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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IN PRAISE OF THE UNCOOL MOM

I always wanted one of those chatty, gabby mothers, the ones who set out the warm cookies and milk after school, eagerly hovering on both elbows to hear all about the day’s crushes, heartbreak and gossip.  I coveted the moms who begged to do their daughters make-up, twisted tresses into French braids and got excited about the latest elephant bell hip hugger jeans and platform shoes.

 

My mother was the exact opposite.  Our after school snacks were carrot sticks and celery.  Cranberry juice stood in for soda and there were no weekends spent trolling the mall for the latest shade of frosted pink lipstick.  My mom’s idea of a good time, her reward for a day of chores and household maintenance, was to curl up every afternoon with a book.

 

My mother is a smarty-pants.  An intellectual.  Her idea of a challenge was reading Will and Ariel Durant’s classic “A Story of Civilization.”  All eleven volumes.  I kid you not.  I proudly told friends in our upstate New York suburb that she had a master’s degree.  Take that, all you girls who’s Moms got the Mary Tyler Moore flip curl and culottes!  Her currency was never the latest hairstyle, although she did get a cropped “Beatles “ cut before I was born.  She wasn’t the interior decorating type, a serious cook or gardener. She was bookish. And she reinforced the importance of that by example, taking us to the library from a very early age.


When we were old enough to ride our bikes alone, I loved the grown up feeling of consulting with the librarians, having my own library card (so COOL!) and then placing the books in my bike basket for transport home.  I can’t quite articulate the feeling I still get walking into a library or a bookstore today. It’s a sense of endless possibilities and want.  Entering a fashion boutique on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue will never carry the same thrill.   Books are a different form of acquisition, more lasting and fulfilling.  My mother taught me that.


I picture my mother now, absorbed in her book; feet propped to rest her “throbbing veins,” (GROSS! we’d mouth to each other) as the late afternoon sunlight knifed through the living room window onto the mustard colored rug (yes, it was the 70’s.)  The table was set for dinner; the roast was roasting, the vacuuming and dusting completed for the day.

 

Only now do I understand how reading buttressed her sense of individualism during the years when tending to our repetitive needs must have strip-mined her intellectual life.  Books nurtured her own flame, especially as she navigated through three daughters’ teen years (oy vey), bubbling with hormones, churlishness and delayed gratification.  It is in hindsight that I see how reading legitimized her presence among us.  Books were her “cover” as she stationed herself in the living room chair, her antennae alert without meddling; such an under-rated attribute in today’s world of micro-managed parenting and helicopter hovering.

 

I don’t ever recall her telling me what to wear, criticizing a friend or offering up opinions about the boys who cycled in and out of our hearts (especially the one with the red Camaro who reeked of Marlboros.) Adolescence is a desert landscape of shifting sands and petty hurts.  She was smart enough to recognize that the girl who excluded you from her birthday party one day is back as your bestie the next.  My mother taught me how to be the bobber on the fishing line, not the hook with the bait.

 

You absorb things as a kid—even when you are trying not to.  You tell yourself that when it’s your turn you will be a slightly different parent.  You will edit, accept and reject. You will change things from the way you were raised, do it your own way.  And sometimes you do.  But I understand now what she was up to, each afternoon as we walked in the door from school.  She was hanging back, holding her counsel and her tongue, being my parent, not my BFF.  She was mothering—not smothering—and she gave me the space to learn for myself, to make my own decisions, choices and mistakes. 

Now that I am a parent, working to instill a sense of well being and independence in frustrated by her occasional maternal indifference, I see that her approach required far more restraint than the dishy, tell-me-all tact.   Those afternoons she spent at home, quietly reading, were a gift.  They were an act of love equally as important as the love of reading.

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TOO OLD TO BE A MOM?

Just this morning, I did the thing experienced mothers aren’t supposed to do.  I lost it on my daughter. She’s 11 and I’m 52.  That makes me the adult.  In fact, last year I was the oldest living mother in elementary school.  I should be a total ball of zen-nicity.  Yet suddenly I was going all Linda Blair after a morning of protracted nagging.  Perhaps this rings a bell?  “Hurry up – get dressed – brush your teeth, your hair, your tongue- shoes on- backpacks packed...move faster. Go!”  You’ve been there.  No expanded vocabulary required, just sixth grade level word retrieval.  And yet opening a can of whoop ass can feel satisfying sometimes.  Like binge eating foods dipped in Marshmallow Fluff.

 

Wasn’t it supposed to be a blissful experience entering mother hood again at 40?  Wasn’t I supposed to have more patience and understanding about “the long haul” and “how fast it all goes” with my twins? And yet here I am, shrieking as my hormones retreat, as snappish and churlish as one of those cringe-worthy reality show teen moms prevented from a night of clubbing by their colicky unwanted off-spring.

