A WARRIOR MOM

 “When you become a parent, you might as well just open a vein.”  I’ve long forgotten who said that to me, but as a mother, I immediately understood.  Parenthood abruptly catapults one into the realization of how many ways you can fail at protecting your child from life’s randomness.  Before you, at all times, one hundred little heartbreaks lie in wait. 

This is why military families have my deepest respect.  When a son or daughter enlists, they pledge themselves to defend and serve this country.  And when that child is deployed to an area of conflict, a parent serves too, uttering a daily prayer, while braced for the possibility that a phone call could rip through their life like a bullet.

When the phone rang on May 11, 2005, Diana Mankin Phelps’s first thoughts were “No, Lord why?  I’ve got to get to my child!” 

A half a world away in Iraq, her son Cpl. Aaron P. Mankin, was serving as a combat correspondent in the United States Marine Corps.  He was filming from the top of a 26-ton Amphibious Assault Vehicle, carrying 17 other marines, when it rolled over an IED buried in the dirt road.   As the bomb exploded, they were thrown ten feet in the air, crashing down in a ball of fire.  All of the men were injured and six did not survive. Aaron was flown from the field hospital to Germany and 48 hours later, arrived at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in severe respiratory distress, with burns over 25% of his body.  The entire trajectory of Diana’s life and her family’s was forever changed with one phone call. 

As Diana’s third child, her baby, Aaron had a special place in his mother’s heart.  You can see it in the way they act around one another; the deference and respect with which Aaron treats her, the outright pride and devotion that plays over her face as she watches him speak from the audience, or accompanies him to warrior events, where he is often the honored guest.

Aaron can still recall his first day of school, when he began to cry at the thought of leaving home and his Mom. “She took my hand and kissed it,” he said.  “Her lipstick left a stamp and she told me this way she would be with me all day.”

Almost 20 years later, Diana would make the same promise to herself and to Aaron, only this time she truly would not leave his side.  At the military hospital, her new role was to witness, comfort, care and advocate for her son during the more than 60 surgeries that would follow in the ensuing years.  Battling back the fear and heartbreak that could so easily consume in the wee hours of the night, she remained by Aaron’s side for the next nine months.

One thing Diana shares with so many other military parents whom I have met along the way is moxie, a determination and an ability to soldier on, to call upon resilience and rely upon blind faith when the going gets tough.  

Born in Fresno, California, Diana moved to Oklahoma, where she graduated high school and then took a job in Arkansas working in the home office of Wal-mart and Sam’s Clubs, climbing the corporate ladder in a number of different professional capacities.

During those years, she began to develop health issues and was ultimately diagnosed with lupus and degenerative disc disease, precipitating a retirement in 1993.   While staying by Aaron’s side during his difficult and often painful recovery, she quietly battled her own health issues and pushed down the frequent pain that accompanied her illness.

Diana’s story is that of the caregiver.  She is the mother in the equation, the other side of war.  Parents like her don’t wear a uniform.   They don’t get a parade or a medal for their actions.  Diana is one of the hundreds of thousands of loved ones on the front lines here at home, a witness to the back end of war, both the obvious, visible wounds and the hidden traumatic injuries, that can be triggered by the littlest things.Diana is one of the legions of people pushing the wheelchair or dispensing the medications, lifting up a loved ones spirits with a cheerleader-like devotion, explaining away their son’s jitters in a crowded public place or requesting restaurant seating so their warrior can feel safe with his back to the wall.

And because life doesn’t take a vacation when a loved one is injured, Diana soldiered on with her own basket of troubles.  During the years she was helping Aaron to recover, she lost her own brother and sister, both of her parents and battled cancer.   Yes, I said cancer.  On top of her other medical issues, Diana was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 2010.

How, one wonders, did she find the fortitude to get up some mornings, to try to understand that maybe there was a grander plan?  Writing her book, “A Mother’s Side of War,” was part of her own catharsis and it fulfilled a need to try to educate about war from a parent’s perspective.

