Sometimes Goosebumps Saves a Life

H ave you ever had a birthday celebrated? For most of us, the answer is an obvious “yes.” But that’s not a given. I’ve learned that while spending time with the Sisters of Life, who accompany women who are looking for options other than abortion during unplanned pregnancies. If you have never had your life celebrated, how can you celebrate a new one? It adds a layer of pain. But recognizing the value of life isn’t about abortion as a political or otherwise contentious and intensely intimate issue. It’s about our common humanity. This is something that Rob Henderson highlights in his new book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

At ten years old, he had reached the conclusion: “As far as I was concerned, adults were unreliable liars. With each new family, new parent, and new rejection, grief, anger, and loneliness accrued within me.”

I’ve heard this before from men, but it bothers me most reading it from Henderson, given his circumstances: “To this day, I think I was supposed to be left-handed, as my left arm is stronger and I favor it for every activity except writing. But at the schools in LA, no adults paid attention to which hand I preferred and made me use my right hand because it was easier for them.”

After being taken from his birth mother and placed at seven homes in seven years, Henderson finally had a moment of stability — which only lasted about a moment. He had been enrolled in six different elementary schools before the third grade. When he was finally adopted, his parents were talking up his December birthday in anticipation. “But,” he writes, “I’d never done anything for my birthday before — never had a cake or gotten any birthday presents — so in my mind I didn’t have much to be excited about.”

His parents took him to his adoptive maternal grandparents, who had a pile of presents waiting for him. “These are mine?” he asked, in some astonishment. “Everyone assured me that they were mine. I said to everyone that I never got birthday presents before, and they replied that they were making up for it now. Hot Wheels cars, finger skateboards, dinosaur books. It was overwhelming. I didn’t know what to play with first. I thanked everyone many times.” They also sang “Happy birthday” to him, “which no one had ever done before either.” “I had to sing it in school sometimes to other kids in class, but nobody sang it to me because my birthday was during the holiday break.”

He was doing well in school when he had the kind of normalcy every child deserves. Then his adoptive parents broke it to him that they were getting divorced. He had already predicted that it was all too good to last. He knew adults too well.

He had another moment of relative stability when his mother entered a relationship with another woman. He and his sister lived with them — his father seemed to have rejected him in the divorce proceedings, perhaps to get back at his mother. If we could ever become a culture that prioritizes children above all the mess of adults, we would be more tender and forgiving and reconciled with what is most important in life.

Henderson was a voracious reader as a child. Earlier on, it was Goosebumps. Later, books taught him things that the transient father figures in his life wouldn’t. In middle school, he found himself “reading biographies of boxers and martial artists like Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, and Bruce Lee.” He learned about Jake LaMotta, a Bronx boxer whose father forced him to fight other kids for change. “His dad would then take the coins for himself and leave nothing for his son.” Knowing more about the world than his circumstances made him grateful. “My life wasn’t as bad as what some of them had gone through.”

He did yard work so he could take boxing classes around the same time. It was ingrained in him that he could only punch in the gym. The instructor made it clear that if he learned that students were doing it elsewhere, they would be kicked out of class. One of Henderson’s father figures turned out to be Chuck Norris. He read a book Norris had written in which “he describes sitting in a bar and someone coming up to him, insulting him, and challenging him to a fight. Norris declines. Later, someone asks him why he didn’t take the guy apart, and Norris replies that he didn’t feel the need to prove himself to anyone.” Henderson reflects: “For me, this was a new and appealing idea — being so strong that you don’t feel the need to prove it.”

Henderson’s Troubled is an inspiring story of someone who could be living a legitimate life of grievance. Instead, he has found the miracle of gratitude in every opportunity that has snuck up on him.

The circumstances of Henderson’s early life are more common than we realize. I wish he could speak to every inner-city schoolboy.

In an election year after the end of Roe v. Wade, when human life is so politicized, Troubled is a reminder not only of the mess of humanity but also of our need to offer radical hospitality to scared moms and dads and children, including those who are already outside the womb and in limbo.

Henderson was adopted before he became a teenager. The odds get worse the older you get. Whatever your politics — and your disgust with politics — it doesn’t matter. Read Troubled. And let it prompt questions about what more we can do to help children who deserve more than being subject to adults’ issues.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.