 

OK, maybe it’s not quite like that with me.  That was a tad dramatic.  But as I swam my laps this morning trying to re-balance, I wondered idly if I really was too old to have kids this young?  Was biology nature’s way of saying,  “you won’t have the energy for this in a few years?”   And yet how many of us are successful at making life fall in line with the perfect time to marry, procreate or change careers?  Is there ever a perfect time?  

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

I smile gently at the young women who emphatically tell me when they want to marry and how many kids they will have.  I long ago learned that we don’t write that script.  The friend with the repeated miscarriages knows that, the couple that can’t conceive, the mother who loses her son to a brain tumor, the wife whose husband up and leaves.  The greatest part of life is our ability to dream big, but most of us are unprepared when things go awry or when dreams don’t come true.  

 

When our first attempt to become parents at age 31 resulted in our son, my husband got on the bus to fatherhood with extreme speed.  He was thrilled and so was I, but then again I knew it wouldn’t change his life in nearly the same way that it would change mine.  But when our children didn’t come in the intervals we planned, when there was a loss and then a dry patch and then some sorrow, we were blindsided when the bad thing happened to us.  And why shouldn’t it have?  What made us any different from the family down the street?  It’s not human nature to always feel so generous, though.  The fickle finger of fate and the Ouija board are supposed to land somewhere else for the hard stuff. 

 

When my twins were born at age 40, our “Team B” as my husband calls them, I resolved to work less and Mom more.  I would be the chilled out mother I never quite got to be the first time around with the older two because I had been so concerned with trying to balance it all.  And while it didn’t exactly happen that way when the girls were born, (chilled isn’t an adjective normally associated with Moms of multiples) I learned to relax into my choices, to stop trying to mute the working part in front of my stay at home friends or dial down the mother part in other facets of my life.  I learned to accept that I am a person who likes her sack stuffed really full.  What other reason could there possibly be for continuing to stuff more in it?  Saying “yes” mostly felt better.

 

 

There is no question that as an older mother I have more patience than the 31-year old I once was who never thought she’d be spontaneous again.   A six-year gap between Team A and Team B equipt me with a fish eye lens.  I don’t sweat the small stuff and I do try to cherish the ride a bit more.  On my second chance, I didn’t want to talk about mucus and home made baby food, I wanted to discuss my middle-agedness, my politics, the struggles of aging parents and husband’s snoring.  I was never great at board games or watching Dora videos with my older kids and this time around I didn’t feel the need to pretend. I am no longer half-way apologetic or conflicted about working when I’m focusing on being a Mom.  I regularly absorb the whiff of envy from friends when I spend a night away in a nice hotel with room service and first-run movies.  I’m proud of my ability to earn my own wage at a career I love, even as I miss a few soccer games and a basketball tournament or two.

 

Motherhood is a selfless business.  And like so many parts of being an adult, there are repetitive parts, as same-old as emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry.  No wonder we grumble or watch our heads spin at times like a bobble-head on a dashboard.  No wonder we lose our tempers.  We all do. There are some who will swear that the right time to have children is when you are younger and full of energy. But in my 20’s I would have been too selfish, less patient, yearning to accomplish things yet un-named.  I would have resented the recalcitrant child, the ungrateful eye roll or lip curl that soaks through their very being because that’s precisely what they are programmed to do.  Anna Quindlen, one of my all-time favorite writers, says that “sometimes taking care of children full-time feels like a cross between a carnival ride and penal servitude.” Do any right-minded adults really enjoy a two-hour marathon of Candy Land or repeated rounds of Lego towers?  Be honest. 

 

Still, I wouldn’t trade this for anything, even as my friends with their newly childless homes are crowing about their lack of schedules and the fabulous sex they are re-discovering with their husband (yes, their husbands!).  I’m still packing lunches and right now boys are still just something to giggle about behind cupped hands.   I know that’s about to change.  We’ve just had our first discussion about shaving legs and puberty lurks in the bathroom corners.  I can smell it like basement mold.  Most days, the can of whoop-ass aside, I feel incredibly lucky to be experiencing this second wave of motherhood.  The first chapter feels like a temp job in retrospect. Time wrinkles and buckles, telescoping as the calendar flips ever forward.  

 

 

There will only be a short time left when they will ask me to crawl in bed and cuddle, a limited time they’ll still believe I might have something important to contribute in the way of advice.  But they’ll be back. Yes, they’ll come crawling back someday on their bellies as I did when I had children of my own.  I take comfort in that.  It’s already happening with my older two, the slow subtle gravitational pull of interest in what perspective their father and I might have to offer.

 

I’ll be 60 when the younger two go off to college.  And Lord, that used to sound ancient.  Now I can picture myself like one of those old Euell Gibbons ads for Grape Nuts as he leaps around the outdoors, brown as a berry.  I may be gnarled and gnarly, but I’ll be at graduation day standing as proud as the 40 something parents.  That will be me, the one doing the Bronx cheer.  I’ll be celebrating and mourning in equal parts, not only for the days to come, but for the unsung ones that have flown by.