eyes connect and I feel as if I can exhale for the first time since I met this tiny little boy.

He's working a puzzle with Lisa and I watch them, seeing two children and a miracle in progress. One is a grown up child, a fine young woman, and the other a little boy, desperately ill, but smiling. One is evidence of what hard work and intelligence and resiliency and a little help and a boatload of compassion from a host of social workers can do, and the other is evidence of the immeasurably powerful effect of love.

It's a little trite and certainly a cliche, but that doesn't take away the truth of it: love given freely to others can expand in a huge ever-widening circle, like concentric rings surrounding a single drop of rain in the center of an ocean. One tiny act of love happens and then the waves of it expand and go on and on and on touching others in ways we'll never know. A drop of love, of kindness, compassion, it seems like nothing; yet it was enough to carry one child through a tragic life and into adulthood, buoyed on the tiny waves of love from this social worker and that one, from a teacher, a minister, a therapist, a doctor, even from a summer practicum student. With nothing but rejection from her family, from the pseudo-parent hired by the state, she still thrived on drops, on waves, on the buoyancy and solidity of caring and compassion. In doing so, she preserved her own goodness and the hope that exists in all of us unless it's stamped out by indifference.

She saved herself and turned right around and saved this little boy. Michael is 10 now and he's got T-cells and the TB's gone. He goes to school and he has friends and he has the kind of life every child should have. Five years of neglect and lack and now five years of love and the kind of cherishing that heals and nourishes body and soul. I don't know if one can entirely make up for the other, but looking at Michael's eyes, at his strong young body, at the way he is with Lisa, I can believe.