Leigh Anne Tuohy - In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving

In a Heartbeat

SHARING THE POWER of CHEERFUL GIVING

Leigh Anne AND
Sean Tuohy

WITH Sally Jenkins

Henry Holt and Company
New York

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

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Copyright 2010 by Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tuohy, Leigh Anne.

In a heartbeat : sharing the power of cheerful giving / Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy with Sally Jenkins.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9338-4

1. Adoptive parentsUnited StatesBiography. 2. Tuohy, Leigh Anne. 3. Tuohy, Sean. 4. Generosity. 5. Social action. 6. Oher, Michael. 7. Football playersUnited States. I. Tuohy, Sean. II. Jenkins, Sally. III. Title.

HV874.8.T84 2010

362.734092'273dc22

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First Edition 2010

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For all the children fighting to survive
in the invisible cracks of our society, we see you.

No one has ever become poor by giving.

ANNE FRANK

In a Heartbeat

We all begin on the same page and were all going to end on the same page.

SEAN TUOHY

After many years of getting and spending, of being broke, then rich, then almost broke again, of cashing in and paying up, andlets face ithoping to die with the most toys, were convinced that its better to give than receive. Some folks call that philanthropy. But we arent the fancy types. We dont always have enough starch in our shirts and our household is about as formal as a sandbox. Instead, we live by a more informal notion, which we call the Popcorn Theory.

It goes like this: You cant help everyone. But you can try to help the hot ones who pop right up in front of your face.

The Popcorn Theory is about noticing others. It starts with recognizing a fellow soul by the roadside as kindred, even if he doesnt seem to belong in your gated community and, at six foot five and over three hundred pounds, is the biggest piece of popcorn you ever saw. Its about acknowledging that persons potential and value. Its about seeing him, instead of looking past him.

Like with popcorn, you dont know which kernels gonna pop, Sean likes to say. But the hot ones just show up. Its not hard to spot em.

Except, that first day we almost drove right by him.

It was a raw autumn morning in late November 2002, the day before Thanksgiving. A light dusting of snow had just fallen, which we in Memphis, Tennesseebeing Southernersconsidered a blizzard. Ice draped the roof gutters and the sky was dull and blanched, a waste-colored day.

We were on our way out to breakfast. He was trudging down the street in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, his arms wrapped in a sad knot, his breath visible in the cold.

We glanced at him, briefly. Then we did what comes too easily to all of us. To be honestgut-punch honestwe kept on driving and passed him by. Past the occasional patches of snow that lay on the yards like sheets half pulled back. Past the stubbled lawns and the freeze-cracked sidewalks.

But, as we left him behind, a thought tugged at Leigh Annes consciousness. It was as faint as the wind, as indistinct as the chittering of birds.

Turn around, Leigh Anne said.

With that, our lives changed in a heartbeat.

If you are among the millions of people who saw the movie The Blind Side, or read the book it was based on, then you know what happened next. You know how a wealthy suburban couple pulled over and spoke to young, rootless Michael Oher. How Michael was a ward of the state, his mother an addict, his father murdered. How he ran away from twenty foster homes and passed through eleven schools before he met us. How he eventually became a second son to us and earned a football scholarship to the University of Mississippi, where he made the Chancellors Honor Roll. How he then went on to stardom in the National Football League. How an Academy Awardnominated film was made about our family, and how Sandra Bullock won her first Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne.

You probably think you know everything about us, our whole story. Actually, you only know part of it. Dont get us wrong. Our friend Michael Lewis, the author of The Blind Side, wrote a wonderful book that deserved to be a bestseller. (Most of his books sell big. We havent read all of them, but if you see him, tell him we did.) Our friend Sandra Bullock is a brilliant actress and her star turn in the movie, all nerve and bluntness, was perfect. (Leigh Anne doesnt actually wear skirts that tight, but its a minor point.) Compared to our real lives, though, the book and movie were just sketches.

For instance, people ask all the time: Is Leigh Anne Tuohy really like that?

Our friends are quick to answer: Its worse. The movie could only get an hour and a half of her in.

The truth is, childbirth is easier to explain than our story. So in this book wed like to introduce our family properly, tell you how we saw events through our own eyes, and deliver our message in our own voices.

Its a message about giving. We often say that our son Michael gave us much more than we gave him. That confuses people: how is it possible that a homeless kid could give anything to wealthy parents who already had two perfect children? Its possible because in every exchange with Michael, we came out on the better end. We gave him a homeand he gave us back a stronger and more centered family. We gave him advice and supportand he gave us back a deeper awareness of the world. We gave him love as a boyand he gave us back a man to be proud of. Each thing we gave to him has been returned to us multiplied.

But before any of that could happen, something else had to happen first. A fundamental precondition had to be met.

We had to notice him. We had to see him.

At this point we should pause to explain why a couple of well-heeled suburbanites would go out to breakfast on a weekday morning. The answer is that we dont cook. Or, to be more specific, Leigh Anne doesnt cook. As Sean likes to tell people, My wife believes that if somebody else cooked it, and we bring it home and eat it, thats home cooking.

Our son Sean Junior, who we call S.J. for short, claims that our conversations about meals always consist of the following exchange:

Whats for dinner?

Whatever you pick up.

S.J. also likes to tell the story of our Krogers supermarket card. A while back the local grocery started a program: for every fifty bucks spent at Krogers, four dollars would go to the school or charity of your choice. After about a year, our grand contribution to the team, based on the amount of food we purchased, came to just seven dollars. The only things we ever bought were Diet Coke and Gatorade.