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NEXT CHAPTER:

After genetic counseling, we decided to have a second child three years after this traumatic birth. We were told we had a 5% change of having another child with a neural tubed defect. I wanted to have a second child, as I did not want Julie growing up as an only child.  We did conceive another child, a girl, and this baby was healthy at 8.5 pounds, born on the expected due date, and with no birth defects.  I was joyous. I was even able to breast feed this child until she was over a year old.

Even though my daughter's father thought he might not be able to continue schooling with a child with special needs, what an irony that he and I both finished our educational goals, and that Julie's various and intensive therapies and hospitalizations made us even more determined to do so. I realized while in my twenties that without a career path, rearing a handicapped child would be a daunting task both emotionally and financially. It took twelve more years, but I did finally finish my formal education. And later, as a single parent of a handicapped child, I was thankful for this endurance to finish school because it did afford me an upper level career in health administration.

In spite of heartache, there have been many positive, bittersweet successes for Julie:

• Julie has worked for as a receptionist, using public transportation via her wheelchair;
• Julie completed a college education;
• Julie has resided independently both as a single and married woman;
• Julie has maintained an 18 year long, loving marriage to a man having the same handicap of spina bifida;
• Julie moved across country from her native state, and then she and her husband built their handicap accessible home twelve years ago;
• Julie and her amazingly resilient husband are members of a strong faith-based Christian community in which they are of spiritual importance;
• Julie aspired to be a journalist, then subsequently worked for a newspaper, and had several sequential articles published. She currently writes to the editor of her local newspaper, expresses her opinions and has her letters regularly published;
• Although confined to a wheel chair most of her life, and now being bed-bound, Julie is still a loving, generous, stubborn, sweet person with amazing coping mechanisms


She has become the person she is, in part, because of her own will to live and thrive and through caring adults coming into her life by way of a loving family. Also credit excellent medical care, good surrogate fathers, a decent education, mental health assistance, the religious community, paid caregivers, and adult friends. 


Julie’s father died of cancer before his fortieth birthday. Julie is still living and is now older than her father was when he died of melanoma. 


 Julie's life has played out in far reaching ways that I cannot fathom. But it was the right decision to try and stave off hydrocephalus and systemic infections from an open back in those first hours after her birth. All of the lives she has touched have been significantly, and I believe positively, changed by knowing and caring for Julie. Maybe more than a few will find this story of merit.  


It is a story of love, perseverance and that each person is important and is a part of the framework behind the doors where we reside.  That one major decision to seek medical intervention for an infant in 1970 has effected many people over the years in myriad ways.  Her life and subsequent death will make a far greater impact on this world than I ever could have imagined in those first hours after her birth.

Memoir Submission to Fishpublishing

My Fifteenth Summer

At fifteen years of age, a few days after a secret was revealed, my life, and that of my mother, changed dramatically. It changed in terms of geography, acquisitions, and community standing, shifting from a relatively innocent childhood to a more caretaker way of daily living. I began to take care of my mother instead of looking to her for parenting my adolescent self.

Before the secret came out, I had lived in a fairly typical middle class neighborhood in a west Texas oil town with two siblings and two parents. My father was a verbally abusive man who damaged others with his anger and his need to be right at all costs. He especially berated my older brother with, “Why the hell did you do that?” or “You idiot! Get the hell out of my sight!”

We all four learned to stay clear of him, but still managed to get along with him while under one roof. My second brother later said he mellowed somewhat in later years but I still wondered about this change in behavior. I marveled at the benevolence on the part of my brother.

A revelation of our mother's affair with another man was revealed to my father during a week long vacation when she and I were in Ruidoso, New Mexico. What was an affair? What did that mean? A third party disclosed this relationship to my father, who held on to his quiet rage until mother and I returned from Ruidoso with my aunt's family. Within minutes after returning to Odessa, we were greeted by my older brother telling the adults that my father wanted to see mother alone in the back yard. Hushed conversations by and between adults were held outside or in closed off rooms over the next hours. What in the world are they talking about? What is happening? Was there some sort of violent crime that happened while we were away on vacation ? My questions were unanswered and remained so until a few months later.

