Kara Mia

CHAPTER 20 Guerin When Kara became ill, Guerin was in the final weeks of her senior year at Morse High School. This was supposed to be an exciting and carefree time of her life. She had been accepted at Providence College, academic expectations were all but over at her high school, the senior prom was just around the corner, the weather was warming and the beach was beckoning. But the phone call that she received while she was swimming in Florida changed all that. Her life of limited responsibilities and her role in the family all had to be reassessed and new pat- terns had to develop quickly and effectively in order for Tom and me to do our best for Kara, Guerin and each other.

Guerin was at the stage of her life where she was developing her independence from Tom and me and was closely tied to her friends, many of whom she had known since kindergarten. She never complained about the many hours that Tom and I devoted to Kara. I think she tolerated our preoccupation with Kara because it kept us from interfering in her life. Guerin has been involved in her share of mischievous events and I am sure that Tom and I only know about half of them, but she is a good and responsible daughter who knows right from wrong.

Most of the parents of Guerin’s friends were our friends, too, and that was a big source of consolation for us. Every night that I stayed at the hospital later than I should have, Guerin always had a home and good meal at the house of one of those friends.

She never lacked for love or attention because if her own parents couldn’t provide it that day, one of her “surrogate parents” could. They also made sure that Guerin got down to Portland to see Kara at the hospital whenever she wanted.

It was difficult for Guerin to find the right balance between her responsibilities. She needed to spend ample time studying to keep her grades acceptable for Providence College; she needed to enjoy her friends so that she wouldn’t resent time spent with Kara; she needed to fulfill her obligation as a sister helping Kara with her recovery; she needed to help with some household chores that Tom and I no longer had time for, and she needed to be safe and assure us that all of her social deci- sions were mature ones so that we could be free of the usual parents-of-teenagers’ worries. She had to be able to look to the future but know that when she looked back on this time of her life she had tried her best to be fair to herself, to Kara and to us.

Tom and I knew what a difficult balancing act this was going to be as we struggled with some of the same dilemmas. We knew that Guerin needed autonomy and had the right to make many of her own decisions but we also knew how dangerous the end of senior year is for these young adults of the nineties. We desperately needed her to be safe. We already had one daughter in the hospital with a brain injury, and we didn’t want anything to happen to Guerin. Tom did a better job of find- ing the correct balance than I did; he could trust her judgment, whereas I had to know where she was, how she was getting there and whom she was with at any given moment. We knew that Guerin could physically take care of herself, but certainly she needed us for emotional support, and we had to be sure to save enough of ourselves to give it to her.