I’ve had a few recent requests to repost, so here it is…

On August 19th, I gave the following speech at NOVA’s (National Organization For Victim’s Assistance) Annual Conference.  Since then, more than a dozen people have urged me to post the speech in its entirety. Others have said it would bring on criticism, and to those people I’ll say, I’m ok with that.

The speech covers what happened to the babies and how we reacted.

Here is the transcript of the speech entitled, Choose Your Own Adventure ….

Choose Your Own Adventure

Thank you for that great introduction. Thank you to Marsha and Will and Tim for inviting me into this group. The people in this room, you walk on the side of angels and I’m blessed to share this hour with you.

And it’s so fun to be back in Chicago. I grew up in Winnetka, just a half hour north of here on a grass-lined street with oak and elm tress that threw giant green canopies in the spring. Our white stucco house was a block from Lake Michigan where I spent my summers sailing, swimming and walking home barefoot with sand on my feet. It was the time and place where we played outside until dark, had campouts in tents in the backyard, and the summers smelled like fresh cut grass, all day, every day. And when I was eight years old, I was given my first “Choose Your Own Adventure Book.” Night after night, I was that kid, who hid under the covers and read, re-read, and then read again the pages of this marvelous invention.

If you are unfamiliar with this particular brand of scintillating splendiferous genius, a) I’m sorry, b) it’s never too late, and c) Choose Your Own Adventure were a series of children’s books where the kid, the reader, assumed the role of the protagonist and made choices that determined the book’s outcome. Mountain climber, investigator, doctor, the stories were structured such that after a few pages, the reader was given options for where to go next. So that first book was called the Cave Of Time and it began like this….

“You are hiking in Snake Canyon when you find yourself lost in the strange, dimly lit Cave of Time. Gradually you can make out two passageways. One curves downward to the left; the other leads upward to the right. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future. Which way will you choose? If you take the left branch, turn to page 20. If you take the right branch, turn to page 61. If you turn around and walk outside the cave, turn to page 21. Be careful! In the Cave of Time you might meet up with a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex, or be lured aboard an alien spaceship!” 

Right? Fantastic stuff. So in our house, these days, we have our own T-Rex. It looks a bit different than the one imagined in the book, this is my husband Dan playing T-Rex Daddy with our 2.5 year old twins, Kalvin and Grace. : [wpvideo zCrq5M6r]

Anyway, back to the book. The Cave Of Time had 40 different endings, some pleasant, and some not so pleasant, much like the experiences life throws at us all. I did, however, like the brilliant option one book offered to go back and change your last decision. So you’ve come to the end, so to speak, BUT you have the choice re-choose. How great would that be? Eh, I think I’ll go back to page 32 and have a re-do.

To say I loved these books was an understatement. That as a little kid, in my bed in my splendidly sweet and ridiculously safe little suburb, I had a say in the outcome of this big adventure in the world. I LOVED that I could go back and see what choices I made that led to a particular ending and that the next time, I could choose a different ending. I didn’t know it then, but what I was experiencing and experimenting with, all those nights hidden under the covers was no less than what I have come to believe is…well….the key to life. The key to my life.

That is to choose my own adventure. Well, that’s great Sarah, but what does that mean as an adult standing up here, some thirty years later, hoping to convey something of meaning or poignancy or at least entertaining to all of these people? How does Choose Your Own Adventure relate to anybody’s life?

What I have come to believe is it’s like this — We get one life. Actually, I believe in reincarnation so I think we have multiple lives. But in this form, in this particular random conglomeration of chaotic human traits, thoughts, emotions – I get one shot. I want to live it. To me, in this context here today, choose your own adventure means three parts of one run-on sentence:

• It’s not what happens to us, but how we react that defines us.
• So it would behoove us all to fully embrace and accept with courage, the very daunting accountability and equally daring responsibility of writing our own story
• And three, knowing we can handle what comes our way.

In retrospect, given my intense and enduring love of reading, 

it shouldn’t be a surprise that I am now inching my way towards identifying myself as a writer. I write, therefore I am a writer. And like so many writers, my topic chose me.

It is a story that begins with evil and ends with hope. So let me begin by asking you this… What would you do if evil itself came knocking at your door?

Do you have an image of what evil looks like?   Somewhere along this spectrum?

I’m not sure what evil looks like to you, but as a kid, I was terrified of the shadows that came out of the walls in the movie Ghost. You know the movie with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze and the pottery wheel thing? If you’ve seen it, perhaps you remember when a bad guy dies, shadow creatures pull themselves up off the pavement or out of the walls and with a horrible screeching screaming howling sound, take and drag the bad guy’s spirit off somewhere. And, I gotta tell you, that was enough to make me walk the line, because the good guys got to go into this soft lovely white light. Much nicer.

