Excerpt: "You Get Past the Tears"

April 22 -- You Get Past The Tears: A Memoir of Love and Survival tells the story of Hydeia Broadbent, a teenager who was born with AIDS. Written by Patricia Broadbent, Hydeia Broadbent and Patricia Romanowski, it is a first-person account of a mother and daughter trying to keep life as normal as possible.

Excerpt from You Get Past the Tears : A Memoir of Love and Survival

ONE

The first time I saw her, she didn't even have a real name.

Just six weeks old, she had been taken from the hospital nursery, where her mother had abandoned her, to Child Haven, a county-run temporary facility. Now, here at my doorstep, was Baby Girl Kelloggs. As it turned out, Kelloggs was not her father's name or her mother's, either. Perhaps her mother picked it up off a cereal box. This fact, like so many I learned about the children I had fostered or adopted over the years, would have shocked me if I hadn't heard a dozen stories like it before, and worse. A veteran social worker, an activist for minority adoptions, and a foster parent, I knew how this story began and how it would probably end. A baby born to a drug-addicted mother and temporarily cared for by the state now needed a loving home until she could be adopted. A friend who worked for the state had called and told me about this baby. Was I interested in taking care of her until she could be adopted? As a foster parent, my role in this little one's life would be brief but, I hoped, important. Having taken in several foster children before, I had learned the art of loving and caring for children who would not be mine forever. I knew when to hold tight and when to let go, how to draw the lines around my heart and theirs so that they regarded me as Auntie Pat and not Mommy. (Besides, I already had four of my own children to call me Mom.)

This little one, like so many, was born with drugs in her system. That, along with the fact that her mother had left the hospital within hours of giving birth, told me that she probably had not received good prenatal care. I expected a baby who was smaller than average, more likely to fuss, less likely to interact spontaneously. I wouldn't have been surprised if she had problems with eating and sleeping or didn't like to be held as much as other babies. That was okay. To hear the media — then in the grip of hysteria over crack babies — tell it, "drug babies" were close to hopeless. But I knew better. With a few months' care, love, and attention, this baby girl would blossom. Even before she arrived, I was looking forward to the day when she would leave in the arms of adoptive parents who would love her forever.