Mom recalled a moment from her childhood: the days of black-and-white photos, radio shows, and the dark ages before rural electricity and indoor plumbing. The year was probably 1947 in god-forsaken Oklahoma. One day she was searching for her mother, pregnant at the time with her 12th child. The search had an air of tragedy, Mom recalled, because her mother was always around the house and would never abandon all the other little kids of various ages running loose, the oldest already married with children of their own. Mom was 10. She searched all around outside their ramshackle house located in the poor side of a small rural community. She called for her mother several times, yelling loudly in the deep woods. Finally she spotted her mother standing at a creek, looking somberly, in another world, seemingly unable to hear my mother. Grandma had clasped the hand of her 11th child, a two-year-old toddler, as she stared at the body of water, ignoring my mother’s calls—pleas by this time. She knew her mother feared water and drowning. Why was she so close to this dark hole? Where was she really?
Though Grandma eventually acknowledged her daughter and with my little uncle in tow walked way back to the house, Mom suspected her mother was thinking of suicide and taking her youngest with her for some reason. But this thought was left unsaid in the chores and rugged living when re-entering their life in the woods.
Grandma knew something was wrong with the baby she was carrying. It never kicked in the womb. Grandma spent more than two decades of her life either pregnant, breastfeeding or weening. She also had a few miscarriages before the change of life stopped her from getting pregnant all the time.
My grandfather was no help. The couple had been advised by doctors to stop having children. But sex was the most important thing in my grandfather’s life, a life that left him poorer than he’d experienced as a kid. Grandma said he was an indulged child and always wanted a large family. He got one but due to the fateful era of his working years, the Great Depression, jobs were nonexistent, and he simply could not afford to care for his enormous family of nine boys and three girls. Mom said the family ate meals at a large picnic table with the kids sitting on long benches, their father in a chair at the head of the table—shouting down the rowdy brood every night to listen to the news.
The most important thing to know about my mother’s father was he didn’t care enough about his wife, once a very attractive dark-haired and dark-eyed beauty with a round face and luscious lips who loved to Charleston and swing her legs up real high. After a couple of decades, Grandpa didn’t realize what a dozen pregnancies and births had done to her body—a woman’s body—not to mention her spirit. They married young. Grandma was thought to be 16, but ancestral research indicates she was likely 14. Mom said her mother knew she married too young but that her home life was “real bad.” What could that mean … except …?
Grandma gave birth for the twelfth time, a home birth or at least not a hospital delivery. The folks could never have afforded that luxury and in this case necessity. Then grandma saw it, the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. The baby, oh alive but not kicking, had never received the nourishment needed to be a healthy human being. They named her Lynn. For reasons unknown to me, the little baby was taken in by a neighboring family with just one child about my mother’s age while Grandma recuperated. The baby was left with that family for an entire year. I was surprised to learn that fact rather recently. Then I realized that birth, that life, that devastation of a perpetual baby state for God knows how long, must have been unbearable for my grandparents. No doubt, they and the siblings like my mother checked in on Lynn every day. And when it was time for my family to take Lynn back home, that little girl friend of my mother cried no: “They don’t love her like we do!”
Earth Angel
My mother was the one who ultimately cared for Lynn, though attending school every day. For years Grandma was taken to bed, perhaps suffering a severe depression but also was physically ill. She bled all the time. Everyone referred to Lynn as a ‘late in life baby’ because she was born with cerebral palsy to an older woman. In those days, women of a certain age who had babies were thought to be too old as the ‘change of life’ was approaching. But Grandma was about 38. Still, a woman should know the best time to get pregnant and expect a healthy baby is in your 20s. By our 30s, things are shutting down, more so in our 40s, and more often things go wrong with the expectation of having a perfectly healthy baby. By ages 45-50, one in four births will have Down Syndrome.
Lynn never walked or talked and couldn’t sit up. Though a happy being, she was like a rag doll with no ability to grasp objects, no control over her bodily functions. She would never be able to care for herself. The family feared she might swallow her tongue. She was fed baby food and had to be diapered, cloth diapers in those days. She was bathed about as often as the rest of the family, perhaps once a week, then dressed and pampered, held and coddled, before placing her in her baby bed and lifting the rail so she wouldn’t fall out. She could not turn herself over, so family took turns turning her during the night. When lights were out, many times Lynn would cry. She didn’t want to be left alone in the dark. Can you imagine?
