I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not me!
Not I,
Not me!
Not me!
I won't grow up...
We sat in the pediatrician's office, waiting for a routine 'well baby' check up...maybe our baby was three months old? The woman across from us cradled a much larger child, silky black hair spilling down his shoulders, a tiny spittle of drool at the corner of his mouth. He wore blue. His actual age was four. His mental age was six months. And would be forever. He had been thrown from the back of a pick-up truck along a stretch of Arizona highway when he was just a baby. The woman was his caseworker waiting with him for a check-up.
Now our baby is a world away on his second sojourn, navigating university classes in a foreign language. When Erik first approached us about going to Germany, he was barely in his teens. At sixteen off he went, as a foreign exchange student. So many people asked us how could we let him go?
How could we not?