Old Parents, Part Two

When Elizabeth Edwards died recently, I couldn't help thinking about how she was leaving behind two young children who were born—thanks mega doses of hormones, painful in vitro technology, and probably some very expensive donor eggs—when she was 49 and 51 years old.

Now those two kids, ages 10 and 12, are left with no mother and a sixtysomething self-absorbed philandering father. When it comes to children, maybe we should listen to our bodies more and our egos less.

RIP Patricia Neal

A celebrity obituary a couple days ago reminded me of an infamous remark once blurted out by Rob's favorite speech therapist: "I wish The Patricia Neal Story had never been filmed!"

This is a TV movie about the late actress, once married to author Roald Dahl, who is known for having come back 100 percent from a major left brain stroke. A few years after her early 1960s stroke, she was acting in movies and on stage again as if nothing had ever happened.

Rob's therapist, Don, who has spent decades working with stroke survivors suffering from aphasia, knows all too well how rare it is for this to happen. A couple years ago, when I'd gotten good and sick of everyone expecting Rob to follow suit, I wrote the essay posted below. Rob is somewhat better now, but the main sentiment holds true.

Wrong Answer

After awhile you get tired of answering the same question: How is Rob doing? Because the answer isn’t heartening and will probably never lend itself to a Reader’s Digest story of triumph over adversity. Because the answer doesn’t change much from week to week and I can see people’s faces drop when I respond honestly. Because a lot of people who suffer a massive stroke never do completely recover. And my husband is one of them.

Just two years ago Rob was a successful residential architect, a writer on design and development issues, an energetic, intelligent man with many interests. Only 45, he’d owned his own business for a decade and had a perennial waiting list of would-be clients. Committed to the city he loved, he had written plan books for updating bungalows, ranch houses, and Cape Cods so that people would stay in Minneapolis instead of fleeing to the suburbs. He’d designed townhouses, lake cabins, even a Minnesota state fair booth.

He was an accomplished amateur photographer, and had begun work on a cemetery photo project. Kayaking was a new interest of Rob’s and he’d recently started setting aside money for the craft of his dreams. He loved fatherhood and was teaching the girls archery, camping skills, and photography, as well as serving as a chaperone on third grade swim outings and overnight trips. He’d always had more ideas, more passions, and more commitments than he had time. His brain raced, and his body struggled to keep up.

And then one day it didn’t. On that hot July day, as he refereed our two daughters’ squabbles while I drove home from an out-of-town trip, a blood clot shot up to the left side of his brain and brought him down on the bathroom floor. Our 6- and 10-year-old girls, confused by the sight of their father seemingly sleeping, watched him fretfully but made no calls. When I found him three hours later, he was laying on his side, unresponsive, fists clenched. By the time the ambulance arrived, the clot had done its work.

The brain’s left side controls the verbal centers—speaking and reading, talking and comprehending. It also contains the executive function, the multi-tasking, organizing piece so vital to being a functioning adult in today’s complex world. By day two the doctors were asking about his living will and preparing me for the worst.

When a health crisis like this one hits, the family first handles a series of urgent problems. Would he live and would surgery be performed should his brain swell? Where would he go for rehab? Could he ever learn to walk again, or to dress and wash himself? Task by task, challenge by challenge, Rob worked hard and I supported him through it. Therapy? Check. Disability insurance? Check. Accessible shower? Check. CaringBridge site to keep friends and family informed? Check. The adrenaline of crisis mode carried me through the three months that Rob was hospitalized and in rehabilitation facilities, and people marveled at my coping skills.

During those months, cards flowed in, meals came in, rides were offered. People rallied round and applauded each new development—first sentence, first solo shower, first walk around the lake. But then recovery slows down. And the months turn into a year. And the second year slowly moves on and still there is no movie-of-the-week climax. Nearly two years post-stroke, Rob continues to speak haltingly and to search for words. He doesn’t remember certain people, events, and places he once knew. He cannot talk about the coming presidential election, the rising tide of teardowns in the city’s lakes neighborhoods, or his daughters’ problems at school.

He cannot say what he wants for lunch if he is also washing the dishes. He cannot laugh about something a friend said because he can’t remember that friend, nor understand why that particular comment is funny. He can no longer work as an architect because he can’t talk on the phone, juggle multiple projects, or remember how to use the design software. “My husband used to be an architect,” I told someone the other day and felt so unutterably sad I could barely finish the sentence. Rob decided to become an architect when he was 7 years old and he never once strayed from that desire. He’d always planned to continue doing the work he loved into his 90s, pointing to role models like Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.

Now his identity is no longer tied up with his profession. And what I’ve come to understand is that permanently disabled is not the ending the world wants to hear. Well-meaning former colleagues offer tales of miraculous recoveries, of stroke survivors turned speaking-circuit authors. Friends, be they acquaintances or buddies of long standing, crave the Patricia Neal story, not the James Brady story. Once the crisis is past, everyone expects, even needs, a happy ending.