The day after we returned to Odessa, mother met the wife of her male friend, Bing, to try and make amends with her. Mother went to meet her in a nearby parking lot so that they could talk. My uncle, a dignified Baptist minister with a doctoral degree in Divinity, was to be the mediator while they talked in his wooden sided station wagon. He drove mother to meet the woman, Aggie, and thought he would be using his pastoral counseling skills to help bring about peace and reconciliation for the two of them. Instead, Aggie, a German woman who had survived the Holocaust and was brought to Texas as a war bride in the 1940's, had only vengeance on her mind. She had been egregiously wronged by my mother! The end result of that conversation among the three of them resulted in Aggie slugging my demure, diminutive mother in her face, also loosening one of her teeth.

My uncle was horrified when the two returned home from the parking lot, and mother's face was already beginning to bruise from the impact of Aggie's fist. Poor Uncle Ed was not able to achieve reconciliation or forgiveness for mother. He was amazed at the wrath Aggie displayed, and had never been a part of violence as a pastor, even until his dying day.

I looked at my mother coming through the door with Uncle Ed, crumpled up and bruised, knowing the conversation with Aggie had not gone well. Seeing someone hit, or gazing on the after effects of a knock out, had only been observed by my innocent self when weekly ring fights were occasionally viewed on TV. Having someone physically harmed in my family had never happened before. To say I was flabbergasted was not an exaggeration.

The next morning, after a cold breakfast of cereal and milk, I was told my father decided mother and I were to leave Odessa and live with her parents, my grandparents. He would be divorcing my mother and they would not live together anymore. I was instructed to pack up everything I wanted to take with me to live in Stephenville, Texas. The two of us, just about penniless, were then moved with help of the aunt and uncle into a strict Southern Baptist home in Stephenville. My grandparents lived in that town across state, five long hours away from what I had always called home.

That evening before we were moved, I overheard my grandfather say to my father over the telephone that this would break their hearts, but that we could move in with them. My grandfather's manic depressive moods would only deepen; but this fact played out only after our move there.

So my bruised, sorrowful, ashamed mother and I were packed into an already crowded vehicle with extra clothing that would fit into my relation's wooden sided station wagon. People, suitcases, tearful faces and a few boxes of our items were jammed into the vehicle as the journey toward a strange new life began on that sweltering August day. I later referred to this sad journey eastward across the boiling hot Texas interstate as having been displaced overnight with “just the clothes on my back.” I left friends, my boyfriend, my brothers and father, my home, my school, my bedroom, my closely knit girls' church group, and all but a few possessions. As I left Odessa, never to return to my life as I had known it, those rear view mirror images from the woody station wagon haunted me for years.

My aunt Mamie looked back from the front seat and patted my leg and said, “You must feel like your world has been turned upside down.” She was the only person who said what I was actually feeling, and I was grateful to her for that, so grateful that I still remember it fifty years after she spoke that sentence. My sad symbolic wave good-bye and what it meant for me could not be clearly articulated until five decades after we sped toward Stephenville that day in 1965.

Our abrupt move also meant that I no longer would have my own bedroom like I had occupied in our 1950 style tract home in Odessa, a booming, dry, dusty oil town. From that safe haven of my very own room, I went overnight to sharing a single bedroom and one half of a closet with my mother. Worse yet, I had to also share one half of the double bed, since I was now to sleep and quarter with my mother in my grandparents' “guest room.” It was a stifling change. Mother and I were now semi-permanent guests in the home of my grandparents. Turning on the TV or taking a slice of cheese always was prefaced with a, “May I?”

I was to later learn my entire future would be shaped by living with grandparents and a mentally ill mother who was sleeping through most of her life in a semi-catatonic state. She followed in the genetic footprints of her father, my grandfather, with her deep depressive disorder. Depression is in our genes, I was told by mother. Many times over the next few years I heard my grandfather say, “I just don't know how much more I can take.” Even then, I could not empathize with him in this moral abyss he felt that he and my grandfather had fallen into. He had a home, a job, Social Security and a car. Why did he feel he was so imposed upon? Mother and I obeyed every unsaid rule of the house, including giving my grandmother and him time alone each evening in the den so they could talk between themselves. 