Our particular brand of evil looked liked this.

And when she came knocking…I let her in. I rolled out the welcome mat. We fed her dinner. We bought her Christmas presents. We bought her snow tires so she could be safe. And we left her alone with our precious tiny newborn twin babies. Kalvin and Grace.

And on Sunday, January 30, 2012, our 8 week old son Kalvin began acting fussy. I’ll give the cliff note version as too many of you hear too many of these stories in your day job. For us, unaccustomed to darkness, we thought Kalvin was just going through the same fussy stage Grace had been through the week before.  The books all said fussiness reached its peak at six weeks as babies became more aware of their surroundings. Kalvin and Grace were exactly six weeks, adjusted for their early birth.   But that Sunday, when his fussiness continued, we thought perhaps something else was going on. We talked about switching him from regular formula to sensitive formula thinking it could be gas. We checked for any loose clothing strings, tags or zippers, anything that could be hurting him. We actually completely undressed him to see if something was bruising or scratching or pinching him. We gave him a bath to try to settle him bath. None of this worked. The only position that seemed comfortable for him was over my shoulder with his weight supported by a hand on his bum.   Kalvin cried off and on all day Sunday until he finally fell asleep exhausted that night. Then he slept much of Monday. And we thought we were through the woods.

But Tuesday morning, we noticed Kalvin’s left foot was swollen. He was a fat baby,

as all babies should be. Sorry, needed a bit of humor.  But still, Kalvin’s foot looked swollen. I laid him down on the bed and undressed him again. Not only was his foot swollen, but his lower leg was swollen from the knee down. I sat watching his little baby movements and felt this gut panic that was awful. Because his left leg wasn’t moving much, or really at all. This is a full ten days later, it’s a minute long. [wpvideo OrDH6CLd] I called the pediatrician who booked us that afternoon. In retrospect, some part of me knew then. Because a few weeks earlier, when the twins were six weeks old, a bruise had appeared on Grace’s face overnight.

Aubrey was working that night. Okay, so Aubrey. 31 years old at the time, an infant twin specialist, a supposed ten-year veteran nurse at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake, a caregiver of at least eight sets of twins whose parent’s we spoke with as references before hiring her. We actually called 12 references total and did two national but not international, background checks. We did our homework. It all checked out clean. And still….Aubrey….Evil. My personal opinion. Nobody in this room has to agree with the existence of evil, but I do. Now. Of the bruise, Aubrey said Grace had bumped her face on the side of the crib.   I knew that wasn’t right. I thought perhaps Aubrey had accidentally bumped Grace’s face on a doorway in the night or on the changing table or in the process of taking her in and out of her crib. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t jump to infant abuse. I was wrong and I live with that mistake and Kalvin had to live with that mistake.

At the doctor’s office, our pediatrician said to take them down to Children’s.

Between Grace’s bruises

and Kalvin’s leg, it was bad. Timber, our dog,

was in the car where she’d end up spending almost twelve hours. Dan was traveling, he was in Philadelphia. I called him from the car. I told him I knew it was Aubrey, and he told me not to blame anyone until we had more facts.

At the hospital, where I checked them in under false names because Aubrey also worked at that hospital, x-rays revealed Kalvin’s left leg was broken. A doctor informed me that in a case like ours, they wanted to do a full body x-rays and CT scans on both twins. I watched both my babies, my tiny naked babies, be strapped down on a cold unforgiving tables, screaming, crying, looking for comfort as their little limbs were manipulated and I paced back and forth between the two rooms, running to each of them any time there was a break. There was nothing I could do to help them until it was over. And I sat there holding them under the assault of the harsh fluorescent glare of the examining room lights and doctors and nurses, and my own anxiety wondering if my babies were ok, if their brains were ok? 

Forty-give minutes later, an ER doctor named Dr. Kadish entered our little form of hell and informed me that that though their CT scans were thankfully clear, and I breathed a sigh of relief and wanted to hug this strange man, the next sentence was, but Kalvin’s right leg is also broken. That’s when I knew that it wasn’t an accident. It couldn’t have been an accident. And while I understood when he said they’d be ok, that three weeks from now we wouldn’t know anything had even happened….my brain could not compute intent. I mean, truly. Because anytime I came close, a wave of anger and guilt threatened to drown me.

She did it on purpose. Why? 

