Might as Well Laugh About It Now (6 page)

Except I’m sure I can say “never” about one thing: I will
never
,
ever
again play the marimba.

The Ones Who Really Live Happily Ever After

I had my first child twenty-six years ago. It was also the birth year of the charity I cofounded, Children’s Miracle Network, which watches more than 17 million of my other kids every year.

A plate of tuna fish sandwiches was how it all began. A kitchen table. A yellow legal pad and pencil. Eating lunch that afternoon at my brother Alan’s home were John Schneider (yes,
Dukes of Hazzard
John), myself, and a small group of very talented businesspeople. I’ve read various claims that the omega oils in fish really boost brainpower. I’d have to say it was doing its job that afternoon, because at that table in the fall of 1981, the idea for Children’s Miracle Network was born.

At the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration in 2008, someone in the press asked me how John and I got involved in cofounding the charity. I think I answered that John is like a brother to me. Which is true. However, it’s also true that we did date once. Okay, maybe twice or more. He asked me out soon after the
Donny and Marie
show went off the air, and just as the
Dukes of Hazzard
was a fresh hit show. I went from four years of performing with Been Duped (Donny!) to dating Bo Duke. What a transition.

John was and still is handsome, funny, and kind-hearted, a combination that’s not always easy to find. However, by the time he asked me out on a date, my heart was already pretty occupied by Steve, the Brigham Young University basketball star whom I was also starting to see. That story continued with a picture-book wedding, but didn’t end with happily ever after, like we had both hoped. By the time this Children’s Miracle Network lunch meeting took place, I’m certain that John Schneider and I were no longer dating. I mean, no one eats tuna fish when they’re trying to flirt. Right?

Our topic of the day was: How could we help more kids who are physically challenged, sick, or injured? And how would we decide which cause needed the most help? There were hundreds of causes, all important, each needing funding for research and various treatments.

Years before, my parents had established the Osmond Foundation, a charity to help hearing-impaired children, because my two oldest brothers, Virl and Tom, were born deaf.

If a newborn appeared to be healthy in the 1940s, he was sent home with the mother with no further tests. Vision and hearing were only routinely tested when a child entered public school. My mother had to make the scary discovery with her first two babies on her own. Virl, the oldest, was showing some signs of speech problems as a preschooler, but she thought Tom was merely a quiet baby.

My parents had just moved to Ogden, Utah, and my father was devoting eighteen-hour days to setting up a real estate and insurance business. To keep my brothers entertained, he built them a little sandbox in the backyard. Mother told me that she was calling to them one day to come in the house and realized that only Virl looked up at her. Tommy never responded at all.

After having them tested and finding out that Virl had less than sixty percent hearing and that Tom was almost totally deaf, doctors recommended that they be placed in an institution as soon as they reached school age. This was where my mother put her foot down. Not the first or last time, either! (I think I inherited the best of her headstrong qualities.) She couldn’t bear the thought of having her babies live away from her. As devastating as the news was to her, by the time she arrived home, she had started making a plan.

Day by day she taught them to speak. She would put her face near to theirs and pronounce words, letting them feel her throat as she spoke. She devised a way for them to hear speech through earphones and a record player. My father painted the kitchen walls with blackboard paint and my mother became their teacher. They were given tap-dance lessons to feel rhythm, and were both so good they ended up teaching the rest of my brothers to dance. She and my father not only taught my two oldest brothers to function well in a hearing world, but they taught the rest of their kids the ultimate blessings that come with helping other people. When my brothers Alan, Wayne, Merrill, and Jay first started singing at professional events as very young boys, it was to raise money to buy the best-quality hearing aids for their older brothers. Later, the funds went to the Osmond Foundation to help other deaf children.

My parents strongly believed that philanthropy was not only something we could do in our spare time but something that was to be part of our weekly schedules. It was, in their view, as important a time commitment as finding time to eat. One nourished the body, the other the spirit.

Almost every day during the seventies, a crowd of teenage girl fans would stand vigil outside of whatever house, apartment, studio, or hotel we happened to be occupying in order to catch a glimpse of my brothers. They would always call out, “Hi, Mother Osmond!!!” whenever she would enter or exit. I guess because they always called her “Mother,” she felt she had the go-ahead to advise them in the same way she did all of her children. I would sometimes see her walk over to the fence or sidewalk where the girls lined up, and with a broad smile on her face and gentleness in her voice, say, “Stop wasting your time, girls. Think of how much good you could be doing to help other people with all these hours you spend standing here. Go be of service by reading to the blind, or helping out a handicapped child. You could be working in a food pantry or visiting the elderly. Now, get going, girls. Then report back to me on what you accomplished!”

