Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (28 page)

Bernie’s mail order of baby chicks was delivered in late March to William and Dani’s delight. There’s nothing like opening a big box and finding a hundred adorable balls of fuzz inside to make a kid happy. Dani loved to reach inside the box and gently cup one of them in her hands, then put it down and get another. The future egg layers were still in the mud room under warming lights while we turned one of the shacks into a coop and until they were big enough to fend off the dogs, and I took a secret delight in how their incessant peeping had to annoy the parrot.

On the day that I went back to the empty Gilbert Valley house to give it one final cleaning before putting it on the market, I passed by a little dog lying on the side of the road. I figured he had been hit by a car and left for dead. His white coat was stained with fresh and dried blood, and he yelped when I picked him up, but he let me place him on a blanket in the backseat of the car. I took him to the shelter first, but when the shelter workers told me they would put him down because his injuries were so severe, what could I do but take him to our own vet to be patched up? He recuperated in the laundry room until he could limp around on his own. William named him Frosty, and he was the only one of all of our dogs who was allowed access inside and out through a doggie door Bernie installed for him near the back door.

There was always some fixing or project that needed tending to. Though the neglected and abandoned house was becoming a loved and cared-for home, it was and probably always will be a work in progress. The folks at our nearby Lowe’s know us by name, and the floor guys and gals always have a couple of lollipops in their work aprons for Dani and William.

At the end of the first summer that we were in the farmhouse, we went to get some lumber Bernie needed to build another nursery pen in the barn, where the rapidly growing herd of goats resided. I was pestering him to see if Lowe’s might be having an end-of-season sale on above-ground pools. I knew it wouldn’t be the same as our Florida pool, but it would give William and Dani something to look forward to next spring.

Dani held her arms up to Bernie to be put in the cargo section of the cart, and, of course, even though at her size she looked a bit ridiculous sitting there, Bernie complied. Whatever his little girl wants, she gets. William and I walked along behind them. He was wearing me out about a miniature horse he had seen an ad for somewhere. “William Christian Lierow! The last thing we need is a horse on top of everything else!” “But Mom! It’s a miniature horse!” “William! Horses have giant appetites! Even miniature ones. And winter is coming, so it won’t be able to graze and will need feed. Feed is not free!” “I’ll take care of it, Mom! I promise. If you let me get a couple of rabbits, I can raise them to sell to make money for the feed. You know how much Dani would love to have a miniature horse, right?” Wow. My own son had resorted to playing the “you know how much Dani . . .” card. “And Mom, guess what else? Her name is Hope!”

We practically rear-ended Bernie, who had stopped in the middle of the aisle. He gestured toward Dani sitting cross-legged in the cart. She was looking at Bernie, directly into his eyes, saying something quietly over and over. William and I stopped our bickering to listen.

“I pity . . . I pity . . . I pity . . .” Pity? Had she overheard someone saying something about pity? About pitying her?

A school photo of Dani that Diane thinks was taken in the fall of 2008.

 

Bernie gently urged her to say it again. “What are you saying, sweetheart? Tell us again.”

We all leaned in closer to her. “I pity.” Bernie was puzzled. “You pity? Dani pity? I pity?”

Dani smiled at the three of us—her father, her mother, and her sweet big brother—and patting herself on the chest, she said, “I pretty.”

On an ordinary afternoon in the lumber department of the Lowe’s store in Lebanon, an extraordinary thing had happened. While her family erupted with shouts of joy, a little girl with the face of an angel and the unwavering faith of a survivor patted her heart and said as clear as day, “I pretty.”

Epilogue

Bernie and I are pretty simple people, leading pretty ordinary lives. Like millions of other people around the world, we work, we parent, we try to be good partners to each other. We do all we can to make sure our kids mind their manners, do their homework, eat healthy food, get fresh air, respect others, make good decisions, have compassionate hearts, and say their prayers before bed. We don’t care so much whether they are “gifted” as we do that they are kind, generous, and thoughtful. To us, that
is
gifted.

On the rare occasions that we go out, we go out as a family, but we prefer to be at home. We find camaraderie and support in our church and with our close friends.

We do not by any measure seek the spotlight. We adopted Dani because we were called to do it and because we fell in love with her before we even met her. We feel blessed every single day that we were led to her and that we were able to overcome all of the obstacles so she could become our daughter.

The attention we received as a result of the newspaper article and then appearing on
Oprah
overwhelmed us. Not just the enormousness of the response, but that people felt we had done something special, something remarkable. That we were heroes, as many people said.

We only did what thousands of other people in America do again and again—we brought a child into our home whom we did not conceive, but who was as much a member of our family as if we had. We are no more special than all of those others who do the same.