But all too often, as so many stroke survivors and their families know, there is no happy ending. The person is alive but utterly altered. Rob remains a hard worker, a gentle father, a neat freak. But the light that once shown from his eyes is gone, visible now only in photographs. His pleasures, once so various and numerous, are now simple: watching the cats sleep, seeing the girls play, eating a good meal.

The invitations are fewer and more tentative, the inquiries hopeful yet guarded. And my answers vary, depending on my mood and energy level. Usually I say Rob’s fine, getting better all the time, thanks. But occasionally, when I tire of the charade, I respond instead with the unvarnished truth: Rob has plateaued, he’s permanently disabled, he will never be the same person again.

And the alarmed faces quickly tell me I’ve gone too far, that it’s neither positive nor polite to state the bald truth. Yet the loneliness of not admitting our day-to-day reality becomes so burdensome that the real answer keeps leaking out, leaving social awkwardness in its wake.

So, how is Rob? He’s a different man from the one you and I once knew. He’s trying hard to get better and to enjoy his life. He misses you, and he sees the world passing him by. He knows, as I do, that sometimes the ending you wish for is not the one you get.

Julia goes to camp

It was really hard to drive away from Camp Warren on Sunday afternoon, beautiful and bucolic as it is, leaving behind my younger daughter. Julia is just 10 and was very nervous about being away from home for five nights.

She hates having her photo taken, so I'm not sure if this picture reflects that or the fact that she's hating the group-life that is summer camp. Three guesses which kid she is.

Eulogy for my mother

In the last week, I have attended funerals for the mothers of three good friends. Their pain at losing their mothers has brought back the sadness—always close to the surface—that I feel about losing my own mom two years ago.

So I thought I'd post the eulogy I gave at Mom's funeral. I don't have any photos of the mass, but suffice it say there were as many priests there as at any Kennedy funeral.

Eulogy for Marjorie Anna Brehm Lamb, March 2008

When I think of my mom, what always comes to mind first is her abiding and genuine kindness. She never gossiped about people, and always gave even the nastiest person the benefit of the doubt. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” was her personal mantra as well as her frequent gentle reminder to my own acid-tongued younger self.

At a party, she would always talk with the most socially awkward person in the room, asking him so many questions about himself that he would soon forget to be shy. She taught us that manners were not so much about etiquette but about making others feel welcome and wanted.

Although Mom was herself a socially gifted introvert who preferred to stay home with a good book, she entertained frequently. To her entertaining was a kind of service, a way of including people and folding them into our family and home. Because we never lived near our own relatives, Mom was especially sensitive that on holidays her friends shouldn’t be alone, and thus we never quite knew who would be there at Thanksgiving dinner.

Through the years she hosted numerous staff receptions and dinners, book clubs, high school cast parties, graduation fetes, Xmas eve masses, and more wedding receptions than she actually had daughters.

Mom and Dad also took in friends of ours, sometimes for entire summers, and our friends were always welcome for dinner or our regular Sunday morning pancake breakfasts. All of our friends loved to spend time at our house, basking in Mom’s warmth and rapt attention. On one memorable occasion, she braved my student slum house off Regent Street, racing between two kitchens on two floors as she helped me and six roommates cook a Chinese banquet. Needless to say my roommates, like everyone else who met her, adored her.

But it wasn’t just her own family and friendship circle that enjoyed Mom’s kindness. She was an inveterate volunteer, serving as a religious education teacher, a church secretary, a meal server, a food pantry staffer, and much more. She was never a social volunteer, organizing pretty receptions and fundraisers, but instead she toiled behind the scenes, directly serving people, willing to literally get her hands dirty to help the homeless and hungry of Madison.

What else was my wonderful mother, Marjorie Anna Brehm Lamb? She was a gourmet cook and baker, an inveterate reader, an art lover, a world traveler, a top-notch tennis player, an avid walker, and a first-rate grandmother. She was an Iowa farm girl without a snobbish bone in her body. She was a feminist before her time and utterly without vanity, qualities that made her a great model for her three daughters. She was a devoted liberal Catholic who walked her talk. She couldn’t sing or tell jokes, but she enjoyed—or at least tolerated—the musical and comedy stylings of other family members.

She knew Latin and she knew crops. She remembered Catholic feast days and the birthdays of every grandchild and friend. She was a 30-year breast cancer survivor who heroically battled numerous other health problems over the years without complaint.

She was a mother who had infinite patience for and great interest in her children, and the sensitivity to let us be who we truly were. She taught me to love language, and encouraged me to pursue a career in journalism that I have enjoyed for 30 years.

I was well into my twenties before I understood what an extraordinary mother I had, and how lucky I was to have her. I’m glad her suffering is over, but I will miss her kind and loving spirit more than I can say.

The New Mommy Wars

I've decided the new mommy wars aren't working mothers versus non-working mothers but mothers of "gifted and talented" kids versus the rest of us poor schlubs. I can't tell you how many women in my circle dine out on Junior's awards, starring roles, and fabulous SAT scores. Oh, and did she mention that Little Precious is also a violin prodigy? And a math genius?