This past November 11th, as I stood at our town’s Veterans Day ceremony this year, I noticed the shocking absence of young people in the audience.  Heck, there wasn’t even much of an audience to begin with. 

Where were the children, I wondered? Where were the very people who would be called upon to care for those who have served and been injured, especially in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Where were the 99% who benefit from the freedoms that the less than 1% uphold and fight for?

As the divide grows between the civilian and military worlds, the lack of a draft means that only a small fraction of our population will understand the definition of serving.  We risk losing something as a culture that fosters that “good shiver” up the spine when the flag is unfurled, a patriotic song plays, or jets do a flyover.And can we please set aside here all of the things we’d like to fix about America?  Just for a moment? It’s too easy to pick apart what’s wrong. The trick is to put our collective shoulders into fixing it. 

There was something potent at work in the wake of September 11th, a palpable unification that rose up and fused us together as a land.  Where is that now, I wonder?   Much of that pride is still very alive and well amidst our military families. It’s a sense of mission and purpose and a belief that, despite our warts, America is still a country that stands for and tries to deliver great things, even as we sometimes stumble and fail.

Books like Diana Mankin’s memoir help us to keep the stories of our country alive.  It is the story of sacrifice, of bravery and of love of country.  Her story is all of our stories.  It’s the story of America.

“A Mother’s Side of War” by Diana Mankin Phelps is available at amotherssideofwar.com or at your preferred online retailer. 

                                                        

During this season of giving let us remember those like Diana and Aaron who have given so much 
For information on how you can give, visit the Bob Woodruff Foundation.

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Summer Bribes

When I joined my DNA with my husband's, there were many unanswered questions. Would my recessive blonde genes triumph over his green eyes and dark hair?  Would our kids inherit his more mathematical and logical mind?  Would his laid back attitude trump my more tightly wired list-making one?  No matter. Those were all things we had little or no control over.

But I did feel certain of one thing:  our kids would be avid readers.

When I think back to my childhood, and the one my husband describes, we both loved to disappear into a world of books.  Reading took us to new places, requiring only imagination to color in the lines or draw the landscape.  

I fell just a little bit more in love with Bob when he first described his boyhood self to me as a kid “buried in a book.”  That’s when I knew, among other things, that he was the man for me.  Naturally, we would create a little cache of eager beaver readers.  Forget nature—that part was all about nurture, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Oh, hang on a tick, no one in my household is illiterate, no one is using rope for a belt or wears cardboard shoes.  All four of my kids have a decent grasp on current events.  But much to my great sorrow, they don’t read for pleasure.  So if you are one of the lucky people whose progeny devour books like Halloween fun-size candy bars, you can stop reading now.   We need not feel the sting of your smugness.

I got through July and I put my foot down. Summer was half over! The tide had to turn.  I announced to my 13 year olds that they would read or lose their allowance.  Read beyond their summer reading assignments and, well, there would be a new article of clothing in it for them.

Admitting this two-pronged “punitive plus bribery” approach to making my kids read, feels a little like standing up in an AA meeting and announcing that I’m an alcoholic.

But I figure, if I out myself, maybe some of the rest of you won’t be so hard on yourselves.  You’ll abandon the unproductive search for where you failed, after years of modeling solid recreational reading habits, countless bedtime stories and dedicated visits to your public library. It’s a jungle out there in the world of modern childhood— the concept of reading for fun today feels more like being the Victorian bathing costume in the Miss America Bikini Contest--- its just not as sexy as its technologically entertaining competitors.

Bribing kids to read?  Horrors, say the ghosts of child librarians past.  I wasn’t beneath using Skittles as a reward for potty training.  Is this really any different?  Isn’t regular reading as essential as proper pooping if you’re going to thrive in this world? 

As an author I have the pleasure of knowing and working with some wonderful people in the book business. So I canvassed a few industry folks and came up with a stack of current YA books.  I’m no dummy.  I’m not going to try to force-feed Jane Austen right now.  I chose the Harry Potter-style lane. Every crack addict knows you need to begin with a gateway drug.

