There But For the Grace of Stupid Luck

A family in the Ethiopian adoption community recently lost their toddler, who'd been home with them for a year, to a tragic parking lot accident. She apparently got herself unbuckled out of her car seat and the vehicle door opened before her father was able to get out of his seat and come around to get her. She ran across the parking lot, eager to see her brothers playing lacrosse -- and right into the side of an oncoming car.

And I think "There but for the grace of God...." remembering all our parking lot/carseat/doorlock battles. Except that I'm agnostic at best, and this family is devoutly Christian. So really, God's turned off  his grace for this family but had it turned on for us? No, it was not by God's grace that this wasn't our story; we just got stupidly lucky.

Reading that family story, I could see T sitting in the park's parking lot, stubbornly refusing to get up, while cars were pulling in and backing out all around us. I could see it as if it were playing out in front of me right then and there. There's an element of PTSD for me. One small child, so newly home with us after years of planning and waiting, sitting in the middle of a parking lot. "I did not go through all I went through to lose you here!" I would think.

He always had great timing. I'd be pulling his bike out of the car when he'd decide that something was wrong with how it was all going down and he'd run into the middle of the lot and plunk himself down. So there I would be with a bike half in and half out of a vehicle and a four-year-old sitting down in an incredibly busy parking lot.

Throw the bike into the lot; pick up the kid. Shut the hatch, open the door, throw the child around the car seat and as far across the bench seat as possible, then slam the door before he could get back to prevent me from shutting the door. The one smart thing I'd done was to engage the child-proof locks while he wasn't looking, so he never did figure out how to get the door open once I'd shut it. But as far as unbuckling his car seat -- his gross and fine motor skills worked just fine thank you very much. I would work up a sweat getting him buckled in. He had the three-second unbuckle mastered.

And the day he tore down the driveway into the street without a look after conning me into wading thigh high into the snow -- in the middle of winter when we had four-foot high snowbanks and a three-foot high child. There are times you just can't move fast enough -- and being thigh-high in snow in the middle of the yard is one of them. Once I freed myself, I was able to chase him down.

But, there but for the grace of stupid luck....I still reel at the thought of "What if a car had been coming down the road just then?" He was two weeks home from Ethiopia -- from a village that is inaccessible by car. He had no street sense. Zero.

As it happened, after I grabbed him and turned around, I saw a van turn onto our street to drive up our block. A difference of 15 seconds....

That this family lost this little girl who they dreamed about, yearned for, worked so hard to bring here in order to give her a forever family -- this is not part of "God's plan." This was not "meant to be." This did not "happen for a reason."

Those platitudes make some people feel better about crap happening. I do not mean to offend anyone whose belief system believes that. But I don't buy it. I believe that shit happens for no reason at all. And it could have been me. It so easily could have been me. I can see a little boy sitting in the middle of a parking lot with cars pulling in and backing out all around him.

There but for the grace of stupid luck.