Each time he voiced his “I Just Don't Know How Much More I Can Take” phrase, I inwardly rolled my eyes, incredulous that he thought he was the victim in this sordid little soap opera concerning his daughter and granddaughter. But mother always defended him, saying she had brought shame on him by her actions and after all, he had taken us in when we had no where else to go.

Granddaddy imposed a nine o'clock evening curfew on me the two years we lived with him, almost until my eigthtteenth birthday. I almost hated him for that. But what I really disliked was that, in my mind, he wimped out, not acting as an emotional stronghold for mother or me. To give him some credit for not completely ostracizing me from his sad inner life, he suggested we play tennis together at the nearby college courts. We did hit balls back and forth together for a while, but I always managed to hit the ball in a place on the tarmac that would not require him to move too quickly. After all, he is pretty old to try and do this with and for me.

But having gone through those two years, experiencing life in a multi-generational home, taught me life lessons: frugality, the value of mental health, and realizing that acquisitions are merely ephemeral. As an adolescent, relying on myself for most of my emotional needs, and taking on the task of becoming my mother's primary caretaker were other burdens accepted and undertaken, likely in not the most effective of manners. I would ask a current boyfriend if we could include mother on a trip to the local Dairy Queen to get a Coca Cola just so she would get out of the bedroom, away from sleeping and that depressive house. I wondered if there was this depressive gene in me, too.

It was only three months after our move to my grandparents, when I was in my sophomore year of high school, that I learned what mother's affair actually meant. Until then, I did not know why an affair brought about the destruction of our nuclear family. This full disclosure, an adult definition of an affair, occurred when my dad, whom I had not seen since the previous summer, picked me up for an overnight visit. We drove to Dallas to spend his working weekend there. We checked into a downtown hotel and were in the assigned room when he explained why we were moved out of the house and why he was divorcing my mother.

Dad said, “Nancy, your mother had sex with Bing over several years. I found out this summer and will not forgive her for doing this to me. She humiliated me. I am through with her and this marriage, but I am sorry that you have to be put in the position of living with your grandparents.”

I was very uncomfortable with his saying all this, partly because he never had conversations with me. Thinking I was worldly at fifteen, I really did not know that having an affair meant having sex with another person. What a revelation that was, and how embarrassing for my dad to tell me that. But at least he had shed light on those hushed conversations over the prior summer. An affair was about sex with another person and the adults did not want me to know about this sordid sexual detail, nor did they have the guts to talk about it with me.

All the years we had lived in Odessa, I knew that mother had male friends in the workplace, as a substitute for affection that my father could not seem to give, but I had never considered that sex was also included in her friendships with male associates. Was there more than one man? Was this just the one that came to surface to break up the family? Is my mother a slut?

Dad clearly laid all the blame on my mother for the breakup of the family. He was fed up, humiliated by having been married to her while this affair went on, and there would never be a reconciliation on his part. I was changed after this conversation with my dad. I started looking at mother as a woman with real psychiatric problems. She had previously told me she was having an affair in order to make life more exciting, and to help her from getting depressed, and that an affair was a tonic, for her, to keep depression at bay. She failed to tell me that her affair involved sex with Bing. I wondered if her behavior would affect my future behavior, because I was moving through boy friends pretty quickly during the first months after we had moved to Stephenville. Did this mean I might have the tendency toward sexual looseness? was that why I kept breaking up with boys, finding a new one to date every month or so? was this proclivity in my genes, too?

When the west Texas house was sold a year or two after mother and I were moved out, I no longer wanted to look into my prior closets or save any item from the accretion of my childhood. For I had been forced to start a new life and certainly did not need a raggedy baby doll from my younger years, taking life head-on without looking backward. (After the divorce, mother took her measly portion of profit accrued from the sale of that house and held on to it with tight fists for the remainder of her life.) Dad had a garage sale the following spring and sold all furniture and possessions that he and she had owned together, including all my brothers' and my baby clothes. One trunk full of papers and other minor accoutrements were shipped to us later in Stephenville after the rummage sale.

