The Strength Within

The early years of Kylee's life were a test for all of us.

When she was merely a few weeks old she contracted RSV, a respiratory virus that, I am told, is fairly common and equally undefined. To this day I am still a little in awe of just how close we came to losing her during the first few days of that illness. It didn’t seem so at the time. We asked a great deal of questions, kept vigil at her bedside day and night, and watched her blood oxygen level like hawks, all the while not recognizing that in her shallow, labored, congested breaths there was a real danger she would not be able to draw the next one.

But she rebounded from that, and raising Kylee returned to normal for at least a little while. Then, at six months, she somehow came down with salmonella poisoning. We never figured out how the heck she came up with this one, and neither could the state health department. We didn’t own any reptile pets. She was the only one in the family to come down with it. We had not eaten chicken for as long as we could remember. I remember answering a confident “no” to all the other questions the person from the health department asked me on the phone, and so today it still remains a mystery.

Shortly before her second birthday Kylee was riding piggyback on her mother’s back during an afternoon of play at home and lost her grip. On the way down, she hit her arm on a bedside table and produced a hairline fracture in her forearm. The fall was so slow that Michelle didn’t think it could be a break until Kylee continued to cry and complain about it for longer than usual, and even the doctor in the emergency room didn’t think it could be a break. He handed her an ice cream cone, and when she grabbed at it and began lapping at it through a smile, he proclaimed it a sound bone without x-rays. It wasn’t until two weeks later when we noticed her favoring it at a dance that we had it examined again and had they put it in a cast.

Not long after that we began to notice that Kylee had an eye that seemed to be tracking just a little bit different than the other. Instantly, we were struck with the fear that this was yet another injury from her seemingly mild fall, and so we got her in to see an optometrist. She was diagnosed with strabismus—wondering eye, as it is known to most—and scheduled for surgery a few weeks later with one of the best eye surgeons in the Midwest that, thankfully, practiced in the same town. That was fun; try getting a two-year old through major eye surgery sometime. She was sick for two days after and I thought we were going to have to tie her hands behind her back for weeks for fear that she was going to rub them.

At about four years old Kylee’s respiratory challenges returned in a mild form of asthma. This we discovered through a bout of flu that landed her in the hospital, one of several. Kylee had a pattern we learned to predict whenever she came down with the flu. First she would wane in energy and develop fever, then she would quit eating, and then—despite all our best efforts and pleadings—she would quit drinking. Once we hit that stage, it was off to the emergency room to put her on IV fluids until she felt better enough to take in nourishment. We experienced this cycle for about the next three years.

Next came shingles. Yes, shingles. It's something I always attributed to people with stress and nerve disorders and far older than Kylee's years. Apparently it is also an offshoot of the same virus as Chickenpox and can be the result of having had the vaccination for chickenpox they offer for newborns these days. Megan came down with chickenpox the day that Kylee was born, so we thought we were being prudent and protective parents by haveing Kylee vaccinated.

Then, it stopped. We waited weeks and then months for the next health issue, exotic or otherwise, but the other shoe never dropped. Kylee went a year without any emergency room trips, impromptu doctor’s visits, or days off from school even. The nebulizer sat idle on the closet. At first we thought we were just experiencing a lucky phase, and then we gradually grew less and less concerned. At some point our only reminder of Kylee’s past difficulties came in the form of a call about her annual eye appointment. One day Michelle and I looked at each other and realized that it had been at least a couple of years since we had been to the emergency room for anything.

To see and know Kylee now, you would never have any idea of what she has been through. She is a perfectly healthy nine-year-old little girl. Every morning she awakens with the vibrant enthusiasm of someone that knows there is something new and exciting waiting for her at school or just outside the door of our home. When the weather is warm, there is hardly anything that can keep her inside. Inside, she reads aloud—loudly so—as if the contents of what she reads are alive and happening right before her eyes. She has been through a Tae Kwon Do phase, a dance phase, a soccer phase, and currently still engrossed in her gymnastics phase. She has approached each with the same vigor; she lives for the next week’s appointed time where she can be with others enjoying the activity she so looks forward to.

At parent-teacher conferences each year we get the same report from her teachers about how bright she is and how much energy she brings to the classroom. Her enthusiasm is matched by her charm, and she tends to wrap her teachers around her tiny finger. Her father, as well.

She almost never displays anxiety; I have to be vigilant for the almost imperceptible signs of something worrying her or frightening her. She’s been through a split of the family, several moves, the loss of the family home, the loss of the family pet, and yet she continues to plow through life like the Eveready Bunny.

Kylee’s approach to life at her age, when I think about the contrast of it against her early years, is a source of inspiration to me. I don’t know that she is exceptionally strong, but I know she is exceptionally strong-willed. Whatever she lacks in the physical—she is still a small girl compared with many her age—she more than makes up for in her determination, curiosity, and desire.

For a brief period her fierce will was most evident in her defiance to boundaries and disciplining. I remember a few times where her time-outs were patience-racking minutes of listening to her stomp her feet and cry at the top of her lungs. I knew then that she saw herself strong, and at several points found myself doing a balancing act with the way I tried to guide her. I didn’t want to quash the will in my efforts to teach her what I thought she needed to learn.

But those angry expressions of independence, like her health problems, fell away, and fell away with about as much notice. As I write this I am trying to remember the last time I heard her cry, or stomp her feet, or storm off to another place in the house in a pouting fit. Odd: remembering those things almost makes me miss them a little.

Like any father, I wonder what lies in the years ahead for Kylee and Megan. What will change about the way they are now when they venture out and require less of me and stand more on their own in their decisions and actions? Have I done everything that I can to prepare them, or have I made mistakes along the way that has caused some irrevocable harm and ill-prepared them for the challenges they will face? I have always thought that the best way to ward off the dangers of peer pressures and temptations was to make a child feel loved and secure at home. A strong family keeps the world away. Enough love at home prevents the need to seek acceptance and self-perception externally, a social environ and world rich in risks and dangers. But accomplishing that, creating and sustaining that blanket of security and balancing it with the lessons of independence and self-reliance, has been the monumental task of parenting, at least for me.

I hope, again—like any father, that I have made more good decisions than bad. I hope that what I see in them now is what I will continue to see in both of them in the next few years of adolescence. I hope that even later, when they enter the world of careers and mortgages and bills and raising their own children—my world now—that it will still be with them then. And I hope their children are as much an inspiration to them as they are to me.