Another side of the family
From the first, Cate Nelson was drawn to the little boy with the thatch of dark hair and the
Disabled by a brain injury when he was 1, Edy didn't laugh like the other kids. He never talked. He couldn't even sit up. Surrounded by toddlers who played for hours on the tile floor, Edy mostly lay in his crib.
Cate, recently graduated from Belmont High, was volunteering in Guatemala City when she met Edy. She would pull him out of his crib and prop him up on the floor between her legs to play. She held him for hours at a time. On Cate's 19th birthday, Edy, who was 3, laughed with her for the first time. The nun who ran the orphanage said she had never seen him eat as well as he did with Cate. She adored him.
The weeks drained away. Cate had an acceptance letter from Harvard. Should she stay for Edy? Could she come back and adopt him in a few years?
Talking to her mother, Ellen, back in Belmont weeks before she was due to leave Guatemala, Cate burst into tears.
"Who will love him when I go?" Cate asked.
"Not me," Ellen thought.
Ellen and Steve Nelson had almost finished raising their three children. They were in their mid-40s, and their youngest, Josh, was already 15. In a few years, their nest would be empty.
"I started young," Ellen says. "And I thought, 'We'll finish young, and we'll have this whole second half to do things in.' "
She wanted to spend more time with her church. She wanted to work in an orphanage in Mozambique. She wanted to be something other than a mother.
Cate asked her to come to Guatemala. Ellen knew her daughter was hoping she would fall in love with Edy right away, too.
She didn't.
"Cate introduced me, and you know, he looked like a nice kid, but there was no ta-da moment," Ellen recalls. "I could tell Cate was disappointed."
Even so, back in her hotel room that night, Ellen prayed.
"It came out of my heart before I had a chance to reel it back in," she says now. "I said, 'God, if you want to give me your heart for Edy, you can.' "
The next day at the orphanage, Edy fell asleep in Ellen's arms, and suddenly, her heart flooded with love. God had taken her up on her offer, she says.
Though she already thought of Edy as her fourth child, Ellen didn't want to get Cate's hopes up. Leaving Guatemala, she made no promises.
When Cate got home the whole family sat around the dining table, crying as she talked about leaving Edy.
Lucy, daughter number two, was the first to say it out loud: "We have to adopt him."
If they were going to do this, the Nelsons would have to do it together. Edy may be legally blind, and though he can sit up now, nobody knows whether the 4-year-old will ever be able to walk and talk and function by himself. Ellen and Steve wouldn't be around forever. Even with the best medical care in the world, Edy might need as much help at 50 as he needs now, and the Nelson children eventually would have to be the ones to give it.
Together, the Nelsons went to Guatemala last summer. Together, they agreed to bring Edy home.
Because of new, tighter rules on adoptions from Guatemala, it may be several years before Edy can come to live with them in Belmont. But he is already Ellen's son, already Cate's brother.
So the new family waits: the college student who rerouted the life of a disabled child in an orphanage in Latin America, the middle-aged suburban parents recalibrating their long-held hopes for a second chapter, and the sweet, dark-haired boy so many others would have passed by.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail is abraham@globe.com.