“All Our Pretty Songs” by Sarah McCarry was first up, a new YA summer entry that got great reviews.  My girls looked over the cover, their summer freckles furrowing as they read the flap; Cool Hand Lukes, those two, careful not to display too much overt enthusiasm.  An eyebrow raised in interest.  The lure and hook snagged in the fish’s mouth.  Success, I thought to myself, displaying my poker face.

I gathered titles like “Social Code,” “Fan Girl” and “Prep School Confidential.”  These books also had wonderful cover art to sweeten the offering, a short skirt here, a mysterious kissy face there.  Hah! Take that you addictive TV series, you seductively shot  “Gossip Girl” and fake blood strewn “Vampire Diaries” episodes! Yes, yes, shame on me.  I do permit them to watch these shows, but I’m what you call an “almost-everything-in-moderation” kind of mother.  Current pop culture has its own important place in adolescence. 

 

The books arrived.  And so they read.

Here we are now, in the early days of August.  Just before lights out, the three of us tuck in, we open our books, stretch out our legs on the bed, the moths beat against the screens in the hushed dark outside. There’s a bullfrog or two, singing baritone with all this recent rain.  OK, OK, so I over-dramatized the scene a little, it does feel sorta triumphant.  And it’s blissfully quiet inside, no vampire victims are screaming on TV, no Park Avenue prepsters are tossing their highlighted manes and huffing away on their Tory Burches.

There is only the flickering of the theater of our minds.  Only the sound of we three drawing breath.  We are reading.  Pure happiness.

Perhaps we will work our way to iconic titles like “The Wind in the Willows,” (although that window has probably passed) “Little Women,”  “The Hobbit” or any of the endless classics that could enrich their sponge-like minds.  Or not.  Is it important that my girls have read Thackeray or can recite sonnets of William Wordsworth or stanzas from William Shakespeare?  Or do we march on now, in the full glare of the information age, with a morphing view of what it means to be well read and well educated?  Quotes and poems and answers lie but a keystroke or two away now on Google.  Do studying Latin and Greek make one especially erudite?  Or obsolete?  What is the future of the “great books” and how will that definition change through the generations?  Who is writing the great books of our time?

Sigh.  All these questions!  I just don’t know.  What I do know is that my girls are reading.  They are marinating in the pure pleasure of delving into a real, live, paper paged book.  And yes, they will redeem their promised reward.  Fair is fair.  A deal is a deal.  They’ll pick a cute top or a skirt at Target as we head out of the mountains after Labor Day and begin to brace for the return of school, chauffeuring and schedules.

 

But here is the thing that gives me hope.  It’s the reminder that all of that foundation laying, all of that work we did as parents in the reading department, lurks somewhere inside like the herpes virus, just waiting to flare up.

 

My 19 year old asked me for book recommendations this summer—she actually asked ME!  And please do NOT tell her I’m writing this.  Aware that I could scare her off by lending her my more literary faves, I quickly pulled down choices like Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” and “Gone Girl.”  I slipped in “The Light Between Oceans,” and that clever Sloan Crosleys “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”  Finally, I thought I’d dazzle her with Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” just to prove my cool factor is intact.  I must have smiled all the way to bed that night.

 

So take hope ye mother’s of children connected to their cell phones and computers.  Don’t despair you parents of instagrammers and Facebook friends.  I share this as a tale of courage that somewhere, around the bend, you might just witness the payback, all those years after the initial investment.

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WHAT MY MOTHER IN LAW TAUGHT ME

These are some of the things I know to be true about my mother-in law:

• She believed without a doubt that her four sons were perfect.  And even if they weren’t, she never said otherwise in public.    

• She taught me to set up the coffee maker in the evening so all you had to do was push a button in the morning.

• The definition of a 1950’s era lady, she wore her Revlon Moonrise Pink lipstick at all times.  Like most of us, she was never fully satisfied with her hairdo.  

 

• Her signature saying, “It only takes a minute,” applied as equally to doing four loads of laundry or whipping up a steak dinner, as it did to driving from Detroit to New York to visit her grandchildren. 