On Saturday nights after Mom had done all the family laundry and commenced to ironing all the clothes, she’d listen to the radio and sing along. She noticed Lynn, an older child by then, would pay attention, though Lynn’s eyes never tracked anyone speaking directly to her. She wasn’t blind. She could hear. She could grunt. She could laugh. And, Mom noticed, when she sang a sad song that brought tears to her eyes, Lynn wept, too. Mom thought Lynn understood the lyrics somehow. She thought Lynn was intelligent. And people with cerebral palsy are usually highly intelligent. It’s just their bodies work against them.
By the 1950s when Mom graduated high school, she had no intention of ever leaving her family home and expected to care for her baby sister, who grew to have a long lean body, dark complexion, dark hair, and wide-set eyes—the family trademark. But the older sister, who married young and was raising three kids of her own, wanted Mom to go away to college, an opportunity my mother was going to pass. My aunt talked with Grandma and Grandpa about Mom going away to college, and everyone agreed she should go. My aunt bought Mom a big suitcase and filled it with a few dresses, slacks, a couple pair of shoes, a coat and personally drove her to the bus station and saw to it Mom was going to have a future—without being the perpetual caregiver to their baby sister. Still, Mom would frequently return home to visit family and Lynn. After college, she got a teaching job in a town far away. Life for her was just beginning. She would soon marry and eventually have two kids to raise. All along, my parents would take Lynn home with us for a week or two every year. I vaguely recall the time, but I know Aunt Lynn slept on the couch. I remember how it was covered with sheets and perhaps pads in case of urination or the other, how Lynn was tucked in at night before we’d go to sleep. I guess she never rolled off the couch.
By 1969 my grandparents were dead, and Lynn had been placed in a nursing home in the family’s town, so the ones who lived nearby could visit her often. She’d been placed in a nursing home when family realized Grandma, thought to be an old woman in her 50s, could not take care of Lynn, an adult-size baby in many ways. In every way. My uncles had formed a country band and would set up at the nursing home and perform concerts. Lynn’s face would beam. She loved her family. Perhaps she understood, too, that among their own lives, they could not take care of her. It would require a total sacrifice of someone 24/7.
Then Lynn died. She was 21. Died in her sleep, we were told. She was dressed in a lovely nightgown in her coffin. I’d never seen a dead body before or my mother cry. Her older sister smiled and comforted her, telling her quietly this was for the best. Mom’s tears were bitter; she felt the family had betrayed Lynn, left her alone to wither away and die.
Many years later when my mother became an old woman, she recalled her thoughts about Lynn’s death in a nursing home. She had come to realize, she wanted me to know: “Nothing is what it appears to be.”
So … today with all the talk about abortion—whether it should be legal or illegal—I’ve always first thought about my dear sweet Aunt Lynn and the thousands of other lives born similarly and yes tragically every year: human beings who will always need care every minute of their lives. The great majority of families know absolutely nothing about this situation, cruel or at best bittersweet. Should our free society force this on families who, let me assure you, cannot cope with this outcome? Seems a strange position for the U.S. government or State of Texas to play a part in. This is not government’s business.
And let me tell you something else: When a person like Lynn comes around, notice how the public will pay her no mind. Heads turn away and eyes roll when a person as debilitated as she is rolled into the grocery store. People like Lynn cannot control their loud screams and grunts and gross sounds that little kids will laugh at while all the adults want nothing more than to pay for their stuff and leave—leave the scene, thanking God they don’t have to deal with this situation. They might even kiss the heads of their normal children for everyone knows there but by the grace of God …
Like the rest of the family, I’ve been haunted by the memory of Lynn. Mom sometimes would say she was a burden to the family, already dirt poor and struggling just to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table. I told her, “I think Lynn was her own burden. She would’ve died if no one fed her and took care of her.” Mom was silent. In Eastern religion, there is a theory about souls like Lynn who incarnate in a body that will not function. They think these souls have reached the highest spiritual plane; they cannot do anything, so they will never sin. They have chosen to live a life of utter dependence on family and humanity else they die. A cousin sent me an old snapshot of Lynn: lying flat on her back on a couch, her hair short, big widespread brown eyes, mouth open–just like I remember her. Then I noticed the position of Lynn’s forearms and hands, a twisted position she could not help. Each of her forearms was bent up at the sides of her chest and her hands away from her body. She looked like this all the time. All along, she was showing us her wings.