Bell Bridge Books

“I Got a Happy Meal and Mommy Got a Baby”

By Deb Stover

Following the birth of our daughter, Barbi, in 1981, my obstetrician said another pregnancy was “paramount to a death wish.” So we spoiled her for four years, then started looking into adoption.

After completing a workshop on special needs adoption and our Home Study, we went on a waiting list as not only potential, but eager, adoptive parents. A mere 3 months later, the phone rang to inform us that a newborn girl with Down Syndrome needed us.

We lived near Tulsa at the time, and Bonnie was born in Oklahoma City. We stayed in constant contact with the agency. Not only was she born with Down Syndrome, but she also had a heart defect. The only test that had been done was a simple EKG. Our medical insurance would cover Bonnie immediately, so I made appointments with a pediatric cardiologist and our pediatrician before we even brought her home.

Finally, the day arrived. The social worker suggested we meet somewhere between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Dave took the day off and the three of us drove to the appointed rendezvous point.

McDonald’s!

Bonnie only weighed four pounds, fourteen ounces. She was all blanket and  hair and beauty. People stared at us as we exchanged baby and paperwork. I have to admit now, it must have appeared rather clandestine, but nothing could have been more right or more good.

The next morning, when I took 4 1/2-year-old Barbi to Noah’s Ark Preschool, she marched in the door and proudly announced to the room, “We went to McDonald’s. I got a Happy Meal and Mommy got a baby.”

The teachers and other parents stared with mouths agape as I stepped in holding our tiny Bonnie. All I could do was laugh, because Barbi had simply told the truth. After a few happy explanations, we made our trip to the cardiologist, where we learned that Bonnie’s condition wasn’t as serious as originally feared. While she did require surgery at eighteen months, she now has a normal–and very loving–heart.

Since that day in 1986, we went through another so-called “special needs” adoption of our son, Ben. As far as we’re concerned, the only special needs were ours, and our children have fulfilled them and then some.

Bonnie’s special all right, but not because of that extra number twenty-one chromosome. She’s special because she’s Bonnie. Her dad often said she was born missing the mean gene. He was right….

My husband is no longer with us, but every Mother’s Day I am surrounded by the love of our children, and blessed with the knowledge that each of them has his love and goodness to carry them through life.

———————————————————————

Maid Marian and the Lawman (Bell Bridge Books) tells the tale of a band of misfits who—much like Deb’s own family—discovers the joy of unconditional love and acceptance.

After declaring her candidacy for President at age four, Deb Stover veered off course to play Lois Lane for a number of years. After she refused to blow Clark Kent’s cover, she turned her attention to her own Real American Hero and married him. Considering her experience with Heroes, redirecting her passion for writing toward Romance Novels seemed a natural progression. For more information, please visit www.debstover.com

My mother’s smile.

by Skye Taylor

My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was seventy-seven, but even then we all wondered if she’d had it for a lot longer than we or the doctor knew. She’d been completely deaf since her late thirties and while she lip-read very well, she also got to be an expert at pretending she knew what strangers or casual acquaintances were saying even when she didn’t have a clue. In retrospect, we began to realize that she’d been faking it with us as her memory began to fail.

She never seemed frustrated by her loss of memory. In fact, it was the rest of us who were frustrated and she always responded with a big smile that defused our exasperation.

Even before she went into assisted living care, she began to be foggy about who I was. One night when she asked, and I told her, she didn’t believe me. So I hauled out my driver’s license thinking to prove I was who I claimed to be and her shocked reaction was to ask why I was in possession of my sister’s driver’s license. Even she laughed about it two nights later when she did remember who I was. Conversing with a deaf person who can’t recall how the sentence began has moments of humor, but it’s mostly frustrating and increasingly sad. A few things she never forgot – like the fact that it was me who took her car away. Until nearly the end of her life, she held that indignity against me. And she never forgot that her Johnny was the love of her life.

One thing I remember most about her last few years was that in spite of not being sure who I was, she still loved me and it showed. Until she went into care, she lived next door and I always stopped by on my way home from work. She always lit up with welcome and opened her arms for a hug when I walked into her living room. I  “talked” to her mostly through written notes on her multitude of notebooks which had the advantage of being able to flip back a page or two when she continued to repeat the same questions. But the visits were always good ones because I knew she enjoyed our moments together even if she remembered nothing of them as soon as I disappeared from sight.

When the call that I’d been dreading for some time came, I rushed to her side at the hospital where her labored breathing was the only sound in the room. Her heart had failed and although the EMTs had gotten it started again, she never did regain consciousness. When her last breath came, my sister was with us and we were talking on the phone with my brother who lived several states away. So we were all together, hanging on to each other and our memories of a mother who had always loved us with her whole heart. I will always remember the stillness and love that filled that room at that moment. But even more, I will always remember the thousand-watt smile that greeted me every time I went to visit her, even long after she’d completely forgotten either my name or my place in her life. Sometimes a mother’s love is felt more than spoken, and ultimately it transcends even death. I see her smile in billowing white clouds against a brilliant blue sky and a dozen other things she loved, and I feel her touch in the soft darkness as I fall asleep each night.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. You were and are the best.

Pick up Skye Taylor’s Bell Bridge titles today:

Mama was a Diva

by Marilee Brothers

If you’re looking for a warm, fuzzy, my-mama-was-the best-mother-ever story, you might want to stop reading now. My mother was a diva long before the word became part of the current vernacular. The only daughter of doting parents, she was clad in frilly dresses, wore a giant bow in her hair, learned to read at four and became a concert pianist in her teens. She was a beauty with an independent streak. In the roaring twenties, she bobbed her hair, visited speakeasies and sneaked cigarettes. At age 23, she married my father, an outstanding athlete whose pitching record for the University of Washington still stands.