• It was her personal philosophy to never say a bad word publically about other people. 

• Homemade chocolate chip cookies were her calling card.  They had verifiable magic powers to change the course of an illness, heal a broken heart, brighten up a new home, refresh a friendship, thank people, wish a Merry Christmas or just simply say “hi.”  To know Frannie Woodruff was to have eaten one of her ultra thin and crispy chocolate chips, the secret of which she liberally shared -- extra butter and cake flour.

• She was an early convert to “transition” glasses, which meant her Jackie-O size  lenses were usually a shade of dark purple, even when indoors.  Although her sons teased her, I now realize it was a clever way to have “eyes in the back of her head."

• No matter what she ordered at a restaurant (usually Fettuccine Alfredo), when it came, 90% of the time, before she even tasted it, she remarked that she should have ordered what we did.

• I’ve tried to imagine all the places she went in the pairs of white and black formal gloves that she gave to my daughters for dress-up, including one elegant opera length kid leather pair smelling faintly of smoke.

• She knew bank tellers, grocery clerks, pharmacists, hairdressers, T.J. Maxx employees and just about everyone else by their first names.

• Raising four boys in the 70’s who played every sport imaginable, she inexplicably cooked only one package of frozen corn at dinner, causing them to develop a lifelong habit of eating too fast.

• She knew the names of every one of our neighbors in all of the cities we ever lived and kept up with some of them—adding them to her Christmas card list-- long after we’d moved.

• She worshipped butter, whole milk, and cream sauces.  Her sister Lynnie bought a framed poster of a stick of butter and Frannie coveted it so much that she dragged Lynn to every Homegoods store in the greater Detroit metro area looking for its duplicate.  In the end—they agreed to share it.

• She could not have told you what NPR stood for and did not listen to it.

• She danced the Charleston like she had rubber bands for legs and enthusiastically taught my children how.

• She was an avid reader of mass-market fiction.  We both shared a secret love of Sidney Sheldon.

• Bob and I moved to nine places in 25 years of marriage (seven were domestic) and she was physically there for all seven.   In each house she would unfailing set up the kitchen (my version of plunging toilets after an intestinal virus) and unpack boxes with me from dawn until long after the kids went to bed.  I always gave up first.

• She was such an enthusiastic and regular patron of TJ Maxx and Marshalls that on her 70^th birthday, her local store had a nametag made for her.

• She never spent a second worrying that she needed to fulfill herself, find her passion or broaden her horizons, and she could not have accurately defined the word “feminist.”  She was 100% happy being a wife, mother and the “World’s Best Grandma,” although she never would have worn the T-shirt out of the house.

• Never once in my presence was she able to work the TV controller, program the VCR or operate the cable box.  She did, however, have a grasp on the volume button.

• She set a gold standard, real life example of the word “devotion.”  Watching her move through the world, I learned many important things that go into the secret sauce of being a wife, mother and good girlfriend --  not just in the placid times, but when the going gets choppy.

• She taught me you could drive a car with your left leg up on the console, a coffee cup balanced on the dashboard and the seat belt alarm circumvented by clever buckling.

• She was the oldest sister of three girls (like me) and two brothers.  Watching her interact with her siblings was my preview for how that bond would further strengthen, long after the kids are grown and flown.

• The famous story of Frannie -- one Pappagallo shoe on the flank of their black lab as she extruded a long stream of black plastic garbage bag out of the dog’s butt (he had escaped and eaten a neighbor’s garbage AND the bag)  -- became an iconic metaphor in our house for some event, issue or what-have-you that just won’t end.

• Her cornflower blue eyes and signature dark “Dawson” brows and lashes were passed on to her lucky, lucky boys. (Why is it always the boys who get this gene?)

• She was fortunate enough to die exactly the way she would have wanted -- in her own home, in her own bed, surrounded by her devoted husband and her beloved boys, and the repeated assurances (not that she needed them) that she was the most loved, most wonderful Mom in the world.  And she was.

Rest in Peace Frances Dawson Woodruff – 1933 --- 2013

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