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Off the Beaten Path
A Different Road To Motherhood
Part One
By Kathleen Sorabella
Nearly 6 months prior to his arrival, we began an e-mail correspondence with Daniel, a 16-year-old boy from Germany traveling on scholarship to America for the first time in his life. I would like to think that he was as scared as I was leading up to his arrival. Each and every day before his scheduled date to land in Boston, I continued to doubt that I possessed skills necessary to be a functional parent to this needy young and impressionable human being for 10 months. I worried that I would fail him miserably and ruin his little emotional being. To make matters worse, his parents made me nervous. They barely spoke English, and they were entrusting me with their child. "My God," I thought. "How can they give up their child to a total stranger, to me, for nearly a year?"
I couldn't possibly write in this small space all the experiences that we had in those 10 short months. The bottom line is our goal was accomplished and we sent that young man home a little older – and not damaged. Our experience allowed us to see the void that for so long we had denied existed. Not only did hosting confirm its existence, but when Daniel left, the emptiness seemed to widen and grow larger. From the moment Daniel stepped foot on the plane, we vowed never to entertain the thought of hosting again. Saying goodbye to Daniel was emotionally worse than seeing the minus line on the pregnancy test all over again. It was as if a positive result turned to negative right in front of my eyes.
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