I let her into our home, I let her into our lives, I let her into my babies’ lives.

All those times they must have been so alone and scared and confused as to where the pain was coming from or what they had done to deserve that. I didn’t protect them. That was my job. As their Momma.

And that was the internal dialogue that was happening at the same time the external questions started. The police arrived. And somebody from DCFS. And another detective. And some guy with a gun telling me they wanted me to leave my babies at the hospital overnight, “We’ll know they’ll be safe here,” he said. It was the cruelest thing anyone has ever said to me. I knew he was doing his job, somehow I knew that parents are the most common perpetrators of child abuse, but I couldn’t help myself. I don’t do super great with authority, never have. Anger was a much more useful emotion than guilt at the time and so I believe the words I used with this nice Mormon detective were, “There is no f’ing way…and I didn’t abbreviate… I’m leaving my babies here, alone, after what they’ve been through. I’m taking them home. You can come, but I’m taking them home and I’m leaving now.” Swearing at Mormon cops at the beginning of an investigation was perhaps not my smartest move. Nor was inviting them into our home, but we had nothing to hide.

So an entire caravan of police, detectives, and DCSF followed me home. It was 2am, twelve hours since our appointment at the pediatrician. When we got home, I put the babies in their cribs. Timber was as happy to be home as the rest of us.

But I had lost my voice. At some point in the hospital, a cold that I had been fighting had turned to severe laryngitis and no matter how I strained, I could only produce a whisper. Over the next few days, I lost even the whisper. And it was just such a startling metaphor for what it would feel like to be a victim in the system for the next year. My babies didn’t have a voice and I lost mine and couldn’t their story for them.

You all know the next few days. Detectives took hair and blood samples from the babies thinking their injuries could have been masked by medication, Dan and I took polygraphs, someone from Safe and Healthy Families wanted to do a Nucleoscan on Kalvin as they thought he may have had broken ribs in the healing stage. Also, in those few days after, someone also informed us there was an Interpol warrant out on Aubrey. She was wanted for questioning for the abuse, at the time they said six broken bones, on two-week-old twins in Belgium. Six months before working for us, Aubrey had worked for a family in Belgium with newborn boy girl twins. We learned all of this later, of course. But at six days old, Louisa Noyen developed the same bruise Grace had, which, it turns out, is from pinching. When their twins were 10 days old, the parents took the little boy, Archibald to the hospital with a swollen arm, but no x-rays were taken. When the twins were sixteen days old, Aubrey presented the baby girl to the parents in the middle of the night with a visibly broken humerus. A humerus on a baby that small is tiny, tiny. They took the twins to the hospital where they underwent the same x-rays that Kalvin and Grace had undergone. Those x-rays revealed ten broken bones between little Louisa and Archibald. By the time the parents got home the next morning Aubrey was gone, fled, back to the US and Utah where she came to work for us six months later.

Despite all that, it was four and a half months before she was arrested. For months, Aubrey was allowed to go to work at the Primary Children’s Hospital and “care” for vulnerable sick kids in the PICU. For months, Dan and I were told we were suspects, to pipe down, let the professionals do their job. Those months were marked by confusion, anger, guilt, rage, but also gratitude, a profound deep appreciation that my kids were ok.

Marsha, our victim’s advocate, was a ray of light in some very dark and confusing times within the legal system, even she become exasperated by the seeming resistance to doing anything about Aubrey. And I want to take a moment on this stage thank Marsha, and everyone here, for what you do for victims. Marsha, you show up. You take it in. It’s not just your compassion, it’s the way you try to absorb and almost compost other people’s pain that I found simply astonishing. And thank you for your integrity. For doing the right thing, no matter what the cost.   And I know it came at a cost in our case. You were the lighthouse in the storm of our process. I will forever love you for that.

Eventually, anger won out. I was good and pissed off and we decided that if the “authorities” weren’t going to do anything about this woman, we were going to let the world know she existed because we felt an extremely strong need to warn other parents. Already, one couple expecting twins had called us as a reference for Aubrey. Obviously she had given them our number before that awful night. But still, it scared us into action. We asked for a meeting with the prosecutor and Sherriff’s office. And it was clear from that meeting that the prosecutor’s office didn’t want to file charges. It was different for the Sheriff’s Department; they seemed equally frustrated by a lack of movement. In that meeting actually, the Sherriff, Sherriff Edmunds himself looked me in the eye said, “She will be arrested. I promise you that.” They’d had probable cause since day 2. And I think for his investigators as well, enough was enough. Finally, someone was going to do something about this woman. It seemed as though that caused some tension between the Sherriff’s department and the prosecutor’s office. But that was ok because few weeks later, Aubrey was arrested and charges were begrudgingly filed. Here is she in her pink silk pajamas smirking for her mug shot.

