Barry Clifford: Still This Child Would Not Die

The expectant mother did not want to be pregnant, or her unborn baby, whose tiny heartbeat beat inside of her, to be born. She would try anything to be rid of it and did after doctors were unable to change her mind.

Finally she tried poisoning the fetus with alcohol after everything else did not work in trying to kill it. Still, this child would not die. In the end she accepted that he might just live.

Despair for her lot was more than a state of mind for she knew that her alcoholic husband was more in love with a bottle than his own family. Her poverty was complete and permanent with three children already, and being pregnant again with nowhere to go, no job and little food gave for little optimism either that it would ever change and so she wept alone.

At last she gave birth against all the odds on the 5^th of February in the year of 1985 to a boy and it became love at first sight for the both of them.

As her child grew up he was not sure footed in where he wanted to go. As a young teenager, he was less so. By the time he was fourteen years old he was already expelled from school after throwing a chair at a teacher and from that his future was in doubt. By the time he was fifteen years old it was discovered that he had a racing heart and any job that he hoped for was now in crisis.

Before he was sixteen he had found his footing, and his heart had recovered fully too only for it to be discovered later that it was one of the most generous that had ever pumped blood through any arteries in such a young man. It helped too that in the year of 2013 alone he had earned $73 million. 

The man’s name was Cristiano Ronaldo.

By Barry Clifford