A Boy Named Silas: The First Five Years by Alana Terry

Author:Alana Terry [Terry, Alana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2012-11-05T06:00:00+00:00

What Would You Choose?

I’ve been known to have some pretty strange dreams. My most vivid (and disturbing) dream regarding Silas and his condition came to me one night when my son was about four months old.

Up until that time, I prayed for an instantaneous and thorough healing, but it didn’t seem to be coming. Our son was drugged up with anti-seizure medicine that impoverished him of any emotion or expression whatsoever. His face and eyes remained vacant day in and day out. He showed no sign of recognizing his family members and didn’t care if he was held or not. My son was so “not there” I sometimes wondered if there was a little boy at all trapped inside his sickly little body.

One night, while Silas was sleeping near me with an apnea monitor wrapped around his chest, I dreamed Scott came home with tremendous news: “They found a cure for Silas! I have to take him to the hospital right away.”

I handed my son over to his daddy and waited for this miraculous healing to occur. Scott came home a short time later with a chubby, smiling, cooing little baby.

“What’s that?” I’m sure even in my sleep my body shuddered.

“This is our son.”

I wanted to throw up. “That’s not my baby. Where is Silas?”

“This is Silas,” Scott assured me.

“What happened to him?”

“They cloned him,” Scott answered, “and then made him the right age. See? Isn’t he cute?”

“But where is Silas?” Then suddenly Scott understood as well. As occurs so easily in dreams, I was able to transport to the hospital and saw Silas — the real Silas this time — discarded and withering away in a dirty bathroom trash bin.

“I need my baby!” I didn’t look back at the “other” Silas. He wasn’t mine. I didn’t have a four month-old who was chubby and fat and smiley. My four month-old took horrible medicine that suppressed his personality and kept him from relating to us at all. My four month-old had lungs that rattled and rasped so it sometimes sounded like he had bubble juice jostling around in his chest. My four month-old had a two-inch scar across his abdomen and a plastic tube sticking out of his belly.

That other little baby — that perfect, cute, chubby, healthy baby — wasn’t mine, and I didn’t want anything to do with him.

When I woke up the next morning, Silas and I still weren’t bonded by a long shot. In fact, even after my son got off the seizure meds, it still took work getting to know the “real” him. But at least my dream helped me discover that given the choice between a healthy clone or the real deal, I would chose my son every time.

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