The investigators disliked her so much (or so I like to think) that when they arrested her, they didn’t allow her to get shoes. So I personally love the image of her going to jail in her pink pajamas barefoot. Small victories, right? She was charged with two-second degree felonies for Kalvin’s broken legs and two A misdemeanors for the bruises on Grace.

Let me say here that I understand, my Dad is a lawyer, I understand there’s a difference between knowing someone is guilty and being able to prove guilt in the legal system. I always knew that although our circumstantial evidence was strong, it was still circumstantial. But let me lay it out: 1) twelve broken bones plus bruising on four infants, across two continents and one ocean, with one person in common. 2) A successful 404B hearing, which made the Belgium evidence admissible in our case. 3) Four hours of prelim hearing testimony from the most prominent child abuse expert in the country detailing the non-accidental, extremely rare, and identical mechanism of action for the injuries between Kalvin and the Noyen’s babies. 4) The discovery by the Sherriff’s department of a third family in West Virginia who called the police to have Aubrey physically removed from their home, citing fear for themselves and their infant twins. That family never filed charges. 5, 6, 7, whatever) Blatant forging of diplomas and credentials. An alleged stay in a mental institution at the age of fourteen. The absolute willingness of the Belgium parents to come to the US to testify about what happened. Lies caught on jail phone calls. It was all circumstantial, but it was strong.

Still, the prosecutors just didn’t want to try the case. I remember that last meeting vividly. We, Dan and I and Marsha, walked into the conference room at the prosecuting attorney’s office expecting to meet with the two prosecutors to talk about the upcoming trial. Instead, there were maybe eight people in the room, all of whom had been informed of the plea, that had already been given to Aubrey, which we obviously knew nothing about, and our victim’s advocate knew nothing about. All of the people in the room were recruited to convince us it was the right move.

“Look at Casey Anthony”, one person said. “She went free. How would you feel if Aubrey was acquitted?”

Another person said, “Every prosecutor in the state would be thrilled with this plea.”

Another person said, “At least she’ll be a convicted felon.”

Ultimately, that was how Dan and I made peace with that show of a meeting, that with Aubrey as a convicted felon, at least other parents would be warned of this serial international infant abusing intra-species predator. And so that’s what happened. Aubrey obviously accepted the plea: she pled guilty to two third degree felonies, nothing for Grace, out on jail time served which was less than a year in jail, no prison time despite a PSR that recommended prison, five years probation, a slap on the wrist. She was free. Yes, our case was resolved, but I wouldn’t call it a victory. Incidentally, Belgium did better, they convicted Aubrey in abstentia and sentenced her to four years in prison. We’re told the US has agreed to extradition and they’re just working through the process.

But going back to our case, that meeting was a solidification of what I’d felt all along, that it wasn’t about us. And it wasn’t about justice for Kalvin and Grace.

Dan thinks the plea was a budget issue. He’s a finance guy. I think there were other agendas and motivations at play. But what’s real is what remains for me, that bad taste. And maybe even irresponsibility of not trying this case, because if you’re not going to try a serial infant abuser, (PIC) someone who preys on the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society, who can’t defend themselves and who can’t tell you about the abuse, who are you going to try? And what it felt like, in the end, was that we, as victims, that they- Kalvin and Grace – were an inconvenient unnecessary part of the legal process.

Am I still angry? Yep, at times, I am. I’m angry at the vehicle of evil that is Aubrey. And I still get angry at the impotence we felt throughout the process. At withheld information and agendas I didn’t really understand.

BUT… the overwhelming emotion I feel is gratitude. Our babies are ok. I am acutely aware that five children, little kids, just starting out in life, five die a day from abuse and neglect. Kalvin and Grace are not only alive, they are healthy, happy, hilarious little toddlers. (PIC) Aubrey didn’t lose her temper and shake them. She didn’t permanently injure them.   She didn’t kill them. As strange as it sounds, she just broke Kalvin’s legs. She intentionally pulled and twisted until his little malleable bones broke. But his legs healed and they are fine, perfectly fine. I am so grateful for that.

And I’m also grateful because her darkness highlighted the light. My default operating system before Aubrey was this lofty notion that a piece of divine light exists in everyone, and if someone is bad, it’s the human part, but the divine part remains a piece of Oneness, that we all share. Essentially that all people are inherently good. That lovely notion was obliterated, shattered, destroyed, decimated, gone completely. But what grew in it’s destruction was a deep profound love for how often human beings choose, choose service, hope, gratitude, selflessness, art, poetry, connection.

And I’ve even become grateful for the experience as a whole. Not for the babies pain, NEVER for that, but for an experience that serves as a constant accessible reminder and perspective on exactly what is important. It’s always there, to remind me to take joy in the precious, simple moments, reminds me to pay attention, infects with me and my life with depth and texture and gratitude that contribute to a life fully lived.

So yeah, it’s all there, anger, guilt, gratitude, then anger for being grateful to an infant abuser for not killing my kids, it’s all there, the big tumbling roiling chaotic unpredictable mess of emotions.

But, and this is what I want to talk about now…none of this is me. None of that is Dan. None of that is Kalvin and Grace. All those emotions, they exist but they are not my story.

Aubrey wrote one chapter, it’s an ugly friggin chapter. And it’s not a chapter I would have chosen for me and for my family. But if you’re going through hell, keep on going.

And so that’s what I did, I started writing again. I started to write my own chapters. I began to choose my own adventure forward, for me, and for my family.

Spoiler alert, there wasn’t one big flash of enlightenment that made infant abuse and the existence of evil ok. It was a fight. I earned my freedom, one tiny step at a time….a few steps forward, one slide back…a few irate calls to Marsha, but I doggedly, stubbornly, persistently climbed that mountain answering questions such as — Why did she do it? How could I have missed evil? What does that say about me? How can I trust myself again? Why does evil exist anyway? Why are here? What is the point? Big questions, right? Ones that I explored much more as I wrote my book, but I can tell you a few stories that helped along the way.

Stories that fall into those three aspects of choosing your own adventure,

• it’s not what happens to us, but how we react
• so we should embrace creating powerful stories for ourselves
• knowing we can handle the challenges that come our way.

Choose How To React

One big step forward was the day I heard myself recount to somebody else, for the hundredth time, Viktor Frankl’s story.

Viktor Frankl was a Jewish neurologist and psychologist living in Vienna at the start of WWII. He and his wife, Tilly,

had a chance to leave as Hitler’s army closed in, but chose to stay to treat patients at the only hospital where Jews were still admitted. On September 25, 1942, Tilly, Frankl, and his parents were deported to the Nazi Theresienstadt “Terishienstadt’ Ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Dachau “dahow”. By the time Frankl was liberated two and a half years later, his wife Tilly, mother Elsa, father Gabriel, and brother Walter had all died in the concentration camps. Three years after his liberation, Frankl’s book was published, called A Man’s Search for Meaning. That’s the English title. The direct translation of Frankl’s German title is a tad long but worth it, it is “Say Yes to Life In Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.” One of Frankl’s hallmark conclusions, was that even in the most absurdly cruel, despicable, depraved of situations, prisoners still retained the freedom to choose. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

And sometimes it’s just the same thing said a different way that for some reason, that time it hits home. Big massive breakthrough, a light bulb, an aha Oprah moment that I had handed my life, my conversations, my friendships, my focus, my parenting almost, over to anger and guilt. How the hell had I missed applying Frankl’s conclusions to myself, in this particular situation?

How many times do I have to learn the same lesson that it’s not what happens to me, but how I react that will define me, and how I react will define the quality of my life.

Because here’s the thing about reacting. I’m really good at. I was a goalie, right?

Goalie is all about reacting to the puck, reacting to a shot.  Someone else is shooting a hard rubber object at me at 90 mph, and I’m reacting. But it’s so much more than that. Those are not the eyes…

of someone who is passively reacting to what comes their way, passively reacting to life. Goalie is a positive and pro-active mindset that says, go ahead, shoot, bring it. I’ll react, I’ll make the save, and not only that, I’ll determine what to do with the rebound after that will help my team.

My ability to react, react-ability. It’s very similar to responsibility, our ability to respond. It’s such an interesting interplay of words, because the alternative, to be non-reactive, non-responsive, those just aren’t good terms. No, I want to retain my ability to react, but I want to bring some responsibility to my reactions.

So, backing up, before I played for the national team, I was the only girl on New Trier’s Highschool Boy’s hockey team, the only girl in the league. My senior year, we were playing our rivals, an all boys catholic school across town. And I guess they were not accustomed to a girl beating them at a sport such as hockey because as the game began, a giant white sheet unfurled in the stands upon which was written, “Sarah has a big five hole.” For those unfamiliar with goalie vernacular, the five hole is the space between a goalie’s legs.

