The mother stood holding the little club-footed baby in her arms, contemplating suicide. She knew exactly how she was going to do it: she would throw her baby and herself under a fast-moving streetcar. She felt she could not have her child go through life as a cripple. She had seen so many deformed, helpless children that the very thought of her own child going through life in that condition was more than she could bear.
Ever since Jean could remember, she had wanted children and hoped to have both a boy and a girl. After Nancy had been born six years before, Jean then prayed that she would soon have a son. Five years later when she found herself pregnant again, she offered a spontaneous prayer, “O Lord, let it be a boy!”
The Shattering Discovery
When the time came for her delivery, this prayer was still on her lips and in her heart, and it seemed that her cup of happiness was full. When just coming out of the ether, she heard her husband say, “You have your little boy, honey.” And then – Elmer Crider took his wife’s hand and gently told her the truth. There was something dreadfully wrong with one of the baby’s feet.
“I pulled the receiving blanket back,” recalls Jean, “and I looked at his little foot, and I just wanted to die. ‘Why, O Lord,’ I asked, ‘couldn’t it have been me instead?'”
The baby’s tiny foot was turned back until his toes touched his heel, and where there should have been bone, there was only flesh.
The Struggle for Hope
“What can you do for it?” was Jean’s first agonized question.
“We will have to put him in a brace,” he said. “Will he ever be able to walk, will he be all right?” Jean demanded.
“Well-” responded the doctor, “We’ll have to see. A thing like this takes time, you know.”
Two days later they put the brace on the baby. ‘Bring him back to see me when he’s four weeks old,’ the doctor told me-‘ and we’ll see then how things are.” When Jean left the hospital with little Ronnie, she did not go home rejoicing over a perfect little son. She went home as a heartbroken mother of a probably hopeless cripple.
In three weeks Elmer took the baby back to the doctor, who was still noncommittal. Jean was carefully instructed by the doctor as to the physiotherapy to use, and she assiduously massaged the little leg and foot at home, but with little effect, for still there was nothing but flesh where bone was supposed to be, and the foot still turned back.
A Mother’s Breaking Point
By now Ronnie was five months old. In addition to the club foot, the little leg itself was considerably shorter than the other normal one. “When he begins to pull himself up,” the doctor had said that day, “we will go into the matter of surgery. The operation will involve his hip and his foot. One leg will inevitably be shorter than the other, but at least he will be able to walk.”
Jean looked at the beautiful baby lying on the examining table. Walk? Yes, perhaps, but never to run, never to play football or baseball, never to be like other children.
“No one will ever know how I felt that day,” confided Jean. “When I left the Jenkins Arcade Building holding Ronnie in my arms, I wanted more than anything in the world to protect him. I felt so helpless. I could see him going through life as a cripple-hurt and bewildered when his friends made fun of him. And I knew I was powerless to save him from all this.”
That was the day when Jean planned to throw herself and him in front of a streetcar. The only thing that prevented her from doing this was the thought of her six-year-old Nancy at home. What would become of her? Who would take care of her without a mother? “I guess this was really God speaking to my heart,” Jean says. “He stopped my doing what I thought I wanted to do that afternoon.”
A Divine Interruption
For years Jean had listened every morning to the Arthur Godfrey program as she went about her work, but for some extraordinary reason that she couldn’t then understand (although she does now) the morning after her visit to the doctor she changed the station on her radio and “Suddenly,” she recalls, “I heard a voice: HAVE YOU BEEN WAITING FOR ME? it said.”
To Be Continued…
Miraculous Monday: 27th March 2023
Miraculous Monday 033
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