Free Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey by Kathryn Kennish, ABC Family

to be learning to harmonize.

Chapter Five
    How Tandoori Chicken Can Change Your Life
    I know there is no way I will escape this memoir without at least touching on that abstract concept known as Fate. Whether you call it karma, kismet, fortune, destiny, serendipity, good old-fashioned dumb luck, or all of the above, surely you must be wondering where, in light of my circumstance, I stand on this issue. As I am not a philosopher or a Zen master or a theologian, I will have to explain it to you in the rudimentary terms by which I myself have come to understand it. If it seems oversimplified, that’s because it is.
    Six days prior to the due date of my second child, I found myself craving Indian food in the absolute worst way. Visions of Vindaloo danced in my head as I called John at work and instructed him to bring home as much curry-flavored take-out food as he could fit in the cargo hold of the Range Rover he was driving at the time.
    “Isn’t Indian food a little spicy?” he asked cautiously. (I’d entered that phase of my pregnancy when even the slightest hint of provocation could send me into a hormone-driven meltdown.)
    “It’s very spicy, actually.”
    “Well, you’re due in six days.”
    “What’s your point?”
    Needless to say, John picked up the Indian food and I devoured every last morsel like the extremely pregnant woman I was.
    Which was why I developed one hell of a case of heartburn.
    Which was why I couldn’t fall asleep.
    Which was why, at two o’clock in the morning, I decided the upper shelf of the walk-in cedar closet needed to be completely reorganized, and since in a mere six days I would be the mother of two (count ’em, two !) children under the age of twenty-four months, I’d better get a move on and do it now while I had the chance.
    Which was why I was stupidly attempting to lift a thirty-gallon plastic storage bin filled with woolen blankets and flannel sheets in the middle of the night.
    Which was why I went into labor six days earlier than I was scheduled to and wound up giving birth to my daughter on a day when the nurses in the maternity ward were being forced to work quadruple shifts.
    Which is why in a state of utter exhaustion, one of them unintentionally gave me the wrong child.
    Call it fate. Call it chance. Call it whatever you want. But that’s how it happened. Life is just one big cosmic flowchart. I can’t explain it any better than that. And I’m sure Regina can give me a similar breakdown of the events leading to the illness that resulted in Daphne losing her ability to hear. But what it all boils down to is this—whether you kill a ladybug in Tokyo and it causes a bridge to collapse in Belgium, or you crave Indian food in Mission Hills and it results in a hospital staffer putting the wrong ID anklet on your newborn baby, there are forces at work in the universe over which we mere mortals have no control. If I had been craving oatmeal, or mashed potatoes, then maybe none of this would have ever happened.
    Or, then again, maybe it would have. I don’t presume to know, and frankly, it’s too exhausting to even try and guess.
    I heard an expression once: Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
    In other words, the best and only thing we can do is simply enjoy the Tandoori and hope the dominoes fall in our favor.
    I met John Kennish in the fall of 1990.
    I graduated from Wofford College in South Carolina the spring before and was living at home with my mother and her second husband, Dr. Gregory Dixon, a very successful orthopedic surgeon. Most of my girlfriends were away in graduate school or paying their entry-level dues in the corporate world.
    I had been working part time at The Gap, mostly to keep busy while trying to determine what I really wanted to do with my life. My mother was distraught that I wasn’t “serious” with anyone (I was twenty-one and, according to her, “not getting any younger”), so she saw to it that I maintained an active social