My sister Beth came along first. Five years later, I was born. I’m not sure what troubled my mother, but some of my earliest memories are of long, sulky silences where we knew we’d done something wrong, but weren’t sure what it was. She was unable to express anger and disapproval and eventually, turned it inward. For years she was stricken with migraines and depression. One of my jobs was to tiptoe into the darkened bedroom and rub her aching forehead.

As my sister and I blossomed into our teen years, things became more difficult for our mother as her beauty began to fade. It was almost as if she resented the daughters she’d given birth to. At age twelve, I was a tall, gawky, shy kid. I remember crying when she refused to help me fix my hair. Fortunately, I had a big sister.

Years passed. My sister and I married into warm, loving families and had children of our own. Both of us stayed connected to our birth family, especially me since we lived in the same town. Mother was in her late eighties when the miracle happened. She had a slight stroke. Yes, I know. That sounds heartless. But truly, my mother, the former hypochondriac, was transformed into a different person. She was physically unaffected by the stroke, but her mental attitude underwent a cataclysmic change. She became the sweetest little old lady on the face of the planet. In her former life, a hangnail was a good reason to take to her bed. When she was 89, she fell and broke some ribs. I said, “Oh, that must hurt!” Her response? “Nope, not at all.”

On her last birthday, the 94^th, it fell on Mothers’ Day. Her May 13^th birthday often did. I have a picture in my office of the two of us posing with her birthday cake. The day she died, my husband received the call first and got to her bedside before I did. Later, he told me she was restless and uncomfortable until I arrived to hold her hand. She then relaxed, looked at me and smiled. I was with her as her breaths became farther and farther apart and finally stopped altogether. I am so thankful that, in my mother’s later years, I was able to make the mother-daughter connection I’d been longing for. It’s never too late.

Pick up Marilee Brothers’s Bell Bridge titles today:

MOTHER’S DAY MEMORIES

by Nancy Gideon

My favorite memory of Mother’s Day was in 1983.  I was pregnant with my first son and at that moment, the fact of motherhood (other than the already swelling feet) made a unique impression upon me. It got me thinking about what kind of mom I’d be and the things that I’d learned from my own that I wanted to pass on.

My mom was my hero.  She was 41 when I was born (as if that wasn’t enough to denote hero status!). Many mistook her for my grandmother.  She was  the middle child of five living in Florida and would amaze us in telling stories of how she was terrified of the gas mask that her neighbor’s son brought home from WWI, of her grandmother shaking her bible from the front porch at Babe Ruth who rented the house across the street during spring training, of living in a pre-civil Rights South, and of her brothers delivering newspapers to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford (both of whom signed their diplomas).  Stories about bravely traveling alone to New England to go to nursing school to become an occupational therapist, of reading my dad’s redacted letters from the Philippines where he was in the medical corp during WW II.  Of being a busy stay at home mom who sewed our clothes, pressed our sheets and curtains in a mangle  and canned from our garden until I was the last to start kindergarten. Then she returned to OT part time, saving money to give her three girls the one thing she felt was more important than anything else:  higher education. My mom was filled with nearly a century of history, but her eye was always on the future. Except for Star Trek.  She never got Star Trek.

I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was in grade school and my mom always supported that dream. The one time she stood firm was when I graduated high school.  I was working and didn’t see the need for college – I was going to be a writer, after all.  She told me flatly, get your education first then you can be anything you want to be. Knowledge was something never wasted.  It opened doors for her and she wanted me to have unlimited opportunities, too. Every time I sit down to plot or edit or research, I’m thankful for that line she drew.  She was my biggest fan when it came to my books.  And I’m still hers.  Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

FROM THIS DAY FORWARD by Nancy Gideon (w/a Dana Ransom) is a Big Deal on Amazon for only $1.99! Grab it today! 

This offer only lasts until the 24th!

Mother’s Day

by Anne Stuart

My childhood was not the stuff of dreams.  I loved my mother, and she loved me to the best of her ability, but the fact is she didn’t like children.  Why she had three of them is beyond me – I think she figured she ought to love them, and post war everyone was having three and four children.

Needless to say, with three children she didn’t want and an alcoholic husband, my mother suffered from depression and rages, and life in the Stuart family was fraught with chaos.

Things finally imploded when I was seventeen, when both my parents were hospitalized and I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle.  I’d basically cut class the first half of my senior year in high school, and suddenly I had to toe the line.  One class, that I will forever bless, was called Personal Typing.

The teacher was a fluttery, elderly woman named Miss Hale, who drew a picture of a tree on the blackboard and would exhort us to “hang our troubles on the trouble tree” while we learned touch typing.

The week before Mother’s Day she decided to teach us how to write cards, folding the paper in quarters, writing a couplet on the outside and the inside.

I came up with something like “Roses are red, violets are gray, my mother is gone, she abandoned me today.”  I was being a smart ass, of course.

Miss Hale came around, checking everyone’s work, and when she looked over my shoulder she let out an anguished cry and flung her arms around me, much to my embarrassment.  I stayed after class to explain the situation in my nonchalant way, and she insisted I write a kind greeting card to my mother.  Sigh.

Some teenagers are just too cynical for their own good.

The happy ending to all this is I became an adult and my mother liked adults, she was enormously proud of me, and I took excellent care of her until she died at 98.  Her last words to me were, “it’s my darling Krissie.”

And I never sent her that Mother’s Day card.

Pick up Anne Stuart’s titles from Bell Bridge Books today: