The scars on my mother’s arms lasted for years. These scars were teeth marks, inflicted by my brother Everett, who could not control his muscles--neither his ability to swallow nor the bite reflex which caused him to clamp down on anything that came near his mouth.
Feeding sessions for my brother were torture, not for my mother, but for him. My mother offered bits of food, and he hungrily tried to take these, but his mouth wouldn’t cooperate. Much of the food ended up outside his mouth, and my mother would gently guide it back, until he had consumed a good portion.
My mother’s coaxing was only the beginning of Everett’s feeding challenge. Once he managed to keep food in his mouth, he tried to swallow. This would result in choking and gagging. It was terrifying to watch. He’d sputter and cough up the food, then swallow what he could. When he caught his breath, my mother tried again. Every spoonful was a battle.
Three times a day, my brother struggled to eat.
A bite on the arm? Collateral damage. My mother cried out sometimes, in the moment, when Everett’s teeth sank in, but she never paid attention to the pain. She would coo to Everett while he ate, “Good boy, my boy, my handsome boy.” He would answer, in his fashion, with sounds that were meaningful to him.
Everett’s crib was in the center of the main living area. “Don’t stomp your feet,” my mother would remind us. Startling Everett could bring on a seizure, or a series of seizures. March music was prohibited because it would make him shriek. As I remember it, Everett rarely cried. It’s his laughter I recall. A smile would take up his whole face.
My mother retold the saga of Everett’s birth throughout my childhood. It was part of the family lore, like stories about her parents, or the time she nearly lost her life to pneumonia.
Everett was an identical twin, the second to be born. There was a fifteen minute lapse between the first twin’s birth and Everett’s. “The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck,” she explained. “They used forceps to deliver him.”
She remembered everything, because they didn’t give her anesthesia. She had damaged lungs.
“The nurse put both babies on my chest afterwards,” she would tell us. “They were so fair. Perfect. Then Everett turned blue. I yelled for help, and they took him away. When I saw him again he was fine and nobody said anything about the incident.
“It wasn’t until months later I noticed something was wrong. One twin could hold a bottle, and the other could not. One sat up, the other did not. That’s when we learned what had happened to Everett. Oxygen deprivation at birth damaged his brain.”
I wonder if that’s why my father left. Everett was his namesake, and my father was an ambitious man, a proud man. In the early years he came and went from home, with long absences, because he was attending law school in distant city. Then there was WWII, when he worked at a munitions factory, again in a distant city. Absence became routine. Still, my parents brought three more children into the world, after the twins were born. Six of us, in all.
By the time I was born, in 1947, my father was a stranger, a man who came and went. And then, he mostly went. My mother had the six of us to herself.
Everett’s feeding sessions must have lasted at least a half hour. I didn’t time it. I was a child, and didn’t have a clock. Couldn’t tell time. My mother would sit on a chair, all 4’10” of her, and hold Everett in her lap. There would be a table on the side, where the food dish was waiting, with mashed whatever it was we’d had to eat.
She was never impatient. She took her time. So much time. And that time came from somewhere. From cooking, and cleaning. From washing and drying.
My mother had no washing machine, no dryer. No electric stove. No running water. No furnace. She started a fire with wood in the stove every day. She hung our clothes on the line, winter and summer. She drew water from a pump in the backyard and heated it on the stove for our baths.
Never did I feel my mother neglected me. Never did I feel my mother was too busy for me. Never did I feel she didn’t have time for me.
She read us stories from a large storybook. I can remember Br’er Rabbit, “Oh please, oh please don’t throw me in the briar patch,” he’d plead to Br’er Fox.
Where did my mother get the time? From herself. From her sleep, from those hours that should have been reserved for rest.
My mother gave her children many gifts. She gave us love, the ability to love, to share, to be generous and kind. Not one of us measures up to her gifts, but they are in all of us.
The most precious gift my mother may have given us was the gift of time. Her time. Her life. Years of hard work could never be regained, could never be repaid.
Everett ended his days in a nursing home. It broke my mother’s heart that he was there, but the day came when he was too big and his seizures were uncontrolled. We always visited him and loved him to the last.
My mother spent her last days in my home. Not until the end did I realize I hadn’t shown her the honor she deserved. Her love was given freely, without expectation of reward. I didn’t return it as I should have.
Her final crisis, my reckoning, came suddenly. There were signs, but I didn’t see them. She was in the hospital and there was death in the room. I was distraught, penitent. She was ready. I was not.
She told my sister she would hold on, because I needed her. Four months she stayed with me. Four months the clocks stopped in my home, as an oxygen machine whirred, therapists administered bronchodilating mists.
In the end, we were at peace. She passed quietly, with Rosary beads in her hand, my sister and I at her bed. She had given me her final gift, the one she had given Everett and all of us those years ago. She gave me the gift of time.
Image credit: open clip art on (table) Pixabay and franz26 on (bowl) Pixabay