But Dani’s story is compelling, and Dani haunts the people who meet her in a way that is hard to understand unless you have met her yourself. As uncomfortable as it was for us to open our home to a newspaper reporter and a photographer, to create a website, to sit onstage with Oprah Winfrey, and, finally, to write this book, we did it for two reasons.

First, we hope that by reading our story, people may be inspired to look into adoption, foster care, or volunteering for whatever the guardian ad litem program may be in your state. In our area, it is CASA—Court Appointed Special Advocate. These volunteers give abused, neglected, and abandoned children a voice and an advocate, often the first and only advocate they have ever had.

Second, we felt that if we told Dani’s story, and it inspired people to call their local adoption agencies, meet some of the children who were looking for their forever families, and take a leap of faith, then what Dani suffered in the nearly seven years of being confined in an unimaginable hell will not have been in vain. Even if reading her story causes just one of you to be brave enough to make that call when you know something is not right in the house next door, with the little girl at your daughter’s bus stop, or with the little boy in your son’s day care, then it was worth it.

If we had not told Dani’s story, then all of her suffering, all of her struggles, and all of the strength she somehow found to survive would have been for nothing. If telling her story helps other children in the foster care system find a home, then her ordeal may be the catalyst for a positive outcome.

When people hear our story and learn about Dani, they all ask the same questions: “What is her prognosis? How far will she go? Will she ever learn to speak?”

And we have the same answer every time: “We don’t know.” Incredibly, there are many children who are neglected as badly as Dani was, but it is extremely rare that one goes undiscovered and lives as long in such an abominable situation. Certainly, as Dr. Armstrong pointed out to us, doctors and scientists can’t experiment on children as they do on animals. So there is really no way of knowing for sure, although research has painted a pretty grim picture.

We know that about 80 percent of the brain is developed by a child’s fifth birthday, and that the critical years for language development are between two and three years of age. Some senses are much better developed when we are born than others. Hearing, for example, is pretty close to perfect at birth. Vision is much less developed in newborns, and it requires many things coming together for a child to develop visual skills.

Your brain is born with all of the neurons you are ever going to have, and what happens in the process of development is that you build connections—synapses—with the neurons, or you shed the neurons. It is known as pruning, like pruning a tree. Those things that aren’t used, you lose. Those that you use, you build and develop more and more connections.

Babies are born hard-wired to learn, but it takes relationships, stimulation, and a healthy environment to do that. Dani was born with all of the neurons she was ever going to have, hard-wired to learn. The heartbreaking tragedy is that no one in her life provided her with the relationships, the stimulation, and the environment that were necessary to build the connections she needed to realize her potential, whatever that was. So many of those neurons she was born with were lost. Forever? Science says so.

Some forms of mental retardation are genetic: Down syndrome for one; Fragile X, for another. Genetic testing that was done on Dani when she was taken into custody showed none of those genes. Fetal alcohol exposure can also cause mental retardation, but her birth mother claims that she did not drink during her pregnancy. Dani was never diagnosed with autism.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong tested Dani three times. She said that in thirty years of practice as a psychologist, she had never seen a child of Dani’s age so severely neglected. It was her opinion that had Dani been removed from the home when she was three or four, when calls were first made to the DCF, the prognosis for her could have been different.

Reports written by Dr. Bruce Perry state that the earlier and more pervasive the neglect, the more devastating the developmental problems for the child. The earlier that a child is removed from such an environment of severe neglect, the more positive and hopeful the prognosis, although, in reality, the child is unlikely to ever become the adult he or she might have been had the child not been so severely neglected in those crucial developmental years.

Bernie and I know all of that. And we know this: after Dr. Armstrong tested her, the best-case scenario that she envisioned for Dani was that she would end up in a nursing home, institutionalized for the remainder of her life. We know that aside from Garet White, no one in the DCF believed that Dani could be adopted, and, indeed, people discouraged us when we expressed interest.

We know that when we first met Dani in January 2007, she bounced from being a wild child, hitting herself with her fist and screaming animal-like noises, to being a drooling, lethargic, unengaged child with developmental skills that were somewhere between an infant’s and a toddler’s. There was no telling what state Dani might be in from one moment to the next.

Three years ago, when we brought her home for the first trial visit with us, she wet all the way through her diaper and clothes onto the backseat of the car, and she was completely oblivious to it, as an infant would be.

Just recently after a therapeutic horseback riding session, when Dani dismounted she took off like a shot out of the barn. Bernie ran after her to see where she was going and found her on the seat in the port-a-john, with her pants down around her ankles, her helmet lopsided on her head, and a look of total relief on her face. I had warned him when they left the house that she had drunk three sodas that afternoon at a school party. I can’t believe she managed such self-control through a one-hour lesson, but she did it! She loves riding so much that she doesn’t want to come off the horse, so she knows she has to do whatever it takes to stay dry. No one would have imagined that for her when she was taken into state custody in 2005.

