Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey (15 page)

At this point I really could have used a mai tai. A strong one.

The thing was I knew full well how Bay and Daphne were feeling, because Regina and I were going through the same thing. The boundaries in our new life were hazy at best. We were a living, breathing Venn diagram.

I wanted my daughter and I wanted Regina’s daughter and I wanted Regina to quit messing with my frickin’ wallpaper. She wanted me to stop imposing my suburban fairy tale on her and her family, and she probably wanted to tell me to take my Birkin bag and shove it where the sun didn’t shine.

But none of those things were ever realistic options. And watching the girls work out their differences (which remains an ongoing process) has been not only enlightening but truly heartwarming for me.

Eventually, of course, the Ty/Liam conundrum worked itself out. It was an uneasy truce, a lesson in compromise that served us well because it came up again not long after, when the girls had a similar standoff, this time over Emmett.

As luck would have it, Bay had begun dating Emmett at the same time that Daphne thought her own feelings of friendship for him had blossomed into love. It was a minor romantic altercation, and it was solved soon enough. The real pseudo-sibling-rivalry fireworks came later. And once again, that blasted motorcycle was at the core of things.

Emmett had done something utterly out of character: He got arrested, and slapped with a five-thousand-dollar fine. His only hope for paying it was to sell his beloved bike.

I don’t mind saying that would have been perfectly all right with me. But, of course, both Bay and Daphne wanted to rush to Emmett’s financial rescue. More to the point, each girl wanted to be the one to rescue him
first
.

But once again, something good came out of it—that is, if you define “good” as having your deaf daughter (at the suggestion of your hearing one) lie to you in an effort to wrangle five grand out of you. And of all things, Daphne chose to lie about losing her hearing aids, which of course was something we would never dream of denying her.

You’re wondering where the “good” comes in? Well, I suppose it’s all in how you spin it, but for me, the “good” was that when they realized that their individual efforts to assist Emmett were falling short, they forged a united front. This was the first time Bay and Daphne were willing to work together toward a common goal. Their methods may have been on the sketchy side, but deep down, I think their motive was sincere. And they recognized that together, they could accomplish more than they ever could by taking rival stands.

Bay and Daphne acted in tandem to help someone they both cared about very much. They put aside their own differences to bail out (unfortunately, in this case literally) a friend.

I think this is a lesson Regina and I, as dueling moms, will do well to emulate.

Because as sisterly behavior goes, that’s about as good as it gets!

Let me be clear. I know that Bay and Daphne aren’t blood sisters. Strictly speaking, they aren’t even stepsisters. But I like to think of it like this (with my apologies to Donny and Marie Osmond): Daphne is a little bit Bay, and Bay is a little bit Daphne. They walked in each other’s shoes without even knowing it. They borrowed each other’s history while that history was still in the making. They were each other’s warm-up band. And yet they are both delightfully individual and independent.

I feel blessed to have been given more than I ever wanted—to be a part of this bittersweet paradox. My two girls are sharing a most unique evolution. One which very few people will ever be able to comprehend. They are bound. They are connected. And although they may not realize it yet, they are on their way to being friends.

So we sally forth, we Kennishes and Vasquezes. We carry on. If someone asked us all, separately, to describe the process, to wax metaphoric on the events of the last year, surely they’d come away with a mixed bag.

Daphne and I might call upon our love of cooking and liken our family to a terrifically complex recipe in which many different flavors are simmering together to produce a one-of-a-kind pièce de résistance.

Bay and Regina, our gifted Latina artists, would surely describe us as a mixed-media masterpiece, a collision of materials and a blending of colors and textures. The most important thing, though, is that the meaning behind this family portrait is always open for interpretation. We are unpredictable, like performance art.

John would go with something sports-related—he’d compare our ever-improving team dynamic to a triple play executed with exquisite timing. Then he’d go slightly off topic to tell you all about the 1985 World Series, the “I-70 Showdown” in which the Royals defeated the Cardinals (just nod and smile, that’s what we do).

And Toby would compare us to a symphony, slightly out of tune, but ambitious, with a thousand different melodies, contributed by instruments of every variety. Or maybe he’d define us in terms of the lyrics of some Counting Crows song.

And all of these interpretations would be accurate. Because we see things, always, through the filter of who we are. We absorb the world and make sense of it on our own terms. The conclusion is the same, even if the paths we take to get there are not.

