Timing

Timing

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under Heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

I have often wondered why things happen in our lives.  If human beings are molecular structures of neurons and protons woven together by our individual DNA, can science explain the events of our lives?  If we are created by God, in His or Her image, can religion answer this question?  Maybe life is just random – a combination of events that occur within the framework of time and space for no apparent reason.  Perhaps humans, as a supposedly evolved species, like to find meaning behind these events as a way to make sense of our vast world and our individual lives.  Maybe it is all of these things or maybe it is none.  

My mother, devout Lutheran that she is, would say that it is the hand of God that determines our destiny.  Life is not random or without meaning, it is created by God and infused with His purpose.  My father, the thoughtful, philosophical one, would tell me the significance is not in the answer to the question, but in the asking of the question itself.  As for me and my life, I think much of it is simply the result of timing. 

My mere existence is explained by timing.  My maternal grandmother, a labor and delivery nurse, loved to tell me the story of how I was a full month overdue.  So comfy in my mother’s womb, I just didn’t want to come into the world as my own person.  My mother later laughed at her recollection of events and confided “I was not pregnant with you for 10 months.  Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t let me and dad get married unless we had to so we told them I was pregnant.  When they agreed to let us get married, we had to hurry up and get pregnant.  You came right on time.”  Were it not for their creative problem solving skills, and my quick conception, I wouldn’t be.  I was three months old when my father had the diving accident that broke his neck in three places rendering him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to conceive a child.  Timing.

It was timing that allowed my Cambodian born brother, Quynh, to be my brother.  Twenty-five families had been called by a social worker before us.  Either not home or not able to take a child at that point, our name came up on the list.  He and two other unaccompanied minors were already on a U.S. bound plane from Thailand and the social worker needed an answer “right now” or she would need to move on to the next family on her list. Two days later, we loaded everyone into the family van and met my brother in the airport.  Timing.

A perfectly timed phone call explains how my first child, Micaah, entered my world. The call from the social worker came while both of my parents were away.  I was a twenty-year old college student living in my parent’s basement when the phone rang.  As a foster home, we often got calls from placement workers trying to find homes for children.  There was an urgency in this worker’s voice when she told me “I need to find a home for this child right now.”  I said “yes” and a couple of hours later, after picking him up from Children’s Hospital, my sister carried him through the back door and into the forefront of my life.

It was timing that allowed Micaah, my foster brother at the time, to later become my son.  I submitted all of the paperwork to become a licensed foster parent shortly after his arrival and just prior to my twenty-first birthday.   I was told that it would go into effect when I turned twenty-one (a licensing requirement) which happened to be on Mother’s Day that year.  The significance of this timing was not lost on me!  I had always felt that I was destined to be a mother to hurting children.

I just happened to shut the vacuum cleaner off in time to hear the phone ringing when the placing worker called looking for a home for Kyelaya and Jonah.  Had my timing been a bit off and the vacuum cleaner continued to drown out the sounds of a ringing phone, maybe I would have never met my children.  Instead, my life was instantaneously and forever changed.  Moments after I finished vacuuming, I was in the car and on my way to pick up this brother and sister duo who, in time, I would later adopt.

It was timing that Ryan and I met and later married when we did.  Had we met in high school, neither of us would have given the other the time of day.  He was too much of a rocker, grease monkey, stoner for me and he would have thought I was too virtuous and straight-laced for him.  Had we met shortly after his divorce, he would have still been in his misogynist, all women are evil, mind frame and I would have been in my self-declared years of celibacy focusing all of my energy on raising the hurting children that were being placed in my foster home.  Had we met then we would have both looked the other way and walked in opposite directions. 

After arriving late to our own wedding, in time we blended his two children and my three into a newly created family. Over time, our family continued to grow with foster children, informal foster children, birth children and grandchildren.

And it is because of Myotonic Dystrophy, a cruel disease threatening to rob me of my time left on earth, that I now sit down and write my life stories – both true and fictional. I need to do it now, before I run out of time.