Loving My Children

Channel-surfing for tonight's entertainment, I came across My Sister's Keeper. The first few minutes of the movie had me sold. For everyone who doesn't know the movie: an 11-year old girl, Anna, is suing her parents to gain medical emancipation. As the story goes on, backflashed from the point of view of different family members draw a picture of hope, desperation, and cruelty. The family's older daughter, Kate,  is diagnosed with leukemia as a child and neither her parents nor her brother qualify as bone marrow donors; they decide to have another child, designed to be a genetic match to her sister. Anna is shipped from procedure to procedure, until one day, when her mother wants to force her to donate her kidney, she decides to put a stop to it.

Source: IMDb

Being a mother I can understand Sara, the mother in the movie, who does everything to save her beloved child's life. What I cannot fathom is how she can put her other daughter through so much pain and suffering. Did she ever love her designer baby, or did she distance herself from Anna from the beginning to be able to go through with the plan. But how can one carry a child for nine months and not love them like crazy and would give the world for them to be healthy and happy?

Violet was not planned, and I had a very hard time accepting the pregnancy at first, but when I first saw her wiggling around on an ultrasound picture, I fell in love so hard, I have no words for it. From this moment on, I knew that she was meant to be with us. But despite that, I was still finding myself sitting at Lily's bed at night, crying and wondering how I could ever love another child the way I loved our girl. Then, I held our Violet in my arms for the first time. She was still a little squeezed up from her little journey, but there she was, this tiny little baby, and it felt as if I had always had the two of them. I love them both so much; they have taught me that I can love them both equally but in very different way, since they are both so different in every respect.

So I know a little about having a much anticipated child, and one that was not planned at first. I could never imagine not loving them both. It was heartbreaking how Sara confronted Anna about being selfish for not giving one of her kidneys to Kate. She kept arguing that Anna never minded helping Kate and having the procedures done; a flashback showed Brian, the dad, carrying Anna as a pre-schooler to the operation table, kicking and screaming and fighting. I once had to hold Lily down to have a medical procedure done. She was very, very sick and seriously dehydrated, but still she fought as hard as she could when they tried over and over again to get an IV-needle in her little, dried-out body. I was able to do it because I knew that she needed it to save her life, and I knew that I needed to be the one by her side. I could have never done it otherwise.

I hope that I will never have to be in the situation having to say good-bye to one of my daughters, having to go a much harder path with them, giving them hope when I am losing it myself. But I know that I could never hurt one of my children to save the other.