Notre Rose Céleste (First in a series)

Adoption policies have standard criteria regarding the age of parents who wish to adopt infants. For someone who is over the age of forty-five, it is almost impossible to adopt a baby . At age sixty, you’d have a better chance of winning the power ball and being struck by lightening twice. Unless, of course, it is a one-legged baby with half a brain. Then a parent of any age can buy one get one free. The adoptive parent themselves don’t even have to have legs or brains. Why wouldn’t the most challenging children be offered to the elderly?  Fortunately, this policy worked in our favor when we sought to adopt an infant in our golden years. Each of us even had a full set of legs and at least a brain between the two of us.
It was Thursday, May 21 2009.  We received the call about a baby girl not yet born. The tests in utero showed that she lacked a corpus callosum and most likely had a club foot. Club foot we understood but corpus callosum? It sounds like a botanical name for a Gerbera Daisy. What we googled wasn’t very pretty and the kids that lacked corpus callosums were funny-looking little things. We really didn’t care.  We knew love would conquer all and this little baby to be would be the cutest ever!!  I am pretty sure a mother hippopotamus has the same thought as she waits for her baby hippopotamus to be born. And so we agreed to take the baby, missing parts and all.  We were excited and spent the next few days eagerly awaiting the call that the little one had been born.  Her name would be Therese in honor of St. Therese of Lisieux aka The Little Flower, to whom we are fondly devoted.
It was Sunday night, May 24th.  Dexter browsed emails while I cooked dinner. One of the emails, a forward from our daughter, Suky, displayed a shower of roses and an inspirational text. It had been sent a few days  before but Dexter only now had the occasion to read it. At that very moment, the call came.  She had just been born.  Were the roses in the email a sign from Therese?  Traditionally, roses are associated with favors granted through the intercession of Therese.  We needed no convincing. This was notre rose celeste (our rose from heaven). Soon we learned that her birth mother’s name was Rosalina. And so the baby would be called Rosalina Therese, our little Rosey.
As it turned out, Rosey did not have a club foot.  She did have a corpus callosum, a thin one, but alas, no septum pellucidum. When its all put together, a corpus callosum (CC) minus a club foot(-CF) minus a septum pellucidum(-SP) plus one half a pituitary(+.5 P) equals Septo Optic Dysplasia(=SOD). To us, it sounded like Rosey should be a veritable Baby Einstein. According to the docs, it was more like she would be a another Helen Keller. Either way, no matter how you figure it, it’s all relative anyway, Rosey is our little miracle.

This entry was posted in Marriage and Family, Uncategorized on August 14, 2014.

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