Essentially this giant white sheet was calling me a ho. They could not have been more wrong, after having grown up in a boys locker room I didn’t actually date until my twenties.

But as my teammates skated by and offered encouragement, this fierce fortitude descended and spread throughout my body. It wasn’t anger, it was just a simple conclusion, “You will not score. You’re not going to win.” I will not cower, I will not be embarrassed, you will not infect with me with shame. No.

We won that game. They didn’t score. The boys got suspended. I never even knew their names, it didn’t matter. Because this is me and my teammates winning the state championship a month later.

This defines me, not the cruelty of some adolescent product of inherited prejudice and sexism. This is me.

Here’s another one. It’s not my story so I can’t take credit, but I will take credit for my profound love of country music. It’s really all I listen to, have even listened to. Kenny Rogers has this awesome song called The Greatest.  Like all good country music, the song is a self contained story. And this one is about a little boy in a baseball field playing by ball himself. This is my little boy, Kalvin. (baseball PIC)

So I don’t know why he’s playing by himself, but he is.

He steps up to the plate and throws the ball in the air and swings….strike one.

Picks up the ball and adjusts his hat, he grits his teeth and tries again. Ball goes up and he swings….misses…strike two.

So once again he picks up the ball. This time, the game is on the line. He throws the ball up and he swings his bat with all his might…and the ball falls to the ground…strike three.

And so now I’ll let the song pick up with the story, because Kenny is a much better singer than I am. (Audio: The Greatest, by Kenny Rogers, even I didn’t know I could pitch like that.)  It’s a little different ending to the story. I just love that, I love that twist.

Here’s another story. A less happy one. My babies were abused, they were tortured. I failed to protect them. But very early on, I knew that the greatest impact on Kalvin and Grace would be how Dan and I reacted. We were very lucky because they were so young. They don’t remember, obviously. But If I became someone who was less trusting, over-protective, who couldn’t forgive myself, who was angry all the time or felt less joy, who lived in fear of the darkness of the world- all of which were very real possibilities- Kalvin and Grace would learn from me. And that’s how they would be impacted by that crime.  I just decided…that was not the lesson I was going to pass along. That was not going to be the legacy of the Aubrey chapter in our lives. That somehow, someway I had to prevent Aubrey and all she stands for from polluting our family. And I had to do that by shattering the dark snow globe of guilt and anger in which I found myself.

That was a bit tricker of a fight than the ones I’d had in the past because the person taking the shots weren’t some kids in the stands, or even an opposing team. It was me. And all the tools I had used in the past to overcome challenges didn’t apply to this. Persistence, determination, pure stubbornness are great. But the arsenal needed to fight the self-directed anger and guilt was totally foreign – it was made up of soft things, like self –forgiveness, patience, learning to be gentle with myself and walk lightly with myself. That was what Kalvin and Grace needed from me.

And just when I thought I had a handle on one battle, that I was choosing my way forward, a new one would break out. Because being a victim in the system felt very reactive, worse than that. I felt impotent, disempowered, and disregarded.

It would have been different if we’d hired a lawyer, if every victim was given a lawyer, given the same rights that criminals are afforded, I think it would have been different. Perhaps we could have avoided the bad taste that has become the enduring part of the process which is we needed a lawyer whose only job was to fight for criminal justice for Kalvin and Grace, with no agendas, no other considerations, somebody other than the overly-emotional purposefully un-informed parents of the victims to hold the people in the system accountable.

But we didn’t know. So here I am. Bad stuff happens. It is going to happen. But what cannot be taken away, EVEN by a system that isn’t always victim friendly is the freedom to choose how we react.

Power Of Story 

Because it’s like this: we start writing our own stories from the time we are kids. We choose the narrator, we choose the important events, we choose how we think about them, we put it all together to create a coherent narrative of ourselves and our lives. If you doubt how early it starts, listen to kids.

A few months ago, Kalvin was running down our driveway. It looks something like this.  (driveway running PIC)

And naturally, eventually, he took just a gigantic digger. His head bounced off the pavement, and I raced to him and picked up he cried for less than thirty seconds before he wanted to be put down.

And I was reticent to let him go. “You got a pretty good dinger there buddy, you ok?”

And he says,

“Yeah, I got an ouie, but I’m ok Momma.” Then he said, “That road pushed me. Bad road. No road. No thank you road.”

Yep, bad road. No thank you.

Or a few weeks ago, Grace was exhausted and clingy.(hands on face PIC)

So I asked her,

“Gracie girl, are you tired today?”

