Mother's Day 2009

Why in the world would be expect momma, at age 88, to be able to make sensible health care decisions for herself and daddy when she always deferred those decisions to someone else, even strangers, is beyond me. To say that momma is not good during an medical emergency is a vast understatement. We have spent our entire childhood laughing at incidents that give credence to this statement. My earliest memory of her avoidance of offering emergency medical assistance comes from family tales of her screaming and running the other way when my brother enters the house with a bloody face that was the result of sledding down a steep hill in Richmond Heights, MO and being stopped by either a stop sign or a fence. I asked my brother about the particulars of this accident yesterday at our parents house where we had all gathered to honor our mother on Mother's day. He told me it was an angle iron post on a fence. I said that I always thought it was barbed wire. My other brother who was born at least ten years after the incident said he thought it was barbed wire too. See how family folk lore changes with the retelling of stories. At any rate the results of the crash were not favorable to his face or the sled. You would have thought that the fence post/barbed wire incident would have discouraged him from dangerous childhood activities but much to mamas dismay it only seemed to fuel the fire of adventure.

I clearly remember momma running the other way, are we starting to see a pattern here, when I had the mother of all bike wrecks while attempting to use my newly acquired riding skills in a bike race on a hot Clovis, NM subdivision street. A front wheel spoke broke only to find its way in to my shin. Ever since I have worn a scar that resembles the continent of Africa. I obviously do not have the ability to learn from other's mistakes.

When my little brother laid his forehead open as he ran under the back of a big farm truck, momma ran the other way. By now all mom ma's children have learned the benefits of direct pressure on a cut. She once waved me away when she was talking on the telephone when I approached her with an ice pick through my finger, don't you just love those frost free refrigerators we have now. My next door neighbor said in the telephone, "I have to go Linda is here with an ice pick through her finger." Momma thought she could prevent injury to her children by threatening to spank us if we got hurt. So we just didn't tell her when we got hurt. It saved time. This turned out not to be the best policy when my brother poured hot lead on his arm while making lead solders. We are not even going to go in to how dangerous our toys were then. He was afraid to tell momma because she said that she would whip him, so he waited until the red streaks started running up his arm. When he showed her his arm she said "I ought to whip you".

Turns out all of this self taught medical assistance and her remarriage to a chiropractor led three of her children to become chiropractors. We were never squeamish when we went to the lab to dissect frogs. Heck no, we had seen plenty of blood and guts just taking care of each other. Besides that my oldest brother and I had a little frog surgery unit on Sherwood Drive. We would catch frogs, use the Underwood Typewriter cleaner, which I now believe was ether, to put them "under" for their surgical procedure. We learned many things from our early surgery days, like a frog can not live without a heart. True, we had a high mortality rate and no frog ever returned to have their stitches removed. In fact they could hop remarkably well post surgery as they fled our yard. Maybe this is why momma and daddy do not want us to interfere with their health care decisions.

My youngest brother works for Delta Airlines so momma has a resource for running the other way if things get really bad at home. Thank goodness she has stuck with us all these years and we will stick with them to the end.