That summer of 1965 also heralded drastic changes for my mother. Within one week in August my genteel, petite, mother in her early 40's became a person I hardly recognized. She was no longer the chatty, pretty lady who always wore red lipstick and fussed with her hair. She had lost her husband, family, friends, lover, the family business, her home and everything she had made in Odessa over the prior decade, including social and church standing in the community. Like Hester Prynne, she wore the scarlet letter, a deep embarrassment. She became severly depressed again. She knew she was the guilty party, and felt deep sorrow for what she had reigned down on all concerned. Her depressive episode during that time period required neither the harsh ECT treatments she had undergone in the early 1950's, nor the required hospitalizations. At least she was in Stephenville with me. Even if I had to share a room and bed with her, at least she was not hospitalized in an institution in Dallas.

That summer of my fifteenth year came to a close in a new town. I put together a new wardrobe, a few dresses I had sewn in late August while waiting for the first day of high school to open. Having grown somewhat over the summer and needing clothes when there was no money for ready purchase, I began to learn to use my grandmother's old treadle sewing machine she had salvaged from the turn of the century. The cloth was bought from J.C. Penney's where I could use my grandfather's discount as a forty year manager of that chain. Fussing and fiddling with both the old sewing apparatus and teaching myself how to cut patterns for my developing body, I learned to sew and proudly wear my newly homemade dresses.

But my skirts were now layered with ruffles of adult concerns, sewn in a strangely confining environment where church attendance was mandatory three times a week. This place was where I was supposed to call home for the next two years. I never felt at home again until I had established my own place in the world, moving away from Stephenville, toward goals other than caring for my mother.

In the end, mother never married again, gaining back her mental health, working and making her own way financially, and always being true to herself. Those were lessons hard earned for her, invaluable to me.

My Fifteenth Summer

At fifteen years of age, within a few days after having a secret revealed, my life, and that of my mother, changed dramatically. It changed in terms of geography, acquisitions, and community standing while shifting from a relatively innocent childhood to a more adult and caretaker way of daily living.

Before the secret came out, I had lived in a fairly typical middle class neighborhood in a west Texas oil town with two siblings and two parents. My father was a verbally abusive man who damaged others with his anger and his need to be right at all costs. But we managed to get along under one roof.

The secret, a revelation of our mother's sexual liaison with another man was revealed during a week long vacation when she and I were in Ruidoso, New Mexico. A third party disclosed this relationship to my father, who held on to his rage until mother and I returned from Ruidoso with my aunt's family. Within minutes after returning to Odessa, we were greeted by my older brother telling the adults that my father wanted to see mother alone. Hushed conversations by and between adults were held outside or in closed off rooms over the next hours. My father decided my mother and I were to go away and live with her parents, my grandparents, and that he would be divorcing my mother. 

So mother and I were packed into a crowded station wagon with clothing we could fit into the aunt's wooden sided wagon. People, suitcases, tearful faces and a few boxes of our items were jammed into the vehicle as the journey toward a strange new life began on that sweltering August day. I later referred to this sad journey eastward across hot Texas interstates and boiling asphalt streets as having been displaced overnight with “just the clothes on my back.” I left friends, my boyfriend, my brothers and father, my home, my school, my bedroom, and all but a few possessions. Our one car now belonged to my father. 

The two of us, just about penniless, were moved with help of the aunt and her vehicle into a three generational and strict Southern Baptist home with my grandparents in a town across state, five long hours away from what I had always called home. When the west Texas house was sold a year or two after mother and I were moved out, I no longer wanted to look into my prior closets or save any item from the accretion of my childhood. For I had been forced to start a new life and certainly did not need a raggedy baby doll from my younger years, taking life head-on without looking back. (After the divorce, mother took her measly portion of profit accrued from the sale of the Ancestral Home, and held on to it with tight fists for the remainder of her life.) 

Our abrupt move also meant that I no longer would have my own bedroom like I had occupied in our 1950 style tract home in Odessa, a booming, dry, dusty oil town. From that safe haven of my very own room, I went overnight to sharing a single bedroom and one half of a closet with my mother. But the worst thing about living in that shared bedroom was that I had to also share one half of the double bed, since I was now to sleep and quarter with my mother in my grandparents' “guest room.” It was a stifling change. 

