At seven, I remember being on my knees by Andrea Martin's bed looking out her window at the streetlights. I prayed the way that I had been taught to:
"Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus, heavenly Father I want to go home...I want to go home...I want you to save my mother....take the thing out of her head...that tumor"
Since my mom's accident, my Dad couldn't take care of us and work so we stayed with people we knew. The night I remember praying this, we were at the Martin's house. My mom had her accident in February 1976. Her car slid out of control on black ice under the Lodge Freeway and hit a guard rail. When they took an xray of her skull to check for a concussion that's when they found a tumor. It was a fluke that they found it. Had she waited much longer it would have killed her.
All of Highland Park Baptist Church prayed for her to live, for the neurosurgeon to get all of the tumor-and he almost did. The church claimed it was a miracle, my mother was a living miracle from Jesus. I was the child of a miracle. Everyone held me up like a trophy. I didn't feelshiny. I still played by myself on the playground. I still didn't fit in.
The kids in my class still made fun of me. My classmates would always say things like "Who is the "actress" pretending to be today?" or "We know you can sing, but how about learning to kick the ball so we don't lose?" And eventually, the teasing became about my mom who wasn't "normal". It was a double edged sword for me because, I loved music and theater and I didn't fit in, but at the same time I was given special opportunities: The music teacher had been working with me on a Mozart piece to sing at the winter concert. Seven year olds didn't sing Mozart-they played kick ball and could climb things. I was happy to work with Mrs. White, the music teacher, during recess because it allowed me to escape recess and facing the kids along with the rest of my life.
My Mom came home in the Spring to keep recovering from the brain tumor. Things slowly began to return to normal. She would make me lunch and take me on errands and drop me off and pick me up from school. Then, one day in May, my father picked me up instead. By the look on his face, I could tell that something had happened. He wouldn't look me in the eye when he came into the classroom. Instead, he went straight to my teacher and then got my things and led me to the car in silence. When we reached home, he went upstairs and I could hear him sob from behind his bedroom door.
Mom had blacked out in the middle of a Bible study at the church. She had what they called a seizure. My father helped me pack my things to stay with my aunt and uncle. I got to go home after a couple weeks and noticed that my mom slept a lot. She had to take all these pills that made her always seem like she was in a stupor. She would ask me to get things for her and to do things around the house to help her out. She would burst into tears a lot and wear her nightgowns around the house all day. After a while she began to get dressed and we would do things away from the house. She talked to me about how sorry she was that she was like this and I said things like it was a miracle she was here and that God's timing was perfect because they had saved her just in time. She told me she wished Dad would notice her. I would listen to her and hold her hand, telling her how beautiful she was. I cared for my mother and became the adult in our relationship. I had learned about death and loneliness. I became her confidante and the one to hold up hope for her that she would live and not die. Sometimes when she had a seizure she would wake up afraid and didn't know who I was. I would tell her it would be alright and go get her Phenobarbital and make her take two pills. I would call the ambulance and then my father at work . I began to question God. How could this supposedly loving God allow so much terror to fill my mother's life? She was a good person who was faithful to those she loved.