“Yeah Momma, I’m feeling a bit fragile. I need Starbucks, that will make me feel better.” (kneeling Olympic podium PIC)

Stories are how we make sense of our lives. They define us. We view our entire life as one big story, with a beginning, middle, end and new chapters along the way. It’s woven throughout our vernacular. And not only that, it’s hardwired in our brains.

Research has shown that’s its actually our left hemisphere that is wired to interpret events and create that coherent narrative, that story of our lives. (it sounds like a cotton commercial) When I was at Dartmouth, one of my neuroscience professors was Michael Gazzaniga who did extensive research with split brain patients. The subjects of his studies were typically severely epileptic patients whose corpus collosum had been severed to prevent the seizures from spreading from hemisphere to the other.

Surprisingly enough, these patients actually do quite well. But what it meant for Gazzaniga and his team is the had two separate functioning, meaning non-lesioned, non-diseased hemispheres, to study. His studies consisted of communicating with just one hemisphere.

For instance, he presented the word walk to a subject’s right hemisphere (or left eye). The subject got up and started walking. But the interesting part came when they asked the patient why he was walking. The left brain which is where language and the interpreter reside, but didn’t see the word walk, created a reason for the action.

And the patient said, “I wanted to go get a coke.”

Another patient suffered from reduplicative paramnesia, a strange condition where patients perceives a location has been duplicated, or moved to another site. As a result of her lesion, her interpreter had to work overtime to create stories that made sense of all of the errant and erroneous pieces of information it was receiving from her diseased brain. For example, she thought she was in her home in Maine as opposed to the hospital where she was being treated. When the doctor asked her how their could be elevators outside the room if she was in her home, she replied, “Doctor, do you know how much it cost me to have those put in?” Our brains, our left hemispheres in particular, are hardwired to create stories to make sense of our world, to generate explanations about our perceptions and our experiences. We literally create ourselves and our world through our stories.

And if that’s the case, how about being an active participant in the creation of our own story. And even in re-interpreting and re-creating of our past stories, we still get to choose. Sort of like going back to page 32 and re-deciding how to assign meaning to that event. If you want the redemptive story, turn to page 70. If you want the contamination narrative, turn to page 50. That’s a big difference there. The contamination narrative goes something like this: everything was great, after three years of IVF, three early miscarriages, two gestational surrogates, we finally had healthy newborn twins, then evil showed up at my door, I invited her in, she tortured my babies, and nothing was ever the same again. That is a story. The redemptive story goes something like this: everything was great, we finally had a family, then evil showed up, intentionally broke my infant son’s legs, and flipped my world upside down. But, this is how I reacted, this is how we healed, and sometimes the parts of our hearts that are broken heal stronger. I like that redemptive story. That feels good to me.

So even in history, we get to spin the tale we want.

I have a friend who had a very difficult childhood. Alcoholism.  Physical abuse.  Neglect.  All of it.  One of her sisters didn’t really survive childhood.  Her two brothers struggle badly, daily.

The story my friend tells herself is she is just different.  She’ll say, “I am genetically wired to be resilient.  I’m just lucky, I was born that way.”  But you have to listen not just to the stories she tells, but the interpretation of those stories.  Because it’s in the interpretation that makes her different.  Like the time when she was five years old and her dad came into the room where she and her three siblings were sleeping screaming about a broken plate.  “I won’t beat anyone and you can all go back to sleep if you just tell me who did it.” She was five, and as she recounts, her five-year old brain did the math, no beating, her dad will leave, lights go off, we all get to go back to sleep and so she said she had broken the plate.  Her dad took her into the bathroom.  But what she will tell you about this story is this: as she was being beaten, she remembers thinking, “This isn’t fair.  He lied.  He said he wasn’t going to beat us, he is. It isn’t fair.  I’m not going to be like him. I’m going to be different.”

I’ve heard her tell this story at least a dozen times in the twenty years I’ve known her and there is no footnote.  She is loving, compassionate, empathetic.  She is different because she told herself, from the age of five, that she was. Period.

Here’s another story. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve put my life on hold for three years to train for the 2002 Olympics. I’ve lived in Lake Placid with twenty other women while my college friends began their lives and careers in new and exciting places. Now it’s the closing ceremonies of the 2002 Salt Lake games.  Everything I’ve trained for, everything I’ve sacrificed, all those workouts, all those weeks. For nothing. Because we lost the gold medal game.

 

This silver medal hanging around my neck represents failure. To so many, it is a symbol of success, dedication, joy, triumph. For me, I hate it. I hate even looking at it. I stick it in a drawer where I don’t have to see it. Wow.  This is an Olympic Silver Medal.