Mother and I were now semi-permanent guests in the home of my grandparents. Turning on the TV or taking a slice of cheese always was preferaced with a, “May I?” 

I was to later learn my future would be shaped by living with grandparents and a mentally ill mother who was sleeping through most of her life in a semi-catatonic state. Frugality, the value of mental health, and realizing that acquisitions are ethereal were just a few life lessons well learned from that experience. Relying on myself for most needs, and taking on the task of becoming my mother's primary caretaker was another lesson not lightly learned.

That summer also heralded drastic changes for my mother. Within one week in August of 1965, my genteel, petite, mother in her early 40's became a person I hardly recognized. She was no longer the chatty, pretty lady who always wore red lipstick and fussed with her hair. She had lost her husband, family, friends, lover, the family business, her home and everything she had made in Odessa over the prior decade, including social and church standing in the community. Like Hester Prynne, she wore the scarlet letter, a deep embarrassment, and was severely depressed.

Thus began my high school years: wearing a newly layered life ruffled with adult concerns.

Our Dog, Mercy

She has a need to be alone. It is her primal nature, for she was bred in the north, Calgary, where the cold wind blows. She was meant to stay in solitude for hours in small spaces and to keep quiet, the perfect condominium animal, bred over twenty generations for solitude and minimal barking. Keeping still and silent is necessary for some animals, the owl, the snake, the wolf. Now it is in her genetic makeup as well.

In her essence: a she-wolf. She observes, focuses, and is a watchful waiter when human food is being consumed. Patient, patiently watching and waiting until that last bite, knowing it is saved for her, is gratefully taken with intense poise into her gentle mouth. It is almost a kiss she gives when taking her small treat. Her mustache is smoothed down with a light human touch, and she is told she is loved.

This is her day: a short walk led by the man of the house, a bit of play time, kibble and water, and then sleep. For sleep consumes the majority of her day. Snuggling down into the pillows on the bed, uncovering the bolster if necessary in order to reach her master's down pillow, her favorite, she takes time to make her day nest. Here she will stay for hours, for only nature's call will bring her out of this nest that she inhabits. The others in the house, her sister animal friend and the humans, do not inhabit this space of hers called the peoples' bedroom. Those others stay in their own dens doing whatever it is they do during the daytime hours...reading, knitting, cooking, talking. But here, on this bed and on the once forbidden pillow, she stays.

Occasionally, when dreaming, a slight whimper will come from deep within her throat. It is not unlikely that she yelps. Perhaps a play date with her sister dog is in her dreams, or maybe it is one of those pesky UPS men ringing the doorbell, making her jump to attention, shaking her from that sleepy lethargy. Whatever the cause, those yips and slight low growls sometimes can be heard from farther rooms when she is deep in slumber. Her distant presence is made known.

Now the night comes. The people in the house retire to this, her place, at night. At first she welcomes them, and snuggles down, this time at the foot of the bed, into the old down comforter throw that is kept just for her, although the feathers are slowing disengaging from the seams, and little white fluffs can be found on the bedspread beneath her silky throne. With the lights off, now surrounded by these human masters of her universe, she again settles and sleeps.

After two or three hours of this nighttime darkness, she awakens and feels the presence of the humans and realizes she is, indeed, not alone. She jumps from her downy nest on to the wooden floor, her front paws making a soft, padded sound, her toenails barely scratching the surface of the hardwood.   She yips, awakening her masters. They interpret the yipping noise to mean that she wants out to pee, and the one called Gene cooperates, reaching for his flashlight at the headboard of the bed, pulling himself up and out of slumber, releasing her out into the cold night air. Upon command, she performs her duty, and both the human and she return into the room.

Circling round just the right number of times, she replaces herself on the nest. She again sleeps, or feigns sleep. I often wonder if what this canine really craves is to be alone, again, on the bed she calls her own. And later in the night, when the owners correctly interpret that throaty call, her name is sternly called out in the darkness to return to bed. Reluctantly, she deftly jumps from the floor and back to her rumpled place at my feet. Perhaps she woke to realize she had others in her space. Her primal need was again calling her to solitude.  All she really craved was to be alone.