The other day, while I was loading the dishwasher, my husband came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me. We had all just finished dinner—the six of us. I made a big Italian meal using a recipe passed down from my grandmother, the one I’d always credited for Bay’s dark hair and fiery personality. I was arranging the silverware in the basket and trying to fit all six drinking glasses on the top shelf in a way that wouldn’t cause them to chip.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.

I laughed. “Why? Because I always remember to rinse the stuck-on spaghetti sauce from the dinner plates before I put them in the dishwasher?”

“Well, that, too. But I was talking about the book. You’re doing something very unselfish, Kathryn. You’re helping people.”

I would like to tell you he stuck around to help me finish wrapping the leftover garlic bread in tinfoil, but that would be a fabrication. He grabbed himself an anisette-flavored biscotti and headed off to his den to go over the papers our newest lawyer had sent over.

Because that part of this journey continues still. The lawsuit is an ongoing concern, and I don’t know when, if ever, it will come to fruition. Unfortunately, I inadvertently set us back a bit when I tracked down the star witness—a nurse named Brizia, who was prepared to swear under oath that on the day the girls were born she’d been forced by her superiors to work forty-eight hours straight, to the point of exhaustion. We are asserting that this is the reason for the mistake that resulted in the switch. I gave this nurse a large sum of money.

If you’ve come with me this far, then I’m confident you know me well enough to understand that this was not a bribe. I had discovered that Brizia, in return for electing to testify on our behalf, had been fired from the hospital. So I gave her the money not as a plaintiff to a corroborating witness, but as one mother to another. I gave it to her because I didn’t want her and her children to suffer because she was doing the right thing.

So the lawsuit is just one more indefinite in our universe at the moment. One more outcome we await. The details and specifics seem to change daily. But then, so do we.

Several months ago, I set out to write a book that I thought would be helpful to anyone who ever faced the nightmare of learning that their child had been switched at birth. I wanted to write a book that was part memoir, part how-to, that might provide insight and advice. I thought my story could help guide parents of switched children through the twists and turns and heartaches of their “lightning strike” situation.

But if this is a book exclusively for them, I hope I never sell a single copy. Because as Regina said when she told us about waiting out Daphne’s meningitis, “I wouldn’t wish that on any parent.” It is my dearest wish that never again will someone require such a reference tool as this one.

And yet, as I reviewed what I’d recorded here, as I reread my own thoughts and reflections (because I was curious to see if I’d pulled it off, and also because my editor said I had to), I realized that this was not merely a book about a hospital mix-up. This was not
What to Expect When You’re Expecting a DNA Test
or
Switched at Birth for Dummies
. It’s about much more than that. It’s about fortitude and forgiveness. It’s about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It’s about embracing the unexpected and making it work. It’s about family and how that word defies definition.

So this is a book for anyone who is part of an “unconventional” family. Stepmothers and stepfathers, stepsiblings, foster children—anyone who arrives a little late to that party known as “the conventional family.” It’s about finding your place at the table and knowing there will always be enough to fill your plate.

It’s for children who have been adopted and for the wonderful, wonderful people who become their mothers and fathers. I believe that God guides the hands of adoptive parents; He leads them to the children they are meant to love. It is the purest form of reciprocity—hearts in need of one another finding their way home. Adoption is nothing short of magical. It is a different path, as I say, but it leads to the same place, to the right place, and that place is family.

And it is a book for anyone who has a child who is different. Our daughter is deaf. She is not broken or defective or strange or inferior. She just can’t hear. But she can communicate and she can laugh and she can bake a batch of butterscotch brownies that will knock your socks off. She can date and she can dance and she can sink free throws and ace biology exams; and she can torture her big brother (which, really, he totally has coming to him).

And she can love. Boy, can that kid love.

And this is a book about how she came into my life and made
me
different, made me better than I was before.

This is a book for kids like my darling, darling Bay, who touches your life with her beautiful vision and shows you a world you could never have imagined on your own. She, too, is a kid who loves with all of her heart and soul. She makes me laugh. She is the little girl whom the universe allowed me to raise.

Every day I am thankful.

This book is about fortitude and forgiveness and how there is no way to know what’s coming around the next bend, or off the next highway exit.

And it’s about life.

Happening.

Kathryn Kennish is a mother turned published author, who lives with her newly expanded family in Mission Hills, Kansas.

Copyright © 2012 ABC Family

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eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-1274-9

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