Often this bragging is couched in the sheer difficulty of it all: the exhaustion of touring top-flight colleges, the difficulty of fitting in all those award ceremonies, the problem of finding enough challenges in the fifth grade curriculum for their oh-so bright little darling. But it's bragging all the same.

I have one nice, average kid and one hard-working dyslexic kid who struggles to read. The only awards these two are going to win is "Most Episodes of Lost Downloaded" and "Most Bags of Cheetos Consumed in Two Days."

I kind of miss the 19th century (at least as depicted in literature), when moral qualities such as kindness, generosity, and yes, even humility, were more valued and avidly sought than straight A's and the top soccer team are today.

Maybe some of these "gifted and talented" kids would be a little easier to like if that were the case.

Saved by the Nanny

On Mother’s Day I got a call from a beautiful and intelligent 21-year-old woman, a history major at the University of Minnesota. She was calling to wish me a happy Mother’s Day, but she isn’t one of my children. Both my girls are still in grammar school.

Instead, my caller was one of my current nannies, the latest duo in a long line of responsible young women who have helped my husband and me raise our children over the past several years. I have found these young women not through an expensive agency or a trusted friend, but by placing ads in the Minnesota Daily.

Every one of these nannies has been a hard-working University of Minnesota student who needed extra money. At first their work for us was just a summertime convenience, an easier alternative to day camp. Sara from Owatonna worked at a Dinkytown bookstore and recommended literature to our budding 9-year-old reader. Her art teacher-mother’s influence led to many craft projects; she also made each girl her own book, featuring that girl as heroine. It was fun to have her in the house and made life simpler, but it was really just a convenience, not unlike a cleaning lady.

Then, four years ago, my husband had a stroke, and the nannies suddenly became essential. Those first weeks I had to ask Sara and Heidi of Phillips to drive our weepy and frightened kids to hospital visits, to lead outings that would prove distracting, and to help the girls just remain kids while their whole world was turned upside down. My younger daughter, then six, sat on the nannies’ laps, hugged them, depended daily on their affection and constancy.

Later, I counted on these young women, barely out of their teens, to pick up kids from school, help them with their homework, take them to the dentist, even attend an occasional performance in my place. At age 19 or 20 these remarkable undergraduates were arranging play dates, overseeing school-supply shopping, refereeing sibling squabbles, drying tears. They made my life as a quasi-single parent manageable. My motto became, “I get by with a little help from my nannies,” but most weeks it was more than a little help.

When my mother died, Kelsey from Spring Green made sure the girls had proper funeral clothes and drove them five hours to the service. When I faced my first family vacation without a spouse’s help, Stephanie from Rice Lake came along so I could relax. When my younger daughter feared the water, Heidi, who’d grown up on a lake, taught her how to swim. When I’ve needed to get away, Maddy from Middleton and Ashlee from Mequon have stayed overnight.

When I felt that my girls, both adopted from China, could benefit from a nanny who was herself an Asian adoptee, Kelsey answered my carefully worded Daily ad. She spent hours as a nanny/mentor, talking with the girls about birth parents, homeland trips, and growing up in the Midwest as a member of a minority group.

When 13-year-old Grace began to experiment with makeup or needed advice about friends, Ashlee was there to guide her through the thickets of female adolescence. After all, she’d been through it herself just a few years earlier, whereas I’d first wielded a lipstick during the Nixon administration.

When 10-year-old Julia developed a classic horse fixation, Maddy was there to share stories about her own childhood riding experiences, to drive Julia to a weekly therapeutic riding class, even to volunteer for the same program.

Through the years, as I’ve talked, eaten dinner, and vacationed with these young women, I have become close to them as well. They tell me about their boyfriends (many), classes (hard), and money woes (legion), and I offer advice on grades (worry less), marriage (wait), and travel abroad (early and often). We’ve been to two of their weddings, with another coming up this summer.

That’s how these Twin Cities campus students have come to consider me their Minneapolis mom—sort of a more urban, more detached version of their own mothers. And that’s how, too, I’ve become familiar with the good and the bad of today’s U of M: the very real impact of rapidly escalating tuition, the difficulty of finding summer internships, the frustration of a bad teacher, but also the excitement of a research job, the fun of new friends, the transformative power of a charismatic instructor. I was ready to tell off the absentee landlord who wouldn’t turn on Heidi’s heat and the financial aid officer who tried to cut off Ashlee’s loans. I’ve seen how hard these young women work at everything they do, and I’ve ached that I couldn’t do more for them.

So I guess it made sense to get that Mother’s Day call after all. For our nannies have been not just household help, like the guy who shovels the driveway, but more like members of the family. These nannies, University of Minnesota students every one, have made all the difference in my life and in the lives of my daughters.

Surely no one has ever been quite so satisfied with a Minnesota Daily classified.