So obviously that story wasn’t serving me, so I changed it. Now the story goes like this: I learned as much from the silver medal as I did from the gold.

 

I learned it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. But we all need the destination to give the journey meaning. I learned about the value of friendships and family and playing for my country and taking care of myself and being a role model and that’s the tip of that iceberg.

And oh, did I mention, there were some great parts of those Olympics, like when President Bush sat directly in front of me for opening ceremonies. So when a President sits right in front of you, what do you do? “Hey Mr. President sir, would you mind talking to my parents?” And I handed him my cell phone, saying, “Hey Mom, Dad, remember to call him Mr. President.” And then I listened to him, the President of the United States tell my parents how proud he was of me and my teammates and all the entire US delegation. And at the same time, my parents, in their living room, in Winnetka, saw the President on TV talking to them. Can you imagine that? And can you imagine, someone handing the president a cell phone today? This was five months after 9-11, security hadn’t quite caught up perhaps. But it was a moment, a big moment that I had thrown out with the story about the 2002 Olympics being failure.

I’ve learned to be very careful with the stories I tell myself. It is irresponsible not to be.

And it’s scary and I get that. Because if you have half a brain, pardon the pun, what we’re talking about here is terrifying. Because to truly embrace and accept full ownership for your life, and your life’s story, there is nobody else to blame. It’s not what happened to you when you were x, y, z years old or when a husband or wife left or when someone tortures your child or anything. It’s you. Because you always retain the ability to keep writing. And that is scary.

Because in my opinion, we are all the sole authors of our own story. We are all in one big Choose Your Own Adventure book. Someone else may write a chapter, but unless we fold in on ourselves and collapse, we get to write what happens after. So we should make ourselves the heroes. You don’t have to wear a cape, but we should make ourselves superwoman, ten stories high with some sort of magical superpowers. Sure, write a fun external story with adventures out in the world.

But more importantly, and I really believe it is more important, pay attention and write a beautiful, creative, magical, powerful inspiring internal story. Because that’s where meaning and purpose are found.

So here’s another story, one that I haven’t changed and it’s possible I never will. It’s one that you’ve probably heard running throughout this talk. And that’s the story of Guilt.

Because I hired her. I let her into our house. My intuition knew something was off, but I mis-interpreted that intuition and my babies suffered badly for my mistake. Every species on the planet knows how to protect their young, and I failed. I know I’m a great Mom, but there will always be this ugly footnote.   It was my job to protect them, and I failed.

Now I’m sure a trained psychologist would say, that’s faulty thinking, that’s a bad story. There’s nothing you could have done, you couldn’t have known, that thinking won’t move your forward. And I tried to agree with that line of thinking.

But now I disagree because I came to a point where I had to stop pushing the guilt away and accept that I’d have to find a way to live with it. And that was a giant step in the healing process. I messed up royally, I missed the signs. And I’m ok. I can carry that. That’s the story I live now. The story that I have expanded myself to hold the guilt and anger, I’ve become not only stronger and less apologetic but softer, more intuitive around those two things.

Because I simply got tired of running from myself. I decided, that there was nothing that could live in my own mind and my own heart that I can’t handle. Because what’s the alternative to that statement? I can’t handle it. Then I have to spend my life afraid of myself, of the cataclysmic end of what, “I can’t handle it” means. No, instead, the story is I’m ok. My babies are ok. I hate that it happened, I hate the role that I unconsciously played, but I’m ok. Better than ok.

And that for me is resilience. If I can pass along anything to Kalvin and Grace, (PIC)it would be that, how to rise about what threatens them. I wish for them grit and resilience and hope and optimism.  And if some interloper writes a chapter for them, I hope they keep on writing.

Because we can’t always make sense of a story when we’re in it, sometimes it only makes sense in the re-telling of it. And so the story I choose is this: anger, guilt, yes. But I’m also happier, I take even more joy in my kids, I live with even more depth, texture, passion, compassion, gratitude, and purpose. Because we can’t let the story stop when evil writes a chapter.  Frankl kept writing, he got re-married, he had a daughter, he kept living and he kept writing, as I hope we all can. Because I believe with my entire being what he wrote, “Say Yes To Life Inspite Of Everything.” We get to finish our own story. Write a big beautiful one, Choose Your Own Adventure.

I want to leave you all feeling as uplifted as I feel being here with you…so here is a short thirty second video…

Thank you.  Thank you for allowing me to share my story and I wish you all profound and great success helping others write their own story.

Note: transcript here includes minor editing to protect privacy