HUM 6930 – Arts and Compassion Creative Practice #4

Humans in my Life

This lovely couple, my mother and dad, married very young and immediately started their family. One month before Mother's 16th birthday and two before Daddy's 18th, they married and exactly one year and two days later, I came into their world. Daddy and Mother both thought they were done after having  four children. But as Mother said, "God had other plans" and another child came along unexpectedly when I was a senior in high school. At 79 and 81 years young, they are still raising children today. My dad said, "Do you know that there hasn't been a time in 62 years that we did not have a child in our home?" We talked about that for a while. I asked him if he would change that and he said, "not really", and that the children had all needed them, that it was just the right thing to do.

He recalled that he was taking mid-terms at the University of Arkansas, when he received the call that my mother had gone into early labor with me. Mother was staying with her parents on the other side of the state. She said she was knitting on the back porch and the little Boston Terrier she had grabbed her yarn and took off with it. When she jumped up to go after him, she bumped into the porch railing and went into labor. Daddy claims he made it across the state in two hours.

There would be a succession of children born every 17 months thereafter until there were four of us. First three girls, then finally a boy when I was nine years old. My parents really thought they were through. Mother told me she had forgotten to take her birth control pills along when she and daddy had taken a business trip and she came home with a surprise. So we had a new baby sister arrive the last half of my junior year in high school. 

That sister was supposed to be their last child, but as fate would have it, there would be another addition to their family when she was ten. Mother and Daddy took in one of my other sister's children because my maternal grandmother who had been taking care of him got breast cancer that then metastasized to her liver. He was just a few years younger than our baby sister, so it just seemed like he was our little brother. His mother soon remarried and took the child back home to live with her. Mother told me that it was very hard to let him go and that she became terribly depressed.

But it wasn't long before my baby sister would become a mother while still in high school, so once again there was a baby in their house. This sister would have issues that still plague her today and her own instability led her to marry someone else who was also unstable. Mother and Daddy would end up with all six of this sister's children.

The first four of them are grown now and with children of their own, but there are still two left. Both are in their early teens. A handful for two senior citizens to care for. Daddy still goes to work six days a week while mother drives the girls all over town. They are so proud of their five children, 15 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren. Even the ones who have struggled to find their way. Daddy says they are just simple people whose only dream was that they could give their children a better life than they had. The first week in April, my first grandchild, their 13th great grandchild will arrive. Both Mother and Daddy said they were excited to add one more to their crew.

I told him we were all very lucky to have parents who were so loving and willing to sacrifice their own lives for the good of ours. Daddy said, "you just do what you've got to do".