I know quite a few girls did report back to my mother over the years how she had changed their lives, often by her encouragement to “not waste a moment of this precious life.”

The idea for Children’s Miracle Network, scribbled out on that legal pad over twenty-five years ago, was to help as many kids as possible by supporting the hospitals that cared for them. Through funds raised by individuals, media outlets, and wonderful corporate sponsorship, as well as through the dedication of amazing doctors, nurses, and researchers who have donated countless hours of their time, Children’s Miracle Network is now able to provide state-of-the-art care and facilities to 17 million children every year. To date, $3.4 billion worth of free medical care has been given away to families who need help in making sure their child receives the best possible chance at life.

A couple of years ago, I was stopped in an airport by a darling man who wanted to shake my hand.

“I wanted to say hello and to thank you,” he said shyly. “I was a Children’s Miracle Network Champion about twenty years ago. I was fourteen then, and had undergone three rounds of chemotherapy for lymphoma.”

I’m always thrilled to meet one of the Champion kids again.

“Then I was bald from the chemo,” he continued. “Now I’m just getting bald from middle age!”

I told him, “I’ll be smiling about this success story for weeks.”

The money CMN has raised has helped millions of families. And for me, the opportunity to be in the presence of these incredible children over the years has helped me in countless ways as well: teaching me, expanding my thinking, increasing my gratitude. I’ve heard this same sentiment from everyone who works with Children’s Miracle Network, from the most brilliant surgeon to the high school volunteers who help out by doing fund-raising dance-a-thons.

I’ve never once met a sick or injured child who had a “why me?” outlook on life, even when their condition appeared to be incurable. One small boy, whom I’ll call Blake, was no exception.

I met Blake and his parents during a radio interview about the Children’s Miracle Network fund-raising gala at a Florida resort a couple of years ago. Blake has brittle bone disease, and though he was seven years old at the time, he was about the size of a three-year-old due to the disease. He wore Harry Potter-type glasses along with his adorable grin, and had his wheelchair decorated with various stickers, mostly Disney characters. It was not the first time my heart has been captured, but when he burst into giggles at my one and only pirate joke (What’s a pirate’s favorite letter of the alphabet? R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r), I just had to hijack his wheelchair and run away with him.

With his parents in close pursuit, we got as far as the resort gift store, which was featuring toys from the latest
Pirates of the Caribbean
movie.

“I want to get you something fun. Pick out a toy just for you,” I told him as we took a tour of everything available.

After doing two laps of the entire store, Blake reached up to a rack to choose a plastic pirate’s sword that lit up and made swashbuckler sounds. He held it up for his parents to see.

It was only an inexpensive little toy, so I insisted that Blake pick out another gift to go along with it. I showed him around to the more extravagant
Pirates of the Caribbean
play sets. We looked at scallywag hats and board games, ships in bottles and pirate watches. Though his eyes lit up and he seemed excited about each new selection, he would always return them to the shelf.

As we circled back to where we started, Blake took one more plastic sword off the rack, handed it to me, and said, “Thank you very much.”

“Pick out something else you really want,” I said, hanging the sword back on the rack. “I’m already getting you a sword like this. Remember?”

Blake dropped his voice to a whisper. I bent my head down to hear him.

“I know,” he said. “But Alex doesn’t have one.”

Confused, I looked up at Blake’s parents.

Blake’s mom explained. “Alex is his friend at the children’s hospital. He’s a five-year-old being treated for an inoperable brain tumor. Blake always makes sure Alex never feels left out.”

I’m often left speechless by these children, usually because their pure intentions leave me swallowing tears.

Perhaps it is their challenges, faced in their few years on earth, that give them such clarity about what matters most, along with a deep understanding that “happily ever after” is now.

I’m grateful that Children’s Miracle Network has given families access to financial and emotional support, technology, and the best research available, so they don’t have to figure it out on their own the way my mother did with Virl and Tom. Mostly, though, I’m overwhelmed by the life-changing blessings these children give to all of us who work with and for them. I’m always reminded that some special spirits can, in seven short years, walk that enlightened path that takes most of us seven decades or more to journey.

A busy manager from one of our major sponsors, who was attending the Children’s Miracle Network celebration for the first time, summed it up perfectly for me. She had spent the day meeting each of the Champion children, one representing each state, the Canadian provinces, and the UK, and spending five or ten minutes with each of them.

As I posed for a picture with her, I had to ask, “What did you think of our Champion kids?”

“Here’s the manager coming out in me,” she said, with a wink. “Just like with my employees, I hope these kids don’t compare notes about what I said to them.”