Remembrances of Mom

        On what would have been her 88 birthday, I want to share my memories of a remarkable woman, my mom.  I share this honor with three others Glynn, Charlotte and Jay.  What follows are my remembrance's of her.  So let me start by stating that in general all mothers are special and that I feel that all mothers who raise children with chronic illnesses are very special indeed.  In my world my mother would have been the leader of the pack.

        She was born and raised on the family farm outside of North Freedom Wisconsin where she learned about hard work.  She also spent a fair amount of time on her grandparents farm located in the Sumpter area up the hill from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant.  She learned to knit and crochet from her grandmother something she did for most of her life.  She survived a near fatal encounter with a hornets nest as a child and became afraid of birds after being attacked by chickens while cutting through their enclosure on her way back from the mailbox on her grandparents farm.

            She studied Latin in high school wanting to prepare to study nursing after graduation but this was not to be, she worked for her father as a secretary for awhile in Madison.  This is where she met my father who was in the U.S. Air Force stationed there.  They married when she was 19 years old and by the time she was 21 they had two children 11 months apart.  I have joking referred to the two of us as Irish twins, however mom said that there was an old wives tale that you could not get pregnant while nursing, she said that I disproved that one.  What was unknown at the time was that my older sister was born with a severe hearing loss and then I came along and was diagnosed with classic hemophilia 6 months after birth.  This was not a accurate diagnosis but given the treatments at the time it sufficed.  There was a family history of the disorder two of mom's three uncles had been diagnosis with hemophilia but both died before she was born.  It was her grandmother who originally recommended taking me to the doctor because of bruising around my ribcage.  Little did she know how much that doctor appointment would change her life.  She noted in my baby book that she drove across town afterwards not remembering that she had done so.  Sometime after that they started to notice what was considered behavioral issues with my older sister which doctors at the time blamed on the amount of attention I was getting because of my hemophilia, it was not until a young intern commented to my mother "you know she can't hear" that they realized to what extent there was yet another physical issue with another of their children.

        My father was transferred to Kelly A.F.B. San Antonio Texas in the later part of the 1950's and shortly before her 25th birthday we had our most harrowing experience together.  As was their custom my parent's would check on the two of us before retiring for the night.  On April 15th 1959 they found me gasping for air, it was mom who drove me to the emergency room (ER) at Wilford Hall Medical Center Lackland AFB all the while telling me to breath.  It was mom who carried me to the ER where an emergency tracheotomy was preformed.  It was determined that the tracheotomy was misplaced and I was taken to the operating room where a second tracheotomy was preformed during which my heart stopped and an open heart massage was preformed causing my left lung to collapse resulting in chest tubes being inserted.  Several more times that night my heart stopped where mom witnessed the efforts to start it again.  She recounted the many transfusions the I endured when it appear that I was bleeding faster than they could pump it into me.  That was a long 69 day hospitalization mostly spent in a shared room with other very ill children all of which died, causing mom to meltdown one day asking a doctor if any children every gets out of that room alive.  Well she did witnessed at least one, her own.

        Long before there were terms like "tiger mom's and "mainstreaming" there was our mom.  She made sure that schools treated my sister and I as any other student, of course in my case there were limits to physical activities but our parent's wanted us to live the real world and not be sheltered from it.  Regardless of the grade or the school over the years she'd go make sure that we got a well round education.  If that meant fighting with a school counselor over whether not my sister should or could take a speech class in high school she was always up for the challenge.  Additional, because the military moved us every four years there were new doctors and neighbors to train in hemophilia and teachers to push to accept the fact that my sister could function in a regular classroom.  For a short period of time at the start of my life, we live near extended family members.  So after that time it became necessary to rely on neighbors to fill that void, in many ways they became our extended family and mom cherished many of them to the end of her life.

        My younger sister made her appearance shortly before we moved to Japan in 1962 and it was left to mom to get all of us from San Antonio (SA) to the West Coast to ship our car.  So by herself she drove a 1959 Ford with no power steering, no power brakes, no air conditioning and a three on the column manual transmission and no power clutch from SA to the San Francisco area with three children one of whom was not even a toddler.  I remember the car breaking down near or in El Paso which she had to deal with all the while keeping us all in line.  And then there was the long flight to Japan that she had to handle alone on Pan Am.  Our first house in Japan was in an American compound off base with a huge kerosene heater in the middle of the front room,  And the water truck from the base supplying drinking water which the women had to run out with buckets to fill when they showed up.  What came out of the faucet while filling the bathtub was sometime amusing to me but not always to my sister.  It was while we lived in this house that my youngest sibling made his appearance.

        In 1966 we were living in Wichita Kansas and I was in the hospital for a bleed when mom showed up unexpectedly only to tell me that Dad had been injured at work.  He was a crew chief for an F-105 and was hit by a fuel truck while walking away from the plane as it was starting up.  The accident broke his back and he was in traction for weeks and a back brace for a long while.  Eventually he was sent to Wilford Hall (1968) to have three of his vertebrate fused, mom accompanied him with our two younger siblings.  It was the one and only time I remember being left by both parents with neighbors for an extended period of time growing up.  I know that my dad had to go before a medical review board to fight to stay on active duty after the surgery.  Upon winning that fight he went to Southeast Asia for the last time the year was 1969.   

        In the early 1970's while we were stationed at Randolph AFB and my older sister and I were deemed old enough to watch our younger sibling and to take on some of mom's chores around the house.  Mom went back to secretarial school to improve her shorthand and typing skills.  Watching her type was something amazing to behold, if my memory serves me she could type better that 120 words a minutes at her peak.  After completing her courses at Lee Business School she got a civil service job on the base as a secretary.  Later she transitioned to word processing and final became a supervisor of a word processing center.  In the late 1970's mom finally went to college earning an Associates Degree in Computers and went on to work as a technical support person at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio before she retired.

        In 1979, she got to watch her eldest son get married.  I am sure that this was both a moment of pride but also filled with great trepidation as I stepped out into the great unknown that was my future.  In 1983 the first of her grandchildren was born and in 1986 her husband was diagnosis with inoperable prostate cancer and given one year to live.  Unknown to her was my diagnosis of being HIV positive, it was not until 1994 that I disclosed this fact to her.  After a period of adjustment she began to educate herself on the topic and became the HIV/AIDS educator for her chapter of the Lions civics society  

        In 1989 she lost the love of her life to cancer at age 55 and yet for the most part she did what she always did, she put one foot in front of the other and moved forward.  All be it never really recovering from this loss.  She went on to finish dad's term on city council and then was elected to a term of her own,

        She moved to the Los Angeles area to be near her daughter and take care of her two grandchildren living there. One of her great joys were having her grandchildren with her during the summer.

        All in all a full life well lived.  I miss our weekly talks but I still hear her voice in the lessons she taught me.

Mom with her twin great grandsons.