.The Second Chance

Joan Ryan found a hidden gift in her son's near-fatal accident.

Told that her sixteen-year-old son had just fallen off a skateboard
and hit his head, Joan Ryan rushed to the scene: “There was no
blood. No obvious injury.” Agitated, the teen — who went by
his middle name, Ryan, which is also his mother’s surname
— spoke to her and strained against the straps that affixed
him to a stretcher. He’d sustained no broken bones, but a paramedic
explained that any head injury mandated a visit to nearby Marin General
Hospital just to be checked. Because the basically good-humored but
sometimes volatile 215-pound six-footer with ADHD had transgressed his
parents’ rules by skateboarding without a helmet, Ryan joked with the
paramedics about how “as soon as he’s fixed up, I’m going to kill
him.”

Hours later, he was in a coma. Ryan and her husband stared blankly
at the hospital chaplain.

“I began to cry. Okay, I get it. My son might die,” Ryan writes in
The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, a Son, and Their Second
Chance
, the harrowing but skin-tinglingly inspiring new book about
how “for ninety-four days in 2006, my life hurtled backward, then
slowly forward again.” Having sustained a traumatic brain injury that
at first thoroughly disabled him, the youth made a remarkable recovery,
albeit fraught with terrifying setbacks: “Brain injuries are the wounds
that keep on wounding,” Ryan writes. Yet the author, best known as an
award-winning San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter, now calls
those long months “a do-over” because “I received the gift
— at however high a price — of getting to raise Ryan
all over again. It was as if he went through all the stages of
childhood during the course of those three months: learning to talk, to
eat, to walk, to think, to use a toilet,” she says. “And this time I
was a different kind of mother. I finally could accept and truly admire
Ryan for who he is, not who I imagined who he should be.”

She and her sportscaster husband, Barry Tompkins, adopted Ryan at
birth. Although she adored him, she struggled with parenting a
tantrum-prone child.

“Motherhood isn’t something I could simply will myself to do well.
It’s not something you can learn from research or even from watching
other people,” says Ryan, who will be at A Great Good Place for
Books
(6120 La Salle Ave., Oakland) on Friday, November 13. Raising
her son the first time, “I was trying to do motherhood as if it were a
paint-by-number project, and if I was really diligent and worked really
hard, I’d end up with the picture I wanted.”

To other parents facing similar ordeals, she asserts: “Don’t believe
the doctors who say your child will never — pick one —
walk, hold a job, live independently, go to college, etc. They don’t
know. They can’t know. Nod your head politely and ignore them.” 7 p.m.,
free. GreatGoodPlace.Indiebound.com

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