When she first came to us, she ate so much food—stuffing it into her mouth with her hands—that she literally made herself sick. She didn’t know when to stop and was afraid she wouldn’t get any more. Now she makes herself a snack and pours herself a drink, and at mealtimes when she is no longer hungry, she stops eating.

When she first came to us, she floated directionless around the pool in a life jacket like a human bobber. Now she swims like a fish, traversing the bottom of the pool, holding her breath from one side to the other, and gliding like a mermaid.

When she first came to us, she did not participate at all in helping us dress or undress her. Now, she at least makes an attempt. This past winter, when the kids were out of school on break, I had the flu. Bernie had a job in Nashville, so I didn’t have the luxury of burrowing under the covers until I felt better. Goats, chickens, horses, and dogs don’t feed themselves, and it’s too big a job for William alone, so one morning after Bernie left, I hauled myself out of bed for the chores. Dani was still asleep in her room. When I came back into the house, she was downstairs, fully dressed. I called Bernie on his cell phone to ask him why he had put her to bed with her clothes on the night before. He assured me that he had done no such thing, and when I went upstairs to investigate, I found her pajamas and the pull-ups she sometimes still wears at night on the floor in the bathroom. She had taken everything off, gone to the bathroom, picked the clothes up from the floor in her bedroom where Bernie had left them, and put them on herself.

When she first came to us, she didn’t know what a book was or what it was for. Now, when she sees me sitting on the sofa, looking as if I have nothing to do, she brings a book or five for me to read to her while she curls up beside me.

She is a very busy girl. She can turn on the little organ in the playroom, and she likes to press the keys or sit on them, to make spooky noises. She can take everything out of the refrigerator in less than twenty minutes or as long as it takes me to shower upstairs. One day, she took all of the cups out of the cupboard, filled each of them with water, and lined them all up on the counter.

She knows right from wrong. She knows when she is doing something she is not supposed to do or has something she is not supposed to have. She loves to play little tricks on us, and she has a sense of humor.

We know she’s taking it all in. We know that it takes longer and is a more complicated route for something to get from the outside to the inside and out again, but she gets it. She has a hard time getting it out, but we believe she understands.

What is her prognosis? How far will she go? Will she ever learn to speak?

We don’t know. But back when we first had Dani with us in Fort Myers Beach, I was reminded in a very humbling way that not knowing isn’t the worst thing. When she started at Spring Creek Elementary, she was placed in the lowest-level classroom. We were fighting the school to have her moved out of that room and up to the next level.

One day I went to pick her up her from school, and the mother of a severely mentally and physically disabled young boy in that classroom smiled at me as she wheeled him toward the door. She remarked on how pretty and sweet Dani was and then said, “You’re so lucky. It may not seem that way to you right now, but you are. You have no idea how much Danielle might accomplish. I know my son will never get any better than this. But Danielle has so much potential and so many possibilities.”

She was right, of course. I like to remember a conversation Bernie had with Mr. O’Keefe; I think it was after
Oprah
. He told Bernie that he wasn’t surprised that Dani has progressed as far as she has. “Sometimes people assume a lack of intelligence when there is a handicap. But I would assume there is some type of intelligence there. When I saw her pick up the skill of walking up the stairs so quickly, that made me think there was more there than appeared to the eye.”

And then this man who has cared for some of the most hopeless children I have ever seen told Bernie, “I try to remain an optimist. I’ve heard about miracles, I’ve seen miracles happen. I believe miracles can happen. I have hope and I have faith, and you and Diane do, too. Don’t ever become hopeless. Don’t doubt your faith.”

We can’t answer that question of how far Dani might go, not only because we don’t know, but because it doesn’t really matter to us. She is our daughter, she is William’s little sister, and we love her as much when she is having a meltdown, caroming around the house and crying, “Woo woo woo woo” as we do when she looks in our eyes, pats her heart, and says, “I good.”

To us, every milestone Dani reaches is a little miracle. Every day is a walk in hope, faith, and gratitude.

We ended up trading some goats for that miniature horse William was needling me about. Her name is Hope. Naturally, feeling as if she needed some companions of her own breed, we got two more miniature horses to keep her company, Izzy and Oreo.

But Hope is definitely Dani’s horse. Dani loves to walk beside her, pat her, and lay across her back, but Hope is a bit too small for Dani to ride. Besides, not long after we got her, we discovered that Hope wasn’t fat, as we had first thought: she was pregnant. In the first days of spring 2010, as the earth around us was awakening to life again, we gathered in the barn with the bleating goats and watched in wonder as Hope gave birth to a tiny foal. We laughed (and I cried) as she struggled to her feet on her wobbly spindly legs, and we welcomed her to our crazy world.