The Normal One

My mother is the normal one of the family, but even she has a quirk. She often almost died and then changed

her mind at the last minute. As a baby, she had measles, chicken pox and whooping cough simultaneously, but somehow pulled out of that one. Her next spell was during the birth of her third child, when she hemorrhaged and was not expected to live, which would have made my father the single father of three small children. But she did, and then, bravely, foolishly, or inadvertently, went on to have a fourth. During my sophomore year in college, she began falling down when she walked and started losing her hearing. She saw a doctor who diagnosed too much alcohol, as did a second one. But she was a nurse who trusted her gut and kept trying until a new ENT moved to town and referred her to a neurosurgeon in Miami. After her appointment with him, she was immediately sent to Jackson Memorial Medical Center. The surgeon spoke to my father in very solemn terms and left us not expecting the best. But the orange-sized brain tumor was not malignant and although she has a hole in her head, she is otherwise very normal still.

Her normality meant that not only could she tell her right hand from her left (the only member of our family who can), she was valedictorian of her class in Blakely, Georgia, while most of the rest of us were mediocre students. She chose nursing as her career, and headed off to Emory University, an all male school that let women in only if they agreed to be nurses. Her very pronounced southern drawl and champion pool playing skills kept the guys intrigued, especially my father. But then he flunked out and had to wait a semester to return (a fact that must have been highly embarrassing to his faculty father), and so their relationship was put on hold. When he did return, most of their dates were study dates, and his grades improved significantly. He had already bombed in the pre-med and pre-law programs, and figured any idiot could be a teacher. He was successful in that program, although he did take the same math class every semester until the end, finally making a C his last semester there. He felt he was at his best teaching elementary school math since he knew every possible way to mess up.

Love did not always run smoothly, however. His senior year they broke up and afterwards at a party at my father’s fraternity house, his frat brothers decided they liked her better than him. In their state of drunken indignation, they chased him through the building with a pair of pruning shears, planning to render him incapable of reproduction. He jumped off a balcony, breaking a foot, and walked home to his parents’ house, where he proceeded to fall down a flight of stairs. When the alcohol wore off, the pain began, and his younger brother took him to the University hospital the next morning. His assigned nurse was my mother.

Perhaps she felt he’d be less trouble married to her, perhaps she craved excitement, perhaps she really loved him, but she married him. They carefully scraped up the rice her bridesmaids had filled her suitcase with and cooked it, and when they got too hungry would call her aunt and chat until she invited them to supper. The two of them were barely making it on his teacher’s salary as she finished nursing school. He’d had the mumps as an adult and was told he’d never father children. I was born ten months after the wedding.

Normal doesn't mean boring though. Sometimes it means meals on the table, Halloween costumes made, and stability when her husband and her kids were a bit like pinballs, careening from one thing to the next, making left turns when they meant to make rights.